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In one early fifteenth-century manuscript of Piers Plowman, Cotton Caligula A XI, housed in the British Library, the following exchange opens passus 16 of the poem. The Dreamer thanks Anima for his instruction on salvation, ecclesiastical history, and contemporary problems within the institutional church,Now fayr falle 3ou q[uoth] I tho . for 3our faire shewyng for haukyns loue the actyf man . eu [er] I shal 30U louye ac 3k I am in a were . what charite is to meneto which Anima replies, hit is a drye . . . treuly to telle.1 Textual error, however, has crept into the copy here: Langland's Tree of Charity is supposed to be a full trie - meaning fine or excellent - and indeed the Cotton Caligula text goes on to elaborate upon the leaves and blossoms of this marvelous wood. While we may dismiss such occurrences of textual error as proof of scribal incompetence, such a point of view does not alter the fact that Cotton's textual reading possesses sense as written, because its ful drye tree calls to mind the Dry Tree of medieval legend. But the background and significance of this fabulous tree, even though familiar in the Middle Ages since the thirteenth century when the Tree became a stock reference in travelogues and romances,2 are barely known in the twenty-first century outside the confines of art history. Cutting a wide swath through the boundaries of century, geography, gerne, and artistic medium, the Dry Tree was placed on medieval maps and listed among the wondrous sights of the East described by the fictive Mandeville in the fifteenth century and by the historical Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and William Wey in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. It was the subject, in part, of Petrus Christus's 1460 painting Madonna and the Dry Tree, wherein the tree's otherwise bare branches were adorned by fifteen golden A's. And the emblem has even made at least two modem re-appearances, first inj. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as the dead relic of the Tree of Gondor, the White Tree of Amor, that stands in the Court of the Fountain3 and second, in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as the leafless that marks the location where Vladimir and Estragon are told to meet Godot.4 This paper aims to fill a void in the scholarship on the Dry Tree through a comprehensive study of this long-neglected figure as it appears in a wide range of medieval texts across many centuries and genres. As one might expect of an object with branches and roots, the Dry Tree is a complex and multivalent figure that cannot be reduced to one or two set meanings determined by historic and generic context. There are from the beginning, multiple variations upon this legendary figure, ranging from its often-assumed link to the Cross of the Crucifixion, to its appearances in history, and to its several overlapping, sometimes contrary literary manifestations. And thus before we can know what problem any particular artist or writer may be seeking to resolve when he or she deploys the Dry Tree, we first need to understand the Dry Tree itself in its manifold shapes and appearances. Although coming to grips with the figure is a formidable task in itself, through this survey of the various manifestations of the Dry Tree, I hope to reintroduce the figure to modem scholarship. It is also my wish that this investigation will inspire other scholars to further explore this medieval trope.I restrict my focus in this essay to specific instances of the Dry Tree's larger significance and meaning within medieval and some early Renaissance texts. To be considered an example of the legend, either the must pointedly be said to be dry, as in Cotton Caligula A XI's case even against the evidence of leaves and blossoms to the contrary, or else the description of the needs to meet specific criteria that ascertain the tree's fit within the notion of dryness, although the articulation of these standards proves to be far more complicated than one might expect, given how many references there are to green and flourishing dry trees. …
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