Reformations: Three Medieval Authors in Manuscript and Movable Type (TEXTS AND TRANSITIONS) 9782503523163, 2503523161

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KATERN 1

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R EFORMATIONS

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TEXTS AND TRANSITIONS: STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF MANUSCRIPTS AND PRINTED BOOKS General Editors M artha W. Driver Derek A. Pearsall Editorial Board Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, University of London) Jennifer Britnell (University of Durham) Ardis Butterfield (University College, London) Philippa Hardman (University of Reading) Dieter Mehl (University of Bonn) Alastair Minnis (Yale University) Oliver Pickering (Brotherton Library, Leeds) John Scattergood (Trinity College, Dublin) John Thompson (Queen’s University, Belfast)

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R EFORMATIONS Three Medieval Authors in Manuscript and Movable Type

by

Rebecca L. Schoff

H

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Schoff, Rebecca L. Reformations : three medieval authors in manuscript and movable type. - (Texts and transitions ; 4) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. Canterbury tales Criticism, Textual 2. Kempe, Margery, b. ca. 1373. Book of Margery Kempe - Criticism, Textual 3. Langland, W illiam, 1330?-1400?. Piers the Plowman - Criticism, Textual 4. Transmission of texts - England - History - 16th century 5. Printing - England - History - 16th century I. Title 820.9'002 ISBN-13: 9782503523163

© 2007, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2007/0095/100 ISBN: 978-2-503-52316-3 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

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C ONTENTS

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: History of the Book and Authorship in the Late Middle Ages Chapter 1. Reading, Writing, and Printing the Canterbury Tales I.

Reading in the Canterbury Tales W riting the Canterbury Tales III . Printing the Canterbury Tales II .

Chapter 2. Editing the Books of Margery Kempe I.

Tales of Real Life II . The Hands in the M argin III . On Fleet Street IV . The Businessman and the Monk

Chapter 3. Printing, Writing, and Reading Piers Plowman I.

Printing Piers Plowman II . W riting Piers Plowman III . Reading Piers Plowman in M anuscript and Print

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vii ix 1 11 17 42 78

91 94 110 116 127

141 143 172 202

Conclusion: Readers as Agents of Change?

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Bibliography Index

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L IST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1, p. 14. ‘Excerpt from Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale within Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19, fol. 179r. Late fifteenth century. Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College. Figure 2, p. 44. ‘Portrait of Chaucer’, London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 851, fol. 2r. c. 1410-20. Reproduced with permission of the British Library. Figure 3, p. 51. ‘Double Portrait of Nicholas Blunt’, in Thomas Harman, Caveat for common cursetors ([London]: Henry Middleton, 1573), sig. D2r. Reproduced with permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino. Figure 4, p. 112. ‘Sketch of the Virgin’s Smock’, London, British Library, Additional MS 61823, fol. 115r. Mid-fifteenth century. Reproduced with permission of the British Library. Table 1, p. 114. Showing Annotations per Manuscript Opening in Additional MS 61823.

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P REFACE

Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. ’Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great losse; and revolutions of ages doe not oft recover the losse of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole Nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men […] (Milton, Areopagitica, 1644, p. 4)

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he earliest articulated defence of the freedom of the press in English depends on three assumptions about the nature of books. Milton imagines that a good book is the work of a single person; the voice he defends is crucially described as the voice of an individual. Second, the text, as the singular expression of one man’s mind, is unchanging; it contains immortal truth intended to express the same ideas before and after the death of its mortal author. Third, the author defended is necessarily a ‘public man’, a known identity who can be equated with his book. While Milton’s intervention was politically contingent in practice, its theory is based on changes in literary ideas about the relationship between author, text, and audience that grew out of the tensions created by the long transition from manuscript to print culture. When early attempts to regulate the circulation of texts in manuscript (such as Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409) were put forth, none of Milton’s assumptions normally would have been made. Each of them gained prominence as the rise of the printing press brought increasingly centralized control of the circulation and production of books. Broadly speaking, the idea of the English author exemplified in Milton’s treatise is bound up with the beginnings of copyright and the growth of governmental control of the press. These developments made it both necessary and effective to express the theory behind a free press in terms of the unique, immortal contribution of exceptional individuals.

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This broad picture of the differences between manuscript and print in England, however, elides much of the subtle negotiation of such issues by writers, readers, and the practitioners who copied or prepared texts for printing in the late medieval period.1 The survival of these texts depended not only on the prestige attached to the idea of the single author, but also on an array of collaborative relationships in the making of a book. In manuscript culture, scribes, patrons, and even book owners might help to shape the author’s text in ways that did not instantly die out when compositors and printers developed their trade. The emergence of the author and stable text idealized by Milton in the English literary imagination is best understood in the context of the multiple other configurations of the relationship between author, text, and reader that were available in late medieval England; configurations that helped or hindered certain texts in surviving the transition from manuscript to print and all the forces that fuelled it — social, economic, political, and aesthetic. Crucially, Middle English texts that made the transition from manuscript to print brought characteristics and contingencies of their own to the process. The forces of the Reformation era did not produce the same effect across the varied textual legacy of the Middle Ages. The only way to understand the transition from manuscript to print in anything more than a paradigmatic way is to account for the influence of the texts themselves. Each text brought with it a set of concerns, a tendency to address a particular readership in particular ways, and a physical presence developed in manuscript culture; all of these factors might shape the pathways by which a text might arrive in print, and what it might look like when it got there. It is undoubtedly true that the technological and cultural developments of the English Reformation, not least the more centralized legislative regulation, exerted great force on the medieval texts that were converted to print, but a much fuller picture is possible if we take into account the ways in which texts retarded or accelerated the processes that led to their particular reformations. This study follows The Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman from their circulation in manuscript to their presentation in print, in order to track how each of them survives the metamorphosis of the relationship between their writers and readers as the new technology is introduced. Taken together, the three case studies demonstrate the variety of

1

The cover image of this book, a diagram from an early printing manual showing how a compositor filled a composing stick with letters, was chosen to emphasize the role of these preparers of texts, the human element working within technological change.

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possible impacts made when texts composed in manuscript culture were prepared for printing. As a selection of Middle English works, they might be configured as representative in a variety of ways (encompassing the secular and devotional, ‘lerned and lewed’, as courtly, bourgeois, and populist) but they are most useful as a set of texts that demonstrate the limits of categorization. None of them fits easily into a single genre or class and thus in each case, their presentation in manuscript and print seems especially to have invited (even required) very different acts of interpretation. The first chapter of the book examines fifteenth-century manuscripts that contain continuations or modifications of the Canterbury Tales in comparison with the early printed editions. The manuscripts that expand and adapt the Canterbury Tales are excellent examples of the collaborative model of book production. By freely modifying the Tales without distinguishing between Chaucer’s work and the work of others, these manuscripts treat the tales as the accumulation of a group’s efforts, not as the work of a single author. Critics have traditionally viewed Chaucer as the inventor of authority in the English vernacular. Chaucer presented himself this way at particular textual moments, the closing of Troilus and Criseyde and the caustic lyric ‘To Adam, his own Scriveyn’ among them. The stance Chaucer adopts in the Canterbury Tales is arguably different. In part because the poem itself is structured as a compilation, the Canterbury Tales shows a Chaucer more focused on collective efforts modelled by the pilgrim fellowship. Recently the authorial Chaucer, father and master, has been seen as the construction of his imitators, a myth of origin that serves the purposes of later poets looking to assert a place for themselves in a literary history. The fifteenth-century manuscripts that add to the tales offer a meaningful intervention in understanding this range of postures taken by Chaucer and his readers. Fifteenth-century readers were not simply imitative of Chaucer’s work. The anonymous additions to the Canterbury Tales artfully engage the same questions of artistic fellowship that are encountered in the narrative frame of Chaucer’s text, but offer a range of responses of their own that show sensitivity to a hierarchy of readers. The Canterbury Interlude in the Northumberland Manuscript, for instance, addresses the lack of an education as a potential barrier to the fellowship when some of the pilgrims are unable to read the images in the windows of Canterbury Cathedral. The continuation of the Cook’s Tale in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686 invokes the benefit of clergy based on a literacy test when two characters are sentenced for their crimes, again implying that the egalitarian society of creative exchange imagined in Chaucer’s frame is,

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in reality, complicated by social strata that are supported by the legal system. Even as these manuscripts employ a collaborative approach to the text that does not impose a hierarchy between the author and other contributors, they explore the complications of the approach in wide practice, at exactly the time in which literate practice was spreading. Printed editions of the Canterbury Tales, like Caxton’s, pick up the strand of Chaucer’s authorial reputation, but the continued influence of the collaborative kind of manuscript can be found in the early printings of Chaucer’s collected works. Thynne’s edition includes texts not written by Chaucer. Stow’s edition builds on Thynne’s collection by adding a number of anonymous and related works also known not to be authored by Chaucer. Stow organizes his edition according to associations between texts that might be made by readers of manuscript anthologies, rather than strictly according to the opus of a single author. In the use of Chaucer’s name to authorize the collection as a whole, however, Stow shows himself sufficiently interested in the pragmatic benefits of elevating a single author to identify and market the qualities of the collection to his readership. The ultimate practical benefit of Chaucer’s reputation as a literary author, however, is that his established position as a particular kind of poet protects his works from press regulation. When parliament considers banning Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s collected works, it is the apocryphal Pilgrim’s Tale that touches off the debate. As Francis Thynne recounts the incident, Chaucer’s reputation as a writer of fiction (‘fables’) saves the collection from being banned. This protected status was available to Chaucer only because he was publicly recognized as a literary author, as an author whose claims were widely considered fictional. However, unlike Milton’s master spirit, Chaucer is protected here not by his truth claims but, ironically, by his claims to untruth. While Chaucer’s use of fictional personae like the pilgrims secures the privileges of a purely literary enterprise, Margery Kempe’s activity as a reader and author occurs in the far riskier realms of devotional literature and avowed autobiography. However, the second chapter begins with a focus on Kempe’s self-presentation as a teller of common tales, a position from which she is able to claim some of the privileges of fiction. In the climate exemplified by Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, which restricted the transmission of devotional texts, Kempe nonetheless manipulates the common tales and exempla she shares with other lay devotional readers to garner support at a few key moments. For instance, Kempe is able to win over the angry crowds that gather to watch her under house arrest in Beverly by telling them ‘many good talys’. It is the

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explicitly stated hope of the text that shared tales (including Kempe’s) will create sympathies between readers. The use of Kempe’s own text indicated by the marginalia in the only extant manuscript suggests the text’s afterlife as an impetus to shared references within a reading community. The annotations in the manuscript edit and recontextualize Kempe’s narrative. Kempe’s text went through a similar but far more extensive editing when it was prepared for print, I argue, as part of a program of Syon-sponsored printings by de Worde that were calculated to increase access to devotional texts while keeping their selection under clerical control. As in the case of the manuscript text, the printed text of Kempe’s book is closely managed by an editor who guides its interpretation, but this time for an imagined community of readers that is much larger. Here the pressures of the popular market, the potential for press regulation (this time ecclesiastical), and the idea of an author in print work very differently from what we see in the case of the Canterbury Tales. Unlike Chaucer’s apotheosis to print, in which his name and reputation become important to the survival of the text, Kempe’s transition occurs in such a way that all that might be associated with Kempe as an individual is scrubbed from her text. Kempe is transformed by the edits into an unrecognizable ideal. The survival of what little is left of her text depends on its generalization such that it is authorized, not so much by the idea of Kempe, as by a familiar stereotype of feminine devotion. In the second printing by Pepwell, the colophon even identifies her as a devout anchoress. Kempe comes off the press as if already read, and there is little left for the reader to do but passively accept this version of her. The process robs much from what might have been Kempe’s legacy if a fuller text had been printed, but in return the excerpts are sanctioned by the authorities that resisted Kempe herself in the full account. The final chapter follows a shift in the development of the authorial persona of Piers Plowman from the internal, immediately present Will in the manuscripts to the external, historically fixed Langland in the critical apparatus of the first printed edition. Crowley’s 1550 edition of Piers Plowman is the first edition of a Middle English author to include a historically specific biography as an aid to interpreting the work — a status that was not rendered to similar standards on behalf of Chaucer until Speght’s edition of 1598. It is a move that converts Langland into something more like Milton’s imagined ‘public man’. The reasons why Piers Plowman, of all the canonical works of English literature, should have been the first to be treated this way are rooted both in the qualities of the poem itself and in the historical circumstances surrounding its first appearance in print.

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Crowley’s edition appeared at the pinnacle of a series of Tudor proclamations through which Henry VIII progressively shifted the responsibility for censorship from ecclesiastical to secular authorities, and re-defined the basis for identifying banned books from the characteristics of a text to the identity of its author. Henry’s final proclamation was the first to ban books by the author’s name and the first to require that every book be printed with the author’s name identified. The death of the king in 1547 brought about an immediate ideological change in the basis for censorship, but not in the prominence of the formerly banned authors, such as Crowley’s protestant colleague, John Bale. Piers Plowman was uniquely placed to pioneer the development of the critical apparatus now familiar in modern printed editions, because it brought an engagement with the stability of texts, the place of the author, and the ethics of artistry to this critical moment in history. Piers Plowman was rewritten by so many readers in manuscript (including Langland himself ) because the poem conceives of every reader as a potential poet, and its poet represents an active reader. Crowley recognizes the centrality of the poet by including a biography in his edition. In doing so, Crowley turns Langland into a historically fixed identity that becomes a tool for interpreting the poem from the outside, rather than an internal presence. Langland’s readership was singularly well prepared to put this tool to use. One reader of the printed edition responded with marginalia that use this new presence of the poet to argue against the editor’s reading of the poem, revealing that one of the origins of the vernacular author was as a reader’s first defence against the modern critic. Crowley, himself a radical reformist, sought to protect the voice for social critique in Piers Plowman by promoting its author as a literary figure. As Crowley’s work suggests, early textual criticism played an important role in constructing a literary history that was privileged to speak on its own terms, apart from political history. However, the series of Tudor proclamations governing the way in which books could be banned suggests that the rise of the vernacular author in England also has origins in the bibliographic mechanisms used to control the press. In a recent account of the transition from the medieval period to the early modern, James Simpson has argued that ‘if literary history and criticism is, as I believe it should be, ancillary to the complex history of freedoms, then this is a narrative of diminishing liberties’.2 This book hopes to respond and contribute to that narrative by exploring what was precisely non-narrative in the transition

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The Oxford English Literary History, ed. by Jonathan Bate and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002–), II: James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002), p. 1.

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from manuscript to print for these three medieval authors and their readers. It is a history of starts and stops, of surprising continuities, and, occasionally, of readerly resistance to the diminishing of liberties so vigorously argued for in Simpson’s study. It is also occasionally a history of new liberties taken by readers who learned to use the evolving literary culture at the rise of the printing press to serve their own needs, as they always had. I would like to acknowledge gratefully the guidance of the editors of the series, Martha Driver and Derek Pearsall, and the hard work of Simon Forde and the staff at Brepols, especially the copy editor, Kaele Stokes. In particular I would like to thank the anonymous reader for the press, who I now know was Julia Boffey, for her perceptive and wonderfully helpful attention to the manuscript. I also received much invaluable help from the staffs of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Glasgow University Library, the Huntington Library, Trinity College Cambridge Library, and Widener Library. Thanks are also due to the following journals for permission to include in the book matter previously published in articles: the Journal of the Early Book Society and the Yearbook of Langland Studies. I am grateful to have worked with Rebecca Krug, Nicholas Watson, and Derek Pearsall at the first stages of the project. C. David Benson also read this work with great generosity and insight over many years. The project was much aided at every stage by the support and advice of members of the Harvard Medieval Doctoral Colloquium, including Mary-Jo Arn, Larry Benson, Dan Donoghue, Joseph Harris, Stacy Klein, Ziva Mann, Katharine Horsley, and my co-teachers, Andrew Scheil and Andrew Romig. I owe very special thanks to Katie Peterson and Aimee Schoff Arlington, whose support meant so much to this book and more to its author. I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, Richard and Mary Schoff.

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INTRODUCTION : H ISTORY OF THE B OOK AND A UTHORSHIP IN THE L ATE M IDDLE A GES

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he relationship between the history of the book and the history of literature, or as it might be put, the relevance of textual criticism to literary criticism, has recently developed in its complexity and productivity for Medieval Studies. Initially, the textual critic has had a clearly defined job: to determine which manuscript most closely represented what the author in question wrote. The textual critic’s ideal contribution to the endeavour of literary criticism was the authoritative critical edition. The vagaries of scribal copying stand in the way of such work, and the scribe who makes intentional changes is the bane of these critics, second only to the careless copier. Prime examples of this work would be the massive collation of Canterbury Tales manuscripts undertaken by Manly and Rickert in the ’30s, and the magisterial editing of Piers Plowman by Kane, Donaldson, and Russell for the Athlone Press. The Chaucer favoured by these critics is the Chaucer who curses his scribe with a horrific scalp disease in the caustic lyric, ‘To Adam, his own Scriveyn’: Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scale, But after my making thow wryte more trewe [...]. (1–4)

This is the Chaucer who is protective of his own legacy. The second half of the poem describes him laboriously correcting Adam’s work by scraping and rubbing the parchment, physically battling the defective manuscript for control of his text as it will be received. In so doing, this Chaucer sets himself up as a canonical author, a figure that seems to claim the solemn sense of personal legacy and poetic self-worth associated with Petrarch and the emergence of humanism.

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In recent times, a number of developments in the theory of text and authorship have added multiple roles to the repertoire of the textual critic and have allowed manuscript work to inform reading in new ways. An understanding of the variability of texts in manuscript has been theorized as a fundamental characteristic of medieval literature — Paul Zumthor’s work on the mouvance of medieval French texts was fundamental in helping to bring about the trend of publishing editions of single manuscripts as multiple witnesses of a text, rather than emending and compromising between them.1 Likewise, the change in perspective brought about by reader response theory and reception studies has caused new interest in the kind of evidence that the deviant manuscript can offer, about how readers other than the original author of the piece interpreted and adapted it. The favourite Chaucer of these critics is not the Chaucer who canonizes himself, but the one constructed by the canon-building efforts of fifteenth-century Chaucerians. For instance, Seth Lerer suggests that the only extant copy of ‘To Adam, his own Scriveyn’, which was written out by the early critic and scribe, John Shirley, was preserved as part of the canon for reasons that rest with Shirley’s interests, not Chaucer’s. Lerer suggests that the lyric ‘may serve as a touchstone for recovering those processes by which Shirley preserves, attributes, and hence canonizes Chaucer’s shorter poetry’.2 These critical readings of the lyric are themselves touchstones revealing the central concerns of critics. Likewise, recent work in identifying the historical ‘Adam’ to which the lyric is addressed indicates the resurgence of interest in the historical circumstances of textual production in the last twenty years.3 The 1981 conference at the University of York offered early evidence of this development, with the goal, as Doyle put it, of ‘the integration of our knowledge of medieval literature with the understanding of its contemporaneous conditions’.4 Since then, many scholars have productively turned to the relationship between 1

Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. by Philip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 2

Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 121 (emphasis mine). 3

Linne R. Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 97–138. For an example of the early response to Mooney’s identification of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, see Brendan O’Connell, ‘Adam Scriveyn and the Falsifiers of Dante’s Inferno: A New Interpretation of Chaucer’s W ordes’, The Chaucer Review, 40 (2005), 39–56. 4

A. I. Doyle, ‘Retrospect and Prospect’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, Essays from the 1981 Conference at the University of York, ed. by Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), pp. 142–46 (p. 145).

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medieval literature and the manuscripts that preserve it.5 The work of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise Depres comes to mind: they recently published a book-length analysis of a single manuscript of Piers Plowman, gleaning from it not only a reading of the poem rigorously contextualized by the manuscript’s provenance, but also a political history and economy of making such books among the class of civil clerks who read them.6 Alongside these contexts for interpretation, my own approach to the lyric posits that it is referring not only to a specific relationship between Chaucer and his scribe but, ironically, to the ways in which rewriting has inspired Chaucer’s poetic imagination. ‘My making’, the work he protects so ferociously in the lyric, actually consists of brilliant re-workings. Each text mentioned in the lyric is an adaptation of a pre-existing work: ‘Boece’ is not only a translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, but a translation that makes artful use of Jean de Meun’s French version. ‘Troylus’ is an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. When Chaucer curses Adam, he protests a little too much: the real ‘rewriting’ going on is that done by Chaucer. There is an implicit, ironic joke in the description of Chaucer scraping the manuscript clean for revision — his own texts are palimpsests, written over his sources. As read above, the poem draws an analogy between the physical recopying of manuscripts and the artistic adaptation of texts. The variation inherent in the medium of transmission, a limitation of scribal copying, is also manifested in the culture as the idea that texts are inherently mutable, in spite of the preferences of whoever composed them. This idea is available to Chaucer as a metaphor, an object of play, and a sign of the creative power in reading. This perspective was tremendously influential in the manuscript culture preceding the rise of the printing press, and it affected not only the transmission of texts, but also their composition. The studies that follow, of Chaucer, Kempe, and Langland, each begin with the goal of understanding the influence of the circumstances surrounding textual transmission, not just on the reception of these authors, but on their own ways of writing. An assumption that there is no relationship between text and manuscript is likely to minimize and perhaps misunderstand the relationship between text and

5

See, for example, the essays collected in Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation, ed. by Tim W. Machan (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991). 6

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise Louise Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, Medieval Cultures, 15 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999).

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reader. For instance, Mark Rose’s recent study draws a strict line between the manuscript as a material object, to which the owner has rights, and the text, in which the owner presumably has no hand: In the Middle Ages the owner of a manuscript was understood to possess the right to grant permission to copy it, and this was a right that could be exploited, as it was, for example by those monasteries that regularly charged a fee for permission to copy one of their books ... Perhaps this practice might be thought to imply a form of copyright, and yet the bookowner’s property was not a right in the text as such but in the manuscript as a physical object made of ink and parchment. Moreover, the rights of the bookowner had nothing to do with authorship. True copyright is concerned with rights in texts as distinct from rights in material objects, and its historical emergence is related to printing technology.7

On the contrary, the rights of the book owner had much to do with a kind of authorship, given the way in which some book owners were involved in the making of the text itself. Surely some of the value that the monastery in Rose’s example is charging for its copy fee is in the unique elements of the monastery’s text, the scholarship of glosses, contextualizing works, and marginal annotations that only the monastery’s copy might contain. The only extant copy of the Book of Margery Kempe, for instance, is significantly reshaped and contextualized by the annotations of the monks from Mount Grace. Far from ‘exploiting’ the chance to sell content to which it can have no real claim, a monastery, or the group of readers that contributed to the creation and annotation of its library, might legitimately claim to have an intellectual investment in the library beyond the ink and parchment of the material object. My point is not necessarily that every text copied was unique. Particularly among theological texts, for instance, there were strong traditions of commentary that became fixed components of texts that were copied faithfully. Rather, I am interested in, first, the potential for uniqueness in singly produced texts, and second, in the requirement that decisions about physical copies (in terms of style and content) be made singly, in many cases by readers who ordered the copies. Both aspects of manuscript copying seem to me to be indicative of an attitude that recognized the malleability of texts even when it did not consistently take advantage of it. Examples of manuscripts that give evidence of readers choosing to contextualize or even adapt the Canterbury Tales in unique ways, for instance, will be examined in Chapter 1.

7

Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 4.

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Part of my point is that we should not see these manuscripts as aberrations, but as evidence of an available approach (not the only approach, but one available in the late Middle Ages) to the relationship between text and reader, in which readers have a sense of participation in the creation of the text. Manuscript culture is distinguished not purely, as in Rose’s example, by the textas-object. Medieval readers were aware of differences between texts as texts, not just as objects. They made decisions, for instance, about which exemplars to use for a copy and which texts to include in a miscellany. Even when such decisions were constrained by chance (for instance, by what exemplars were available), medieval readers could be said to have a hand in the making of both unique books and texts. Current consensus emphasizes the extent to which the London literary book trade functioned on a made-to-order basis.8 There was little production on spec, meaning that each copy of a literary text was not only uniquely handwritten, but produced with a specific reader in mind. Even where there is some evidence of multi-copy production by scribes, the copies produced are not necessarily driven by a desire for authoritative or uniform texts.9 The uniqueness of the handwritten copy is a consequence of the only technology of transmission available at the time, but the unique reader for

8 Doyle and Parkes argue that there is little evidence of professional scriptoria for the production of literary manuscripts — rather scribes worked together on an ad hoc basis. See A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. by M. B. Parkes and others (London: Scolar, 1978), pp. 163–210. Their conclusions are taken up by A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 257–78. See also Charles A. Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer Studies, 17 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991). Owen refutes manuscript by manuscript the evidence for shop-copies suggested by Manly and Rickert. For a judicious (and cautionary) account of the evidence for the role of owners in book production of all types in England, see Kate Harris, ‘Patrons, Buyers, and Owners: The Evidence for Ownership and the Role of Book Owners in Book Production and the Book Trade’, in Book Production, ed. by Griffiths and Pearsall, pp. 163–99. For a summary of the consensus regarding the various venues of manuscript production, see Stephen Partridge, ‘Questions of Evidence: Manuscripts and the Early History of Chaucer’s Works’, in Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Daniel J. Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 1–26 (pp. 9–11). 9

Linne R. Mooney and Lister M. Matheson, ‘The Beryn Scribe and His Texts: Evidence for Multiple-Copy Production of Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century England’, The Library, 4 (2003), 347–70.

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every copy is the consequence of a more complex intersection of technology, economics, and the perceived importance of readers as participants in literary production. Acting as annotators, compilers, and correctors, the owners and producers of medieval manuscripts often shaped the texts they read. Of course, the desires and decisions of medieval readers in most cases went in the direction of the consistent, careful, scribal reproduction of fixed texts. But there was a range of other possibilities that also distinguished the medieval reader’s sense of what was possible and appropriate for a reader to do with literary texts. For instance, they occasionally chose to leave out some of the Canterbury Tales, or contribute one of their own. They might correct Chaucer’s versification, even work with it over a number of years — or gloss Margery Kempe’s autobiography with references to more familiar mystics.10 In a few cases, they produced whole new drafts of Langland’s lifework by combining one or more of his published versions.11 While this activity of average or amateur readers differs in scale and quality from Chaucer’s work with his sources or Langland’s decades-long labour of revising his own work, it is analogous in ways that ought to influence our understanding of the relationship between author, text, and reader in the Middle Ages. This book explores a number of these relationships through studies of manuscripts whose scribes and readers have responded to the poetics of Chaucer, Langland, and Kempe, not by slavishly copying, canonizing, or passively receiving their texts, but by reworking them as creative readers. In doing so, they

10

For instance, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fonds anglais 39 famously abridges the Monk’s Tale and bears readerly corrections of Chaucer’s versification. Alnwick, Duke of Northumberland MS 455 adds a new tale and expands the narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales. These manuscripts will be discussed further in Chapter 1. The annotations on the only extant copy of the Book of Margery Kempe, London, British Library, Additional MS 61823, will be discussed in Chapter 2. 11 There are several manuscripts that combine elements of the A and C texts, including the Ilchester MS (now London, University of London MS V.88) and two other manuscripts dated before 1400: Liverpool, University Library MS F.4.8 and Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.14. A handful more manuscripts combine elements of the A, B, and C texts, including Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851 (now referred to as the Z text) and San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 114. For more on the recombination of the authorial texts of Piers Plowman, see A. I. Doyle, ‘Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman’, in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986), pp. 35–48. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 137 preserves a readerly continuation of the A text. This manuscript will be discussed in the third chapter.

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continue and contribute to the great layers of intertextual conversation that made the work of these now canonical authors relevant, interesting, and, fundamentally, possible. From there it is natural to wonder what happened to the members of this conversation, between author, text, and reader, when the technology of transmission changed with the rise of the printing press. It has been observed that ‘both scribes and authors were ready for the printed book’.12 Cora Lutz cites ‘the many colophons penned by weary copyists’ on the one hand. On the other is the impatience such authors as Petrarch and Chaucer show toward the ‘imperfect workmanship’ of scribes.13 Histories of the transition from manuscript to print commonly argue that manuscript and print technologies settled into a ‘peaceful coexistence’ in which each offered a different mode of transmission. Incunables offered ‘accurate useful texts for scholars’ while manuscripts were ‘distinct and personal’.14 How is it, then, that we account for the free reign given to compositors, for the indifference of early print editors to the ‘accuracy’ of the text?15 How do we explain manuscript copies of printed books so slavish that they copy the print colophon?16 There are numerous scenarios in which manuscripts and printed texts might look and act like each other. As late as the seventeenth century we find examples of print being used in ways ordinarily thought exclusive to manuscript culture. 12

See Cora E. Lutz, ‘Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books’, Yale University Library Gazette, 49 (1974), 261–67 (p. 261). She builds on the arguments offered in Curt F. Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators, The A. S. W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960). 13

Lutz, ‘Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books’, p. 261.

14

Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book, p. 26. For similar arguments see J. R. Thorne and Marie-Claire Uhart, ‘Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman’, Medium Aevum, 55 (1986), 248–54. See also N. F. Blake, William Caxton and English Literary Culture (London: Hambledon, 1991). 15

For example, see Lotte Hellinga, ‘Manuscripts in the Hands of Printers’, in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing: Some Papers Read at a Colloquium at the Warburg Institute on 12–13 March 1982, ed. by J. B. Trapp (London: Warburg Institute, 1983), pp. 3–11. She resists Eisenstein’s conclusion that printing immediately led to standardization of textual content, that printers ignored manuscript sources once a printed text was available, and she argues for a very active role for compositors; see also Blake, William Caxton, p. 283, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 16

For examples of specific manuscripts, see Lutz, ‘Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books’, p. 267.

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Introduction

Marotti notes that William Drummond of Hawthorndon, a friend of Ben Jonson, circulated his poetry on loose printed sheets: ‘He thus treated print as a medium that could, like manuscripts, be used to facilitate coterie communication’.17 There is evidence of the same kind of cultural crossover in the habits of readers. There are two notable extant copies of Wyatt’s poetry that are extensively re-annotated by readers, down to the punctuation: one of them is a copy of Tottel’s Miscellany, the other is Wyatt’s holograph.18 In these cases, the printed text is not necessarily received as the ‘accurate’ one, nor is the manuscript copy given special status because it is in the hand of the author. Another way to look at this evidence is that the connection between the status of a text and the technology of its transmission is somewhat flexible. It is certainly true that the inclination of printing was to reproduce texts accurately, while manuscript copying more easily accommodated the personalization of texts for particular readers. The flexibility of both technologies, however, was made to respond to multivalent reading and writing practices throughout the long period of their establishment in England. It was possible for authors to conceive of, even to hope for, the transmission of identical texts before a mechanical means of reproduction made that goal more easily achievable.19 It was possible for a scribe to reproduce a text down to the last pen mark; it just was not probable. It was possible also for readers to emend a printed book as if they were still following the instructions of that common scribal colophon: ‘Si erravit scriptor, debes corrigere, lector’.20 Readers were, however, less and less likely to do so as the norms of print culture grew set with time.21 Print culture embraced not only mechanical reproduction of the text, but also the growth of a new kind of professional reader, the editor.22 The production of identical copies of the

17

Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 325. 18

Ibid., pp. 135–38, 145.

19

For an example, see Derek Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. by Siân Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 73–97. See especially the section on the character of the manuscripts, pp. 80–86. 20

Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book, p. 21.

21

See Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 145. On the heavily annotated copy of Tottel’s Miscellany, he remarks: ‘Clearly literary reception was not so passive a matter as it became in a more developed print culture’. 22

The phrase was first coined in manuscript studies of Piers Plowman; see Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader. See also The Medieval Reader: Reception

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editions prepared by professional readers gave them a public role. The amateur ‘lector’ was less and less likely to be considered the judge of error in the text as the job of the professional editor was defined and codified. This development in the role of the professional reader inevitably affected the role of the professional writer, but not always because manuscript practices were abandoned. Change could be effected just as surely when manuscript practices were followed in print. Tracing the progress of medieval authors from manuscript to print and back again will demonstrate a variety of ways in which a new kind of authority could be constructed from manuscript material, and a variety of ways in which that new authority could be received. The only constant in the studies of evolution that follow is that the impact of the history of the book on literary history is ultimately defined by the traditions of the text at hand. The production, use, and policing of the material objects (the ink, the parchment, the press) are surprisingly and intimately involved with the imagination of the text. When parliament debated whether or not to condemn the newly printed edition of Chaucer’s collected works in the sixteenth century, the members who defended Chaucer were happily able to appeal to a literary strategy employed by Chaucer himself in the Canterbury Tales. As Francis Thynne recounts: ‘When talke was had of Bookes to be forbidden, Chaucer had there for ever byn condemned, had yt not byn that his woorkes had byn counted but fables’.23 In fact, by the sixteenth century, the phrase ‘Canterbury Tale’ had become a euphemism for a fable or falsehood.24 The connotation is suggested by the distinction made between earnestness and play in the narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer the Pilgrim excuses himself on these grounds before recounting the Miller’s Tale: ‘Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame; And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game’ (I, 3185–86). At the risk of making too much that is earnest out of a game, this book is a partial history of the special place of literature, the play of fiction, in the real world.

and Cultural History in the Late Medieval Manuscript, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and others, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, n.s. 16 (New York: AMS Press, 2001). 23

Francis Thynne, Animadversions Upon Speght’s First Edition of Chaucer’s Workes, ed. by F. J. Furnivall (London: The Chaucer Society, 1876). 24

Spurgeon records the first usage of the phrase in this sense in 1535. See Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1357–1900): Part I (London: The Chaucer Society, 1914; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925).

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R EADING , W RITING , AND P RINTING THE C ANTERBURY T ALES

For sikerly, nere clynkyng of youre belles That on youre bridel hange on every syde, By hevene kyng that for us alle dyde, I sholde er this han fallen doun for sleep, Althogh the slough had never been so deep; Thanne hadde your tale al be toold in vein. For certeinly, as that thise clerkes seyn, Whereas a man may have noon audience, Noght helpeth it to tellen his sentence. (VII, 2794–802)1

T

he audience of the Canterbury Tales gets a sense of its own power in the Prologue of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, when the Host admonishes the Monk for nearly putting him to sleep. The Host’s insistence on the central importance of the hearers in their rejection of the Monk’s Tale radically shifts the tale’s centre of gravity from the teller to the listeners as he continues: ‘And wel I woot the substance is in me, / If any thyng shal wel reported be’ (VII, 2803–04). The Host claims that it is only through reception that the Monk’s Tale can hope to find meaning. The substance of the tale is literally in its hearer.2

1

All quotations are from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry Dean Benson and F. N. Robinson, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Citations will be given by fragment and line number. 2 Hussey gives a different interpretation of the line, postulating it as evidence that the Host served as narrator of the frame in an earlier revision. See S. S. Hussey, ‘Chaucer’s Host’, in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. by Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Wolfeboro, NH: Brewer, 1988), pp. 153–61. For a discussion of the Host’s almost editorial role in shaping fragment VII, see Alan T. Gaylord, ‘Sentence and

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Yet, the emphasis on ‘sentence’ and ‘substance’ in the Host’s objections is puzzling, given that the content of the tale seems to have been adequately understood, if not enjoyed. Both the Knight and the Host make appropriately topical objections to the narrative; their difference with the Monk seems to be in the ability to appreciate the aesthetic appeal: That ye han seyd is right ynough, ywis, And muchel moore; for litel hevynesse Is right ynough to muche folke, I gesse. I seye for me, it is a greet disese. (VII, 2768–70)

The Monk’s own enthusiasm for tragedies, however, is expressed not in terms of their moral content, but of their form, which he delights in defining: Or ellis, first, tragedies wol I telle, Of whiche I have an hundred in my celle. Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. (VII, 1971–77)

There is no moral to be drawn here, no ‘sentence’; the generic trajectory of the narrative presupposes the tragic conclusion without suggesting it as a consequence of anything more than formal requirement. The monk rather emphasizes the poetics of his sources: And they ben versified communely Of six feet, which men clepen exametron. In prose eek been endited many oon, And eek in meetre in many a sondry wyse. ( VII, 1978–81)

The Monk’s appreciation of his sources as a reader colours both his compilation and his expectations of its reception.3 Because ‘it is a peyne […] to heere of

Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 82 (1967), 226–35. Gaylord’s argument that fragment VII explores the responsibilities of the artist and the audience to each other is very persuasive and I think has applications beyond what he calls the ‘literature group’ of tales. 3

The Monk asks a lot of his audience in not varying the form of the several tragedies he recites end to end, but it is worth noting that the form is itself an unusual eight-line stanza Chaucer adapted from a French equivalent. See Norman Davis, ‘Introduction: Language and Versification’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. xxix–xlv (p. xliii).

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hevynesse’, the Host is unable to appreciate the Monk’s Tale for what it is: a genre marathon. The reactions of the Knight and the Host are strangely prescient of the tale’s historical reception, as evidenced by its inclusion in Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.19. Figure 1 reproduces fol. 179r of the manuscript, where the scribe begins to copy from the Monk’s Tale. This late fifteenth-century miscellany incorporates fragments of the Monk’s Tale into John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes without attributing them to Chaucer. The point at which the text picks up Chaucer’s tale, at the tragedy of Sampson shown in the figure on the previous page, is not marked at all. The mixture implies a number of things about the compiler’s understanding of the tale. Textual studies indicate that the stanzas were copied from Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales, so the compiler must have known of their original context and correct attribution.4 Yet, the compiler switches seamlessly from Lydgate’s text to Chaucer’s and back again, mixing the two collections of stanzaic tragedies together without distinction. He also makes no distinction between the purely aesthetic form of Chaucer’s tale and Lydgate’s tragedies, which are punctuated by the Christianizing morals that Chaucer’s monk conspicuously fails to draw. We may characterize this as a misreading of Chaucer’s monk, as an elision of one of the Monk’s central shortcomings, if we view Lydgate himself as a more satisfyingly monastic tragedian. But we might also view this use of Chaucer’s text as evidence of the continued assertion, late into the fifteenth century, of the mode of reception predicted by the links of the Canterbury Tales: a reception not dictated by the terms of the author, but by the resonance of the text with its readers, who, like Chaucer and the other pilgrims, could expect to be able to appropriate and re-tell tales in the creation of new contextual meanings. Within the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims’ response to one another’s tales is never final, never comprehensive, but nonetheless it is productive. Their exchange produces more (if not strictly ‘new’) tales. The historical reception of the Canterbury Tales bears out this form of productivity, fictionalized in the narrative frame. By modifying, excerpting, and adding to the Tales, fifteenth-century readers sensitively respond in kind to the poetics of reading and composing within which the Tales themselves work. These poetics serve as an open

4

See The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, ed. by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, 8 vols (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1940), I, 533.

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Figure 1. ‘Excerpt from Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale within Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19, fol. 179 r . Late fifteenth century. Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College.

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invitation to re-adaptation and an acknowledgement of the centrality of readers in vernacular literary production. There is ample evidence that people in the fifteenth century freely responded to this invitation: there were active readers and re-adapters of the text itself, and at times they showed a remarkable lack of interest in recapturing the author’s holograph. This was not, of course, the only response to the Canterbury Tales: there is a well-documented tradition of reception that highlights interest in Chaucer as an authority figure.5 The ambivalent manuscript history of the Tales is explained by competing demands for texts of each type. The long recognized pattern of exemplars being collected for a full text of the Tales, and then broken up again, is the footprint left by a shifting market. Some of Chaucer’s readers persisted in disregarding what others had established as his iconic status. By ‘readers’ here I mean in some instances scribes, in others directors or book owners, depending on the manuscript in question. The common thread is that in each case they have left behind physical evidence of their readings, interpretations manifested in the presentation of or interaction with the text in manuscripts that have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve. Manuscripts that do not contain complete texts of the Tales (as understood by one of the early authoritative manuscripts of choice, Hengwrt or Ellesmere)6 were for a long time (and sometimes still are) classed as ‘anomalous’ or ‘defective’. Some studies do not even include them in counts of extant manuscripts, leading to an artificially biased view of the fifteenth-century construction of Chaucer as an author.7

5

For an account and analysis of this tradition in the fifteenth century, see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers. For a perspective on the effects of Chaucer’s prominence from the fifteenth century up to the modern reception of Middle English language, see Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6

The two earliest manuscripts of the Tales are the Hengwrt MS (now Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D) and the Ellesmere MS (San Marino, Huntington Library MS El. 26 C. 9). See M. C. Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts: Volume II, The Canterbury Tales (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), p. 10. 7

McCormick lists non-complete manuscripts in a separate appendix entitled ‘28 defective MSS, single tales, or fragments’. See William S. McCormick and Janet E. Heseltine, The Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). Seymour does not include non-complete manuscripts in his study at all, but does list deviations from the authoritative text in the complete manuscripts: Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts, pp. 17–26. Manly and Rickert are comprehensive, but judge manuscripts solely by their

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One of the primary points of this chapter is to glean what evidence we can when we cease to see readerly editing and expansion of the Canterbury Tales simply as idiosyncratic aberrations, unique to particular readers. Manuscripts that purposely fragment, expand, or edit the tales offer evidence of choices made by Chaucer’s readership based on their sense of their own role in interpreting and, in some cases, even making the text. While it is frequently argued that many choices made by scribes or readers, such as the selection of exemplars in the production of a copy, are bounded by happenstance, it only goes to show that there were often contingencies in manuscript production that had to be accommodated or considered. The small space in which some readers had room to work does not in any way deny that they did so. This chapter will explore the interaction between Chaucer’s readers and his text in the manuscripts that transmit the Tales. The first section will focus on models of reading and writing in the text of the Tales itself. Here Chaucer will be shown to play with the dynamics of reiteration, in which the context of the telling can reshape the meaning of a tale. The study in this section will point out several issues, including the flexibility of source texts (in oral and written form), the place of group dynamics in creating a context for interpretation, and the relationship between composition and reception. The second section will examine the ways in which these issues are taken up by the manuscripts that transmit the tales. We will examine the major non-authorial additions to the Tales (the Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 686 continuation of the Cook’s Tale, the Canterbury Interlude, and the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes), alongside the annotations of readers and scribal decisions regarding the organization of manuscripts that adapt or anthologize the Tales. The place these manuscripts had in literary history radically changed when the culture surrounding the printing press arose. The final section of the chapter considers the development of the desire for an authentic, ‘authorial’ text and its effect on the status of manuscripts. The editorial work of John Stow, especially his

contribution toward recovering the authoritative text: The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert. Similarly Silvia offers an excellent account of manuscripts that excerpt the tales, but characterizes their value only in terms of what they can tell us about fifteenth-century interpretations of the anthologized tales: Daniel S. Silvia, ‘Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. by Beryl Rowland and Lloyd A. Duchemin (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp. 153–63. Owen’s study of the relationships between manuscripts is perhaps the only study to argue the importance of single-tale and excerpting manuscripts to the evolution of the text of the Canterbury Tales: Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.

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treatment of source texts in manuscript and print, will form the central part of this epilogue to the history of reading and writing the Canterbury Tales. I.

Reading in the Canterbury Tales For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce Hir tales alle be they bettre or werse, Or elles falsen som of my mateere. (I, 3172–75)

The disclaimer before the Miller’s Tale is just one way in which the fiction that Chaucer is only repeating tales first told by others is maintained in the Canterbury Tales. In the voice that narrates the frame of the tales, Chaucer abrogates responsibility for the Miller’s Tale, imagining his poem as the written record of a lively exchange of tales between multiple other tellers, each with different, sometimes opposing, intents. The dramatization of the conflict between adversarial pairs of tellers — the Knight and the Miller, the Miller and the Reeve, the Wife and the Friar, the Friar and the Summoner — has driven much of the critical interest in the frame as a fictional narrative. But on another level, the narrative frame is not a fiction at all. In most cases, Chaucer is in fact relating tales that have been told by others, tales that have survived in multiple sources and analogues. By having the pilgrims stand in as tellers of his own adaptations of common exempla, fabliaux, romances, and hagiographies, Chaucer dramatizes nothing more clearly than the late medieval circulation and re-adaptation of such tales by multiple authors, which constituted the most common form of literary composition in the period. The ease with which adaptations of commonplace tales could slip from spoken performances into manuscript compilations (and back again) is played out as the prologue to the Miller’s Tale continues: And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, Turne over the leef and chese another tale; For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale, Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse, And eek moralitee and hoolynesse. Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys. (I, 3176–81)

In this passage, Chaucer slides easily between references to an audience of readers, who can ‘turn the page’, and listeners, who may or may not ‘wish to

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hear’.8 It is possible to attribute the references to speaking as the residual traces of the tradition of oral performance often found in late medieval texts, even when composed with readers in mind. But the resulting mixture of references to speaking and reading itself evokes a number of important issues surrounding the status of these texts. The tales told by the pilgrims lend themselves to oral performance in a manner similar to the sermon exempla that serve as a number of Chaucer’s source texts. The manuscript miscellanies recording these exempla invite re-adaptation and excerption on the page and in performance as the exempla are transmitted both through the oral delivery of sermons and by scribal recopying into ever-new compilations. It is exactly this kind of fluid exchange and editing that Chaucer seems to invite in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale: read only what you like, he says — the onus of selection is on the reader. There is much historical evidence that late medieval readers accepted this invitation with pleasure by creating copies of the tales that drastically cut, expand, edit, and otherwise modify Chaucer’s work.9 This activity goes beyond the mechanics of scribal copying: Chaucer rightly anticipates that readers will enjoy modifying the Canterbury Tales as they read because his own creative reading of source material is at the heart of his artistic project, with all its brilliant manipulation of new context and familiar allusion. Chaucer begins by retelling old tales, and continues with the assumption that the tales he tells will be reiterated in new versions according to the tastes of his readers. As Chaucer invites listening or page-turning, the medium of transmission becomes a metaphor for the role of reception in interpretation. The collection as a whole poses questions about the way in which once traditional, oral, vernacular tales might become part of a single author’s book — and everywhere the Tales resist binding in order to preserve a manuscript culture that is as immediate and vital as the dynamic of face-to-face encounters. Much recent work has profitably taken note of the oral and ‘theatrical’ qualities of the Tales, and the way in which the Tales participate in a traditional 8 The same is true throughout the narrative frame: for example, another assumption that the audience is reading occurs in the Second Nun’s Prologue, VIII, 77 — curious because the Second Nun is speaking. By contrast, Chaucer the Pilgrim, acting as narrator of the frame, assumes a listening audience at the close of the General Prologue, I, 858, and in the Cook’s Prologue, I, 4364. 9

Of the eighty-two extant manuscripts of the tales, twenty-seven of them contain only selected tales. Eight of those, however, are physically fragmented. Daniel Silvia accounts for each of the extant manuscripts and analyses the purposefully anthologizing manuscripts in ‘Some Fifteenth Century Manuscripts’.

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culture of reiteration. John Ganim’s study in particular articulates the implication of quotation as a linguistic metaphor that informs the structure of the collection: When the speakers of the Canterbury Tales quote from books, they footnote carefully. When they tell their stories, they are inventing and performing, but the assumption, spoken or unspoken, is that the story was first heard elsewhere. It is the originality — the ‘modernity’ — of Chaucer that he places the traditional story and its art in the mouths of concrete and historically defined characters, so that their impulses and individual quirks and personalities ‘make it new’.10

Ganim’s reading is illuminating on its own terms, but reference to speakers who ‘footnote carefully’ is also a reminder of the material culture of the book that intrudes on the oral fiction and freedom of the Tales. The footnote itself was a seventeenth-century invention of printers,11 but it is irresistible to a modern reader as a metaphor for the scrupulous recognition of sources. As Ganim rightly points out, Chaucer’s use of speakers in the Tales begs us to question the relationship between teller and tale with much at stake: ‘[…] the implications of this are revolutionary: tradition itself may be then regarded as a series of contexts rewritten for special and momentary purposes. Perhaps the received meaning of any of these stories may themselves have been a historically limited interpretation’.12 However, the Tales are interesting in part because they propose that we read through the context of the telling, not in person, but from the page. This occurred at a time when assumptions about the importance of a vernacular writer to his work were not necessarily in play, in part because the culture surrounding the manuscript transmission of vernacular works was not always interested in authorial recognition. Chaucer himself would not receive an authorial biography that situated him in contemporary historical circumstances until Speght’s printed 10

John M. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 127. 11 For the development of the architecture of the footnote, in which notes at the bottom of a page are ‘linked to the text’ above by a series of signes de renvoi, see M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 57. Printers began experimenting with such systems in the sixteenth century and they were common ‘by 1700’ (p. 57). Anthony Grafton covers the evolution of the philosophy of citation in The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). See particularly pp. 24, 30–33, on the distinctions between the medieval and Renaissance traditions of citation and the modern footnote. 12

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collection of the Works in 1598. Of course, Chaucer immediately undercuts the question of his own relevance to the interpretation of the Tales by including a deprecating self-portrait among the pilgrims and, in many cases, by describing the stubborn resistance of the other pilgrims to the readings prescribed by the tale-tellers. Any questions regarding the relationship between teller and tale, or the historical limitations of interpretation, are immediately thrown back into the text itself, where the relationship between teller, tale, tradition, and audience is explored with reference to the survival of the text in the written record, for the eyes of future readers. It is this survival imagined for the written text that ultimately keeps alive the concord between oral and written traditions, and the importance of the reader, like the hearer, as a present and creative agent in receiving and recasting the tale in new contexts. To that extent, the references to textual transmission in the Tales seem to me to reflect on the dynamics of composition and reception in the manuscript culture known to Chaucer. For instance, the prologue to the Second Nun’s Tale assumes that the text is being read: Yet preye I yow that reden that I write, Foryeve me that I do no diligence This ilke storie subtilly to endite, For bothe have I the wordes and sentence Of hym that at the seints reverence The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende, And pray yow that ye wole my werk amende. ( VIII, 78–84)

The likelihood of this tale having been composed independently, as the Lyf of Seynt Cecile, before Chaucer conceived of the Canterbury Tales leaves open the possibility that the reference to a readership is merely the result of a lack of revision.13 But even if the address to readers is an inadvertent leftover from the original composition, its presence in the Tales offers a kind of archeological evidence of these imagined oral performances as previously written texts. The rubrics that everywhere remain a part of the text, in spite of its imagined recitation out loud by the Second Nun, similarly remind us that the premise of the pilgrimage goes only so far. The point is less a complete mimesis of an oral performance than perhaps an illustration of the flexibility of written texts, of their ability to re-create a gathering of teller and audience as writer and reader. The Second Nun’s formulation of the modesty topos explicitly articulates the tale-teller’s position as an intermediary between the source, to which she desires

13

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to be faithful, and her readers, who are invited to share in her work by amending it, presumably with reference to the memory of the legend. Elsewhere, the narrators of the tales invoke similar sentiments as they convert their written sources into oral tales. The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale makes it clear that the Monk is drawing from his books: Or ellis, first, tragedies wol I telle, Of which I have an hundred in my celle. Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, An is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. (VII, 1971–77)

The Monk’s voracious reading forms the basis of his own tale. Like the Second Nun, the Monk is explicitly conscious of a written tradition that plays into the understanding his audience will have of the tale he plans to tell, ‘as olde bookes maken us memorie’. As we will see, the pilgrims actually resist the aesthetic of the genre in an assertion of personal preference that is mirrored in the real-life textual history of the tale. The memory created by the old books does not finally fix these tragedies, but rather makes them available for adaptation by the Monk, reinterpretation by the pilgrims, and finally appropriation by the compilers of other books. This is the flexible role Chaucer assumes that the written text will play in the transmission of a tale, the meaning of which will not only be preserved, but enhanced by variant oral and written articulations. The fullest exposition of this idea is given to Chaucer’s own persona, in the link to the Tale of Melibee, which he describes as ‘a moral tale virtuous, / Al be it told somtyme in sundry wyse / Of sundry folk, as I shal yow devyse’ (VII, 940–42). Chaucer offers the story of the passion of Christ as an example of a text enhanced by multiple versions, without injuring its meaning: As thus: ye woot that every Evaungelist That telleth us the peyne of Jhesu Crist Ne seith nat alle thyng as his felawe dooth; But natheless hir sentence is al sooth, And alle acorden as in hire sentence, Al be ther in hir tellyng difference. For somme of hem seyn moore, and somme seyn lesse, Whan they his pitous passioun expresse— I meene of Mark, Mathew, Luc, and John— But doutelees hir sentence is al oon. (VII, 943–52)

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It is an example that emphasizes the value of multiple perspectives and expressions of the same story, even within a stable textual tradition. In other words, it is an example in which multiple versions of the same narrative are all endowed with the same ‘sentence’.14 Implicit is the idea that re-readings and adaptations of tales need not be inconsistent with the preservation of a higher truth. The point in all this variation through multiple versions is not simply random activity, but the potential for real participation in the meaningful life of a text. Such participation is not just for a single Author who originates the text, but also for the readers and retellers of the tale. Chaucer’s final plea to his audience clearly identifies the contribution of this new version as the addition of proverbs ‘to enforce with th’effect of my mateere’ (VII, 958): And though I nat the same wordes seye As ye han herd, yet to yow alle I preye Blameth me nat; for, as in my sentence, Shul ye nowher fynden difference Fro the sentence of this tretys lyte After the which this murye tale I write. And therfore herkneth what that I shal seye, And lat me tellen al my tale, I preye. (VII, 959–66)

Surely the slip from ‘saying’ to ‘writing’ and back again here is not simply the result of carelessness, but a hint of Chaucer’s interest in the flexibility of the boundary between oral and written texts — between the participatory performance of a tale-teller, and the similar potential for readers to write their own manuscripts, ‘writing’ here being equal to ‘composing’. Like the four versions of the Gospel, the variations created by readers would contribute to, not diminish, the understanding of the text. The idea that texts are mutable and available for reinterpretation by their readers is everywhere at work in the Canterbury Tales. The Host begins their endeavour with the assumption that the tales told will not be new tales, but old ones, ‘of aventure that whilom han bifalle’ (I, 795). The entire project comes out of, and depends on, the recycling of texts.

14 Alan Gaylord argues that his ‘citations [of the word sentence] all illustrate that the wisdom involved lies in interpretation’: ‘Sentence and Solaas’, p. 229. Gaylord also acknowledges, however, that ‘Chaucer’s pilgrims are as original in deriving sentences as they are perverse in applying them’ (p. 229), a fact that will complicate the idealism of this particular moment, in which Chaucer imagines that ‘sentence’ can survive multiple readings.

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However, the faithfulness with which Chaucer the Pilgrim characterizes his role as an exact compiler of tales, and the generosity with which he turns over his text to be modified by his readers, is not shared by all of the pilgrims. The remainder of this section studies five pilgrims who challenge the untroubled relationship Chaucer claims to have between his sources and his readers in the narrative frame. The exchange between the Wife of Bath and the Friar explores the extent of the power of context to remake meaning through the virtually irresistible perspectives of each of these tale-tellers. Unlike Chaucer the Pilgrim and the Second Nun, these pilgrims rework their sources in adversarial ways that, far from enhancing the meaning of their source texts, succeed to varying degrees in using the sources against their original writers. By contrast, the Clerk, the Pardoner, and the Man of Law are made to grapple with the authors of the source texts they appropriate and with the other pilgrims’ reception of their tale. Through them, Chaucer explores the complexities involved both in confronting recognized authorities and in relinquishing a text to its readers, all complications that are brought to a head when the ephemeral tales of tradition pass into the textual record. The Wife of Bath and the Friar The Wife of Bath famously begins her prologue with a defence of her right to speak: ‘Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage [...]’ (III, 1–3). Her confrontation with the authorities of Patristic exegesis is precipitated by their challenge to the nature of her experience, and whether it can be read as ‘mariage’ or not: But me was toold, certeyn, nat longe agoon is, That sith that Crist ne wente nevere but onis To weddyng, in the Cane of Galilee, That by the same ensample taughte he me That I ne sholde wedded be but ones. (III, 9–13)

The suggestion that her marriages might not be marriages motivates her to engage with the long tradition of biblical exegesis in order to defend her personal perspective, her ‘experience’ as a married woman. She does so, however, not by formulating new arguments of her own, but by re-compiling the polemics of, for

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example, Paul, Theophrastus, and Jerome, in contexts that forcibly adjust their significance.15 The Wife’s process of adapting Jerome’s misogamist arguments according to her own perspective often causes Jerome to argue against himself. The argument concerning Jesus’s example is found in Jerome’s Epistola adversus Jovinianum.16 The Wife’s initial defence against that charge is actually a paraphrase from the same work, where Jerome concedes that the number of allowed marriages has never been defined: ‘Yet herde I nevere tellen in myn age / Upon this nombre diffinicioun’ (III, 24–25). In the context of his own treatise, Jerome goes on to argue that the number of legitimate marriages is considered undefined because even ‘whoremongering’ is forgiven at baptism.17 Jerome builds a subtext beneath this argument on the Pauline epistles, quoting 1 Corinthians 7. 29, where Paul warns of impending death and that soon ‘those that have wives may be as though they had none’.18 The Wife, however, reads the lack of a definite number as

15

It has often been noted that, in the process of confronting these authorities, the Wife of Bath uses them as direct sources for her own argument, even to the point of ventriloquizing them. See Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 70–86. I am much guided by her reading of the Prologue’s interaction with Jerome. As Mann acknowledges, Aers takes this argument beyond the appropriation of content to the adoption of like rhetorical strategies: ‘As David Aers has noted, there is no essential difference between the Wife of Bath’s manipulation of “auctoritees” and that of the clerics she attacks; the standard practices of medieval exegesis included the sustained pulverization and fragmentation of Biblical texts, the utter dissolution of their existential and historical meanings, and the imposition of pre-determined dogmatic propositions’ (p. 72). A similar point is made in Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 123. For texts of the authorities alluded to in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and fundamental analyses of their use, see Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, ed. by Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). See also Robert P. Miller, Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 411–36. See also Bartlett J. Whiting, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. by William F. Bryan and Germaine C. Dempster (New York: Humanities Press, 1941; repr. 1958), pp. 207–22. 16

Epistola adversus Jovinianum, 1.40, printed in Miller, Chaucer, p. 431. See also The Riverside Chaucer, p. 865, n. 13. 17 18

Epistola adversus Jovinianum, 1.15, printed in Miller, Chaucer, p. 425.

