SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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apply.” 5
In his assiduous questioning of Amans, Genius proves a most thorough spiritual
priest-physician. The tales analogize incest to tyranny, and prove that personal lives or
social institutions built upon a foundation of incest tend not to stand, as shown in the
story of Arthur in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, which I compare to the Confessio. The
subject of Gower’s great work—love—is made to serve as the locus of debates spiritual,
philosophical, and practical. Love, in all its permutations, is perhaps the subject of
greatest interest to medieval poets, troubadours, and clergy, and Gower and Malory were
not, of course, the first to note that love was divided into the two realms of the spiritual
and the carnal. St. Augustine posited two cities formed by these two types of love: the
earthly city and the city of God, the heavenly city. 6
The medieval Western world,
dominated as it was by the church, struggled to reconcile these two ideas of love, and the
course of this struggle produced an astonishing variety of literary types such as conduct
books, homilies, and consolatio. These works are attempts to come to an understanding
of human nature—bestial and selfish, or reasonable and progressive.
Chapter III, “ ‘Incest is in Me’: Incest and Early Modern Drama,” begins with an
examination of the role of incest in the Henrician affair. Tyrannical kings and the terror
they unleash on their families and their lands are, emphatically, still of great concern, just
as they were in the medieval era, but newly arising tensions arise to complicate this
concern. The power of the king was sharply delineated by Henry’s manipulation of
incest laws, and later again by Elizabeth’s mystique. Her refusal to marry utterly
5 The many diverse forms and philosophies of medieval confessions and penitential manuals are surveyed
in Biller, Peter, and Minnis, A.J., Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages. Sins were classified
according to the individual circumstances of the sinner and therefore began to be categorized according to
professions and estates. 138
6 Augustine, City of God 14.28. c. 400 A.D.