Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England 9781641892551

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WRITING OLD AGE AND IMPAIRMENTS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

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BORDERLINES Borderlines welcomes monographs and edited collections that, while firmly rooted in late antique, medieval, and early modern periods, are “edgy” and may introduce approaches, methodologies, or theories from the social sciences, health studies, and the sciences. Typically, volumes are theoretically aware whilst introducing novel approaches to topics of key interest to scholars of the pre-modern past. See further: www.arc-humanities.org/our-series/arc/bl/

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WRITING OLD AGE AND IMPAIRMENTS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND by

WILL ROGERS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2021, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The author asserts their moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94–553) does not require the Publisher’s permission. ISBN (print): 9781641892544 eISBN (PDF): 9781641892551

www.arc-humanities.org Printed and bound in the UK (by CPI Group [UK] Ltd), USA (by Bookmasters), and elsewhere using print-on-demand technology.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Introduction: Staves and Stanzas��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1

Chapter 1. Crooked as a Staff: Narrative, History, and the Disabled Body in Parlement of Thre Ages�������������������������������������������������������������23 Chapter 2. A Reckoning with Age: Prosthetic Violence and the Reeve���������������������������45 Chapter 3. The Past is Prologue: Following the Trace of Master Hoccleve�������������������69 Chapter 4. Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower’s Supplemental Role�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 103

Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 125 Works Cited�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 135 Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 147

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The debts one accrues in writing a book are endless—​the library staff and faculty at three institutions, the colleagues I met at Cornell in the PhD program, and the English department staff at Cornell who are instrumental in running a large program, these folks all deserve a mention. While this book is many revisions away from the original dissertation I  wrote at Cornell University, I  have a list, too numerous to recount, of people who helped make this project possible. My largest debt remains to Andrew Galloway and Masha Raskolnikov, who helped shape the earliest form Writing Old Age took and have continued to assist me long after I left Cornell University. Together with the rest of my committee—​Samantha Zacher, Jenny Mann, and Cary Howie—​Andy and Masha left long-​lasting lessons with me and showed me how to become a generous reader and a thoughtful writer. Students and colleagues at University of Louisiana Monroe deserve mention too, for maintaining a vibrant and supportive intellectual environment: Mary Adams, Janet Haedicke, Jack Heflin, and Elizabeth Oldfather have all contributed to giving me the space and intellectual engagement necessary for this undertaking. And, in real material ways, Tommy and Mary Barham’s continuing support through the ULM Foundation has made archival research and conference presentations possible. Colleagues and friends in my field, too many to list, have offered numerous critiques of the work through drafts and conference presentations. Susannah Mary Chewning, Georgiana Donavin, Wendy Matlock, Betsy McCormick, Eve Salisbury, and others saw portions of the book or heard me discuss its argument. And, of course, Natalie Grinnell and Michelle M. Sauer have been supportive friends and colleagues, answering frantic emails and texts, making sure I had the energy to finish. Last, but not least in any way, Christopher Roman has been a friend and close collaborator for many years, and, as with the others in the list, the book would not exist without them—​but any errors remain my responsibility. On a personal note, my husband Joseph, also a professor writing his own book, made meals and cleaned the house while I was buried in drafts and revisions. He allowed me the time I needed to make this first book a reality, and, while not a medievalist, let me prattle on as I thought aloud about Writing Old Age. Perhaps the oldest debt is the one I  cannot repay, the one I  owe to my mother, Paulette Rogers, the first person to notice that I had a knack for reading, and writing, and school. A being of laughter and wit, she supported me throughout decades of school and showed me how to be kind and empathetic, especially to my students. She died in the first months of quarantine as I was making final changes to this book. Even though she’s gone, hers is the voice I hear when I read through what I have written here—​and I hope somewhere she can see how her care, love, and support reverberate throughout my life.

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INTRODUCTION: STAVES AND STANZAS

And indeed, if you care to read or hear foreign history, you will find that the greatest states have been overthrown by the young and sustained and restored by the old.1

At the end of the Knight’s Tale, the narrator of the Tales reports the unanimity of the pilgrims:

Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold, In al the route nas ther yong ne oold That he ne seyde it was a noble storie And worthy for to drawen to memorie, And namely the gentils everichon. (I.3109–​13)2

The terms of this unanimity are given in status and age: the gentlefolk, in particular, find the value of the story the Knight has told, as well as both young and old. But oldness really is paramount here: from the beginning of his tale, the Knight has been conscious of the past, aware of the value of what is old, even as his tale seems to focus on the traditional concerns of the young: love, battle. Indeed, even as the Knight tells a tale, much of the tale’s power is found in its age, a fact apparent from the tale’s first line: “Whilom, as olde stories tellen us” (1.859). And much of what the tale tells us as readers in the twenty-​ first century about old age can be seen in the workings of Saturn toward the end of the tale, in the depiction of the old god, whose discussions of disease, age, and infirmity are central to his power, even if the human figures of the tale fail to see this.3 Even though these strategies are frequently deployed—​the temporal framing of the tale, the inclusion of Saturn as a mover of divine disorder or an older order—​I see in the Knight’s frequent citations of oldness from the beginning more than a commonplace. While many messages about oldness and old age exist in the Tales and late medieval England—​old age and its effects might be negative, old stories are important, and age can be a source of debility and impairment as well as authority and veneration—​this framing has consequences for how these lines at the end of the tale can be understood, which I use a map for Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England. Although these lines are not connected 1 Cicero, Cato Maior de Senectute, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1923), 29. 2 All citations of the Tales refer to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robison (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

3 Harry Peters, “Jupiter and Saturn: Medieval Ideas of ‘Elde,’ ” in Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 375–​91.

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Introduction: Staves and Stanzas

directly or indirectly to Parlement of the Thre Ages and Wynnere and Wastoure, which I  discuss in the next chapter, the parallels are intriguing:  an old story narrated by a mature person, which is worthy of memory and characterized by its nobility. In the naming of nobility and the call to memory, we might also see how this focus on memory and old narrative anticipates the choice of old texts focused on history and nobility for William Caxton’s imprints, which I  discuss in Chapter  4, or the resurrection of John Gower in William Shakespeare’s Pericles, who returns from oblivion, memorializing Gower’s source texts and Gower’s even older sources. Moreover, the answers to this unanimity—​the tales of the Miller and the Reeve—​shatter this conjunction between young and old, as both introduce debate among the ages. Mirroring the connections between these lines and the range of texts which Writing Old Age treats, the connections between old age and narrative within the Knight’s Tale do not end at the end of his tale as the phrasing of these lines suggests further links. Even as we might be skeptical of the narrator’s claim that all loved the story, that claim nevertheless introduces the downward arc of the First Fragment, as disorder and conflict, and age dominate the next three tales, beginning with the Miller interrupting the Knight and offering the “legende” of an old carpenter who is cuckolded by his young wife.4 The Miller introduces his tale by positing that “Men sholde wedden after hire estaat,/​ For youth and elde is often at debaat” (I.3229–​30). The breaking of this community, through the Miller’s insertion of a fabliau, is given in the same terms as the description of the community created through the end of the Knight’s Tale: estaat, with its connotations of condition and status, also dovetails here in these opening lines with those of bodily condition and age. The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale (subject of the second chapter) recognizes this downward trajectory, as narrative there emphasizes its power for an aged teller: both as a way to wield authority with a body that has physical limitations and as a way to release that body from the demands of physical desire. Surely, old age functions like this in different historical moments, as the Reeve himself seems to implicitly echo the Ciceronian benefit to old age and its release of the body from lust and desire. But as an entry point to narratives of old age, the evocation of age-​ related disunity and the potent impotence of the aged body uncovers the intersection between age and ability outside Chaucer’s texts. In these Middle English texts, these grumbling old men repeat, in their garrulous voices, a steady refrain chronicling the pain of existence and their disappointment in the present and future. While a common image, one so frequent that reference to examples seems unnecessary, these common depictions are more than simply narrative fodder: these figures of age use their litany of age-​related impairments and elderly debility to create narratives which both highlight 4 The type of narratives Writing Old Age treats are themselves worthy of discussion, for what seems clear is that certain narratives seem to touch on old age more than others. So, for example, in the Miller’s exposition of his narrative, he claims that he will discuss a “legend,” which according to the Middle English Dictionary, can mean “a story about a person” or “a narrative dealing with a happening or an event.” Middle English Dictionary:  https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​ english-​dictionary/​dictionary/​MED25010/​track?counter=1&search_​id=1382410. But the main connotations of this word remain tied to hagiography.