Epistola adversus Jovinianum, 1.13, printed in Miller, Chaucer, p. 423. See also The Riverside Chaucer, p. 865, n. 23.

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evidence of a different kind of leniency, and she interprets the fleeting nature of life as an incentive to take pleasure in youth and energy while they last.19 Contemporary readers would have been very aware of the Wife’s manipulation of both Jerome and Paul in the passages above. The Ellesmere manuscript tradition included Latin glosses identifying the sources behind the prologue by quotation and sometimes attribution. The Latin gloss to the lines above combines the quotation from Jerome with the allusion to Paul: ‘the number of wives is not defined, since, according to Paul, those who have wives are as though they had none’.20 One effect of the presentation of the text in this manuscript tradition is that it is clear that the Wife has not heard a definition of the number of legitimate marriages because the authorities agree that none exists. Thus the manuscript glosses the Wife’s own pronouncements with recognized authorities. But the other effect is to track her use of these authorities in cobbling together her narrative, suggesting that her most powerful presence for that tradition was as a compiler, not an author. As Dinshaw has argued, the Wife glosses even as she battles the glossators.21 Her own voice as an ‘experienced’ woman answering the authorities is less prominent than her presence as a selective reader of them. The physical presentation of the glosses in the Ellesmere manuscript strikingly defines the Wife’s text, punctuating it along the right-hand margin with decorated notae. The Wife’s perspective as a selective reader, however, proves extremely powerful. For instance, when the Wife reiterates Jerome’s metaphor of the vessels made from diverse materials, her control over the context in which that metaphor is read gives it a completely new meaning: I graunte it wel; I have noon envie, Thogh maydenhede preferre bigamye. It liketh hem to be clene, body and goost; Of myn estaat I nyl nat make no boost, For wel ye knowe, a lord in his houshold, He nath nat every vessel al of gold; Somme been of tree, and doon hir lord servyse.

19 The Wife’s poignant comments here have been seen as that moment in which she seems least like a crazy-quilt of misogynist stereotypes and most like a feeling woman. See Arlyn Diamond, ‘Chaucer’s Women and Women’s Chaucer’, in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. by Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 60–83 (p. 71).

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20

Translated in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 865, n. 13.

21

Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 123.

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Chapter 1 God clepeth folk to hym in sondry wyse, And everich hath of God a propre yifte— Som this, som that, as hym liketh shifte. (III, 95–104)

Mann’s analysis of this passage rightly emphasizes the effect of the shift in the speaker, from Jerome to the Wife of Bath: ‘[…] the affective power of the metaphor disappears under the Wife’s cheerful renunciation of spiritual ambition. Jerome’s arguments merge with her own purposes; rebellion speaks with the voice of orthodoxy’.22 In the context provided by the Wife of Bath’s perspective, Jerome’s metaphor takes on new meaning. The past history of the discourse she appropriates provides support for the authorization of her own argument, in the sense that it carries the stamp of orthodoxy, but the implications of her personal preferences (acknowledged by litotes: ‘Of myn estaat I nyl nat make no boost’) provide enough pressure on the metaphor to collapse its original hierarchy. It should be noted, however, that the context of the Wife’s own preference is not the only context in play. The Wife follows the metaphor with another allusion to Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. The complete quotation would read: ‘For I would all men to be as my self: but every one hath a proper gift of God: one so, and an other so’.23 The Wife excises Paul’s stated preference, and substitutes the de facto preference of God: ‘God clepeth folk to hym in sondry wyse […] as him liketh shifte’. Here Paul is brought to bear against Jerome’s metaphor, and both find themselves in service of the Wife. If it is true, as Mann has argued, that ‘the Wife sets herself up as a new “authority” (and is meekly accepted as such by the Pardoner, at III, 164–87)’ so that ‘male discourse passes into female control’,24 this is partly a function of who is doing the reading at the moment, as the Wife discovers for herself when her husband Jankyn reads to her from his ‘book of wikked wyves’ (III, 685). As Jerome is among the authorities identified in the book (at III, 674), Jankyn is in effect reading back to the Wife the same anti-feminist tracts she has been using herself. As long as the Wife is reading from her sources, she retains control,25 but

22

Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 73.

23

Biblical quotations are from the Douay-Rheims translation unless otherwise noted.

24

Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 73.

25

Mann interestingly casts what I am calling control here, as a personal presence through reaction. ‘[...] It is in this interaction [between the Wife and the stereotypes of her sex] that we feel the three-dimensional reality of her existence. That is, she does not live in the insulated laboratory world of literature, where she is not more than a literary object, unconscious of the interpretations foisted upon her; she is conceived as a woman who lives in the real world, in

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the competition between readers is insoluble, ending only when the Wife prevents her husband from reading on by tearing a page from his book. It is exclusively at this moment that the Wife seems conscious of the power in reading, a true crisis given that the episode demonstrates male control of both discourse and its reception. Elsewhere, the Wife remains devoted to a fantasy of authority. Her muchquoted appeal to the myth of the lion and the painter ironically belies the successes of her own performance as a reader: For trusteth wel, it is an impossible That any clerk wol speke good of wyves, But if it be of hooly seintes lyves, Ne of noon oother womman never the mo. Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (III, 688–96)

The Wife implies that to be the painter is to control the interpretation of the painting,26 but her own reading of the authorities demonstrates that the painter has less control than whoever looks at the painting, whoever constructs the context of reception. The Wife has already constructed a text in which the clerks do speak ‘good of wyves’. Conversely, Jankyn’s book of ‘wicked wives’ draws from sources that report the speech of women who complain bitterly about men. In that context, however, their complaints form a critique of the women themselves as inveterate nags.27 Perhaps it is this control of both discourse and context that the Wife is hinting at when she wishes women could have written ‘as clerkes han withinne hir oratories’ (III, 694). The essential problem for the Wife’s challenges to antifeminist discourse is access to the closed chapels, chapter houses, and universities

full awareness of the anti-feminist literature [...] and she has an attitude to it just as it has an attitude to her’: Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 79 (emphasis Mann’s). It is this sense, of an extra-textual reaction, that encourages me to think of the Wife’s Prologue as a reading, rather than a writing. That reading catapults her back into the ‘laboratory world of literature’, or at least reconstitutes her response through it, is evidence of the inescapable intertextuality that makes the Wife of Bath’s performance so effective. 26 See Mary Carruthers, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 94 (1979), 209–22. 27

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in which that discourse is not only written, but also received. For women to achieve the same voice would require a closed mode of reception of their own. The next move, made by the Friar, turns away from questions of limited access and addresses shared context. The Friar explicitly rejects the Wife’s preoccupation with entering the closed precincts of authority in the Prologue to his tale: Ye han heer touched, also moot I thee, In scole-matere greet difficultee. Ye han seyd muche thyng right wel, I seye; But, dame, heere as we ryde by the weye, Us nedeth nat to speken but of game, And lete auctoritees, on Goddes name, To prechyng and to scoles of clergye. (III, 1271–77)

The Friar sets aside ‘auctoritees’ in favour of ‘game’ in the stated objectives of his tale-telling. As the pilgrims ‘ryde by the weye’, he suggests, they all enjoy an equal footing in the exchange of tales, as in a game in which they all play a part. The Friar therefore attempts to best the Wife by seizing control of the immediate context. His initial interruption of her prologue brings the discussion out of the Wife’s past and back into the context of the pilgrimage. He invokes the audience around him and identifies a foe that is present: Now, by my feith I shal, er that I go, Telle of a somonour swich a tale or two That alle the folk shal laughen in this place. (III, 841–43)

Where the Wife of Bath’s manipulation of context functions in the textually bound world of lemma and gloss, the Friar reworks a traditional tale to engage with the context of the pilgrimage. The result is a story that challenges institutional authority without being hampered by the problems of access to a closed hierarchy of readings faced by the Wife of Bath. The ‘game’ that ensues has already grown out of a dispute based partly on the competition between the Friar and the Summoner, one that the Friar expresses in terms of a challenge to the Summoner’s authority as an agent of the ecclesiastical courts: For thogh this Somonour wood were as an hare, To telle his harlotrye I wol nat spare; For we been out of his correccioun. They han of us no jurisdiccioun, Ne nevere shullen, terme of alle hir lyves. (III, 1327–31)

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True to form, the Summoner answers back that the brothels are also out of his jurisdiction. Here, there is a fundamental difference between the Wife of Bath’s attempt to engage with the clerics and the Friar’s challenge of the Summoner. The Friar and the Summoner enjoy a free exchange of discourse in which neither attempts to control the reception of the other’s tale. When the Host tries to prevent the Friar from attacking the Summoner in the Friar’s Prologue, the Summoner corrects him: Oure Hoost tho spak, ‘A, sire, ye sholde be hende And curteys, as a man of youre estaat; In compaignye we wol have no debaat. Telleth your tale, and lat the Somonour be.’ ‘Nay’, quod the Sumonour, ‘lat hym seye to me What so hym list; whan it comth to my lot, By God, I shal hym quiten every grot.’ (III, 1286–92)

The exchange between the Friar and the Summoner defines the company as one in which each pilgrim has an opportunity to speak and be heard, an opportunity founded, not on personal authority, or even, as the Host attempts to suggest, on the conventions governing the civil interaction of their estates, but on the common agreement to share their tales. In contrast to the Wife of Bath’s opening gambit, basing her right to speak on personal experience, the Friar’s initial exchange with the Summoner rests on a free exchange of traditional tales, to which all have equal claim. The Friar’s use of the tale exploits existing group loyalties in the connections it attempts to forge between himself and his hearers. Similarly, Chaucer manipulates the tale’s relation to its traditional sources in ways that create new meaning for this iteration of the tale. In other words, the Friar’s play with the group loyalties of those present in his audience is matched by Chaucer’s play with the intertextual relationship between the tale and its tradition. The Friar’s Tale is based on a folktale that historically had been used to ridicule the greed of institutional officials and middlemen like bailiffs or lawyers.28 The essence of the tale is an encounter between the devil and a victim. The victim witnesses the devil’s unwillingness to act on insincere curses, only to

28

The Riverside Chaucer, p. 875; Peter Nicholson, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), pp. 87–99 (p. 87). See also Archer Taylor, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues, ed. by Bryan and Dempster, pp. 269–74.

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be taken by the devil when a ‘heart-felt’ curse is aimed at him.29 By the time Chaucer composed his version, various incarnations of the tale had already enjoyed widespread popularity for more than a hundred years. Most probably born out of oral tradition in Germany, the tale had been treated in Latin sermon literature and manipulated by the Middle High German master of the verse tale, known as the Stricker. The tale would have been transmitted as easily in conversation as in the sermons of the clergy. It was, therefore, an appropriate choice of source material for the Friar, whose authorial self-presentation claims its origins in the common culture that produced the tale. The earliest extant record of the motif is in a fragmentary collection of exempla and miracles known as Libri Octo Miraculorum, which was gathered by Caesarius von Heisterbach. Archer Taylor asserts that the Latin exempla closer to Chaucer’s time are ‘probably ultimately derived’ from this text.30 Roughly contemporary with Caesarius is the versified vernacular adaptation by the Stricker. The only fourteenth-century analogue recorded in England appears in Robert Rypon’s sermons in London, British Library, Harley MS 4894, fols 103v–104v.31 As Owst puts it, the similarity between this analogue and the Friar’s Tale is ‘all the more significant [...] as it falls from the lips of an English homilist who was actually preaching in this country [England] while Chaucer was alive’.32 The only other fourteenth-century analogue is found in London, British Library, Additional MS 15833, apparently produced in Austria.33 The Friar’s Tale differs from its tradition most importantly in the handling of the victim of the curse. The closest analogues to the tale were sermon exempla, which were used by the Church to instruct congregations in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries with a very different thrust. The Friar’s focus of condemnation on the summoner as the victim of the curse completely remakes the meaning of the tale. Traditionally, the story had been used to criticize secular administrators. Rypon’s last two morals, for instance, aim his exemplum at the

29

The Riverside Chaucer, p. 875. The explanatory note to the Friar’s Tale identifies the motif as the ‘tale of the heart-felt curse’. 30

Taylor, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, p. 270.

31

The similarity between the exemplum and the Friar’s Tale is pointed out by Gerald R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933); see also Nicholson, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, pp. 91, 96–99.

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Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 405.

33

Nicholson, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, p. 89 and n. 7.

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cupidity of manorial officials: ‘ne officiarii dominorum sint nimis cupidi’.34 All of the Latin analogues except that in Additional 15833 explicitly share this condemnation of greedy ‘officiarii dominarum’ of some sort. The exemplum of Caesarius is aimed at an advocate (an ‘advocatus’ and ‘exactor’), an agent like an attorney who speaks and acts on behalf of another.35 The loans and taxes he collects are owed to his employers. Abuse of the position likely provides opportunity for extortion, but as an intermediary the advocate derives his power from the landowner or creditor — in this case probably the Church, since he is an advocate at an abbey. The censure for corruption, however, never extends so far up the ladder. Caesarius reserves his condemnation for the middlemen: ‘Audiant hoc exemplum pauperum exactores, quorum hodie infinitus est numerus’.36 Likewise, Rypon’s exemplum ends with the cursing of a hired agent, but any suggestion that the agent is hired by the Church has dropped out of the story.37 Of the four exempla most contemporary to Chaucer, three are aimed at secular officials charged with the administration of property. Chaucer’s departs from all other analogues in that he aims the story at an official of the Church, who has been charged with the administration of souls. In the analogues, the advocates, bailiff, and seneschal take advantage of their financial authority to satisfy avarice. The depravity of the Friar’s summoner is not simply that he exacts money from the poor, but that he does so from a position of spiritual authority. The analogues were a tool of correction that

34

The text is transcribed by Nicholson, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, p. 99.

35

For more on the translation of this word, see Nicholson, ‘The Friar’s Tale’, p. 89, n. 5.

36

Lutz Röhrich, Erzählungen des späten Mittelalters und ihr Weiterleben in Literatur und Volksdichtung bis zur Gegenwart (Bern: Francke, 1962–67), p. 257. 37

All of the remaining analogues but one feature victims exactly like Rypon’s bailiff. The early fifteenth-century exemplum included in the Promptuarium Exemplorum by the Dominican, Johannes Herolt, follows almost verbatim Caesarius’s text, again, minus the mention of any abbey. Likewise the exemplum in London, British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra D VIII features a ‘senescallus et placitator’, whose position and duties resemble those of Caesarius’s advocate, except that, once again, there is no indication that he is employed by an abbey. Essentially he is accused in the text of extorting the goods of the poor, as a ‘pauperum calumpniator et bonorum huiusmodi spoliator’. The version of the tale in Additional 15833 should be considered something of an exception to the general rule in the tale’s development. It features a farmer (‘rusticus’) as the cursed man, who earns the anathematization not by coming to exact money, but by failing to pay a poor woman for her work.

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ecclesiastical authority had aimed at the secular world. Chaucer’s Friar aims that same tool back at the Church. The sermon exempla using the motif of the heart-felt curse were part of a larger campaign waged by the Church in the late fourteenth century against the various secular administrators of property. Owst cites ‘page after page of the fiercest denunciation [...] found in the sermons against these “officers of gret men [...] the wiche, by colour of lawe and agens law, robbeth and dispoyleth”’.38 For instance, John Bromyard’s Summa Praedicantium compares seneschals, bailiffs, and attorneys with ‘cruel, hellish, diabolical lions’.39 This proliferation of criticism came at a time when the growing bureaucracies of Church and secular authorities were competing heavily for control. Hahn and Kaeuper write that ‘by the fourteenth century agents of administration — manorial, ecclesiastical, royal — touched men’s lives more directly, regulated local events more fully, and lightened men’s purses more efficiently than ever before’.40 In this context, the tale served the Church as a vehicle for criticizing the secular bureaucracy. Chaucer adapted the heart-felt curse motif so that it attacked the very ecclesiastical authorities who were using the motif to target secular officials. If his desire had been simply to reiterate the tale in the voice most consistent with its tradition, he could have put it into the mouth of a monk and aimed it at a reeve. But Chaucer’s modification of the tale renders it a weapon against the very people who once used it against secular manorial officials. In the specific diction of the tale is a direct response to those ecclesiastical critics of manorial administrators. The devil says to the summoner: ‘Thou art a bailly, and I am another’ (III, 1396). The summoner allows this misnomer to stand because ‘he dorste nat, for verray filthe and shame / Seye that he was a somonour, for the name’ (III, 1393–94). The target of Chaucer’s tale, the summoner, equates himself with the target of Rypon’s tale, the bailiff. The relationship between the Friar’s Tale and its tradition sets up a comparison between laymen of Chaucer’s station and their ecclesiastical counterparts. Chaucer’s message to his own critics is that the agents of ecclesiastical authority are just as reprehensible, if not worse, than the agents of secular authority whom the Church censures.

38

Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 324.

39

Ibid., p. 323.

40

Thomas Hahn and Richard W. Kaeuper, ‘Text and Context: Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, 5 (1983), 67–101 (p. 89).

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The exchange between the Wife of Bath and the Friar ultimately explores the extent to which the immediate circumstances of the telling shape a tale as it enters the written record. The Friar’s Tale turns the exemplum inside out by altering the context of its presentation and reception. In the bluntest terms, the new context effectively reverses the objective of the narrative from an ecclesiastical critique of secular institutions to a secular critique of ecclesiastical institutions. Any residual traces of past interpretations only point out the analogy between ecclesiastical and secular officials that form part of the Friar’s critique of summoners. The dynamics of the Wife’s appropriation of Paul and Jerome are somewhat different. The Wife’s voice of experience brings a new timbre to old arguments. However, the authority of her sources encapsulated in the marginal glosses serves to remind us that she quotes them from the outside. The Clerk, the Pardoner, and the Man of Law While the Friar and the Wife of Bath are proved to be accomplished manipulators of context in their tellings, the Clerk, the Pardoner, and the Man of Law are more concerned with the reputations of specific tale-tellers as factors in the interpretations of tales. The Clerk’s Tale uses a source that had already been appropriated by two of the great authors of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio and Petrarch. We will see that the Clerk begins by resisting this legacy in various ways, but ends by finding his true competition in his readers. When the pilgrims react to the tale, it becomes clear that the primary challenge to the Clerk’s control of his story is the rigorous interpretation it inspires in its ‘afterlife’, as Chaucer shows the pilgrims bringing their own perspectives to the act of interpretation. By contrast, the roughly contemporary analogues of the Pardoner’s Tale had not been appropriated by any major author before Chaucer adapted the tale. The extant analogues appear in miscellaneous compilations of source material for preachers. Like the analogues to the Friar’s Tale, they are not linked to any authors and they are presented for the express purpose of readaptation. In this context, the Pardoner finds that it is his own personality that interferes with his attempts to benefit from the reception of his tale. The pilgrims read the teller as well as the tale and, in the case of the Pardoner, reject the teller even while they seem to learn from the tale. A comparison of the Clerk’s tale to the Pardoner’s performance reflects the contrast between working with source material that has been authored by a recognized authority, and working with unauthored cultural matter such as an anonymous exemplum. As we will see, the Man of Law’s Prologue addresses the same issues with reference

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to Chaucer’s legacy. In all three cases, it becomes clear that the figure of the author or tale-teller can form part of the context that makes a retelling unique, but that Chaucer seems equally aware of the significant role that readers play in the reception of both tale and teller. The prologue to the Clerk’s Tale is, in some sense, about obedience to authority. Beginning with the Host’s description of the Clerk as ‘a mayde new espoused’, and the Clerk’s response ‘host, I am under youre yerde’, the Clerk is associated with the value of ‘obeisance’ that will be illustrated by his tale of an obedient bride. Obedience to his stated sources, however, is slightly more problematic. His tale begins as a tale of Petrarch — that is, a tale about Petrarch: I wol yow telle a tale which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As preved by his wordes and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste; I prey to God so yeve his soule reste! (IV , 26–30)

This passage is most often read as a demonstration of the Clerk’s deference to Petrarch,41 but the confinement of Petrarch’s corpse seems oddly emphatic here, contrasted by the recounting of Petrarch’s introduction to the tale, with its sweeping catalogue of the Italian countryside. Here the Italian source of the tale is figured by the source of the river Po: Where as the Poo out of a welle smal Taketh his firste spryngyng and his sours, That estward ay encresseth in his cours To Emele-ward, to Ferrrare, and Venyse, The which a long thyng were to devyse. ( IV , 48–52)

The anxiety implied by the desire to contain Petrarch is more clearly manifested by the Clerk’s explicit anxiety concerning the confines of the text: And trewely, as to my juggement, Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent, Save that he wole conveyen his mateere; But this his tale, which that ye may heere. (IV , 53–56)

41 See Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, pp. 24, 32–34. Anne Middleton describes the Clerk as a ‘professed devotee of Petrarch’s “wordes and werk”’ and characterizes this devotion as ‘a very modern way of loving what is to be found in old books’: ‘Chaucer’s “New Men” and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales’, in Literature and Society, ed. by Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 15–56 (p. 19).

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The Clerk’s observation begs the question of what exactly Petrarch’s matter was. It can be read more generally as an indictment of the way in which Petrarch’s appropriation and localization of the tale renders it less pertinent to the generalized moral it is intended to illustrate. It is not that the localization of detail in such tales is unusual: in fact this would be the ordinary use of an exemplum. The complication is that, after Petrarch’s death, the tale remains his own. I am suggesting that, here, Chaucer is showing awareness of the limiting effect of authorial self-promotion on the availability of texts for re-adaptation. Once appropriated by the poet laureate, the tale will remain a tale of Petrarch. The final line of the prologue represents an acquiescence to this order of things: ‘But this his tale, which that ye may heere’. The Clerk positions himself between his source and his audience, but the former is always given primacy: ‘gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche’ (I, 308). Finally, it should be noted that this submission to the prominence of Petrarch is a fiction. Textual analyses by Severs suggest that Chaucer’s rendition of the tale is actually a combination of Petrarch’s version and an anonymous French prose translation.42 By contrast, the Pardoner’s prologue focuses on the anticipated reception of the tale rather than its source. The prologue is a narrated rehearsal of the performance of the tale: Thanne tell I hem ensamples many oon Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. For lewed peple loven tales olde; Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde. ( VI, 435–38)

His obsession with reception, rather than source, is repeated in the tale: the three revellers never question where the treasure they have found came from, but they do worry about the perception of others: ‘Men wolde seyn that we were theves stronge / And for oure owene tresor doon us honge’ (VI, 789–90). To the extent that the Pardoner addresses the issue of authority at all, it is to establish his own, or rather, to recount the paradigm he follows in order to do so: Oure lige lordes seel on my patente, That shewe I first, my body to warente, That no man be so boold, ne preest ne clerk, Me to destourbe of Cristes hooly werk. (VI, 337–40)

42

Jonathan B. Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale, Yale Studies in English, 96 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942).

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Where the Clerk focused on the confinement of Petrarch’s corpse, the Pardoner gives first priority to the safety of his own body. Interestingly the Pardoner’s exact concern is not to prove his right to preach, but to make just enough of a show to diminish the boldness of the parish priests and officials with which he would have competed. He forces a false acknowledgement of authority through the manipulation of familiar signs of office, even to the extent of mimicry: ‘I stonde lyk a clerk in my pulpet’ (VI, 391). Yet, the ease with which the Pardoner appropriates pastoral discourse for his own purposes stands in marked contrast to the negotiations performed by the Clerk: ‘Thus spitte I out my venym under hewe / Of hoolynesse, to semen hooly and trew’ (VI, 422–23). Unlike the Clerk, who endeavours to mediate between his sources and his audience, the Pardoner maintains distance between himself and his text: ‘For though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle can’ (VI, 459–60). The dissociation between himself and his tale is borne out in the tale’s reception by the pilgrims. The reception of the Pardoner’s tale by the Host can only be described as violent, yet it must be noted that the reaction is directed against the Pardoner and not the tale. The Host directly responds to the Pardoner’s pursuit of personal gain, as he tells the Host, ‘Unbokele anon thy purs’ (VI, 945). The virulence of the Host’s reaction ‘I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond’ (VI, 952), might be read as evidence of the efficacy of the exemplum, which, according to its stated moral was intended to identify cupiditas as the root of evil. The tale has apparently succeeded too well for the teller’s good. Minnis remarks that: the type of the bad preacher was […] Chaucer’s main model for his portrait of the Pardoner […] This preacher then tells a tale which, judged by many standards, including the late-medieval standards of exemplary narrative and technique, is a masterpiece. Although its moral effect is ruined in this one instance because the Pardoner has scandalized his audience, the morality of the tale itself seems to have survived its immoral teller.43

So the tale has a life of its own, but, I would argue, only because the assumption is that others will tell it: ‘For lewed people loven tales olde; / Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde’ (VI, 437–38).

43

Alastair Minnis, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner and the “Office of Preacher”’, in Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe, ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen: Narr; Cambridge: Brewer, 1986), pp. 88–119 (p. 118).

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Unlike a text linked to a recognized authority, an unauthored exemplum like the source of the Pardoner’s tale can, upon retelling, escape its old context, and be reinterpreted through limitless iterations. The tale proves to be beyond the control of the Pardoner, who is silenced by the Host’s reaction to his cupiditas, though it is undoubtedly an appropriate reaction to the tale’s condemnation of greed. Like the revellers of his tale, who cannot recognize death when they see it, the Pardoner is unable to recognize the association between his tale and the Host’s response to it: ‘This pardoner answerde nat a word; So wrooth he was, no word ne wold he seye’ (VI, 956–57). The reception of the Clerk’s Tale similarly demonstrates the way in which texts, and particularly exempla, can escape the control of their tellers. The climax of the tale can be read as an inverse of the crisis in the Pardoner’s Tale. Where the Pardoner’s tale centres around the failure to recognize true death, the Clerk’s tale climaxes when Griselde realizes that her children are alive. Griselde expresses her happiness as a feeling of immortality: Now rekke I nevere to been deed right heere; Sith I stonde in youre love and in youre grace, No fors of deeth, ne whan my spirit pace! (IV , 1090–92)

Ironically, the Clerk finds it necessary to bury her, as he did Petrarch, when anxieties about the way in which the tale will be interpreted begin to surface: Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience, And both atones buryed in Ytaille; For which I crie in open audience No wedded man so hardy be t’assaille His wyves pacience in trust to fynde Grisildis, for in certein he shal faille. (IV , 1177–82)

The anxiety exhibited in this passage regarding what kind of example Grisilde offers, is built into the history of the tale. When Boccaccio adapted the tale in its earliest extant literary form, it was accompanied by protests of its unfitness as an example for the right conduct of men or women. The tale is given to Dioneo in the Decameron, who ends it with the following cautionary moral: ‘For perhaps it would have served [Gualtieri] right if he had chanced upon a wife, who, being driven from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skincoat for her, earning herself a fine new dress’.44 This fantasy of the wife’s potential for obtaining revenge is echoed in the envoy to Chaucer’s version: ‘In 44

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. by. G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 795.

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jalousie I rede eek thou hym bynde’ (IV, 1205). When Petrarch translated the tale into Latin, he added the Christian moral that is also (initially) espoused by the Clerk: This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee, For it were inportable, though they wolde, But for that every wight, in his degree, Sholde be constant in adversitee As was Grisilde; therfore Petrak writeth This storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth. For sith a woman was so pacient Unto a mortal man, wel moore us oghte Receyven al in gree that God us sent; For greet skile is he preeve that he wroghte. (IV , 1142–51)

Following Petrarch’s adaptation, however, a French version of the tale appeared in nine manuscripts with marriage manuals ‘intending to instruct wives on proper conduct’, including Livre de la Vertu du Sacrement de Mariage, Le Menagier de Paris, and Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry.45 The reception of the tale by the pilgrims mirrors the historical reception implied by the analogues in French marriage manuals. The Host immediately thinks of his own wife: Oure Hooste seyde, and swoor, ‘Be goddes bones, Me were levere than a barel ale My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones! This is a gentil tale for the nones, As to my purpos, wiste ye my wille; But thyng that wol nat be lat it be stille’. (IV , 1212b–12g)

The Host at once rejects the allegory of the Clerk’s interpretation and the implicit idealism in his own more literal approach to Griselde, calling into question the efficacy of the exemplum as a controlled mode of expression. Similarly the merchant immediately thinks of his wife: Ther is a long and large difference Bitwix Grisildis grete pacience And of my wyf the passyng crueltee. ( IV , 1223–25)

45

Amy Goodwin, ‘The Griselda Story in France’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Correale and Hamel, pp. 130–67 (p. 131).

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The symbolic, collective meaning of the exemplum inevitably slides back into the private life of the auditor as parallels and contrasts are recognized. Undoubtedly it is a comic moment, but one that also reflects on the persistence of readerly context both within the Canterbury Tales and in the historical record of the tale’s reception in its various forms. It would seem that the Clerk’s anxiety over the prominence of Petrarch is in some sense misplaced. No matter how nervous the laughter is when the merchant insists on reading Griselde alongside his wife, that moment is a victory for the immediacy of the text, for its ability to intersect with lives far beyond the scope of the author’s original intent. As the proliferation of the analogues to the Clerk’s Tale in marriage manuals would suggest, availability of these texts for multiple readings was highly productive for late medieval manuscript culture in a way that true deference to Petrarch would have threatened. A more pointed anxiety of this threat is expressed in the Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale. If the recently dead Petrarch might pose limitations on the Clerk, the live Chaucer nearly silences the Man of Law, who reasons that Chaucer has already told all the good tales: [...] But nathelees certeyn I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly On metres and on rymyng craftily, Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man; And if he have noght seyd hem, leve brother, In o book, he hath seyd hem in another. (II, 45–52)

The Man of Law’s criticism of Chaucer’s versification makes it clear that his point has nothing to do with admiration of Chaucer’s skill. Rather, the Man of Law directly challenges the premise with which we began, that tales once told can be retold with significance: ‘What sholde I tellen hem, syn they been tolde?’ (II, 56). He then launches into a list of the tales that Chaucer has already told. The irony is that not one of them was first told by Chaucer — he can hardly be guilty in any real sense of monopolizing all the fresh content. The point seems rather that Chaucer’s fame (‘as knoweth many a man’) has diminished the possibilities for retelling his tales in the future. The Man of Law’s perspective is explicitly forward-looking, casting Chaucer into the past: ‘Chaucer [...] / Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan / Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man’ (II, 47, 49–50). The perspective is one in which Chaucer is remembered as an established and unchanging auctoritas like Ovid, except that there is no interest even in appropriating his tales:

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Chapter 1 For he hath toold of loveris up and doun Mo than Ovide made of mencioun In his Episteles, that been ful olde. What sholde I tellen hem, syn they been tolde? (II, 53–56)

The moment seems oddly prescient of a modern approach to valuing texts for their originality. Once Chaucer has told the tales, the Man of Law sees no reason to tell them again. His solution to the problem, however, is not to invent a completely new tale. Instead, the Man of Law faces authority armed with a dogged assertion of his own station, and a tale told by another: But of my tale how shal I doon this day? Me were looth be likned, douteless, To Muses that men clepe Pierides— Methamorphosios woot what I mene; But natheless, I recche noght a bene Though I come after hym with hawebake. I speke in prose, and lat him rymes make. ( II, 90–96)

The Man of Law’s tale, of course, is also told by Gower in Confessio Amantis.46 Thus, part of the humour of context here is that the ‘hawebake’ he tells was once Gower’s material, but Gower’s version (unlike Chaucer’s adaptations) was not memorable enough to end the interest in it being told again. The Man of Law’s choice of the Tale of Constance might also be seen to resolve his scruples against the value of twice-told tales. The tale itself is invested in the idea of continuity, from the name of its heroine, Constance, to the repetitive cycles of its narrative. The question that remains unresolved but undeniably posed by the Man of Law’s Prologue is how Chaucer will be received by future readers and tellers of tales. As we will see in the next section of this chapter, the early manuscript history of the Canterbury Tales shows evidence of several modes of receiving Chaucer. Against those witnesses with a vested interest in producing a complete authorized text (such as the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts), stand such manuscripts as Clitheroe, Stonyhurst College MS B XXIII and Longleat House, Library of

46 The following argument depends on the relatively later dating of the Man of Law’s Prologue: see Larry D. Benson, ‘The Order of the Canterbury Tales’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, 3 (1981), 77–120. See also Peter Nicholson, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower’, The Chaucer Review, 26 (1991), 153–74.

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the Marquess of Bath, MS 29, which take a different focus.47 The Stonyhurst manuscript is an anthology of didactic works which includes a heavily edited version of the Tale of Melibeus, without any reference to its place in The Canterbury Tales. Charles Owen argues that the passages edited from the tale result in a ‘heavier didacticism and some incoherency’.48 Because textual studies indicate that Stonyhurst B XXIII is closely related to three other manuscripts, all of which are collected texts of the Canterbury Tales, it seems likely that the new context of a didactic anthology took precedence over what the compiler probably knew as the tale’s relationship with Chaucer.49 Similarly, Longleat 29 appropriates and re-titles the Parson’s Tale ‘Penitencie’ without crediting Chaucer, and places it in an anthology of religious works alongside Hilton’s De Vita Activa et Contempliva. The potentially close relationship of Longleat 29 to the Ellesmere manuscript itself makes this appropriation particularly interesting. Longleat 29, thought to have been produced in the 1420s, is the earliest singletale manuscript and, according to Owen, it was produced from a twin of the exemplar for the Ellesmere manuscript. So it would seem that multiple attitudes toward Chaucer, as an author whose text should be kept intact, and as a maker whose work should be available for appropriation, went hand-in-hand from the beginning. No more powerful analogue for this idea exists than in the textual history of Chaucer’s Retraction. Interestingly, the doubts expressed in the Retraction are focused on the breakdown of intent: ‘And if ther be any thyng that displese hem, I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge and nat to my wyl’ (X, 1083). The stated intent of the passage is to renounce Chaucer’s corpus, but of course the historical effect has been to preserve it for posterity. As Chaucer repudiates each work, he associates it with his own name — but, significantly, not with his personality or an intended interpretation. The Retraction sets the poems and the poet free from each other. It is accompanied in the manuscripts of the Ellesmere tradition with a rubric that articulates that release. It will never be known whether the rubric that appears above the Retraction originated with

47 I am dependent on Owen’s descriptions of these manuscripts in The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. 48 49

Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 106.

Stonyhurst B XXIII derives its Melibee from the exemplar of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.3, which it inherited from Chicago, IL, University of Chicago, Regenstein Library MS 564 (formerly the McCormick MS), as did Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 141.

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Chaucer or with one of the earliest readers who compiled his work together in the Ellesmere manuscript, but the confusion of the source even in these authorizing traditions only strengthens its voice as a dedication of the book to its readers: ‘Heere taketh the maker of this book his leve.’

II.

Writing the Canterbury Tales

The writer of the rubric announcing Chaucer’s departure turned out to be wrong in many respects. Chaucer, as an idea, as an authorizing presence, remained important to the production of texts of the Canterbury Tales. There were early efforts to collect complete manuscripts of the Tales that preserved, not only Chaucer’s name and his corpus in the list given in the Retraction, but also his portrait. The Ellesmere manuscript itself is the chief representative of these. It is the earliest manuscript to include all of the surviving tales now thought authentic, and it contains the earliest portrait that may be a verisimilar likeness of Chaucer.50 This particular form of Chaucer’s portrait offers us one form of evidence that there was early interest, not only in the works of Chaucer, but in Chaucer as a man. The idea that there might be a tradition of true likeness in one strain of Chaucer portraits famously arises from the text of Hoccleve’s The Regement of Princes that accompanies a marginal portrait of Chaucer in London, British Library, Harley MS 4866. Hoccleve says of Chaucer: Al-þogh his lyfe be queynt, þe resemblaunce Of him haþ in me so fressh lyflynesse, Þat, to putte othir men in remembraunce Of his persone, I haue heere his lyknesse Do make, to þis ende in sothfastnesse, Þat þei þat haue of him lest þought & mynde, By þis peynture may ageyn him fynde. (4992–98)51

50

Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 288–89. 51 As adapted by Jeanne Krochalis from Furnivall’s Early English Text Society edition, without Furnivall’s diacritics: Jeanne E. Krochalis, ‘Hoccleve’s Chaucer Portrait’, The Chaucer Review, 21 (1986), 234–45 (p. 234); cf. Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works, III: The Regiment of Princes, AD 1411–12, from the Harleian MS. 4866, and fourteen of Hoccleve’s minor poems from the Egerton MS. 615, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 72

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The intention is to call for a ‘realistic author portrait’ that would be recognizable to those who knew Chaucer in life.52 The resemblance of the Harley 4866 portrait to that in the Ellesmere manuscript speaks to the possibility of a tradition of true portraiture.53 We cannot know whether Hoccleve’s intention was accurately carried out, but the desire for an accurate likeness is apparent here and it has been argued that it ‘says something new about the role of the poet’ in memorializing the image of the actual man.54 This calling up of Chaucer’s person by Hoccleve goes hand-in-hand with the fifteenth-century construction of Chaucer as a founding father of English literature who defines an authorized body of work. But alongside this tradition is another that views Chaucer less as an author and more as a fellow reader with whom the scribes and book owners of the fifteenth century comfortably exchanged tales by adding their own material or by adapting Chaucer’s text to their own needs. A different kind of Chaucer portrait exemplifies this tradition, found in a manuscript copied in London at roughly the same time as the Ellesmere: London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 851. It contains several spurious links and an extra tale not written by Chaucer. Its portrait is a stylized ideal with no resemblance to the Chaucer portrayed in the purportedly lifelike portraits of the Ellesmere manuscript and Harley 4866. Reproduced as Figure 2, the portrait in Lansdowne 851 represents the poet as a conventional figure without distinctive facial features. It is also the only medieval portrait in which Chaucer is shown reading a book. He stands, holding the book in both hands, as if about to read from it or hand it to an unseen companion.

(London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 180–81. 52

Krochalis, ‘Hoccleve’s Chaucer Portrait’, p. 234.

53

Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 285–303. The Chaucer portrait in the Ellesmere manuscript resembles the portrait in Harley 4866, not only in its facial features, but in its proportions, in which the upper half of the horseback-riding Chaucer seem influenced by a three-quarter-length portrait like that in Harley 4866, suggesting that the two portraits derive from the same exemplar (Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 288–89). Hoccleve may have supplied the exemplar in both cases, as a possible editor of the Ellesmere manuscript (ibid., p. 289). Some art historians remain sceptical about the feasibility of verisimilar portraits in this context. See Lois Bragg, ‘Chaucer’s Monogram and the “Hoccleve Portrait” Tradition’, Word and Image, 12 (1996), 127–42. For my own purposes, the desire for a realistic portrait, which seems undeniable in Hoccleve’s poem, is sufficient to demonstrate the idea of a particular author’s central role in the remembrance and construction of his own literary legacy, as opposed to a generalized ideal of a poet without particularity. 54

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We are reminded, not of his personality in his own private life, but of his role as a reader and sharer of texts.

Figure 2. ‘Portrait of Chaucer,’ London, British Library, Lansdowne M S 851, fol. 2 r. c. 1410-20. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

In this tradition, the act of reading constitutes the iconic representation of the author, rather than his personal, physical attributes. Participation in a textual tradition is more important than personal identity in recognizing the author, and it is a participation that can be taken up by anyone. Accordingly, the scribe of the manuscript participates himself by adding lines to what we would think of as Chaucer’s work. The scribe claims that he has a copy of the now lost ending of the Cook’s Tale, but refuses to write it out for shame. He has the Cook interrupt himself with new lines that bridge to a tale not written by Chaucer: Fye therone, it is so foule! I wil nowe tell no forthere For schame of the harlotrie that seweth after. A velany it were thareof more to spell, Bot of a knighte and his sonnes, my tale I wil forthe tell. (6–9) 55

55

All quotations from the Lansdowne MS are noted by line number and taken from The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by John M. Bowers

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It is tempting to read the ‘my’ in ‘my tale’ as coming, not from the Cook, but from the scribe of Lansdowne 851, who substitutes a tale in his own possession for the unfinished Cook’s Tale.56 The motive behind such expansion is probably to produce a book that looks ‘complete’ — but it is a definition of completeness that is not defined by what Chaucer wrote. The completeness of the book in these cases is defined by what satisfies the reader, regardless of whether the pleasing text is authorial. While the practical realities of scribal transmission certainly made such opportunities to alter texts commonplace, there is more going on here than the mechanics of scribal copying. Chaucer rightly anticipated that readers would enjoy modifying the Canterbury Tales as they read, because his own creative reading of source material is at the heart of his artistic project, with all its manipulation of new context and familiar allusion. By modifying, excerpting, and adding to the Tales, fifteenth-century readers sensitively respond in kind to the poetics of reading and composing within which we have seen the Tales themselves work. These poetics act as an open invitation to re-adaptation and an acknowledgement of the important role of readers in vernacular literary production.57 There is much historical evidence that late medieval readers accepted this invitation with pleasure by creating copies of the Tales that drastically cut, expand, edit, and otherwise modify Chaucer’s work.58 Some manuscripts of this (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, W estern Michigan University, 1992). The lines cited above can be found at p. 43. 56

For a recent study of the manuscript evidence regarding the ‘incompleteness’ or potentially intentional ‘openness’ of the Cook’s Tale, see Jim Casey, ‘Unfinished Business: The Termination of Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 41 (2006), 185–96. 57

For a study of Chaucer’s acknowledgement of the centrality of the reader, see Jill Mann, ‘The Authority of the Audience in Chaucer’, in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991), pp. 3–12. 58

Of the eighty-two extant manuscripts of the tales, twenty-seven of them contain only selected tales. Eight of those, however, are physically fragmented. John Bowers has edited the major additions to the Tales in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions. Daniel Silvia accounts for each of the extant manuscripts and analyses the purposefully anthologizing manuscripts in ‘Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts’. There was another fifteenth-century tradition equally interested in constructing Chaucer as an authority figure; see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers. See also James Simpson’s study, which suggests that both traditions coexisted in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: James Simpson, ‘Chaucer’s Presence and Absence, 1400–1550’, in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. by Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 251–69.

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tradition, like Trinity MS R.3.19 with which this chapter began, challenge Chaucer’s ownership of his work through alternative ascriptions and organization of his texts. Others contribute new material to the Tales on an equal footing with Chaucer. The following section of this chapter will examine the relationship between author, text, and reader in this particular textual tradition of the Canterbury Tales, beginning with the three major continuations of the Tales. Three Continuations of the Tales The manuscripts preserve a number of non-authorial additions to Chaucer’s text that re-visit the pilgrim fellowship in order to reflect on many of the issues we have already seen the Tales address. This response to the Tales was not simply imitative, however. Certain additions and continuations of the Tales rise to interrogate the terms on which the pilgrims exchange their narratives. Chaucer seems sure of the ease with which the Tales can negotiate the bounds of orality, literacy, and class in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale, where the drunken Miller famously preempts the Monk’s place in the established social hierarchy, just as Chaucer invites all comers to edit out the tales that do not please them. The assumption of the frame is one of equal participation among those who receive the tales, fictional pilgrims and actual audience alike. Those who adapt the Tales are, at times, demonstrably less willing to elide the limitations potentially imposed on interpreters of tales. Two major additions to the Tales discussed here each develop education as a potential basis or barrier to interpretation. The continuation of the Cook’s Tale in Bodley 686 brings the narrative degeneration of the first fragment to its foreseeable end in the criminal conviction of the bawdy apprentice and his friend, but also ultimately judges between them according to their ability to read. Even as the poet of the Canterbury Interlude changes Chaucer’s work, he questions the consequences of readerly intervention by representing the limited ability of certain pilgrims to interpret and understand their own endeavour. In Bodley 686, an unknown poet has added a number of lines to the body of the Cook’s Tale and has rounded it out with a grim summary of the fates of the revellers. The majority of the new lines build on the already present description of a fellowship that takes part in Perkyn Reveloure’s ‘disport’. The Bodley 686 poet adds the idea that Perkyn learns his wayward behaviour from this group: And gadered hym a mayny of his sort To hoppe and synge and make such disport.

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With Rech-never and Recheles this lessoun he lerys With Waste and with Wranglere, his owne pley-ferys, With Lyght-honde and with Likorouse-mowth, with Unschamfast; With Drynke-more and with Drawe-abak, her thryst is y-past, With Malaperte and with Miysseavysed—such meyne they hight, That wolle do but a lytull tylle her dyner be dyght. (17–24)59

As Bowers has noted, the added lines owe much to Piers Plowman in both style and content.60 Here the allegorical personifications, like Langland’s, make it possible for the text to explore the inner qualities that contribute to a person’s downfall without diminishing its commentary on the social aspects of the situation. The names of Perkyn’s companions are a mixture of attitudes (NeverCare, Careless, Unshamefast, Malapert), actions (Waste, Wrangler, Drinkmore, Drawback), and physical characteristics (Light-hand and Lecherous-Mouth) — but also among the company is ‘Misadvised’, a name that implies the unmet obligation of authority figures in the community to guide them. The added lines also hint at the social pressure on Perkyn to continue his indulgent habits by making clear the economic dependencies nurtured by them: The tapster, the taverner: the koke was nedy, Wolde clepe on Perkyn, for his purs was so redy— And that fownde his Maister welle in his chaffare, For every other day his boxe was lefte bare. (37–40)

Chaucer’s version of the tale mentions the effect of Perkyn’s ‘generosity’ on his master’s coffers, but does not create relationships with the tapster, the taverner, and the cook that put pressure on the apprentice to steal and spend. The Bodley 686 version further remarks on the irony of the master’s relationship to Perkyn, in that no man pays more for Perkyn’s entertainment than his master, who enjoys none of it: ‘That bargeyn no man so sore schalle abye / As his Maister that hath no parte of his melodye’ (43–44). These lines replace a similar couplet in Chaucer’s fragment (‘... His maister shal it in his shoppe abye, / Al have he no part of the mynstralcye’: I, 4393–94), but there the irony is focused on the master in his shop, rather than on the range of relationships Perkyn might have. The Bodley 686 version brings attention the many people who are involved in

59

All quotations from Bodley 686 are from The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, pp. 33–39. I have followed his practice of giving Chaucer’s lines in normal text and the added lines in boldface. 60

34.

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Perkyn’s transactions. While the master pays sorely for Perkyn’s bargain, others profit; but Perkyn is also being used by his fellowship of revellers. The version in Bodley 686 enhances the existing sense of warring perspectives between Perkyn’s fellowship of revellers and the master’s payroll of employees; partying in the eyes of the first means theft from the perspective of the second: ‘For thefte and riot, they been convertible’ (I, 4395). Each group reads the situation in a different way. For the Bodley 686 version, this difference is rooted in class: When thy purs is penyles, where schalt thou have more, Thou that wylt not the occupie no thyng therfore? Revell ys ordeyned to hem that mow pay, But prentise ne pore man, they mowe not away; Evelle-sponne woole at the last wolle come oute, Though thou kepe it never so prevey in a lytelle cloute. (49–54)

These lines were added wholesale as a reminder that only the leisure class can afford to indulge in revelry full time — but something makes the apprentice, like a poor man, unable to move on. The proverb with which the passage ends implies that the apprentice is stuck in this position because he has made a bad beginning; like ill-spun wool, he must eventually unravel. The habit of this lifestyle, once established, will eventually make the apprentice’s position untenable, no matter how private he attempts to keep it. Crucially, in both versions, the master’s primary concern is that Perkyn’s perspective is capable of corrupting the rest of his staff. It is this consideration that motivates him to turn Perkyn out of his house: But at the laste as his Maister hym bethought To over-se his papire and hym thorow sought Uppon a proverbe that seith this same worde: ‘Better ys rotten apulle out of an hurde Than for to let hem rot alle the remenaunte’. (59–63)

The Bodley 686 poet takes particular interest in this idea, adding a similar proverb that reiterates exactly how potent a bad influence can be: Even as a scabbed schepe in the folde Alle a flocke wolle defyle, both yonge and olde, Ryght even so a febel servaunt may Distruye fourty of his felaws in a day. (67–70)

The Bodley 686 poet is not content to let this image of diseased corruption explain the motivation of the master, however. The master’s words to the

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apprentice, also added in Bodley 686, make it clear that the master’s desire to maintain the virtue of his household is based on the desire for profit: Therefore his Maister gaffe hym acquytaunce And bade hym goe with sorowe and meschaunce: ‘Better ys betyme to voyde such a clerke; The lenger he abydeth, the wors is his werke. He that his maister no profite wolle wynne, Y holde hym better out of the house than withynne’. (71–76)

The abrupt introduction of the first person here, asserting the perspective of the master, is shot through with irony again: ‘I consider him better out of the house than within.’ As will soon be made clear, the apprentice is not morally better outside the house, but worse. However, the lines that follow, describing the apprentice’s happiness at having been given his freedom, imply that the apprentice also considers himself better off in another sense: And thus the joly prentys had leve; Now let hym revell alle the nyght or leve. Ther ys no thiffe without a lowke That helpeth hym to waste and to sowke, Or [Of?] that he brybe can or oght borowe may. (77–81)61

Now fully a member of the fellowship of thieves, the jolly apprentice is free to revel and his accomplices join with him. But the sense of belonging in these lines is ominous. The ‘help’ given by the thief’s ‘lowke’ takes some advantage of the thief. In the household of the master, the apprentices were expected to ‘win profit’ collectively. In the fellowship of thieves, the revellers spend it together. One can see the attraction of joining in play, over joining in work, but the speed with which bribing and borrowing follows wasting should trouble Perkyn. As the apprentice sets himself up in a new household, the parallel between the fellowship of thieves and the master’s house is pointed: Anon he sent his bed and alle his araye Unto a compere of his owne sorte

61

‘Or that he brybe can’ is grammatically awkward. According to the Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Hans Kurath and others (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–); hereafter MED, ‘sowke’ regularly takes ‘of’ for the meaning, in the sense to use up, consume or impoverish. The Riverside Chaucer reads ‘of’ for ‘or’: ‘There is no thief without an accomplice who helps him to waste and use up that [which] he can steal or anything he may borrow’ (I, 4415–17). Textual variants for the Cook’s Tale fragment are not given by Benson, and Bowers does not put the reading ‘or’ in boldface to indicate that it is unique to Bodley 686, but it seems likely to be an error for ‘of’.

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Chapter 1 That loved welle the dyse, ryot and disporte. A wife he hadde that helde her contenaunce A schoppe, and ever sche pleyed for his sustenaunce. (82–86)

A good thief (or wife) supports the dissipation of the group just as a good apprentice supports the diligence of the master’s shop. The Bodley 686 manuscript’s reading, ‘pleyed for his sustenaunce’ (in place of the original, ‘swyved for hir sustenance’), has been read by Bowers as an indication of the Bodley 686 poet’s ‘moralizing intentions’ and ‘delicacy’,62 though the substitution preserves some of the erotic suggestion of Chaucer’s words in a possibly more current formulation. It also accomplishes two critical thematic closures. First, it brings the parallels of work and play, of sexual gratification and profit, to a head. Second, by replacing ‘hir’ with ‘his’, the Bodley 686 poet makes it clear that the wife supports her husband with her immoral activity. Like every thief with a ‘lowke’, she gets help spending whatever she manages to beg, borrow, steal, or sell. This ominous half-line, in which the wife is said to ‘play’ for her husband’s sustenance implies that the sense of freedom felt by the apprentice is likely to be only temporary, as he settles into a new world that has its own masters and apprentices. The parallels set up in the Cook’s Tale seem to reference the myth of a criminal underworld that mirrors respectable society. This phenomenon was not described by contemporaries until Thomas Harman’s 1566 Caveat for common cursetors [STC 12788],63 but according to this view, ‘crime was a trade with, in some cases, an apprenticeship scheme’.64 As suggested by the Bodley 686 poet’s expansion of the parallels between the master’s house and the fellowship of thieves, the criminal world was described as being ordered according to ‘a strict hierarchy within this group [of professional criminals] mirroring the social system it had rejected’.65 Those who planned robberies and extortions, the

62

The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, pp. 34, 39, n. 85. 63

Alfred W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 4 vols (London: British Library, 1950); also available at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. Hereafter, works with a Short-Title Catalogue number will be indicated by the form [STC]. 64 John Briggs and others, Crime and Punishment in England: An Introductory History (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 20. 65

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‘upright men’, were at the top of this hierarchy, while beggars and prostitutes formed the ‘peasant’ criminal class. Recently historians have made serious challenges to these accounts of street life in early modern England as based purely in the fiction of rogue literature like that of Thomas Harman.66 For my own purposes the idea of such a phenomenon might just as well help to explain the parallels being set up by the Bodley 686 poet. The myth of a criminal society that mirrors lawful society had so grown by the time Harman printed his sensational account that it was possible for him to conceive of a double portrait of one celebrity upright man, Nicholas Blunt (Figure 3).

Figure 3: ‘Double Portrait of Nicholas Blunt’, in Thomas Harman, Caveat for common cursetors ([London]: Henry Middleton, 1573), sig. D2 r. Reproduced with permission of The Huntington Library, San M arino.

66

See Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 1–12.

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On the left, Blunt appears as a respectable gentleman; on the right, he is depicted in the disguise he uses as a false beggar. The two images are arranged around the axis of the gentleman’s walking stick, or the false beggar’s cane, as each incarnation of Nicholas takes hold of the same stick. A poem beneath the picture makes it clear that the sensationalistic attraction is that, like the wife who maintains a shop in the Cook’s Tale, the upright man is able to mirror his bourgeois victims: ‘These two pictures lyuely set out, / One body and soule, God send him more grace: / This monstrous dissembler, a Cranke all about’. The Cook’s Tale invokes this underworld in its inception. The setting in Cheapside (13), the mention of the apprentice being led to Newgate with ‘revel’ (58), the brief sketching of ale-houses and their entertainments, and the house of prostitution masquerading as a store, are all elements of the contemporary London underworld that are present in Chaucer’s original conception of the tale, but there Chaucer’s version breaks off.67 The elements of the two parallel fellowships, the master’s household and the wife’s shop, are present in Chaucer’s fragment, but the ramifications are unexplored. The potential developed in Bodley 686 is for a didactic lesson aimed at young apprentices, but the Bodley 686 version also remains sensitive to the challenges they face. The Bodley 686 poet brings the apprentice’s career to an abrupt conclusion in four lines. The fellowship of thieves is broken up when they are caught and their punishments distinguish between them. One of the wayward friends is sentenced to life in prison, the other to death because he cannot read: What thorowe himselfe and his felawe that sought, Unto a myschefe bothe they were broght. The tone y-dampned to presoun perpetually, The tother to deth for he couthe not of clergye. (87–90) 68

Reading, in this example, is the basis on which the group is divided, not brought together. Bowers suggests that it is the apprentice Perkyn who is executed because we know that he has neglected his education.69 There is nothing to distinguish between the two, however, other than the benefit of clergy. In the

67

John Scattergood, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Correale and Hamel, pp. 75–86 (p. 75). 68 The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, p. 39, n. 90. 69

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judicial system of fifteenth-century England, the benefit of the clergy was the difference between life and death. The Bodley 686 poet’s further exploration of the parallel fellowships that were nascent in Chaucer’s fragment is evidence that he was seeking to do more than simply fill the gaps in the text he had. In particular, the introduction of the benefit of clergy at the close of the tale connects the new text with an issue pertinent to fifteenth-century urban life. The benefit of the clergy was intended to exempt men in the ecclesiastical orders from being sentenced under the jurisdiction of the secular courts, where the death penalty might be applied for a variety of crimes, including theft. There were initially a variety of different ways to test for the benefit of the clergy: for instance, by checking for tonsure. But by the mid-fourteenth century, the literacy test was used to establish sufficient proof of the right to the benefit.70 As some ability to read became more common among the laity, the potential for abuse of the benefit beyond its original conception grew.71 Leona Gabel’s analysis of the Gaol Delivery Rolls confirms that, at the close of the fourteenth century and after, the numbers of prisoners who successfully claimed the benefit and who also list a secular occupation increased dramatically.72 The trades are well represented among the occupations listed, as well as ‘yoman’, ‘laborer’ and, significantly for the newly unemployed Perkyn, ‘vacabund’.73 At the time when the Bodley 686 poet was writing, then, the line between those who could claim the benefit of the clergy and those who could not was increasingly blurred. It remained, nonetheless, the privilege of a relative few. Bellamy has calculated that the percentage of convicted felons in each circuit who successfully claimed the benefit consistently fell in the range of thirteen to seventeen percent between 1388 and 1460.74 In the context of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, it is a sober reminder of the boundaries of class and education

70 See Leona Gabel, The Benefit of the Clergy in England in the Later Middle Ages (Northampton, MA: [n. pub.], 1929), p. 69. 71

For a discussion of the increase of literacy amongst the laity, and the secularization of clerical training, see P. H. Cullum, ‘Learning to be a M an, Learning to be a Priest in Late Medieval England’, in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. by Sarah Rees Jones, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 135–54. 72 73 74

Gabel, The Benefit of the Clergy, p. 77. Ibid., p. 77.

J. G. Bellamy, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England: Felony before the Courts from Edward I to the Sixteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), p. 136.

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that dissonate sharply with the harmony of the pilgrim group, in which all participate freely almost as if these boundaries did not exist. The eight-line moral with which the Bodley 686 poet completes the tale, makes an effort to address the problems faced by young men as they seek to find a place in the stratified society of late medieval England: And therfore, yonge men, lerne while ye may That with mony dyvers thoghtes beth prycked al the day. Remembre you what myschefe cometh of mysgovernaunce. Thus mowe ye lerne worschep and come to substaunce. Thenke how grace and governaunce hath broght hem a boune, Many pore mannys sonn, chefe state of the towne. Ever rewle the after the best man of name, And God may grace the to come to the same. (91–98)

Significantly, the key is that which caused the central anxiety in the tale: modelling oneself after a respectable citizen. The statement is quite without irony, however, because it offers the opposite, mirror image of Perkyn in the poor man’s son who learns appreciation and self-discipline, and who subsequently earns the highest office in town — not by revel but by ‘rewle’. Ultimately, the version of the tale in Bodley 686 reaffirms the role of the right kind of fellowship in the education of the young men it addresses, just as it rehabilitates the role of the Cook’s broken fragment in the narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales. The same issues of class division and readerly choice preoccupy what we now call the Canterbury Interlude, an anonymous expansion of the frame of the Canterbury Tales preserved in Alnwick, Duke of Northumberland MS 455 alone. For the Interlude, too, the problems faced by the fellowship are best solved within it. The 732-line Interlude, also known as the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, narrates the adventures of the pilgrims in Canterbury. They visit the cathedral and lodge at an inn, where the Pardoner attempts to seduce the tapster, only to be cheated out of a meal by her. The tapster’s lover and the innkeeper then beat the Pardoner, who is forced to spend an ignominious night hiding in bed with a dog, before the pilgrims head back home together with the Pardoner protected among them.75 Studies of the Interlude have focused on its relationship 75 All quotations are from The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, pp. 55–79. The Interlude introduces a non-Chaucerian tale told by the Merchant and known as the Tale of Beryn. Most studies have assumed that the Interlude and the Tale of Beryn were written by the same author; see The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, II, 393. Bowers does suggest that the Interlude ‘may have been

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to Chaucer’s work, which is textually seamless.76 The composer of the Interlude silently steps in and writes new lines for Chaucer, as well as for a number of the other pilgrims.77 The appropriation of Chaucer’s persona as narrator of the frame (unusual in the fifteenth-century additions to the Canterbury Tales)78 allows the Canterbury

written later than the tale it prefaces’ (Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, p. 57). 76

Curry finds the Beryn-poet in agreement with a reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner as a eunuch: Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926). Bashe offers a detailed test of Furnivall’s observation that the Berynwriter ‘kept up’ Chaucer’s characters very well, concluding that they are generally consistent with the authorial versions: E. J. Bashe, ‘The Prologue of the Tale of Beryn’, Philological Quarterly, 12 (1933), 1–16. Kohl breaks away from the question of characterization, concluding that the Beryn-writer describes the pilgrims in a way that reflects his distance from the moral climate of Chaucer’s text: Stephan Kohl, ‘Chaucer’s Pilgrims in Fifteenth-Century Literature’, Fifteenth-Century Studies, 7 (1983), 221–36. Bowers also sees the Beryn-writer’s work as a departure from the text as it survives in other manuscripts, with the Beryn-writer presenting the pilgrimage as a round-trip in a philosophical and literal sense: John M. Bowers, ‘The Tale of Beryn and the Siege of Thebes: Alternative Ideas of the Canterbury Tales’, in Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Daniel J. Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 201–26. The studies by Darjes–Rendall in 1985 and Winstead in 1988 return to the idea of the Beryn-poet as a faithful reader of Chaucer, whose work finds both direct source and stylistic influence in the authorial text of the Canterbury Tales: Bradley Darjes and Thomas Rendall, ‘A Fabliau in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn’, Mediaeval Studies, 47 (1985), 416–31; Karen A. W instead, ‘The Beryn-Writer as a Reader of Chaucer’, The Chaucer Review, 22 (1988), 225–33. 77 The manuscript does contain a colophon attributing the authorship and translation of the Tale of Beryn to a monk of Canterbury: ‘Nomen Autoris presentis Cronica Rome Et translatoris Filius ecclesie Thome’ (fol 235; see The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, II, 387, 391–92). The presence of another ‘autor’ in the text only proves that the unity of the text of the Canterbury Tales is not based on Chaucer’s authorship for these manuscripts. The colophon appears after the Tale of Beryn and there is no explicit connection between it and the Interlude. The leaves concluding the Canterbury Tales have been lost from the Northumberland MS, so it is impossible to determine what form a colophon or explicit might have taken in this copy of the text. 78

Lydgate introduces his own persona as narrator of both prologue and tale in the Siege of Thebes. The majority of the other additions are expansions of existing tales or wholesale additions of new tales (for example, the Tale of Gamelyn: see The Tale of Gamelyn, ed. by W. W. Skeat, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893)). For an account of the exceptions, which are all on a much smaller scale than the Canterbury Interlude, see the spurious links in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, pp. 41–53.

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Interlude to expand the General Prologue’s commentary on the fellowship as a community of readers. The Interlude opens with a re-iteration of the textual exchange that holds the fellowship together: When all this fressh feleship were com to Caunterbury, As ye have herd tofore, with tales glad and mery, Som of sotill centence, of vertu and of lore, And som of other myrthes for hem that hold no store Of wisdom, ne of holynes, ne of chivalry, Nether of vertuouse matere, but to foly Leyd wit and lustes all, to such japes As Hurleywaynes meyné in every hegg that capes Thurh unstabill mynde, ryght as the leves grene Stonden ageyn the weder, ryght so by hem I mene. (1–10)79

As in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale, in which Chaucer urges the ‘gentil’ reader to ‘Turne over the leef and chese another tale; / For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale [...]’ (I, 3177–78), the narrator of the Canterbury Interlude is committed to a compendious collection, with something for everyone. The right of preference this time, however, is explicitly honoured ‘for hem that hold no store / of wisdom [...]’ (4–5), rather than for the gentle readers emphasized in the Miller’s prologue. The Canterbury Interlude here begins to question the openness of the reading community set up in Chaucer’s narrative frame. The lines that follow describe the pilgrim’s reading preferences in terms of another popular tradition, the mischief of Harlequin.80 The trickery of Harlequin’s company is grammatically in apposition to the folly that some of the pilgrims choose over ‘virtuous matter’. However, the use of ‘meyné’ so soon after ‘feleschip’, combined with the conspicuous manoeuvre to keep the reference in

79

Bowers offers the following translation: ‘to such trickery as Harlequin’s company, with their wild minds, (performs) behind every hedge that opens up when the green leaves withstand the weather — in this way I refer to them’: The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, p. 165, n. 6. 80

The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 2nd edn, 20 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); also at [accessed 18 August 2007] and hereafter OED, lists a similar reference in Richard the Redeless: ‘Other hobbis ye hadden of hurlewaynis kynne, Reffusynge the reule of realles kynde’. Hurlewayn, like his counterparts in France and Italy eventually known as Arlequin/Arlecchino, is possibly related to a mischievous clown of Classical mime that was spread across Europe by performers who dispersed at the fall of Rome. Elements of the character include low class status and sometimes trickery involving invisibility, hence his hiding in the hedges here. The etymology of the name is not known. See Thelma Niklaus, Harlequin Phoenix (London: Bodley Head, 1956).

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check (‘ryght so by hem I mene’), invokes the pilgrims themselves as Harlequin’s company. The voice here is consistent with the naivete of Chaucer the Pilgrim elsewhere in the text. Chaucer the Pilgrim never seems quite to have mastery of the narrative in the Canterbury Tales, and in the Canterbury Interlude there is the uneasy suggestion that such lack of control is mildly dangerous, that free readers will lead to mischief through ‘unstable minds’. But this anxiety is countered by the invocation of Spring: Harlequin is active only when the cover of new spring foliage provides him with hedges in which to hide. The hardiness of the new foliage, ‘when green leaves withstand the weather’, is expressed as a natural, desirable form of resistance, suggesting an alternative reading of the final phrase that is reinforced by the rhyme: ‘ryght as the leves grene [...] / [...] ryght so by hem I mene’ (just as the green leaves stand against the weather, so I mean by them [the company]). This reading refers back to the opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue in which Spring engenders the pilgrimage in some larger sense, and here again the season offers a mitigation of the mischief caused by those very human readers, who must also withstand the weather. The mischief hinted at in the opening of the Interlude is fully dramatized when the fellowship arrives at the shrine. The Knight attempts to bring courtesy and order to the proceedings by ushering certain members of the group forward as they enter the cathedral: Then atte chirch dorr the curtesy gan to ryse, Tyl the Knyght of gentilnes that knewe righte wele the guyse Put forth the prelates, the Person and his fere. (135–37)

Here the sense of order in the group seems less influenced by the General Prologue, in which the Parson and his companion the Plowman are placed near the end of a descending class structure,81 than by the ideal relationship between the estates dreamt of in Langland’s Piers Plowman. As in Langland’s ideal, the Knight takes care of the Plowman, who is brought forward with the clergy in the group. This sense of order soon breaks down, however, just as in Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales, at the instigation of the Miller: The Pardoner and the Miller and other lewde sotes Sought hemselff in the chirch, right as lewd gotes, Pyred fast and poured highe oppon the glase, Counterfeting gentilmen, the armes for to blase,

81

See Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 57–58.

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Chapter 1 Diskyveryng fast the peyntour and for the story mourned And ared also—right as rammes horned. (147–52)82

The attempts of the ‘lewd’ pilgrims to read stained glass windows undoubtedly invoke contemporary Lollard controversy over images in churches, yet the point is made moot by the complete inaccessibility of the window’s meaning.83 The narrator is emphatic that the Pardoner and the Miller are unable to interpret the images correctly and there seems little danger of inappropriate veneration — they read exactly as rams are horned, that is, in a twisted way. Also explicit is the sense that their attempts to read are not motivated by a desire to understand, but by a desire to pass as members of a higher class, to ‘counterfeit gentlemen’. The reference to heraldic arms in the windows is a reminder of noble patronage in the Church that reinforces the class lines imposed by the inability of the Miller and the Pardoner to interpret them. For a moment, the role of reading as the basis for the community is reversed. Interpretation becomes a divisive issue as the Pardoner and the Miller break out into an argument, but the force remains undoubtedly comedic: ‘He bereth a balstaff’, quod the toon, ‘and els a rakes ende’. ‘Thow faillest’, quod the Miller, ‘thowe hast nat wel thy mynde. It is a spere, yf thowe canst se, with a prik tofore To bush adown his enmy and thurh the sholder bore’. (153–56)

The emphasis on literal interpretation recalls the exchange between the pilgrims following the Clerk’s Tale, in which the Clerk’s admonition that his tale must be interpreted as a spiritual allegory is ignored by the Host.84 In the

82

Bowers glosses ‘ared’ as ‘interpreted’ so that the line reads: ‘And read it also, straight as a Ram is horned’. He notes a similar line in Mum and the Soothsegger with the reading ‘redith’ for ‘ared’: The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, pp. 64, 167–68, n. 147. 83

Ibid., p. 167, n. 147. Bowers argues that the scene sustains the argument put forward by Madeline Caviness that the primary aim of the stained glass windows at Canterbury was not to educate the illiterate public, but to occupy the monks of the cathedral with esoteric imagery. See Madeline Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, circa 1175–1220 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 84

In the Northumberland MS, the Clerk’s Tale is followed by a spurious link to the Franklin’s Tale. In it, the Host makes an observation similar to that in the Host stanza of the standard text. The Clerk–Franklin link of the Northumberland MS begins: ‘I have a wyffe quod our hoost thoug she pore be / Yit hath she an hepe of vicis lo / For of hir tung a shrewe is she’. For the complete link, see McCormick and Heseltine, The Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Host compares his own wife unfavourably to Griselda, in spite of the

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Interlude, however, neither the correct literal nor the spiritual interpretation of the images is given. Both the Pardoner and the Miller are intent on deciphering the images at the level of physical identification, as implements of work, or as a weapon. We know from the narrator that they are wrong, but we as readers are also excluded from the authoritative answer. It does not seem likely that even contemporary readers familiar with the windows of the cathedral would have been able to identify the image in question. Bowers suggests that ‘it would be appropriate if the image causing such confusion in interpretation — a man with a staff? or rake? or spear? — were the panel originally in the north window, opposite the main southwest entrance, showing Adam delving the earth, since the Miller and his friends so clearly belong to the unregenerated class of the Old Adam’.85 It seems just as likely however that the image is that of pilgrims at the shrine of Canterbury. Several of the windows surviving from the thirteenth century depict pilgrims being healed or making offerings at Becket’s tomb. These images form part of the ‘extensive remains of a series dealing with the miracles of St Thomas’ in the ambulatory of Trinity Chapel, surrounding the site of Becket’s shrine.86 The shrine itself is depicted in two windows, one of which represents Becket issuing from the shrine with a staff in his hand.87 Pilgrims are also depicted carrying staffs or clubs that might fit with the Miller’s description in several windows.88

Clerk’s warning that Griselda should be read as the soul. 85

The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, p. 167, n. 147. 86

Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, p. 26.

87

On the representations of the shrine, see ibid., p. 33. The window representing Becket is reproduced as fig. 164 there. It is window N:III of the Trinity Chapel. 88

For instance, Matilda of Cologne is shown being beaten with clubs and brought to Becket’s tomb in an effort to cure her madness in window n:II. The panels are reproduced as figs 209–11 in Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral. See also Michael A. Michael, Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (London: Scala, 2004), pp. 17–18, 150–51. Similarly, the cure of the madness of Henry of Fordwich (in window n:IV, 14) shows him being beaten with long clubs at Becket’s tomb. In the next roundel (15), the sticks used to beat him are depicted as offerings at the tomb while Henry gives thanks for his recovery. The roundels are reproduced in Michael, Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, pp. 112–13. Staffs are also carried by pilgrims before the tomb in windows n:III, 40, which depicts the cure of leper Godwin of Boxgrove (reproduced in Michael, Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, p. 128), and n:III, 28, which depicts the cure of the lame daughters of Godbald of Boxley. In this panel St Thomas is again depicted with his staff, and a companion of one of the daughters

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In this case the joke would be that the Miller and the Pardoner do not recognize their own endeavour, or at least do not understand enough of its import to refrain from making fun of it. No matter which image is being discussed, however, the point seems to be in the indeterminacy of the question, in how quickly even as familiar an object as a staff can dissolve into multiple meanings.89 Rather like the anxiety over Harlequin’s company at the opening of the Interlude, the narrator’s comments inject the episode with a conservative’s scepticism regarding the ability of the laity to ‘read’ responsibly, to generate meaningful and morally relevant interpretations. As before, the conflict is resolved with an appeal toward the value of the group as a whole, but for a different reason: ‘Pese!’ quod the Hoost of Southwork. ‘Let stond the wyndow glased. Goth up and doth yeur offerynge. Ye semeth half amased. Sith ye be in company of honest men and good, Worcheth somwhat after, and let the kynd of brode90 Pas for a tyme. I hold it for the best, For who doth after company may live the bet in rest’. (157–62)

Here the influence of the group is seen to ameliorate folly rather than encourage it. Imitating those who know how to read the windows, or who know enough to ‘let them stand’, is, according to the Host, the best hope the Miller and his friends have to learn: ‘For who doth after company may live the bet in rest’. The episode comes to an end when the pilgrims return to the Inn and, after a good meal, begin to exchange tales again: But then as Nature axeth, as these old wise Knowen wele, when veynes been somwhat replete, The spirites wol stere, and also metes swete Causen offt myrthes for to be i-meved.

stands behind her with a staff in his hand, while she bends over the tomb (reproduced in Michael, Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, p. 132). The most famous depiction of pilgrims to Canterbury, that in window s:IV, is now thought to be a ‘deceptive recreation’ made during the restorations of the early twentieth century. See Michael, Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, p. 214. 89

The word ‘staff’ itself carried concurrent meanings from the thirteenth century on as both ‘a stick carried in the hand as an aid in walking’ and ‘the shaft of a spear or lance’ (see OED, ‘staff’ definition I.1.a and I.3.a; cf. MED, ‘staf’, definition 1a.a and 1c.a). 90

Bowers offers the following translation: ‘Behave with more reserve and hide your native (gauche) manner’: The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, p. 64, n. 3.

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And eke it was no tyme tho for to be i-greved; Every man in his wise made hertly chere, Talyng of his felowe of sportes and of chere, And of other myrthes that fyllen by the wey, As custom is of pilgryms—and hath been many a day. (196–204)

So the actions of the pilgrims are described as both traditional and natural. They are imitating a long history of pilgrims, much as the frame of the Canterbury Tales recounts the stories recounted by others. The questions of imitation and learning by example are further taken up in the Interlude’s most developed interaction with Chaucer’s narrative frame: its continuation of the disagreement between the Friar and the Summoner. In the Interlude, the Clerk actually approaches the Summoner and offers him advice on how he should properly interpret both the Friar’s actions and his tale, so as not to be offended: The Clerk that was of Oxenforth onto the Sompnore seyd, ‘Me semeth of grete clerge that thow art a mayde, For thow puttest on the Frere in maner of repreff That he knoweth falshede, vice, and eke a theff. And I it hold vertuouse and right commendabill, To have verry knowlech of thinges reprovabill, For whoso hath may eschew it and let it pas by. And els he myghte fall thereon, unware and sodenly. And thoughe the Frere told a tale of a sompnour, Thowe oughtest for to take it for no dishonour, For of all crafftes and of eche degré They be nat al perfite, but som nyce be’. (251–62)

In doing so the Interlude-poet clearly addresses two of the problems encountered in the interpretation of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and Clerk’s Tale: the value of a negative exemplum and the generalization of the individual. It seems appropriate that the Clerk would be in favour of negative exempla but reject conclusions drawn from a single individual, given his admonitions that Griselda should not be made a standard for all women. By contrast, Chaucer’s Clerk counsels that husbands should learn from Walter’s negative behaviour, but not imitate it. Interestingly, the Knight, rather than the Summoner, is given the response: ‘Lo, what is worthy’, seyd the Knyght, ‘for to be a clerk! To sommon among us hem, this mocioune was ful derk. I comend his wittes and eke his clergé For of ether parte he saveth honesté’. (263–66)

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The Knight acknowledges the paradox of the Clerk’s logic, that knowledge of vice is virtuous. However, I take the Knight’s approval as entirely without irony.91 The Interlude-poet is working through one of the fundamental conflicts in Chaucer’s narrative frame: the way in which the tales that are supposed to bring the pilgrims together often end up forcing them apart. His Knight approves of the creation of a rhetorical space in which the Summoner and Friar can coexist with some integrity, even as he recognizes its convoluted shape. For the Interlude-poet, the centripetal force of the group must always be more powerful than the centrifugal forces of the dialogic narratives they tell, because the group itself is the source of the narratives. The remainder of the Interlude is taken up by the Pardoner’s exploits with Kit the Tapster, but even as the tale-tellers act out one of the fabliaux that ordinarily divides the group,92 the idea of fellowship remains in the fore. The trio who dupe the Pardoner are twice referred to as a kind of anti-fellowship in opposition to the pilgrims (cf. 464–66, 534), and the Pardoner escapes them only by hiding ‘amydward the route’ (670), within the safety of his own group. As the pilgrims ride off from the Inn, the Interlude-poet returns to the concluding episode of the General Prologue, only this time the Host does not attempt to draw lots to decide who will tell a tale, but emphasizes periphrastically that the next teller should volunteer: Who shall be the first that shall unlace his male In confort of us all, gyn som mery tale? For and we shuld now begyn to draw lott, Peraventur it myght fall there it ought not On som unlusty persone that were nat wele awaked, Or semy-bousy over eve and had i-song and craked Somwhat over much. Howe shuld he than do? For who shuld tell a tale, he must have good will therto. (701–08)

Partly the Interlude-poet is simply rehearsing the lesson learned from the Miller in his prologue, when the Miller boisterously breaks through the Host’s organized hierarchy: desire is a better motivator than order. But the passage also re-invokes Chaucer’s admonition to readers in the same prologue to take responsibility for their own selections, to read by choice and with good will:

91

Bashe disagrees. His understanding of the Knight’s passage is that it ridicules the Clerk for a lack of common sense. See Bashe, ‘The Prologue’, p. 4. 92

For the idea that the Pardoner’s exploits with Kit take the form of a fabliau, see Darjes and Rendall, ‘A Fabliau’.

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‘Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys [...] Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame; / and eek men shal nat maken ernest of game’ (I, 3182, 3185–86). The Interlude-poet closes the circle from readers back to writers, who ideally are comfortable telling tales ‘in confort of us all’. The Host’s final word stresses the value of the will to tell a tale: ‘So this is my conclusioun and my last knot: / It were grete gentilnes to tell without lott’ (715–16). The response of the Interlude-poet to Chaucer’s construction of authorship here is that artistic productivity requires, not only an audience that reads strongly, but also a teller who shares his text freely. There can be no anxiety of influence and no conflict of intellectual property rights in this milieu. The Host’s list of impediments to tale-telling are all jocular: hangovers (706), sleepiness (705), morning dry mouth (709–11), getting up on the wrong side of the bed (713–14). But this does not diminish the force of the Interlude-poet’s point: just as anyone can experience these impediments, anyone can tell a tale in a culture that fosters such free exchange. These readings of additions to the Canterbury Tales demonstrate how contemporary readers of the Canterbury Tales responded to and commented on them as the work of a vernacular maker — not an author; that is, as work to be appropriated and expanded at will.93 That the Canterbury Interlude in particular was copied into the textual tradition of the Tales suggests that there were others who shared this vision of Chaucer’s work. The assertion by Manly and Rickert that the copyist of the Northumberland MS could not have been the translator of the Tale of Beryn or of the headlink requires that the Northumberland MS be at least once removed from the Interlude-poet’s holograph. Thus the text of the Canterbury Interlude was sought out and added on the same footing as the exemplars of Chaucer’s Tales. The additions discussed above silently expand Chaucer’s text without internally acknowledging the new author. John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, however, both identifies its own author as someone other than Chaucer and adds a new persona to the pilgrim group in the form of Lydgate the Pilgrim. In the Prologue, Lydgate projects himself into the pilgrimage as the new narrator, who praises the dead Chaucer in a manner reminiscent of the Clerk’s praise of Petrarch, except that Chaucer is never named:

93

There are multiple other examples of augmentations made to the frame on a much smaller scale; see, for example, the ‘spurious links’ in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. by Bowers, pp. 41–54. For a description of the scribe’s likely method, see Partridge, ‘Questions of Evidence’, pp. 2–7.

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Chapter 1 As opynly the storie can yow lere, Word for word with every circumstance, Echon y-write and put in remembraunce By hym that was, yif that I shal not feyne, Floure of poetes thorghout al Breteyne, Which sothly hadde most of excellence In rethorike and in eloquence— Rede his making, who list the trouthe fynde!— Which never shal appallen in my mynde, But alwey fressh ben in my memoyre, To who be gove pris, honoure, and gloyre Of wel seyinge, first in oure language, Chief registrer of this pilgrimage [...] (36–48)

Modern readers have noted that Chaucer’s ‘making’ had not been recalled ‘word for word’ by Lydgate — this passage is preceded by a short recap of the Canterbury Tales in which the Pardoner is confused with the Summoner.94 But the conflict with memory here may be indicative of a deeper problem for Lydgate, who is properly known as one of the great promoters of Chaucer as an authority figure. Lydgate wrestles with the problem of continuing the story twenty years after the storyteller is dead but not forgotten. The moment recalls Chaucer’s Clerk attempting to re-tell Petrarch’s tale. The Clerk opens with a description of Petrarch that is laudatory, but oddly emphatic on the subject of his death: ‘He is now deed and nayled in his cheste’ (IV, 29). Lydgate’s praise sits as oddly with his refusal to name Chaucer as the Clerk’s praise jars with his description of Petrarch’s coffin. Thus the emphasis is on memory, as Lydgate navigates the transition from Chaucer’s narration to his own: vernacular storytellers are not ordinarily remembered in a way that makes their texts difficult to expand. Lydgate wants to remember Chaucer as an author while treating his text like that of a maker, one free to be authored by Lydgate himself. The organizers of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales that append the Siege of Thebes also show themselves aware of the problem of how to deal with two authors who have collectively written one text. There are five extant manuscripts of Canterbury Tales that include Siege of Thebes. Though damage to

94

Derek Pearsall, ‘Chaucer and Lydgate’, in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 39–53 (pp. 49–50).

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two of the manuscripts prevents drawing a conclusion from them,95 the remaining three offer a survey of the available positions. Longleat House, Library of the Marquess of Bath, MS 257 is a late fifteenthcentury anthology that includes Siege of Thebes, the Knight’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and the prose Ipomedon (a Middle English romance).96 It does not present any overt connection between the two Canterbury Tales it contains and Siege of Thebes.97 It accomplishes this separation by expunging from its versions of the Knight’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale every indication that they are from the Canterbury Tales.98 The prologues have been excised and the tales are given new titles, ‘Arcite and Palamon’ and ‘Grisild’. The stanza referring to the Wife of Bath near the end of the Clerk’s Tale is also missing.99 The only hint of

95

Oxford, Christchurch Library MS 152 is missing (among others) the final leaf of the Canterbury Tales. The manuscript was badly disarranged in binding. The Siege of Thebes begins a new quire, currently bound at the end of the manuscript with Lydgate’s ‘The Churl and hys Bryd’ separating it and the Canterbury Tales, though the same scribe copied Siege of Thebes and Canterbury Tales, and ‘The Churl and hys Bryd’ is in a hand some thirty years later. See The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 85–91; McCormick and Heseltine, The Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, pp. 77–84. So the loss of the final colophon after Canterbury Tales and the disarrangement of the manuscript make it impossible to characterize accurately the original presentation of the two texts, though the hands suggest that they were contiguous. In its current binding the Cardigan MS (now Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom H.R.C. pre-1700 MS 143) interpolates a chronological table between Canterbury Tales and Siege of Thebes (see The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 71–78), but Bowers notes that ‘in a forthcoming study Daniel W. Mosser argues persuasively that the Cardigan copy of Y also originally preceded that manuscript’s copy of The Canterbury Tales, whose writing and collection were not adequately assessed by Manly and Rickert’: Bowers, ‘The Tale of Beryn and the Siege of Thebes’, pp. 223–24. Until the collation of the manuscript has been determined, there can be no certainty of the relationship between Siege of Thebes and Canterbury Tales. 96

Longleat House, Library of the Marquess of Bath, MS 257.

97

Manly and Rickert date the manuscript 1450–70 (see The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 339–42). The manuscript is also described in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. by Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 108, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), II, 42–43. The fols 49–52, containing the end of Siege of Thebes, are missing. I,

98

Bowers suggests that in Longleat 257 ‘the Knight’s Tale follows as a sequel to Lydgate’s poem’: Bowers, ‘The Tale of Beryn and the Siege of Thebes’, p. 223. But he does not note any way in which the manuscript indicates the connection. I have been unable to detect a connection, other than the implied one of content, which I would see not as a link between these two particular texts, but as a function of the guiding principle of the collection. 99

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Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 41.

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Chaucer’s authorship is that the final few stanzas of the tale are headed ‘Lenvoie Chaucer’. The goal in this manuscript seems to be to construct a collection of separate Romances. The omission of any connection to the Canterbury Tales is notable because the text was copied directly from London, British Library, Egerton MS 2863, a complete manuscript of the Tales with a connection to the Chaucer family.100 Therefore the scribes likely knew the correct context and attribution from their copytext and chose not to recognize Chaucer. This can only mean that the organizers of the manuscript were working for readers who had no interest in the ‘completeness’ of the text as defined by Chaucer’s authorship.101 London, British Library Additional MS 5140 highlights an interest in both authorship and completeness, but its compiler does not define the completeness of the collection by authorship. The manuscript contains only the Canterbury Tales and Siege of Thebes.102 The explicit and incipit that separate the two works consider them both as part of a single text authored by more than one person. Throughout, running headers in the upper right corner of the page identify the pilgrim telling the tale. For the tales of Melibee and Sir Thopas, the teller is Chaucer; for the Siege of Thebes, the teller is Lydgate. Thus, the index that helps readers to navigate the text is treating Chaucer and Lydgate as personae on the same footing as the other pilgrims. Chaucer’s Retraction is followed by an explicit, as if it were part of the Parson’s Tale: ‘Explicit narracio Rectoris et ultima inter narraciones huius libri de quibus composuit Chauucer cuius anime propicietur deus. AMEN’. There is a short space on the page, followed by the incipit for the Siege of Thebes: ‘Incipit ultima de fabulis Cantuarie translata et prolata per Dompnun Iohannem Lidgate monachum in redeundo a Cantuaria.

100

See Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 109; cf. The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Ricket, I, 341. For the connection with the Chaucer family, see Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 41. Egerton 2863 has been badly mutilated. The folios containing the General Prologue and the beginning of every tale except for the Second Nun’s Tale are missing, as are the closing pages of the Parson’s Tale. It is thus impossible to know what the initial apparatus of attribution was, though the nature of the damage to the manuscript suggests that there were once portraits of the pilgrims or illuminations. Running headers identify the pilgrims throughout. 101

One of those readers was probably Richard III. The manuscript carries his signature as Duke of Gloucester on fol. 98 v. For more on the manuscript see Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), esp. pp. 6, 213–21, 280–81. 102

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Incipit prologus’.103 The efforts made by the compiler or scribe here effectively stave off the Retraction as an end to the Canterbury Tales by folding it into the Parson’s Tale. The explicit then navigates the distinction between Chaucer, who ‘composed’ the tale, and the Parson, whose narration it is. Similarly the incipit indicates that Lydgate is both the composer and the teller of Siege of Thebes, which is presented as an integral part of a text defined, not by what Chaucer composed, but by whatever the scribe means by ‘fabul[a] Cantuarie’. In a similar manner, the Retraction in London, British Library, Egerton MS 2864 is folded into the Parson’s tale with an explicit, and then launches into Siege of Thebes with even less concern for the line between Chaucer’s authorship and that of Lydgate’s.104 The explicit after the Retraction reads simply: ‘Here endith the Personnys Tale’. Siege of Thebes is followed by an explicit that draws a parallel between Lydgate and Chaucer: ‘Here endith the laste tale of Canterbyry maad and told bi Dan John Lidgate Mon’.105 The verb ‘maad’ recalls the colophon appearing before the Retraction: ‘Here takith the Maker his leve’. The combination of ‘maad and told’ reduplicates in Middle English the Latin 103

For both explicit and incipit, see Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. by Erdmann and Ekwall, the similar incipit between the Parson’s prologue and tale, transcribed in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 31. I take the use of profero here as an equivalent of ‘tell’ — it is used of publishing orations (see Charlton T. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1918)) — and the use of transfero as an equivalent of the modern ‘translate’, though the classical Latin meaning included interpretation or transference in meaning, so that ‘adapt’ might be a better translation. II, 36. Compare

104

See Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. by Erdmann and Ekwall, II, 47–48. Erdmann and Ekwall refer to Egerton 2864 as the Ingilby manuscript. There is an empty space between the explicit after the Retraction and the beginning of the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, but this does not differ substantially from the spaces left between tales within Chaucer’s text: for example, between the General Prologue and the Knight’s Tale, Monk’s Tale, Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, and so on. Cf. The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 146. In both the Canterbury Tales and Siege of Thebes, Egerton 2864 and Additional 5140 derive from a common ancestor that possibly featured the texts separately. Manly and Rickert note that the glosses are very close throughout, but that the headings (incipits and explicits) differ. This suggests that the compilers were working from exemplars that did not combine the two texts and at each copying combined them in a slightly different manner. However, because the headings differ mostly on the basis of language, it is also possible that the scribe of one or the other manuscript was translating headings as he copied them. This would indicate that at least one manuscript that combined the two has not survived. Because neither the copytext for the Siege of Thebes nor the Canterbury Tales is extant, the question is insoluble. 105

The page is cut vertically, excising the rest of the explicit; see Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. by Erdmann and Ekwall, II, 48.

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phrasing at the close of the text in Additional 5140. It acknowledges Lydgate’s dual status, like Chaucer’s, as both a real-life maker and a fictional persona within the text. Lydgate’s tale is an integral part of that text; it is ‘the last tale of Canterbury’. This explicit is the final word on the completeness of the text, which has taken on a life of its own, distinct from its contributors. As these expansions of the Canterbury Tales suggest, the tellers of tales cannot define the limits of the collection with their work, because more tales can always be added to this kind of compilation, with or without acknowledgement of the author. Rather, it is the work of readers that defines the text. Those who select tales for inclusion in a particular manuscript and present them with such textual cues as incipits and explicits lay out the boundaries of the Canterbury Tales. In this form of artistic production, what qualifies as a tale of Canterbury is purely a matter of interpretation, or of manuscript construction, which amounts to the same thing in the search for the hard material facts of reception. Excerpting and Editing Manuscripts One of the primary contentions of this chapter is that the long-observed contingencies of manuscript production — the lack of attributions, the mangled texts, the compendious additions — are not necessarily inadvertent mistakes. Rather, apparent contingencies of manuscript production can at times reflect evidence of active choices driven by the preferences of late medieval readers in their reception of great vernacular works. In the last section, we saw evidence of the drive to expand the Canterbury Tales, but there is an equally apparent effort to edit and excerpt Chaucer, and in many cases to edit him out altogether. At least five of the manuscripts that take excerpts out of the Tales with little or no recognition of Chaucer’s authorship derive from complete copytexts that undoubtedly attribute the work to Chaucer. We have already discussed two of them: the stanzas from the Monk’s Tale that were silently melded with Lydgate’s Fall of Princes in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19 were copied from Caxton’s first edition of the Tales, and the texts of ‘Grisild’ and ‘Palamon and Arcite’ in Longleat 257 were copied from Egerton 2863. There are at least three more examples. Longleat 29 is the earliest of the single-tale manuscripts that is not a fragment of stray leaves.106 It contains the Parson’s Tale under the title

106

See The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 343–48; Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 105–06.

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‘Penitencie’ and, according to Owen, there is ‘no reference to Chaucer or to the Canterbury Tales’, despite ‘using as copytext a twin of the Ellesmere exemplar’.107 The implication is that the same tradition that produced the most complete authorizing manuscript is the source for a manuscript of a very different type.108 This is evidence that some readers chose not to acknowledge Chaucer’s authorship of the texts they included in manuscripts. The active choices by the makers of manuscripts in late medieval England indicate above all that they were experiencing a collision of different concepts regarding the roles of writers and readers in defining a text. The most powerful illustration of this is in an anthology of religious prose narratives, Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS 6709.109 The Second Nun’s Tale and the Prioress’s Tale are included in the collection as the ‘Vita Ste Cecilie’ and the ‘Miraculum Ste

107

Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 106.

108

Similarly, San Marino, Huntington Library MS 144 derives its texts of Melibee and the Monk’s Tale from the common ancestor of London, British Library, Harley MS 7334 (one of the earliest collected manuscripts still extant) and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 600. Huntington 144 re-titles the tales respectively ‘Proverbis’ and ‘The Falle of Princis’. The linking passages have been excised and Owen observes no ties to Chaucer: The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 117. For Owen, the length of time elapsed between the production of Harley 7334 and Huntington 144, as well as the use of their exemplars in Laud 600, adds to the likelihood that the texts of Melibee and the Monk’s Tale that came to the scribe of Huntington 144 were no longer identified as part of the Canterbury Tales. Because Laud 600 is a complete manuscript that seems to have been forced to gather exemplars from sources other than the set of exemplars in Harley 7334, it is evident that set in Harley 7334 was broken up. It is not evident, however, that changes were made to the exemplar that would make it unrecognizable as part of the Canterbury Tales. The passage linking Melibee to the Monk’s Tale, present and copied in Harley 7334 and Laud 600, was more likely still present when the exemplar reached the scribe of Huntington 144, even if only those two tales were circulating together. The passage linking them is only 100 lines long, too short to have been in a separate booklet. The simpler conclusion is that the scribe excised the linking passage, along with every other indication of the original context for the tales, then replaced the passage with a colophon indicating his own (or his director’s) reason for associating them: ‘They that this present and forseyde tale have or / shall reede remembyr the noble proverbis that rebukyth / covetise and vengeanse takying in truste of Fortune / whiche hathe causyd many a noble prince to fall as we / may rede of them here follwyng’ (as transcribed by McCormick and Heseltine, The Manuscripts, p. 542–43). 109

See The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 82–84; Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 115–16. Partridge reports a slightly different transcription of the titles: ‘Vita Sancte Cecilie’ and ‘Miraculum Beate Marie Virginis’: ‘Questions of Evidence’, p. 6.

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Marie Virginis’. In Owen’s terms, ‘no sign of their belonging to another work intrudes’.110 Yet, they were copied from Caxton’s second edition of the Canterbury Tales.111 This is the edition containing the well-known preface in which Caxton recounts the protests of a reader that the text of the first edition was not authoritative. Caxton claims to have made his text over by consulting an authentic manuscript. Caxton’s preface is one of the earliest manifestos of vernacular authorship in English publishing, yet the scribe who copied Chetham 6709 read from Caxton’s book and nonetheless used its material to construct a book of his own, without regard for the form of Chaucer’s text or recognition of Chaucer’s authorship.112 Stephen Partridge evaluates the worth of evidence like Chetham 6709 with the remark: ‘Yet, surely it would be mistaken to take such instances as evidence of an anonymous literary culture in which an author’s identity was unimportant. It is clear that the organizing idea of several of the anthologies containing the lyrics and dream-visions is Chaucer as author’.113 Partridge goes on to cite such manuscripts as Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.4.27, the earliest extant manuscript that attempts to gather Chaucer’s work together, but I would argue that the existence of these manuscripts does not refute the activity of an ‘anonymous literary culture’. The manuscripts organized according to the author only prove that more than one literary culture was active in late medieval England. The effect that competing cultures had on the pool of exemplars of the Canterbury Tales is perhaps best illustrated by the family of manuscripts surrounding Stonyhurst B XXIII. Stonyhurst B XXIII is a manuscript that heavily edits the Tale of Melibee so that it better fits into the manuscript’s general scheme as ‘a collection of religious and didactic pieces’.114 Owen characterizes the textual changes as follows: ‘omissions include the visit Prudence makes to Melibeus’s enemies and her dissuasion of his impulse to penalize them [...] The result is a heavier didacticism and some incoherency’.115 I would add 110

Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 116.

111

See The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 83; Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 116. 112 The scribe identifies himself as William Cotson, ‘canonicus’. He was apparently an amateur, and possibly copied the book for his own use. He gives the date of its completion as March 1490 (fol. 170; see The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 84).

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113

Partridge, ‘Questions of Evidence’, p. 6.

114

The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 520.

115

Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 106.

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that the deletions target passages of dialogue between Melibee and Prudence, but spare the long citations of proverbs and authorities. The narrative becomes much more static, effectively shifting in genre from a tale to a treatise.116 The exercise of reader preference in excerpting the text is palpable through the copy’s distance from its exemplar, which was used to produce texts of the tale in three complete manuscripts probably within a year of Stonyhurst’s production.117 The Stonyhurst B XXIII text of Melibee derives from the set of exemplars that Owen argues were single tales first gathered together for the production of the complete McCormick MS in about 1450.118 The exemplars were almost immediately re-copied to produce another complete manuscript, Rawlinson 141. At this point, all evidence points to them having been broken up: Perhaps the most important thing about the constant group Mc is what happened to the exemplars shortly after Ra 1 was made. The editor of Trinity College Cambridge E.3.3 (Tc 1) found himself forced to supplement the five exemplars he inherited from the almost contemporary Ra 3 [Rawlinson 223] and the earlier Ln [Lincoln 110], turned to a set of five from Mc, then finished his manuscript by copying the final four tales from En 1 [Egerton 2726] [...] If the Tc 1 editor had had access to all the Mc exemplars or to either of the manuscripts, he would have seen the Shipman’s Tale and the Prioress’s Tale (B 2ab ) in their proper order at the beginning of the B 2 fragment.119

The disorder of Trinity E.3.3, in addition to the obvious difficulties in gathering a complete text from four different sources, points to the McCormick group’s disintegration — but why, when the group had only recently been formed? It is not a question that can be definitively answered, but we can be confident that the group was not broken up to facilitate the production of more complete manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. Two of the exemplars turn up as sources for single-tale manuscripts: Melibee is used in Stonyhurst B XXIII sometime close to 1450, while the Prioress’s Tale from the McCormick group is used in London,

116

I,

The passages excised are listed by Manly and Rickert in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 520. They are also transcribed by McCormick and Heseltine in The Manuscripts, p. 560. 117

See Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 106. I am making use of Owen’s account of the affiliations throughout the next paragraph; see especially pp. 50–52, 106–07, 110. 118

The shelfmark is now Chicago, IL, University of Chicago, Regenstein Library MS 564. See Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 50. Manly and Rickert disagree, characterizing the ancestor of McCormick MS as ‘an obviously picked up manuscript which was put together early’: The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 357. In either case, the McCormick MS is the earliest extant witness of a varied textual tradition that forms a new constant group at mid-century. 119

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British Library, Harley MS 1704, dated to the 1460s by watermark.120 There is no mention of Chaucer or the Canterbury Tales in Harley 1704, which presents an excerpt of the Prioress’s Tale (lines 1645–1880 of fragment B) under the heading ‘Alma redemptoris mater’ as an anonymous contribution to an anthology of ‘English religious verse and prose’.121 The different directions in which the McCormick group scattered implies the force that broke it up: demand for excerpted and edited versions of Chaucer’s text, in opposition to demand for Chaucer as we know him today.122 Manuscript Readers as Writers The final question, then, is what the possible attraction could have been for readers who preferred aggressive rearrangement of Chaucer’s texts? Inevitably, the answer would have been different for every reader, but in its essence it must always have included the sensation of participating in artistic production. Two examples of extant manuscripts that show signs of readerly activity will suffice to suggest something of the experience of these readers who took on extraordinary levels of responsibility for the form and content of the books they owned. One manuscript of the Canterbury Tales became a source of study and diversion over a number of years for Jean d’Angoulême, the younger brother of Charles d’Orléans, during his thirty-three-year captivity in England as guarantee for the payment agreed upon in the Treaty of Buzançais.123 At some point during his time in England, Jean and a professional scribe, who identifies himself as ‘Duxworth’ at the end of the text, began work on an extraordinary edition of the Tales that records in several places what we assume were Jean’s reactions to them. This manuscript, now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS Fonds anglais 39, is especially notorious for the explicits that form a running commentary on the

120

The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 239.

121

Ibid., I, 238.

122

I believe there is a similar argument to be made regarding the family of Huntington 144, discussed above. For a contrary case, in which exemplars (or perhaps one intermediary copy) appear to have remained together for the extraordinary period of sixty years, see Owen on London, British Library, Sloane MS 1686: The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 82. 123

See Martin Crow, ‘John of Angoulême and His Chaucer Manuscript’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 86–99.

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Tales, some of which are broken off when they fail to satisfy.124 Following the Knight’s Tale, there is a compliment: ‘Explicit fabula Militis valde bona’. The Monk’s Tale, however, is cut off after only thirty-two lines with the explanation: ‘non plus de ista fabula quia est valde dolorosa’. Similarly the Squire’s Tale, after only twenty-eight lines, is termed ‘valde absurda in terminis et ideo ad / presens pretermittatur nec ulterius de ea procedatur / sed subsequenter incipit prohemium fabule Francolani’. Evidently, Jean was picking and choosing from the tales as the text was being copied. Therefore, these edits are, no doubt, partly a function of Jean’s personal taste as a reader. As Strohm puts it: Chaucer’s relatively original efforts within these forms [Squire’s Tale, Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, Cook’s Tale, and Sir Thopas] might have failed to satisfy the esteem for the familiar implied by Jean’s attitude toward Chaucer as a compiler of other people’s tales [...] [In the case of the Monk’s Tale], more likely, however, Jean assented to a simplified version of the Knight’s argument that the tragedies are more oppressive than sad.125

124

The manuscript is described in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 399–405. See also Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 27–28. Transcriptions of the headings are from McCormick and Heseltine, The Manuscripts, pp. 384–85. Extensive studies of the manuscript have been published by Martin Crow. For a complete account of owner Jean d’Angoulême’s biography and literary activity, see Crow, ‘John of Angoulême’, pp. 86–99. For studies of Jean’s role in the making of the manuscript alongside the activity of the scribe, as well as transcriptions of variants and corrections, see Martin Crow, ‘Corrections in the Paris Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Study in Scribal Collaboration’, University of Texas Studies in English, 15 (1935), 5–18; Martin Crow, ‘The Reeve’s Tale in the Hands of a North Midland Scribe’, University of Texas Studies in English, 18 (1938), 14–24; Martin Crow, ‘Unique Variants in the Paris Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’, University of Texas Studies in English, 16 (1936), 17–41. For a study of Jean as a reader of Chaucer, see Paul Strohm, ‘Jean of Angoulême: A Fifteenth Century Reader of Chaucer’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 72 (1971), 69–76. 125

Strohm, ‘Jean of Angoulême’, p. 73.The Cook’s Tale is omitted silently. Lines 1920–2108 (the end) of Sir Thopas are omitted, followed only by the comment introducing the Host, ‘Verba hospitis ad Chauncers’. I find Strohm’s reading entirely persuasive for all but the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. The manuscript omits lines 750–1393 with the comment: ‘Maior pars istius fabule est pretermissa / usque huc quia termini sunt valde absurdi’. The edit simply cuts out the large middle section of the tale in which alchemical frauds are committed. In Jean’s version, the Yeoman skips to the philosophers: ‘Thus was I ones learned of a clerk. / Of that no charge; I wol speke of oure werk. / Philosophres speken so mystily / In this craft that men kan nat come thereby[...]’. The result is that the Yeoman seems to be warning his listeners that alchemy is a serious science — Jean has edited out the source of ambiguity in the tale’s

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An extension of Strohm’s final point, however, is that, a little like Lydgate in the Siege of Thebes, Jean has projected himself into the text. He adds his voice to the other pilgrims, like the Knight, who react to the Monk’s Tale within the narrative frame. In fact, in every case except for the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, Jean’s edit echoes the response of the pilgrims in the text. If the Knight’s objection has been read as evidence that the tragedies of the upper class were too close for comfort, then the same was probably true for Angoulême, who was the grandson of one of the tale’s villains.126 It is difficult to imagine a reader much closer to the text’s content, but even more impressive is the evidence of Angoulême’s investment in its form. Angoulême probably spent years gathering exemplars from multiple sources.127 Once the text was copied by his scribe, Angoulême made roughly 300 corrections to the text while consulting yet another manuscript.128 Crow observes: Angoulême’s corrections [...] are mostly in consecutive groups, A, B1, and E1. Here he makes about 230 corrections, but apparently becomes tired and makes others only now and then through the remainder of the manuscript.129

Angoulême’s fatigue is understandable: as modern buyers of machine-printed novels it is difficult for us to imagine the level of involvement in Angoulême’s reading. It is evident that the manuscript constituted a pastime for Angoulême. He not only read from it, but also worked on it, writing into the text. In this way, it is clear that manuscript reading practices encompassed more than passive enjoyment of texts. Readers like Angoulême could view a manuscript text as a starting point for a range of activities not limited to passive reception. In

treatment of alchemy. What Jean found absurd in the terms of the tale was perhaps its suggestion that alchemists are charlatans, rather than the originality of the point per se. 126

Crow points out that ‘one of the so-called modern instances’ tells that Angoulême’s grandfather, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Lord of Milan, in 1385 imprisoned and poisoned his uncle Barnabo Visconti: Crow, ‘John of Angoulême’, p. 97. Actually, Chaucer forbears to tell the whole story himself, addressing Barnabo, ‘But why ne how noot I that thou were slawe’ (VII, 2406) — possibly Jean knew more. 127

See The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 400–05.

128

Angoulême’s hand has been identified in comparison with holograph manuscripts. Crow describes and categorizes Angoulême’s corrections in comparison with the approximately 120 corrections made by the scribe. Generally speaking, the scribe’s corrections are mechanical, or are the result of checking against the exemplar. See Crow, ‘Corrections’. 129

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Angoulême’s case, Crow’s studies of the corrections in Angoulême’s hand reveal competing interests, including the clarification of meaning, the improvement of meter, and textual comparison with other manuscripts: [...] he makes two sets of corrections, one with the aid of a manuscript and another without, for often where he detects omissions he inserts unique readings instead of which the correct readings could have as easily been inserted and with a still greater gain in metrical smoothness and meter.130

The combination of textual study and poetic composition in his corrections forms an impression of a reader whose interest in the text is active. Chaucer’s text is treated by Angoulême as an opportunity for artistic production of his own. From the selection of the tales to be included, to the minute details of metrical polish, Angoulême took part in the construction of the text. Angoulême and Chaucer are both compilers of another’s tales; both are makers of the book. We should imagine that books for late medieval readers were not just containers for texts. In extreme cases, they were projects, the physical byproducts of active and often collaborative reading. Our final example is one in which the production of a text of the Tales is the collaborative project of a father and son: Glasgow, Hunterian Museum MS U.1.1. They identify themselves in the final colophon that commemorates the completion of the text when the father, Geoffrey Spirleng, was fifty years old, and his son Thomas was sixteen.131 The qualities of the manuscript suggest that father and son worked together on the text with the exploration of scribal practice perhaps more in mind than the production of a clean reading text of the Tales. Though the elder Spirleng served as a professional clerk,132 the manuscript is badly disarranged: some tales

130

Ibid., p. 30.

131

The manuscript is described in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Manly and Rickert, I, 183–88. See also Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 99–101. The colophons are transcribed in McCormick and Heseltine, The Manuscripts, pp. 179–88. The final colophon reads: ‘Orate pro salute animarum Galfridi Spirleng Ciuis Norwici Courtholder Clerici maioratus et Comitatis dicte Ciuitaties ac Thome Spirleng filii sui qui scribendo hunc librum compleuerunt mense Ianuary anno domini Millesimo ccccm o lxxvito quo tempore dictus Galfridus quasi quinquaginta et dictus Thomas quasi sexdecim etatis extiterunt annorum’. 132

For the historical records of Spirleng’s career, including service as common clerk of Norwich, see Richard Beadle, ‘Geoffrey Spirleng (c. 1426–c. 1494): A Scribe of the Canterbury Tales in His Time’, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. by P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), pp. 116–46. Beadle also analyses Spirleng’s faithfulness to one of his exemplars, Cambridge, University Library MS Mm.2.5, identifying intelligent editorial interventions.

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are repeated while others are inadvertently omitted, only to be added later. Running headers at times misidentify tales, and incipits are often missing, crowded into the margin, or copied in the wrong place. The manuscript is, however, an extraordinary practice field of scribal technique. There are multiple scripts, ‘running heads [...] involve a variety of styles and even handwritings’, and there are ‘three different ways of distinguishing stanzaic verse’.133 Though the Prioress’s Tale is copied twice, the two copies can be distinguished by their different methods of indicating verse and the division between the prologue and tale. Decorations of the script vary, as on fol. 29v, where there is experimentation with stippling in the open space of the initial ‘I’ for the Monk’s Tale. At times, this kind of exploration of scribal techniques seems to build on itself wherever fancy or inspiration strike. On fol. 46v an underline and a flourish are first added to the running header for the Wife of Bath’s tale, followed by more play with ascenders and descenders at the top and bottom of the column, and finally, a flourish at the column’s base. Then on fol. 47v , a pen stroke adds a flourish to the catchword, too. Throughout the manuscript there are sporadic uses of red and blue ink to write and box in initials (for example, on fols 3v and 4r ), or for notae (for example, fol. 103r ). Flourishes of the pen occasionally add emphasis to particular words with amusing effect. On fol. 61v in the Pardoner’s Tale (‘Þonne may we bothe oure lustes fulfille’, VI, 833), there are long, elaborate descenders with stippling and cross-hatching added to ‘may’ and ‘fulfille’. This is what having fun while copying a text must look like. Father and son apparently worked closely together, copying very short stints — hands change within single tales. While their work has not been highly valued in terms of the quality of its product,134 it seems evident that father and son cared more about the process. Their interest was in working together to shape the text in its physical form. In addition to the variety of brackets, dots, and notae they used to add order and emphasis to the tales, they also worked with two different exemplars (with two different orders), undoubtedly contributing to the confusion of the content, but also to the variation in models for the physical organization of the text. It was a project that they evidently enjoyed for its own sake. Like Jean d’Angoulême, Geoffrey Spirleng and his son found a pastime, not only in passively reading the

133 134

Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 99.

Owen’s judgement is that ‘they show little aptitude for literary work, and their hands have not been detected in other poetic manuscripts’: The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 99.

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Canterbury Tales, as we assume they must have, but in constructing their own text of it, as we can see from their surviving manuscript. It was a project father and son made to last. Before the putting the project down for the last time, Geoffrey Spirleng returned to the manuscript with Cambridge Mm.2.5 as a correcting text. It was then that he caught the omission of the Clerk’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. Instead of inserting leaves within the sequence, Geoffrey struck the final colophon and added the tales to the end with the comment: ‘This writyng is drawn for the book of Canterbury is nat yet ended [...]’. Of all the tenets of textual criticism regarding the order of the Tales, that the Retraction ends them is the most persistent.135 Spirleng, however, disagrees: the Tales end when he needs them to end, that is, ‘not yet’. For a set of the extant manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, the desire to continue the life of the text overpowers the attraction of an authority figure, whose death defines the end. When evaluating Chaucer’s role in the dramatic increase in vernacular manuscript production in the fifteenth century, Pearsall writes: There didn’t have to be a Chaucer: his role as a new English writer of already high national prestige was indeed of decisive importance in boosting manuscript production at the beginning of the century, but this very expansion made possible in turn an exponential growth in his reputation. The comparative slowness of English printing to expand its productive power and its markets in the same way in the last quarter of the fifteenth century may have had something to do with the absence of a contemporary poet who could be exploited in the same way — as well as Caxton’s general conservatism.136

It is also true, however, that a percentage of the market simply preferred the malleable Chaucer of fifteenth-century manuscripts to the Chaucer of blackletter print. These are the readers who used Caxton’s text of the Canterbury Tales to make their own books. If an English poet of national prestige was needed to increase the attraction of the printing press, English vernacular readers also needed to acquire the taste for a single authoritative text. The slowness of English printing to expand relative to the explosion of literary manuscript 135

See, for example, Benson, ‘The Order of the Canterbury Tales’; Helen Cooper, ‘The Order of the Tales in the Ellesmere Manuscript’, in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. by Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1995), pp. 245–61. 136

Derek Pearsall, ‘The Ellesmere Chaucer and Contemporary English Literary Manuscripts’, in The Ellesmere Chaucer, ed. by Stevens and W oodward, pp. 263–80 (p. 267).

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production in the fifteenth century might partly be due to the fact that the press offered a vastly different reading experience to the public: one that must have appeared somewhat impoverished and passive to those, like Spirleng and Angoulême, who included the physical construction of the text as part of the pleasure and pastime of reading. The authorial completeness of the printed text must have also bound off an outlet for those, like the Bodley 686 poet and the Interlude poet, who might have liked to expand the idea of what a Canterbury tale could be. The loss of opportunity in the rise of English printing was at least equally shared among the poets and the readers. III.

Printing the Canterbury Tales For I fynde many of the sayd bookes / whyche wryters have abrydgyd it and many thynges left out / And in somme place haue sette certayn versys / that he neuer made ne sette in hys booke / of whyche bookes so incorrecte was one brought to me vj yere passyd / whyche I supposed had ben veray true & correct / And accordyng to the same I dyde do enprynte a certayn nombre of them / whyche anon were sold to many and dyuerse gentyl men / of whome one gentylman cam to me / and said that this book was not accordyng in many places vnto the book that Gefferey chaucer had made / To whom I answerd that I had made it accordyng to my copye / and by me was nothyng added ne mynusshyd / (Caxton’s Preface to the second edition of The Canterbury Tales)137

Ever since an unexpected visitor suggested to Caxton that his copytext for the first edition of the Canterbury Tales was flawed, manuscripts have been used as forensic instruments to recover ‘the book that Gefferey chaucer had made’. How did we get there? As suggested by the reading of the Monk’s Tale in Trinity R.3.19 with which this chapter began, there were alternative modes of reading and writing in the fifteenth century that had drastically different goals. The compiler of Trinity R.3.19 turned to Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales with little interest in recovering Chaucer’s complete text. If anything, he was looking to produce one of those manuscripts in which ‘wryters have abrydgyd it and many thynges left out / And in somme place haue sette certayn versys / that [Chaucer] neuer made ne sette in hys booke’. As modern readers, we habitually view the composite of The Fall of Princes and the Monk’s Tale as a fragmented text, but it is more likely that the compiler viewed his new text as

137

As transcribed by Beverly Boyd, ‘William Caxton (1422?–1491)’, in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. by Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1984), pp. 13–34 (p. 21).

