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GAWAIN'S PRACTICE OF PIETY IN "SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT"

1999; Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature; Volume: 68; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/43630179

2398-1423

HARDMAN,

Byzantine Studies and History

It has become a critical commonplace that an important element in the ingenious symmetry of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the pairing of the pentangle and the girdle, the two tokens or signs that the hero carries on his journey to the Green Chapel. In a recent study the poet's design is epitomized thus: 'Gawain leaves Camelot armed with the golden pentangle. He leaves Hautdesert armed with the green girdle'; the girdle is read as placed in opposition to the pentangle, a 'symbolic contrast' seen as 'obvious'.1 Interpretation often focuses on the contrast between Gawain's true faith as expressed in the pentangle and the superstitious trust he places in the girdle. However, the contrast may be more obvious to twentieth-century readers than it would have been to the Gawain-poet's contemporaries, for whom many details in the poem would have resonated with echoes of popular pious practices that blur what may seem to modern judgement a clear distinction between Christian faith and superstitious beliefs. I Following tradition, the poet attributes the figure of the pentangle to Solomon, and, as Richard Hamilton Green long ago observed, documentary evidence for Solomon's pentangle in the Middle-Ages concerns its use in magical practices that were systematically condemned by the Church.2 Green reads the poet's 'wholly original' appropriation of the pentangle for 'a token of inner virtue' as a master-stroke of ambiguity: 'the poet transforms a suspect magical sign into an emblem of perfection to achieve the simultaneous suggestion of greatness and potential failure' (p. 186). Recent scholarship, on the other hand, stresses the philosophical and mathematical uses of the number five and five-sided figures in scholastic Aristotelian thought, hence inferring a medieval understanding of the pentangle as a symbol of rational perfection; and on the strength of this argument, Helen Cooper excludes any association of the pentangle on Gawain's shield with magic.3 But are these opposed meanings necessarily exclusive? A shield, after all, has the double function of declaring the bearer's identity and of warding off attack; thus it would seem in principle quite appropriate for the pentangle to be seen both as the cognizance of Gawain, the perfect knight, and as a magical symbol used to ward off evil. This is not to suggest that Gawain's pentangle actually functions as magic: as Cooper points out, 'it does nothing within the poem that Gawain himself does not do in his own person' (p. 279); but if the pentangle was understood by the poet's contemporaries to be a symbol with magical associations outside the poem, it might indeed have been meant to be seen as having the potential for double meaning on Gawain's shield.4 lt is hard to recover the pentangle's accepted meaning in fourteenthcentury England, for there is very little discussion outside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but an examination of what evidence there is permits some conclusions to be drawn. William of Auvergne had described the design of Solomon's pentangle in great detail in his De legibus (c.1240) as he used scholastic argument to expose the irrationality of attributing supernatural power to any such device: Exempli autem causa ponemus pentagonum, quem dicunt Salomonis: necesse igitur est, vt iste pentagonus habeat hanc virtutem mirificam ex ista lineatione, qua intus habet quinque angulos obtusos, et extra quinque acutos quinque [ed. cit. acutos, quinque] triangulorum exagorum [ed. cit. exagonorum], quibus circundatur interior pentagonus. Vt autem, vel angulis, vel angulo attribuatur diuinitas, nullus patitur intellectus.5 (Now, for instance, let us cite the pentagon, which they call Solomon's: it is inevitable, then, that that pentagon possess this marvellous power by reason of that very diagram, by which it has five obtuse angles within, and outside the five acute [angles] of the five triangular enclosed spaces by which the interior pentagon is surrounded. …