Satire of Patience Advice in Sir Isumbras

Abstract

The Middle English romance entitled Sir Isumbras has been neglected, and a series of pronouncements by the hero regarding patience has been all but ignored. However, a closer examination of them allows one to treat these patience episodes as crucial junctures in Isumbras’s development as a character. If a reader recognizes them as examples of satire of the prevailing rhetoric concerning patience in the literature of medieval England and compares the patience episodes with later descriptions of Isumbras’s actions, then the hero’s development is much easier to follow than previous critics have found it to be. Isumbras starts the poem as materialistic and naive. A messenger from God causes him to repent, but a newly acquired tendency to self-righteousness leads him to admonish his wife, children, and other members of his household to be patient in the face of extreme adversity. His advice seems more and more inappropriate as his manifold sufferings alienate him from his family and reduce him to an abject state. Isumbras’s struggle provides insight into the remarkably exacting moral standards of the poem: the process of trying to give up worldly attachments is fiendishly difficult, and pride is nearly impossible to eradicate.