Geoffrey Chaucer's “Physician's Tale” is a story centrally concerned with the making and unmaking of literary persons. It focuses on the facture and destruction of one figure in particular, that of the maiden Virginia, whose creation is recounted in the opening lines and whose death at her father's hands constitutes the narrative climax. At issue, I suggest, is not only the meaning of her short life but the validity of the rhetorical and narrative techniques that have animated her within the framework of Chaucer's account. The present essay argues that the “Physician's Tale” is fruitfully read as a Chaucerian investigation into prosopopoeia, or the trope of fashioning a mask or face, the poiesis of a prosopon. To borrow a phrase from James Simpson, Virginia's “textual face” is at the center of Chaucer's retelling. Most readers agree that the “Physician's Tale” is not a work that sustains hermeneutic optimism, not in the identification of its genre or moral nor in the parsing of its heroine's fate. Yet it is precisely because the tale is dissonant and self-divided that it makes an apt site for reexamining certain aspects of Chaucer's art.

What do I mean by prosopopoeia? In its broad sense, the figure differs from allegorical personification, or the trope of “lending voice and body to abstract ideas,” as Katharine Breen has recently glossed it. The broader phenomenon (of which allegorical personification would be a particular case) appears in works of classical and medieval rhetorical theory under labels like prosopopoeia, ethopoeia, conformatio, adlocutio, effictio, sermocinatio, ficta oratio, fictio personarum, and personarum ficta inductio. Definitions of these figures emphasize the mercurial interplay of voice, embodiment, presence, and liveliness. The account of conformatio in the Rhetorica ad Herennium is representative, where the figure is explained as “that by which an absent person is represented as though present, or a mute or formless thing is rendered articulate, attributed a definite form and language, or a certain behavior, in conformity with its character.” The definition sets several aspects of personhood in circulation together and would seem to include literary techniques that range from quoting speech to animating formless things, or, in the examples offered by the Ad Herennium author, from giving a city a voice to ventriloquizing the dead.

SECTION A

APPOINTMENT

SEPTEMBER 1943–MARCH 1944

It might be thought that Cunningham succeeded to the First Sea Lord's post by divine right and with the smoothness of a calm sea; that, it seems, is what the Navy as a whole expected and wanted. The actual transfer of power from the fading Pound, who was effectively out of the frame in September 1943, eventually dying on Trafalgar Day (21 October 1943), to the new man was, however, protracted because of Churchill's disinclination to accept Cunningham [150–1, 153]. He raised a smokescreen of reasons not to have him and actually summoned to London Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, C-in-C, Home Fleet, who had become well known to the Prime Minister while serving at the Admiralty as Controller and Third Sea Lord. He offered Fraser the post but the latter, in an act of magnanimity rarely paralleled, declined in favour of Cunningham [152]. Churchill had no choice but to interview Cunningham, whom he said was in accord with his own aims; that was surely an attempt to put the best possible construction on the appointment of someone he feared would prove obstructive and out of sympathy with his grandiose strategic vision. He had to take the advice of the First Lord, A. V. Alexander, in turn advised by the Naval Secretary, Rear Admiral Freddy Dalrymple-Hamilton, who put the case for Cunningham deftly, while Alexander showed unusual force and persistence in favouring the C-in-C, Mediterranean [141–6].

Fraser would have proved a suitable candidate, for he was an officer of wide experience and, as a result of serving as Controller, knew his way round the Whitehall jungle and was adept at inter-service politics. He was relatively young, pleasant and sharp, technically proficient, open to new ideas, and had spent a year with the Home Fleet, gaining its confidence. The other possible contenders received hardly a mention by anyone. Sir John Tovey, Fraser's predecessor as C-in-C, Home Fleet, and now C-in-C, The Nore, had crossed swords with Churchill on several occasions, while Sir Max Horton, C-in-C, Western Approaches, and Sir James Somerville, C-in-C, Eastern Fleet, though spoken of occasionally elsewhere, seem not to have entered Whitehall discussions [141].

