Among the arresting array of images in the opening lines of what Peter Brown has aptly called the "dynamic but controlled" Canon's Yeoman's Prologue,(FN1) Chaucer underscores none quite as graphically as the bodily outpouring of sweat. Our first mark of the black-clad Canon's dramatic arrival is the glistening hide of his horse, which "So swatte that it wonder was to see" (8.560), while that of his yeoman, similarly, "So swatte that unnethe myghte it gon" (563). A few "foom ... flekked" lines further on, the narrator returns to the image with a fixation that tonally foreshadows the Yeoman's obsessive fascination with the allure of alchemy soon to come. Focusing now on the Canon, he declares that "A clote-leef he hadde under his hood/ For swoot and for to keep his heed from heete./ But it was joye for to seen hym swete!" (577-79).(FN2)
    The imagery is the more evocative in light of two incidental details of which every careful reader of the pilgrimage narrative has at least a subliminal awareness: the fact that fewer than forty lines earlier, the Second Nun's St. Cecilia rests impassively in the bath of flames that "made hire nat a drope for to sweete" (522); and the less visible but equally striking fact that the word swete--including its variants swoot and swatte--is rarely used elsewhere in the Canterbury corpus. (Of only nine such appearances, five occur in the aforementioned fifty-plus lines at the end of the Second Nun's Tale and Canon's Yeoman's Prologue, while a sixth occurs later on--in line 1186--of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale).(FN3)
    The modern reader may be forgiven, in short, for the faintly surreal feeling that Chaucer has temporarily deposited him in the medieval equivalent of an aerobic center or footballers' weight room, where burnished bodies pump perspiration to the heavy metal allure of pain and gain. More analytically, it seems reasonable to ask what precisely it is we are encountering here. Why all these graphic references to sweat?
    In so framing the question, I mean to suggest that Chaucer intends something more than a simple reinforcement of the contrasts so many recent critics--dating back to Charles Muscatine--have illuminated through their detaiied exegeses of the tightly interwoven narratives of Fragment 8, though most of what I shall proceed to say will build on, rather than challenge, their central arguments. In short, I take it as a given that whatever else his audience would have inferred from this plenitude of perspiration, Chaucer clearly lingers on the alchemists' bodily effluvia to highlight the profound disjunction between the sacred and profane worlds the two tales mutually illuminate--a disjunction variously perceived as "men's alchemy and God's";(FN4) "orthodox religious ideals" and a "sacrilegious distortion of the central mystery of the Christian faith";(FN5) the anagogical opposition of material and spiritual "multiplying";(FN6) physical sight and metaphysical insight;(FN7) "trouthe" and "falsnesse";(FN8) "cupidity" and "charity";(FN9) spiritually transformed souls and the putative metamorphosis of matter as reflections of Chaucer's interest in "the epistemology of artistic transformation";(FN10) and a "grimy, sooty ... sluttish" sensuality that is the cosmic antithesis of "the breath of God"(FN11)--to cite a representative cross-section of important emphases among critics who have attended to the relationship between the two tales.
    Yet despite such studied attention to the two poems' mutually illuminating themes and resonating imagery of fire, stones, purification, "multiplying," and blindness, no one to my knowledge has shown more than passing interest in this proliferation of sweat.(FN12) The relative inattention is especially curious given the implicit invitation Muscatine extends to future critics as he closes his brief, groundbreaking commentary on the prologue and tale of the Canon's Yeoman: "Chaucer's emphasis on the haste and the hot sweat, like the Yeoman's stridency of tone, seems to call for a more-than-dramatic explanation."(FN13)