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more satisfyingly complete, complete in a sense not defined by the authorship of his source texts but by whatever elements compelled him to bring them together. It seems clear then, that, particularly during the transitional period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, readers could have varying levels of interest in the role of an author, and there was considerable interplay between manuscript and print sources as readers pursued these interests. As the compiler of Trinity R.3.19 demonstrates, print sources could be folded back into anthologizing, nonauthorial texts in manuscript. While we have seen that manuscript construction could be conducive to indulging readerly desires to modify texts, and, on the other hand, printers like Caxton would find it helpful to market an authoritative text, neither mode of transmission fully limited what readers could do in response to a manuscript or print source. In this context, the assumption that manuscripts would necessarily be more reliable sources of authorial material than printed editions is out of place. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to the relationship between manuscript and print sources in the construction of John Stow’s printed edition of Chaucer’s collected works [STC 5075, 5076].138 The primary points of interest in this final section are the status of the manuscript source and the influence of what might be thought of as ‘manuscript culture’ on the early development of Chaucer’s canon in print. Trinity R.3.19 is a unique witness to the relationship between manuscript and print in the early building of the Chaucer canon. The manuscript is known to have belonged to Stow and is the unique extant manuscript source for a number of the poems he appended to the 1561 edition of Chaucer,139 in addition to being his printer’s copy for others. Trinity R.3.19 was primarily a source of trouble for Stow, as historically his additions to the collected works of Chaucer have been

138

The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer newlie printed, with diuers addicions [...], ed. by John Stow (London: Ihon Kyngston for Ihon Wight, 1561). There are two extant issues of the edition, both of which can be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. See Anne Hudson, ‘John Stow (1525?–1605)’, in Editing Chaucer, ed. by Ruggiers, pp. 53–70 (p. 57). 139

For manuscript sources of all Stow’s additions to the Chaucer canon, see Bradford Y. Fletcher, ‘Printer’s Copy for Stow’s Chaucer’, Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 31 (1978), 184–201. Kathleen Forni concurs: The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 36–37. Hudson postulates Stow’s access to other manuscript(s) as sources for his attributions: ‘John Stow’, pp. 62–63.

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poorly received. Tyrwhitt referred to them as ‘a heap of rubbish’.140 Skeat ridiculed what he called Stow’s ‘hardihood’ in attributing poems from Trinity R.3.19 to Chaucer, saying, for instance, that ‘The Craft of Lovers [...] seems too bad even for Lydgate, and the ascription of it to Chaucer is [...] preposterous’.141 Each of these poems is marked ‘Chaucer’ in the margin of the manuscript, and the correlation between Stow’s selection of poems and the marginal attributions caused some readers to speculate that the marginalia had misled Stow into authorizing spurious poems. Others assumed that the marginalia had been written by Stow, as notes for his compilation of Chaucer’s works. However, in 1913, W. W. Greg argued that the hand responsible for all but one of the marginal annotations concerning Chaucer is that of an eighteenth-century Cambridge scholar, Beaupré Bell, and that his source for the attributions is Stow’s edition.142 Here the assumed relationship between manuscript and print is exactly reversed: Bell uses the printed book to establish the authority of the manuscript.143 This reading of the marginalia clears the way for two arguments: first, that Stow never intended to attribute all of the poems he added to Chaucer, and second, that the misreading of his intentions stretches back to the beginnings of Chaucerian scholarship. Bell and Tyrwhitt shared the same eighteenth-century assumptions about what Stow was trying to do, though they apparently differed on whether he had succeeded. The modern reassessment of Stow’s contribution has focused both on how Stow might have defined success, and whether he achieved it.144 Edwards has characterized Stow’s edition of Chaucer’s Workes as ‘a curiously perfunctory edition, if one assumes that Stow’s primary concern in it lay with the works of

140

B. A. Windeatt, ‘Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–1786)’, in Editing Chaucer, ed. by Ruggiers, pp. 117–43 (p. 142). 141

Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. 120.

142

W. W. Greg, ‘Chaucer Attributions in Ms R.3.19, in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge’, The Modern Language Review, 8 (1913), 539–40. 143

This is not a phenomenon unique to Bell. Driver notes similar behaviour by eighteenthcentury antiquary Peter Le Neve: Martha W. Driver, ‘Stow’s Books Bequeathed: Some Notes on William Browne (1591–c. 1643) and Peter Le Neve (1661–1729)’, in John Stow (1525–1605) and the M aking of the English Past, ed. by Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 135–43. 144

In addition to the studies cited individually above and below, for example, see the collection of essays, ed. by Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie as John Stow (1525–1605).

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Chaucer’.145 Indeed, Stow’s modifications to the text of Thynne’s edition were confined to the addition of the Siege of Thebes, clearly attributed to Lydgate on the title page, and to twenty-three more short poems, only a handful of which are now attributed to Chaucer.146 Anne Hudson acknowledges that Stow’s organization of the edition leaves open the possibility that only some of these twenty-three poems were intended to be received as Chaucer’s: He headed the section in which all but the first four appeared: ‘Here foloweth certaine workes of Geffray Chauser, whiche hath not here tofore been printed, and are gathered and added to this booke by Jhon Stowe’. Chaucer is mentioned again in the headings to numbers 5,7,8,9,20,and23, but no specific attribution is given to the remainder. It is noteworthy that four of the five poems now associated with Chaucer appear in the attributed group.147

This would narrow the number of poems directly misattributed by colophons to two: ‘The Craft of Lovers’ and ‘Doubleness’. If we do not assume that Stow’s ‘primary concern’ was with Chaucer’s works in preparing the 1561 edition, then where was it? Kathleen Forni has argued that the early printed collections of Chaucer’s works were ‘not necessarily intended as single-author editions’ because of the influence of ‘the material and conceptual format (the manuscript anthology) in which Chaucer’s works had circulated throughout the fifteenth century’.148 In Roger Chartier’s formulation, the vernacular author was born when ‘the connection between a codicological unit and a textual unit ascribed to an author in his full singularity became true of certain works in the vulgar tongue’,149 that is, when the ordering principle of the vernacular book shifted from its readership, as in manuscript anthologies, to the author-function, as in a single-volume, single-author collection. Both comments would put the early print editions of Chaucer in a transitional period, during

145 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘John Stow and Middle English Literature’, in John Stow (1525–1605), ed by Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 109–18 (p. 114). 146

Hudson divides the handful of ‘attributable’ poems into two categories. Three have been ‘accepted as genuine Chaucer’: no. 5, ‘Gentilesse’; no. 20, ‘A Complaint to his Lady’, and no. 23, ‘Adam Scriveyn’. Two more ‘are accepted with some reservations’: no. 6, ‘Proverbs’, and no. 7, ‘Against Women Unconstant’. See Hudson, ‘John Stow’, p. 62. 147

Hudson, ‘John Stow’, p. 62.

148

Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha, p. 9.

149

Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 56.

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which the construction of authorship in print was influenced and communicated by factors more subtle than direct attributions. As an avid collector, borrower, and lender of manuscripts,150 Stow was perhaps particularly susceptible to the influence of the ordering principles of manuscript anthologies. Accordingly, he seems to act more as an archivist than an editor in his compilation of additions to Chaucer’s works. The relationship between book, text, and author in Stow’s 1561 edition is markedly different both from Thynne’s 1532 Workes [STC 5068],151 and Speght’s editions of 1598 [STC 5077, 5078, 5079]152 and 1602 [STC 5080, 5081]. Only Stow’s edition selfconsciously promotes a non-canonical context for Chaucer’s works, a move undoubtedly made under the influence of anthologies like Trinity R.3.19. However, Stow responded to both manuscript and print sources in his construction of an authorship based, not on a single standard edition, like Crowley’s text of Langland, but on the relationship of the authorial text to nonauthorial texts. Ordinary constructs of authorship marginalize anonymous texts, but Stow’s conception of Chaucer depends on them. This section of the chapter will begin with an examination of Stow’s work as a literary editor outside of the Chaucer edition, with particular attention to the way in which he interacts with manuscript and print sources. Then it will return to define Stow’s place in a comparison of the black-letter editions of Chaucer, as the relationship between book, text, author, and editor in the Chaucerian tradition evolves. In addition to the Workes of Chaucer, Stow is credited with editing three literary texts: a small miscellany entitled Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems, a collected edition of Skelton’s Workes, and an edition of Lydgate’s Serpent of Division.153 The miscellany [STC 21499] is of immediate use in establishing a

150

See Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Stow’s “Owlde” Manuscripts of London Chronicles’, in John Stow (1525–1605), ed by Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 57–67. 151

The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. by William Thynne (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532). Full text can also be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 152

The Workes of Our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. by Thomas Speght (London: Adam Islip, 1598). Full texts of STC 5077, 5078, 5079, 5080, and 5081 can be found at English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 153

Alexandra Gillespie regards the attribution of the editing of Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems to John Stow as ‘a little less secure’ than his editorship of the other two editions. All three editions are signed in the same way, with an ‘I.S.’, but Stow’s ownership or transcription of manuscripts is not attested for all the texts in Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems. There is

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reading of Stow’s colophon to the supplement to Chaucer’s works. Forni reads this colophon with the suggestion that ‘Certaine woorkes of Geffray Chauser’ could ‘denote works that are “determined and fixed”’, meaning ‘works that are certainly by Chaucer’; alternatively it could mean ‘that all [...] or some of the following poems are by Chaucer’.154 When the colophon in the Chaucer edition is compared with the title-page of the miscellany, ‘certaine’ in this particular usage by Stow clearly means ‘some’. The full title of the miscellany is ‘Certaine worthye manuscript poems of great antiquitie reserved long in the Studie of a Northfolke Gentleman. And now first published by I. S’. Though the book actually contains only three poems, the title shares the sense of vague number with the colophon’s use of the word ‘certaine’. It defines the scope of the collection by its original reader, the ‘Northfolke Gentleman’ who reserved them. Chartier’s description of the manuscript anthologies of laymen comes to mind: ‘the unity of such a book comes from the fact that its producer is also its addressee’,155 that is, the coherence of such non-professionally produced manuscripts is based, not on the author-function, but solely on the identity of the reader.156 The Northfolke Gentleman’s manuscript is not known to be extant, as Stow’s text of all three poems is independent of any surviving manuscript copies157 — so there is no way for us to know what form the manuscript took — but his editorial interventions are suggestive, on the one hand, of readerly manuscript culture. On the other, Stow clearly asserts his own role as a kind of print-compiler: ‘And now first published by I. S’.

no extant manuscript of one of the poems, the Northern Mother’s Blessing. See Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Introduction’, in John Stow (1525–1605), ed by Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 1–12 (pp. 10–11). On the edition of Skelton, see Jane Griffiths, ‘Text and Authority: John Stow’s 1568 Edition of Skelton’s Workes’, in John Stow (1525–1605), ed by Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 127–34. See also William Ringler, ‘John Stow’s Editions of Skelton’s Workes and of Certaine Worthy Manuscript Poems’, Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 8 (1956), 215–17. On Stow’s edition of Lydgate, see W illiam Ringler, ‘Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, 1559, Edited by John Stowe’, Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 14 (1961), 201–03. 154

Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha, p. 29.

155

Chartier, The Order of Books, p. 56.

156

See also Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Marotti argues that the same is true of sixteenth-century lyric anthologies in manuscript: the ‘unifying principle of collections [is] the social relation, political interests and literary tastes of the compiler’ (p. 67). 157

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Stow’s other significant editorial intervention in Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems is in pairing the last two poems off into a section of their own with another title page bearing the subscript: ‘written nine years before the death of G. Chaucer’. Stow stops short of invoking the author-function by attribution. Rather, Chaucer seems symbolic of a tradition or a temporal space to which the poems belong, without necessarily having been produced by Chaucer. I read this subscript as an apposition to that of the main title page which describes the poems as ‘of great Antiquitie’, as well as an invocation of the sixteenth-century Chaucer’s Englishness to which the two poems paired in the miscellany, The Northern Mother’s Blessing and The Way to Thrift, share a claim. The odd poem out, The Statly Tragedy of Guistard and Sismond is a translation and versification of the Decameron, IV, i.158 So it would seem that Chaucer functions as a category, as a point of order, but not necessarily as an author in Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems. Stow’s Workes of Skelton [STC 22608] comes much closer to using Skelton, in Chartier’s terms, ‘as a guarantee of the book’s coherence’,159 at least with regard to its print sources. The full title, ‘Pithy Pleasant and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate, nowe collected and newly published’, invokes the honours due to Skelton as Poet Laureate while simultaneously echoing the jocular alliteration of his lines.160 Stow’s own name does not intrude until the table of contents. As an exercise in canon building, the collection is highly successful.161 It collects and reprints material from all previous printed volumes (missing only seven poems), adds twelve poems from manuscript sources, and only offers one misattribution. The edition contains all but eleven of the poems now certainly assigned to Skelton, and it served as the standard edition until 1843.162

158

Ibid., p. 217.

159

Chartier, The Order of Books, p. 57.

160

For other contemporary representations of Skelton as poet laureate, see J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books: The Panizzi Lectures, 1990 (London: British Library, 1991). 161

This is true in the sense that Stow’s edition ‘assured the survival of a number of Skelton’s works that would otherwise have been lost’, though Griffiths has argued that the content of Skelton’s poetry resisted Stow’s portrayal of Skelton ‘as a poet of nation’: Griffiths, ‘Text and Authority’, p. 134. 162

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In contrast to the compilation process involved in putting together the supplement to Chaucer’s Workes, Stow collected the majority of these poems from print sources, some of them single-author, single-work volumes. The only lapse in the coherence of the collection is the inclusion of William Cornysshe’s ‘Treatise bituene Trouth and Information’, which is correctly attributed to him in the table of contents. The only rationale for its inclusion appears to be that it is found in the same manuscript as Skelton’s Northumberland elegy, first printed here by Stow.163 The influence of manuscript context exerts itself on Stow’s methodology even in this most authoritative collection, at least where miscellaneous manuscript sources are involved. The remainder of the collection, dominated by print sources, is ordered according to the author. By contrast, Stow’s edition of Lydgate’s Serpent of Division [STC 17028] authorizes itself by an apparently false claim to a manuscript source. The title page replaces the author’s name with an appeal to his copy: ‘The serpent’s division whych hathe ever bene yet the chefest undoer of any Region or Citie, set forth after the Auctours old copy by I. S.’. Textual studies by Ringler, however, establish that the printer used the Treverys edition as copy without recourse to manuscripts.164 The claim of being ‘set forth’ after the old copy might simply mean that the manuscript copy was consulted to identify the treatise and its author — rather than to establish an authoritative text down to the singleletter variants. None of the variants is significant except the addition of an explicit: ‘Thus endeth this litle tretise entituled: the Serpent of division, made by John Lydgate’. Ringler therefore asserts that Stow’s ‘only editorial contribution was the addition of the name of the author’.165 It is a contribution that is consistent with Stow’s long term interest in Lydgate’s works, which, as demonstrated by A. S. G. Edwards, stretched over ‘a period of forty years’, culminating in Stow’s contribution of a list of Lydgate’s works to Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Workes.166 If we return to the only marginal notation in Trinity R.3.19 that is still attributed to Stow, we find it is, in fact, an emendation of a single character. Next to the final stanza of ‘The Craft of Lovers’, which dates the poem to 1448

163

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164

Ringler, ‘Lydgate’s Serpent of Division’.

165

Ibid., p. 203.

166

Edwards, ‘John Stow and Middle English Literature’, p. 114.

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in roman numerals, Stow has written ‘Chaucer died 1400’.167 Stow’s printed text, which includes a heading attributing it to Chaucer, emends the last stanza so that it reads ‘1348’ (with one less ‘C’ in the roman numeral).168 So, in this case, Stow has allowed his attribution of the poem in print to determine his reading of the manuscript text. The co-dependent relationship between manuscript and print at this period could take many forms, as these editions by Stow demonstrate. The apparatus of each book constructs a different relationship between the new publication and its textual source. The implication for our understanding of the 1561 Chaucer is, first, that Stow is demonstrably aware of the dynamics of the relationship between manuscript and print; second, that he is fully capable of constructing books that are organized by multiple configurations of readership and authorship. Returning to the 1561 Chaucer, I hope it will be possible to show that the apparatus of the edition explicitly engages multiple principles of order in a way that neither Thynne before nor Speght after did. Thynne’s edition does present a context for Chaucer, but it is not calculated to define a Chaucerian tradition within his own time. The preface monumentalizes Chaucer in comparison with Demosthenes, Homer, and Cicero, while claiming that the editor has obtained ‘very trewe copies of those workes of Geffray Chaucer’. The emphasis is clearly on the authoritative text, whose only competitors are dead, or rather belong to the Classical past. Thynne’s edition then presents each of the texts with a cover page of identical appearance, presenting Chaucer’s works in parallel with poems by Usk, Hoccleve, Henryson, and Lydgate. The edition in fact contains twenty pieces not now regarded as Chaucer’s, but the apparatus of the book does not explicitly relate the texts to each other: they are presented individually and on equal footing. By contrast, Stow’s supplement is densely printed. The headings that do attribute poems to Chaucer are closely shouldered by competing texts. While Thynne names only Chaucer cum privilegio on the title-page, Stow links Lydgate and Chaucer on the front page, giving equal billing to Chaucer’s works and to Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, which Stow added. Stow also introduces a new attribution to Lydgate by adding a heading to a poem within Thynne’s original selection. All of these measures paradoxically reduce the pre-eminence of Chaucer’s authority in the volume, while at the same time drawing attention to the issue of authorial recognition. The supplement of poems, some explicitly

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167

See Greg, ‘Chaucer Attributions’, p. 539.

168

Fletcher, ‘Printer’s Copy’, pp. 190–91.

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headed with Chaucer’s name and some without, is concluded with an explicit: ‘Thus endeth the Workes of Geffray Chaucer’. The section therefore ends by asserting that Chaucer is an author, but one whose corpus is defined by a context of poetry with a multivalent set of relationships to the reader. The poems in the supplement are variously attributed to Chaucer, attributed to others, or not attributed at all. There can be no single response to the influence of fifteenth-century manuscript culture in sixteenth-century printing, nor is that influence one-way: print culture affected the way manuscripts were read and understood in the same way that manuscript culture influenced the development of printed books.169 We need only return to Stow’s reading of Trinity R.3.19 for a number of examples. Trinity R.3.19 was copied in the late fifteenth century. Textual studies indicate that its excerpts of the Monk’s Tale were copied from Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales,170 so the compiler must have known how to attribute them, but instead chose to incorporate them silently in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. Chaucer’s editor was surely capable of recognizing the Monk’s Tale, and it must have served as a powerful illustration of the fifteenth-century Chaucer in context. Forni has demonstrated that Stow’s selection of poems from Trinity R.3.19 favour this kind of pastiche: ‘All of the patchworks Stow prints in his 1561 edition are unique to Trinity R.3.19; indeed, with the exception of one poem ‘Lady of Pity’, Stow prints all of the patchworks found in the manuscript’.171 Stow does not, however, print the Fall of Princes. Stow’s response in the 1561 edition modifies the nature of the fifteenth-century context by explicitly 169

Similarly, Arthur Marotti notes that ‘just as the happenstance process that characterized most manuscript compilation shaped many early printed anthologies (even the presentation of a text such as the first edition of Donne’s Poems), the conventions of printed editions of poetry affected the presentation of verse in manuscript anthologies. For instance, the arrangement by genre found in some printed editions also appears in certain seventeenthcentury manuscripts[...] The increase in authorial ascriptions in manuscript anthologizing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries is clearly a reaction to the foregrounding of authorship in print culture’: Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 328.The distinction in Stow’s case is that the meaning of ascription itself is affected by Stow’s experience with manuscripts. The question is not only whether to ascribe or not, but what it means when he does. For Stow, a collection of work by Chaucer includes poetry by others because he observed Chaucer’s own work defined in the manuscripts by its context. 170

Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, p. 113. Owen concurs with Fletcher’s analysis in Manuscript Trinity R.3.19: A Facsimile, ed. by Bradford Y. Fletcher (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1987), p. xviii. 171

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recognizing it. In the manuscript anthology, the blending of Chaucer and Lydgate is silent. Stow’s addition of Siege of Thebes to the Workes is not silent, but advertised on the front page and again in an incipit. Similarly, the provocation of questions of authority left Trinity R.3.19 marked not only by the marginal attributions added in the eighteenth century, but by Stow’s own copies of Lydgate’s Fables five and seven. Stow hand-wrote the fables into the manuscript himself and dutifully attributed them to Lydgate with a heading. Looking forward to Speght’s editions of 1598 and 1602, we can see that Chaucer’s status within his own collected works has at last been asserted. The title-page advertises ‘The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed’, along with ‘his portraiture and progenie shewed, his life collected, arguments to every booke gathered, old and obscure words explaned, authors by him cited, declared, difficulties opened, two bookes of his, never before printed’. The new prefatory material builds a myth of Chaucer that can perhaps, for the first time, be used as an interpretive tool more powerful or more imposing than the contextual poetry that at that time still crowded his collected works. It is interesting to note that Stow, who knew Speght, is identified in the edition for two new contributions.172 One is the list of Lydgate’s works. The other is the source for the spurious Plowman’s Tale. Speght notes that the tale was ‘made no doubt by Chaucer with the rest of the Tales. For I have seene it in written hand in John Stow’s library in a booke of such antiquity as seemeth to have beene written neare to Chaucer’s time’. The conclusion Speght’s drew from the ‘antiquity’ of the book illustrates the static position into which the relationship between print and manuscript had begun to settle at the close of the sixteenth century. The ‘antiquity’ of the manuscript becomes evidence for a specific attribution to Chaucer, rather than the source of a more mediated tradition active in Chaucer’s time. The book ‘in written hand’ is more likely to contain a tale ‘made no doubt by Chaucer’. M. D. Reeve has observed that the editorial inclination to view older manuscripts as more

172

On the relationship between Speght and Stow and the tensions arising from the differences in their ‘background, education and social class’, see Derek Pearsall, ‘John Stow and Thomas Speght as Editors of Chaucer: A Question of Class’, in John Stow (1525–1605), ed. by Gadd and Gillespie, pp. 119–25. Pearsall demonstrates that Speght was grudging in his acknowledgement of Stow’s contributions, which were likely more extensive than Speght implies. For instance, the edition’s new life of Chaucer includes information ‘said to be drawn from the records of the Guildhall and the Tower, which could have come only from Stow (who acted as an unofficial archivist for the City)’ (p. 123).

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authentic texts is a thoroughly modern impulse.173 The historical distance with which Speght and Stow view the handwritten copy of the Plowman’s Tale defines their own modernity as much as it defines the manuscript’s antiquity. A kind of faithfulness to the manuscript has grown into departure from the culture in which the manuscript was originally produced and read. The manuscript can now be mined as a historical object for material that, in most cases, it never really contained.

173

M. D. Reeve, ‘Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books’, in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing, ed. by J. B. Trapp (London: Warburg Institute, 1983), pp. 12–20 (pp. 14–15).

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E DITING THE B OOKS OF M ARGERY K EMPE

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n 1501, Margery Kempe’s book suddenly reappeared on Fleet Street when Wynkyn de Worde printed excerpts from it under the title A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon. Decades after Kempe’s death, then, a new set of readers encountered Kempe’s story in a form very different from the one she would have known in her lifetime. Because there is only one extant manuscript of Kempe’s book, we know relatively little about the kind of readership the full version of Kempe’s autobiography might have enjoyed. The sole surviving manuscript seems to have been read only under monastic guidance, within the monastery of Mount Grace.1 After de Worde’s printing, anyone in London could buy a personal copy of extracts from Kempe’s book cheaply. The editing of the book down to selected extracts has been most often viewed as a silencing of Kempe’s voice, but it was also quite possibly the first opportunity lay readers had to

1

For a description of the manuscript, see Sanford Brown Meech, ‘Introduction’, in The Book of Margery Kempe: The Text from the Unique MS. Owned by Colonel W. Butler-Bowdon, ed. by Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, Early English Text Society, o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940; repr. 1961), pp. vii–lii (pp. viii–ix). On the irony of a limited, monastic readership for the manuscript, see Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, New Cultural Studies Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). For the most extensive analysis of monastic annotations in the manuscript, and the possibility that they were used in guiding lay readers, see Kelly Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator of the Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience’, in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 85 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 2001), pp. 143–216.

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encounter any part of Margery’s story.2 The printing of the extracts increased Kempe’s potential readership even as it reduced the manuscript’s text. It also completed a trajectory that brought this remarkable text into contact with the many cultural developments that would define the Reformation in England, including proto-Protestant Lollardy, the emergence of the press, and increased public access to devotional texts. That Kempe was not in fact a Lollard, and that the press in this case laboured to produce orthodox instruction, is simply a reminder of how complex such developments could be. This chapter concerns the way in which Margery Kempe’s story was transformed to meet its new audience, why it was radically different from the other devotional texts that had been printed before it, and what remained constant in the book’s tradition, from Margery Kempe’s composition to Wynkyn de Worde’s printing. The Book of Margery Kempe underwent a series of translations at the time of its printing from full text to extracts, from manuscript to print, from the monastery to the popular press on Fleet Street, but the compilation of extracts for print was based on an older tradition of reading in the vernacular that stretched back to Kempe’s own composition of the original text. The surviving manuscript indicates that it was not only the compiler of de Worde’s extracts who edited Margery Kempe; readers of the full narrative in manuscript edited and reshaped the text through marginalia, highlighting extracts from it by way of annotation. A group of readers who navigated the manuscript according to the annotations would produce a new text, just as the compiler of de Worde’s printing did. As different as the two versions of the text in manuscript and print are, the manuscript readers and the print compilers shared a methodology of excerpting and adapting the text to fit a particular readership. Kempe herself can be observed interacting with her own sources in a similar way, particularly in the retelling of tales and exempla and in the re-imagining of scenes from the Gospels. The short moral tales that serve as source texts for Margery were primarily exchanged orally in the Middle Ages, as in the case of sermon exempla. Some of their analogues have come down to us in miscellanies or sermon anthologies that capture, as if in a snapshot, the moment at which

2

Following the practice adopted by Lynn Staley, I use ‘Kempe’ to indicate the author of the text, and ‘Margery’ to indicate her subject. See Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). On the printing as a silencing of Kempe’s voice, see A. E. Goodman, ‘The Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter of Lynn’, in Medieval Women, ed. by Derek Baker, Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 1 (Oxford: Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978), pp. 347–58 (pp. 357–58).

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such material passed from speech into the written record, but they cannot illustrate for us what kind of life these tales had when they were recounted aloud to a live audience. Kempe’s book is exceptional in giving us a fuller picture of how a layperson could use these tales in conversation or to instruct another. Margery’s manner of adapting tales to her listening audience is very much in line with the activity of Kempe’s readers, which is likewise captured in the marginal notations of the manuscript. She manipulates the context of her retelling in order to guide the interpretation of her listeners and, later, readers of the written text. The idea that texts should be absorbed, revised, and recast according to the personal needs of readers is central to The Book of Margery Kempe. There is a sense in which Kempe records the story of her life expressly so that it will be read and rewritten in multiple new contexts. As Lochrie notes, Kempe explicitly offers up the narrative in the proem as an example from which others should learn.3 Margery Kempe wants most to be reread. The process that produced the excerpts for print, then, owes much to the reading practices that produced the original manuscript; but as we shall see, the final product could not be read in quite the same way. Whoever prepared the text for Wynkyn de Worde’s press used old tools to create something quite new in its purpose and potential. While this manner of adapting a text according to personal needs was a common feature of manuscript transmission, there was, in the fifteenth century, an official move toward restricting such active reading of vernacular devotional texts. The earliest attempts at censorship before the rise of the press were aimed as much at limiting the transmission of existing devotional material as at the composition of new works.4 Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, for example, which were articles issued by the Archbishop in order to regulate the teaching and study of Christian doctrine in England, both emerged from and helped to create a climate in which lay readers of devotional literature were not encouraged to share what they read with others, much less to re-sculpt their reading in the process. It has been suggested that Kempe’s career is exceptional as an orthodox fifteenth-century record of this kind of devotional reading, in which readers pass on and exchange their interpretations of what they have read.5

3

Karma Lochrie, ‘The Book of Margery Kempe: The Marginal Woman’s Quest for Literary Authority’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 16 (1986), 33–55 (pp. 36–37). 4

Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitution of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64, esp. pp. 828, 830. 5

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If this is so, the remarkable afterlife of the text in manuscript and print reveals that it was a site for active reading and transmission of devotional literature well into the early years of the sixteenth century. While the extensive excerpting of Kempe’s book has been read as a cautious reaction by Wynkyn de Worde’s press to a conservative climate that would have balked at the idiosyncratic full text,6 it is equally likely that the reshaping of the text itself is a bold remnant of the active reading that such a climate had begun to restrict in the fifteenth century. The history of The Book of Margery Kempe, therefore, is the story of a text’s survival, which is mirrored by the book’s own account of the survival of its author before the interrogation of Archbishop Arundel himself.

I. Tales of Real Life Margery Kempe’s powers as a storyteller seem to come alive at critical moments in her life as it is described in the narrative now known as The Book of Margery Kempe. On her way home from her final pilgrimage, Margery, a merchant’s daughter and mother of fourteen, whose career ran the gamut from brewster to visionary mystic, is arrested by the Duke of Bedford’s men for suspicion of heresy. In Kempe’s account, the spectacle of her escort under custody from the banks of the Humber to Hesyl draws a crowd. Women come running out of their houses, crying ‘burn this false heretic’, with the distaffs they use for spinning wool still in their hands. Men approach her as she passes and admonish her to ‘forsake this life you have, and go spin and card as other women do’. The repeated invocation of spinning as appropriate women’s work provides a contrast for the description of Margery at her own craft of telling tales. When the Duke’s men lock her in the upper room of a house in Beverly, she manages to make herself heard on the streets below: Than stode sche lokyng owt at a wyndown, telling many good talys to hem that wolde heryn hir, in so meche that women wept sor and seyde wyth gret hevynes of her hertys, ‘Alas, woman, why xalt thu be brent?’ [...] And than the women tokyn a leddyr and set up to the wyndown and govyn hir a pynte of wyn in a potte and toke hir a pece,

6

George R. Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers: The Economics of Devotionalism’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: 4th Exeter Symposium: Papers, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 9–26 (p. 9).

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besechyng hir to settyn a-wey the potte prevyly and the pece that whan the good man come he myth not aspye it. (53, 130–31)7

The tales Margery tells out the window win such sympathy that the women are suddenly confused by her imprisonment. They risk punishment themselves by bringing her wine and trust her to hide the cup from her guard. The episode is remarkable for the way Margery’s stories abruptly change the way she is received. The women with distaffs, screaming for Margery’s execution, are replaced by the women with wine, asking, ‘alas, why will you be burned?’ The transformation is striking because it is accomplished solely through Margery’s tales. The right narrative, in the hands of the right author, pulls the teller and the listener together through the cultural references they share. Margery’s audience recognize her as one of their own by their mutual love of tales, by the popular tradition of tale-telling that she invokes when she most needs it. Critics have most recently explained the ameliorating effect of Margery’s tales on her accusers as a function of the Lollard rejection of tale-telling.8 Lynn Staley argues that ‘the tale Margery tells [in Chapter 52] is similarly designed as a signifier of Margery’s orthodoxy, for Lollards were well known for their dislike of “fables”. By putting a tale in Margery’s mouth, Kempe locates Margery in the bosom of mother Church’.9 Lollardy, the proto-Protestant sect to which Margery is accused of belonging, disapproved of tales, particularly sermon exempla. To be sure, the women of Beverly are partly responding to the familiar orthodoxy of Margery’s form, often heard from the pulpit, when they question her

7

Quotations from the text are based on the Early English Text Society edition by Meech and Allen and are cited by chapter and page number. I have silently expanded ampersands where I have deemed it necessary for sentence clarity and followed the expansions of scribal abbreviations adopted by Meech and Allen without indication. Where appropriate I have modernized by transcribing ‘u’ as ‘v’, and ‘¥ ’ as ‘g’, ‘y’, ‘s’, ‘z’ or ‘gh’. I have transcribed ‘þ’ and ‘ð’ as ‘th’. 8

The extent of Lollard repudiation of tale-telling is indicated in Christina von Nolcken, The Middle English Translation of the Rosarium Theologiae: A Selection Edited from Cbr., Gonville and Caius Coll. MS 354/581 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), which is a kind of Wycliffite encyclopaedia of keywords in the Lollard controversy. The entry for ‘fabulacion’ states that ‘tale tellyng is to be exschewed’ (p. 73). One of the definitions of ‘Antichrist’ is that ‘he schal ordene prechours [...] that schal preche fabeles, dremes, poeses [...]’ (p. 60). Margery’s use of a tale, then, is a sign to her listeners that she is not likely to be a Lollard sympathizer. For the readership and use of the Rosarium Theologiae, see Von Nolcken’s introduction to the translation, pp. 34–35. 9

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imprisonment for heresy. This view of Margery as a shrewd manipulator of genre, and of Kempe as an equally shrewd constructor of her persona, Margery, undoubtedly puts emphasis on the text’s investment in demonstrating that both author and persona are powerful makers.10 However, it is a reading that requires revision to the extent that it imagines Kempe operating outside of the societal pressures upon which the narrative at large comments. Margery must act within, not simply on, the community of lay readers to which she belongs — and the same, of course, is true of Kempe. This means that Kempe must not only exploit the tale as a tool read or written by orthodox teachers, but also negotiate a place for herself within a community that places limits on what kinds of reading, writing, and teaching were appropriate for fifteenth-century Englishwomen. The orthodoxy of the sources for Margery’s tales does not guarantee that she is free to adapt and pass them on in her own right. No matter how many times Margery’s tales may have been heard from the pulpit, her tellings are distinct precisely because she is not a preacher and, as a woman, is prohibited from preaching. The text is at pains to establish Margery’s right to tell tales and it does so by emphasizing her role as a member of a community that is allowed to hear them. The narrative at these moments constructs Margery’s authority on the basis of her reception by others, as a reader sharing with other readers — not as a writer. Accordingly, the words she speaks out the window to the women of Beverly are not recorded (or constructed) at all. We know only that Margery’s tales create sympathy between her and her audience, where before there was none. Staley’s reading of Margery Kempe, which parallels the way mid-twentiethcentury critics read Chaucer as a literary artist with a special status apart from the societal pressures he satirized, gives limited attention to the way in which societal pressures shaped Kempe’s artistry.11 Episodes like the one set in Beverly occur

10

I find it useful to distinguish between the discursive practices of Margery and the way in which they are recounted by Kempe, primarily in order to show the affinity between the two. As avowed autobiography, however, Kempe’s text is subject to interpretational questions that are not applicable to texts that signal their fictional status. See Michael J. Wright, ‘What They Said to Margery Kempe: Narrative Reliability in Her Book’, Neophilologus, 79 (1995), 497–508. 11 The same might be argued of Chaucer himself, to the extent that we are still tempted to read Chaucer the Poet as an entity completely unencumbered by a fellowship like the one that surrounds Chaucer the Pilgrim. See the first chapter of this book for a reading of the exchange of tales in the pilgrims’ fellowship as an analogue for the real process of textual transmission and adaptation that Chaucer the Poet worked within, and through which the tales themselves

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within the narrow confines of new censorship regulations and old misogynist discourses. Kempe survives and thrives as an author while experiencing those tensions as a reader. The Book of Margery Kempe bases Margery’s claim to blessedness as much on the persecution she suffers for sharing her readings of sermon exempla as for her reception of Christ’s visitations. The circulation of her text in manuscript and print forms an epilogue to her efforts as an oral storyteller that confirms the success, if not of her complete narrative as she dictated it, then at least of the methodology her narrative defends. It is a methodology of reading, adapting, and reshaping texts within the vernacular devotional tradition that perhaps began with oral tale-telling, with exchanges in which a present author adapted a text for a known and equally present audience. This model of reiterating common tales in order to create a sense of community is also found in the narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales. While addressing the general indebtedness of Kempe’s narrative, Goodman has asserted that ‘the work is, indeed, a monument to [Kempe’s] lack of originality. Its originality — its peculiar mixture of devotion and controversy — springs from the circumstances and purposes of its composition’.12 The same might be said of The Canterbury Tales, in which so many of the tales are made new, not by their original plots, but by the circumstances of their retelling in the fictional narrative frame. It is just that the stakes are much higher for Kempe than for Chaucer or for any of his fictional pilgrims. Chaucer is able to use the premise of retelling the tales of others as a playful screen to protect against the impugning of his own intent. For Margery, the retelling of tales provokes questions about her right to read and use her source material. As she is frequently reminded by angry crowds and clerics, her life depends on the answers. While much recent work has been occupied with interrogating Kempe’s text on a par with other self-consciously authorial projects like Chaucer’s, there is a similar parallel between Kempe and Chaucer as self-consciously active readers. As we have seen, in the Canterbury Tales reading is perceived as more than a passive absorption of texts, and texts themselves are seen as material available to be reworked by readers. In The Book of Margery Kempe, these same attitudes are at work under the pressure of Kempe’s precarious position as a laywoman who is both reader and author of devotional literature. Margery Kempe centres her

were preserved (and modified) in manuscript copies. The mid-twentieth-century approach I reference had its root in the magisterial study by E. Talbot Donaldson, ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 69 (1954), 928–36. 12

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text on various forms of reception, not composition, from her own readings of sources to the way in which she is read by others. All writers need readers, but Margery Kempe depends on the volatile reaction of her audience to establish the core claims of her text: their approval legitimates her mainstream orthodoxy; their persecution is the means by which she earns divine reward. Accounts of the relationship between Kempe and her own reading have revolved around the overwhelming influence Kempe’s sources exercised on her, both as a woman and as a layperson with limited literacy. Studies of her reception of devotional texts, ranging from the Sarum Missal to the Meditations on the Passion ascribed to Rolle, have emphasized their influence upon her, particularly where this influence can be seen as a subconscious pressure brought to bear on the potential originality of her own composition.13 Interference by the first scribes, which is at all points possible and at some points even explicit in the text’s composition, has also compromised the status of this dictated narrative as a text authored by Kempe.14 The dictation of the full narrative as described in the two proems, however, is only the last of many tale s Kempe told in her lifetime. Embedded throughout the narrative of Kempe’s life are episodes in which Margery relates tales and exempla that, in many cases, remain largely

13 Ibid., p. 350; Wright, ‘What They Said to Margery Kempe’, p. 506; Naoe Yoshikawa, ‘Veneration of Virgin Martyrs in Margery Kempe’s Meditation: Influence of the Sarum Liturgy and Hagiography’, in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. by Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 177–95. See also Roger A. Ladd, ‘Margery Kempe and Her Mercantile M ysticism’, Fifteenth-Century Studies, 26 (2000), 121–41. Ladd argues that Kempe has internalized satirical representations of merchants. For an incisive study of texts that influence Margery’s scribe, see Roger Ellis, ‘Margery Kempe’s Scribe and the Miraculous Books’, in Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, ed. by Helen Phillips (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 161–75. 14 See in particular John C. Hirsch, ‘Author and Scribe in the Book of Margery Kempe’, Medium Aevum, 44 (1975), 145–50. Hirsch concludes that the scribe should be considered as the author of particular sections of the text. For the view that the scribe acts as the writer of the text, with Margery as his source, see Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), pp. 112–13. For the argument that the Margery’s struggles with her reception are equally dependent on her confessors’ failure to emulate Continental models of the relationship between holy women and their confessors, see Janette Dillon, ‘Holy Women and Their Confessors or Confessors and Their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and Continental Tradition’, in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. by Rosalynn Voaden (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1996), pp. 51–70.

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unrecorded. Their presence in the narrative is marked only by their hearers’ strong, affective responses, as in the example above. Her sources in these cases are not external influences so much as tools she uses to influence others.15 In the composition of The Book of Margery Kempe, and in the exploits it describes, we see the actions of an active lay reader, even if the term ‘reader’ here is nuanced by the level of literacy we can attribute to Margery Kempe.16 According to her own account, Kempe was not literate enough to write down her narrative, or to read it back. Yet, Margery’s creative presence, which accounts for much of what can be termed ‘authorial fashioning’ in the book, consists of her activity as a reader in a community, interpreting and passing on the tales and exempla she has heard in sermons and from her confessors.17 Her faithfulness to such sources can at times be problematic. In chapter 45, Margery surprises a group of clergymen by criticizing the way in which they swear. The focus of their wonder seems split between her use of the Gospel as a source and her temerity as a laywoman in correcting them: And than the religiows men had hir in a mongse hem and mad hir good cher, saf thei sworyn many gret othys and horryble. And sche undyrname hem therof aftyr the Gospel, and therof had thei gret wondyr. Nevyrthe lesse summe wer ryth wel plesyd, thankyd be God of hys goodnesse. (45, 110)

The wonder of the ‘religious men’ is not due to any unorthodox content in her admonition. The early twentieth-century scholar, Gerald R. Owst, identified a

15

See chapters 38 and 43 for episodes in which Margery’s tales are so influential that they inspire the hearers to offer Margery cash payment for them. These are perhaps the earliest recorded instances of a woman being paid for her compositions in English. 16

For a discussion of medieval notions of literacy as they might have applied to Kempe, and for a helpful distinction between composition and writing, see Lochrie, Margery Kempe, pp. 101–03. The idea that Kempe could not read in the modern sense once persuaded critics that she could not have been author of the text where it is influenced by mystical literature; see Hirsch, ‘Author and Scribe’, pp. 145–50. More recent work has been sensitive to the variety of conduits through which readers of varying levels of literacy might have been exposed to devotional texts. See Melissa Furrow, ‘Unscholarly Latinity and Margery Kempe’, in ‘Doubt Wisely’: Papers in Honor of E. G. Stanley, ed. by M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 240–51. See also Yoshikawa, ‘Veneration of Virgin Martyrs’; Liliana Sikorska, ‘Hir Not Lettyrd: The Use of Interjections, Pragmatic Markers and Whan-Clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Terttu Nevalainen, Topics in English Linguistics, 35 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 391–410. 17

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The phrase is Lynn Staley’s: Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, p. 11.

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whole tradition of sermon exempla that indulged in just such critiques of the clergy: ‘A [...] class of anecdotes exhibits [...] sermon humor at the expense of fellow-clergy’. He also observes that ‘upon the iniquities of swearing and the need for its denunciation the preachers, orthodox and unorthodox alike, are in perfect accord’.18 Margery’s correction is surprising because it comes from her — it is only the context of her repetition of this common admonition that makes it exceptional in any way. If it can be argued that Margery’s discourse borrows from the form and content of sermon literature, then it must also be argued that the more faithful she is to her sources, the closer she comes to undermining her own authority. As David Lawton has written, ‘Her only challenge to authority is in her desire for recognition by it’.19 The imitation and acknowledgement of sources, which is so often an authorizing mechanism for medieval authors, is problematized for Margery, both by the injunction against women preaching and by the limits on lay access to scripture. This is a complication because Margery’s project includes a desire to remain faithful to orthodox doctrine.20 The crux of the problem is played out in the passages dealing with Margery’s examination by the Archbishop of York in chapter 52. Here, there is also a shift in the form of the narrative, so that the tales she is supposed to have told are partially recorded. She submits her tales to the judgement of her readers at the same time that she submits them to the clergy. In the examples that follow, however, we will see that the tales are recorded with a minimum of detail, in some cases requiring prior knowledge of the tradition in order to understand them fully. Thus Margery is exposed by the text only to the judgement of those who are already members of her community, to those who already understand something of the context of her sources. In the face of the Archbishop’s judgement, Margery also relies on the context of her own speech. Margery’s defence begins with a formal distinction between preaching and other speech, which she bases on the location of the speaker. Because she ‘come[s] into no pulpit’, she does not preach:

18

Owst, Literature and Pulpit, pp. 164, 416.

19

David Lawton, ‘Voice, Authority, and Blasphemy in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. by Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 93–115 (p. 111). 20

Lollards could and did make claims for the right of women to preach. For a discussion of Margery’s own defence at her examination by the Archbishop of York in relation to one such Lollard justification by William Brute, see Lochrie, ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’, pp. 43–47. See also Goodman, ‘The Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter’, p. 355.

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Asswythe a gret clerke browt forth a boke and leyd Seynt Powl for hys party ageyns hir that no woman xuld prechyn. Sche, answeryng therto seyde, ‘I preche not, ser, I come in no pulpytt. I use but comownycacyon and good wordys, and that wil I do whil I leve’. Than seyd a doctowr whech had examynd hir be-for-tyme, ‘Syr sche telde me the werst talys of prestys that evyr I herde’. (52, 126)

The representation of the clerk ‘bringing forth a book’ in order to introduce St Paul into the dialogue emphasizes the distance between learned preaching and ‘communication’. As has been noted, the distinction Margery makes is common to the popular fifteenth-century treatise, Speculum Christiani21 and these are terms Kempe’s public would recognize.22 The implication is that she uses only ‘good words’, as opposed to good books, the guarded authorities whose use signals a different kind of composition. However, the rebuttal offered by the doctor of divinity just as tenaciously refocuses the debate on the method by which that gap between secular life and sermonizing was most often bridged by preachers themselves: that is, the telling of tales. The doctor rightly implies that the connection between sermons and exempla impugns Margery’s claim that there is a formal distinction between what she does on the street and what a preacher does in the pulpit. Margery’s response to the doctor’s accusation that she is telling evil tales precariously reasserts the context in which Margery first encountered the tales herself: she states that she learned them from someone else: ‘Sir, wyth yowr reverens, I spak but of o preste be the maner of exampyl, the whech as I have lernyd’ (126). She first insists on a peculiar function of exempla, by which one is able to speak ‘but of one priest’ and make an example of him, without directly speaking of priests as a class. Next, with the subtle reminder that Margery has been taught this story (‘the whech as I have lernyd’), Margery’s response to the doctor suggests the rather ordinary experience of an orthodox laywoman being taught by way of such exempla. If exempla are prone to being incorrectly applied to whole classes of people, then, Margery points out, it is not a problem she herself created.23 Karma Lochrie has characterized the trial as one in which

21

Lochrie, ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’, pp. 46–47.

22

Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, p. 7.

23

In fact, Chaucer’s Clerk complains of a similar problem when he exhorts against the incorrect application of Griselda’s example at the close of the Clerk’s Tale. There, the specific worry is that women will read Griselda literally, missing the metaphorical spirituality of the example: ‘This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde / Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee, / For it were inportable, though they wolde, / But for that every wight, in his degree, / Sholde be

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‘Kempe’s personal battle with church authorities [...] becomes a political battle as she attempts to assert her religious orthodoxy at the same time that she overturns orthodox anti-feminism’.24 However, it is less a deflection of orthodox anti-feminism than a canny invocation of a woman’s sanctioned place within the status quo. Margery is allowed to hear these tales, even required to hear them. The problems she may have with reading them are anticipated by orthodox antifeminist descriptions of women as poor readers,25 descriptions that Margery invokes to make her own reading activity seem less out of the ordinary. Margery’s tactics effectively change the stakes of the interrogation. She frames her response so that it shifts the focus of the Archbishop’s examination away from her own retellings of exempla and onto the ways in which exempla are employed by preachers in front of lay audiences. When Margery retells the above-mentioned tale of the priest for the benefit of the Archbishop, she succeeds in manipulating the new context of his examination to put the clergy around her on the defensive. The story itself focuses on the way in which the private shortcomings of a priest (for example, his gluttony, excess, lechery, and uncleanness) affect the public performance of his sacramental duties, and thus his own hopes of salvation. The priest sees a bear eat the flowers of a pear tree. The bear then defecates in the general direction of the priest, who seeks the advice of a palmer in the interpretation of the scene. The palmer explains that ‘be thy mysgovernance, lych onto the lothly ber, thou devowryst and destroist the flowerys and blomys of vertuows levyng to thyn endles dampnacyon and many mannys hyndryng’ (127). Staley’s reading of the tale deals with the ways in which it ‘suggested [...] key Lollard issues’ through which ‘[Kempe] refuses to sanitize completely either the tale or Margery’s actions’,26 but even this cautious estimation, I think, overstates the heterodoxy of the tale. Margery is careful to note that the priest’s ‘misgovernance’ is ‘hindering’ the salvation of many men because it affects his performance of the sacramental rites: ‘thou takyst ful lytyl heede how thou seyst thy Mateynes and thy Servyse, so it be blaberyd to an ende’ (127). The Lollard connection between

constant in adversitee / As was Grisilde’ (IV , 1142–47). 24

Lochrie, ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’, p. 43.

25

See Rita Copeland, ‘Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and the Lollard Heresy’, in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, ed. by Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 253–86. 26

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‘sacramental efficacy and priestly virtue’27 is rather a different issue, since the Lollard case assumes that a priest’s lack of virtue reduces the efficacy of the sacrament, even if his performance of it is flawless. Kempe’s emphasis on performance is wholly orthodox. Similarly, Lollard attacks on transubstantiation, ‘many of [which] focused on the physical process of defecation’28 only serve to imply what ‘the worst tales of priests’ might really have sounded like. By contrast, Margery undoes the materiality of the process of defecation, which was used in such unsavoury ways to ridicule the materiality of the sacrament. In the tale of the bear and the pear tree, the allegorical meaning of the process is emphatically insisted upon, and the excrement itself is not emblematic of the sacrament, but rather of the lost salvific benefits of ministering the sacrament, which should have been earned by the priest’s soul: ‘Preste, thu thiself art the pertre, sumdel florischyng and floweryng throrw thi Servyse seyyng and the Sacramentys ministryng’ (127). The priest’s carelessness, symbolized by the bear, converts the fruits of his ministry (the flowers of the tree) into bodily waste. In Margery’s hands it is an orthodox tale that emphasizes the priest’s obligation to perform correctly. She criticizes the vices of the priest because they threaten both the performance of his duties and his personal salvation. As if in response to how effective the tale is in this context, one of the clerks seems to take the story personally, responding: ‘Ser, this tale smytyth me to the hert’ (127). As often happens, the clerk’s reaction re-opens the question of how Margery’s tale-telling works and whether her telling is permissible. She responds to the clerk with another story that explicitly illustrates the way in which she is able to manipulate the context of her retelling to justify her use of such fables: The forseyd creatur seyd to the clerk, ‘[...] in place where my dwellyng is most, is a worthy clerk, a good prechar, whech boldly spekyth ageyn the mysgovernawns of the pepil and wil flatyr no man. He seyth many tymes in the pulpit, “Gyf any man be evyl plesyd wyth my prechyng, note hym wel, for he is gylty”. And ryth so, ser’, seyd sche to the clerk, ‘far ye be me, God forgeve it yow’. (128)

The preamble to the short tale situates Margery in the congregation and the preacher in the pulpit, but the re-iteration of the tale in the context of the trial at the Archbishop’s chapel instead places Margery in the pulpit and the clerk on the receiving end of the preacher’s rebuke. The more closely she imitates her source in the use of such a story, the closer she comes to disqualifying herself

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27

Ibid., p. 9.

28

Ibid., p. 8.

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from the claim of faithfulness to it. The original purpose of the clerk’s comment above is to render his authority from the pulpit unassailable. An adverse reaction to it is merely a sign of guilt. Margery’s use of the tale to admonish a clerk effectively reverses its original purpose, giving Margery a way to rebuff a clerk’s authority, but without portraying herself as anything other than an obedient listener. Margery is only absolutely safe in positioning herself as the receiver of these tales. Repeating them puts her dangerously close to preaching. Thus she presents her telling, not as the product of creative composition, but as the outgrowth of her own reception of the tales. It is a strategy with limitations of its own. As Rita Copeland has observed, ‘canonical prohibitions against women preaching or serving the office of priest are enforced in much broader terms through regulation of the practice of reading itself’.29 Not all reading practices are sanctioned for laywomen, and certainly reading (that is, interpreting) in public venues is one of the practices that makes clear the close connection between reading and preaching in the first place. The Archbishop of York’s second examination of Margery pointedly explores her role in educating other laypeople, and again demonstrates the way in which she is able to play off the available tradition of sermon exempla to make her own point without offence. The chapter offers a startling portrait of one lay reader educating another — and how that lay reader might successfully defend her activity to the clergy. She is accused of saying ‘enough to be burned for’ to the Lady of Westmorland: The Erchebischop askyd hir what tale it was that sche telde the Lady of Westmorlonde whan sche spak wyth hir. Sche seyde, ‘I telde hir a good tale of a lady that was dampmyd for sche wolde not lovyn hir enmiis and of a baly that was savyd for he lovyd hys enmys and forgaf that thei had trespasyd agen hym, and yet he was heldyn an evyl man.’ The Erchebischop seyd it was a good tale. Than seyd hys styward and many mo wyth hym, crying [...] ‘Lord, we prey yow late hir go hens [...]’. (54, 134)

Margery’s tale of the damned lady and the good bailiff comes from a vein of sermon literature identified by Owst, in which manorial officials become proverbially corrupt. This tale hardly makes sense without the context of the evil reputation enjoyed by bailiffs, which manifested itself in sermon exempla somewhat analogous to modern lawyer jokes. Bailiffs, also known as ‘messenger[s] of Satan’, were compared to everything from ‘infernal millstones’ grinding the poor, to ‘hogs always ready to wallow in filth’.30

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29

Copeland, ‘Why Women Can’t Read’, p. 259.

30

Owst, Literature and Pulpit, pp. 323–24.

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An initial gloss on Margery’s tale would simply be that reputation is not an accurate indication of salvation, and that failure to love one’s enemies yields the surprising (one would have thought impossible) result of being less worthy of salvation than a bailiff. The conflict between God’s judgement and the judgement of the world in the tale also has obvious resonance in Margery’s predicament. But there is another layer of context Margery is playing against. Many of the sermons cited by Owst in this strain are those of friar-preachers. Their scathing indictment of how manors were being run could easily extend to large monastic land-holdings. We have already seen, in Chapter 1, the way in which Chaucer adapted an analogue from this tradition to a critique of ecclesiastical officials in the Friar’s Tale. Almost any other exemplum from this tradition would have been offensive to an Archbishop with manors of his own, but Margery’s tale refers to the evil reputation of bailiffs without maintaining it. Rather than damning the bailiff, she transforms his proverbial damnation into a sobering warning to ladies, one of whom was the original hearer of the tale. We are not told how the Lady of Westmoreland received the tale, but it plays very well with the Archbishop, who pronounces it ‘a good tale’. Margery deflects the elements of social critique in her version, notably at the expense of the group she is accused of encouraging too much freedom within — that is, women. The conflict between the landed and un-landed that is implied in the traditional critique of bailiffs is sublimated into a conflict between the judgement of this world and the next. The brunt of the motif’s force is shifted from the bailiff to the lady. The audience at the chapter house, which is presumably exclusively male, is able to accept the tale and its teller: they beg that she be set free. The manipulation of context and detail that allows Margery to play to her audience in the examinations by the Archbishop of York is matched by the control in Kempe’s recounting of these episodes in the full narrative. The tale told to the Lady of Westmoreland is recorded by Kempe only in a highly abbreviated form that is difficult to understand without prior knowledge of the motif. This restricts the readership that is able to enter into judgement with the Archbishop on the quality of the tale. The same strategy is applied more generally throughout the narrative. Kempe’s account of Margery’s exploits similarly assumes a tradition of vernacular tales with which its readership is familiar. Motifs common to oral genres cross over into this written account in a way that invites readers to bring that context to their reading. For instance, the significance of the exchange between Margery and the priest who recognizes the devil in her voice is made

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much clearer when read within the tradition of exempla in which possession by the devil is discovered and cured by priests. Kempe’s account reads: Than the preste seyd to hir agen, ‘Now wote I wel that thu hast a devyl wythinne the, for I her hym spekyn in the to me’. ‘A, good ser, I pray yow dryvyth hym away fro me, for God knowyth I wolde ryth fawyn don wel [...]’ And than he wax ryth wroth [...] and sche seyd to hym, ‘Ser, I hope I have no devyl wythinne me, for, gyf I had a devyl wythin me, metyth wel I schuld ben wroth wyth yow [...] (34, 85)

The recognition of the devil by voice is a motif common to Germanic and Middle English folk tales.31 A Middle English example can be found in a fifteenth-century translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum: ‘So on a day a religious man happend to here hym harpe, and onone as he harde hym he sayd in this maner of wyse; “This voyce and this melodie is not of a man bod, rather of the devull”’.32 An explanation of the priest’s anger at Margery’s response is suggested by the fact that such tales usually culminate in the casting out of the demon — an element required in order for the tale to legitimate its own narrative. The appearance of the demon upon expulsion confirms that it was correctly recognized by voice. While the priest’s comment to Margery might well have been meant metaphorically, Margery turns the tables by interpreting it literally in the vein of these exempla. Because he cannot cast her demon out, his admonition suddenly rings false. Similarly, another clerk’s curse of Margery in chapter 13 is reminiscent of a common motif of folk tales: ‘I wold thow wer closyd in an hows of ston that ther schuld no man speke wyth the’ (27). This comment is usually interpreted by modern readers as a desire to contain Margery as an anchoress within one of the established ecclesiastical roles available to women. But, as evidenced by Julian of Norwich and other anchoresses in the Book, an anchorhold rarely kept women from speaking, and the position was not a sign of the disapprobation that is palpable in the clerk’s comment. It seems more likely that the clerk is referring to another folk tale motif in which women are walled-up as punishment. A German example is the thirteenth-century ‘Die Eingemaurte Frau’ by the

31

Indexed by Stith Thompson, Motif-index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabilaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends, rev. and enlarged edn, 6 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58), as motif G303.16.19.7. 32

Quotation taken from An Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th Century Translation of the ‘Alphabetum Narrationum’ of Etienne de Besançon, ed. by Mary Macleod Banks, Early English Text Society, o.s. 126-27 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1904-05), pp. 86.

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Stricker. In it, a husband walls his wife up in a tower because ‘dô wolde si ir willen hân’ (‘she would insist on her own will’; l. 3).33 She learns her lesson and becomes an example to other wives. Above all, then, the episodes just discussed demonstrate the way in which Kempe’s narrative could take advantage of references to a wider set of cultural phenomena. The tradition of vernacular verse tales moves through and circulates around Kempe’s own narrative, lending it a context familiar to those of her own class and culture. Kempe controls the extent of reference to that context, sometimes limiting it to her advantage. The rhetorical strategies apparent in Kempe’s recounting of the narrative, the careful control of reference, and the strategy of omission are also apparent when Margery faces Archbishop Arundel himself. Margery is shown to brave Arundel’s persecution with as much acumen as Kempe shows in negotiating the obstacles to earning her readers’ acceptance. Glimpses of such similarities in the rhetorical stance of the full manuscript narrative and the strategies employed by Margery in the interviews she has with ecclesiastical officials are the best evidence that Margery herself dictated the narrative — or at least that the same person who crafted the dialogue between Margery and the Archbishop was also the architect of the full narrative. We know her best by what she does with her material. In the case of the interview with the Archbishop, the material Margery carefully edits is her career. She forgoes an account of her ministry to others, beginning instead with her desire for greater guidance and observance: Whan sche cam to hys presens, sche salutyd hym as sche cowd, prayng hym of hys gracyows lordshyp to grawnt hir auctoryte of chesyng hyr confessowr and to be howselyd every Sonday, gyf God wold dysposen hir therto, vndyr hys lettyr and hys seel thorw al hys prouynce. (36)

She asks for the authority, not to teach others (as she has been doing), but to choose her own teacher. Once again she presents herself primarily as a receiver — a student and reader rather than a teacher and author. Only when Arundel approves her request does she continue, significantly linking her communication with Christ to her ‘manner of living’: Whan this creatur fond this grace in hys sygth, sche was wel comfortyd & strengthyd in hir sowle, and so sche schewyd this worshepful lord hir maner of levyng & swech grace as God wrowt in hyr mende and in hir sowle to wetyn what he wold sey therto, gyf he fond any defawte in hyre contemplacyon er in hir wepyng. And sche teld hym

33

Quotation taken from Der Stricker: Verserzählungen, ed. by Hanns Fischer, Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 53, 2 vols in 1 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), p. 50.

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also the cawse of hyr wepyng and the maner of daly[awns] that owyr Lord dalyid to hyr sowle. And he fond no defawt therin but a-prevyd hir maner of levyng & was rygth glad that owyr mercyful Lord Cryst Ihesu schewyd swech grace in owyr days, blyssed mot he be. (36–37)

Her communication with God is figured only as a source of self-discipline (not power). Arundel accordingly approves, and his approval stands in stark contrast to the contempt with which she was initially received by Arundel’s retinue. Rather like the episodes discussed above, in which she mollifies the crowd after her arrest by the Duke of Bedford’s men, or before the Archbishop of York, Margery is able to reverse her own fortune by winning over her audience. When she arrives at Arundel’s palace, a laywoman spits on her and wishes to burn her, saying: ‘it is a pety that thow leuyst’ (36). When she walks out of Arundel’s palace, she leaves with a sealed letter of his approval, ‘and many worthy men desyred to heryn hir dalyawns and hir comunycacyon, for hir communycacion was so mech in the lofe of God that the herars wer oftyn-tyme steryd therthorw to wepyn ryt sadly’ (37). Margery flourishes within, and even because of, the boundaries she must negotiate to share her tales. The continued mediation required between Margery, her sources, and her audience, is represented as one of her claims to blessedness. During one of Christ’s visitations, he recounts the time when St Paul appeared to Margery, a vision not otherwise recorded in the narrative: [...] And Seynt Powle seyd unto the that thu haddyst suffryd mech tribulacyon for cawse of hys wrytyng, and he behyte the that thu xuldist han as meche grace ther agens for hys lofe as evyr thu haddist schame er reprefe for hys lofe. (160)

Paul’s injunction against women preaching is here reconfigured as the source of her motivation to continue to ‘boldly spekyn in [Christ’s] name’ (160). Her faithfulness to orthodox doctrine, and the limited access she has to its texts, create a paradox that is resolved only after death, when ‘schame’ is translated into ‘lofe’. Christ’s reminder to Margery, ‘Dowtyr, I have telde the many tymys that I xulde maynteyn thi wepyng and thy crying be sermownys and prechyng’ (217), seems to cement the connection between preaching and the physical suffering that she experiences as divine. The text makes an implicit connection between her crying at the sermons of others and her own near-sermonizing: both cause her to be publicly persecuted and divinely rewarded.34 The limitation of her 34

Chapters 61, 67, 68, and 69 deal with the violent crying Margery experiences while hearing sermons, and the various responses preachers have to it. In chapter 61, the vehemence of her response causes a grey friar to ban her from his sermons. Thus Margery’s reception of

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access to the discourse of preaching provides her with a divine grace that is withheld from sanctioned preachers because they are not punished for their preaching: Than seyd the creatur, ‘A, my derworthy Lord, this lyfe xuldist thu schewyn to religiows men and to preistys’. Owr Lord seyd agen to hir, ‘Nay, nay, dowtyr, for that thyng that I lofe best thei lofe not, and that is schamys, despitys, scornys, and reprevys of the pepil, and therfor xal thei not have this grace’. (158)

Without the injunction against women preaching, which both causes her worldly embarrassment and earns her heavenly grace, and without sermons that at once invoke shame and consolation, there would be no tale to tell. In the full manuscript narrative, Margery’s relationship with her audience is never resolved as complete acceptance, at least not among fellow speakers of English. Throughout the Book there are moments in which continental Europeans or Saracens accept Margery far more readily than do her own people. However, these moments never dislodge her central goal of finding approval within her own community, with those who share the set of cultural references to which she alludes, and who are afflicted by the pre-Reformation anxieties experienced in fifteenth-century England.35 Here, I am reading this desire for local understanding in the text as akin to the presence of Margery as an oral taleteller in front of her audience. However, as the marginal notations in the manuscript suggest, Kempe’s written account elicited a similar response in the members of the monastic community that owned the manuscript. The sermon literature precipitates a crisis in the text reminiscent of the crisis in her use of it: the deeper her response to sermons as sources of divine inspiration, the greater the danger that she will be denied access to them. The text responds to this crisis with repeated anecdotal evidence that other preachers ‘suffered’ her to cry during their sermons: ‘for ther was nevyr clerk prechyd opynly ageyn hir crying but the Grey Frer, as is wretyn beforn’ (167). 35

The observation is made in chapter 30: ‘& sche fond alle pepyl good on-to hir & gentyl saf only hir owyn cuntreman’ (75). Throughout her pilgrimage, when the group of English pilgrims with which she travels repeatedly abandons her, Margery finds Italian advocates; see especially chapters 38 and 41. The German priest Wenslawe becomes her confessor in spite of opposition from English priests; see especially chapters 33 and 40. For a discussion of these episodes in terms of Margery’s ability to communicate with foreigners, see Furrow, ‘Unscholarly Latinity’, pp. 240–51, especially pp. 246–48. Her successes in making connections with foreigners only intensify the challenges she faces in winning over fellow Englishmen; see chapter 47, in which the Steward of Leicester tests her Latin. W hen she says that English is her only language, he replies: ‘Thu lyest falsly in pleyn Englysch’ (113). The challenge to make herself understood in her own language forms the basis of the trials for which Jesus tells her she will be rewarded.

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annotations edit and reshape Kempe’s text according to new frames of reference that are particular to that community in the early sixteenth century, making Kempe’s work in manuscript an enduring site for the kind of active reading she undertook herself. II.

The Hands in the Margin

Margery Kempe’s book values reading in a way that revision is invited. According to Margery’s own account of her life, she was not uniformly successful in motivating those around her to edit their opinions of her, but her desire for the possibility of revision is nevertheless central to her book. For instance, when she wears white clothing to her interview with the Archbishop of York, she succeeds only in provoking the question of her virginity: At the last the seyd Erchebischop cam into the chapel wyth hys clerkys, and scharply he seyde to hir, ‘Why gost thu in white? Art thu a mayden?’ Sche, knelyng on hir knes befor hym, seyd, ‘Nay, ser, I am no mayden; I am a wife’. He comawndyd hys mené to fettyn a peyr of feterys and seyd sche schulde ben feteryd, for sche was a fals heretyke. And than sche seyd, ‘I am non heretyke, ne ye schal non preve me’.36

The inflexibility of the Archbishop’s reading (she is either a virgin and innocent, or a wife and heretic) is countered in the text by the example of Christ’s acceptance of Margery’s new status. Christ comes to Margery and tells her that she is a maiden in her soul. She responds: Blyssed Lorde, me thynkyth that thu hast schewyd ryth gret charité to me, unworthy wrech. Thu art as gracyows to me as thei I wer as clene a mayden as any is in this worlde and as thow I had nevyr synned. Therfor, Lorde, I wolde I had a welle of teerys to constreyn the wyth that thu schuldist not takyn uttyr venjawns of mannys sowle for to partyn hym fro the wythowtyn ende, for it is an hard thyng to thynkyn that any erdly man schulde evyr do any synne wherthorw he schulde be departyd fro thi gloryows face wythowtyn ende.37

In this passage, Christ models the correct reinterpretation of Kempe’s life, the spiritual reading. He is as gracious to her as though she were ‘as clean a maiden as any in this world’. His forgiveness motivates her desire to ‘constrain’ his

36

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Lynn Staley, Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1996), I, 52, 2921–26. All references taken from this edition cite book, chapter and line numbers. 37

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judgement of humanity. She specifically rejects the finality of the Last Judgement, more than its consequences, repeating that souls should not be condemned ‘wythowtyn ende’. Kempe’s text is thus deeply invested in the concept of revision, such that even the judgement of souls should not be final. In fact, Kempe constructs the amendation of her own life around the reimagining of hagiographical scenes and passages from Gospel accounts of the crucifixion. Her devotional practice depends upon her re-readings of these tales in such a way as to create a web of reference and allusion that enfolds her own experience into her interpretation of texts. One evocative example is her use of the Virgin Mary’s life. In chapter 6, Christ advises Margery to think about the Virgin Mary. In response, she constructs a vision of Mary’s birth and adolescence that rewrites the Annunciation in striking ways: And than anoon sche saw Seynt Anne gret wyth chylde, and than sche preyd Seynt Anne to be hir mayden and hir servawnt. And anon ower Lady was born, and than sche besyde hir to take the chyld to hir and kepe it tyl it wer twelve yer of age wyth good mete and drynke, wyth fayr whyte clothys and whyte kerchys.38

In her vision, Margery dresses the Virgin in the same white clothing that Margery herself will adopt in token of her spiritual virginity. In the recounting of this detail, Kempe effectively creates a source for Margery’s white dress in imitation of the Virgin Mary. As the meditation continues, Margery herself performs the Annunciation: And than sche seyd to the blyssed chyld, ‘Lady, ye schal be the modyr of God’. The blyssed chyld answeryd and seyd, ‘I wold I wer worthy to be the handmayden of hir that schuld conseive the sone of God’.39

The Virgin’s response to Margery’s annunciation is echoed by Margery’s reaction when the Virgin returns as the Mother of God. Both women are immediately concerned with their worthiness: The blysful chyld passyd awey for a certeyn tyme, the creatur being stylle in contemplacyon, and sythen cam ageyn and seyd, ‘Dowtyr, now am I bekome the modyr of God’. And than the creatur fel down on hir kneys wyth gret reverens and gret wepyng and seyd, ‘I am not worthy, Lady, to do yow servyse’. ‘Yys, dowtyr’, sche seyde, ‘folwe thow me, thi servyse lykyth me wel’.40

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38

Ibid., I, 6, 406–09.

39

Ibid., I, 6, 410–12.

40

Ibid., I, 6, 413–18.

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Margery later experiences extended visions in which her own wish to serve as the handmaiden of Christ’s mother is fulfilled, notably in chapter 7, in which she assists Mary through the birth of Jesus, and chapters 79 to 81, in which she attends Mary through the events of the Passion. This set of passages in chapter 6 pulls together the episodes in which Margery acts as Mary’s handmaiden and constructs them as imitative of the Virgin herself. Margery’s efforts to re-edit the stories of Mary’s life are then paralleled by her efforts to re-edit her own life. The wife and mother of fourteen presents herself in a white habit, reconfiguring experience as innocence. The construction of comparisons and internal allusions exploits the familiar points of the text to create new meaning.

Figure 4. ‘Sketch of the Virgin’s Smock’, London, British Library, Additional M S 61823, fol. 115 r. Mid-fifteenth century. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

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The sixteenth-century annotations in red ink famously pick up on the possibilities of this new meaning in the drawing of the Virgin’s smock on fol. 115r (Figure 4). Kempe offers a quick description of Margery’s arrival in Aachen: ‘And so thei abedyn ther togedyr ten er ellys eleven days for to seen owr Ladys smokke and other holy reliqwiis whech wer schewyd on Seynt Margaretys Day’.41 The red-ink annotator has drawn a lady’s dress in the margin and bracketed the lines quoted above. The drawing is specifically prompted by the text’s repeated interest in the clothing of virginity, but the red-ink annotator contributes to the continuity of the theme by portraying the Virgin’s smock in blank outline, as if it is a white dress. He thereby evokes both Kempe’s earlier description of the Virgin’s clothing and Margery’s own contested white dress — a connection not made explicit by the body of the text. The drawing of the Virgin’s smock is an excellent example of the way in which marginal annotations can reshape the text by creating new parallels or internal allusions like those massaged into her sources by Kempe. The annotations also function, through their sheer physical concentration, to realign the climaxes of the text. The set of annotations in the Mount Grace manuscript does more to reshape the text by emphasis than has perhaps been recognized before. Meech’s still-standard description of the manuscript perceives the distribution and character of the annotations as uniform throughout the manuscript: ‘The marginal and interlinear linings [...] are distributed fairly evenly throughout the one hundred and twenty-three folios [...] Furthermore, [...] the nature of the annotations is quite constant’.42 While marginalia do appear on nearly every page, when considered by manuscript opening, that is, by each pair of facing pages, as one actually experiences them when navigating through the book, there is significant variation in the distribution of notae. Using Kelly Parson’s catalogue of the annotations,43 I have charted the number of notations per opening. The average number of annotations per opening is 2.9, but there are four significant spikes with eight or nine annotations each, as indicated in the chart below (Table 1):

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41

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, II, 7, 415–17.

42

Meech, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxvi.

43

Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator’, pp. 166–216.

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Table 1. Showing Annotations per Manuscript Opening in Additional M S 61823.

These are at the openings that pair fol. 25v with 26r, 77v with 78r, 78v with 79r , and 88v with 89r. There are nine second-order concentrations of six to seven marginalia, and a slightly larger number of third-order spikes at five marginalia per opening — but the four spikes at eight or nine notations make a striking impression to a reader leafing through a manuscript that is otherwise largely undecorated. These excerpts are highlighted by the annotator’s work in a way that shifts the emphasis of Kempe’s text. All four passages explore the spiritual aspects of Margery’s devotional practice, and the relationship between her spiritual devotion and physical discipline. The first of the points of high concentration on fols 25v and 26r, occurs at Christ’s promise that Margery will dance in Heaven with the Saints. An interlinear notation edits the passage so that the dancing will be ‘ghostly’, while another annotation notes the emotion of the moment, translating into Latin Christ’s description of Margery as his singular lover. The second spike, at fol. 77v, highlights another of Christ’s visitations, in which he thanks her for thinking of him so often, and recounts St Paul’s promise to Margery that she will experience grace in Heaven in return for her worldly shame. At fol. 78v, Jesus directs Margery to cease fasting because he prefers her

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‘ghostly labours.’ Here annotations again note in Latin the love relationship between Margery and Christ. At fols 88v and 89r, Margery prays for her crying to cease, but Jesus refuses to grant her prayer, explaining the value of crying as a spiritual discipline, and as a submission to divine power. The highlighted passages all have two things in common. First, they are dominated by the words of Christ (as opposed to Margery’s own tales or Kempe’s narration). Second, they emphasize the spiritual aspects of Margery’s experience, sometimes over the physical demonstrations of her devotion. Both of these elements have been noted as characteristics of Wynkyn de Worde’s excerpted version of the book in print.44 The second aspect of this reading remained consistent in Pepwell’s reprinting of the extracts, making it a durable piece of the sixteenth-century reception of Kempe’s work in both manuscript and print. Jennifer Summit has demonstrated that Pepwell’s anthology contextualized the extracts with works of central importance to a sixteenthcentury program of lay devotion that downplayed physical disciplines. Summit writes: The indulgence promoted in Pepwell’s representation of Margery Kempe seems calculated to appeal to a new devotional reader who seeks the benefits of indulgence without having to undergo the physical disciplines or actual pilgrimages that might have been expected of him or her at an earlier time.45

One of the advantages of such a program is that it is practicable by a wider, more general readership than the full manuscript version of the book ever seems to have enjoyed. I am not the first to argue a kinship between the manuscript annotator and the print compiler. Lynn Staley argues that ‘like Wynkyn de Worde’s distillation of Kempe’s flood of language into quartos, the wielder of the red ink attempts to impose order (or genre) on a narrative that tests our abilities to respond to what appears amorphous and, hence, threatens to become chaotic’.46 I feel this reading should be qualified, however, by noting that Kempe’s own language also

44

For the predominance of Christ’s voice in the printing, see Sue Ellen Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and Wynkyn De Worde’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1987 / Exeter Symposium IV , ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 27–46, esp. p. 29. Holbrook also notes the emphasis on a private, mystical mode, and the ‘repression of enthusiasm’, at pp. 38, 42. 45 Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 133. 46

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Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, p. 98.

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constitutes a controlled attempt to carve a life story out of a lifetime of reading. Kempe was an equal participant in the same process. The compiler and annotator may even have learned something from her. The red-ink annotator and the compiler of de Worde’s extracts, then, were not as different from each other as has been generally argued. The essential difference in these two early editions of Kempe’s text is that the manuscript remains rooted in a specific community of readers at Mount Grace, while the printing excises local allusions, even in the main body of the text. A number of the manuscript annotations famously seek to recontextualize Margery’s life with examples from members of the Mount Grace community who would have been known to the readers of the manuscript. For instance, at fol. 14v, there is the comment, ‘R. Medlay vicar was so wont to say’, and in response to a description of Margery’s roaring and crying, the annotator recalls, ‘so dyd Prior Norton in hys excess’. Hence, if we can think of the annotated manuscript as an edition, it is admittedly an edition with the smallest possible run and for an anticipated readership that was actually well known to the editor. By contrast, the printing of A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon is best understood within the context of de Worde’s attempts to tap a wider audience (and market) for devotional literature. III.

On Fleet Street

The turn of the fifteenth century was a watershed for de Worde’s printing business. In 1500 he moved from Caxton’s old house near Westminster Abbey to a new shop on Fleet Street, where he began to produce smaller, cheaper books.47 Bennett argues that ‘during the last decade of the fifteenth century de Worde and Pynson carried on the heritage which Caxton had left them in so far as they were capable’, but by 1500 de Worde understood that ‘Caxton’s imposing

47

See Henry Robert Plomer, Wynkyn De Worde & His Contemporaries from the Death of Caxton to 1535; a Chapter in English Printing (London: Grafton, 1925), pp. 65–69. See also H. S. Bennett, English Books & Readers, 1475 to 1557, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 186–87. N. F. Blake dissents, arguing that there was little change in de Worde’s output: ‘W ynkyn De Worde: The Later Years’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1972), 128–38 (p. 128). But Plomer’s remarks on the ephemeral state of the evidence for chap-book publications (Wynkyn De Worde, p. 66), like the excerpts from Kempe’s book mediate Blake’s objections, and Bennett’s handlist of de Worde’s extant publications supports Plomer’s argument for an output of cheaper quarto volumes (English Books & Readers, pp. 239–76).

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series of works were beyond him in every way’.48 De Worde lacked either the same access to or the same interest in aristocratic patronage that had partially supported, economically and morally, much of Caxton’s output.49 It is widely argued that de Worde also lacked Caxton’s literary skills as an editor and translator.50 Bennett describes de Worde’s course of action both in terms of a new format and a new readership: A series of experiments during the first few years of the sixteenth century showed him how to proceed, and determined the main lines of his output for the next thirty years. Briefly it was to give the public a variety of books on subjects known to have a popular appeal — religious and homiletic, practical and instructional — and to issue these in easily handled volumes likely to attract readers who would recoil from large and expensive volumes. These comparatively small books, generally in quarto form and seldom exceeding a hundred pages, met a real need. A few pence bought a small-sized book.51

It is to this group of books that A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon belongs. With only seven pages of text and one full-page woodcut, it makes a very small book in the vein of de Worde’s ephemera, much of which has survived only in fragments. Plomer’s description of de Worde’s lighter publications in the sixteenth century suggests that the survival of the only extant copy of A shorte treatyse was exceptionally lucky: ‘Many of the poetical satires, romances, and chap-books that came from his press are only known from fragments rescued from old bindings, and we cannot even guess at the number that have perished’.52

48

Bennett, English Books & Readers, p. 186.

49

Bennett makes both arguments: English Books & Readers, pp. 41–50, 185–93. For Caxton’s connections at court, see George Duncan Painter, William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biography of England’s First Printer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), pp. 108–20. 50

See James Moran, Wynkyn De Worde, Father of Fleet Street, 2nd edn (London: Wynkyn de W orde Society, 1976), p. 48; Bennett, English Books & Readers, pp. 182, 185–86. De W orde’s lack of literary training is often cited as evidence that he could not have prepared the extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe himself; see Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and Wynkyn De Worde’, p. 40, and Lochrie, Margery Kempe, p. 222. Blake is more optimistic, allowing that ‘the extracts are brief and may have been compiled by Wynkyn himself’: ‘Wynkyn De Worde’, p. 128. 51 52

Bennett, English Books & Readers, p. 186.

Plomer, Wynkyn De Worde, p. 66. See also Bennett, English Books & Readers, p. 182. He cites an example of a fragment from the late fifteenth century.

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The contrast with de Worde’s output in the previous decade is made clear by a quick comparison with the only other vernacular mystical work previously printed by de Worde. This was Walter Hilton’s Scala perfectionis and Mixed Life [STC 14042], printed in 1494. It was a folio of 298 pages, a good-sized book, though somewhat below the average for the decade before 1500, which Bennett reports was 360 pages per volume.53 The edition of Hilton’s works is accompanied by a verse envoy in praise and service of de Worde’s patroness: The kyngis moder of excellent bounte Henry the seuenth that Ihesu hym preserue This myghty pryncesse hath commaunded me Temprynt this boke her grace for to deserue.54

Based on the evidence of the envoy, Keiser suggests that de Worde ‘undertook the printing of Scala with some assurance that he was incurring little financial risk’.55 It is a volume in the tradition of Caxton’s aristocratically backed folios, which presented well-known masterworks under the patronage of well-known nobles in a form much like that of a manuscript book.56 In Keiser’s words, ‘among its likely buyers, the clergy would need no introduction, and for the laity, if any were unfamiliar with the work, the patronage of the pious Lady Margaret would be sufficient advertisement’.57 There is a great deal of evidence that the Scala perfectionis was already being read in London. Surviving manuscripts demonstrate its circulation between Syon Abbey and the charterhouses at Sheen and London, and the text was included in two common profit books used by the London merchant class.58 Sargent’s observation that three of the four surviving 1494 prints belonged to inmates of Syon, where there

53

His largest folio, printed in 1495, ran to 956 pages. This was Bartholomeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum [STC 1536]; see Bennett, English Books & Readers, p. 183. 54

As quoted in Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers’, p. 11. The page is reproduced with the envoy in Moran, Wynkyn De Worde, p. 15. 55

Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers’, p. 11.

56

De Worde reprinted Scala in 1525, but then it was re-set in a quarto format. See the ‘Handlist of de W orde’s Publications’, in Bennett, English Books & Readers, p. 254. De Worde also apparently reprinted Julian Notary’s 1507 edition, [STC 14043] in 1519 [STC 14043.1], but I have not been able to determine its format, which Bennett does not list.

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57

Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers’, p. 13.

58

Ibid., pp. 12–13.

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were already manuscripts in circulation, further suggests that the manuscript and the printed book were used in similar venues for similar reading practices.59 The production of a text such as A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon implies a completely different readership and reading practice. In A shorte treatyse, there is neither financial need for a patron nor space for an envoy to recognize one. The excerpts are presented in a succinct way that implies the self-evidence of their value. The text opens with an incipit that treats The Book of Margery Kempe as a source for direct teachings from Christ: ‘Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste / or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lynn’.60 As Holbrook’s analysis shows, the content of the extracts actually bears out this promise, as the majority of the direct speech quoted is from Christ rather than from Margery. Holbrook writes, ‘as the incipit announces in the phrase “taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste”, the treatise makes the voice of Christ dominate: eighteen per cent of the words come from the woman as direct or indirect speech; twenty-two per cent are in the voice of the narrator; and sixty per cent are uttered directly by Christ’.61 The process implicitly approves Margery’s Book as a legitimate source of Christ’s words and Margery as a legitimate mystic. It is often the case that de Worde’s printing is read by modern critics as a silencing of the Margery we know from the complete manuscript.62 But in the midst of our recognition of how much was lost in the selective reduction of the manuscript into twenty-eight short passages, it is important to acknowledge that the presumable purpose of the editing was not to reduce Kempe’s influence or exposure but to increase it.

59

Michael G. Sargent, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection: The London Manuscript Group Reconsidered’, Medium Aevum, 52 (1983), 189–216 (pp. 206–07). 60 sig. ai. Quotations are taken from the scans of the Cambridge University Library copy of A short treatyse [STC 14924], available through Early English Books Online, and crosschecked with the transcription in the Early English Text Society edition, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, pp. 353–57. I cite the page from the Meech and Allen edition and the extract number assigned by Worde. I have reproduced spelling and punctuation but, following the practice of Meech and Allen, indicate expanded abbreviations with italics. 61

Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and W ynkyn De W orde’, p. 29. Voaden argues that this predominance of Christ’s voice in the extracts, along with the wording of the incipit, diminishes Kempe’s claims to authorship of the Book: God’s Words, Women’s Voices, p. 149. If so, it is because, in the extracted text, Kempe’s authorship is replaced by a higher claim to authority, that is, God, who spoke directly to her; that Margery also wrote a book becomes less important. 62

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A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon accomplishes a kind of apotheosis to universality for The Book of Margery Kempe. The sublimation of as much detail and tension as possible leaves behind a sourcebook of accessible principles and examples from the complete narrative. In its final form, the text has more in common with the printed anthologies of proverbs than with the only previous printing of a vernacular mystic, de Worde’s preparation of the complete Scala perfectionis.63 Keiser aptly describes the change in genre in economic terms: The taste of the compendious may have contributed to a decision that printing an inexpensive quarto pamphlet offering a collection of extracts, taken out of their context, was more economically sound than a large and costly volume containing all of Margerie’s ample and generously detailed narrative of her life. The Boke of Margerie Kempe has become, so to speak, the Dicts and Sayings of Christ to Margerie Kempe.64

Collections of aphorisms were a recognized genre early on in the history of English printing. Major examples from Caxton’s output include two translations by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. These were The morale prouerbes of Christyne [STC 7273, 1478] and The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres [STC 6826, 1477]. A crucial difference between these early printings and A shorte treatyse is that Caxton’s printings are presented under the patronage of Earl Rivers, who also translated both texts. Jennifer Summit has demonstrated the extent to which Caxton’s verse envoy to The morale prouerbes of Christyne ‘displaces authority from the female author to the figure of the male patron’.65 Summit describes this phenomenon in terms of a new relationship between text and reader that slights the author: [...] by redirecting the focus away from Christine de Pizan, he sends the text to Woodville instead and thereby establishes the text’s value within a circuit of exchange that will extend from patron and printer to a broader community of readers of the printed book.66

63

For a history of the printing of mystical works in English, see Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers’, pp. 9–26. 64

Ibid., p. 17.

65

Summit, Lost Property, p. 87.

66

As Summit notes, however, the earlier manuscript translations of the work did not credit Christine as author at all. In terms of a context for feminist literary history it is also important to acknowledge that such authorities as Socrates receive the same treatment from Caxton in The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres. Caxton’s epilogue there similarly constructs Rivers as the organizing principle of the text, to the extent that Caxton recounts how the ‘very affeccyon, love and good wylle’ that the Earl ‘hath unto alle ladyes and gentylwomen’ prevented him

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In the early years of the sixteenth century, Wynkyn de Worde broke out of this mold. The only prayers in A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon are spoken by Margery. The colophon uses her name as a synecdoche for the text: ‘Here endeth a shorte treatyse called Margerie kempe de Lynn. Enprynted in fletestrete by Wynkyn de Worde’. Unlike Caxton’s Christine de Pisan, Wynkyn de Worde’s Kempe is named as the source of the text, without a patron. The use of Kempe’s name in this way, however, does not require that she already be known to the anticipated audience for the pamphlet. The printing of the extracts is often suggested as evidence that Kempe’s name had ‘a certain cachet’ with the London public that would ensure the sale of the eight-page quarto pamphlet,67 but there is nothing in the text itself or in the surviving historical record to corroborate this theory. Rather, the text is carefully constructed to sell itself by defining Kempe internally. Holbrook outlines the evidence for the value of Kempe’s reputation to the marketability of de Worde’s printing in the following way: The prominence given in the BMK to St Bridget, founding saint of Syon, and Bridget’s influence on Kempe herself, Kempe’s use of Rolle, Bonaventure and other mystics favoured by Carthusians and Bridgettines, and the presence of the Salthouse manuscript in the Charterhouse of Mount Grace by the later fifteenth century are among the circumstantial details suggesting that even sixty-some years after her visit to ‘the chirch at Schene’ (identified by the red annotator as ‘Syon’) [...] the inhabitants and friends of Syon, as well as other readers, would know of Margery Kempe and her book.68

There are two things notable about the state of the evidence for sixteenthcentury awareness of Margery Kempe’s Book. The first is that it centres, not on the growing body of lay readers in the metropolitan area, but on a monastic and conventual memory of the text and the woman herself. The second is that the relevance of the book to that memory is largely predicated on its interaction with

from translating a passage by Socrates that is critical of women (see Lost Property, p. 85). Though Caxton himself supplies the passage in his epilogue, he concludes with a prayer for and in praise of his patron that re-focuses the text’s reason for being on its transmission from patron to printer: ‘Humbly requyryng and besechyng my sayd lord to take no displaysir on me so presumyng but to pardon where as he shal fynde faulte and that it plese hym to take the labour of thenpryntyng in gre & thanke whiche gladly have don my dyligence in thaccomplysshyng of his desire and commandement [...]’ (transcribed from Early English Books Online (EEBO), image 75 at [accessed 23 October 2007]).

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67

Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers’, p. 24.

68

Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and Wynkyn De Worde’, p. 42.

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other mystical texts. These are precisely the things missing from de Worde’s printing. The excerpts from the Book are edited so that they promote Kempe’s authority as a mystic without recourse to the contexts — historical, social, and textual — that are so important to the full narrative in its manuscript form. De Worde’s edition is a text packaged for readers who may not know about whom they are reading and who do not need to know beforehand because the text is self-sufficient. The excision of the references to a culture of vernacular devotional literature, references to which are so prominent in the full narrative, makes the excerpts of The Book of Margery Kempe fully accessible to a readership outside Margery’s community. Whoever prepared the excerpts made assumptions very different from those made by Kempe about who would be reading Margery’s story. The new readership in print need not have been familiar with the same set of exempla or traditions of tale-telling. They need not have been active members of a reading community like the English laypeople Margery encountered in person or like the monks of Mount Grace; they need only to have read passively, in the sense that the printed version presented itself to the reader as a finished product. It is seemingly complete and readily understandable without any prerequisite knowledge or contribution from the reader. The excerpts accomplish this through a number of tactics. Perhaps most important is that the printed version polishes away the tensions between Margery and her contemporaries. It is particularly conspicuous that the compiler has edited out all evidence that Margery’s contemporaries had difficulty accepting her as a visionary. For instance, the compiler excised six lines between extracts 1 and 2, in which Jesus comforts Margery that no fire will burn her, no water drown her, nor wind harm her: ‘thow al the worlde be agens the, drede the not, for thei cun no skyl of the’.69 The sense that the world might be against Margery is anathema to the text in its form as A shorte treatyse, which seeks to make the narrative unobjectionable and easy to accept. Extract 12 is presented as just such an accessible vignette, illustrating Margery’s ability to empathize with Christ through ordinary experience: Whan she sawe the crucyfyxe, or yf she sawe a man had a wounde or a best. Or yf a man bete a childe afore her, or smote an hors, or an other beste wyth a whype, yf she myght se it or here it. She thought she sawe our lorde beten or wounded lyke as she sawe in the man or in the beste.70

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69

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, I, 14, 687–88.

70

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, pp. 354–55.

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In the manuscript, this sentence is preceded by a description of how thoughts of the Passion caused crying in her ‘so lowde and so wondyrful that it made the pepyl astoynd’ and that ‘therfor sufferyd sche mych despyte and mech reprefe’.71 Excising the contemporary reception leaves the passage open for only one interpretation, the admiration of Margery’s exemplary mindfulness of the suffering of Christ, particularly without the inclusion of Margery’s bodily response. In the full manuscript, readers must sift through competing reactions in order to side with Margery; in the print version, the incident is so abstracted that it comes already applicable to the general experience of readers in a particularly directed way. What remains is still a core value of Kempe’s complete text, the efficacy of exemplarity in creating sympathy and effecting change.72 But by cutting out the context of a contemporary reception, the compiler heightens the extract’s similarity to a universal exemplum. The sympathetic impulse felt by Kempe in the extract is not only evidence of her own devoutness, but is a form of devotion that is accessible to everyone. In this way, the extracts are edited so that they demonstrate Kempe’s legitimacy as a devout woman and the relevance of her text to a readership more general than the one it found among the Carthusians. There is a similar argument to be made for the recasting of extract 20, which consists of Jesus reassuring Margery that the undertaking of a pilgrimage is not necessary for divine pardon. The extract once again privileges thought and prayer over ‘bodily presence’ and excises Margery’s attempts to win approval from fellow laypeople, leaving only Christ’s private promise that she has earned his approval. The full extract reads as follows: Doughters as oftentymes as thu sayest or thynkest worshypped be all the holy places in Iherusalem where cryst suffre bytter payne & passyn in thou shalt haue haue [sic] the same pardon as yf thu were wyth thy bodely presence, both to thy selfe & to al tho that thou wylt gyve to.73

71

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, I, 28, 1581–84.

72

Lochrie notes that the proem sets up the Book itself as an example: ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’, pp. 36–37. 73

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, pp. 356, Extract 20. The plural in the first line is an interesting typographical error. The verbs remain singular, but it is tempting to read the plural address as a mistake encouraged by the form of the text, which I have been arguing claims the relevance of Christ’s sayings to more than just Margery herself. The mistake is corrected in Pepwell’s printing, not only with a change back to the manuscript’s singular, but with the addition of the tag, ‘he said’, reinforcing the extract’s place in a particular exchange, rather than as a general benediction.

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While the extract is a direct quotation from the manuscript, it loses much of its original force when taken out of context. In the manuscript context, Christ gives this assurance to Margery while she is on a pilgrimage. The chapter from which this extract is taken begins when Margery’s fellow pilgrims reject her company, and Christ requires her to follow them without their permission: An other tyme this creaturys felawshep wold gon to Flod of Iurdon and wold not letyn hir gon wyth hem. Than this creatur preyd owyr Lord that sche myth gon wyth hem, and he bad that sche schuld go wyth hem whethyr thei wold er not. And than sche went forth be the grace of God and askyd hem no leue.74

Her own fellowship persist in ignoring her throughout the trip from the River Jordan to Mount Quarentyne, to Bethany, and back to Jerusalem, though she is welcomed by the Saracens and the friars of the Temple: ‘and sche fond alle pepyl good onto hir and gentyl saf only hir owyn cuntremen’.75 It is only after she refuses the hospitality of the friars in order to follow her own group that Jesus grants her the pardon quoted in the extract. It comes as a reward for her persistence with the pilgrimage she has completed, not as a substitute for pilgrimage. Similarly, in the manuscript she becomes worthy of the power given her to grant pardons to others only by first suffering her party’s lack of tolerance. The opposition she finds in others allows her to demonstrate her commitment to God’s commands. After Margery receives the pardon quoted in the extract, her fellowship abandons her again, this time leaving her alone in Venice. She prays to God: ‘yyf thu bryng me to Rome in safté, I schal weryn white clothys, thow alle the world schuld wondyr on me, for thi lofe’.76 When the printing takes the excerpt out of context, the pardon seems to excuse Margery from the pilgrimage and from the struggle to minister to fellow laypeople through her public observances, which, in the full manuscript version, actually earn her the pardon in the first place. The printed extract reads as if Margery’s ministry to laypeople will occur through their reading of the text — not through contact with her in person. The extract in which the pardon is given by Christ is immediately followed by another excerpt in de Worde’s print, in which the pardon is extended to all who believe that God loves Margery: ‘The same pardon that was graunted the afore tyme. It was confermed [...], that is to say, playne remyssyon, & it is not only

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74

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, I, 30, 1710–13.

75

Ibid., I, 30, 1743.

76

Ibid., I, 30, 1758–59.

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graunted to the, but also to all tho that beleue, & to all tho that shall beleue vnto the worldes ende, that god loueth the’.77 In the manuscript, these words are spoken to Margery by the Virgin Mary in a vision in chapter 73. Margery and the Apostles witness the death of the Virgin. Margery cries out and weeps so loudly that the Apostles command her to stop. She protests that her emotions are, appropriately, too strong for her not to weep. She asks the Virgin to pray for her, and Mary responds with the passage used in the printed excerpts. So Mary’s extension of the pardon, like its initial offering by Christ, occurs after Margery is rejected by fellow worshippers. Where the manuscript bases Margery’s blessedness partly on the persecution she suffers at the hands of her peers, the extracts simply form a community of believers around the authority of the text. ‘All those that shall believe unto the world’s end’ are future readers. The indulgence accessible to Kempe through thinking about Jerusalem is accessible to all through reading Kempe’s text in print. The printed extracts fully reconstruct the basis of Margery’s legitimacy as a devout woman by editing out in this way the criticism she receives from her peers.78 Only Christ’s reception of Kempe remains within the text as a gauge of her behaviour, and it is invariably favourable. Beckwith writes that, ‘for authority to be thoroughly convincing it must be univocal, and its modes of mediation must be invisible; otherwise it might appear as partially constructed, represented and not self-evidently pre-existent’.79 The compiler of the extracts seems to have had a similar understanding, limiting the voices in the extracts to Margery’s and Christ’s, and then demonstrating the extent to which the two sound in unison.

77

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, p. 356, Extract 21. 78

Voaden similarly suggests that the treatise increases Margery’s legitimacy through the excision of the criticism that Margery receives from others. My point differs slightly from hers, however, in the way that such criticism functions in the full narrative. Voaden writes that ‘the revilement discourse undermines the credibility of Margery’s construction within the discourse of discretio spirituum. The virtual elimination of the revilement discourse in the treatise resolves the conflict of discourses and results in the consistent construction of M argery as a holy woman’ (God’s Words, Women’s Voices, pp. 147–48). I am interested more broadly in how the suffering caused by that negative reception drives the sense of her worthiness in the full narrative. The conflict between discourses in Margery’s full book is equivalent to the violence in the martyrology of an orthodox saint. 79

Sarah Beckwith, ‘Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in the Book of Margery Kempe’, Exemplaria, 4 (1992), 172–99 (p. 188).

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Gone is what Beckwith calls the ‘relational, dialogic account of self-making’80 in the full manuscript, but the compiler has reconstructed from it a tight, univocal treatise that should be recognized for its recasting of the book as authoritative discourse. The loss of a context of reception in the extracts belongs more generally to what Holbrook has called a ‘loss of particularity’ in the printing.81 The extractor has consistently edited and in some cases rewritten the excerpts so that details of time and place are left out. For instance, extract 22 forms an axiom for interpreting Margery’s state of mind in the printing: ‘That day that she suffred noo trybulacyon for oure lordes sake she was not mery ne gladde, as that daye whan she suffred trybulacyon’.82 In the manuscript, the sentence is not a generally applicable description of Margery’s moods at all. It is the preamble to her interrogation at York by a number of clerks. A description of the visit following that passage shows that Margery’s feelings toward her mixed experience in the community are left completely unresolved: And in that tyme many good men and women preyd hir to mete and madyn hir ryth good cher and weryn ryth glad to heryn hyr dalyawns, hauyng gret merueyle of hir speche for it was fruteful. And also sche had many enmyis whech slawndryd hir, scornyd hir, and despysed hir.83

Her fruitful speech with well-wishers has an explicit benefit that is lacking in the description of her conflicts with the clerks of this chapter. While there is some celebration of her courage in the face of interrogation, her final confrontation in the chapter ends with the sudden disappearance of the accusing priest: ‘Whan he had long jangelyd wyth hir, he went prevyly er sche was war, that sche wist not wher he becam’.84 The lack of resolution challenges the soundness of the axiom in the manuscript context. In the manuscript, it is not clear that she really does feel merrier in her tribulations, though it is clear that she wishes to. The printed extracts once again offer only the intended resolution as a goal that can be admired and shared by readers.

80

Ibid., p. 176.

81

Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and Wynkyn De Worde’, p. 33.

82

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, p. 357, Extract 22.

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83

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, I, 50, 2826–29.

84

Ibid., I, 50, 2839–40.

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In this way the extracts function on a proverbial level that makes them universally applicable without adaptation. In the printing, extract 26 rewrites the opening sentence so that it substitutes the specifics of her conflict with a preaching friar for the generic premise, ‘Whan she was in grete trouble’.85 Extract 23 preserves only the single-sentence punchline of Margery’s exchange with another clerk: ‘Pacyence is more worthe than myracles doyng’.86 Here the extract takes on the actual form of an aphorism. Similarly, in extract 10, reported speech in the manuscript is reworked so that it functions as a prayer that stands alone, beginning: ‘Dere lorde I praye the late me neuer have other Ioye in erthe but mournynge & wepynge for thy loue’.87 Outside the context of Margery’s struggle to accept and find acceptance for her violent crying, it becomes a prayer for Christian obedience and empathy that might be repeated by any reader. Each of the modifications noted above was made with the readership of the treatise in mind. Like Margery herself, the compiler of the extracts reshaped his source-text according to his audience. The reader remained at the centre of the activity that produced the treatise, though the imagined reader of the printed version was different from the reader of the manuscript. The anticipated reader of the treatise in print might have been less aware of the vernacular mystical and devotional texts that crowd the margins of the manuscript, both metaphorically, in the sense of a cultural background, and literally, in the sense of the annotations made by monastic readers. A shorte treatyse is itself a reading of the full manuscript narrative. But who might have been its original reader? Who prepared the extracts for Wynkyn de Worde’s press and thus became Margery Kempe’s first print editor? IV.

The Businessman and the Monk

The best context in which to understand both the printing and the preparation of the abstracts is within de Worde’s efforts to tap new markets for devotional texts. Edwards and Meale describe the impact of de Worde’s initiative: It is difficult to quantify de Worde’s influence over the market for religious books. If, however, one leaves aside indulgences and service books, Pynson appears to have

85

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, p. 357, Extract 26.

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86

Ibid., p. 357, Extract 23.

87

Ibid., p. 354, Extract 10.

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Chapter 2 produced fewer than fifty works that fall into this category. De Worde printed about a hundred and sixty. The ratios in relation to total surviving output are between less than ten per cent and nearly twenty per cent, respectively. This suggests a sustained effort by de Worde to create new commercial possibilities out of this complex of personal and institutional connections.88

The personal and institutional connections to which they refer are dominated by links to the community at Syon Abbey, the same community that looms large in the theory of a long conventual memory of Kempe and her text.89 Syon Abbey is known to have sponsored a high volume of printings, though the motives on the part of both the printers and the monastery are not entirely clear. Christopher de Hamel writes that There were far more books printed for Syon than for any other English monastery. It is not clear if the initiative came from Syon, anxious to have devotional texts printed either for spiritual or fund-raising motives, or whether it came from the printers, for whom a Syon text and imprimatur was of commercial advantage. It was probably a bit of each.90

Lochrie first suggested that Syon Abbey might have played a role in de Worde’s printing of the treatise, writing: ‘It is conceivable that this monastery, which was familiar with her book, might have encouraged de Worde to print the extracts for the education of laypeople’.91 Syon-sponsored printings seem to have been aimed both at members of the house and, in some cases, at a larger lay audience, forming a link between the kind of reading the nuns were encouraged to undertake within the house, and the kind of reading laypeople might be able to

88

A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale, ‘The Marketing of Printed Books in Late Medieval England’, The Library, 15 (1993), 95–124 (p. 117). 89

For a background of the history and intellectual milieu at Syon, see V. Gillespie’s introduction to the modern edition of the brethren’s library catalogue in Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, Volume 9: Syon Abbey with the Libraries of the Carthusians, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Ian Doyle (London: British Library in association with the British Academy, 2001), pp. xxix–lxv. See also Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 153–206; Veronica Lawrence, ‘The Role of the Monasteries of Syon and Sheen in the Production, Ownership, and Circulation of Mystical Literature in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Mystical Tradition and the Carthusians, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 130 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1995), pp. 101–15. 90

Christopher De Hamel, Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns and Their Peregrinations after the Reformation: An Essay (London: Roxburghe Club, 1991), p. 101. 91

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Lochrie, Margery Kempe, p. 222.

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attempt with the help of appropriately edited didactic and devotional texts in English.92 Locating de Worde’s printing of extracts from Margery Kempe’s book within this trend helps us to think in specific ways about how the experience of reading Kempe changes as the text migrates from manuscript to print, between the monasteries and the secular world in which it was originally composed. De Worde’s connections with Syon Abbey are well documented. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, de Worde printed several texts either by or for members of the community at Syon. As listed by Edwards and Meale, [t]hese include his 1494 edition of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, published at Margaret’s command; Thomas Betson’s Treatyse to Dyspose Men to be Vertuously Occupied ([1500], STC 1978); and various works by Symon Wynter, William Bonde, and Richard Whitford. In addition there is de Worde’s 1519 edition of The Orcherd of Syon (STC 4815), printed ‘at [the] grete coste’ of Richard Sutton, steward of Syon, one of his few works for which we have more than a suggestion of financial underwriting. Also, in 1525, de W orde printed sixty copies of The Image of Love (STC 21471.5), a work translated by his associate John Gough specifically for the Syon nuns, a hefty job lot that may have been more typical of his relations with the house.93

It is clear that de Worde was providing texts to the community at Syon: a number of extant copies of the Scale of Perfection bear marks of Syon ownership.94 It seems likely that a number of the copies de Worde printed of The Orcherd of Syon were destined for the nuns. The authorities were also aware of the connection between de Worde and Syon, and in one notable instance they intervened. In 1525, de Worde’s printing of The Ymage of Love was recalled by the Vicar-General for the Bishop of London on the charge that it contained heresy.

92 See J. T. Rhodes, ‘Religious Instruction at Syon in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana 35, 19, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1993), II, 151–69, esp. pp. 152, 157–59. Rhodes lists examples of texts that were originally meant for the nuns of Syon, but which, in some cases, intentionally ‘circulated beyond their cloister’ (The myrroure of oure lady, The orcharde of Syon, Whitford’s Dayly exercyse and experyence of dethe, and Bonde’s Deuote treatyse; see p. 152), as well as texts which were prepared with laypeople in mind (including Whitford’s Werke for housholders and Fewterer’s Myrrour or glasse of Christes passion; see pp. 152, 157). See also J. T. Rhodes, ‘Syon Abbey and Its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 11–25.

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93

Edwards and Meale, ‘The Marketing of Printed Books’, pp. 115–16.

94

See Sargent, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection’.

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We know from the record of de Worde’s appearance before the Vicar-General that he had sent sixty copies of the work directly to Syon.95 The extent to which the output of devotional texts from de Worde’s press flowed into monastic houses like Syon before and after the watershed year of 1500 complicates the notion of how a popular, secular market might look for de Worde. Mary Erler offers considerable evidence that reading material was shared, particularly by women, across the increasingly ‘permeable partition’ between laywomen and nuns, noting ‘it has been suggested, in fact, that laypersons [in the late fifteenth century] now took a place in the educational hierarchy similar to that which had long been occupied by nuns’.96 So, if de Worde were interested in obtaining devotional texts that would be appropriate, or permissible, for a wide readership, an ideal source might be a monk or priest who had previously prepared texts for nuns. Rebecca Krug argues that the nuns at Syon in particular played an ‘exemplary function’ for lay readers, especially among London’s ‘spiritual elite’.97 It was a role that perhaps could prove problematic. Krug also argues that The Ymage of Love was recalled in part because the sixty copies being read at Syon might be understood in lay minds as the equivalent of an official endorsement of the work, a position the bishop was not prepared to take.98 To the extent that de Worde could anticipate such difficulties, he might also have hoped to find texts that were carefully edited to authorize themselves and to resist misreading. In addition to the changes in physical format already discussed, the editorial moves made in A shorte treatyse seem to indicate preparation for just such a development, away from the reading

95

The record has been translated and published in Arthur W. Reed, ‘The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 15 (1917–19), 157–84 (pp. 163–64). See also Moran, Wynkyn De Worde, p. 41. For the suggestion that the Bishop’s recall of The Ymage of Love had to do with the Bishop’s fear of the influence that the example of the nuns at Syon might exercise over lay readers, see Krug, Reading Families, p. 205. Krug suggests this was a text that was not necessarily dangerous when read in the controlled environment of the monasteries, but that the authorities were unwilling to allow lay people to read. The members of the community at Syon had developed a sufficient reputation among laypeople as readers to be emulated, so that the nuns could not be allowed to read the work without opening it up to the awareness and approval of the lay reading public. 96

Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 8–9, 25.

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97

Krug, Reading Families, pp. 203–05.

98

Ibid., p. 205.

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of large folios shared in community contexts, to a wider, perhaps even disconnected, readership that only a cheaper booklet could reach. Most important for determining the origin of the extracted version of the Book of Margery Kempe is the evidence that Syon was also providing texts to de Worde. The year before de Worde printed A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon, he printed two texts prepared by priests at Syon, The lyfe of saint Ierom and A right profitable treatise. The lyf of saint Ierom [STC 14508] was ‘taken from’ the Legenda Aurea and other sources by Symon Wynter, at the request of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s aunt, the Duchess of Clarence, in the mid-fifteenth century.99 A right profitable treatyse was compiled and in places translated by Thomas Betson, who served as the librarian for the Syon brethren and, according to A. I. Doyle, ‘may have been ... partly responsible for the great growth and modernization of the collection’ in the early sixteenth century.100 From this position, Thomas Betson

99

Lyf of Saint Jerom (Westminster: de Worde, 1500). Full text can also be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. Wynter was a scribe and priest at Syon from 1423. He may have been there when Kempe made her visit in 1434. On Simon Wynter, see De Hamel, Syon Abbey, p. 60. His life of Jerome and his sermon on indulgences are the only works by Syon brethren to survive from the era before the printing press; see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic: Mystical Texts in the Library of Syon Abbey and the Spirituality of the Syon Brethren’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition, England, Ireland, and Wales: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 1999 / Exeter Symposium VI , ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1999), pp. 241–68 (p. 254). For a description of the extant manuscript, see Keiser, ‘Patronage and Piety’, pp. 32–46. For more on the relationship between Wynter and the Duchess, as described in the inscription of the manuscript, see Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 12, 112–13. 100

The full title appears as A ryght profytable treatyse. . . to dyspose men to be vertuously occupied [STC 1978]. See A. I. Doyle, ‘Thomas Betson of Syon Abbey’, The Library, 11 (1956), 115–18. The most comprehensive account of Betson’s activity as librarian can be found in Gillespie’s introduction to his edition of the library catalog: Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, Volume 9: Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie and Doyle, pp. xxiv–lxv, esp. pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, xlvi–li. A right profitable treatyse is undated. The STC conjectures a date of 1499, but Bennett (English Books & Readers, p. 302) postulates 1500, as does Moran, based on both the condition of the woodcut and the ‘state of the printer’s device’ (Wynkyn de Worde, p. 49). De Worde used the same woodcut of the crucifixion to illustrate A shorte treatyse, but he had inherited it from Caxton and used it so often that it would be unwise to draw conclusions about a connection between the texts on that basis (see Moran, Wynkyn de Worde, p. 49; the woodcut is reproduced as it appeared in Caxton’s Fifteen Oes in Painter, William Caxton, p. 185).

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could have supplied de Worde with both his own compilation and the early fifteenth-century Life of Ierom.101 Similarities in the construction of A right profitable treatyse and A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon suggest that Betson also could have prepared the extracts of The Book of Margery Kempe, which was, like Wynter’s Life of Ierom, another early fifteenth-century text thought to have been available at Syon. An exploration of these similarities will do more than suggest Thomas Betson as a new identity for the compiler of the extracts from Kempe’s book. It also reveals the relationship of manuscript reading practice in an enclosed community to de Worde’s experiment with smaller devotional booklets that might make texts available to wider audiences and in new ways. Thomas Betson’s work situates him at the heart of the early publishing initiative at Syon. The one work attributed to him, A right profitable treatyse, is recognized by Gillespie as ‘the first printed book with an irrefutable Syon provenance’.102 He was actively involved both in the instruction of the nuns and, at the same time, in the dissemination of devotional texts. A letter ‘of spiritual counsel’ survives in which he ‘tells the nuns that the writings he is sending are for common use in the community, but they should also be copied for other religious dwelling [sic] nearby’.103 Betson’s role as librarian ensures his access to, and awareness of, the texts that were available in the library of the brethren, and perhaps also to the books used by the nuns, as well as those available from the Carthusians at Sheen, just across the River Thames.104 As the custos librarie, 101

Betson would have had reason to take interest in Wynter’s Life of Ierom. Betson was also serving in the diaconate of Jerome at Syon, and A right profitable treatyse draws heavily on Jerome’s works: see Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic’, p. 260. 102

Ibid., p. 254.

103

The description of the letter is from Rhodes, ‘Religious Instruction at Syon’, p. 152. The letter survives as Durham, University Library, Cosin MS V.III.16. 104

The library catalogue is extant, with additions in Betson’s hand, as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College M S 142. See Doyle, ‘Thomas Betson’, pp. 116. The definitive edition is in Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, Volume 9: Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie and Doyle. The catalogue was also edited as Catalogue of the Library of Syon Monastery, Isleworth, ed. by Mary Bateson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898). Bateson’s introduction remains helpful, particularly in describing the erasures in the catalogue: ibid., pp. v–vi. The Book of Margery Kempe is not listed in the catalogue, but this does not mean that a copy was not available at Syon. It might have been a casualty of the erasures. In addition, Betson’s catalogue covers only the library of the brethren. No catalogue of the nuns’ books has survived, neither did the Carthusians at Sheen leave a record of their books; either source might have furnished Betson with a copy. For the frequency with which Carthusian texts appear in the catalogue of the Bridgettines, see Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic’, p. 261. The same article

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Betson would have been a likely person for de Worde to work with when in search of texts to print. I suggest that Betson began the initiative of Syonaffilliated printings by submitting three similar texts to de Worde: Wynter’s Life of Ierom, Betson’s own A right profitable treatyse, and the excerpts from Kempe’s book forming A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon, which he may have compiled himself.105 The three texts I suggest Betson supplied at roughly the same time all belong to the format of relatively small and unpretentious books already described above as de Worde’s experiments in the early days of his move to Fleet Street. None of the three texts identifies a dedicatee or patron in de Worde’s printing. In the case of the Life of Jerome, this is striking because there is an extant manuscript copy that dedicates the text to the Duchess of Clarence, ‘as hit is take of [th]e Legende aurea vnto [th]e hygh pryncesse Margarete duchesse of Clarence’ (fol. 5 r , as transcribed by Keiser).106 There is an inscription that calls upon the Duchess to distribute the text if it pleases her: ‘that hit sholde lyke your ladyship first to rede hit & to do copye hit for yoursilf, & syth to lete o[th]er rede hit & copye hit, who so wyll’ (fol. 5r, as transcribed by Keiser). In Male Authors, Female Readers, Bartlett interprets this inscription as a characterization of Margaret as ‘both reader and writer’ (p. 12). As such, the inscription encapsulates the close

emphasizes the role of the Carthusians in instructing the Bridgettine nuns, and in transmitting mystical texts, leaving the Bridgettines with the peripheral role of producing ‘ascetic adaptations’ that broaden the audience of their source text (p. 262). For more on the cooperation between Syon and Sheen, see Lawrence, ‘The Role of the Monasteries of Syon and Sheen’. 105

It is possible to speculate on how Betson might have obtained Kempe’s full text. Given the location of the only extant manuscript at the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace, the most likely trajectory would be that the text was transmitted among the Carthusians, and thus from Sheen to Syon. We know that there was an active correspondence between Mount Grace and the charter house of London on the subject of female mystics. For a description of an extant letter regarding Mechtild of Hackeborn, see Rosalynn Voaden, ‘The Company She Keeps’, in Prophets Abroad, ed. by Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), pp. 51–70, esp. p. 64. For the Carthusian interest in Kempe, see Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic’, pp. 246–47. 106

This is New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library MS 317. See Keiser, ‘Patronage and Piety’, pp. 32–33, 41–43. See also Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, p. 12.