Cunningham was viewed by Churchill as a dinosaur of the battleship age, unable and unwilling to adapt to aviation-led and small ship naval warfare.

The chancel screen of Binham Priory has figured in twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic literature as a perfect embodiment of the Reformation's iconoclastic effacement of Image with Word. Where the image of the Risen Christ now emerges from beneath the inscribed words (figure 1), the screen has inspired a more implicit historiographic reading, the pentimento a kind of perfect allegory for its own scholarship, for the intellectual resurrection of that enduring pre-Reformation past. However what makes the screen's expression of sixteenth-century epigraphic culture so suggestive is not so much the superimposition of image with word, but the replacement of one kind of image with another: the epigraphic image. Understanding the screen's inscription as an iconoclastic image, an image that attacks but can't escape its own visuality, prompts a reading of the text as itself a kind of historiography: iconoclasm as an historiographical battle of “cultural rupture” that is ultimately unwinnable.

The distinctive materiality of the Binham screen has made it the subject of frequent references by historians of literature, art, religion, and of both medieval and early modern history. The screen therefore has come to represent “Reformation iconoclasm” in general terms, but a detailed study of precisely what makes it so distinctive raises a specific and significant question: how do such inscriptions – as iconoclastic images – respond to what they replace? In the following discussion, I will argue that this particular object can serve, first, as the basis for a theory of the iconoclastic inscription; and second, as a model for its interpretive practice.

In this object, the Binham screen, the rejected image remains underneath. In other instances of iconoclastic epigraphy, the superseded image may not literally be present but is nevertheless in some sense still there. The artists of the later, epigraphic paintings on the Binham screen could not at that point see the earlier ones: they were painting words against a white ground. It is simply an accident of history and chemistry that the painted letters have often protected the under-layer of white from flaking, such that in places the words appear directly against the superseded figures. So what appears to us now is, in fact, a modern image: an anachronism. But conceptually, perhaps it is the opposite of an anachronism: a rare modern visual manifestation of early modern visuality.

British readers, accustomed to discussions about the coming of war between 1937 and 1939, and to accounts of the great Anglo-American operations after December 1941, might be surprised that the majority of documents in this Part concern Anglo-American co-operation before the Second World War and in the Far East. This is because the first test of the inter-war peace came in China in 1931 and the democracies were faced subsequently with an aggressive autocracy, especially after the ‘incident’ at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July 1937, which was followed by a full-scale war between China and Japan. Though part of the cause was Japanese aggrandisement, the forces of Nippon were responding also to burgeoning Chinese nationalism; moreover, there was little love lost between the Western powers and the government of Chiang Kai-Shek. The Western powers, with long-established (if small-scale) trading operations and a considerable missionary presence in China, had a common interest in protecting their merchants, missionaries, ships and commercial enterprises from the savage and, at times, indiscriminate warfare between China and Japan. There was a sub-text to their endeavours, as some elements in the Japanese hierarchy were intent on driving them out of China. In that drive the British were ‘kicked and cuffed incessantly’ as the Japanese sensed that one Empire was on the way down as its own Empire rose, with the battleground being a third ancient Empire [208]. The British, in fact, blew hot and cold in their struggle with Japan, alternating between apparent appeasement and stout assertion of their historic position. That was because the topsy-turvy situation in Europe affected their power to defend themselves in the Far East – and they could not rely on American help if it came to shooting. The American Admiral on the spot, Harry E. Yarnell, Commander-in- Chief of the Asiatic Fleet, who was strongly pro-British, did his best to support his British friends and got on well with the successive British Commanders-in-Chief of the China Station, Admirals Sir Charles Little and Sir Percy Noble. He was seconded by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William D. Leahy, also pro-British, who hankered after a definite arrangement for joint action. Yarnell, Little and Noble exchanged information, engaged in joint protests and made contingency plans to safeguard civilians [180–85, 187–9, 191, 192, 194, 197–9, 202, 203, 206–8].

