Illicit country: The loathly lady and the imaginary foundations of medieval English land law

In "Illicit Country," I argue that the loathly lady, a shape-shifting land sovereignty goddess best known from Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," is a spectacular figure of the anthropomorphized land also found in 12th- to 13th-century feudal, forest, and common-law court records and 14th- and 15th-century mirrors for princes. I read the Irish legends and English romances of the loathly lady against these 12th- to 15th-century legal texts to show that despite new moves in the English courts to define land as an alienable object with determinate value, romance and legal writers imaginatively linked human inconsistency with the unpredictability of the land. As Henry II colonized Ireland, feudal tenants' right to work the land was transforming into a right of ownership. Owners could alienate land for spiritual intercession, political favors, counter-gifts, retirement maintenance, or money. Land was coming to be seen as an object to be bought and sold. In dialogue with this dawning idea, the Angevin invaders encountered the Irish legend of the loathly lady. This uncanny figure's adaptations in English romances and legal texts signified that the law could not quantify the erratic natural world; nor, implicitly, could it fully rule the human subjects who traded their oaths for the incalculable land. Further: The common and foundational image of the anthropomorphized land in legal writing and romance is the site of important deconstructions of the categories of "land property" and "human owners" that continue to reverberate in contemporary environmental debates. For hundreds of years, the loathly lady has demanded that we re-think our notions of human and natural value---indeed of "the human" as a category separate from "the land."...