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relationship between reading and writing in a manuscript culture.107 Every reader is a potential distributor, an advocate for the transmission of the text. However, de Worde’s experiments of the early sixteenth century are doing something different. In his version of the Life of Jerome, the table of contents begins like the inscription in Beinecke MS 317, but there is no mention of the Duchess of Clarence. There is no inscription or introduction. The printing press silently occupies the place of distributor and the text must provide its own recommendation. As we have already observed in the case of A short treatyse of contemplacyon, each of the other works possibly connected to Betson is headed with a titular paragraph that announces up front the text’s usefulness to readers and the authoritative source from which it comes. For the Life of Ierome, the emphasis is on sources: The fyrst chapitre is the lyf of saint ierom as it is take of legenda aurea The seconde is of his lyf also as saint austyn wryteth in hys pystill The thyrd is how saint Jerome apperid to sai[nt] Austin in grete ioye [...]108

The two treatises give source information but also spell out why the text might be useful. The full title of Betson’s known compilation is: Here begynneth a ryght profytable treatyse co[m]pendiously drawen out of many [and] dyvers wrytynges of holy men, to dyspose men to be vertuously occupyede in theyr myndes [and] prayers.109

The title is constructed to authorize itself as a ‘ryght profytable treatyse’ compiled from the works of ‘holy men’. De Worde’s printing of Kempe opens in a similarly self-descriptive manner:

107

An equally evocative reading of the inscription makes use of an analogy to modern printing practice. Keiser writes: ‘The duchess then is to act as a publisher, encouraging others to read the work and have their own copies made, either from her copy [...]or from the original by scribes within Syon Abbey’: ‘Patronage and Piety’, p. 41. The Duchess’s role as patroness of the manuscript copy is an analogue version of the role played, for instance, by her niece, M argaret Beaufort, in the printing of Scala perfectionis discussed above. The text is recommended by her patronage, and in such examples we can see the way in which early printed texts could seek to mimic, as closely as possible, the channels of authorization and distribution that were already in place in manuscript culture. 108

Life of Ierome [STC 14508], sig. a.i. See Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 109

A right profitable treatyse [STC 1978], sig. a.ii. See Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007].

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Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste or taken out of the boke of Margerie Kempe of lyn[n].110

The use of the word ‘treatyse’ in these paragraphs is idiosyncratic, given the nonnarrative collection of epigrammatical items to which it refers in each case. The sample citations in the MED imply more sustained narrative than is found in either of these examples. De Worde printed eight other volumes described as ‘treatises’ in their titles, but none of them quite share the form of these two, which are both short collections of discrete extracts set off by paraph marks.111 The idiosyncratic use of the word could suggest that the same person prepared both treatises for the press. The evidence that Betson compiled A right profitable treatyse comes in two forms. A colophon appears at the end, recognizing his work, and a version predating the print exists in a manuscript notebook. Doyle describes the relationship between the manuscript and print version as follows: The manuscript notebook at St John’s College, Cambridge, contains [...] English versions of the Lord’s Prayer, commandments, virtues, and other elements of faith (MS. E. 6 ff. 10 v–11v) with a rubric ‘Bi these thingis schal ech man & woman kun knowe god almyghty, Betson’, thus closely comparable in content and purpose and sometimes verbally identical with the parallel items in the printed Treatyse.112

Doyle notes that the sections of the treatise that are headed as if they are quotations from Jerome ‘are in fact quotations from that author and other spiritual counsels adapted for the needs of late medieval English nuns, like those of Syon’.113 The colophon in the printed edition seems to be geared toward those within or entering the religious orders:

110

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, p. 353.

111

These are Treatyse agaynst Pestelence [STC 4592], Treatise upon the Pater Noster [STC 10510.1], A treatyse of Joseph of Arimathy [STC 14806], A lytell treatyse called Alcaron [STC 15084], This treatise is of love [STC 24234], Treatyse of a galaunt [STC 24240], Treatyse of fysshynge with an angle [STC 24243], and A lytell treatyse for to lerne Englysshe & Frensshe [STC 24866]. STC 3318 is known as the Treatise of Hunting, but the only extant copy is a fragment with the first page missing.

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112

Doyle, ‘Thomas Betson’, p. 116.

113

Ibid., p. 117.

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Chapter 2 Praye for your broder Thomas Betson which for your soules th[a]t be come or shall come in to relygyon drewe and made the contentes of this lytell quayer & exhortacion. necessary & nedefull to them that ben come & shall come to relygyon.114

Yet, there is evidence elsewhere that, like A shorte treatyse of contemplation, A right profitable treatyse was adapted for a more general audience like that envisioned by the manuscript rubric, ‘each man and woman.’ In its final form, the treatise is pitched toward a dual audience, within the house and without it. The more general meaning of religion, as a system of faith and worship, rather than a monastic order, had been current since the fourteenth century.115 The way in which the colophon repeats the phrase, ‘them that ben come and shall come to religion’, begs the question of what it meant to come to religion in the first place. In Betson’s adaptation of Jerome’s Epistola ad Eustochium references slide from the feminine ‘doughter’ to the third person plural, and to masculine pronouns in a way that, again, generalizes the applicability of the text, as in this extract, marked off with paraph signs in the text: Also reme[m]bre that ye must forsake your owne wyll & offre it up & gyve it to god & to them that shall be your souerayne & heed for ever more. Enforce eche one of you that shall come to religyon to passe an other in obedyence for than doubtles ye shall please god A true obedyencer that hath utterly fosaken his owne wyll / knowe not ony thynge harde to do th[a]t is com[m]aunded of theyr souerayne ne ony thynge unryghtfull.116

The text in practice bolsters the independence of the devout in and outside of the monastic orders, providing them with prayers and theological texts for personal use — but in theory the treatise advocates obedience as a safeguard against the will. The exchange of texts between Syon and de Worde’s press publicized parts of the Syon library in a way that brought religion, in the stricter sense, to the religious by its more general definition. The same record reporting that de Worde sent sixty copies of The Ymage of Love to Syon also tells us that he sold an equal number from his shop.117 The charge of heresy also reminds us why

114

Life of Ierome, sig. c.vv . See Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 115

The OED’s earliest citation is from Cursor Mundi, a1300.

116

Epistola ad Eustochium, sig. c.ii. See Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 117

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See Reed, ‘The Regulation of the Book Trade’.

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Betson might have so carefully edited both treatises so that they authorized themselves. A right profitable treatyse displays a number of the same interests and rhetorical strategies we have already observed in A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon. The extracts are introduced in a way that does not assume prior knowledge of the author, but rather builds a basis for credibility into the textual presentation. The first extract, for instance, is headed: ‘The famous doctour Johan gerson, Chau[n]celer of Parys / takyng his grou[n]de of holy scrypture. & accordynge with all other doctours sayth thus’ (sig. a.ii). In this extract, there is the same emphasis on purity of thought, rather than ritual practice, as discussed above in extract twenty of A shorte treatyse, regarding pilgrimage: These thre treuthes who so ever sayth w[i]t[h] his herte unfaynyngly in what place th[a]t ever it be /he may sure th[a]t he is in the state of helthe & grace & he shal have everlastynge lyf though he had done all the synnes of the worlde [...]118

As in A shorte treatyse, the forms of devotional practice advocated are generally accessible. The heading for one of the prayers explicitly reconstructs the dual audience I have been describing as an all-inclusive community: ‘A prayer full proftytable to them that shal saye masse & here mass or to them that shall be howseled & comunyed / and besyde for all other that been on lyve or deed’. Through a sequence of appositional phrases, the connection is made between the priests of Syon who say mass, and all other people, living or dead. It is a rhetorical strategy that mirrors the text’s apotheosis from a private manuscript notebook to the printing press. As in A shorte treatyse, however, the transformation is accompanied by considerable emphasis on obedience. It is in this climate of simultaneous caution and openness that the extracting of The Book of Margery Kempe is best understood, basing the credibility of its subject primarily on her example of obedience. It is the same stance Margery herself took before Archbishop Arundel. The basis of authority on humility should not be read, however, as any less powerful an authorization of Kempe or her book. She becomes the central organizing principle of the text, which is itself an exercise in exemplarity. As Holbrook has demonstrated, [i]n number and function, the words said by the woman are subordinate to the Lord’s; however, the words said about her by the narrator and by Christ himself present her as an exmplar of his counsel [...] The daughter’s role is both to occasion, through her speech, and to exemplify, through other means, the counsel of Jesus Christ. In

118

Kempe, A shorte treatyse, in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, p. 356, Extract 20.

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developing this counsel, the treatise signals movements in the daughter’s process of perfection.119

The effect is reminiscent of the treatment of St Bridget in the English rubrics of the breviaries at Syon, which, as Krug observes, ‘make it clear that Bridget’s words are really the savior’s. Rather than an act of authorial creation, Bridget’s writing is portrayed as the verbal expression of perfect obedience to God’.120 No longer simply an author, she is an authority of a higher kind. The artistic status sought on behalf of Chaucer and, we will see in the next chapter, also on behalf of Langland in the face of early attempts to censor the press, is abandoned in Kempe’s defence: Her words are not ‘made up’; they do not have the arbitrariness of fiction, but the weight of divine authenticity. Wynkyn de Worde’s experiment with Margery Kempe’s text (and Betson’s little treatises) seems to me to pose new challenges to the status quo in late medieval devotional reading habits. Both the content and form of the book look beyond the basis of textual transmission on personal relationships or within groups. The large-scale folios that de Worde produced in the late fifteenth century, like Hilton’s Scala perfectionis, were passed down within families and shared between friends for generations. Certainly, studies by Erler on women’s book ownership ‘witness to continuity within a women’s devotional tradition’ before and after the printing press.121 The press would ‘on its arrival in England, merely take advantage of such recent growth in transmission networks [from person to person]’.122 However, de Worde’s production of A short treatyse seems calculated to break free of these personal networks, being cheap enough to buy in multiple copies and too ephemeral to bear sharing for decades. It was also selfcontained enough for a solitary reader to evaluate and understand its claims for authority with little experience of the texts on which the full narrative initially drew. It was, in some sense, new in both form and content. It was also the product of the same culture of adaptation that produced and recycled Margery Kempe’s original text. As acknowledged in the incipit, A shorte treatyse was ‘taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lynn’. The treatise was produced by a self-conscious rereading of Kempe’s narrative so that it functions in its new context, just as we have seen Margery bend and reshape her sources so that they work for her. It is the essence of manuscript reading practice to reshape the text in this way. The

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119

Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and Wynkyn De Worde’, p. 30.

120

Krug, Reading Families, p. 162.

121

Erler, Women, Reading and Piety, p. 133.

122

Ibid., p. 135.

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difference is simply that the printed extracts are mechanically reproduced for a general readership. By standardizing a single reading of a devotional text, the printing press is standing in for the monks, like the red-ink annotator, who might otherwise have guided and promoted the reading of the complete text. The salient feature of the rise of the press is most often thought to be its eventual replacement of manuscript copying as the predominant technology for textual transmission. However, the change in technology affected not only the transmission of texts, but also their reception. In this case study, the transition from manuscript to print did more to reduce the practice of a kind of manuscript reading: the printed text of The Book of Margery Kempe comes already read. This, perhaps, was one reason why the readers at Mount Grace preferred to meet Margery Kempe in manuscript.

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P RINTING , W RITING , AND R EADING P IERS P LOWMAN

P

iers Plowman is a poem that reflects deep thinking about both writing and reading, about the relationship between author, text, and reception in the real world. For instance, the metaphor of a lord who lacks parchment is used in the B text of Piers Plowman as an aid to understanding the nature of God in the act of creation. The lord’s ability to write signifies the Father, with the pen and the parchment representing the other two persons of the Trinity:1 Even as a lord shuld make leters, and he lakid parchment Though he could write never so wel if he had no pen The lettre for al his lordship I leve wer never maked And so it semith by him as the bible tellyth There he sayde. Dixit et facta sunt, He must worke wyth hys worde and his wit shewe And in this maner was man made by might of god almighty. (B: IX , 38–44)2

1

The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three Parallel Texts; Together with Richard the Redeless, ed. by Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886; repr. 1961), II, 140, n. 155 (b.9.38). 2

Quoted from the first impression of Crowley’s edition of 1550 [STC 19906], fol. 42 r (sig. 2L ). It was reproduced in facsimile from Samuel Pepys’s copy, which was of the first impression, but which was also bound with the title page and prefatory material of the later impressions: see the afterword in the reprint by J. A. W. Bennett in William Langland, The Vision of Pierce Plowman: First Printed 1550 (London: Paradine in association with Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1976). Quotations from the poem are cited by identifying the text of the poem quoted (A, B, or C), then by the passus number in Roman numerals, followed by the line numbers. r

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Here, the skill of writing is not enough to create a text. The metaphor is characteristically mindful of the physical realities of writing. Without pen and parchment the technology cannot be used. The passage is meant to illustrate the interdependence of all three persons of the Trinity, none of whom may act alone. However, the metaphor is also remarkable for its fantasy of a writer’s independence. Provided he has the right tools, the lord, acting as his own scribe, is made equivalent to the Creator: ‘He must work with his word and his wit show, / and in this manner was man made by might of God almighty’. The efficacy of the word is demonstrated in both instances without an intermediary. While the holograph manuscript is a relatively rare form of circulation for literary authors of the Middle Ages, Langland’s metaphor suggests how handwritten texts might be associated with powerfully direct communication. Of course, elsewhere in the poem, Langland deals with the vagaries of writing and reading, but for this moment, the handwritten text is as direct and powerful as the Adamic language. The same fantasy is not possible for the printed text, which is inevitably the product of numerous intermediary relationships between author, printer, compositor, bookseller, and reader.3 In the printing of excerpts from The Book of Margery Kempe we have seen an early example of the effect of a print editor. The role of the editor or publisher would become more clearly defined in the sixteenth century, not least through the rise of licensing systems. By the time Piers Plowman was printed, government licensors also played a required role in the process by which printed authors ‘showed their wit’. The first printed edition of Piers Plowman, produced by Robert Crowley in 1550, is remarkable for the way in which its apparatus explicitly works out these relationships, particularly those between printer, author, and reader. Like Langland, Crowley seems to have

3 Natalie Zemon Davis has advanced the idea of the printed book as a ‘carrier of relationships’: ‘Printing and the People’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 191–226 (p. 192). Sandra Hindman provides a summary of the way in which that idea has been taken up, and builds on it, particularly in terms of the relationship between printed text and illustration: see her introduction to Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, Circa 1450–1520, ed. by Sandra Hindman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 1–18, esp. pp. 3–6. In the same volume, Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen advocate reading incunables for evidence of these relationships by giving them the same treatment scholars have ordinarily reserved for manuscript books: ‘Incunable Description and Its Implication for the Analysis of Fifteenth-Century Reading Habits’, pp. 225–58.

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thought deeply about how a text transmits from author to reader, and more broadly, about the place of literature in the world. This chapter will present the argument that Crowley’s effort is very much a phenomenon of its time. In Crowley’s work we can see reactions to recent developments in the print culture of early modern England. But broadly speaking, Crowley’s efforts to present Langland’s text in a particular way are also in concert with the poem’s tradition in manuscript, which is marked by readerly adaptations and multiple versions. The copying of Piers Plowman by hand inspired more active re-editing and recombining of its own text than perhaps any other surviving poem.4 Similarly, the printing of Piers Plowman was accompanied by some of the most rigorous editorial activity in the early printing of the Middle English canon. That is, Crowley’s hands-on interaction with the poem is consistent with the readerly engagement it inspired in manuscript. Following a study of Crowley’s edition, this chapter will turn to two versions of the poem in manuscript (John But’s continuation of the A text and the revisions that make up the C text) to explore what kinds of relationships between poet, poem, and reader can be found in those traditions. Finally, the chapter will turn to two sixteenth-century copies of Piers Plowman, one in manuscript and one in print, in order to examine evidence of the reception of Piers Plowman in both media in early modern England.

I. Printing Piers Plowman The question most commonly asked by scholars about the relationship between Piers Plowman and the printing press is why the printed edition came so late in the sixteenth century. There are two well-known arguments in answer to this question. One response is based on the assumption that, although the poem remained popular in private manuscript circulation, it was banned publicly because of its association with Wycliffite texts, and thus could not appear in print until censorship of proto-Protestant works was relaxed after the death of Henry VIII.5 The other cites the poem as aesthetically at odds with the stylistic 4

The textual tradition of Piers Plowman is exceptionally diverse and varied. None of the fifty-two surviving manuscripts directly descend from any of the others; see George Kane, ‘The Text’, in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. by John A. Alford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 175–200. 5

Much work has been done on the extent to which Langland’s own views might (or might not) accurately be described as ‘lollard’. See especially the collection of essays on the subject in

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trends that made other texts marketable in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this scenario, the poem was saved from obscurity by a printer who was not motivated by economic profit, but by a desire to forward a Protestant agenda of social reform.6 There are complications associated with both arguments. In the first case, there is no direct evidence that Piers Plowman was ever banned, per se,7 and manuscript contexts suggest that the poem was interpreted in a variety of ways, not all of them proto-Protestant.8 Also problematic in this case is the inconsistent way in which Henry’s regime defined what constituted a heretical book. Tyndale’s translation of the Bible, for instance, had been banned in 1529 during Thomas More’s chancellorship, but it was issued with Cromwell’s approval in

‘Special Section: Langland and Lollardy’, ed. by Andrew Galloway, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 17 (2003), 3–105. For the history of the poem’s association with Wycliffism by others, see John M. Bowers, ‘Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes toward a History of the Wycliffite Langland’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 6 (1992), 1–50. Bowers suggests that Caxton’s aesthetic preference for the ‘courtly’ is economically and politically motivated: ‘The likely explanation [for Caxton’s omission of Piers Plowman and the Bible] is to be sought in the printer’s desire to ensure the security of his capital venture by avoiding controversy and appealing to a readership defined as “courtly” in its orthodoxies if not consistently in rank’ (p. 36). For association with the 1381 Rising, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 27 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). John N. King argues that Piers Plowman would have been banned as Wycliffite under the Act of Six Articles of 1536, though the poem is not named specifically as a prohibited text: ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman: A Tudor Apocalypse’, Modern Philology, 73 (1976), 342–52. 6

See R. Carter Hailey, ‘“Geuyng Light to the Reader”: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 95 (2001), 483–502. Hailey’s catalogue of texts printed in the plowman tradition suggests that ‘less fashionably sinister forces than official suppression seem more likely to have occasioned the late appearance of Piers Plowman in print’ (p. 487). Both Hailey and Hudson point out plowman figures who were appropriated by the orthodox Catholic cause. See Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 7

Hailey, ‘“Geuyng Light to the Reader”’, pp. 484–86. He bases his conclusion partly on Steele’s handlist of texts banned by name in the reign of Henry VIII, which does not list Piers Plowman. The handlist appears on pp. 214–17 in Robert Steele, ‘Notes on English Books Printed Abroad, 1525–48’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 11 (1911), 189–236. A fuller exposition of Hailey’s argument can be found in his doctoral dissertation: Robert Carter Hailey, ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 2001), pp. 2–7. 8

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1537, the year following Tyndale’s execution.9 In the second case, there is every indication that Robert Crowley’s first printing in 1550 was economically successful. It went into three impressions and was reprinted by Owen Rogers in 1561.10 The number of manuscripts made and annotated in the sixteenth century further suggests that Piers Plowman retained a continuous and active readership right up to and beyond the time it was printed.11 As a result, it is unlikely that either Tudor press regulations or market pressures alone played a decisive role in delaying the printing of Piers Plowman. This does not mean, however, that control of the press is irrelevant to the publication history of the poem. Tudor regulations exerted influence on more than the date of printing. Many expectations and activities of the market in which Piers Plowman apparently sold so well had been shaped by royal proclamations in the years leading up to the death of Henry VIII. The evolution of regulatory procedures and punishments brought attention to the roles of printers, compilers, binders, booksellers, and authors in the production of texts. As we will see, it is evident that press regulation gave the Protestants of Crowley’s

9

Fred S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Controls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), p. 47. Tyndale’s name was replaced by a pseudonym, ‘Thomas Matthew’. For further discussion of the changes in policy under Henry VIII, and of contemporary perception of instability in its policies, see G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 10 11

Bowers, ‘Piers Plowman and the Police’, p. 41.

There are four extant manuscripts of Piers Plowman thought to have been made in the sixteenth century: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 145, Tokyo, Toshiyuki Takamiya MS 23 (formerly Sion College MS Arc. L. 40. 2/E), Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.iv.31, and London, British Library MS Royal 18 B.xvii. See Ralph Hanna, William Langland, Authors of the Middle Ages, 3 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), pp. 37–44. Fragments from the B text were compiled in a collection of prophecies in c. 1554 in London, British Library, Sloane MS 2578. On the Sloane fragment, see Sharon L. Jansen, ‘Politics, Protest, and a New Piers Plowman Fragment: The Voice of the Past in Tudor England’, Review of English Studies, 40 (1989), 93–99. Earlier manuscripts with sixteenth-century annotations include Rawlinson 137, San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 128, London, British Library, Additional MS 35157, and London, British Library, Additional MS 34779, which has ‘marginal annotation in at least three sixteenth-century hands’ (Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. by George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 11); and London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian B.xvi (see Bowers, ‘Piers Plowman and the Police’, p. 37).

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circle in particular cause to reflect on the relationship between an author, a text, and its printer or editor. Rather than asking whether regulation of the press kept Piers Plowman from appearing in print, I want to focus instead on how regulations affected the presentation of the poem when it was finally printed, especially the impact on the preface, with its interest in Langland’s historical biography, and on Crowley’s addition of marginal annotations. Each of these features corresponds with explicitly regulated aspects of print, since attributions of texts and marginal annotations came under specific scrutiny. I hope to show that regulations regarding the form of books are more important to our understanding of Crowley’s edition than the banning of any particular title. Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman is in no way belated. As a reaction to the development of print culture under Henry VIII and to the new regime at Henry’s death, Crowley’s edition is both timely and innovative. Crowley’s Edition in Context Crowley’s 1550 edition of Piers Plowman is unique among the contemporary editions of works by canonical medieval authors in its emphasis on the poet as a man of his own time.12 It is the first edition of a Middle English author to use historically specific biographical information as an aid to interpreting the work — an approach that was not rendered to similar standards on behalf of Chaucer until Speght’s edition of 1598. Crowley admiringly locates Langland, a ‘Shropshere man’, within the struggles of reformists under King Edward III:

12

The fullest description of the differences between the three editions can be found in Hailey, ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’. Especially interesting are Hailey’s arguments concerning the anticipated audiences for the three editions (see pp. 64, 69–74), based partly on the use of vellum for some copies of the first edition (pp. 64, 237–42). A comprehensive discussion of textual variants and collations can be found on pp. 74–172 of the dissertation. For Crowley’s place in the history of editing Piers Plowman, see Charlotte Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7–19. For praise of Crowley as a progressive editor on other grounds see King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’. For the effect of Crowley’s ‘definitive edition’ on the history of Piers Plowman scholarship, see Eric Dahl, ‘“Diverse Copies Have It Diversely”: An Unorthodox Survey of Piers Plowman Textual Scholarship from Crowley to Skeat’, in Suche Werkis to Werche: Essays on Piers Plowman in Honor of David C. Fowler, ed. by Míceál F. Vaughan (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1993), pp. 53–80.

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[...] in whose tyme it pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geuing them boldeness of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute aggaynste the workes of darckenes, as did John wicklefe, who also in those dayes translated the holye Bible into the Englishe tonge, and this writer who in reportynge certaine visions and dreames, that he fayned him selfe to have dreamed: doeth moste christianlye enstruct the weake, and sharply rebuke the obstinate blynde.13

In contrast, the closest edition contemporary with Chaucer, prepared by William Thynne in 1532, praised Chaucer by way of comparisons with Classical writers: For though it had ben in Demosthenes or Homerus tymes / whan all lernyng and excellency of sciences florisshed amonges the Grekes / or in the season yt Cicero prince of eloquence amonges latyns liued / yet had it ben a thyng right rare & straunge and worthy perpetuall laude / yt any clerke by lernyng or wytte coulde than haue framed a tonge before so rude and imperfite / to suche a swete ornature and composycion.14

In the preface to Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s works, literary history is closed off from the historical context of composition. Chaucer’s own time is referenced only to present Chaucer’s rhetorical achievements as anachronisms. The preface to the most contemporary edition of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, prepared by Thomas Berthelette in 1532,15 is ultimately less interested in Gower’s role as a living poet than in his reputation after death, shored up as it is by Chaucer’s famous reference to him as ‘Moral Gower’: [...] I maye be bold to saye, that if we shulde neuer haue sene his counnynge warkes, the whiche euen at the full do witnesse, what a clerke he was, the wordes of the moste famous and excellente Geffraie Chaucer [...] do sufficiently testifie the same [...] By the whiche wordes of Chaucer we may also vnderstonde, that he and Gower were both of one selfe tyme, both excellently lerned, both great frendes to gether, and both a lyke endeuoured them selfe [...] that they dyd not onely passe forth their lyfes here ryght honourably, but also for their so doynge, so longe (of likelyhode) as letters shal endure

13

Robert Crowley’s preface to Langland, The Vision of Pierce Plowman, sig. *2 r. This reprint is a reproduction of Samuel Pepys’s copy. It is a copy of the first impression [STC 19906] that was bound with the extra prefatory material from the third impression [STC 19907] added (the ‘sum of the principal points’ of the poem that did not appear with the first impression). Hailey designates it as C 6 and uses it as the basis for his collation of the copies of the first edition. See his ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’, p. 92. 14

As transcribed in James E. Blodgett, ‘William Thynne (d. 1546)’, in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. by Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1984), pp. 35–52 (p. 36). 15

For a description of the edition and its place in Gower’s print tradition, see Siân Echard, ‘Gower in Print’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. by Siân Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 115–36.

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Chapter 3 & continue, this noble royalme shall be the better, ouer and besyde theyr honest fame and renowme.16

The preface devotes considerable space to a description of Gower’s tomb. For Berthelette, the poet’s contribution is accomplished largely through the remembrance of his work. By contrast, Crowley highlights Langland’s contribution to his readers in life, ‘crying out against the works of darkness’. In Crowley’s preface, a Middle English poet’s life and the circumstances under which the poem was composed are, for the first time in print, granted relevance to the interest in reading the poem. Crowley makes a startling effort to combine literary history with local history, by making Langland’s role while a living poet important to our understanding of Piers Plowman. Models for an interest in the life of a poet were available in the traditions of both Chaucer and Gower, but only Crowley chose to present his poet in print this way. For instance, Machan has argued that Berthelette might have developed a ‘full-scale Life’ of Gower for his edition from the ‘Quia unusquisque’, a ‘possibly autobiographical’ prose passage that appears in several manuscripts of Gower’s work and in Caxton’s edition.17 Chaucer’s texts had been accompanied by tidbits of biographical and historical information in headnotes, written by fifteenth-century scribe, John Shirley.18 Instead, Berthelette and Thynne produced editions intended to establish the ‘monumentality of Gower and Chaucer’, in Joseph Dane’s assessment, a happy description evoking Berthelette’s interest in Gower’s tomb.19 Dane further argues that Crowley’s ‘small editions’ suggest ‘the marginality of Langland’.20 But on the contrary, Crowley’s preface

16

Thomas Berthelette’s 1532 preface to Io. Gower de confessione amantis, available at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. The scan of the microfilm for the 1532 edition [STC 12143] is difficult to read on the left margin, so I have cross-referenced it with the 1554 printing [STC 12144], also available through Early English Books Online. 17

Tim William Machan, ‘Thomas Berthelette and Gower’s Confessio’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 18 (1996), 143–66 (p. 154). 18 Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, pp. 117–46. None of Shirley’s manuscripts are among those thought to have been used by Thynne. The evidence of Shirley’s interest in Chaucer’s life merely demonstrates that early readers of Chaucer could conceive of using biographical information to contextualize Chaucer’s works. 19 Joseph A. Dane, Who is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), p. 69. 20

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puts Langland at the centre of a tradition presented as his own. Langland becomes, not marginalized, but localized and historicized. One overlooked context for this development is in the rise of governmental control of the press under Henry VIII. During the years between 1529 and Henry’s death in 1547, the mundane particulars of bibliography, the conventions regarding how a book was to be ascribed and described, became increasingly charged around the person of the author, as Henry attempted to regulate the press by royal proclamation.21 Following Henry’s death, Crowley and his circle, including the Protestant scholar and publisher John Bale, sought to recognize the place of English poets in a specifically English literary history. They did so, not only in search of proto-Protestant heroes in England’s past. That is, they were not driven by ideology alone. They had also been sensitized to a social role for living authors under the censorship of both Protestant and Catholic works during Henry’s regime; sensitized, in Bale’s case, because his own books had been banned. The figure of the author would also become an important selling point for religious works in the English marketplace according to Ian Green’s study of print and Protestantism: The practice of including a portrait of the author, sometimes with a flattering caption or verse, became increasingly common in the early Stuart period for both conformist and ‘godly’ authors [...] Autobiographical insights were encouraged by the fact that works with personal anecdotes or observations tended to sell better than those whose authors adopted a generalized or impersonal tone.22

This aspect of English print culture can be seen unfolding throughout the evolution of press regulation, as eventually, in Henry’s last proclamation, the author’s name was required to be printed as the key way to identify a text. The same proclamation banned texts simply by listing their authors for the first time. This innovative use of an author’s name can partly be understood simply as an improvement in the mechanics of bibliography, which aided in the 21

A catalogue of Tudor royal proclamations including paraphrases and partial quotations of extant proclamations has been published by James Ludovic Lindsay, with an historical essay on their origin and use by Robert Steele, A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns and of Others Published under Authority, 1485–1714, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). Full texts of the extant Tudor proclamations, in ‘normalized Modern English orthography, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing’ (p. xl), have been published in Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume 1: The Early Tudors, 1485–1553, ed. by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). 22

Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4.

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implementation of the index of banned books. However, it was also a move that gave authors’ names new recognition, along with a central role in identifying a text. Initially, the system of press regulation dealt with the role of the printer, not only as the distributor, but potentially also as the preparer of an author’s text. As we will see, from the outset Henry’s proclamations explicitly recognized the power of printers, when acting as editors or compilers, to shape an author’s text. Robert Crowley was exactly this kind of printer. He was a Protestant controversialist and cleric who operated as a book publisher and seller from 1548 to 1551. He seems to have ceased publishing work when he was ordained in September 1551.23 Though the preface of Crowley’s edition takes the form of a dedication from ‘the Printer to the Reader’, Crowley himself is not likely to have printed any of the books marked with his imprint.24 Bibliographers have identified the typefaces, initials, and borders of several printers in Crowley’s publications. Almost all of the books bearing Crowley’s imprint are now classed by the Short-Title Catalogue as products of Richard Grafton’s press, though Crowley never acknowledged Grafton’s role in his colophons.25 Instead, Crowley assumed the title of printer as the strongest rhetorical position available to him to describe his role in the selection and presentation of the texts he published. It would have been possible for him to present himself merely as a bookseller, but apparently Crowley preferred the role of printer as one implying control of the text from selection to sale. There was also ample historical precedent in England, reaching back to Caxton, for printers sub-contracting their work to

23 For accounts of Crowley’s life and career, see J. W. Martin, ‘The Publishing Career of Robert Crowley: A Sidelight on the Tudor Book Trade’, Publishing History, 14 (1983), 85–98. For a full biographical sketch of Crowley, see Hailey, ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’, pp. 14–18. See also Albert Peel, ‘Robert Crowley — Puritan, Printer, Poet’, The Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society of England, 6 (1938), 177–201. The introduction to the Early English Text Society edition of Crowley’s own selected works is also helpful; see The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. by J. M . Cowper, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 15 (London: Trubner, 1872), pp. ix–xxiii. 24

King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’, p. 345; Martin, ‘The Publishing Career of Robert Crowley’, p. 87. 25

The various printers include John Day, Reginald Wolfe, Richard Tottell, Edward Whitchurch, and Richard Grafton. See King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’, p. 345, n. 23; see also Martin, ‘The Publishing Career of Robert Crowley’, p. 87.

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other presses.26 Crowley’s expansion of that process to include all of his printing was an intermediary step in the emergence of the professional editor. Crowley set himself up as a textual critic under the guise of a printer who ‘out-sources’ all of his printing. While Crowley’s activity in preparing the text of Piers Plowman more closely approximated that of an editor or publisher, there was no word for what he was doing in the English vernacular.27 Modern scholarship has been incomplete in its treatment of Crowley’s role as an editor and printer because the differences in Crowley’s approach are often read primarily as efforts to appropriate the poem for the Protestant cause. Crowley’s marginal notations at a few crucial moments firmly guide readers toward a Protestant reading of the poem’s interest in reform, in ways laid out by Charlotte Brewer’s discussion of the edition.28 Because modern readers have been

26

For examples of booksellers or ‘stationers’ who had no presses of their own, see Bennett, English Books & Readers, where he argues: ‘The best example is Walter Lynne, who had a shop in St Paul’s Churchyard [...], where he sold many books printed for him between 1547 and 1550. He describes himself as “one that spendeth all hys tyme in the settynge forth of bokes in the Englysshe tounge”, and his publications came from the presses of at least four printers’ (p. 235). For examples of printers who subcontracted their work, see ibid., p. 236. 27

The first citation of the word ‘editor’ in the OED is dated to 1649, where it is defined as ‘the publisher of a book’. The word does not come to mean ‘one who prepares the literary work of another person, or number of persons for publication, by selecting, revising, and arranging the material’ until the eighteenth-century William Caxton was able to credit himself as a translator in much of his work. See, for instance the colophon to the Boke of Enydos, where Virgil is credited as compiler and Caxton as translator, reprinted in Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by N. F. Blake, The Language Library (London: Deutsch, 1973). Where there is another living translator to credit (in the preparation of the Dicts and Sayings, for instance), Caxton goes to greater lengths to describe his own role beyond setting the text in form: to ‘correct’ and ‘amend’ (see the Epilogue to the first edition of Dicts and Sayings, reprinted in Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, pp. 73–76). The words have an obvious relationship to scribal roles. But there seems not to have been a vocabulary for the activity of editors of vernacular texts until much later. For more on Caxton’s critical vocabulary see Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, pp. 44–50. It was certainly possible for humanist scholars like Erasmus to gain recognition (and remuneration) for their editions of the auctors. Mark Vessey’s account of Erasmus’s edition of Jerome suggests furthermore that Erasmus (on the model of Jerome) was able to construct a public reputation both for himself and his editorial subject, but I am not aware of a precedent for the more ordinary editors of vernacular authors. See Mark Vessey, ‘Erasmus’ Jerome: The Publishing of a Christian Author’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 14 (1994), 62–99. 28

Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, pp. 16–17. An excellent example is Crowley’s comment, ‘“Note how he scorneth the auctority of Popes Math. vi” (against B Passus VII 172–73, where the dreamer casts aspersions on the power of papal indulgences)’ (p. 17).

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more likely to acknowledge the extent to which Langland ‘calls for reform [...] but always in terms that implicitly or explicitly reinforce traditional social and religious structures’, a focus on the politics of the Reformation as a context for Crowley’s edition leads some readers to a conclusion like that of Brewer: ‘Crowley’s concern with the poem has more in common with that of the rebels of 1381: both were using Piers Plowman for its political relevance to their own immediate ends. They made no or little attempt to interpret the poem on its own terms’.29 The crucial difference in the appropriation of the poem in the Rising of 1381 is that the rebels promoted Piers Plowman, the character, as an icon, whereas Crowley stepped outside of the poem to claim the figure of Langland, the poet, as a spokesperson for reform. While the edition does not interpret the poem on its own terms, it does importantly rethink what a poem’s ‘own terms’ might be, by exploring the role of the author in the preface and the role of the editor in the margins. As we will see, at the start of the reign of Henry VIII, the policies for controlling the circulation of heretical texts differed little from those applied in the fourteenth century; but when Crowley, Bale, and their circle re-entered the publishing arena in England in the late 1540s, mechanisms for licensing and recalling publications had significantly evolved. Crowley’s preface, articulating in an important way Langland’s role as a poet ‘crying out against the works of darkness’, recognizes the prominent place of literature (and eventually authors) in the cultural revolutions that made up the Reformation and in the mechanisms — ideological and economic — that attempted to control it. Developments in Press Regulation Piers Plowman first went to print at a critical juncture in the development of print culture in England. Henry VIII’s increasingly elaborate attempts to establish a bureaucracy for the control and licensing of book production broke down at his death in 1547. Under the protectorship of Somerset, Reformation literature was printed in England without restriction for the first time.30 So it is 29 30

Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, pp. 7–8, 19.

The period of relatively lax control of the press was short. As Joseph Loewenstein has noted, Somerset headed attempts to reinstate a licensing system through the privy council in August 1549, and finally a proclamation of 1551 required that written approval from six members of the privy council be given to import, print, or sell books in English. See Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University

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true that, in the year or two preceding the appearance of Crowley’s edition, there was less regulation of the press than there had been under Henry’s regime. However, the development of the licensing system had durable effects beyond the suppression of particular texts. While the motivations for the rise of governmental controls were ideological, political, and economic, among the unintended effects was the increased codification of the relationship between author, publisher, and reader. The influence of Henry VIII’s list of banned authors, for instance, can be traced in the efforts of John Bale to catalogue major English authors in print shortly after the king’s death. The list of banned authors helped to single out heroes or martyrs for those who supported the Protestant cause, but it also made explicit the role of all authors, Catholic or Reformer, in the cultural work of the Reformation, especially in the revision of Englishness for the early modern era. John Bale’s construction of the idea that Britain had a legacy of great authors stretching back to King Alfred, for instance, partly had its origin in the period of Tudor persecution. The prominence of authors is only one part of the picture, however. Crowley’s work with Langland can be seen as a response both to the new importance of authors and to the expanded role of printers in promoting them; for it is equally true that the censors drew much attention to the role of those preparing and distributing texts. Authors did not emerge in this system as if they were acting alone. The identification of banned books by author was actually the end point of a long process that considered the interaction of all players in the distribution of books, from author to reader. As the process unfolded, the proclamations searched for the most functional combination between method and object, between how and what to control in confronting the range of activities from the composition to the reception of texts. Books in the ‘englysche tong’ were the primary point of contention in the battles over scriptural translation, which drove the initial developments in openly ideological press regulation. The instability of Henry VIII’s position in these battles made it impracticable to ban books by category, and the number of translations, some approved and some not, made banning books by title equally inconvenient. The identification of

of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 58, 281–82, n. 19. See also Hailey, ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’, p. 10. For a brief but helpful overview see Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, p. 51. William Clyde’s narrative of the rise of licensing systems conflicts with Siebert’s, but only because Clyde seems to have primarily consulted acts of parliament; see W illiam M. Clyde, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press from Caxton to Cromwell, St Andrews University Publications, 37 (London: Milford, 1934), p. 11.

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authors in the royal proclamations that banned books made it possible for the government to articulate a more precise program of censorship. As Joseph Loewenstein has argued, however, any approach that sees the rise of the Author as somehow completely encapsulated at the moment of censorship would elide the roles of commerce and technology in making the concept of an author useful in the print culture of early modern England: ‘The notion that individualisms are back-formations of institutionalization is a useful etiological model, yet we need more institutional divinities in this myth of origins. The Author is a censorship-effect, and also a book-effect, a press-effect, a market-effect’.31 In fact, traditional histories of press regulations note that the involvement of secular government in regulating the press had its origins in commercial concerns. The monarchy had involved itself in the printing trade early on, but initially only to encourage the development of the business by protecting it from foreign competition, by appointing printers to the king, and by granting privileges.32 Yet, Loewenstein’s account is also helpful in redirecting the extent to which the ideological and the commercial should ever be viewed as completely separate, because ‘commerce itself has ideological functions’.33 The protection of English printers from foreign competition, for instance, also protected English readers from foreign ideas. Similarly, the focus on printers and authors did not exclude readers from being implicit objects of press regulation. Evidence of readerly response to the changing regulations survives in the form of correspondence from orthodox and Reformist book owners alike, as they attempted to conform (or circumvent) the proclamations. I imagine Crowley as one of these readers and see the influence of their thought in his work. Their influence, in turn, can be seen in the modifications made to the mechanics of the licensing system in the attempt to improve its clarity and thus its enforceability.

31

Loewenstein, The Author’s Due, p. 12. Loewenstein specifically engages with Foucault’s argument on pp. 266–67, n. 29. Foucault’s essay, ‘What is an Author?’, can be found in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–38. 32

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, pp. 33–35. Privileges could take a number of forms, as protection for the printer’s copy or for the author’s work. Siebert notes that the enforcement of copyright without a special privilege is not recorded until 1558–59, when Owen Rogers was fined 20 pence ‘for printing another man’s copy’ (Freedom of the Press in England, p. 77). Rogers reprinted Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman in 1561 without the preface. There is no evidence of Crowley objecting to this. 33

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The earliest interventions attempting to control the publication of certain texts were built on medieval statutes and demonstrate the kind of confusion to which early press regulation was prone. Henry VIII made his first proclamation banning specific texts from being read, printed, or possessed in 1529.34 As Heinze’s study asserts, the proclamation refers to and ‘repeat[s] almost verbatim’ parts of statutes from the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V regarding the restriction of Lollardy.35 The proclamation begins with the king’s consideration ‘that his most noble progenitors, kings of this his said realm hath before this time made and enacted many devout laws, statutes, and ordinances for the maintenance and defence of the said faith against the malicious and wicked sects of heretics and Lollards’.36 The proclamation ends with a list of books to be banned. The books are identified only by title, except in the case of ‘the Matrimony of Tyndale’, where Tyndale’s name is probably invoked to distinguish that work from another on the list, ‘the Christian state of Matrimony’.37 In actuality ‘the Matrimony of Tyndale’ was not by Tyndale at all. It went by two other titles, Erasmus’s Exhortation, or The Exposition of I Corinthians VII, and was likely to have been written by William Roy.38 The looseness of the bibliographical record of this text implies how difficult it would have been to identify texts as they were presented for review. At this time the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London acted as sole licensors of new texts to be printed. The next attempt to improve oversight of the growing output of the printing trade came the following year, with new bibliographical requirements being implemented. The proclamation of June 1530 delegates the authority to license books ‘in the English tongue concerning Holy Scripture’ to the ordinary of the

34

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, pp. 44–45. See also Loewenstein, The Author’s Due, p. 55. 35

R. W. Heinze, The Proclamations of the Tudor Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 132–33, 133, n. 131. Hughes and Larkin also cite a 1382 statute under Richard II: Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, p. 181, n. 1 36

Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, pp. 181–82.

37

Ibid., pp. 185–86.

38

Steele, ‘Notes on English Books Printed Abroad’, p. 203. For Roy’s career, see David Daniell, ‘Roy, W illiam (d. in or before 1531)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Lawrence Goldman, at [accessed 30 August 2005].

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diocese in which the book was printed.39 Siebert describes the requirement as ‘the first licensing system under secular authority’, though ‘ecclesiastics continued to act as licensors’.40 The distinction was important because of the difference in punishment for infraction. Siebert argues that the controls coming from the crown were more effective than those of the church because ‘executions were substituted for excommunication, and fine and imprisonment for warning and censure’.41 However, there was also an important distinction in the bibliographic tracking of accountability for texts. The same proclamation required for the first time that the name of the printer and the name of the examiner be printed on every copy. Efforts to regulate texts by controlling their attribution are therefore directed toward the printer, who takes responsibility for the work by being identified in the text, not the author. Readers also remained accountable to secular authorities, however, for the possession or trade of the books identified as heretical: ‘Also his highness commandeth all mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, constables, burseholders, and other officers and ministers’ to turn over to the king and the council ‘any person or persons’ who ‘do hereafter buy, receive, have, or detain any of the said erroneous books, printed or written anywhere’.42 Here, my reading of the proclamations of the 1530s diverges from that of Loewenstein. In Loewenstein’s account, the licensing system of the 1530s is notable because of ‘the press, which becomes the central site of criminality’:43 The press changes the cultural situation of heresy, which is now as much in books as it was once in the souls or mouths of heretics: thus the reduced emphasis on both the reader and the author within Tudor ideological regulation and the inscription — the impression, rather — of the license upon the title page of the printed book. Licensing is specifically, and quite consequentially, a press censorship.44

Certainly, the proclamations of the 1530s are novel in the way in which they begin to try to control the new technology with the licensing system. But I cannot agree that Tudor ideological regulation somehow sets the press apart from the people. The same proclamation of June 1530 makes strenuous efforts

39

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Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, pp. 193–97.

40

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, p. 46.

41

Ibid., p. 46.

42

Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, p. 195.

43

Loewenstein, The Author’s Due, p. 55.

44

Ibid., pp. 55–56.

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to control, not only the production of new copies, but also the reading of existing copies, in manuscript, print, or vernacular translation: The King’s said highness therefore straightly chargeth and commandeth all and every [sic] of his subjects of what estate or condition soever he or they be, as they will avoid his high indignation and most grievous displeasure, that they from henceforth do not buy, receive, or have any of the books before named, or any other book being in the English tongue and printed beyond the sea, of what matter soever it be, or any copy written, drawn out of the same, or the same books in the French or Dutch tongue.45

The explicit inclusion of all the king’s subjects in the proclamation seems calculated to incorporate control of the press into a comprehensive regulation that recognizes the special relationship between a printer and a buyer of books, without forgetting that the old technology of manuscript copying still exists. The phrase covering ‘any copy written, drawn out of the same, or the same books in the French or Dutch tongue’ implies that the king is thinking specifically in terms of the activities of private readers who might still make written copies, create new excerpted versions in manuscript, or translate the texts as a way to circumvent the prohibition of these books. The proclamation of 1534, then, is dealing with a market for texts that is still very much a hybrid of manuscript and print culture. Printers and private readers share responsibility for the transmission of texts in these proclamations. Any printer who fails to submit the books he prints for examination ‘will answer to the King’s highness at his uttermost peril’, but any person caught in possession of an ‘erroneous’ book also ‘shall be corrected and punished for their contempt and disobedience, to the terrible example of other like transgressors’.46 The proclamations of the 1530s achieve clarity on the accountability of readers and printers when they are caught with unapproved books. The problem with the early forms of the system was in making it clear which books were unapproved. Evidence that there was confusion over which books were banned by the proclamations comes in the letter of Bishop Stokesley to Cromwell in response to a proclamation of 1536, which intended to suppress the orthodox Catholic writings of John Fisher.47 Fisher, who was Bishop of Rochester, was commissioned to look into the theology of Henry’s divorce from his first wife

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45

Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, pp. 194–95.

46

Ibid., p. 195.

47

Heinze, The Proclamations of the Tudor Kings, p. 136, n. 141.

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and was executed when he repeatedly upheld the legitimacy of the marriage.48 Clearly authors were being held responsible for their texts on separate ground, but the language used to identify their texts for prohibition was convoluted enough to confuse contemporaries. The proclamation denounces ‘sundry writings and books, as well imprinted as other, especially one book imprinted comprising a sermon made by John Fisher’, and commands that the following books be turned over to the chancellor within forty days: any of the said books containing the said sermon of the said late traitor, or any other writing or book wherein shall be contained any error or slander to the King’s majesty, or to the derogation or diminution of his imperial crown or of any authority knit to the same, or repugnant to his statutes of this realm made for the surety of his grace’s sucession, or for the abolition of the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome [...].49

John Stokesley, Bishop of London, wrote to Cromwell, saying: I would have sent you my books of the canon law and schoolmen favoring the bp. of Rome; but as I am informed by those to whom you have declared the King’s proclamation in this behalf, it is not meant but of the bp. of Rochester’s books and sermons, and of those lately written in defence of the said primacy against the opinion of the Germans, I do not send them until I know your pleasure [...].50

The lack of clear ascription apparently made it difficult for readers to comply by sending in the correct books, while the King’s ambivalence regarding the ‘opinion of the Germans’ only exacerbated the problem. Meanwhile, printers and editors for the Protestant cause found new ways around the restrictions, as the next major development in the licensing system suggests. Marginal annotations could be used to convert an approved text into a polemic. The archetypal example given by Siebert is Coverdale’s translation of the New Testament, which, although approved in 1537, ‘contained exceedingly dangerous matter in its annotations’.51 In the Proclamation of 1538, Henry explicitly blames the proliferation of marginalia in print as a source of dissent and a motivation for the tightening of restrictions:

48

Richard Rex, ‘Fisher, John [St John Fisher] (c. 1469–1535)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at [accessed 30 August 2005]. 49

Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, pp. 235–37.

50

Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, arranged and catalogued by J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1885; repr. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), VIII, 19. 51

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[...] by such like books as have been printed within this realm, set forth with privilege, containing annotations and additions in the margins, prologues, and calendars, imagined and invented as well by the makers, devisers, and printers of the same books, [...] whereby divers and many of his loving simple subjects have been induced and encouraged, arrogantly and superstitiously, to argue and dispute [...].52

The proclamation attempts to close this loophole. It centralizes the licensing system by replacing the ecclesiastical licensors with members of the Privy Council and anyone else the King might appoint. The licensors were to screen for heresy and ‘seditious opinions’, a new category that gave them wide jurisdiction over any kind of text.53 Finally, the proclamation required that printer’s privileges be indicated with a new legend, not simply ‘cum privilegio’, but ‘cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum’, with privilege for printing only.54 Much has been written on the implications of this addition to the mark of royal privilege. In the context of my own reading, the most pertinent implication is that the privilege protects the printer, who is given the right to print the text, but not the readers, who might still be prosecuted for seditious use of the book. Indeed such a response might have been provoked from the King by readers who, as Loewenstein describes, conveniently interpreted monopolistic grants indicated by the tag ‘cum privilegio’ as de facto ideological endorsement from the king: Certainly, a Bill of Complaint submitted to Cromwell in 1534 by a group of Lutherans in Essex claims that this was an arguable construction of the privilege. Having been attached by a local parish official for reading from an English primer, they counter that there can surely be no harm in ‘usynge to read pryvyledgede bookes’ and they submit that the king ‘puts forthwith Certyne bookes printed and openly sold with his right royal privyledge sett unto the same to the intente truly (as we do take it) that no man shoulde feare but rather be encoragede to occpuye them’.55

Loewenstein asserts that, in spite of ‘how richly coordinated censorious licensing and monopolistic privilege indeed were’ this particular ‘confounding of privilege and license’ was most probably a willful misreading. If so, it would be an excellent example of how readers closely read and interpreted the regulations of

52 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, pp. 270–71. Hughes and Larkin note that a draft copy of the proclamation with corrections in Henry VIII’s hand has survived. 53

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, pp. 48–49.

54

Ibid., pp. 48–49. For a fuller discussion of the history of thought on this phrase, see Loewenstein, The Author’s Due, pp. 7–10, 79–81. 55

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the 1530s in order to protect their own interests. It is another loophole that the Proclamation of 1538 attempted to close by defining the commercial privilege as distinct from the ideological licensing system. The Proclamation of 1538 also implies that active readers, named as the ‘makers, devisers and printers’ of annotated books, had built strategies for working within and around the prohibition of texts by title. By adding controversial annotations to books, such readers provoked consideration of what constitutes a ‘text’ and how to identify one. The space in the margins around approved and licensed texts was opened for argumentation that broke out of the licensed bounds. Crowley’s addition of marginal annotations arguing for a particular reading of Langland’s poem seems to me to be a legacy of this strategy. Certainly it was one editorial activity that had special meaning for Protestant polemicists like Crowley, giving them a creative role that expanded the epithets of those accountable for the printed book. Henry lists the preparers of these books, not only as printers, but also as devisers and makers. It is as if the proclamation is searching for a vocabulary that will account for the evolving role of the printer or publisher, for that which we might call an editor today.56 The efforts to assess and codify the responsibility for the production of copies would extend to every step in the process: ultimately, provision was made to fine the binders of illegal books 20 shillings per copy.57 Authors were banned by name for the first time in a proclamation dated 8 July 1546.58 The prohibited books were described as ‘any manner of book printed or written in the English tongue which be or shall be set forth in the names of Frith, Tyndale, Wycliff, Joy, Roy, Basille, Bale, Barnes, Coverdale, Turner, Tracy, or by any of them […]’.59 The same proclamation required that each copy of a book be printed with the name of the printer, the name of the author, and the date of the printing.60 At this point the licensing system achieved a clear relationship between ascription and punishment. The legislated advances in the

56

In the OED, the first citation of the word ‘editor’ is dated 1672, and there it is defined as the publisher of a book. The first instance of the modern definition, as ‘one who prepares the literary work of another person, or number of persons for publication, by selecting, revising, and arranging the material’, comes in 1712. 57

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, p. 59. This was under the licensing system of

1559.

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58

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, p. 51.

59

Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Hughes and Larkin, p. 374.

60

Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, p. 51.

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methods of bibliography accompany the expansion of censorship to the complete oeuvres of all these authors because censorship is just not practicable without bibliography. The proclamation of 1546 was only in force for a few months before Henry VIII died,61 but its value as evidence of the growing prominence of vernacular authors is undiminished by its failure to control them. The relationship between Crowley’s publishing career and the licensing of the press came full circle when Crowley himself was appointed as a licensor under Queen Elizabeth I.62 The death of King Henry VIII brought about an immediate ideological change in the basis for censorship, but not in the prominence of the formerly banned authors. The same authors banned by name in the Henrician proclamations were promoted by the efforts of Protestant men of letters like John Bale. In 1548, immediately following the ascension of the Protestant Somerset to the protectorship, John Bale had his Illustrium maioris Britannie Scriptorum [...] Summarium published in Wesel.63 Bale had been one of the authors named in the Proclamation of 1546. The Summarium was a Latin catalogue of authors, many but not all of them vernacular and claimed for the Protestant cause. Under each entry can be found a short biography of the author and a list of attributed works. The apparent objective of Bale’s Summarium is to establish a long, scholarly history of English authors from the Anglo-Saxon kings to the sixteenth century, which firmly includes the formerly banned authors. To that effect, Askew, Wycliff, Frith, Tyndale, and Cranmer are joined by entries on Chaucer, Lydgate, Mandeville, Wyatt, More, Reginald Pecock, and ‘Henricus Octavus Rex’. Bale viewed his own rehabilitation of English literary history as necessary, not only because of the years of Henrician persecution, but also

61

Ibid., p. 51.

62

Martin, ‘The Publishing Career of Robert Crowley’, pp. 86, 95, n. 9. The empowerment came from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and survives in the Stationer’s Company records of 1588. Crowley died the same year. For a biographical sketch of Crowley with further information, see Hailey, ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’, pp. 14–18. 63

Caroline Brett and James P. Carley, ‘Introduction’, in Index Britanniae scriptorum: John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. by Reginald Lane Poole and Mary Bateson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. i–xxxvi (p. xiii). See also Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum ([Ipswich]: [n. pub.], 1548); full text is also available at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. For Bale’s activity as a publisher while abroad in his first exile, see Steele, ‘Notes on English Books Printed Abroad’, pp. 233–36.

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because of the destruction of books by radical Protestant partisans. He wrote despairingly of the loss of books in the dissolution of the abbeys: To destroye all without consyderacyon, is and wyll be unto Englande for euer, a most horryble infamy amonge the graue senyours of other nacyons. A great nombre of them which purchased those superstycyouse mansyons, reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serue theyr iakes, some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, & some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers, & some they sent ouer see to the bokebynders, not in small nomber, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to the wonderynge of the foren nacyons.64

Bale applies a humanistic impulse of conservation to the literary heritage of England. At the same time, the claim of a certain status for such vernacular writers as Wycliff and Tyndale had in part been learned under the Tudor regulation of the press, and Bale shows a partisan preference for these writers. Brett and Carley note that ‘even in his strictly bibliographical works — the Summarium and the Catalogus — [Bale] set out to show the periodization of church history’, a context in which ‘Wycliffe, of course, emerges as the pivotal English author’.65 However, by advocating the preservation of all English literary authors, Bale makes the struggle for survival experienced by banned authors into one shared by the mainstream. Scholars have long thought it likely that Crowley and Bale knew one another, and that Bale was the ultimate source for Crowley’s attribution of Piers Plowman to a Robert Langland.66 On his return to England, Bale began compiling a new bibliographic notebook in which he recorded notes on English authors and book owners.67 New additions include Thomas Hoccleve and Crowley himself. At some point in this process Bale changed his mind about the identity of the author of Piers Plowman, and recorded manuscript ascriptions of the poem to

64

Laboryouse Journey, fol. B.i.r, as quoted by Brett and Carley, ‘Introduction’, pp. xi–xii.

65

Ibid., pp. xiii, xiii, n. 11.

66

A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Early Reception of Chaucer and Langland’, Florilegium, 15 (1998), 1–22 (p. 12); King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’, p. 342. See also Hailey, ‘Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)’, pp. 21–22. 67

Brett and Carley, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. The notebook survives as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Selden supra 64 (s.c. 3452). It has been published under the title Index Britanniae scriptorum, ed. by Poole and Bateson.