It is somewhat ironic that the above quote, the title of an essay by American poet and translator John Ciardi (1916–86), is popularly misattributed to the Italian medievalist and semiotician Umberto Eco (1932–2016). What Ciardi is talking about, of course, is translating literary works from one language into another – in his case, Dante's Inferno from medieval Italian into English. But the idea that translation is a failed process could not be more relevant to the story of early medieval onomancy, for it was in the period between about 600 and 800 CE that the ‘Sphere’ was translated from Greek into Latin. As we will see, the corruptions brought about by translation rendered the whole device useless on its own terms. Despite this, onomancy was popular in Latin translation from as soon as it appeared, throughout the early Middle Ages until the twelfth-century translation movement and beyond.

Beginning with the Neoplatonic movement of the fourth century, this chapter will trace the origins of Latin onomancy in late Antiquity and establish a typology of ‘Sphere’ texts found in Latin manuscripts from the period c. 800– c. 1125. The ‘Victorious and Vanquished’ cannot be included here, since this type of onomancy does not appear in any known surviving manuscripts produced in the Latin West in this period. Whether it was a product of the new translation movement of Graeco-Arabic texts into Latin, or a copy of something that had circulated in Latin earlier but is now lost, cannot be known. There were huge problems in translating the ‘Sphere’ from Greek, and possibly from other languages, into Latin. As well as errors in copying, the main problem was that every Greek letter had a corresponding number, but Latin ones did not. The computistical context of the early medieval ‘Sphere’ will be examined to demonstrate the accretive attraction discussed in the previous chapter between this onomancy and texts of astronomical time measurement, in terms of both content and aesthetic appearance.

Finally, we will look at the ways in which early medieval authors added authority to the ‘Sphere’, first through attributions to various authorities, and second through decoration.

The queen’s mandate for the convocation

Quocirca tenore praesentium peremptorie vos citamus ac decanum ecclesiae cathedralis Dunelmensis et capitulum eiusdem, ac etiam archidiaconos et collegia totumque clerum vestrae dioecesis, exemptos et non exemptos, qui ab antiquo vocari, citari seu moneri solebant facere per vos citari volumus et mandamus quod vos, reverende pater, dictique decani, et archidiaconi Dunelmensis etNorthumbriae personaliter, capitulum vero ecclesiae Dunelmensis huiusmodi per procuratorem suum sufflcientem, clerusque Dunelmensis dioecesis per duos sufficientes procuratores pro clero cuiuslibet archidiaconatus archidiaconatuum praedictorum ab ipsis sufficientes et legitime respective deputatos in ecclesia cathedrali et metropolitica Eboracensi sexto die Octobris proximo futuro post datum praesentium [6 October 1553] inter horas octavam et decimam ante meridiem eiusdem diei, cum continuatione et prorogatione dierum tune sequentium si opus fuerit, et locorum, coram dicto reverendissimo in Christo patre aut eius locum tenentibus, commissariis sive commissario, pluribus aut uno, in ea parte deputatis aut deputandis, compareatis et compareat quilibet eorundem, super his quae statum, securitatem et defensionem Ecclesiae Anglicanae ac pacem, tranquillitatem, bonum publicum et defensionem regni nostri et subditorum nostrorum eiusdem, ac praesertim statum, honorem et utilitatem civitatis, dioecesis et provinciae Eboracensium concernunt et ibidem exponi contigerint, una cum dicto reverendissimo patre sive eius locum tenentibus, commissariis sive commissario huiusmodi aliisque praelatis dictarum civitatis, dioecesis et provinciae tractaturi, vestrum et suum sanum consilium super praemissis et ea concernentibus impensuri, his etiam quae ibidem ordinari contigerint consensuri seu dissensuri,

The grand strategy for the winning of the Second World War was the responsibility of the elected heads of state of the three Atlantic powers – Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States of America, Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada. In practice major decisions were made by the two senior figures, though King made adroit use of his association with the two great leaders, notably at the summit conferences held at the Château Frontenac in Quebec in 1943 and 1944.

