The author John Lydgate (1370–1451) has to hold pride of place in reflections on later medieval English comparison. He after all provides us with one of the most pregnant and quoted remarks on comparison of any age: “Comparisons are odious.”
Lydgate’s is a sort of legal account, so law or adjudication is one of the elements within which the comparative works. In this case, we have the account of a trial before two judges, “the hardy lyon” and the “emperial egle”—these were, Lydgate says, “the dredful royal judges.” The issue they faced was complex but not “too deep,”
as Lydgate put it. The judges needed to listen to the arguments of the horse, the goose, and the sheep and to decide, and I quote, “whyche of them was to man most profitable (v. 25):”36To be brief, they make their cases. The horse and goose rather confidently; the sheep sheepishly, but he makes some good points too, playing the bashful passive soul who only inadvertently has managed to provide the vellum for books and the wool to fend off winter.
As an aside, it is interesting to note that within this poem, in stanza 9, there is a section on the relation of the word horse to concepts, as in cheval leads to chevalier, or that “in Duch a rider called is knight.”37 One can point out here what might 35 Lamond,On Husbandry, 27
36 John Lydgate/Max Degenhardt (eds.),The Hors, Goos, and the Sheepe, Erlangen/Leipzig 1900, 49.
37 Lydgate/Degenhardt,Hors, Goos, and the Sheepe, 51.
seem obvious: Language and translation or travel can be—but are not inevitably—a great invitation to comparative thinking. Lydgate’s move is a small one, but among Bacon’s most characteristic sections of theOpus Majus was that on the importance and utility of learning languages.38Forms of translation, like forms of discovery, lurk, and their relationship to comparing is interesting because they might entice the practice out of the woodwork, so to speak.
In the end, the judges reject all three animals’ claims of superiority, even as the horse has challenged them as to whether, “to put it simply, whether a goose or a sheep in any way can be likened or compared to a horse”39 (150–154). Can they indeed? The poem proves yes, but should they be? From stanza 72, one gets the judgment of the Lion and Eagle. They argue for calm and complacency in one’s lot;
they tell:
“The horse, be kynde to live in travaille,
Goose, with her goselynges to swymme in the lake, The sheepe, whos wollis doth so moche availe, In her pasture grasen and mery make.
{Their} comparisouns of one assent forsake Allwey remembryng, howe Gode and nature To a goode ende made evry creature. ”40
The conclusion is quite pointed, bringing both moral and social concerns to the fore:
“Odious of olde is all comparisouns
And of comparisouns engendered is hattrede, Al folk be not of lyke condicions
Nor lyke disposid of thought, word or deed.”41
Here we find for the first time this aphorism of considerable durability in English:
Comparisons are odious. First, the poem would seem to make a literary comparison to comment on the practice of social comparison and social circumstances. One sort of context affects another. The practice of literary comparison might have an interesting relation to the social, and while this chapter has not tried to assess the literary comparative tropes, here one becomes aware that there might have been an interesting crossover. However, the key is probably Lydgate’s desire to bring social or ethical commentary to the fore just because there were new challenges, even anxieties about the business of comparing.
38 Opus Majus, part three, 75-115 in Burke translation.
39 Lydgate/Degenhardt,The Hors, Goos, and the Sheepe, 55.
40 Lydgate/Degenhardt,The Hors, Goos, and the Sheepe, 73-74.
41 Lydgate/Degenhardt,The Hors, Goos, and the Sheepe,74.
Looking back on the tensions around the legislation on consumption and tax-ation and the resentments these both revealed and engendered, it is hard not to see Lydgate’s work as a response. What is more, other later medieval social ex-pression of considerable popularity would seem to be grappling with the relation between the diversity of statuses and lives. The different sorts of people with whom later medieval England was plainly fascinated is so clear fromThe Canterbury Tales (1387–1400). Here Chaucer describes the 24 pilgrims “to telle yow al the condicioun of ech of hem, so as it semed me,//And whiche they weren and of what degree” and puts juxtaposition if not comparison to the test as to whether they are different.42 However, there is no large moralizing frame in Chaucer—this is not Dante.
Such moralizing work, however, was taking place in other areas of art at the same time, and Lydgate knew it. There seems to be a comparing impulse at work in the theme of the Danse Macabre or Dance of Death, for instance. This image, created apparently in Paris in the 1420s, depicts all the sorts of people, each finding that, in the end, notwithstanding their differences, death would unite them and find them the same, except for their state of grace. It is not surprising to find that our same John Lydgate provided his own English version of the Dance of Death.43As a comparison, the diversity of social types and the sameness of their attitude to death are set at play.
The fifteenth century also saw, contemporary with Lydgate, the arrival of the remarkable cadaver tombs.44They seem to be in close connection with the Danse Macabre. The tombs feature verisimilar carvings of the subject in his or her worldly splendor on the top. Underneath, however, as it were in the ground, we find instead the effects of time and corruption, the carving below the cadaver, sometimes just a skeleton, sometimes wasted flesh, maybe with the odd worm. It would be hard not to see here again a sort of visual comparing of before and after, very much in line with the important point that the body’s splendor, the person’s wealth, did not matter. The differences are underlined by the act of comparison. Chaucer’s granddaughter Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, was a rare woman who opted for this 42 Geoffrey Chaucer/Jill Mann (ed.),The Canterbury Tales, Harmondsworth UK, General Prologue,
lines 38-41.
43 See Lydgate’s in Florence Warren (ed.),The Dance of Death, Early English Text Society, OS 181, London 1931. See Sophie Oosterwijk, Of Corpses, Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture, in:Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (2004): 61-90; and Amy Appleford, The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys, in:Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies(2008) 38, 285-314.
44 See Kathleen Cohen,Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,Berkeley/London 1973; Pamela M. King, The Iconography of the Wakeman Cenotaph in Tewkesbury Abbey, in:Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society103 (1985), 141-48; and Paul Binski,Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, Ithaca 1996, 139-52.
Fig. 1: Cadaver Tomb of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, Can-terbury Cathedral, Kent, built circa 1443.
Fig. 2: Cadaver Tomb of Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, Ewelme Church, Oxforshire, built circa 1475.
tomb style. She was the tertium comparationis, her body in the middle casket, the depiction of her social person on top, the image of her cadaver below, each brought into relation with her true person: body for the resurrection and immortal soul.
While Lydgate’s thinking probably grew alongside these wider concerns with a new sort of comparative or juxtaposing social vision, his statements remain
virtu-ally the first English commentary on the practice of comparisons itself. Comparison is criticized as tending to the unethical and the un-Christian, but it plays the role here of supporting social norms as well. There is still a sense that people cannot, compared to each other, improve themselves, and it is a crossover sort of perfor-mance; medieval social complacency and religious charity pushing back against something perhaps a bit too egotistical or simply too this-worldly.
Lydgate’s final four lines quoted above deserve attention and might be pro-found. It is possible, on the framework that he provides, to see that comparison is especially odious because it is futile, an operation akin to what philosophers call a category mistake. There are places, we might imagine, where one can usefully evaluate and compare, but there are others in which the operation is both idle and conducive to unhappiness. It is not, on this account, possible for comparison to be a useful practice in such human cases.