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and stand in for their physical woes. So, mournful of their loss of youth and ability, these figures appear to possess complaint as a crutch, a verbal and written talent for negative comment and narrative that both defines them and their abilities. Writing Old Age then traces these figures of masculine old age who reject ability and highlight their corporeal debility, and deploy narrative and texts, both written and spoken, to position themselves as participants in a textual economy, as able as the allegorized embodiments of youth who they often debate in medieval and early modern literature. Yet these refrains of this common imagery take on a special, topical significance following the yoking of youth and folly during the Ricardian era. The existence of an age-​ driven debate and discourse would surely have been a familiar point to those reading these texts in the late fourteenth century, and the skeletal outlines of that debate are clearly seen in the treatments of Richard II and his rule.5 Contemporary chroniclers note with increasing frequency the problems of Richard’s youth and the sidelining of older counselors, even as Richard continues to age and is no longer a youth.6 Surely this is a concern for the audience of the poems which Writing Old Age discusses, both in their original contexts and their afterlives. While some of these poems predate Richard, they still all maintain some voicing of the suspicions of youth that take on added resonance in the political upheavals of the late fourteenth century, when Richard II’s youth becomes the focal point of criticisms of his rule. Indeed, the youthful court is as much construction as it is reality, as the future Henry IV and Richard II are defined in opposition in terms of age, with the mature cousin usurping the youthful fool, even as months separate the two cousins in terms of biological age. What this concentration on age, the anxieties surrounding youth, and the elasticity of boyhood and maturity suggest is that age carries with it various weight, socially and politically, and that biological age is not final in determining how to describe bodies and identities. The odd ways in which Richard II is described as a youth to the more mature, though exact contemporary, Henry Bolingbroke speak to the way in which age is more than a number. In this way an apparently timeless discourse about age, as indeed youthe and elde are often at debate, takes on a special significance in the Ricardian age, seeing how the political ramifications of the boy king make discussions of old age and its value timely. Knowing this construction of age is as much a somatic fact as a rhetorical strategy helps to frame the discussion from aged figures in Writing Old Age. 5 While not under discussion, Richard the Redeless (which echoes many of the advisory tactics of Regiment of Princes traced in chap. 3) directly addresses the problems of Richard’s rule and the corruption which chronicles often ascribe to his reign.

6 For the full discussion of these rhetorical strategies, see Christopher David Fletcher, Richard II : Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377–​99 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008). “Reading Richard the Redeless strengthens the impression that the king’s critics associated him with the faults of youth, not because he had a particularly youthful appearance or bearing, but because youth invoked a certain set of political vices which his enemies wished to ascribe to him” (17). Fletcher’s use of then-​contemporary poetry, in the context of various chronicle evidence, serves as one of the touchstones for Writing Old Age. Richard II’s character has suffered from a successful and persistent narrative that links both the king and his rule to eternal depictions of youth, which, according to Fletcher, sometimes dovetail with depictions of the king as effeminate and unmanly.

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Introduction: Staves and Stanzas

Caxton, Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, and the anonymous author of Parlement of the Thre Ages? then inherited a mass of information that facilitated an understanding of old age, even as much of it varies from one classical or early medieval authority to another. The so-​called “Ages of Man,” which existed in various formats, was meant to give some clarity to an otherwise individuating set of bodily, mental, emotional, and social conditions that together constitute old age. J. A. Burrow describes and catalogues these various schematics of ages, which classical, medieval, and Renaissance authors, doctors, and astrologers used to classify and integrate human aging into an existing natural order. Burrow argues that his study “concerns itself with this idea of naturalness as it appears in medieval writings, mainly from England, from the time of Bede to the end of the Fifteenth century.”7 While this schematic indeed appears regularly throughout this period, and roughly conforms to the pattern that Burrow describes, the treatment of age certainly can and does exist outside this paradigm, a fact seen in Burrow’s final chapter on transcendence of the scheme. Even with Burrow’s acknowledgement of transcendence, much medieval material on age cannot be organized so strictly around either fealty to or transcendence of this organizing principle. As an example, parts of Cicero’s Cato Maior De Senectute serve as foundation for that schematic, yet Cicero’s comments complicate it to the point of confusion, as the rather tidy notion of separate stages grapples with a multitude of individuating factors.8 And, in surely one of the most authoritative treatments of the scheme, Isidore of Seville writes that there are six stages of age, with the last, called old age, beginning at seventy, and, obviously, having no set end.9 What we as modern readers might find odd—​or not—​is that Isidore’s scheme of ages marks Iuventus (youth) to fifty, a link an often ageist modern society might not make. Clearly, even within a somewhat universal system of demarcating age, one dependent on centuries of received wisdom, definitions could and would differ. In short, the definition of old age was most likely as hazy in late medieval England as it is today.10 The effect of socioeconomic position, gender, and location all bear and bore upon the nature of what it means to be old. Thijs Porck argues that the “representation of old age is culturally defined; in gerontocratic communities, for instance, the elderly will usually be portrayed in a positive light, whereas societies that prefer the qualities of youth over age will generally devalue old age in their literature.”11 And clearly, Writing 7 J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 1.