Roosevelt had begun the war-long, fruitful and ultimately triumphant partnership with Churchill by writing to him on 11 September 1939, shortly after Churchill had returned to office as First Lord of the Admiralty. FDR, ever the shrewd politician, foresaw that if the war continued for more than a year, or went badly for the Allies, Churchill might well become Prime Minister. Roosevelt told his Ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, that he ‘wanted to get his hand in now’. During the years from the autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1943, they corresponded almost daily, met several times, and sent emissaries when they could not travel themselves; Harry Hopkins, the President's most trusted aide, was a frequent ‘go-between’.

Roosevelt and Churchill had developed a firm working relationship by the latter part of 1943. It was based on a genuine but not truly intimate friendship and, like most relationships, it had its differences, though these were largely political rather than strategic. On grand strategy, they were agreed that their immediate effort must be devoted to overcoming the most serious threat to themselves and their Soviet ally – Hitler's Germany. The ‘Europe-first’ strategy was encapsulated in Admiral Harold R. Stark's ‘Plan Dog’ of October 1940.

Their principal military advisors were the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), which was composed of the British Chiefs of Staff (COS) and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Whereas the British Chiefs had a pedigree going back to 1924, the JCS was newly formed. The CCS, the apex of the military co-operation hierarchy, began during the December 1941–January 1942 meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in Washington (ARCADIA).

The Tudor Navy featured prominently in the Society's early publishing programme. Sir John Laughton's two inaugural volumes on the Armada were soon followed by Sir Julian Corbett's work on the preceding campaigns; meanwhile Michael Oppenheim and Alfred Spont had documented the other end of the Tudor age. Since then, however, only one volume in the main series has been wholly devoted to the period, returning to the Spanish war. The middle years of the sixteenth century have featured in three of the seven volumes of The Naval Miscellany and in the Society's all-embracing Centenary volume. A few papers from these years are also printed in works of wider scope. It was only by way of celebrating the Millennium that the Society finally published the great illuminated inventory of Henry VIII's fleet, an undertaking first planned in 1895. Though more interest in the late Henrician navy has developed as a result of the recovery of the Mary Rose, the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, and the early years of Elizabeth I, remain largely bypassed in naval history. This neglect is not wholly surprising, for it is a period neither marked by a great maritime victory, nor associated with any famous commander. Yet this was a vital time for the administration of the navy, set up at the very end of Henry's reign, and it saw the apprenticeship of many who would lead the service in Elizabeth's later years. There is therefore a gap in the Society's coverage, which is now to be filled in two linked volumes. The second, Elizabethan Naval Administration, is built round a single large document, the Navy Treasurer's Quarter Book account for 1562–63; it is otherwise selective of a very large mass of material. Nothing so extensive exists before 1558, but this means that for the reigns of Edward and Mary the collection can be much more comprehensive. In particular, we are able to include all the extant Treasurer's and Victualler's accounts for the two reigns, printed here for the first time from the original rolls in the Public Records. Entries taken verbatim from the State Papers augment the calendar summaries previously published, and correct a good many errors.

Jamaica, as a British naval station, was in the 1790s concerned above all with the French in St Domingue, the western half of Hispaniola (the modern Haiti). The French revolutionary rhetoric of freedom had reached the slaves. Legally freed by the revolutionary regime in 1791, they had then risen in rebellion against their owners, who in their turn had been less than enthusiastic for the changes. The fighting was confused and savage, the slaves turning quickly to murdering their owners, and to destroying the plantations where they had suffered; the owners replied in kind. From the base at Jamaica, where a rebellion by escaped slaves (maroons) was finally suppressed late in 1795, the British naval forces had established a blockade around the colony, and a British Army invaded the rebellious island.

Duckworth was sent to Jamaica in command of the reinforcing force dispatched in May 1795 – three line-of-battle ships, Leviathan, Hannibal, and Swiftsure [77]. The commander-in-chief, Rear-Admiral William Parker (no relation to Duckworth's ward) remained mainly in Jamaica, and Duckworth was his second-in-command, and took command of operations on the coast of St Domingue as soon as he arrived [83–88]. The bases they used were at the ends of the peninsulas, at Cape Nicholas Mole, and at Jeremie, but any places along the coast were a target. It may have been resentment at this assertiveness, but Parker soon fell into a dispute with Duckworth over a trifling matter of seamanship, but Duckworth's determined stand against what he saw as an unjust accusation of negligence seems to have been sufficient to persuade Parker to trust him [91, 92], and a fortnight later Parker was consulting him about what to do [93, 94]. Parker appears to have withdrawn once more to Jamaica [97].

