nil plus deus exigit a te,” Half of a moon and equally the round of a sun,/And the fourth part of a wheel; nothing more does God demand from you. Half a moon is the letter C; the round of the sun is the letter O; one-fourth of rota is the letter R: the solution is COR: all God wants from us is love. Cf. Luke 8:15: the seed that falls on good ground is those who “in a good and perfect heart hearing the word, keep it and bring forth fruit in patience.” Galloway shows further that to cite the first phrase is to cite the whole riddle, and argues that “half a laumpe lyne” is a rendering of “lune dimidium,” so that line 152 also refers to the whole riddle by its first words (1995:87–88, 90–92).
B.13.157 Vndo it: lat þis doctour deme if dowel be þerInne: Gruenler 2017:159: “Patience’s challenge … uses a typical way of closing a riddle to tell the doctor to look into his own heart.” This “goading address to the doctor,” as Galloway calls it (1995:96), is dropped in C. Actually he is addressing Conscience, the master of ceremonies, urging him to let the doctor deem.
156 holy writ: See above, note to B.13.135a.
157–69 For, by hym þat me made … techest (B.13.158–71a For, by hym þat me made … vincunt): Patience continues his speech in somewhat the same way in both versions. The first sentence is very clear in B: if you have the bouste, which is love, with you, you will fear no danger from man, devil, or nature, because love fears nothing. C is equally clear, really, though it adds pacience 159 to love (since they have been established as synonyms), and, having dropped B’s earlier riddle, throws in a new one: 161 In þe corner of a cartwhel with a crow croune. Galloway 1995:94 shows adroitly that the first half of the line refers to the Latin riddle given above, being the equivalent of pars quarta rote, and so means cor; that the second half also means cor, the caput corvi, head of the word “crow,” and that cor or its anagram cro occurs thrice in the line. In short, bear in your bosom, in Galloway’s words, a “heart given to God, the essence of patience in the Christian tradition” (94).
The second sentence is much shorter in C, listing fewer authority figures, and is rhetorically a little stronger, but both say essentially the same thing: with this bouste you will conquer everybody. A brash peroration indeed.
164a Caritas expellit omnem timorem (cf. B.13.163a Caritas nichil timet): Charity drives away all fear: 1 John 4:18, “perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem,” perfect charity casteth out fear. Maybe compare 17.5a, Caritas omnia suffert (1 Cor 13:7), perhaps yet one more way of saying “Love your enemies.” For B, see Ambrose, Letter 78 (PL 16.1269), “charitatem habens nihil timet”: Paschasius Radbertus, De fide, spe, et caritate 1990:110: “Caritas nihil timet sed excludit foras timorem.”
The dinner comes to a sudden end (170–84, B.13.172–215)
170–84 This is a dido … y folowede (B.13.172–215 It is but a dido … pilgrymes as it were): Patience’s stunning answer (Piers’s too, in C) brings the dinner to an abrupt end. In B, Conscience has responded ambivalently to Clergie, deflecting his dissatisfaction into a wish that Piers will come; he has looked to Patience for something better. He gets it, and yet what Patience says polarizes the company: the doctor erupts in contempt, and expects Clergie and Conscience to support his move to throw Patience out. Conscience surprises him by siding with Patience, and is ridiculed by Clergie, who like the doctor treats Patience as if he were an itinerant minstrel; the rift between Clergie and Conscience, quite tentative and unclear at 131, is now hard to deny. Nevertheless, Conscience, gracious host to the last, takes courteous leave of the doctor at 198, then tries to treat his rift with Clergie as a friendly disagreement, 199–201. Clergie rejects this as a parting gesture, soberly foretelling a time when Conscience will need him, which seems to change the mood, so that they part with expressions of mutual respect. What appeals to Conscience in Patience is presumably his combination of simplicity, hopefulness, and experience: he has cut through not only the doctor’s arrogant learning but the helpless quality of Clergie’s more thoughtful and humble learning; he has a charisma (þe wil of þe wye 190) that Conscience seems to find refreshing enough to want to test further (182); or he wants to test his own capacity for patience, which is Clergie’s view (214).