8 See in particular chap. 3, where I discuss William Caxton’s 1481 imprint of William Worcester’s translation of Cicero’s Cato Maior De Senectute.

9 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. and ed. Stephen A.  Barney, W.  J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 242.

10 Age then, as now, seems as much biological experience, as varied as that might be, as the effects of cultural representations of age. Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Aged by Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) lays bare the ways in which a youth-​dominated culture in modern America largely forces a negative view of old age.

11 Thijs Porck, Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2019), 52. Of particular value are chap.  2 and 3, which describe, respectively, the merits and disadvantages of old age.

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Old Age shows that the literature depicting old age defines this period of life as both advantage and disadvantage—​with the proviso that characters use these disadvantages to gain advantage over their more youthful and able interlocutors. For late medieval England, schemes dividing ages into categories “are abstract conventions that cannot be read as simple mirrors of social practice.”12 While I am attuned to the histories of fourteenth-​ and fifteenth-​century England, the choices available to the aged, and the vocabularies used to describe them, this investigation does not describe in detail the lived experience of age, the reality of social structures, medical treatments and therapies, or even the number of aged men and women living in London, or elsewhere in England. While records exist in great enough number to trace treatments and the lived experience, such as wills, court cases, and annuities and corrodies, Writing Old Age is focused on the rhetorical conditions of the depiction of old bodies. However, throughout I consider the material, medical, and social conditions and pressures associated with their production of these depictions. Besides the political tensions associated with youth and old age, which certainly shape much of what these selected texts associate with old age, medical views of the aging body remain an important grounding for the study of these figures of age. Indeed, in viewing the rhetorical sleight of hand that occurs when inability, debility, and lack become the prosthetic rhetoric which allows activity and action, Writing Old Age refers to then-​ contemporary theories of aging and its treatment and symptoms, from Middle English echoes of Avicenna’s Canons of Medicine to texts associated with Roger Bacon which offer remedies for aging. These texts are not only sources of a discourse of impairment and medicalization—​they also offer places and spaces to trace the language and rhetoric these authorities use to describe old age. The medical and the textual are almost impossible to separate, as we consider the definitions of old age, the conditions associated with old age, and the remedies these texts often propose. In short, narrative remains a concern for these texts, even if we consider them historical, scientific, or documentary. Knowing these tensions, of course, does not obviate the need for historical inquiry, and a small survey of those materials suffices to underscore the extent of new and old thought about age in late medieval England. Importantly, Joel T. Rosenthal traces “the contemporary perceptions of age and the assertions, made time after time and case after case, about its precise nature,” and engages with various documents, pointing to a cultural preoccupation with age.13 Deborah Youngs reconsiders and continues the research of issues, and her work represents both the promise and peril of examination of the reality of age.14 Primary source material that concerns old age of a scientific or sociological 12 P. J. P. Goldberg, “Life and Death: The Ages of Man,” in A Social History of England: 1200–​1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 413–​34 at 413. 13 Joel T. Rosenthal, Old Age in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 11.

14 Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c.1300–​1500 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2006).

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bent is in short supply for the time that her book considers, and the dearth of materials that might shed light on demographics is often anecdotal, limited, or nonexistent.15 The value, then, of literary depictions of age cannot be overestimated, but then cannot also pass as a literal reflection for the experience of age.16 But narrative, of course, persists as one of the clues to this historical old age: medical treatises, descriptions of ailments and impairments, and lists of dubious cures for old age serve as the textual enfleshments for these bodies whose skeletal remains are all that remains. These narratives, like their literary cousins, contain signs for how old age might have been culturally and socially constructed and how the impairments that are associated with old age might have been interpreted or depicted. Because what counts as old age is amorphous and defies boundaries, great care must be taken to unravel the metaphors of old materials or old bodies which often colour the literature of the fifteenth century, and the later, scholarly studies of this literature. As Irina Metzler has made clear, Ageing may be a natural process—​in modern thought a biological phenomenon affected by genetics and cellar change—​but although deemed natural the process has tended to be pathologized. In this respect old age shares some of the aspects of ‘disability’:  it is seen as a biological derivation from the healthy norm.17