The military campaigns launched against the French were generally indecisive [e.g., 95–98], and much of Duckworth's work was directed to assisting the army on land [99, 102, 103]. There is a notable gap in the documents over the winter of 1795–96, but matters were not improved in the spring, as Duckworth's letter to Edward Baker (the midshipman's father) in June revealed [108]. The enemy was able to receive supplies from the United States, as consular information reported [109, 111].

Sainthood imprints itself on space. Michel de Certeau remarks that saints’ lives feature a “predominance of precise indications of place over those of time,” indications that anchor holy communities to the places of the saints’ lives and deaths. The seventh-century English saint, Erkenwald, is closely associated with three specific places: Barking and Chertsey, where he founded monasteries, and London, of which he was bishop from 675 to 693. The late eleventh-century Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi describes Erkenwald traveling constantly around his diocese, even when ill and needing to be carried on a litter; the mid-twelfth-century Miracula Sancti Erkenwaldi details the miraculous signs that appeared after the bishop's death to indicate that his final resting-place should be St. Paul's Cathedral in London, rather than either of the abbeys he had founded.3 Before and after the Norman Conquest, Erkenwald's body occupied various positions of honor in the evolving structure of St. Paul’s, coming to reside in an imposing Gothic-style tomb behind the high altar after the thirteenth-century reconstruction of the cathedral.

The monumental presence of Erkenwald's relics in London's civic space registers itself unmistakably in the topographic imagination of the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Saint Erkenwald. Yet, instead of the splendidly entombed body of the saint, the poem gives us its uncanny double, telling a story of how the miraculously incorrupt corpse of a judge from remote pre-Christian antiquity is discovered during the laying of the foundations of St. Paul's in seventh-century London, where Erkenwald is bishop. Erkenwald's enshrined relics are thus made out to occupy a space inhabited by other bodies in the past. The poem also represents Britain as the site of successive incursions and conversions – by Saxon invaders, then by Christian missionaries from Rome.

This essay argues that Saint Erkenwald defamiliarizes the ambient presence of Christianity in the fourteenth-century English context of the poem's composition in order to raise challenging questions about the grounds of Christianity's occupation of literal ground: in London, Britain, and the world at large. When Christ himself declared that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), what justifies the occupation of space by the earthly Church, especially when such occupation follows the pattern of other territorial conquests such as the Saxon settlement?

This study of onomancy has in many ways been an exercise in contradictions which cannot be simply resolved into a set of neat conclusions. Onomancy could be viewed as both a form of permissible natural magic and a type of illicit divination operated by demons. But whether or not onomancy was permissible could also depend on who was in possession of such a device and why it was being used. An educated physician might be absolutely free from scrutiny for practising onomancy for the most serious ends – working out if and when a sick person might die in order to make sure their mundane and spiritual needs were taken care of. However, if a physician at the royal court was suspected of predicting the death of the king or another powerful figure, and happened to have an onomantic device in his possession, onomancy most certainly would not be perceived as a permissible activity, and would likely be framed as demonic magic.

A second contradiction thrown up by this study is that onomancy was at once a serious prognostic for the prediction of life or death and potentially a fun practice tool or diversionary game for students of the quadrivium. Of course, after their undergraduate degrees these students might well go on to a higher faculty and study medicine, and so these two uses are not necessarily exclusive to particular users. A third contradiction is that onomantic devices claim to offer a definite answer – life or death, yes or no – but the corruptions contained in Latin and, later, vernacular translations meant that very often they did not. This, ironically, may have contributed to their survival, as copyists strove to find the ‘correct’ original version.

Many of the points I have made about onomancy throughout this book can, of course, also be applied to other methods of divination and prediction. But onomancy's operative elements intersected with the lively late medieval debate on universals, just at a time when the category of natural magic was postulated by philosophers and theologians in the burgeoning universities of the later Middle Ages.

1. The Man

Admiral John Thomas Duckworth was born in 1747 at Leatherhead in Surrey, attended Eton College briefly, and was sponsored into the Navy by Admiral Boscawen at the age of 13 in the midst of the Seven Years’ War. He served as a captain's servant, then a midshipman, until 1771; he was a lieutenant until 1779, by which time he had been in the Navy for nineteen years. But the American War of Independence brought promotion, to him as to so many others, and he was promoted captain in 1780. He was employed much of the time between these wars, and in the Spanish and Russian crises of 1790–91 commanded the Bombay Castle. When the French Revolutionary War began he commanded Orion in which he fought in the First of June fight.

The decisive change in his service came during his later posting to Jamaica. He was senior captain on the station by that time (1796) and when the Jamaica Station Commander-in-Chief Sir William Parker evacuated himself to England to recover his health, Duckworth was given the temporary rank of Commodore and acting Commander-in-Chief. By acquitting himself well in this role, he made his mark with the Secretary of State Earl Spencer, who became a regular correspondent. His next step up the ladder came with Admiral Earl St Vincent in the Mediterranean in 1798. St Vincent chose him to command the naval part in the conquest of Minorca, for which he was awarded the lucrative sinecure of Colonel of Marines. When St Vincent himself went home sick, Duckworth took over the command at Gibraltar (Nelson in Sicily was technically the Commander-in-Chief in place of St Vincent), and by capturing a rich Spanish convoy he secured his personal prosperity. This was sealed by his command-in-chief of the Leeward Islands station, where he organised the capture of the Danish and Swedish islands in 1801, and gathered considerable further wealth through the prizes captured on his watch.

It is a mark of the Admiralty's confidence in him he was transferred to the Jamaica command directly from the Leewards, when the commander there, ‘Lord’ Hugh Seymour, suddenly died. He remained at Jamaica for nearly four years, and on his return to Britain was employed as second-in-command to Lord Gambier in the Brest blockade. By chasing and destroying an escaped French squadron (Battle of San Domingo) he prevented further Caribbean trouble.

SECTION A

‘TORCH’:

THE LANDINGS IN NORTH AFRICA JULY 1942–MAY 1943

Operation ‘Torch’, a series of Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November 1942 designed to clear the southern shore of the Mediterranean of Axis forces, was a great success, but its origins were marked by deep division between American and British military leaders. The source of their dispute lay in their nations’ differing strategic traditions. The Americans plunged straight for the enemy's heart but the British preferred an indirect approach, wearing down their opponent in a series of marginal campaigns, which used the superiority of British sea power. In 1942 the Americans, already distracted by a desire to seek vengeance in the Pacific for the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, also sought an early end to the European war. Through operation ‘Bolero’ they proposed to build up forces in Britain with which to invade northern Europe, either in ‘Sledgehammer’, a diversionary invasion of western France in 1942 designed to relieve pressure on a collapsing Soviet Union, or in ‘Roundup’, a full-scale landing across the Channel in 1943, which intended a rapid march on Berlin. The British thought that the German army and air force were too strong for any invasion the western alliance could mount in 1942 or 1943; ministers, military leaders and public opinion feared a repeat of the Western Front's bloody stalemate of 1914–18. They pressed for an attritional campaign which would weaken German military and aerial power, leading to a return to the continent in 1944, when German strength in the air and on the ground would be more manageable. They had invested heavily, in prestige as well as military resources, in the Mediterranean, where their position in the first half of 1942 was parlous; a successful campaign in that region would restore British morale, prestige, control – and her economic and diplomatic position in the post-war Middle East and Balkans. Almost every British minister and service chief supported the idea of an early Mediterranean expedition, Cunningham included [21, 25]. It was President Franklin Roosevelt, interested in securing control of Morocco to aid the Battle of the Atlantic and realising that the British were unalterably opposed to a landing in France in 1942, who tipped the strategic balance in favour of ‘Torch’ in July 1942.