Philology with“a gyfte in my neste when I lay, / To lerne all langage and hyt
to speke aptlye” ( 44 – 45 ).“Langage,”as Parott learns it in Paradise, is
singular. TheGlossa ordinariapoints out that the“division of tongues”
that came with the Tower of Babel did not entail creationex nihilo:“God
made nothing new, but divided the modes of speaking and forms of
language among different peoples. Whence wefind the same syllables and
letters of the same meaning joined in different ways in different tongues,
and often the same nouns or verbs other in significance.”^10 Parrot may have
learned language, but must speak languages and experience the madness of
division:“Nowpandes mory, wax frantycke som men say”( 46 ).^11
Created in the earthly paradise, Parott is an exile from a domain of
nameless“pleasure perdurable”( 186 ), driven now to feed“in valleEbron”
( 188 ), the place of refuge.^12 For Kathy Lavezzo, Parott’s paradisal origins
bring a“sublime geographic identity”^13 into his place as English subject
(“Cryste save Kyng Herry the viiith, owur royall kyng,” 34 ); for Jane
Griffiths, they assert “his long perspective on the abuses which he
chronicles”and his“title to be believed.”^14 The praise that Parott addresses
to the English king and queen, however, is only one of a series of similar
expressions that Parott, with his notorious facility in hailing those in power
with due reverence, reels off (“Parot can say‘Cesar, ave,’also,” 110 ). Framed
by a catalogue of the languages Parott can use aptly–Latin, Hebrew,
“Caldee”( 25 ),“Greke tong”( 25 – 26 ), Castilian, even thelingua francathat
points into the Ottoman Empire (“in Turke and in Trace,” 39 )–the
English plaudit becomes oddly arbitrary, especially coupled with one of
the ambiguous glosses accompanying the poem in Harley 2252 , which
recalls that “Katherine” breaks down etymologically into “universal
ruin.”^15 Even Parott’s national-political identification, then, is when viewed
in another light–as the poem often encourages us to do–merely one in a
series of substitutions, carried along by postlapsarian linguistic caprice.
Parott’s purchase on Paradise–on an infinitude which doubles the
poem’s open principle of potentially infinite extension–is illuminated by
Michael Uebel’s recent discussion of the“utopian desire”which shapes
medieval Europe’s apprehension of its eastern others. Uebel contends that
figurations of the earthly paradise respond to the Fall as disruption of“the
fluid relation of the sacred and profane.”One way in which the narrative of
Edenic loss is managed is through“utopic representation of an allegorical
type,”in which“the radical differences of wonders are always repressed so
that their universal and timeless value can emerge.”^16 Parott, who embodies
the wonders of “Ynde,” thematizes precisely the point of intersection
between such utopian desire and the “timelessly” frozen, repressive
148 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland