Twenty years ago I argued that the hints of effeminacy to be found in Chaucer's portrait of the Pardoner should not be taken to indicate either homosexuality or a physical condition (whether that of a eunuch or a hermaphrodite), but rather an inordinate preoccupation with women.(FN1) To be effeminate in the Middle Ages, I suggested, was primarily the mark of a womanizer. This position has recently been endorsed by H. A. Kelly, who has adduced a plethora of evidence from theological, legal, and physiological texts to support it.(FN2) My purpose here is merely to add a brief footnote to Kelly's characteristically learned and exhaustive survey, one intended to point out that the idea of the womanizing effeminate was not restricted to the schoolroom and the cloister, but can also be found in a milieu with which Chaucer himself is likely to have been familiar. Robert S. Sturges has taken me to task for offering evidence from 'the wrong period',(FN3) so it is gratifying to be able to offer confirmation of my position from a pair of literary texts written during the first phase of the Hundred Years War (1337-60), when Chaucer was a young man.
    The charge of effeminacy seems in fact to have been rather commonly employed by the English in polemical attacks on their French opponents at this time. A long poem titled 'An invective against France' by Thomas Wright (but more simply 'Crecy' by A. G. Rigg in a recent edition)(FN4) begins, 'Francia, feminea, pharisea, vigoris ydea' ('France, effeminate, divided, a mere shadow of strength'), alludes to the French king's fighting like a woman (line 51), and compares him to that well-known type of the effeminate King Sardanapalus (line 149.3).(FN5) Even more interesting for our purposes, however, are a pair of poems that Wright titles 'A dispute between an Englishman and a Frenchman'.(FN6) Together they form a miniature flyting, though as they now stand in the unique manuscript (London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.XX, fol. 96[supr])(FN7) their order appears to have been reversed: the Frenchman's speech makes rather more sense as a rebuttal of the Englishman's points than (as it is there presented) as the stimulus for them.(FN8)
    After four lines in which the Englishman asks how the Frenchman can have had the effrontery to challenge him to battle, he launches into an extended attack (lines 5-22) on his opponent's effeminate behaviour. Since this passage, particularly with Wright's punctuation, is far from straightforward (and at one point (line 12) clearly corrupt), it may be helpful to reproduce it here emended and repunctuated:

   5     Parce viris! Societ mulierem lis mulieri:(FN9)
            Impar certamen cum muliere mari.
         Quicquid agas gestu, quocunque feraris, eidem
            Semper inest aliquid quod tibi crimen emat.
         Si caput aspicias, compto dum crine superbit,
  10        Nescio qua reliquos suspicione trahit;
         Si capitis motum, nunc hac nunc vertitur illac:
            Discu[ti]es(FN10) tanquam non velit esse tuum;
         Si faciem, Veneris vitio praedante ruborem,
            Eloquitur vitium pallida forma tuum;
  15     Si linguam, mollit pulsum ne forte palatum
            Obstrepat, et mulier fatur in ore viri;
         Si gressum, tumidas suspendis in aere plantas,
            Vix pede degustans anteriore vias;
         Si partes alias, muliebrem cedis in usum,
  20        Femineo gestu dissimulante virum.
         Sed(FN11) quia femineos castravit Gallica Gallos,
            Gallinae, Galle, nomen et omen habe.

    A particular difficulty is presented by the poet's switching between second and third person singular in this passage while at the same time addressing two distinct audiences, the reader and his French enemy. In the translation that follows I have tried to simplify this by rendering the address to the reader (i.e. 'si aspicias') in the third person ('if one considers'), while retaining the second person (i.e. 'quicquid agas') where the poet is addressing the Frenchman ('whatever you do'):

Spare the men! Let the quarrel join woman and woman: unequal is the contest of a man with a woman. Whatever you do by way of gesture, wherever you may be borne, there is always something in it that may earn you blame. If one considers the head, while it boasts an elegant coiffure, it drags the rest into God knows what suspicion; if [one considers] the movement of the head, it turns now this way, now that: you will shake it about as if it did not want to belong to you; if [one considers] the face, from which the vice of Venus has robbed the blush of shame, [its] pale complexion proclaims your own vice; if [one considers] the speech, [the tongue] softens its force lest it strike strongly against the palate, and a woman speaks in a man's mouth; if [one considers] the gait, you suspend your proud feet in the air, with the foremost foot scarcely grazing the path; if [one considers] other parts, you yield to feminine manners, concealing the man with womanish gesture. But because French womanhood has emasculated the effeminate French, take on the name and style of 'capon',(FN12) Frenchman!

    The Frenchman responds to each point in turn (lines 9-24), but the general thrust of his argument is that his cultivated behaviour is the external sign of an inner virtue which only a vicious mind could misconstrue as vice.
    What is important about the Englishman's attack, then, is not simply that he describes his French opponent as effeminate but that he gives a detailed physical description of this effeminacy and assigns it a clear cause. Some of the details he lists correspond to those in Chaucer's portrait of the Pardoner: the Frenchman has elegant hair ('compto crine'), for instance, and a feminine voice ('mulier fatur in ore viri'); others, such as the tossing of his head ('capitis motum'), his pale complexion ('pallida forma'), and his mincing gait ('vix pede degustans anteriore vias'), are peculiar to this text. More importantly, there is no evidence that such marks of effeminacy are meant to be read as signs of either homosexuality or physical abnormality: the Frenchman's pallor, for example, is due to his indulgence in the vice of Venus ('vitio Veneris'),(FN13) and in a striking final couplet he is reviled as a 'capon' ('gallinae nomen habe'), castrated by French womanhood ('castravit Gallica'). We could scarcely ask for more convincing evidence that Chaucer's line, 'I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare',(FN14) might be taken by contemporaries as a sign of effeminizing heterosexuality.(FN15)
ADDED MATERIAL
    RICHARD FIRTH GREEN
    Ohio State University
    Columbus, Ohio

FOOTNOTES