Following her portrayal of the biological, cultural, and medical factors affecting the depiction of old age, Metzler continues to interrogate why and how disability might function both as natural process and one which is pathologized. In her view, aging brings together impairment, as it is “both a physical and mental phenomenon,” and disability, as it is “a cultural and medical construct.”18 These layers of meaning that modern culture affords old age are present—​arguably—​in late medieval England, as old age is described not only as a series of mental and corporeal symptoms and changes but also as a factor that prohibits the aged from certain activities, as the texts I describe throughout Writing 15 Although it is no longer strictly considered part of Roger Bacon’s body of work, “On Tarrying the Accidents of Age” remains a touchstone for Writing Old Age. See a Middle English translation of the original Latin work, which is printed in Sex, Aging, & Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, 2  vols., ed. M.  Teresa Tavormina (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. 1, 133–​247.

16 See Shannon Lewis-​Simpson’s “The Challenges of Quantifying Youth And Age In The Medieval North,” in Youth and Age in the Medieval North, ed. Shannon Lewis-​Simpson (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1–​15:  “Literary sources provide the most compelling accounts of personal experiences of the young and old within society, speaking as they often do of the functional, social, emotional, and cognitive ageing of the individual.” Besides J. A. Burrow’s work on the Ages of Man and the edited collection Youth and Age in the Medieval North, other examples of literary studies of age include the edited collection Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007) and Mary Dove’s The Perfect Age of Man’s Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 17 Irina Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (New York: Routledge, 2013), 92–​93. 18 Metzler, Social History, 93.

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Old Age often portray old age as a disqualification in amorous activities, for example. But I track a specific relationship regarding narratives of impairment that trouble this view of old age—​throughout Writing Old Age, speakers and authors alike use narratives of age-​related impairments to highlight and supplement these areas of debility, inability, or infirmity, turning impairment into a prosthetic that challenges the disabling notions of old age.

Old Man Yells at Cloud: Old Bodies and Common Complaints

This contradiction in these complaints needs further fleshing out: what announces and makes clear the nature of age-​related impairment—​these complaints—​also serves to complete these bodies, to open up new avenues of action, and to paper over the ableist assumptions of youth.19 Indeed, this function is prosthetic—​that which both calls attention to and addresses the impairment, and, as I begin to express in Chapter 4, a kind of prosthesis for performance. This prosthetic old age, given through complaint, is frequent, appearing from Chaucer and Gower through Hoccleve and Caxton to Shakespeare, and although varied, maintains similarities that are formal and thematic. The cry that “I am old,” evoked by these practitioners of a kind of narrative or rhetorical prosthesis, calls attention to the impairment while using that call to add to the impaired body. These narratives are known by their common elements, for they often use a common lexicon that speaks to its embodied condition: images of candles burning to their end (The Reeve’s Prologue and Pericles), hairs turned white or “hore” (Confessio Amantis and The Reeve’s Prologue), faces destroyed by age (Confessio Amantis). The catalogue of common elements also includes features that describe mental decay, such as “dotage,” emphasizing the importance of memory to old men, even as it fails; and the enduring link between negative emotions and old men, voiced not only in Aristotle but also in Cicero. So what at first appears a rhetorical move, a kind of corporeal bait and switch, is instead a way to change what might be meant by “the ideology of ability,” as interrogating these speakers and their litany of bodily woes, in turn, uncovers all kinds of fictions about the body.20 Because, ultimately, what is turn for the old speakers of these works 19 For a discussion of prosthesis’s power to both mark vulnerable bodies and complete them, see Richard Godden, “Prosthetic Ecologies: Vulnerable Bodies and the Dismodern Subject in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Textual Practice 30:7 (2016): 1273–1290. 20 See Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). There, Siebers fleshes out what he calls “the ideology of ability,” which is “at its simplest the preference for able-​bodiedness. At its most radical, it defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons” (8). Simultaneously, Siebers considers that the “briefest look at history reveals that human beings are fragile. Human life confronts the overwhelming reality of sickness, injury, disfigurement, enfeeblement, old age, and death … The point is simply that history reveals one unavoidable truth about human beings—​whatever our destiny as a species, we are as individuals feeble and finite.”