    Muscatine's remark is a cornerstone from which to mount the argument that follows, which is similarly predicated on the assumption that Chaucer's apparent "journalistic" realism is, more often than not, "ultimately symbolic."(FN14) My speculative contentions are also indebted to V. A. Kolve's rich iconographic evidence that our sense of Chaucer's imagery "must include ... the mental images that medieval literature invited its readers and hearers to frame in their minds' eye...."(FN15)
    Where sweat is concerned, there is copious evidence from which to infer that the mental images framed in the collective mind's eye of Chaucer's audience would have been considerably more varied--and more graphic--than we are accustomed to today. While the primary definition given by the MED for the verb sweten is the expected "to perspire, sweat,"(FN16) for example, and while, then as now, a colloquialism such as swinken and swete could call to mind the zealous laborings so central to these paired tales on the theme of "werche," the dictionary painstakingly establishes the ubiquity of such secondary meanings as "1 ... (c) to bleed, sweat blood"; "1 ... (d) to exude (sweat, blood, blood and water, etc.)"; "1 ... (e) of blood or other bodily fluid: to flow ... suppurate, ooze"; "1 ... (f) to drool; weep, cry"; "2 ... (b) to form (moisture) on the surface; produce (nectar), exude (rosin, fluid) in drops ... exude (oil)."(FN17)
    No reader familiar with the exhaustive research of Carolyn Walker Bynum will be surprised by such associations, which in their commixture of the material with the implicitly spiritual evoke precisely the chain of evocative connotations we repeatedly witness in the remarkable phenomena of the ascetic lives she delineates. What Bynum pointedly calls their "extraordinary exuding"(FN18) appears everywhere in the dramatic biographies of these late medieval women: milk pouring from the breast of Mary or Christ or Saint Francis; blood flowing from hands, feet, and sides;(FN19) pus pouring from the pores of lepers, the drinking of which became "a favorite asceticism of later female tertiaries";(FN20) tears; saliva; nosebleeds; oil as a "healing liquid" exuded by bodies after death; even vomit and fecal defecations rendered in imagery with the graphic literalness of a Hell "forced to vomit forth the indigestible bread of Christ."(FN21)
    Bynum's thesis, of course, is that these astonishing emanations are far more characteristic of medieval female than of male ascetics--a fact which makes more pungent, in several senses, the singular outpouring of sweat at the outset of the emphatically masculine Canon's Yeoman's Tale. It is surely also worth noting that the opposite of such spiritual exuding--female bodies that don't excrete--is a pronounced mark of spiritual devotion in the lives of many of these same mystics: Thus, Colette of Corbie, whose biographer attests that she never menstruated, and whose body gave off only sweet odors; or Elizabeth of Spalbeek, in whom, as Philip of Clairvaux chronicled it, "neither saliva nor sputum emanated from her mouth nor any mucus or other fluid from her nostrils"; or the celebrated recluse from Normandy(FN22) who, "for many years," "ate and drank nothing, nor from her mouth nor from any of the other natural organs did anything go out."(FN23)
    When even such an empiricist as Roger Bacon can acknowledge a Norwich woman who, "for twenty years," exuded "no excretion from her body, as the bishop proved by careful examination,"(FN24) it seems reasonable to conclude that the flowing perspiration and its miraculous absence in Chaucer's Fragment 8 would have resonated in ways they no longer can some six hundred years hence. At the very least, Cecilia's remarkable ability "nat a drope for to sweete" in her bath of flames would have signalled her spiritual kinship with more contemporary non-exuding female ascetics, while the syncretism of the Canon's sweat-beaded brow and wondrously sweating horse are unmistakable signs of his all too mutable, earth-bound flesh.(FN25)
    That sweat would have had a place on any medieval list of graphic bodily signs marking spiritual health or sickness is an inference one reasonably draws from even a cursory reading of Bynum's abundant exempla, as her recounting of Thomas of Cantimpré:'s description of Lutgard of Aywieres vividly illustrates:
    He also reported that Christ once commanded her to get up from a feverish sweat in which she was languishing and go directly to church. "Why are you lying there?" he asked. "You must do penance ... not indulge in sweat." When, after this reprimand, she ran to Matins she saw Christ in the doorway of the church, and she nursed from his side.(FN26)
    In a similar account, suggesting the widespread nature (with respect to both time and place) of such miraculous perspiration phenomena, Bynum records a biographer's notation on the "failure to sweat" of the late fifteenth-century Italian nun Columba of Rieti.(FN27)
    In sum, by accentuating these contrastive narrative details--profuse sweat and its conspicuous absence--Chaucer crystallizes in a single compelling image the profound disjunction between the fruitful outpouring of the Spirit and the prodigal waste of the carnal self--a bifurcation central to the defining metaphors of late medieval spirituality. For Chaucer's contemporary Raymond of Capua, describing the eucharistic visions of Catherine of Siena, this "torrent of heavenly graces" that "flooded her soul" was potent enough to "check ... the natural flow" of the body's "vital juices."(FN28)
    If this "torrent," which "brimmed over upon her body," is here imaged as metaphysical rather than corporeal, other accounts significantly blur the distinction. They also offer evidence more contemporary than the aforementioned testimony of Roger Bacon that such miraculous phenomena reverberated as far away as Chaucer's land. As Bynum notes in her overview of the life of Catherine, who died in 1380, "... in his panegyric written soon after her death, William Flete, and English hermit of considerable reputation, reported the sweet odor that came from her clothes during life, the blood that flowed from her mouth in her eucharistic ecstasies...."(FN29)
    In light of such evidence, I think it reasonable to conclude that the emphasis Chaucer glves to sweat pouring out in such marvelous abundance that "it wonder was to see"--this astounding outflow of corporeal water--points us clearly to the image's subtlest iconographic function: its ironic force as evocative antithesis to the series of purifying baptisms that spring from the thematic heart of the Second Nun's Tale.
    Several critics, Rosenberg and Kolve most notably, have built their convincing interpretations of Chaucer's Saint Cecilia on the rich suggestiveness of her climactic "bath of flambes rede" (515)--emphasizing such salient points as the poet's rearrangement of Jacobus de Voragine's etymologies to highlight her "brennynge evere in charite" (118),(FN30) his attention to her miraculous "coolness" as "an image of the saint burning with this holier sort of love,"(FN31) and his reinforcement of the flames' significance through scattered details such as Tiburce's fear that "ybrend in this world shul we be!" (318). Rosenberg also cogently argues the implicit contrasts with the fires of the puffer alchemists, whose blear-eyed absorption in their own sulfurous flames further underlines the insight of Cecilia and the "wisdom of the faithful ... purified by the fire of persecution which burns away the dross of sin."(FN32)
    Without questioning any of these conclusions about the symbolic importance of fire in the paired narratives, I want to propose the equal visibility--and connotative resonance--of water. Water whose baptismal potency quietly washes away the "dross of sin" throughout those sections of the Second Nun's Tale that prepare us for the dramatic "burning away" Rosenberg illuminates in the story's climax. And water whose negative valence is equally pronounced in the following tale's sustained imagery of "watres corosif" (853), "Watres rubifiyng" and "watres albificacioun" (797, 805), and the filled vessels in which gulled innocents grope for "mortified" metals at the perilous risk of their souls (1210-11, 1234, 1315-22, etc.).
    It is only within this context of water's symoblic significance, it seems to me, that we fully apprehend the iconographic force of Chaucer's superficially "journalistic" emphasis on sweat and its absence in the two tales.
    And yet it is a context surprisingly easy to overlook. Occupied by the vivid descriptiveness of Cecilia's "bath of flambes," for example, we may temporarily lose sight of a fact that Chaucer takes considerable, if quiet, pains to accentuate: the bath of fire is--first and foremost--a bath:

For in a bath they gonne hire faste shetten,
And nyght and day greet fyr they under betten.
(517-18)
She sat al coold and feelede no wo.
It made hire nat a drope for to sweete.
But in that bath hir lyf she moste lete,
For he Almachius, with ful wikke entente,
To sleen hire in the bath his sonde sente.
(521-25)

    The spiritual resonance of this fact depends partly on an iconographic history Kolve's visual record of Cecilia's martyrdom clearly demonstrates: Unlike many medieval illustrations of her death, which place the bath out-of-doors, Chaucer not only sets the climactic episode inside her house, he underscores it:

And he weex wroth, and bad men sholde hir lede
Hom til hir hous, and "In hire hous," quod he,
"Brenne hire right in a bath of flambes rede."
(513-15)

    When the martyred saint's final response to Almachius' tyranny, scarcely four stanzas later, is her own ringing command to make "Heere of myn hous perpetuelly a cherche" (546), the bath's evocation of a baptismal font seems unmistakable, especially in light of the Prologue's foreshadowing image of Mary as "Thow welle of mercy, synful soules cure" (37).(FN33)
    What I am suggesting, to summarize, is that Chaucer's "bath of flambes" is at least as important iconographically for its suggestion of purifying water as it is of fire. Site of the wondrous transformation from physical death to eternal life of an unswerving saint whose work in the world has been what Kolve accurately encapsulates as "spiritual procreation, spiritual fecundity,"(FN34) the climactic bath is the last in a chain of images that quietly work to place baptism at the thematic center of the poem. Thus Cecilia to Valerian: "If that yow list, the angel shul ye see, / So that ye trowe on Crist and yow baptize" (170-71); followed immediately, after Pope Urban "hym cristned right there" (217), by Cecilia to Tiburce: "Go with thy brother now, and thee baptise, / And make thee clene ..." (299-300); followed by Maximus, his household, and the Roman "tormentours," to whom "Cecile cam ... / With preestes that hem cristned alle yfeere" (379-80).
    These sacramental echoes reverberate through the "watres corosif" and deluding basins of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale to reach their highest pitch in the extended allusion to Arnaldus of Villanova's cryptic alchemical treatise Rosarie (1428-71). Positioned at the poem's conclusion--the obverse reflection of the transuting bath that ends the tale of St. Cecilia--the passage culminates with the "disciple of Plato" beseeching his master for an explanation of the mystical "Magnasia" en route to the "privee" philosophers' stone:

"It is a water that is maad, I seye,
Of elementes foure," quod Plato.
(1459-60)

    Pressed further to reveal "the roote.... Of that water," Plato avows that the "philosophres" have been sworn to "discovere it unto noon,"

"Ne in no book it write in no manere.
For unto Crist it is so lief and deere
That he wol nat that it discovered bee,
But where it liketh to his deitee
Men for t'enspire...."
(1466-70)

    The imagery's sacramental connotations have been convincingly explicated by John Gardner: "Rightly interpreted, the passage reveals that the philosopher's stone is none other than Christ ... exactly as Cecilia's tale says it is. The stone is Titanos, Magnasia, the 'root' of a 'water,' that is, Christ as font, who in coming to this world was incarnated in "elementes foure.'"(FN35)
    It is on the above foundation of detailed evidence, heavily buttressed by such work as that I've cited from Gardner, Kolve, and other penetrating critics of these tightly paired narratives, that I want to build my final--and most speculative--argument for the significance of sweat as a resonant link between the two poems. This hypothesis, which I offer guardedly, is that Chaucer's repeated use of the word within so few lines at the point where the two tales intersect is partly explained by the visually homonymic force of the verbs sweten ("to perspire, sweat") and sweten ("to make sweet, sweeten")--a connotative richness amplified by the similar overlap of their nominal, adjectival, and finite verbal forms: swete, swetes, sweted, sweting, etc.(FN36)
    While we can only speculate on the auditory effects a poet as linguistically gifted as Chaucer could have generated, in an age of oral poetry, from these richly evocative similitudes, their suggestiveness to the reader's eye remains striking--as the juxtaposition of Cecilia's miraculous capacity "nat a drope for to sweete" with Tiburce's "The sweete smel that in myn herte I fynde / Hath chaunged me al in another kynde" exemplifies.
    The sustained symbolic contrast between the sweet odors of salvation permeating the Second Nun's Tale and the sulfurous stench hanging over the alchemists' futile labors has of course often been noted by the critics I have earlier cited, but no one to my knowledge has remarked the implicit association of "sweet" and "sweat" that I am suggesting here. Beyond internal support from Fragment 8, to which I shall return momentarily, the most convincing evidence for Chaucer's exploitation of this visual and auditory proximity comes in fact from outside the Canterbury narrative: a much shorter poem in which equally antithetical imagery is used to evoke a similar contrast between "A blisful lyf" of charitable unselfishness and "the cursednesse / Of coveytyse, that first our sorwe broghte." The poem is Chaucer's own "The Former Age," where the sweet/sweat dichotomy is so pronounced it fairly reverberates with intimations of the opposition between the serene Cecilia and the grasping, sweat-browed alchemists her life implicitly condemns.
    The resonant lines are the poem's opening two--"A blisful lyf, a paisible and a swete, / Ledden the peples in the former age"-- and the pivotally transitional twenty-seventh through twenty-ninth, where the poet turns from the glories of this Edenic state to its fallen, contemporary equivalent:

But cursed was the tyme, I dare wel seye,
That men first dide hir swety bysinesse
To grobbe up metal, lurkinge in derknesse....(FN37)

    In the tales of the Second Nun and Canon's Yeoman, we may discern a similar synchrony generated from the almost limitless capacity of both words to spark chains of sensory associations--a protean synaesthesia of sight, sound, taste, and smell. Bynum usefully reminds us that our receptors to such associations are often less responsive than those of our forebears in the Middle Ages, where "not only poets but ordinary folk as well treated the senses as far less discrete than we do and the items of the phenomenal world as more fluid in identity or significance."(FN38) Paul Taylor's emphasis that "Sight and odour are the cognitive clues to the success of Cedilia and to the failure of the Canon and his Yeoman" is also worth noting here,(FN39) for if my hypothesis is valid, it is the Second Nun's Tale's repeated imagings of the sweetness of salvation that prepare us for the dramatic impact of sweat--with its obvious intimations of the "rammyssh" odor and appearance of the benighted alchemists who "stynken as a goot" (886-87)--in the following tale.
    To demonstrate this fact with reference to but a few of numerous examples: It is the "soote savour" of the lily that climaxes the description in which Chaucer offers his initial etymology of Cecilia's name (91); the "soote savour" of Cecilia and Valerian's flower crowns that the angel promises will never dissipate (229); the same "soote savour," so unusual "this tyme of the yeer" (245-47), that Tiburce immediately notices in the scene leading to the spiritual metamorphosis imaged through the "sweete smel" that he is stunned to recognize has "chaunged me al in another kynde" (244-52)--and so forth.(FN40)
    For less direct but reinforcing evidence that Chaucer would have been attracted by the connotative possibilities in juxtaposing this pair of near-homonyms--one evoking the most pleasurable of tastes and odors, the other a generally disagreeable corporeal waste--I shall briefly return to Bynum's definitive study of Cecilia's later medieval counterparts: the female ascetics whose "sweetness of ecstasy" was signaled, in a myriad of case histories Bynum painstakingly chronicles, by "miraculously sweet bodily effluvia." Thus, Ida of Louvain, whose mouth "filled with honeycomb" whenever she recited John 1:14. Or Mary of Oignies "tasting sweetness whenever she heard words of spiritual advice." Or Alice of Schaerbeke "restored by liquid from the breasts of Christ, as inebriated with his sweetness." Or Lutgard of Aywières, who "sucked such sweetness with her mouth at his breast that she could feel no tribulation"--an ecstasy so pronounced "her own saliva became sweet to the taste." Or Lidwina of Schiedam, her body "closed to ordinary intake and excretion," who subsequently shed skin, bones, and intestinal parts in a "sweet putrefaction."(FN41)
    Such extraordinary effluvia, the marvelous sweetness of which is almost invariably emphasized in countless additional examples, do more than provide a broad contextual frame for the argument I have been developing. They offer specific illustrations that late medieval people saw a direct linkage between spiritual "sweetness" and striking bodily emissions, as in the aforementioned cases of Columba of Rieti's biographer testifying to "her lovely smell, her failure to sweat" and the by no means unique phenomenon of Colette of Corbie, whose body gave off only "sweet odors."(FN42) It is only against the backdrop of such miraculous stories, so comparable to that of the unperspiring Cecilia serene in her bath, that the ironic weight of the jarring hyperbole in Chaucer's description of the Canon, "But it was joy for to see hym swete!", can be fully grasped. Like Hamlet's "rank sweat of an enseamed bed," the line holds within its graphic literalism reverberant intimations of the most profound kind of human sacrilege. In Muscatine's words: "that complacent faith in science that despises God."(FN43)
    The brilliant irony of these counterpointed images--the saintly woman who perspires not a drop; the male cleric from whom sweat streams in marvelous profusion--is perhaps best testified by a set of prevalent medieval associations Hope Phyllis Weissman has delineated in the answer she proposes to a question that peripherally bears on that with which this essay began. Articulating the several reasons why Chaucer's randy Wife is from "biside Bathe," Weissman notes Jean de Meun's confirmation of "the traditional association--out of Ovid, Juvenal, and Jerome--of steam baths with sexually appetitive, and therefore morally reprehensible, women,"(FN44) a cultural frame of reference in which sweat--as the following example from La Vieille's instruction to liberated women illustrates--clearly had a prominent place:

"Sire, ne sai quel maladie,
ou fievre ou goute ou apotume,
tout le cors m'anbrase et alume;
si m'esteut que j'aille aus estuves;
tout aions nous ceuz .II. cuves,
n'i vaudroit riens baign sans estuve,
por ce convient que je m'estuve."