In C, as earlier in the serving of the dinner, the characters are less sharply differentiated. Clergie’s speech has had the same gist but was far less academic, and Conscience did not reply to it at all; in place of his wish for Piers in B, Piers is actually here and speaks—and says the first half of what Patience said in B (love your enemies) but minus the riddles. Patience then picks up where Piers leaves off, and the doctor’s contemptuous response is the same, although he does not explicitly suggest ejecting Patience. Conscience’s farewell to Clergie has the essential combination of respect and disagreement, but there is no subtle interplay between them as there was in B: indeed, Clergie has no lines at the end at all. It is still clear that Conscience has been moved in the course of the scene to abandon his friend Clergie, at least temporarily, to ally himself with Patience, but that alliance is made to seem a response more to the dramatic intrusion of Piers than to what either Clergie or Patience says. Besides the addition of Piers, the second most notable change from B up to this point has been the dropping of the cryptic parts, Clergie’s academic jargon and Patience’s riddling. And we lose the delicate exchange of words between Conscience and Clergie. Again both what happens and what is said are clearer in C, though with some loss of motivation and subtlety.
170 (B.13.172) dido … dysores tale: A dysore is a storyteller or minstrel. The word is not necessarily pejorative, though it is clearly pejorative in L’s two uses of it, here and at 8.52 (B.6.54, A.7.49). Dido in this meaning is otherwise unattested (it seems unrelated to the nineteenth-century dialectical usage that OED defines as a caper or “row”). It is evidently a coinage by L, and defined in the off-verse as a minstrel’s tale, that is, a worthless, blatant fiction, like those that Piers has warned the knight not to listen to at dinner, 8.50–52 (B.6.52–4, A.7.47–9)—perhaps, as is commonly thought, with reference either to the romantic tale of Dido, as told in the Aeneid and the Heroides and often retold, and dismissed by St Augustine in Confessions 1.13 (along with the whole fable of the Aeneid) as inanity, or to Dido’s degeneration into a poetic byword for a mistress, as in a poem by Hilary the Englishman quoted by Boswell 1980:249, “Ut te vidi, mox Cupido/Me percussit; sed diffido;/Nam me tenet mea Dido/Cujus iram reformido” (The moment I saw you,/Cupid struck me, but I hesitate,/For my Dido holds me,/And I fear her wrath). For further discussion of Dido’s reputation in the Middle Ages, see Mann 2002:12–13 and Desmond 1994. Marjorie Woods (2001, 2002) has argued that schoolboys were regularly required to compose laments by Dido, Andromache, or Niobe and enact them; thus the doctor may be implying that Patience is being childish. Woods cites Pico della Mirandola’s famous letter to Ermolao Barbaro, in which he imagines Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus Magnus, or Averroes coming to life again, learning the new eloquence, and, “in terms as free as possible from barbarism, their barbarous style,” saying, “We have lived illustrious, friend Ermolao, and to posterity shall live, not in the schools of the grammarians and teaching-places of young minds, but in the company of the philosophers, conclaves of sages, where the questions for debate are not concerning the mother of Andromache or the sons of Niobe and such light trifles, but of things human and divine” (Woods 2002:287–88; cited from Symonds 1877:333–34; the translation is his; for the original, dated Florence, 3 June 1485, see Garin 1952:806). The doctor’s contempt here is quite like Pico’s—or rather, like what Pico supposes Aquinas and the others would feel if they lived when he did.
Perhaps, though, dido does not refer to Virgil’s Dido at all, but is a nonsense word like “folderol” or “la-di-da” (or “hey trollilolly” 8.123, A.7.108; B.6.116 “how trolly lolly”; see also “mamele” 5.123 and “bablede” B.5.8, A.5.8), invented on the spot by the doctor out of the first syllables of Patience’s “disce, doce”—with the pattern