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Introduction: Staves and Stanzas

is that narrative is indicative of lack and need, even as it supplies the lack and the need it announces. And this contradiction in terms addresses the aging nature of the body, curious and queer and natural and inevitable. Writing Old Age addresses this rhetorical turn toward old age, not only via those examples of old age from the history of rhetoric or those which describe old rhetoricians, but also through what Jay Timothy Dolmage calls a new history of rhetoric, indeed, a “Disability Rhetoric.”21 Showing the need to avoid received histories of rhetoric which might describe an ancient rhetoric that is disembodied and which supports an ableism that erases non-​normative bodies, Dolmage argues “that rhetoric has a body—​has bodies,” a view which helps recover lost stories and different bodies which are both rhetorical and physical.22 Ultimately, rather than argue that rhetoric itself is ableist, Dolmage argues for inclusion of forgotten bodies and their rhetorical weight so that we may leave behind “the narrow view of the role disability may have played” in the ancient world.23 And prosthesis is central to his project, as it is central to Writing Old Age. As Writing Old Age argues, this notion of prosthesis is a rich one, and many of the shades of modern meaning for prosthesis are extant in the late Middle Ages:  indeed, the connotations of prosthesis as something written or textual or rhetorical seem to have roots in ancient Greek rhetoric—​in fact, Writing Old Age argues affirmatively that these medieval authors have, at their disposal, these rhetorical contexts, not simply from Aristotle but also in more implicit uses, such as Cicero’s use of Cato the Elder as prosthetic and prothesis for the aging—​and this dual usage is no mistake. Indeed, Dolmage demonstrates the “imperfect meaning” in his use of “prothesis/​prosthesis” throughout his book. The first half uses the “prothesis” in the sense of a proposition and a central part of speech-​making according to Aristotle.24 But he also uses “prosthesis” throughout the second half of the book, and it is this meaning on which the argument of Writing Old Age depends. And while this usage, Dolmage notes, does not refer to prosthetic body parts until 1704, its meaning is rhetorical in the sixteenth century, referring to ornamentation in both Richard Sherry’s and Thomas Wilson’s rhetorical treatises.25 For both Sherry and Wilson, prosthesis has an additive quality, one that is tied to words. It is the addition of a beginning syllable, which according to Wilson is one of the six schemes, which “contrary to our daiely wont, is either when we adde or take away a sillable, or a worde, or encrease a sentence by chaunge of speech, contrary to the common maner of speaking.”26 But even as the notion of prosthesis available to these medieval and early modern authors would have been different, it would have existed in some way. There are innumerable mentions of “staves” as walking aids, and medieval 21 Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014). 22 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 69.

23 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 70–​71.

24 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 106. 25 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 107.

26 Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique 1560, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 176–​77.

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prosthetic devices do exist. The discussion of narration as prosthetic, however, does not depend on the existence of the extant evidence of the actual word prosthesis. Rather its function in narrative and for bodies becomes clear upon reading these depictions of old speakers. In this way, we might see how prosthesis, pace Dolmage, is not simply additive, but rather central to the production of meaning in these narratives produced by and about old men. This union of prosthesis and meaning so far demonstrates how old bodies, as common sites of impairment and non-​normalcy, are prone to use narrative both to complete and define themselves. Age-​related disability, like disability in general, then is tied to the creation of meaning, a link seen by Dolmage, David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, and David Wills. Mitchell and Snyder, in their Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependency of Discourse, remark that their aim is not to “deny the reality of physical incapacity or cognitive difference.”27 Rather, narrative prosthesis “is first and foremost about the ways in which the ruse of prosthesis fails in its primary objective: to return the incomplete body to the invisible status of a normative essence.”28 Thus, for Mitchell and Snyder, and the aged speakers in Writing Old Age, the act of prosthetic narration calls attention to the lack, to the space between disabled and normative, by attempting to fill that distance. And their approach shows “the pervasiveness of disability as a device of characterization in narrative art.”29 And central to that characterization, it seems, is the central place of these images of disability and impairment in narrative work:  as they make clear, narrative prosthesis is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight. Bodies show up in stories as dynamic entities that resist or refuse the cultural scripts assigned to them.30

Using narrative prosthesis to clarify the status of the aged in medieval and early modern literature too builds upon the notion that these aged speakers use narrative in such a way that calls attention to their bodily shortcomings while simultaneously delivering “the representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight.” For example, as Chapter 2 shows, the Reeve presents a kind of misreading of his own body, which, contrary to his own stated narrative, is not too old to play, and his play is by far the most vicious, showing in its cruelty the consequences of nonchoice in the Knight’s Tale which precedes it. The Reeve’s apologia for old age is more offense than defense, as he uses the fiction of his impaired body to wound the Miller with language. Impairments, and their representation, might be the crutch of these medieval and early modern texts, but powerless they are not. Thinking about poetry and prosthesis this way prompts 27 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 7. 28 Mitchell and Synder, Narrative Prosthesis, 8. 29 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 9.

30 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 49.