    ("Sir, I don't know what disease, what fever or gout or boil, has seized and is firing my whole body. I have to go to the stews, even though we have two tubs here at home; a bath without a sweat would be worth nothing, and so I must go out to sweat myself.")(FN45)
    In a subtle but pointed reversal of such conventional sexist assumptions--the woman here an unsweating virgin "fired" in her sacramental bath; the bankrupt alchemists shrouded in sterile laboratories where they "sweat themselves" in rapacious obsession--Chaucer fleetingly foreshadows gender issues that will emerge into the full light of cultural apprehension only in our own belated time.
    Added material

BRUCE KENT COWGEILL
       Winona State University

FOOTNOTES
       1 Peter Brown, "Is the 'Canon's Yeoman's Tale' Apocryphal?" English Studies 64 (1983): 488.
    2 All citations are to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
    3 See Joseph S. P. Tatlock and Arthur G. Kennedy, A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1927), 901.
    4 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (U. of California Press, 1957), 213-21. The citation is from 215.
    5 Joseph E. Grennen, "Saint Cecilia's 'Chemical Wedding': The Unity of the Canterbury Tales, Fragment VIII," JEGP 65 (1966): 466-81. The citation is from 466-67.
    6 K. Michael Olmert, "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale: An Interpretation," Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 70-94.
    7 Bruce A. Rosenberg, "The Contrary Tales of the Second Nun and the Canon's Yeoman," Chaucer Review 2 (1968): 278-91.
    8 Glending Olson, "Chaucer, Dante, and the Structure of Fragment VIII (G) of the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review 16 (1981): 222-36. See especially 226.
    9 John Gardner, "Signs, Symbols, and Cancellations," in Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry, ed. John P. Hermann and John J. Bruke, Jr. (U. of Alabama Press, 1981), 201. See also Gardner's "The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale: An Interpretation," PQ 46 (1967): 1-17, and Paul A. Olson's brief but provocative contention that the two tales contrast "Amor sapientiae" with overly endowed monasticism. The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton U. Press, 1986), 181-82.
    10 Robert M. Longsworth, "Privileged Knowledge: St. Cecilia and the Alchemist in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 87-96. The citation is from 88. On the epistemological implications of the tales' focus on transformations, see also Russell A. Peck, "The Ideas of 'Entente' and Translation in Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale," Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 17-37.
    11 Paul B. Taylor, "The Canon's Yeoman's Breath: Emanations of a Metaphor," English Studies 60 (1979): 380-88. The citation is from 384.
    12 Glending Olson gives a helpful summary of the contrasting images, including a paragraph that focuses on the moral significance of sweat in the poems. I have profited from his brief comments on the significance of the miners' "swety bysinesse" in Chaucer's "The Former Age," though my treatment of the image later in this essay, while compatible with his, explores thematic implications he does not pursue.
    13 Muscatine, 220. The invitation seems especially compelling, paradoxically, given what Derek Pearsall calls the apparent "gratuitousness of the visual detail of the Canon and the Yeoman and the horses," detail which plays against the "immense and abstract meaningfulness" of St. Cecilia's death. Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 106.
    14 Muscatine, 214.
    15 V. A. Kolve, "Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale and the Iconography of Saint Cecilia," in New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, ed. Donald M. Rose (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1981), 137.
    16 Sherman M. Kuhn and John Reidy, eds., The Middle English Dictionary (U. of Michigan Press, 1956-94), 18:1205.
    17 Ibid.
    18 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (U. of California Press, 1987), 122.
    19 Cf. also "The many miracles of consecrated wafers oozing or streaming drops of blood." Ibid., 63.
    20 Ibid., 98.
    21 Ibid., 123, 93, 32.
    22 Bynum cites the details from James of Vitry.
    23 Ibid., 138, 122, 91. I here cite only a few of many dramatic illustrations of Bynum's point that "Hagiographers connected failure to eat ordinary food or excrete ordinary fluids with exuding extraordinary liquids" (122), a connection made throughout the age of Chaucer, as evidenced by the later pamphleteers "who praised the so-called fasting-girls for not exuding so much as sweat or dandruff ..." (274).
    24 Ibid., 91. Bacon attempted to explain the feat as a "work of nature," linking the matter a fasting woman failed to excrete to her ability to survive without eating.
    25 See D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton U. Press, 1963), who provides both verbal and visual support to confirm that "The analogy horse/flesh is very old and very common" in the Middle Ages (254). See also Kolve's even more extended use of iconographic evidence to establish the late-medieval currency of this association of the horse with "one's carnal nature." V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford U. Press, 1984), 237-56.
    26 Bynum, 122.
    27 Ibid., 148.
    28 Ibid., 168.
    29 Ibid., 171. Cf. also the English reputation of Lidwina of Schiedam, noted below, and Julian of Norwich's extended imaging of Jesus as lactating mother.
    30 Rosenberg, 281.
    31 Kolve, "Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale," 154. Bynum's emphasis that on occasion Catherine of Siena, Lidwina of Schiedam, and Columba of Rieti "all failed to perceive fire as hot" (204) is also relevant here.
    32 Rosenberg, 281.
    33 Cf. Chaucer's similar imaging of Mary in "An ABC": "Zacharie yow clepeth the open welle / To wasshe sinful soule out of his gilt" (177-78). I think it is also worth noting, with Rosenberg, that Cecilia's bath is "similar to a crucible, a giant vessel containing the matter to be purified" (280). Chaucer magnifies the sacramental implications through repeated references in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale to the alchemist Canon's "crosselet"--especially in such scenes as lines 1117-22, where the crucible is used "In the name of Crist." See Olmert, 78.
    34 Kolve, "Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale," 151.
    35 Gardner, "Signs, Symbols, and Cancellations," 201.

36 MED, 18:1205-06.
       37 In his brief focus on the image, Glending Olson calls attention to Chaucer's "more overtly moral use" of sweat in "The Former Age" than in Fragment 8. He notes the close similarity between the "swety bysinesse" of those "lurkinge in derknesse" and Chaucer's description of the alchemists' outlaw quarters in the pilgrimage narrative (223-24).
    38 Bynum, 61. Cf. also her comment, introducing the mystics' use of food images to talk about the soul's desire for God: "To medieval exegetes and spiritual writers, such themes were not mere metaphors. Intellect, soul, and sensory faculties were not divided, with a separate vocabulary to refer to each." (150-51)
    39 Taylor, 385.
    40 The full line ("The sweete smel that in myn herte I fynde") makes the imagery's fluid merging of physical and spiritual especially pointed here, as does the Prologue description of Cecilia as a "bisy bee" (195)--the latter vividly evoking the same near-tactile relationship with the sweetness of the spiritual honeycomb illustrated by the examples from Bynum cited below. It is also significant, as a reading of Cecilia's story in The Golden Legend makes clear, that the Second Nun's Tale stresses the sweetness of the heavenly odors to a greater degree than does Jacobus--whom Chaucer elsewhere follows so closely that his poem in places (the "busy bee" metaphor, for example) reads as a virtual paraphrase. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton U. Press, 1993), 2:318-23.
    41 Bynum, 115-29. The healing power of Lidwina's remarkable exudings, the "sweet odor" of which had been authenticated in a document from the town officials of Schiedam, affords a telling example of the English renown of such continental miracles: "A man in England supposedly sent for the water she washed her hands in to cure his diseased leg" (126).
    42 Bynum, 148, 138.
    43 Muscatine, 221.
    44 Hope Phyllis Weissman, "Why Chaucer's Wife is from Bath," Chaucer Review 15 (1980): 17.
    45 Ibid., 16, from Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Fé:lix Lecoy, Classiques Fran¸cais du Moyen Age, Tome 2 (Paris: Librairie Honoré: Champion, 1973), 187. The English translation, endnoted on p. 32, is from The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton U. Press, 1971), 245-46. Weissman, 14, also cites Juvenal on the Roman matrona, who "loves all the bustle and sweat of the bath" ("... magno gaudet sudare tumultu" [6.420]).

WBN: 9528801223001