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Robert Langland.68 More importantly, Crowley shares Bale’s perspective on the place of vernacular authors in a literary history that encompasses the central ethical and theological questions of the sixteenth century. Crowley and Bale admittedly show an ideological bias in favour of Reformist authors, but it is crucial to acknowledge that they promote them as authors, not simply as Reformists. One way for medieval vernacular writers to become authors in print was through the conduit of a Protestant revisionist literary history. This, at first, was Langland’s way. The same conduit that led to the assumption that the names of vernacular authors were important also led to the assumption that the historical circumstances under which they wrote were relevant to their poems. Crowley’s Langland in History What tempted Crowley to cross that line, to bring the poet’s life out of the internal dynamics of the poem to construct a historical context for its interpretation? Middleton has argued the difference between the external attribution in print and the internal signatures of Piers Plowman primarily in terms of the economic proprieties in play for print culture: It is only the social and material arrangements for mechanical reproduction of the written text that make it possible to form the ideas of literary property that underwrite this assumption about medieval motives for internal authorial self-naming. In late medieval literary texts, internal signature regulates [...] proprieties that are in the first instance grammatical and ontological rather than economic: it proclaims and governs the representative claims of the work rather than the circulation or exchange value of the maker’s ‘hand’.69

Crowley’s external attribution of the poem, however, seems much concerned with the ontological status of the work. The social arrangements for print included, not only the market, but also governmental regulation. Here the 68

Edwards, ‘The Early Reception of Chaucer and Langland’, p. 12. Edwards notes that one extant ascription is in Bale’s own hand, in San Marino, Huntington Library MS Hm 128. For an account of the ascriptions and the origins of the modern shift to William Langland, see George Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965), pp. 26–51. For a summary of what is known of the historical Langland, see Hanna, William Langland, pp. 1–10. 69

Anne Middleton, ‘William Langland’s “Kynde Name”: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England’, in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. by Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 15–82 (p. 27).

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‘representative claims’ of the poem might serve as the basis for its suppression. Crowley’s attribution therefore attempts, not only to market his author, but also to position him as a literary artist whose fictional work can lay claim to the scholarly protection of humanists and to the harmless goal of giving pleasure. In other words, Crowley claims that what tempted him was a desire to know the author. Crowley’s perception of the need to justify his work at once as scholarly and pleasurable is clear from the posture he takes at the start of the preface. Crowley begins with a description of the poem’s author and his method of discovering the information: Beynge desyerous to knowe the name of the Autoure of thys most worthy worke, (gentle reader) and the tyme of the writynge of the same: I did not onely gather togyther suche aunciente copies as I could come by, but also consult such men as I knew to be more exercised in the studie of antiquities, then I myselfe have ben. And by some of them I have learned that the Autour was named Roberte langelande, a Shropshere man borne in Cleybirie, about .viii. myles from Malverne hilles.70

Though the language of Crowley’s description is that of a humanist project (the gathering together of ancient copies; the consultation of greater authorities in the study of antiquities), he maintains for himself a kind of amateur status by couching his motives in terms of desire. At the close of the passage, the subject of study is revealed to be, not a Classical author, but a Shropshire man. The description of Langland is remarkable for its historical situatedness. In contrast to the dynamic of the internal signatures described by Middleton, the advertisement of the identity of the author here does seem calculated to fix the poem in time and place. To this Crowley adds a description of his method in determining upper and lower bounds for the composition of the poem, which is linked to the account that we have already seen, of Langland’s role as a living poet: [...] And in the seconde side of the .lxviii. leafe of thys printed copye, I finde mention of a dere yere, that was in the yere of oure Lorde, M.iii.hundred and .L. John Chichester than beyng mayre of London. So that this I may be bold to reporte, [...] that it was fyrste written about two hundred yeres paste in the tyme of Kynge Edwarde the thyrde. In whose tyme it pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geuing them boldeness of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute agaynste the workes of darckenes, as dyd John wicklefe, who also in those dayes translated the holye Bible into the Englishe tonge, and this writer who in reportynge certaine visions and

70

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dreames, that he fayned him selfe to have dreamed: doeth moste christianlye enstruct the weake, and sharply rebuke the obstinate blynde.71

There is a Protestant slant to this view of the historical period, in the invocation of truth on Wycliff’s side and works of darkness on the other. It is also, however, a heritage that is constructed as both English and immediate, as recent enough to make details familiar to contemporary life — like the identity of the mayor of London — still available. The specificity of Crowley’s approach to the poem, in which the back side of the sixty-eighth leaf leads directly into the history of London, has roots in Middle English traditions. The school of thought represented here by Crowley and Bale developed a mode of literary history not based on the Classical models, but on what has been called the ‘cultural and textual situatedness’ of vernacular theory.72 The pressures that caused ‘writing in English’ to raise ‘large questions about national/cultural identity and about the consequences of the spread of literacy and learning both down the social scale and across the gender divide’ in the Middle English period,73 were in some part kept alive in the mid-sixteenth century by the politics of the Reformation. These pressures are best highlighted by the concentration of Tudor press regulation on books ‘in the English tongue’. At the same time, Crowley’s preface seeks a particular artistic and authoritative status for the poem, above the fray that had become as political as it was spiritual. His exposition of the poem’s form focuses on the aesthetic quality: ‘[...] the metre shall be very pleasant to read’.74 He reassures the reader that the poem will reward ‘such as wyll not sticke to breake the shell of the nutte for the kernelles sake’. Much of my argument here has been spent in describing how Crowley’s preface uses historical reference to fix the poem in place, but it is also true that, for Crowley, the poem is a pleasing and accessible reference

71

Ibid., sig. *2 r.

72

Nicholas W atson, ‘The Politics of English Writing’, in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 331–52 (p. 331). This school should probably also include John Foxe, whose martyrology is mixed with history of the book. For a comparison between the work of Foxe and a chronicle written by Crowley, see Martin, ‘The Publishing Career of Robert Crowley’, pp. 89–90. For the affinities between Bale’s Summarium and a Protestant martyrology, see Brett and Carley, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii, n. 11.

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73

Watson, ‘The Politics of English Writing’, p. 331.

74

Robert Crowley, preface to The Vision of Pierce Plowman, by William Langland, sig. *2 v.

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point for Protestant history. Crowley saw that the Protestant cause was best served by poets, not polemicists. Edwards has noted that the Chaucer tradition developed ‘a stylistic debt’ early on, but that Langland has no equivalent ‘literary’ traditions to which he can be related. The Piers Plowman tradition, as defined recently in the admirable collection of poems under this rubric by Helen Barr, also reflects very different forms of appropriation from those evidenced by Chaucer’s early followers. It is a tradition which locates Langland in contexts where the ideological rather than the aesthetic predominates.75

In this context Crowley’s particular appropriation of the poem is notable for its articulation of the literary value of the poem. Crowley is careful, for instance, to insist on the fictionality of the poem’s premise, describing Langland as ‘this writer who in reportynge certayne visions and dreames, that he fayned hymselfe to have dreamed’.76 He praises the style of the poem as one that facilitates the didactic virtues of the poet, who ‘doeth most christianlye enstruct the weake, and sharply rebuke the obstinate blynde. There is no maner of vice, that reygneth in anye estate of men, whyche thys wryter hath not godly, learnedlye, and wittilye rebuked’.77 Though the preface’s invocation of Wycliff gives it a Reformist tone, the rhetorical stance of the preface generalizes the poem’s appeal as a godly, learned and witty rebuke of all the estates. Studies of Crowley’s publishing career tend to emphasize his role as a Protestant ‘controversialist’. Hailey, for instance, characterizes Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman ‘as a public service, to further the ends of his radical religion by invoking the historical basis of English Protestant theology’.78 Martin puts it more bluntly: ‘Crowley entered the trade mainly to make propaganda for things he believed in’.79 Like Bale, Crowley saw that the Protestant cause needed artists, that theologians and propagandists could not persuade in the way that a poet could. His exposition of the poem’s metre focuses on the aesthetic pleasure of reading: ‘This thing noted the metre shall be very pleasant to reade’. He reassures

75

Edwards, ‘The Early Reception of Chaucer and Langland’, pp. 5–6.

76

Robert Crowley, preface to The Vision of Pierce Plowman, by William Langland, sig. *2 r (emphasis mine).

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77

Ibid., sig. *2 r.

78

Hailey, ‘“Geuyng Light to the Reader”’, p. 489.

79

Martin, ‘The Publishing Career of Robert Crowley’, p. 87.

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the reader that the poem will reward ‘such as wyll not sticke to breake the shell of the nutte for the kernelles sake’.80 The preface also makes it clear that Crowley’s interest in the poem is not strictly historical. Turning to two prophetic passages in the poem, Crowley emphatically shifts their interpretation away from the historical past into an ethical present. Of the second passage he writes: Nowe for that whiche is written in the .l. leafe, concerning the suppresson of Abbaies, the scripture there alledged, declareth it to be gathered of the iuste iudgment of god, who wyll not suffer abomination to raigne unpunished. Loke not upon this boke therefore, to talke of wonders paste or to come but to amende thyne owne misse [...].81

The passage referred to is B: X, 322–25, which is marked in the second and third impressions with the marginal notation ‘the suppression of Abbayes’: ‘And ther shall come a king & confesse you religious / And beat you as the byble telleth for breking of your rule / And amend monials monkes and chanons / And put hem to her penaunce. Ad pristinum statum ire’ (fol. Lr; sig. 2Nr). It has been customary to read Crowley’s interpretation of the passage as a prophecy of the actual dissolution of the abbeys under Henry VIII.82 Crowley’s preface rejects that reading. The suppression referred to is not one of the ‘wonders of the past or to come’, but a warning of allegorical significance to everyone in the present time.

80

Robert Crowley, preface to The Vision of Pierce Plowman, by William Langland, sig. *2 v.

81

Ibid., sig. *2 v.

82

See King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’: ‘Glossing it with approval as “the suppression of the Abbayes”, the editor interprets the following passage as a prophecy of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries’ (p. 351). A notable exception is Bowers, who in ‘Piers Plowman and the Police’, notes the passage in the preface quoted above and characterizes Crowley as ‘alert to the continuing suspicion of prophetic writings’ so that ‘Crowley tried to have it both ways, viewing Langland as a precursor of the Reformation but not necessarily as the author of political prophecy’ (p. 41). With reference to Uhart’s doctoral dissertation, Bowers notes that ‘his firmness on the denial of prophecy here and in the sidenotes to the second printing [...] may have been a reaction to the manuscripts he consulted since prior glosses had repeatedly insisted upon the poem’s prophetic contents’ (p. 41). My own point differs slightly in reading Crowley’s annotations as deliberate ethical challenges to Henry VIII’s program, rather than concessions to continuing disapproval of political prophecies. Even those annotations that indicate a historical context may function as reminders of the ideal that should have been, rather than identification between the poem’s message and the historical reality.

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Similarly, the following passage is marked in the second impression with the sidenote, ‘The suppression of the Abbayes. Good counsell’: And sithen he prayed prelates, and priestes togither That ye preach to the people, preve on your selfe And do it in dede, it shall drive you to good, If ye liue as ye learne vs, we shal leue you the better, And sithen he radde religion, her rule to holde Lest the king and his councel, your commens apere And be stuardes of your stedes, tyl ye be ruled better.83

Hailey reads the sidenote as proof of the extent to which Crowley will go to revise history in favour of the Reformation, remarking, The ‘principall matter’ of the passage is that it appears, at least to Crowley, to call for the suppression of abbeys, which he heartily approves as ‘Good counsell’. Modern readers may be a bit surprised at his interpretation of the passage, part of a sermon from the allegorized figure Reason [...]. Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries certainly went considerably beyond reducing provisions and there was no conditional ‘til you are better ruled’ to what could only in the loosest sense be called stewardship.84

The good counsel to which Crowley refers, however, is not the suppression of the abbeys as it occurred, but as it should have occurred. The sidenote is meant to provoke an unfavourable comparison between the poem’s conception of an ideal rebuke of the monasteries, and the reality of what occurred in the actual suppression. Crowley, like Bale, was very sensible of the rapacious loss caused by Henry’s dissolution.85 That subject is a theme of his own One and thyrtye Epigrammes, published by himself in 1550 [STC 6088].86 The epigram ‘Of Abbayes’ laments the redistribution of monastic wealth in ways that failed to carry out the lost hope of pastoral care. The poem opens with an explicit reference to Henry the VIII’s role in the suppression: 83

Fol. 21r. A text of the second impression [STC 19907a] is available at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 84

Hailey, ‘“Geuyng Light to the Reader”’, p. 501.

85

See the introduction to The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. by Cowper, esp. p. xiii.

86

The epigrams are arranged alphabetically in an alliterative Table of Contents. The text was edited by Cowper for EETS in 1872. There are epigrams on, among other things, Alehouses, Bawds, Bearbaiters, Drunkards, Dice Players, the Exchequer, Idle persons, Nice wives, and Rent Raisers. The subject matter, which runs the gamut of urban life in London, and the sentiment of social reform, probably owes much to Langland. Crowley published Piers Plowman in the same year he brought out One and thyrtye Epigrammes. Crowley’s own works are a repository of the Langland tradition that has received little attention.

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As I walked alone, / and mused on thynges That haue in my time / bene done by great kings, I bethought me of Abbayes / that sometyme I sawe, Which are nowe suppressed / all by a lawe. O Lorde (thought I then) / what occasion was here, To provide for learninge / And make pouertye chere? The landes and the jewels / that hereby were hadde, Would haue found godly prechers, / which might well have ladde The people aright / that now go astraye, And haue fedde the pore, / that famishe euerye daye.87

The sidenote in the Crowley edition similarly creates polemic by stimulating comparison of the contemporary status quo with the poem’s vision of a just management of the abbeys. Crowley launches a criticism of the Tudor administration from the margins of his text, his marginal notations are not simply Protestant propaganda — the ideological (and literary) stance is more complex than that. Crowley’s margins offer a critical reading of the poem that provokes comparison with contemporary events. He asserts the poem’s relevance to the day, and asks readers to work out the complex relationship between literary history, political history, and personal conscience. At the same time, Crowley makes the first attempt to distinguish Langland (albeit Robert Langland) as an author from the scribal interference in the manuscript copies. Again, regarding an alleged prophecy in the text, Crowley remarks: As for that is written in the .xxxvi. leafe of thys boke concernynge a dearth then to come: is spoken by the knowledge of astronomie as may wel be gathered bi that he saith, Saturne sente him to tell And that whiche foloweth and geveth it the face of a prophecye: is lyke to be a thinge added of some other man than the fyrste autour. For diverse copies haue it diverslye.88

He goes on to give two examples of variants. The perceptive leap made by Crowley has been best described by Dahl: In other words, as Crowley prepared the first printed edition of Piers Plowman, he came to believe that manuscript variation resulted from more than simple scribal error. He believed that a significant change of text found in another manuscript was produced by a writer other than the author of the editor’s chosen source.89

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87

The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. by Cowper, p. 7, lines 58–76.

88

Robert Crowley, preface to The Vision of Pierce Plowman, by William Langland, sig. *2 v.

89

Dahl, ‘“Diverse Copies Have It Diversely”’, p. 55.

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Modern textual critics agree with Crowley, who seems to have been the first critic to recognize the work of the active scribes, who have garnered much fruitful study from scholars in recent years.90 The observation comes at the same moment in which Crowley is attempting to give ‘the first author’ a special priority based on distinctive style. The primary distinction Crowley identifies is that the first author was not the one who ‘put the face of a prophecy’ on the poem. Crowley is the first to have argued for the qualities of Langland’s usus scribendi, and thus is the first textual critic of Piers Plowman. Though the evidence from which modern textual critics draw their conclusions has developed beyond Crowley’s blunt first attempt, Crowley’s aim is consistent with George Kane’s characterization of textual criticism: ‘Textual criticism is, first, essentially comparative and evaluative, based on differentiation between the mode of writing of the great artist and those of his copyists, between the usus scribendi of poet and scribes’.91 At the same time, Crowley seeks to keep the ‘first author’s’ work above the political fray in which the poetry of prophecy often engaged.92 The poem rebukes ‘godly, learnedlye, and wittilye’, an estimation in which the stylistic pleasure of the poem is listed on equal terms with the didactic contents. Langland’s method of writing is, he says, scholarly, ethical, and personal: ‘Loke [...] to amende thyne owne misse, which thou shalt fynd here moste charitably rebuked’.93

90

Most recent work includes The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 85 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 2001). See also Tanya Schaap, ‘From Professional to Private Readership: A Discussion and Transcription of the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Marginalia in Piers Plowman CText, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Digby 102’, in The Medieval Reader, ed. by Kerby-Fulton and others, pp. 81–116. For a book-length study of a single manuscript, see Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader. 91

Kane, ‘The Text’, p. 197.

92

The prophetic and the political were so commonly combined that John Edwin Wells, in his A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916) devotes a section of his chapter on political pieces to prophetic writings (pp. 220–26). He characterizes a text known as ‘Tomas of Ersseldoune’ as the ‘chief representative of the tradition’ (p. 224). It survives in five manuscripts, two from the sixteenth century, one also containing fragments of Piers Plowman (London, British Library, Sloane MS 2578). 93

Robert Crowley, preface to The Vision of Pierce Plowman, by William Langland, sig. *2 r and sig. *2 v.

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The value of the author is expressed in aesthetic terms, not because poetry can have no reflection on the political, but because its reason for being and its right to speak are not based on the correctness of its political views. Already in Crowley’s time, the benefits of literary status for a text had been demonstrated by Chaucer’s works. In the Animadversions, Francis Thynne recounts that ‘in one open parliamente (as I have herde Sir Johne Thynne reporte, beinge then a member of the howse,) when talke was had of Bookes to be forbidden, Chaucer had there for euer byn condempned, had yt not byn that his woorkes had byn counted but fables’.94 The parliament in question was possibly that of 1545, at which John Thynne sat for Marlborough.95 This would put the parliamentary debate in the months preceding Henry’s Proclamation of 1546, in which authors were banned by name for the first time. In Chaucer’s case, a style characterized as fable rather than polemic saved his works from prohibition.96 This protected status was available to Chaucer only because he was publicly recognized as a literary author, as an author whose ‘representative claims’ were widely considered fictional. Crowley, himself a radical reformist, sought to protect the voice for social critique in Piers Plowman by promoting its author as a literary figure as well. As Crowley’s work suggests, one of the origins of textual criticism is in the attempt to construct a literary history parallel to political history, to identify the special right of artists to speak before that right was extended to all speech. However, the series of Tudor proclamations governing the way in which books were banned suggests that the rise of the vernacular author in England also had its roots in the encroaching governmental regulation of the press, which equally sought to identify and define the relationship between authors, texts, and printers for the opposite reason. The printing press had its role as a public platform for both endeavours.

94

Thynne, Animadversions Upon Speght’s First Edition of Chaucers Workes, p. 10.

95

Stanford Lehmbergh, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536–1547 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 211, 240. 96

See also King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’. King discusses Thynne’s account in relation to the printing of the spurious Plowman’s Tale (pp. 342–43, n. 5). I disagree with his conclusions but found the discussion helpful because it works through one way to integrate the different publication histories of Chaucer and Langland.

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Writing Piers Plowman

In the previous section, we have seen that there were several ways in which the figure of the author could be useful in the print culture of early modern England: as a commercial selling point; as the signifier of a literary quality determining the aesthetic of the correct or original text; as a historically situated reference point for interpreting the work, and as a fixed bibliographic marker of the text that enabled both censorship and celebrity. Each of these roles contributes to the establishment of what the printer could name as a single, authorial text. These authorial functions worked in the production of Crowley’s particular edition. The correspondence between the role of the author and the needs of the cultural moment of the book’s production begs the question of what role the idea of the poet might have played in the transmission of manuscript copies and indeed within the poem itself. C. David Benson’s study, Public Piers Plowman, has recently offered powerful reasons for re-examining the ways in which the reconstruction of a historical Langland in the attempt to understand the origin of the text has perhaps served the needs of modern scholarship more than it has fulfilled any requirement of the poem as understood by its contemporary audience.97 Yet, one of the most fascinating aspects of the textual tradition highlighted by Benson’s study is the admitted tension between the paucity of information about the author, even within the poem, and the persistent curiosity about him that readers have long demonstrated: ‘The identity of the poet of Piers Plowman has always intrigued readers of the poem. That interest is seen in medieval manuscript annotations and in Crowley’s first print; it shapes Skeat’s editorial work and much modern criticism’.98 It is not, however, an interest that has resulted in the positive, stable identification of the poet, in part because of the qualities of the poem: As previously noted, we cannot be confident that we are hearing Langland when Piers addresses us in the first person [...]. One could easily compile a number of separate anthologies of selections from the poem, each volume containing radically different views and tones of voice, all expressed by the ‘I’. It is no wonder that individual scholars have been able to conclude that ‘Langland’ is conservative or revolutionary,

97 C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 1–75. 98

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orthodox or heretical, friend of the poor or supporter of aristocracy, learned university man or seedy autodidact.99

Although it may never be possible to settle the question of what kind of person wrote Piers Plowman, it ought to be possible to consider what kind of author-figure was useful to particular readers of Piers Plowman and why. Benson, for instance, has suggested that Skeat’s mining of the narrator’s voice for information about a historical Langland’s life has its roots in Victorian sensibilities: Because the Langland myth was created in Victorian England, in a time that valued bourgeois individualism, there is nothing surprising about its assumption that the narratorial ‘I’ in Piers represents a particular human being who is identical with the poet.100

So the equation of the narratorial ‘I’ with an external, historical poet might be said to make particular sense to Victorian readers. Of course, it is also true that moments of the poem make the narrator, Will, into the recorder of his own dreams, and in some sense this move equates the narratorial ‘I’ with the idea of the poet.101 The fourteenth-century continuation of the A text by reader John But, and the revisions that produced the C text, emphasize this move (which is also made in the B text), opening the poem up to the subjects of ‘authorial intention and authorial qualms’, as Kathryn Kerby-

99 100 101

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 90.

George Kane identifies eight ascriptions in manuscript that are not associated with John Bale’s attribution of the poem. Of those eight, seven refer to the poet only by the name W ill or William, ascriptions that might simply play on the name of the speaker Will. The seven are John But’s reference to Will in Rawlinson poet. 137, the explicit (‘Explicit liber Willielmi de petro le plowgman’) in Liverpool, University Library MS F.4.8, and an explicit (‘Explicit visio W illielmi W. de Petro le plouhman’) that appears in five manuscripts of the C text: San Marino, Huntington Library MS Hm 143, Oxford, Bodleian Library M S Digby 102, the Ilchester MS (now London, University Library MS V.88), London, British Library, Additional MS 35157, and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 104. See Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship, pp. 26–51. If these explicits are simply playing on the name of the speaker, however, they are notable for the way in which they bring the speaker out of the poem and into the external apparatus of the text, as if he could exist outside of the work. If they do not offer external evidence of a kind not based on the internal character Will, they are at least playing at the construction of a kind of author, rather as John But does when he describes the death of Will. On the meaning of ascriptions in the poem, see Middleton, ‘William Langland’s “Kynde Name”’.

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Fulton has argued.102 Kerby-Fulton’s study compares these aspects of Piers Plowman with the genre of spiritual or monastic autobiography, which makes the ‘intellectual development in the life of the autobiographer’ an important feature of the text.103 Just as Crowley’s preface instructs readers to view Langland as a voice of authority ‘crying out against the works of darkness’, these elements of Piers Plowman, and in particular the A and C text revisions, presented contemporary readers with a way to read Will as an author-figure — though Will is a very different kind of author-figure for these manuscript versions than Langland was for Crowley. Rather than attempting to uncover the subjective quality of Will’s persona, the A and C texts seem more interested in how ‘receptive’ Will and his account can be. That is, they seem concerned with how readily the perceptions, contributions, or preconceived assumptions of readers will adhere to Will and, in turn, affect what the poem at least pretends is Will’s work. The reception of the poet becomes a subject of the poem in these revisions, as if, as Pearsall has suggested, Langland ‘lived to see his poem overtaken by events’.104 Pearsall’s study argues that, while some of Langland’s revisions of the C text may be ‘apparent attempts by Langland to protect his poem from the suspicion of Wycliffitism’, the revisions are, importantly, not merely ideological, since ‘many of his revisions, even in passages of a possibly Wycliffite bent, were the product of primarily artistic decisions’.105 If the C text revisions do constitute some form of response on Langland’s part to the reception of the B text, then it is not a response that can be reduced to an anxiety to control the political ramifications of the poem. Where the C revisions ‘endeavor […] to clarify the argument of the poem’,106 following the demands of the poem’s art aside from the way in which Langland’s contemporaries might read it, there is also artistic exploration of what it means for an author to be read, as the revisions invest new interest in how the poem is made and makes meaning. This section will focus on passages in the A and C texts that view Will as the author of the poem and ask what stakes these versions of the text have in their 102

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 70. 103

Ibid., p. 71.

104

Derek Pearsall, ‘Langland and Lollardy’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 17 (2003), 7–23

(p. 11).

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105

Ibid., p. 22.

106

Ibid., p. 22.

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author-figure. At this point, I might suggest that a receptive authorial figure who is open to multiple readings and easily accommodates the contributions of readers would ‘make sense’ in a collaborative culture of manuscript transmission. By this I mean that the invitations for readerly contributions extended by such authorial figures — like Chaucer the Pilgrim’s offer that we ‘choose another tale’ — are readily intelligible when textual transmission requires collaboration. Such writers will find responsive imitators, as Langland certainly did, in the form of readers who write their way into the poem, producing non-authorial revisions according to the example of the author’s own adaptive techniques. But I also hope to show that, for the writers who produced the continuation of the A text and the C text, Piers Plowman was as much about reading as it was about writing, which is perhaps just another way to think of Benson’s profound observation of the poem: ‘Piers looks outward as much as it looks inward’.107 John But’s Will: The A Text Continuation The version of Piers Plowman that appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 137 ends with the prayer of a reader who has contributed a new ending to the poem.108 This new ending comments on both the role of the original poet and the reader. Toward the end of the twelfth and last passus, the narrator of the poem, Will, meets Fever, who gives him the following advice: And therefore do after dowel whil thi dayes duren, That thi play be plentevous in paradys with augelys. Thou shalt be laugt into lygt with loking of an eye, So that thou werke the word that holy wryt techeth, And be prest to preyeres and profitable werkes! (A: XII, 96–98)

The closing lines of this version of the A text imagine the entire poem as a response to this advice to live according to the text of the scriptures. According to a new narrator, who picks up at line 99 in a sudden shift to the third person,

107 108

Benson, Public Piers Plowman, p. 106.

The twelfth passus of the A text is attested in only three manuscripts. Rawlinson 137 contains the complete passus. Oxford, University College MS 45 breaks off imperfectly at line 19. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M 818 (formerly the Ingilby MS) finishes with line 88 copied at the head of fol. 54 v . For descriptions of the manuscripts see Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. by George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1960), pp. 8, 14, 16. For a thorough account of the textual question, see the study by R. W. Chambers, ‘The Original Form of the A Text of Piers Plowman’, Modern Language Review, 6 (1911), 302–23.

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Will immediately recognizes the truth of Fever’s words and sets about writing Piers Plowman: Wille [wiste] thurgh inwit (thou wost wel the sothe!) That this speche was spedelich and sped him wel faste, And wrougte that here is wryten and other werkes bothe And of Peres the Plowman and mechel puple al-so. (A: XII, 99–102)

In this interpretation, the writing of Piers Plowman constitutes ‘working the [holy] word’. However, Will does not live to write the very ending of the twelfth passus, which describes Will’s untimely death: And whan this werk was wrought ere Wille mygte a-spie, Deth delt him a dent and drof him to the earthe, And is closed under clom Crist have his soule! (A: XII, 103–05)

The poem must somehow finish itself after the death of the poet, whose identity as Will, the speaker, is revealed in the same closing lines that kill him. In Auden’s well known formulation, the death of the poet is kept from the poem, which continues on to explain the reader’s decision to complete it. Though, therefore, it is clear that the poem is being given a kind of life apart from the poet, its original composition is portrayed as a result of Will’s personal conviction that the advice given to him was ‘spedelich’, that he should live the words taught by scripture, and that writing about Piers Plowman would fulfil that duty. This idea of the poem as a work of purely personal conviction for the salvation of one individual at the close of the A text, however, is complicated by the fact that the end of the twelfth passus was probably not written by Will, or by the same person who writes as Will in the first eleven passus of the A text. The twelfth passus is likely the work of a reader named John But, who penned his own conclusion to the poem.109 Anne Middleton has demonstrated the gulf

109

The most recent studies lean toward the conclusion that the entire twelfth passus was written by But. See Anne M iddleton, ‘Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman’, in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. by Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Wolfeboro, NH: Brewer, 1988), pp. 243–66. Chambers, in ‘The Original Form’, argues that the point at which the Ingilby MS’s exemplar breaks off, line 88, is the likely boundary between Langland’s work and But’s continuation. Skeat’s parallel text edition prints up to line 103, but the notes suggest that lines 99–103, describing Will’s death, are also possibly spurious (The Vision of William, ed. by Skeat, II, 165). For a possible identification of John But, see Edith Rickert, ‘John But, Messsenger and Maker’, Modern Philology, 2 (1913), 107–16. However, Middleton, ‘Making a Good End’,

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between the confident assurances of But’s conclusion and the more complex relationship between salvation and good works in the B and C texts.110 But’s intervention quite poignantly rushes to resolve a question that the original author leaves uncomfortably but importantly unsettled, because the hope that good works are related to salvation is only kept alive by the poem’s lack of resolution.111 In the B and C texts, the poem culminates in Conscience’s desperate crying after Grace. His cries, however, begin to awake the dreamer in a pattern that readers of the B and C texts have been taught to recognize as a reawakening to real experience. I would read the conclusion of the B and C texts, not as a despairing realization that grace alone can satisfy the judgement of a human being’s worth, but as an expression of hope that the dreamed desire for grace in a truly conscientious person will carry over into the waking world as the desire actually to do well (or better, or best). The poem will not rest at the thought of grace; it acknowledges that good works will not save a man, but also insists that a saved man should do good works. In this formulation, works are not judged apart from the man who carries them out. In literary terms, this means that the idea of the author matters in some way to the interpretation of the text. We are encouraged as readers, not only to question whether the poem is a good work, but also whether the poet speaking to us is a good man — thus in John But’s formulation, whether the writing of the poem makes him a good man.112 contains important corrections to Rickert’s article. See also Oscar Cargill, ‘The Langland Myth’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 50 (1935), 36–56. 110

See Middleton, ‘Making a Good End’, pp. 251, 254–55. Much recent work has been done on the importance of works, or more broadly, labour, to the poem, and particularly to the poet’s attempts to justify literary endeavour. See especially Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 111 112

See Middleton, ‘Making a Good End’, pp. 254–55.

Middleton makes a similar point when she argues that ‘Langland seems to have chosen to rest his ultimate defence of his makings on the enigmatic status of a way of life [...] rather than on the integrity and generic stability of his texts, as the vehicle by which his “intent” was likeliest to be fully intelligible’: ‘The C Version “Autobiography” and the Statue of 1388’, in Written Work, ed. by Justice and Kerby-Fulton, pp. 208–338. The distinction I add is that Langland sees the integrity and stability of his texts as dependent on his way of life. What we see as a choice from among many defences available for the free speech of artists is for Langland a personal obligation to establish continuity between what he says and what he does. It follows that the self-criticism particularly apparent in the C text revisions, to which we will later return, applies as much to the integrity of the text as it does to the integrity of the poet. Here my

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Rather like Chaucer’s Clerk, who carefully puts Petrarch in a casket before adapting his history of Griselda, John But finds it necessary to bury Will with praise and a finality that defines him, and therefore make it possible to imitate him. But’s identification of the poet as Will makes an exceptional comment on the poet’s status in relation to his text. That is, But reads an authorial presence in the allegorical speaker, Will, that is palpable enough to require recognition in imagining the genesis of the poem and the end of the poet.113 We cannot know whether But was only inspired by the text itself to add the information regarding Will’s death, or whether he was possessed of external evidence concerning the poet. But may have taken the idea that Will was the writer of the poem (whom, for convenience we will continue to call ‘Langland’) from the B text, for Will begins to write in that text at the beginning of passus XIX. In the ending John But composes for the poem, however, he claims his inspiration is coming, not directly from Will, but from Will’s use of his sources. But explicitly bases his imitation on the observation that Will also composes his poetry using the material of others: And so bad Iohan but busily wel ofte When he saw thes sawes busyly alegged By Iames and by Ierom, by Iop and by othere,

reading differs somewhat from Middleton’s, in which Langland’s self-criticism functions as a distraction from criticism of the content of the text: ‘Langland calls down upon his persona the threat and mechanisms for prosecuting the vagrancy of idle laborers, elaborating these in detailed close-focus, in order to divert attention from the possible imputation to it of a kind of vagrancy that had far more swift and dire consequences: doctrinal, theological, and intellectual error, and pretensions of clerical authority’ (‘The C Version “Autobiography”’, p. 279). I rather contend that Langland encourages scrutiny of the text through his apologia. 113

Given the generic convention noted by George Kane, that medieval dream visions tend to fashion their narrators ‘in the image’ of their authors, it seems to me quite likely that But could have assumed an equivalence between the speaker Will and the writer of the poem without any external evidence to encourage him at all. Imagining the narrator as a historical person, capable of writing the poem and dying, is of course a useful literary trope. See George Kane, The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies (London: Lewis and Co., 1965), p. 12. The consensus, however, leans toward But being privy to local knowledge of the actual poet’s death: see Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship, pp. 32–34. See also Middleton, ‘Making a Good End’, pp. 262–63. Cargill presents historical records that suggest a connection between the Rokayls and the Buts: Cargill, ‘The Langland Myth’. ‘Rokayl’ is the surname given to the father of William Langland, according to an ascription in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 212 (D.4.I). For more on the ascription see Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship, pp. 26–51.

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And for he medleth of makyng he made this ende. (A: XII, 106–09)

John But observes in these lines that the poem written by Will is in part a reading of the ‘saws’ of James, Jerome, Job, and others. If But’s reading was confined to the A text, it is difficult to see which quotations from Jerome, James, and Job he has in mind. Edith Rickert notes that: According to Prof. Skeat’s Index, Jerome is not quoted at all, he is simply named with three other Church Fathers, and not in A (B XIX 265; C XXII 270); James is quoted twice, in B and C only, and not named; Job is quoted six times in C and three times in B, but only one of these passages is found in A; and Job is not named in A except here, XII, 103.114

Rickert’s observations of this pattern of quotation are best understood as evidence that But had also read the B text and possibly C, and that these are the ‘other werkes bothe’ to which he refers in line 103.115 The chief idea But takes from the B and C texts is that Langland’s activity as a reader of the Church Fathers, of the Bible, and even of his own poem, is itself worthy of imitation. But interprets this as an invitation to do some ‘making’ of his own by offering a reading of Will’s texts as ‘profitable work’. Like Will, But ‘meddles with making’.116 But’s continuation is remarkable for its demonstration of the way in which Piers Plowman succeeds in maintaining its openness toward readerly 114

Rickert, ‘John But, Messsenger and Maker’, p. 114.

115

Rickert herself draws a very different conclusion: ‘John But, Messsenger and Maker’, p. 116. Chambers, in ‘The Original Form’, pp. 302–03, argues that But is referring to the B and/or C texts, rebutting the argument originally put forth by Bradley in 1910 (Henry Bradley, ‘The Authorship of “Piers the Plowman”’, Modern Language Review, 5 (1910), 202–07) that But views the A text as constituting more than one work. Middleton upholds Chambers: ‘[John But] not only knew of, but knew well, at least one of the long versions of Langland’s work, and was here also drawing some important critical inferences about it’: ‘Making a Good End’, p. 247. 116

Middleton points out that But’s phrase is a quotation from Langland’s B text, XII, 16 (‘Making a Good End’, p. 247). She also notes that the context there is pejorative. Imaginatyf is rebuking Will for wasting his time ‘meddling with verses’ when he would do better to pray. Middleton suggests that But’s text reads as if he has misunderstood the context. However, there is another echo from this scene in But’s conclusion. Will’s response to Imagynatyf’s criticism is ‘I seigh wel he sayde me soth’ (B: XII, 20). This is very similar to Will’s reaction to Fever’s admonition in A: XII, 99: ‘Wille thurgh inwit [wiste] wel the sothe’. In the B text, Will goes on to defend his writing. Therefore, it may be worth considering whether the quotation from B: XII functions as an allusion to this argument, championing Will’s poetic efforts as But’s conclusion does, without the complication of Imaginatyf’s counter argument.

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intervention, even as it asserts the importance of the author to the text. This is in part because Will, as the author-figure, presents himself most prominently as a reader. In her study of the internal signatures of the poem, Middleton describes Langland as ‘a writer steeped in others’ writings’.117 The set of questions she advances on the subject is worth quoting in full: If what Langland was composing through this process of voracious textual appropriation was himself, how might such a remarkable authorial intent arise from its alleged immediate sources? How, in other words, might such a relentlessly ‘external’ regimen be assimilated and given back as the ‘internal’, as the apparent constituents of a subject located in space and time? And even more puzzling, why? What would prompt a writer steeped in such materials to give them back to his contemporaries in this expository form as a ‘description of himself’? And what kind of reception might he find for such a project?118

One response to these questions is that the text wants very badly for reading to make a difference in the lives of readers — not in the purely didactic sense, but in the broadly conceived ideal that it ought to be possible to learn from authoritative texts and to effect change without the need to suffer painful personal experience. We find in the reconstruction of Will’s reading, however, that learning from texts still constitutes painful personal experience. If Piers Plowman is a didactic text at all, what it teaches is how to read as if reading really mattered. The figure of a kind of author is important to Langland’s teaching in particular ways, which I hope to make clearer through a study of the revisions that constitute the C text. In the C text revisions, the stakes are particularly high, as the instability of texts and the necessity of considering the source are held up against the tantalizing potential of language to illuminate. The poet offers himself as the arbiter between the two — not as a controlling intelligence, but as a key text that must be read and interpreted in concert with the others. Whether at this point we imagine a William Langland revising his own work or some other poet working within the tradition of the poem, the outcome will be the same. Every reader is meant to take the process of interpretation as personally as a poet reading his own poem. For that to happen, however, the model of a reader who is personally involved with the poem, not just artistically, but with consequences in his ‘real’ life, must be conceivable. Will is that reader, of his sources and of his own text. The fact that he is presented as the poet allows the poem to make the

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117

Middleton, ‘William Langland’s “Kynde Name”’, p. 23.

118

Ibid., pp. 23–24.

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most significant comment on the interplay between authorial biography and text in canonical Middle English. Revising Will in the C Text One of the important additions of the B text is the use of dream vision conventions to make its own composition part of the subject matter of Piers Plowman. As A. C. Spearing has expressed it, ‘the dream-framework inevitably brings the poet into his poem, not merely as the reteller of a story which has its origin elsewhere, but as the person who experiences the whole substance of the poem’.119 The B text opens up the exploration of the poet’s role in the composition of the poem. After the A text, Langland ‘could proceed only by going back, rewriting his poem from the beginning [...] and making its next topic precisely the difficulties he had in continuing it at all’.120 Will wakes and begins to write at the beginning of passus XIX: ‘Thus I awaked and wroot what I hadde ydremed’ (B: XIX, 1). This is the point at which Will describes the act of composition. This is also the point at which the structural unit of the poem, the passus, begins to coincide with the length of the visions.121 Having recorded what he dreamt, he promptly falls asleep again, only to wake at the close of passus XIX and write once more: ‘And I awakned therwith and wroot as me mette’ (B: XIX, 481). Inspiration to write suddenly seems the immediate consequence of the dreams. The poem records its own genesis, and establishes a pattern that suggests

119

A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),

p. 5. 120 121

Ibid., p. 151.

The ordinatio of the poem in the manuscripts is inconsistent, particularly in the B tradition. See Robert Adams, ‘The Reliability of the Rubrics in the B text of Piers Plowman’, Medium Aevum, 54 (1985), 208–31. Adams argues that the rubrics dividing the poem into the Visio and the Vita are not authorial, while the divisions into consecutively numbered passus are. This view would make the passus the only authorial unit of the poem. Lawrence Clopper counters that the quadripartite division of the poem into a Visio and a Vita, which is then subdivided into Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, is consistent in the A, AC and C traditions. None of these traditions use consecutive numbering of the passus, and the manuscripts are in greater agreement than those of the B tradition. See Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘Langland’s Markings for the Structure of Piers Plowman’, Modern Philology, 85 (1988), 244–55. The relationship between individual passus and the overall structure of the poem is thus unstable in the manuscript traditions until the final three passus, each of which coincides with the beginning or end of a dream in both the B and the C traditions.

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a potentially infinite continuation, as long as the dreamer lives and dreams. The existence of passus XX, the final passus in the B text, is implicit evidence that the dreamer wrote after he woke from that vision as well. In the C text, this correspondence between the dreamer’s experience and his desire to write is further developed into the culmination of the process that brings poem and poet together. In the revisions of the C text, the figure of the poet is conspicuously held up to the parsing of careful readers. For instance, Will’s physical appearance becomes a subject explicitly offered for interpretation. In the C text, each of the visions begins with a description of the speaker’s appearance in a waking moment. Each of these descriptions ties back to the issues explored by the poem, as readers are provoked either into passing judgement on Will or conceding the difficulty of doing so based on his physical appearance. The only exception to the rule of beginning with Will’s physical appearance is the dream within the third dream, which appropriately describes inner emotions (as opposed to outer appearances) that trigger the one remaining internal vision.122 The opening lines of the Prologue describe the speaker only by elusive similes: In a somur sesoun whan softe was the sonne Y shope me into shroudes as y a shep were; In abite as an heremite, unholy of werkes, Wente forth in the world wondres to here (C: Prologue, 1)

Dressing as a sheep might identify the speaker as one entitled to the pastoral care of the Church. The metaphor is used in C: IX, 259–64.123 Equally possible are references to the ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ who symbolize false prophets in Matthew 7. 15, or to the call for apostles to go out ‘as lambs in the midst of

122

At C: XI, 166, it is his ‘wo and wrath’ at the words of Scripture that send him to sleep while he is still in the midst of the third dream. He is awakened from the inner dream at C: XIII, 212 by a blush of shame. The use of emotions as catalysts to waking or dreaming (woe, wrath, shame) is particular to this inner vision. In all the other cases, physical responses trigger the dreamer to sleep or wake. Weariness, weeping and wailing, soothing music of birds, and the sound of Mass, for instance, send him to sleep. Noise from the speech or actions of other characters typically awakens him. 123

See William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C-text, ed. by Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), p. 27, n. 2. All quotations from the C text are taken from this edition.

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wolves’ from Luke 10. 3.124 Pearsall notes that the image of the hermit is just as over-determined within Piers Plowman: On the other hand, [the speaker] associates himself elsewhere with ‘ermytes’ of dubious vocation (V 4) and a persistent hint of self-criticism is present in his frequent examinations of the justification of the hermit’s life and of the distinctions between holy and unholy hermits (Prol. 30, 51, VIII 146, IX 188, XVII 8).125

Hanna has demonstrated the significance of the eremitic life to the poetic claims ultimately made by Langland, but emphasizes the ambiguity of his dress: ‘Will’s garments gesture ambivalently toward beatitude, divine service and criminality [...]’.126 At the very beginning of the poem, the point to be emphasized is the sense of unmitigated potential. The speaker has not yet distinguished himself with holy works. The array of images with which he associates himself marks him as a nexus for a number of the poem’s key issues. From the outset, the multiplicity of possible readings cues the necessity of context to interpretation. That context can only be provided by the poem itself and, given the opening gambit regarding the instability of allusion, the poem is not likely to offer simple, monolithic definitions. The poet becomes a figure for the text. In learning how to judge him as a reliable source, we are taught how to read the poem. The poet’s self-description at the beginning of the first dream draws attention to the impossibility of reading without context in the waking world. The same assertion is driven home by Conscience at the turning point of the first dream. At the end of passus III, the King attempts a resolution of Mede’s predicament by marrying her off to Conscience. Although her tendency to corrupt is clear, Mede tries to sell herself with the backing of a quotation from Proverbs: ‘Honorem adquiret qui dat munera’ (C: III, 485a). Conscience rebukes Mede at

124

Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 27, n. 2. The wolf in sheep’s clothing was also a common proverbial image: see Bartlett J. Whiting and Helen W. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), W474. 125 126

Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 27, n. 2.

Ralph Hanna, ‘Will’s Work’, in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 23–66, esp. pp. 34–35. Like Middleton, Hanna sees the prominence of Will’s way of life in his defence of his poetic endeavour: ‘Thus Will’s status preempts his poetic claims, and the value of his “makings” may only be construed logically as a corollary of, a pendant to, the value to be attached to his mode of living’ (‘Will’s Work’, p. 44).

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length with an exemplum of a woman who fails to read a complete lesson, and with the other half of the line Mede has quoted: So ho-so secheth Sapience fynde he shall foloweth A ful teneful tyxst to hem that taketh mede, The which that hatte, as y have rad, and other that can rede, Animam aufert accipiencium. Worshipe a wynneth that wol yeve mede, Ac he that resceyueth here or rechet here is rescettour of gyle. (C: III, 493–97)

Conscience’s admonishment of Mede, however, contains encouragement for other readers. He introduces his reading by indicating that it is not exclusive to his own powers: ‘as y have rad, and other that can rede’ (C: III, 495). Those who are able to read are also able to read conscientiously. Mede’s failure to read well, to understand the context of her own allusion, is the last and clearest sign of her impending disgrace. With it, we can begin to see Will’s suggestive selfdescription and its tempting multiple allusions as keys to one of the primary concerns of the poem: learning how to read people. The focus on the author is intensified in the next waking episode, now known as the ‘Apologia pro vita sua’. It presents itself as an autobiographical passage, new to the C text at V, 1–104.127 Its opening description of the speaker ‘yclothed as a lollare’, once again touches off a spark that runs through the rest of the poem, particularly in the C text revisions of passus IX, in which pejorative and non-pejorative applications of the word ‘lollare’ challenge our ability to judge those before us purely by appearance. The primary usage of the word is for a lazy, lame-looking man, though by the late fourteenth century, connotations related to the Wycliffite reformist ‘lollards’ had probably begun to adhere.128 Thus, as Pearsall notes, ‘by representing himself in the clothes of the false religious Langland is repeating the motif of Prologue 3’.129 The criticism of lollares within the dream Will is about to have will be scathing, but it sustains a line of questioning regarding how a lollare, a false, malingering beggar, can be distinguished from his possibly deserving look-alike. The evidence presented by

127

For recent work on the passage see especially Written Work, ed. by Justice and KerbyFulton. 128

See Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 149–60. See also Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 97, n. 2. 129

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Wendy Scase for the early independent circulation of the revisions to passus IX lead her to the suggestion that the opening lines of passus V show Langland dealing with the reception of his own text:130 Thus y awakede, woet god, whan y wonede in Cornehull, Kytte and Y in a cote, yclothed as a lollare, And lytel ylet by, leveth me for sothe, Amonges lollares of Londone and lewede ermytes, For y made of tho men as resoun me taughte. (C: V , 1–5)

Though he looks like a ‘lollare’, he is not well-liked by lollers because he has written about them, as reason taught him to do. As Scase points out, Reason is also about to interrogate Will regarding his own way of life.131 Scase describes the passage as one in which ‘the poet’s self-examination [...] tells how he recognised that he too was a loller’.132 I would rather see the interrogation by Reason as one of the trials Will undergoes to avoid the danger of such hypocrisy. He struggles for the right to examine the lives of others by examining his own. There is a sense that this examination is a requirement of the role he has taken on by writing of others as Reason taught him: Kerby-Fulton connects the C text’s ‘new concern with the credibility of [Langland’s] own manner of living’ with a convention of visionary writing, ‘that of the examination of the appropriateness of the visionary’s mode of life to his vocation’.133 The basis of the poem’s claims to truth in the integrity of the poet’s life continually requires renegotiation by the reader as Will both argues his worthiness and tempts us to question it. The epistemological problem presented by the classification of beggars in passus IX makes it clear that such examination depends primarily on the inward

130

See Wendy Scase, ‘Two Piers Plowman C-Text Interpolations: Evidence for a Second Textual Tradition’, Notes and Queries, 34 (1987), 456–63. See also Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, pp. 149–50, 157–60. Anne Middleton concurs with the second textual tradition in her ‘Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version “Autobiography” and the Statue of 1388’, in Written Work, ed. by Justice and Kerby-Fulton, pp. 208–338, esp. p. 276. For analyses of the manuscripts containing the interpolations outside of passus IX , see Derek Pearsall, ‘The Ilchester Ms of Piers Plowman’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 82 (1981), 181–93. See also R. W. Chambers, ‘The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman in the Huntington Library and Their Value for Fixing the Text of the Poem’, The Huntington Library Bulletin, 8 (1935), 1–27; G. H. Russell and V. H. Nathan, ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript in the Huntington Library’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1963), 119–30.

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131

Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, p. 149.

132

Ibid., p. 149.

133

Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, p. 70.

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state of the examinee, on the intent of the speaker in the text. None of the purely physical distinctions holds absolutely. The text’s condemnation of malingering beggars is clear, but there are endless problems with distinguishing them from those more deserving. The text begins by advising the rich to look for bags, signaling that the false beggar will take more than he immediately needs, and then to look for physical signs of sickness: Ac beggares with bagges, the which brewhous ben here churches, But they be blynde or tobroke or elles be syke, Thouh he falle for defaute that fayteth for his lyflode, Reche ye neuere, ye riche, thouh suche lollares sterve. (C: IX , 98–101)

Bags and bottles, however, can be hidden under cloaks (C: IX, 139–40), and there are, in addition, people who look perfectly healthy but who are nonetheless innocent of the obligation to labour physically: And yut are ther othere beggares, in hele, as hit semeth, Ac hem wanteth wyt, men and women bothe The whiche aren lunatyk lollares and lepares aboute, And madden as the mone sit, more other lasse. (C: IX , 105–09)

Langland makes an analogy between these beggars and the apostles: ‘hit aren as his postles, suche peple, or as his priue disciples. / For a sent hem forth seluerles in a somur garnement / Withoute bagge and bred, as the book telleth’ (C: IX, 117–20). The elements of self–portraiture in the description of the lunatic lollers draws the reader back to the apologia of passus V.134 The issue is less whether Will really begs without bag or bottle, as he claims in V, 52, but that we are required to believe him, because there is no other way to know: Ryht so, ye ryche, yut rather ye sholde Welcomen and worshipen and with youre goed helpen Godes munstrals and his mesagers and his mery bordiours, The whiche arn lunatyk loreles and lepares aboute, For under godes secret seal here synnes ben keuered. (C: IX , 134–38)135

134

Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 166, nn. 122–23. Pearsall explains: ‘Like other classes of society with which Langland shows a particular preoccupation (Prol. 35n), the lunatyk lollares contain features of self-portraiture (compare 105 with V 7, 10; 111 with XV 1; 139 with V 52’. 135

There is a great deal of manuscript variation in these lines, with readings of ‘lorel’ where elsewhere ‘loller’ is used, as in the case of line 137 here: see Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, pp. 155, 217, n. 134.

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I believe that the import of these lines is meant to be discomfiting, to provoke charity by implying that it may be humanly impossible to distinguish between those whose death should not trouble the rich and those who are deserving messengers of God. The struggle to develop a vocabulary for different kinds of beggars in the passus IX interpolation rekindles the issues of truth and verbal representation with which the dream began in passus V. Ultimately Will’s self-examination warns that verbal equivalences are not truths. The integrity of any word must be guaranteed by the speaker behind it. The autobiographical details presented by Will vouchsafe his intent to live according to the best authorities he knows. Most poignant, perhaps, is his attempt to reconcile his aborted education with the directive from I Corinthians 7. 20, ‘in eadem vocacione in qua vocati estis’ (C: V, 43a), which does not allow for the contingencies of life or deprivation that Will must face. Will’s final plea with Reason, to which we will later return, is a request that he be trusted because of who he is, in some fundamental, internal sense: ‘Forthy rebuke me ryhte nauhte, Reson, y yow praye, / For in my consience y knowe what Crist wolde y wrouhte’ (C: V, 82–83). Though Will appears again in the ambiguous clothing of the potentially false religious,136 this moment begins the drive toward the final three passus, in which the poet’s appearance is increasingly in concert with his inner state. In effect, he becomes easier to read as the text nears its conclusion. At the beginning of passus XX, we find him in the clothes of a penitent, ‘as a recheles renk that recheth nat of sorwe’ (line 2).137 The dream that follows, of the Crucifixion and harrowing of hell, at last inspires him to write. At the same time, the joyous celebration after the harrowing of hell, which merges with the real-life bells of Easter tide, causes him to dress himself finely at the beginning of passus XXI. The opening of the final passus finds his face showing the residual worry left by the founding of the Church in the previous vision, as his own temporal need of sustenance closes back in: ‘And as y wente by the wey when y was thus awaked / Heuy-chered y yede and elyng in herte, / For y ne wiste where to ete ne at what place’ (C: XXII, 1–3). The concordance between appearance and inner feeling here is significant, given that the passus culminates in the immediacy of Conscience’s realization that he desires Grace above all things. At the end of the poem, Conscience, crying out for Grace, 136 He wears the russet robes of a hermit at the opening of passus X : see Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 178, nn. 1–2. 137

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wakes the poet. These passages were present at the opening and closing of passus XX in the B text, but the full context of the C text revisions gives them new meaning. The promise made by Will at the C text’s passus V, 82–83, that his conscience knows what Christ wants him to do, is not fulfilled until this moment. As the poem works toward this ultimate affirmation of Will’s integrity, we are constantly reminded to consider the source of any text we encounter. As in the classification of beggars in passus IX, Langland’s social conscience finds the plight of the poor to be an ideal site to work out the relationship between intent, text, and action. The discussion of poverty offered by Rechelessness in passus XII and XIII is mirrored by that of Patience in passus XV and XVI. The C text’s expansion of the role of Rechelessness provides ample opportunity to explore the effect of questionable intent, even where the content of the speech is not obviously objectionable. The C text reassigns a number of lines to Rechelessness that were originally spoken by Will. The revision protects the C text’s investment in the purity of Will’s intent while allowing the poem to portray his development as a process. With the help of Rechelessness, Will goes wrong without wanting to do so. The two of them re-emerge only when Rechelessness’s arguments have been completely put down at XIII, 127. When Kynde holds the Mirror of Middle-Earth up for the angry Rechelessness to see, the text slides back into the first person, and it is Will who looks into the mirror: ‘And y bowed my body, bihelte al aboute, / And seyhe the sonne and the see and the sond aftur’ (XIII, 133–34). Until that moment, Will is overshadowed by Rechelessness, whose use of exempla in particular draws attention to the way in which the identity of the teller can affect the telling of a tale. Many readers have recognized that Rechelessness’s speech on poverty in passus XIII makes use of the same arguments later employed by Patience in passus XV.138 Rechelessness invokes patience itself as an amelioration for poverty: ‘Lo, how pacience in here pouerte thise patriarkes releuede / And broughte hem all aboue, that in bale rotede’ (C: XIII, 20–21). Rechelessness’s formulation, however, seems a little callous in the way it quickly glosses over the transition from ‘rotted in misery’ to ‘brought [...] all above’. Neither state is real to Rechelessness. Though his rhetorical point is to discuss the spiritual advantages of poverty, he is quick to let us know that he does not mean to criticize prosperity: ‘Ac leueth nat, lewede men, that y lacke rychesse /

138

See especially Derek Pearsall, ‘Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman’, in Medieval English Studies, ed. by Kennedy and others, pp. 167–85, esp. p. 182.

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Thogh y preyse pouerte thus and preue hit by ensaumples / Worthiore as by holy write and wyse fylosofres’ (C: XIII, 25–27). The implication is that, while poverty is worthier according to scripture and philosophy, prosperity has advantages that are less abstract, and which will not necessarily stand in the way of a moral life. This is the root cause of the hollowness in the exemplum that follows. Rechelessness’s lack of true engagement with the suffering of poverty prevents him from speaking with conviction. The importance of the perspective of the storyteller is illustrated when Rechelessness uses an exemplum to prove the advantage of poverty. Rechelessness begins the exemplum of the messenger and the merchant as if he means to illustrate that the poor will be saved more easily than the rich. The poor messenger, who travels lightly, is unlikely to be molested by the authorities, as he has no money for tolls, or by thieves, as he has nothing for them to steal. The propertied merchant is open to both hazards: Thogh the messager make his way amydde the fayre whete Wol no wys man be wroth ne his wed take— Necessitas non habet legem— Ne non haiward is hote his wed for to taken. Ac if the marchaunt make his way ouver menne corne And the hayward happe with hym for to mete, Other his hatt or his hoed or elles his gloues The marchaunt mote forgo or moneye of his porse, And yut be ylette, as y leue, for the lawe asketh Marchauntz for here marchaundyse in many place to tolle (C: XIII, 42–48).

It is interesting to note that the distinction between the authorities and thieves is blurred in the person of the hayward, whose demand for the hat or hood of the merchant plays more like opportunistic extortion than the legal enforcement of a fine for trespassing in the hay field.139 Similarly, the differences between the messenger and the merchant begin to break down at the end of the exemplum, as Rechelessness assures us that they will both reach Winchester Fair at almost the same time: There the messager is ay merye and his mouth ful of songes And leueth for his lettres that no lede wole hym greue. Ac yut myhte the marchaunt thorw his moneye and other yeftes Haue hors and hardy men—thogh he mette theues Wolde noon suche assailen hym for such as hym foloweth,

139

Pearsall notes that the reputation of haywards as extortioners is supported by other texts: Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 224, n. 44.

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Chapter 3 And as safly as the messager and as sone at his hostiele come. (C: XIII, 58–63)

Though the merchant will encounter more problems along the way, Rechelessness imagines, his wealth will help him to solve them. Meanwhile, the life of the poor is figured as a comparatively easy trip to the same destination, without the cares or responsibilities of the rich. The exemplum told by Rechelessness actually ends up illustrating a reckless indifference for the distinction between poverty and wealth as lived experience. When, in conclusion, Rechelessness returns to the idea that the poor have an advantage in being able to achieve conformity with the law more easily than the rich, we are given an extended portrait of the importance of considering the source of an argument: So the pore of puyr reuthe may parforme the lawe In that a wilneth and wolde uch a wyht as hymsulue. For the wil is as moche worthe of a wrecche beggare As al that the ryche may rayme and rihtfully dele, And as moche mede for a myte ther he offreth As the ryche man for al his mone and more as by the gospell. (C: XIII, 92–97)

In essence, Rechelessness stresses that it is possible for the poor to comply with the law merely by feeling charitable, because they are unable to act charitably by distributing their goods. By contrast, the rich can only achieve integrity by acting on their feelings through material donations. The emphasis on material wealth masks the difficulty of achieving the true charitable feeling that is expected of both the rich and the poor. It is an example of careless thinking. By contrast, Piers Plowman constructs Will’s empathy for the suffering of the poor as one that is truly felt, if partly through the power of imagination. George Kane writes: For all their confidential asides to the audience, their apologies for digression, the dreamers and narrators of Chaucer and Langland are, if I may use jargon, constructs. They bear the poets’ names, and speak of writing down their dreams. But things happen to them which could not, except in imagination, have happened to the poets; thus their ultimate reality is imaginative only.140

The ‘imaginative reality’, however, is precisely that sought by Will, particularly but not exclusively in the case of finding honest sympathy for the suffering of others. His flirtation with Rechelessness in his inner dream is broken by the 140

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Kane, The Autobiographical Fallacy, p. 15.

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images in the Mirror of Middle-Earth, which allow him to imagine or see with his mind’s eye the world more vividly than his recklessness allowed. It is in fact Imaginatyf who puts Will in contact with poor people. The lessons of Imaginatyf intervene in passus XIV,141 carrying Will from the inner vision in which he views the mirror of Middle-Earth, to the Feast of Patience in passus XV. Here, at last, the poor are allowed to speak for themselves. The crucial difference between the arguments mounted by Rechelessness and their reintroduction by Patience is that Patience teaches Activa Vita about the just claims of the poor by quoting the speech of a poor man directly: There the pore dar plede and preue by puyr resoun To have allouance of his lord; by puyre law he claymeth Ioye that neuere ioye hadde; of rihtfull iuge he asketh And saith, ‘Loo! Briddes and bestes that no blisse ne knoweth And wilde wormes in wodes, thorw wyntres thow hem greuest And makest hem wel-nyh meke and mylde for defaute. Thereaftur thow sendest hem somer that is here souereyne ioye And blisse to all that been, bothe to wilde and to tame’. Thenne may beggares, as bestes, aftur a blisse aske That all here lyf haen lyved in langour and defaute. (C: XV , 287–96)

The poor man is an infinitely more creditable source than Rechelessness proved to be, and his account of the hope of the poor is correspondingly more affecting. He begins with a sympathetic description of the suffering of animals. The analogy he draws between man and beast is then made more poignant when he describes the relief from hardship that the animals are given at the coming of summer, but which the poor man has not yet received. However, he avers that, though the poor have not yet experienced a metaphorical equivalent to summertime, the turning of the seasons teaches them that they have a right to hope for the joy such a change would bring. At moments like these, the poem invites us to extend the ‘autobiographical fallacy’ to speakers other than Will. George Kane describes how the imputation

141

One of those difficult lessons is that ‘a bad priest can be a true witness’: C: XIV , 64–68. See Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 237, n. 65, p. 251, n. 113. Thus, the clergy have special access to a body of truth. Learned study gives the clergy the ability to transmit the truth verbally and that ability must be respected, even when a priest does not personally own or manifest his knowledge. As a violation of the pattern of integrity demanded elsewhere in the text, the exception is no more a problem to this argument than it is to the dreamer himself, who does struggle to accept it.

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of real intimacy to a fictive speaker functions to render the literary moment more vivid: [A reader’s] feeling that he ‘knew’ the poet might be as much a fictive impression as his experience of those parts of the poem where the narrator did not figure. But the direction of that feeling to an actual living and speaking man would diminish distance between the actual and the literary experience and thus intensify the latter.142

The privilege given to speakers who can claim real life experience intensifies their speech with a timbre of authenticity that is deeply important to the poem. Will, as the dreamer and ghost-writer of these episodes, undoubtedly stakes part of his claim to truth in the workings of a sympathetic imagination. However, it is inescapable that the text also builds its credibility on Will’s life as the authorfigure, just as Patience builds his argument by quoting the voice of experience. If the poor man is recognized as a more authoritative source on the subject of poverty than Rechelessness, then Will’s claims to have begged without bag or bottle in passus V similarly give credence to the extended concern with ethics and integrity in the poem as a whole. Will is open to the scrutiny of the reader on this and all other points because of the vernacularity of the text. Authoritative claims that would pass in Latin are continually re-examined in English. Translation occurs, not only between languages, but also between sensibilities. That which seems abstract but absolute truth in the Classical language is expressed in terms of real life experience in the mother tongue. Patience’s use of Latin in passus XVI of the C text to further illuminate the nature of poverty, for instance, touches off a series of English glosses on Latin auctores. Patience gives the Latin definitions and interprets them at the request of Actyf. Here, the allegory serves to make a Latin ideal comprehensible in everyday, English life, as represented by the Actyf: Quod Actyf tho al angyliche and arguinge as hit were: ‘What is pouerte, Pacience?’ quod he, ‘y preye that thow telle hit’. ‘Paupertas’, quod Pacience, ‘est odibile bonum, remocio curarum, possessio sine calumpnia, donum dei, sanitatis mater, absque solicitudine semita, sapiencie temperatrix, negocium sine dampno, incerta fortuna, absque solicitudine felicitas’. ‘Y can nat contrue al this’, quod Actiua Vita. ‘Parfay’, quod Pacience, ‘propreliche to telle hit, Al this in Engelysch, hit is ful hard, ac sumdel y shal telle the’. (C: XVI, 114–19)

142

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Kane, The Autobiographical Fallacy, p. 16.

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There is an argument to be made about translation in the other direction as well, since Actyf is sometimes referred to as Activa Vita. In this reading, the C text revisions seem to emphasize the hope that the gap between Latin and vernacular can be bridged. Here, the idea of the active life can exist in the purely idealized world of Church Latin, just as Patience can make the aphoristic words of Secundus Philosophus audible in the midst of an active life.143 Patience proceeds to gloss nine of the ten aphorisms at length. Each gloss is more a dramatization than a translation, setting up the aphorism in the context of the real world. An example is the commentary on the eighth phrase, which would translate literally, labour without wrongdoing: The eyghte hit is a lel labor and loeth to take more Then he may sothly deserue in somur or in wynter, And thogh he chaffare, he chargeth no loes, may he charite wynne: Negocium sine dampno. (C: XVI, 146–48)

Patience glosses by describing an honest labourer who trades fairly. The aphorism that Patience does not translate is the ninth one, incerta fortuna. Of the ten it is the most difficult to reconcile with the others, which are all affirmations of the advantages poverty is sure to bring. How incerta fortuna (uncertain fortune) fits in with the other purported benefits of poverty is hard to say, at least in terms of the way in which the pressure of uncertainty might be experienced in real life. It was conceivably an oversight by the poet to leave that one aphorism untranslated, but, whatever the reason for the missing translation, it is an oversight that nonetheless leaves the bridge to the vernacular unfinished. Other failures to translate Latin passages in the poem are equally poignant and involve more than a complication in finding equivalent vocabulary. The pardon of passus IX, for instance, is adequately translated from the Latin by the priest, but it no longer makes sense as a pardon in the vernacular: In two lynes as hit lay and nat a lettre more, And was ywryte ryhte thus in witnesse of Treuthe: Qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; Qui vero mala in ignem eternam. ‘Peter!’ quod the prest tho, ‘y kan no pardoun fynde, Bote “Dowel and haue wel and god shal haue they soul And do yuele and haue euele and hope thow non othere Bote he that euele lyueth euele shal ende”’. (C: IX , 286–93)

143

On the sources and analogues of Patience’s aphorisms, see Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, p. 265, n. 116.

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The dilemma recalls Conscience’s attempts to explain the relationship between salvation and works with a Latin grammatical metaphor. As the king predicted in passus III of the Visio, the assurance of an appropriate concordance between good works and grace is unreadable in English. In English, and perhaps as a feature of real-life experience, the arrangement sounds conditional, though orthodoxy promises that it is not. In the B text, Piers famously tears the pardon in two and vows to leave his life of plowing in favour of a life of prayer. The C text’s deletion of this episode leaves the pardon intact, while an ensuing but unspecified argument between Piers and the priest wakes the dreamer, who immediately begins to contemplate the nature of dreams. In the context of the C version’s preoccupation with texts and translation, the preservation of the pardon’s physical integrity is an important cue that the text it holds will continue to be read, glossed, and worked out as the poem progresses. The pardon is just one example of text-as-object that the C text reveres.144 The proof of Hope’s identity in passus XIX comes in the form of letters so carefully described that they are palpable: A pluhte forth a patente, a pece of an hard roche Whereon was writen two wordes and on this wyse yglosed: Dilige deum et proximum. This was the tyxt trewly, y toek ful good gome. The glose was gloriously writen with a gult penne: In hiis duobus pependit tota lex. (C: XIX , 12–15).

That Hope’s letters turn out to be the law inscribed on a rock is undoubtedly a reference to Exodus 31. 18.145 But the reference retains the same reassuring permanence, as indicated by the proverbial phrase ‘written in stone’. The dreamer emphasizes that he has seen the ‘true text’, engraved in stone, gilt, and circumscribed by glosses. Even if the law is no more immediately understood than was the pardon, its physical integrity is comforting. No matter how dissatisfying the initial reading of such a text may be, it endures to be read again until it can be understood. The C text builds a significant investment in texts up to the culmination of this line of thought in our encounter with the Bible, personified in passus XX:

144

On the role of ‘documentary discourses’ in the poem, see Emily Steiner, ‘Langland’s Documents’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 14 (2000), 95–107. See also Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 145

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Thenne was ther a wihte with two brode yes; Boek hihte that beau-pere, a bolde man of speche’. ‘By godes body’, quod this Boek, ‘y wol bere witnesse, Tho that this barn was ybore ther blased a sterre That alle the wyse of the world in o wit acordede That such a barn was ybore in Bethlem the citee That mannes soule sholde be saue and synne distruye’. (C: XX , 239–45)

This bold man of speech with two broad eyes is one of the true heroes of the poem. Appearing at the harrowing of hell, he is a witness to the beginning and the end of the Passion, closing the circle from prophecy to destiny even as he embodies it in both testaments. As the dreamer’s own vision of Christ’s life is coming to a close, he at last sees the text itself come alive. The moment of encountering the living Word is the C-poet’s reward for his steadfast commitment to the integrity of texts, even in the face of the equally palpable limitations of language recognized throughout the poem. Ultimately, the C text reconciles its faith in texts with its suspicion of them by urging that readers take responsibility for their reading. Surprisingly, the warning is most powerfully put by Rechelessness, who equates the careless proofreading of a charter with default of pastoral duty at the mass. A tenor and the vehicle thus matched tell us much about the intensity of Rechelessness’s contempt on both sides: A chartre is chaleniable byfore a chief iustice; Yf fals Latyn be in that lettre the lawe hit enpugneth, Or peynted par-entrelynarie, parseles ouerskipped. The gome that gloseth so chartres for a goky is halden. So hit is a goky, by god! That in the gospel fayleth Or in masse or in matynes maketh eny defaute. Qui offendit in vno in omnibus est reus. (C: XIII, 116–21)

The onus is on the reader to maintain absolute faithfulness to those texts that are worthy of it. Rechelessnesse makes the point by using the metaphor of a badly written text to tell use something about reading. The example shows how manuscripts can become corrupt (through careless copying), but the cure is still the same: conscientious reading. Learning to move through the right text carefully is figured as the key to conversion and salvation at the close of passus XVII, as Liberium Arbitrium describes the process by which Christian belief can be built: And sethe that this Sarresynes and also the Iewes Conne the furste clause of oure bileue, Credo in deum patrem, Prelates and prestes sholde preue yf they myghte

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Chapter 3 Lere hem littelum and littelum et in Iesum Christum filium, Til they couthe speke and spele et in Spiritum sanctum, Recorden hit and rendren it with remissionem peccatorem, Carnis resurrectionem et vitam eternam. Amen. (C: XVII, 315–22)

The entire experience of conversion is here compressed into reading the Creed. It is a staggering image of the personal impact that reading should have in the C text. Will himself is portrayed as a careful reader, particularly in a series of exegetical interpretations that make the role of reading central to the poem’s mission. Through Will’s treatments of scripture, the poem attempts to model the relationship between intense personal conscience, textual study, and action in the world. In a series of quotations that relate the paternoster to a web of other scriptural references, the poem works out how reading the scripture leads to real charity in the world, and gives us a picture of Will learning this as well, looking over the shoulder of Actyf. John Alford has demonstrated the way in which the themes within passus are built up through the method of reading by concordance, or interpreting by relating quotations from scripture (and other sources) to each other.146 The theme is built up by a string of quotations linked to each other by the repetition of a particular word. Alford shows, for instance, the way in which the idea of spiritual solicitude is advanced in the B version by the series of quotations concording on bread, pane, in passus XIV: For man does not live by bread alone, Patience goes on to explain, ‘but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God’; just as our bodies cannot live without earthly bread, so our souls cannot live without spiritual bread, that is, the word of God, or, more specifically, ‘a pece of pater-noster, fiat voluntas tua’. Taken together, these three quotations form a logical progression or what Étienne Gilson has called ‘raisonnement scripturaire’; yet the conclusion, fiat voluntas tua, is not so much an inference from the earlier texts as it is a revelation of the meaning implicit in them from the start.147

In the B text, the series is laid out by Patience in a way that links the spiritual sustenance of the scripture with the daily bread requested in the paternoster, recognizing both as manifestations of God’s will. In the C text, however, the series is expanded backwards, so that the first quotation concording on pane is spoken by Will, and forwards, so that its culmination is expressed by Charity.

146

See John A. Alford, ‘The Role of the Quotation in Piers Plowman’, Speculum, 52 (1977), 80–99. See also Judson Boyce Allen, ‘Langland’s Reading and Writing: Detractor and the Pardon Passus’, Speculum, 59 (1984), 342–62. 147

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The C text revisions of this series reveal two important insights relevant to the arguments with which this chapter has been occupied. The first point regards the poet’s importance to his own poem. The second point deals with the instability of signification as one moves from text to text. The C text revisions accomplish the marriage of both concerns by beginning the series of quotations concording on pane with the poet’s self-description added to passus V. A string of eleven quotations then stretches from C: V to C: XVI, threading its way through multiple passus. While they ultimately do advance the argument for uniting spiritual feeling with charitable action, for a kind of integrity in Will, the advancement is not steady or linear. The culmination that comes with the definition of Charity in C: XVI is hard won, and must, I think, be understood as the fruit of the poet’s own reading efforts. As Alford says, the meaning is ‘implicit from the start’, but in the C version the meaning begins with the reallife poet’s conviction.148 We are meant to see him reading, rereading, and learning along with us as the guarantor of good intent through the hazards of multiple allusions. Particularly interesting to this perspective is the likelihood that the revision of C: V was one of the last revisions made to the poem, so that the poet may have only inserted Will as the poet-figure into this chain of readings after the work of revelation in C: XVI was already complete.149 If correct, this order of revision would mean that the C text first developed the link between emotion and action, and then placed Will at the head of it, making it clear that the figure of the poet provides a model for translating thought into the real world. It will be remembered that Will makes a kind of promise to Reason in C: V that his conscience knows what Christ wants of him. The first quotation from the paternoster comes as the second half of that promise: ‘Forthy rebuke me nauhte, Resoun, y yow praye, For in my conscience y knowe what Crist wolde y wrouhte.

148

George Russell also sees the C text revisions as motivated by the personal convictions of the poet, though he focuses on the classification of beggars: ‘But the imperative of revision is clearly upon the poet, not now dictated by the state of his original, but apparently by the demand for an exploration of the social and personal cost of poverty’ (239). See George Russell, ‘The Imperative of Revision in the C Version of Piers Plowman’, in Medieval English Studies, ed. by Kennedy and others, pp. 233–42. What I am driving at is that, in Russell’s happy phrase, the imperative of revision is written into the C text as a meta-narrative comment on the poet’s presence in his own work. 149

For the lateness of the C: V revisions see Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy’, pp. 276–77. See also Scase, ‘Two Piers Plowman C text Interpolations’, p. 462.

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Chapter 3 Preyeres of a parfit man and penaunce discret Is the leuest labour that oure lord pleseth. Non de solo’, y sayde, ‘for sothe vivit homo, Nec in pane et in pabulo, the pater-noster wittenesseth; Fiat voluntas dei — that fynt vs alle thynges’. (C: V , 82–88)

Will conflates Matthew 4. 4, ‘man does not live by bread [and food] alone’, with part of the conclusion of the paternoster, ‘[God’s] will be done’ (Matthew 6. 10). Already, then, in this passage are the seeds of the idea that Alford identifies as the climax of the series in the B text, an equivalence between the spiritual food of Matthew 4. 4, and the daily bread of the paternoster. The realization of this connection and its significance, that faith in God’s charity will provide all sustenance, is built into Will’s pledge. The next quotation that concords on pane moves in a different direction, working away from the concept of charity to the idea that accepting bodily food from others may corrupt spiritually.150 Repentance responds to the confession of Avarice: Yut were me leuer, by oure lord, lyue al by welle-cresses Then haue my fode and my fyndynge of fals menne wynnynges. Seruus es alterius cum fercula pinguia queris; Pane tuo pocius vescere, liber eris. (C: VI, 292–95)

We will hear the echoes of this idea later at the climax of the series, when true Charity is seen to beg only from God. But for now, there is only the discomfiting sense that spiritual and physical sustenance are somehow related. The connection between the bread of the body and spirit is further conflated, or even, confused, in a set of three quotations in passus IX. The deserving beggars (or ‘lunatic lollers’) are associated with the apostles by the following quotation from Luke 22. 35: For a sent hem forth seluerles in a somur garnement Without bagge and bred, as the book telleth: Quando misi vos sine pane et pera. (C: IX , 119–20)

Jesus uses the phrase to remind the disciples at the Last Supper that they were sent out without physical sustenance and were provided for. Being ‘without bread’ here means strictly without bodily food, but it inescapably comes with the context of Jesus’s breaking of the bread at the table with the words ‘hoc est corpus meum’ (Luke 22. 19). The quotation thus provokes the question of what 150

The source of the quotation is not known, see Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, pp. 122, 294, n. 95.

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kind of bread the lunatic lollers lack, while the next would seem to clarify with its imperative to help the virtuous indigent with charity: Such manere men, Matheu vs techeth, We sholde haue hem to house and helpe hem when they come. Et egenos vagosque in duc in domum tuam. (C: IX , 124–25)

The full text of the verse reveals its concordance on pane. As Pearsall notes, it is actually from Isaiah 58. 7, ‘[Frange esurienti panem tuam] et egenos[...]’. Here the meaning of bread must be construed physically: it is an obligation to ease the physical suffering of the poor. The misattribution of the exact words to Matthew forms a connection between an Old Testament call to charity and the New Testament association of that charity with the saved on Judgement Day (Matthew 25. 31–46).151 In what would seem to be a moment of contradiction, the next quotation to concord on pane is presented as an imputation of unrighteousness to beggars: The boek banneth beggarie and blameth hit in this manere: Iunior fui, etenim senui. Et alibi: Infirmata est virtus mea in paupertate. (C: IX , 162)

The full text of the first quotation reveals its concordance on pane: ‘Iunior fui, etenim senui, non vidi iustum derelictum, nec semen eius querens panem’.152 Here the meaning of bread is again physical. The children of the righteous have not been seen begging bread. In the context of the dreamer’s comments, it sounds like a ban on begging, but understood as a link in the chain following the previous quotation, it is directed more toward the faith that the righteous must, and will, be provided for. Passus XI switches back to this gear when Dame Study quotes again one of the passages from passus IX, this time as angry proof that the prideful are not living up to the law: ‘[...] this wreches of this world [...] / Ne [...] withdraweth hym for pruyde / Ne parteth with the pore, as puyr charite wolde, / Bute in gaynesse and in glotonye forglotten here godes / And breketh nat here bred to the pore, as the boke hoteth: Frange esurienti panem tuum’ (C: XI, 63–67). Study’s use of the quotation reinforces the idea that charity as a form of giving physical sustenance is an obligation of the worldly. Study argues that giving bread is an antidote for pride. According to the next authority quoted in the chain, however, pride can only be ended through a lack of bread. In passus XV,

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Ibid., p. 166, n. 125a.

152

The Vision of William, ed. by Skeat, I, 237.

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Actyf remarks: ‘Ne mannes prayere maky pees amonges cristene peple / Til pruyde be puyreliche fordo and that thorw payn defaute. Habundacia panis et vini turpissimum peccatum advenit’ (C: XV, 229–30). At this point of furthest divide from the beginning, Patience steps in and brings the dual meanings of bread together by circling back to Will’s original quotation, ‘Non in solo pane vivit homo’, reminding the readers as he teaches Actyf for the first time that there are other forms of sustenance (C: XV, 245). Actyf demands and receives proof of this: ‘Hastow’, quod Actyf, ‘ay such mete with the?’ ‘Ye’, quod Pacience, and oute of his poke hente A pece of the pater-noster and profred hit to vs all. And y lystnede and lokede what lyflode hit were And thenne was hit fiat voluntas tua that sholde fynde vs alle. (C: XV , 246–50)

This, the climax of the concordance on bread in the B text, seems to be the point at which Will learns that acceptance of God’s will provides a sustenance of its own, a lyflode, a way of living. Looking over the shoulder of Actyf, he first makes the connection between the paternoster and spiritual sustenance, which he later adds to passus V in his revision. This is not, however, the climax of the concordance in the C text. The C text continues the series of concordances into the next passus and pushes it to guarantee more than spiritual sustenance, and more than the hope provided by faith. There, knowledge of the paternoster is built into the identity of Charity, who clothes and comforts the poor (C: XVI, 322–23). In other words, the paternoster not only sustains the needy with spiritual food, but motivates charity from those who can give the needy physical sustenance, because that, too, is the will of God. As Pearsall notes, Charity’s knowledge of the paternoster is ‘momentarily envisaged in terms of the work of a manuscript illuminator’:153 Oen Aperis-tu-manum alle thynges hym fyndeth; Fiat-voluntas-tua festeth hym vch a daye. And also a can clergie, credo-in-deum-patrem, And purtraye wel the pater-noster and paynten hit with auees. (C: XVI, 317–20)

Here the comforting solidity of texts returns to suggest that their impact on the world is real, and it is Charity who ‘paints’ them. So as not to confuse the point,

153

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however, we are reminded that Charity himself is sustained only by God, which is to say that the motivation of his giving is ethically pure: As y tolde the with tonge, a litel tyme ypassed For nother he ne beggeth ne biddeth, ne borweth to yelde. He halt it for a vyce and a foule shame To begge or to borwe, but of god one. Panem nostrum cotidianum, etc. (C: XVI, 368–71)

Only with that final assurance can the daily bread of the paternoster regain its significance as physical sustenance. At the same moment the reference to daily bread is quoted directly from the paternoster itself. Will has met his conscientious pledge by combining faith in words and action. There can be little question that the idea of an author is written into Piers Plowman. Remarkably, it is written in a manner that does not prevent others from reading themselves in as well. It is perhaps in the invitation to extend the ‘autobiographical fallacy’ to speakers other than Will that readers of the poem like John But have felt invited to speak or, more commonly, to read along with Will in re-mixing the likely authorial versions of the text. Even the C text as we have it may very well be the product of a literary executor.154 If so, the historical circumstances of its transmission have not diminished the centrality of the poet’s presence within the poem.155 Middleton has described the referent of the internal signatures of the poem as ‘not the absent maker but his confected presence, an “entente” animated and reproduced in the act of reading’.156 This is undoubtedly one of the keys to the openness of the text to readerly intervention. The genesis of the poem, and the poet within it, are recreated with every reading. The poet is ever present, but internal to the poem, not limiting its interpretation by forming an external point to which the poem might be fixed. By contrast, Chaucer’s Retraction imagines a poetics in which the maker and his

154

See George Russell, ‘“As They Read It”: Some Notes on Early Responses to the CVersion of Piers Plowman’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 20 (1989), 172–89, esp. p. 175. See also George Kane, ‘“Good” and “Bad” Manuscripts: Texts and Critics’, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 2, 1986, ed. by John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, TN: New Chaucer Society, 1987), pp. 137–45, esp. p. 144. 155

On the logical convergence of the profile of the author and the executor, see Andrew Galloway, ‘Uncharacterizable Entities: The Poetics of Middle English Scribal Culture and the Definitive Piers Plowman’, Studies in Bibliography, 52 (1999), 59–87, esp. p. 75. 156

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works might diverge.157 For Chaucer, it is possible to live and feel one way, but write in another: ‘And if ther be any thyng that dysplese [readers], I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge’ (X: 1082). The author-figure in Piers Plowman is intent on closing the gap between will and speech. To this end his authorial presence is not intended to be external to the poem in the way that a printed attribution would be, no matter how tempting it is to assume so. However, the author-figure internal to Piers Plowman does address some of the same issues for a manuscript audience that Crowley’s external attribution addressed in print: the stability of texts, the place of the reader, and the ethics of artistry. III.

Reading Piers Plowman in Manuscript and Print

The public performance constituted by Crowley’s edition left only intermittent traces of influence on the reception of Piers Plowman. Owen Rogers’s 1561 reprinting [STC 19908], claims to be ‘after the authours olde copy’ but no longer names that author, having omitted Crowley’s preface.158 By the time Puttenham summed up the medieval canon in The Art of English Poesie in 1589, Langland was once again a nameless polemicist and no great artist: ‘a very true Prophet, his verse is but loose meetre, and his termes hard and obscure, so as in them is litle pleasure to be taken’.159 In fact, the most convincing evidence of the printed edition’s use can be found in the poem’s return to manuscript. While Crowley was intent on establishing an authorial text, the evidence of London, British Library, Sloane MS 2578 suggests that readers used his printed edition to produce texts of their own. Thorne and Uhart’s study of the textual variants suggests that the goal of Crowley’s edition was to reproduce a ‘best text’, faithful to the manuscript tradition, a goal quite different from that of the majority of the manuscript copyists: 157 Middleton observes a different contrast between Langland’s apologia and Chaucer’s Retraction: ‘Acts of Vagrancy’, p. 213. 158

There is no evidence that Rogers used an authoritative manuscript to correct Crowley’s edition. See The Vision of William, ed. by Skeat, II, p. lxxvi. Rogers makes the claim quoted above on the title page. A text of his reprinting [STC 19908] can be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007]. 159

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There are very few instances of Crowley tampering with the text in order to promote his own point of view, while there are a number of such instances in the M SS [...]. This brief study suggests that Crowley felt a strong obligation to reproduce a text faithful to the MS tradition which he came into contact with, or at least to the one he regarded as best.160

Unlike Margery Kempe’s first editor, then, Langland’s first editor was concerned with providing access to a complete text. He guides the reader from the margins rather than cutting the text itself to fit his reading. The making of manuscript copies of Piers Plowman that do cut into the text itself in the sixteenth century has been read as evidence that manuscript and print audiences were essentially separate groups with very different interests. Thorne and Uhart argue: That the contemporaneous Sion College MS does demonstrate a rewriting of sorts simply illustrates one of the differences between the potential readership for a printed text and that for a MS: one large, imaginary and with diverse interests, the other small and specialist.161

However, there is at least one sixteenth-century manuscript that suggests some crossover between the readership for the poem in print and that in manuscript. It also suggests a kind of readerly resistance to the assumed use of the printed book, for the makers of Sloane 2578 use Crowley’s preface to read Piers Plowman in a way exactly contrary to Crowley’s instruction. Sloane 2578, dated to c. 1554 by Hanna, contains a fragment of Piers Plowman made up of two passages from the B text.162 On its discovery, the use of the fragment was interpreted as evidence of the way in which the poem continued to be reshaped by independent readers: [...] the resourceful sixteenth-century ‘composer’[...] has carefully mined his fourteenthcentury original for lines he considered to be especially meaningful for his own day. From these extracted lines, originally widely separated in the Piers text, he has carefully shaped a unique and timely political statement.163

However, it seems more likely that the reader’s primary resource was not the poem itself, but Crowley’s preface. The two passages are those referenced by

160

Thorne and Uhart, ‘Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman’, p. 252.

161

Ibid., p. 253.

162

Hanna, William Langland, p. 40. For identification of the fragment, see Jansen, ‘Politics, Protest, and a New Piers Plowman Fragment’. 163

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Crowley in the section of the preface on prophecy.164 Crowley’s references made those two passages more salient than others. So Crowley reshaped the poem for the compiler of Sloane 2578, but interestingly did not determine the compiler’s interpretation of the text. Where Crowley admonishes, ‘loke not upon this boke therefore, to talke of wonders paste or to come’ (sig. *2v), the compiler of Sloane 2578 put the passages in the context of political prophecy.165 The manuscript is a commonplace book of prophecies. Crowley’s readers may not have agreed with him, but they were obliged to argue with him. He does not seem to have won over the Sloane compiler, but his preface certainly defined the playing field. In the reception of the printed edition, there is evidence that at least one reader resented and resisted Crowley’s mediation, but not from the standpoint of active readers like those who reshaped the poem for themselves. The copy of Crowley’s edition preserved as Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 205 is heavily annotated by its owner, Andrew Bostock.166 Bostock registers objections to every part of Crowley’s apparatus: the preface, the summaries of the passus, and the marginalia.167 Bostock challenges the printer’s authority on several subjects. For instance, he resists Crowley’s construction of the historical context for the poem. Next to the mention of Wycliff in the preface, Bostock has written: ‘Wickleffe was a corrupter of the truth and the master of [...] Rebels who being led by Sir John Oldcastle rose against the sovraign’. Bostock, then, is fighting back with his own revision of history, matching Crowley’s invocation of detail with the mention of Oldcastle. For Bostock, as for Crowley, a

164

These are VI, 321–31 and X , 322–25. Because they are so widely separated the coincidence of the same lines being independently chosen seems improbable. Jansen notes that the textual variations are ‘suggestive of Crowley’s 1550 printed edition’ but registers ‘a couple of distinctive variants in agreement only with [...] BL Additional 35278’ (‘Politics, Protest, and a New Piers Plowman Fragment’, p. 94). However, both of these are sixteenth-century spelling variants, line 1, ‘wurke’, and line 5, ‘fall’, that the compiler might have produced independently without the influence of London, British Library Additional MS 35278. Jansen also notes a number of unique variants and indications that the copying has ‘signs of carelessness’ (ibid., p. 94). 165

See Jansen, ‘Politics, Protest, and a New Piers Plowman Fragment’, pp. 95–96. Other excerpted texts include Thomas of Erceldoune. 166

Bostock signs and dates the book 1613. My own examination of the book confirms the transcriptions of the marginalia offered by King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’, p. 351, n. 39, except for a few minor variations in spelling. 167

Samuel Pepys’s copy also survives, but it is unannotated. If Pepys had a reaction to Crowley’s reading, it did not provoke him to mark his copy. See the facsimile: The Vision of Pierce Plowman.

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contemporary context for the poem is important to the reading; the two simply disagree on that context. King summarizes Bostock’s response as that of an ‘educated Roman Catholic’ who ‘returns to the traditional interpretation of Piers Plowman as an orthodox appeal for reform within the established church’.168 The extraordinary development in this resistance is that the text becomes a static object. Only its interpretation is in question. For instance, Crowley remarks in his summary of passus V: ‘The fyfte part begynneth in the laste syde of the twentieth leafe, and endeth in the laste syde of the .xxx. It declareth howe Reason proveth that Pestilences come for synne, That due correction muste be hadde, That Abbayes shoulde be suppressed [...]’ (sig. *4v). In this way Crowley’s summaries slide between description and interpretation. As noted above, what Crowley had in mind by the ‘suppression of the abbeys’ may not have been what actually occurred under Henry VIII. Bostock, however, objects on the grounds that the interpretation is not consistent with authorial intention, noting: ‘This is false, for the Author sprak against abuse onely’ (sig. *4v). The author’s intent becomes the point of contention for perhaps the first time in the recorded history of the poem’s reception. At B: VII, 170–86, Crowley remarks, ‘Note howe he scorneth the auctority of Popes’ (fol. 39). Bostock responds with a theological argument on the efficacy of Papal pardons, which always depended on ‘[...] a fit disposition in the persons to whom they are applied And that may be a sincere resolution of forsaking sin and doing good’. Bostock then turns to the ultimate authority on the poem, the poet himself: ‘And the Author may not be understood to scorn the Authority of the cheif Pastor, as the Heretical margin wold suggest, but to reprove those who trust or presume upon such pardons whilst they live viscously’. Bostock’s attempts to drive a wedge between the text and the ‘heretical margin’ show his awareness of the printer and the author as separate authorities. In this particular case, the author is invoked as proof against the critic. What the author meant has clearly become the organizing principle of the poem for Bostock, while the idea that the text itself is malleable, that ‘diverse copies have it diversely’, has been lost. This is primarily because the author is useful to Bostock as an interpretive touchstone more likely to reveal the ‘true meaning’ of the text than the printer or his diverse textual sources. Thus Crowley succeeded as an editor in producing a standard text,169 but failed to persuade as a 168 169

King, ‘Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman’, p. 351.

A complete text of the poem was not re-edited until 1813, by Thomas W hitaker. On this edition and the poem’s excerpting in early print anthologies, see Sarah A. Kelen, ‘Peirs

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professional reader. From Bostock’s response it is clear that one of the other origins of the medieval vernacular author was as counterpoint to the early modern critic. Of all the roles of an externally attributed author, Langland, or any poet of the Piers Plowman tradition, would have been most at home in this, championing the efforts of a fellow reader, in defence of a personal reading.

Plouhman [Sic] and the “Formidable Array of Blackletter” in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, ed. by Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan Benton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 47–67. On the rebirth of textual scholarship after the edition and Crowley’s influence on it, see Dahl, ‘“Diverse Copies Have It Diversely”’, p. 58.

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C ONCLUSION : R EADERS AS A GENTS OF C HANGE?

It is difficult to observe processes that enter so intimately into our own observations (Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 8)

T

he great force exerted by the technological and cultural developments of the English Reformation, not least the more centralized legislative regulation of the press, has long been essential to the study of the history of books. My general argument has been that the shift from manuscript to print occurred not once, under the impetus of a single historical revolution, but in effect many times, both as a practical matter and in ways relevant to our theoretical understanding of the Reformation. It is necessary to take into account the ways in which individual textual traditions pushed back or accelerated the forces of early modern reform, producing their own plural reformations at their own pace and time. The shift to print occurred at different times and with drastically different results in each of the three case studies discussed in this book. The Canterbury Tales appeared almost immediately after the introduction of the press to England, as one of Caxton’s earliest editions, in 1478. Yet, Crowley’s 1550 edition of Piers Plowman is the first edition of a Middle English author to include a historically specific biography as an aid to interpreting the work — a status that was not rendered to similar standards on behalf of Chaucer until Speght’s edition of 1598. Why would Piers Plowman, of all the canonical works of English literature, be the first work treated in this way? The answers as I explored them here are not just rooted in the historical circumstances of English print culture in 1550, including the new emphasis on the role of authorship as a means for identifying books for censorship. At least an equally important role was played by Crowley’s reaction as a reader to Piers Plowman itself, to the poem’s

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investment in the role of poet. In that sense, Crowley’s work was in line with the poem’s textual tradition of readers, like John But, whose own interest in the poet’s role (in the poem and in society) led him to remake part of the poem himself. Similarly, we can see the workings of a readerly tradition in the treatment Stow gave to Chaucer’s collected works in 1561. The results of Stow’s work expanded the collection with a context of Chaucerian lyrics, influenced not by any new emphasis on authorship brought through Tudor press regulation, but by Stow’s antiquarian love of the manuscript anthology. In understanding the major shift from manuscript to print, then, it has been necessary to think of printers and editors, at least in part, as readers. In the case of the Book of Margery Kempe, the print editor, possibly the monastic librarian Thomas Betson, who may have provided the text for Wynkyn de Worde, seems to have been fulfilling a role familiar in manuscript culture. The annotations in the manuscript copy of Kempe’s narrative produce a reading of the full text as a monastic guide, possibly even for lay readers.1 The selection of excerpts for print recalls this reshaping of the text from the margins, but this time for an imagined community of readers made much larger by the potential of the press for disseminating identical copies of a text. The pressures of the producing devotional literature for a popular market, the potential for press regulation (in 1501, driven by ecclesiastical authorities), and the idea of this particular author in print produce very different results from those we saw for Chaucer and Langland. Chaucer’s reputation as a writer of fables and Langland’s association with the proto-Protestant reformers of the fourteenth century each played roles in the sixteenth-century evaluation and preservation of their work in print. By contrast, Kempe’s preparation for print elides anything that might indicate an authorial personality. Kempe is transformed by the edits into an unrecognizable ideal, but the process of adapting her text for a new readership would have been familiar to her. As different as the two versions of Kempe’s text in manuscript and print are, the manuscript readers and the print compilers shared their methodology of excerpting and adapting the text to fit a particular readership with Kempe herself. Kempe can be observed interacting with her own sources in a similar way, particularly in the retelling of tales and exempla and in the re-imagining of scenes from the Gospels. Margery’s manner of adapting tales to her listening audience is very much in line with the activity of Kempe’s readers, whose

1

For the idea that the work of the red ink annotator is ‘difficult if not impossible to reconcile with an exclusively monastic audience’, see Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator’, p. 144.

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adaptations of Kempe’s text are likewise captured in the marginal notations of the manuscript. The idea that texts should be absorbed, revised, and recast according to the personal needs of readers is central to The Book of Margery Kempe. Whoever prepared the text for Wynkyn de Worde’s printing used similar tools in order to serve the needs of a generalized print audience. Therefore, the sensibilities of what might now be called a professional editor were not constructed from the screws, levers, and fonts of the printing press. The technology only gave new purpose, economic impetus, and an extra measure of professional exclusivity to ideas and activities that were already comprehended generally in medieval literate practice, even for a laywoman like Margery Kempe, whose literacy was apparently limited. This is to acknowledge that what I have been calling vernacular manuscript culture has some roots in orality, in the adaptation of common tales through retelling. Whatever the ultimate source of the idea that texts are productively and entertainingly adaptable in anyone’s hands, its legacy can be seen in the handling of texts in both manuscript copies and early print editions. The early editors and compilers of texts for print were functioning, for instance, as we have seen some owners of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales function: excerpting, adapting, or anthologizing the Tales. This kind of activity now no longer seems to us to be an ordinary part of ‘amateur’ reading, like Jean d’ Angoulême correcting Chaucer’s versification, or Geoffrey Spirleng and his son playing with the layout of the Second Nun’s Tale. Part of the point in this study has been to show that the range of possibilities for what might be considered ‘reading’ in the late Middle Ages was wider than in the post-medieval period. Blurring the lines between the more or less settled roles of author, editor, and reader in the post-medieval view might help us to recapture a sense of the collaborative culture of manuscript transmission. As I have tried to show, each of the authors in these case studies worked most productively as readers themselves. As undoubtedly influential as the potential of the printing press itself was in the evolution of authorship, readers were also important agents of change. Some of the readers I have in mind were editors, like Caxton, who saw the advantages of selling authors to readers and whose desire for an authorial text of the Canterbury Tales came well before the realization of its object in print. These editors developed new attitudes and assumptions about the differences between manuscript and movable type, leading to the idea that ‘ancient’ manuscripts were the depositories of authorial texts. Some of the readers I have in mind became authors who thought through the implications of the new technology (including its potential for regulation) and accordingly adjusted their own relationship to

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writing. The example of Milton’s voice in the Areopagitica with which this book began might stand in for this development. But so might the work of Bale and Crowley, who were critics and editors as well as authors, and who appreciated early on both the opportunities and the liabilities created by the shift to print. Some of the readers I have in mind were simply readers, like Andrew Bostock, who responded to the commentary of Piers Plowman’s editor by appealing to a higher authority, writing in the margin of his copy: ‘This is false, for the Author sprak against abuse onely’.2 On the one hand, Bostock thoroughly rejected Crowley’s interpretation, but on the other, he accepted Crowley’s presupposition that the Author is the key to understanding the poem. Such small shifts in readerly assumptions form the fault line between medieval and modern understandings of the relationship between author, text, and reader.

2

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Primary Sources An Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th Century Translation of the ‘Alphabetum Narrationum’ of Etienne de Besançon, ed. by Mary Macleod Banks, Early English Text Society, o.s. 126–27 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1904–05) Bale, John, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum ([Ipswich]: [n. pub.], 1548). Full text can also be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007] ———. Index Britanniae scriptorum: John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. by Reginald Lane Poole and Mary Bateson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990) Betson, Thomas, A ryght profytable treatyse ... to dyspose men to be vertuously occupied (Westminster: de Worde, 1500) Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron, trans. by G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry Dean Benson and F. N. Robinson, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) ———. The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. by William Thynne (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532). Full text can also be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007] ———. The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer newlie printed, with diuers addicions [...], ed. by John Stow (London: Ihon Kyngston for Ihon Wight, 1561). Full texts can also be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007] ———. The Workes of Our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. by Thomas Speght (London: Adam Islip, 1598). Full text can also be found at Early English Books Online (EEBO) at [accessed 23 October 2007] Hoccleve, Thomas, Hoccleve’s Works, III: The Regiment of Princes, AD 1411–12, from the Harleian MS. 4866, and fourteen of Hoccleve’s minor poems from the Egerton MS. 615, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 72 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972)

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INDEX

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D 15, 40 Adams, Robert 181n Aers, David 24n Alford, John 196–97 Allen, Hope Emily 91n Alnwick, Duke of Northumberland MS 455 6n, 54–63 annotations 113–16, 158, 204–06 Arundel’s Constitutions ix–x, xii, 93 attribution 13, 25, 66, 68, 80–82, 84, 86, 88, 146, 156, 162–64, 173, 199, 202 Auden, W. H. 176 audience 11, 17, 29, 93, 109, 127 Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom H.R.C. pre-1700 MS 143 65n Bale, John 149, 153, 160–63, 166 Bartlett, Anne Clark 131n, 133 Bashe, E. J. 55n, 62n Bateson, Mary 132n Beadle, Richard 75n Beaufort, Margaret 131, 134n Beckwith, Sara 125n, 126 Bell, Beaupré 80 Bellamy, J. G. 53

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benefit of clergy 52–54 Bennett, H. S. 116–17, 118n, 131n, 151n Bennett, J. A. W. 141n Benson, C. David 172–73 Benson, Larry D. 40n, 77n Berthelette, Thomas 147–48 Betson, Thomas 131–39 Blake, N. F. 7n, 116n, 117n, 151n Blodgett, James E. 147n Boccaccio, Giovanni 3, 33, 37 Bostock, Andrew 204–06, 210 Bowers, John 45n, 47, 50, 52, 54n, 55n, 56n, 58n, 59, 60n, 65n, 144n, 145n, 167n Bragg, Lois 43n Brett, Caroline 161n, 162n, 165n Brewer, Charlotte 146n, 151–52 Briggs, John 50n Bühler, Curt F. 7n But, John 143, 173, 175–80, 208 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 142 132n; Trinity College MS E.3.3 71; Trinity College MS R.3.3 41n; Trinity College MS R.3.14 6n; Trinity College MS R.3.19 13, 46, 68, 78–80, 85, 87;

ORDER 2071192

226 University Library MS Gg.4.27 70; University Library MS Gg.4.31 145n; University Library MS Mm.2.5 77 Canterbury Cathedral, stained glass windows of 58–60 Canterbury Interlude ix, 16, 46, 54–63 Cannon, Christopher 15n Cardigan MS, see Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom H.R.C. pre1700 MS 143 Cargill, Oscar 177n, 178n Carley, James P. 161n, 162n, 165n Carruthers, Mary 27n Casey, Jim 45n Caviness, Madeline 58n, 59n Caxton, William ix, 13, 68, 70, 77–78, 116–18, 120, 144n, 148, 151n, 207, 209 Chambers, R. W. 175n, 176n, 179n, 185n Charles d’Orléans 72 Chartier, Roger 81, 83n, 84 Chaucer, Geoffrey xi–xiii, 11–89, 97, 147–48, 161, 171, 207–10; portraits of 42–44; works of: Clerk’s Prologue and Tale 33–39, 64, 101n, 178; Cook’s Tale 44–54; Friar’s Prologue and Tale 28–33; General Prologue, 18n, 57; Miller’s Prologue and Tale 9, 11, 17, 56; Monk’s Tale 11, 13–14, 21, 78, 87; Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale 33, 35–37; Parson’s Tale 41; Prologue of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale 11; Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale 33, 39–40; Retraction 41–42, 201–02; Second Nun’s Prologue 18n, 20–21; Tale of Melibee 21, 70–71; Wife of Bath’s Prologue 23–29; ‘To Adam, his own Scriveyn’ xi, 1–3; Troilus and Criseyde xi

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Index Chicago, IL, University of Chicago, Regenstein Library MS 564 41n, 71 Christine de Pisan 120–21 Clitheroe, Stonyhurst College MS B XXIII 40–41, 70–71 Clopper, Lawrence 181n Clyde, William M. 153n Cooper, Helen 77n Copeland, Rita 102n, 104 Cotson, William 70n Cromwell, Thomas 144, 157 Crow, Martin 72n, 73n, 74–75 Crowley, Robert xiii–xiv, 82, 142–75, 202–06, 207–08 Curry, Walter Clyde 55n Dahl, Eric 146n, 169, 206n Dane, Joseph 148 Darjes, Bradley 55n, 62n Davis, Natalie Zemon 142n Davis, Norman 12n de Hamel, Christopher 128, 131n de Meun, Jean 3 Depres, Denise 3, 8n de Worde, Wynkyn 91–94, 115–22, 127–39; printing of The Ymage of Love 129–30, 136, 208–09 Dillon, Janette 98n Dinshaw, Carolyn 24n, 25 Donaldson, E. Talbot 1, 97n Doyle, A. I. 2, 5n, 6n, 131, 135 dream visions 70, 181 Driver, Martha W. 80n Dublin, Trinity College MS 212 (D.4.I) 178n Durham, University Library, Cosin MS V.III.16 132n Duxworth 72

ORDER 2071192

227

Index

Echard, Siân 147n Edward III 146 Edwards, A. S. G. 5n, 81n, 85, 127, 128n, 129, 162n, 163n, 166 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 7n, 209 Elizabeth I 161 Ellesmere MS, see San Marino, Huntington Library MS El. 26 C. 9 Ellis, Roger 98n Elton, G. R. 145n Erler, Mary 130, 138 exempla 17–18, 30–32, 92, 98, 101–02, 122 Fisher, John 157 Fletcher, Bradford Y. 79n, 81, 83, 86n footnote, invention of 19 Forni, Kathleen 79n, 81, 83, 87n Foucault, Michel 154n Furrow, Melissa 99n Gabel, Leona 53 Galloway, Andrew 201n Ganim, John 19 Gaylord, Alan T. 11n, 22n Gillespie, Alexandra 82n Gillespie, Vincent 128n, 131n, 132, 133n Glasgow, Hunterian Museum MS U.1.1 75–78 Goodman, A. E. 92n, 97 Goodwin, Amy 38n Gower, John 40, 147–48 Grafton, Anthony 19n Grafton, Richard, 150 Green, Ian, 149 Greg, W. W. 80, 86n Griffiths, Jane 83n, 84n Griffiths, Jeremy 5n

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Hahn, Thomas 32 Hailey, R. Carter 144n, 146n, 150n, 161n, 162n, 166, 168, 202n Hanna, Ralph 145n, 163n, 183, 203 harlequin 56–57, 60 Harman, Thomas 50–52 Harris, Kate 5n Heinlen, Michael 142n Heinze, R. W. 155 Hellinga, Lotte 7n Hengwrt MS, see Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D Henry IV 155 Henry V 155 Henry VIII 143–46, 149, 152–55, 157–61, 167–69, 205 Heseltine, Janet E. 15n, 58n Hilton, Walter 41, 118, 138 Hindman, Sandra 142n Hirsch, John C. 98n, 99n Hoccleve, Thomas 42–43, 86, 162 Holbrook, Sue Ellen 115n, 117n, 119, 121, 126, 137 Hudson, Anne 79n, 81, 144n Hussey, S. S. 11n Ilchester MS, see London, University of London MS V.88 Ingilby MS, see New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 818 Jansen, Sharon L. 145n, 203n Jean d’Angoulême 72–76, 78, 209 Julian of Norwich 106 Justice, Steven 144n Kaeuper, Richard W. 32

ORDER 2071192

228 Kane, George 1, 143n, 163n, 170, 173n, 178n, 190–92 Keiser, George R. 94n, 118, 120, 133 Kelen, Sarah A. 205n Kempe, Margery xii–xiii, 6, 92–139, 203; examination by the Archbishop of York 100–05, 110, 126; examination by Archbishop Arundel 107–08, 137 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn 3, 8n, 173–74, 185 King, John N. 144n, 150n, 159, 162n, 167n, 171n, 204n, 205n Kohl, Stephan 55n Krochalis, Jeanne 42n, 43n Krug, Rebecca 128n, 130, 138 Ladd, Roger A. 98n Langland, W illiam xiii–xiv, 6, 57, 82, 141–208, 210 Lawrence, Veronica 128n, 133n Lawton, David 100 Lehmbergh, Stanford 171n Lerer, Seth 2, 15n, 34n, 45n, 148n Lindsay, James Ludovic 149n Liverpool, University Library MS F.4.8 6n, 173n Lochrie, Karma 91n, 92, 99n, 101, 117n, 119n, 123n, 128 Loewenstein, Joseph 152n, 154, 156, 159 Lollards 58, 92, 95, 100, 102–03, 143n, 155 London, British Library Additional MS 5140 66, 68; Additional MS 15833 30–31; Additional MS 34779 145n; Additional MS 35157 145n, 173n; A dditio n a l M S 35278 204n ; Additional MS 61823 112–16; Cotton MS Cleopatra D VIII 31n; Cotton MS Vespasian B.xvi 145n; Egerton MS 2863 66, 68; Egerton M S 2864 67;

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Index Harley MS 4866 42–43; Harley MS 4894 30; Harley MS 7334 69n; Harley MS 1704 72; Lansdowne MS 851 43–44; MS Royal 18 B.xvii 145n; Sloane MS 1686 72n; Sloane MS 2578 202–04 London, University of London MS V.88 6n, 173n Longleat House, Library of the Marquess of Bath, MS 29 41, 68; MS 257 65, 68 Lutz, Cora 7 Lydgate, John 13–14, 68, 74, 161; Fall of Princes 68, 78, 87; Siege of Thebes 16, 55n, 63–67, 74, 81, 86, 88; Serpent of Division 82, 85 Machan, Tim W. 3n, 148 Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS 6709 69–70 Manly, John M. 1, 15n, 63, 65n, 71n Mann, Jill 24n, 26, 45n marginalia, see annotations Marotti, Arthur 8n, 83n, 87n marriage 23–25 Martin, J. W. 150n, 161n, 165n, 166 Matheson, Lister 5n McCormick MS, see University of Chicago, Regenstein Library MS 564 McCormick, William S. 15n, 58n Meale, Carol M. 127–28, 128n, 129 Meech, Sanford Brown 91n, 113 Michael, Michael A. 59n Middleton, Anne 34n, 163, 164, 173n, 176, 177n, 178n, 179n, 180, 185n, 197n, 201–02, 202n Miller, Robert P. 24n Milton, John ix, xii, 210 Minnis, Alastair 36

ORDER 2071192

229

Index Mooney, Linne 2n, 5n Moran, James 117n, 130n, 131n More, Thomas 144 Mount Grace 4, 91, 113, 116, 121–22, 133n, 139

Pepwell, Henry 115, 123n Petrarch 7, 33–39, 64, 178 Plomer, Henry Robert 116n, 117 Plowman’s Tale 88–89 Puttenham, George 202

New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library MS 317 133n, 134 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 818 175n Nicholson, Peter 29n, 40n Niklaus, Thelma 56n

readers, active 15–16, 18, 22, 45, 97 reception 12, 27, 34–36, 38, 141 Reed, Arthur W. 130n Reeve, M. D. 88 Reformation x, 109, 152–53, 165, 207 Rendall, Thomas 55n, 62n retelling, of tales 22, 28–34, 92–110 Rhodes, J. T. 12n Richard III 66n Rickert, Edith 1, 15n, 63, 65n, 71n, 176n, 179 Ringler, William 83n, 84n, 85 Röhrich, Lutz 31n Rogers, Owen 145, 154n, 202 Rose, Mark 4 Roy, William 155 Russell, George 1, 197n, 201n Rypon, Robert 30–31

O’Connell, Brendan 2n Oldcastle, John 204 Owen, Charles A. 5n, 16n, 41, 65n, 69, 70–71, 87n Owst, Gerald R. 30, 32, 99–100, 104–05 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686 xi, 16, 46–54, 78; MS Bodley 851 6n; MS Laud Misc. 600 69n; MS Digby 102 173n; MS Digby 145 145n; MS Douce 104 173n; MS Douce 205 204–06, 210; MS Rawlinson poet. 137 6n, 145n, 173n, 175; MS Rawlinson poet. 141 41n, 71 Oxford, Christchurch Library MS 152 65n Painter, George Duncan 117n, 131n Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fonds anglais 39 6n, 72–75 Parkes, Malcolm 5n, 19n Parsons, Kelly 91n, 113, 208n Partridge, Stephen 63n, 70 Pearsall, Derek 5n, 8n, 42n, 43n, 57n, 64n, 77, 88n, 174, 183–84, 185n, 186n, 188n, 193n, 199–200 Peel, Albert 150n

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Saenger, Paul 142n San Marino, Huntington Library MS El. 26 C. 9 15, 25, 40–43; MS HM 114 6n; MS HM 128 145n, 163n; MS HM 143 173n; MS 144 69n Sargent, Michael G. 118–19, 119n, 129n Scase, Wendy 184n, 185–86, 186n Scattergood, John 67 Schaap, Tanya 170n Severs, Jonathan B. 35n Seymour, M. C. 15n Shirley, John 2, 148

ORDER 2071192

230 Siebert, Fred S. 145n, 153n, 154n, 155n, 156, 158, 160n Silvia, Daniel 16n, 18n, 45n Simpson, James xiv, 45n Sion College MS Arc. L. 40. 2/E, see Tokyo, Toshiyuki Takamiya MS 23 Skeat, Walter W. 80, 141n, 172–73, 176n Skelton, John 82, 84–85 sources and analogues, for Chaucer’s work: of the Clerk’s Tale 34–35, 37; of the Friar’s Tale 28–33; of the Man of Law’s Tale 40; of the Monk’s Tale 12; of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue; 24–27; for Kempe’s work: 96, 103 Spearing, A. C. 181 Speght, Thomas 19, 82, 86, 88–89, 146, 207–08 Spirleng, Geoffrey 75–78 Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. 9n Staley, Lynn 92n, 95–96, 99n, 101n, 102, 115, 128 Steele, Robert 144n, 149n, 155n, 161n Steiner, Emily 194n Stokesley, John 157–58 Stow, John xii, 79–89, 208 Stricker 30, 107 Strohm, Paul 73 Summit, Jennifer 115, 120 Sutton, Anne F. 66n Syon Abbey 118, 121, 128–35

Index

Thynne, Francis xii, 9, 171 Thynne, John 171 Thynne, William 81–82, 86, 147 Tokyo, Toshiyuki Takamiya MS 23 145n Trapp, J. B. 84n Tyndale, William 144–45, 155, 161–62 Tyrwhitt, Thomas 80 Uhart, Marie-Claire 7n, 167n, 202–03 Vessey, Mark 151n Visconti, Barnabo 74n Visser-Fuchs, Livia 66n Voaden, Rosalynn 98n, 125n, 133n von Heisterbach, Caesarius 30–31 von Nolcken, Christina 95n Watson, Nicholas 93n, 165n Wells, John Edwin 170n Windeatt, B. A. 80n Winstead, Karen A. 55n Woodville, Anthony 120 Wright, Michael J. 96n, 98n Wycliff, John 161–62, 165–66, 204 Wynter, Symon 131, 133 Yoshikawa, Naoe 98n, 99n Zumthor, Paul 2

Tale of Gamelyn 55n Taylor, Archer 29n, 30 textual transmission 3, 20, 45, 138–39, 175 Thorne, J. R. 7n, 202–03

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T EXTS AND T RANSITIONS: S TUDIES IN THE H ISTORY OF M ANUSCRIPTS AND P RINTED B OOKS

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field.

Titles in series Jane H. M. Taylor, The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (2007)

In preparation Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris BnF MS fr. 25458)

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