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a reevaluation of the notion that the able body is a temporary (and temporal) fiction, that given age and enough time, even bodies that are whole and active will lose power and ability. But perhaps prosthesis and narrative might change the dimensions of that inevitability, if only through additions and lack? Or perhaps, to return to Dolmage’s account of the “crooked” history of rhetoric and the bodies that comprise it, there is no temporary aspect to that fiction, as the normal body is the constant fiction. These old bodies then remind us of impairment’s central place in literary depictions. And certainly medievalists have found narrative prosthesis useful as well—​so that beyond Dolmage’s conceptualization of a disability rhetoric or Mitchell and Snyder’s discussion of narrative prosthesis in more modern materials, medievalists have grappled with prosthesis, from a term that describes the body’s connection between flesh and bone to the prosthetic use of disability for medieval occurrences of impairment itself.31 Indeed, Walker argues that “Flesh’s natural properties –​its radical difference from the rest of the body, its natural moistness and viscosity –​thus enable it to function as a natural form of prosthesis within the body.”32 These descriptions of “Disability Rhetoric” point towards the “staves” in descriptions of old age, but a turn toward descriptions of poetry in George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy demonstrates how stanzas and staves are connected: Staff in our vulgar poesy I  know now why it should be called, unless it be for that we understand it for a bearer or supporter of a song or ballad, not unlike the old weak body that is stayed up by his staff, and were not otherwise able to walk or to stand upright.33

Puttenham’s discussion here points to the hazy etymology of “staff,” a word used synonymously with stanza by poets such as George Gascoigne and in certain medieval poems. This connection here—​that poetry itself might be a staff, that material support needed to help the “old weak body”—​is no mere conjecture by Puttenham. Indeed, he has drawn attention in this quotation to the way in which staff and stanza were synonymous, possibly related to the OE origins of stæfcræft, or book learning. In fact, in Old English discussions of grammar and learning, stæf appears often as a reference to the drawing or shape of characters or letters, shades of meaning that are arguably still part of the late medieval notion of a staf. This Middle English word maintains its literary and learned meanings, pointing toward descriptions of “proportions and measure” in 31 For a particularly rich discussion of prosthesis see the essays in Textual Practice 30:7, “Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture,” which include essays by Naomi Baker, Isabel Davis, Richard H. Godden, Margaret Healy, Allison P. Hobgood, Julie Orlemanski, Chloe Porter, and Katie L.  Walter. Godden’s, Orlemanski’s, and Walker’s discussions of prosthesis are particularly important for Writing Old Age. For a very succinct and clear presentation of disability and narrative prosthesis, see Jonathan Hsy, “The Monk’s Tale: Disability/​Ability,” The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (https://​opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/​mkt1/​)

32 Katie L. Walter, “Fragments for a medieval theory of prosthesis,” Textual Practice, 30 (2016), 1345–​63 at 1349. 33 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 154.

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poetry, according to Puttenham in the late sixteenth century. While today, we might understand staff as a walking aid or an accessory for a religious authority or magical figure, authors in late medieval England often used staff interchangeably with stanza, as a measure of poetry. This stick, used to aid walking, carried by wizards or witches, or employed as crutch, and its poetic connections offer as a result a way to re-​conceptualize not only poetic making but also discourses about old age, impairment, and prosthesis.34 That is to say, if stanza and staff sometimes have a synonymous relationship in late medieval England, is this relationship one way, or might we read stanza as staff, as a way to uphold the body, to help impairments, and to demonstrate power and authority? Moreover, as staves and crutches are associated with old age—​as prosthetic or aid to the aging and impaired body—​from Chaucer and Gower to Hoccleve, Caxton, and Shakespeare, do staves and stanzas offer new links among the old body, its apparent inability and impairments, and the creation of new verse and the incorporation of old sources? The frequent citation of the old man and his dependence on this aid serves as signal that fourteenth-​ and fifteenth-​century textual production is positioned both as impairment and prosthetic. Like the old body, this verse announces its impaired state, its incompleteness, its reliance on ancient sources, its inability to follow the pattern of past potency and, simultaneously, serves as prosthetic, grafting itself onto classical and early medieval sources, which are not completely extant. This “staff” refers to a rhetorical pose and a claim upon old age. In other words, staff refers both to the prosthetic used by the aged and the impaired in everyday life, while simultaneously also referring to the prosthetic nature of this poetry of complaint and impairment. This expanded view of staf—​both as a prosthetic implement such as a walking cane and as a signal that narrative has a prosthetic function—​encapsulates time as a layered concept—​the present existing with the past. Writing Old Age then introduces a rhetorical posture that finds resonance with the material role of the past in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, borrowed from classical and early medieval sources The growth and practice of this literary borrowing—​from the sources that describe old age in Latin texts—​serves as a beginning point for Writing Old Age, as the section on classical sources below makes clear, especially where the transmission of that material influences the stylized depictions of impairment that surround certain formations of old age. Taking as its focus the repetitions of claims of impairment in descriptions of old men from the anonymously authored Parlement of the Thre Ages to Shakespeare’s Pericles, this examination of stylized old age fleshes out the contours and characteristics of the rhetorical creation of old age. An analysis of the rhetorical claims of impairment, however, cannot and should not substitute for the archaeological, biological, and sociological evidence of aging within pre-​ and early modern literature. Nevertheless, even with such “hard” evidence, it is clear that such sources demand their own rigorous rhetorical examination. Facts about aging, as with any other contested social and 34 For the staff’s use in imagery of the Ages of Man, see Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 54–​79, especially 73 and 75.

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biological process, must necessarily be read with caution and care, and these facts often undergird the stylized depiction of age which Writing Old Age highlights. But what are these facts about aging? Aging is both biological process and cultural phenomenon, with multiple levels of interplay between biological and cultural meaning.35 Even that biological fact of aging is tenuous, connected to cultural attitudes, economic considerations, and genetic markers. Whereas genetics might have been a foreign concept to ancient and medieval authorities, the difference in experience in aging based on outside circumstances was not. Cicero’s De Senectute, mentioned above, presents old age as affected by one’s amount of wealth, serenity, and character, including how one spends one’s youth. Age, like gender, sexuality, and class, is so foreign a concept between different cultures and periods that it defies easy categorization. And that is, in part, the point of a new inquiry into age depictions of late medieval and early modern England: how might figures of old age function beyond their assumed and common roles (which must of course include comic figures, figures of wisdom, and in certain love narratives, the role of procurer or obstacle)? Their narratives are worthy of study that centres these complaints of impairment and debility. Across each of these texts under discussion here, a set of practices emerges in the depiction of this old age:

1. Writing Old Age finds in the criticism of Richard II’s youth and bad governance both a valuation of maturity and a space where complaints about old age are highlighted. 2. What Writing Old Age argues is that narratives of old age are themselves both scripted and natural, inasmuch as they describe the biological states of aging. 3. The nature of scripted impairments, therefore, does not reduce the truth of these statements, but the scripted nature suggests their similarities and conventions are central to how these narratives work. 4. They work to emphasize and claim impairments. As a kind of narrative sleight of hand, connected to the modesty topos, these narratives use inability and debility to stake out power and authority. They are, therefore, prosthetic in nature, as they both call attention to a lack or inability while nevertheless papering over it and supplementing that apparent loss of ability. 5. These narratives maintain prosthetic meanings beyond lack and supplement of individual textual bodies. Indeed, the narratives serve as necessary prosthetic to the old speaker because they actually seem to constitute old age. Without them, old age seems indefinable in these texts. 6. Medieval narratives of old age reach beyond the grave and can be used prosthetically not only to create a definition of “medieval” in Early Modern England but also to serve as prosthesis for early modern literature, emphasizing and supplementing sources 35 The field of gerontological studies is both an old one, evidenced by the pseudo-​Baconian De Retardatione Accidentium Senectutis and Gabriele Zerbi’s fifteenth-​century Gerontocomia, and fairly recent, evidenced by works such as A World Growing Old, ed. Daniel Callahan, Ruud H. J. Ter Meulen, and Eva Topinková (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996).

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or the lack thereof.36 As a term tied to ages and time, the Middle Ages and the term “medieval” offer suggestions for how texts themselves might be old yet powerful to the early modern thinkers recycling some of these older authorities.

Four Aging Authorities: Aristotle, Cicero, Juvenal, Maximianus Reading late medieval and early modern English literature, one frequently encounters a paradoxical status of old age and of things considered old, ancient, or belonging to a past long dead. On the one hand, medieval and early modern authors treasure the past: it is a storehouse of timeless ideals, courageous figures, and monuments to an earlier, golden age. On the other hand, old age could be feared and viewed in the most negative of lights. Indeed, as authorities such as Cicero and Seneca—​widely known throughout the Middle Ages—​make clear, age has much to dislike, even hate, in it. Humans might wish to achieve it, but once gained, they notoriously often regret how their bodies are failing and bringing them closer to death. The anonymously authored Elde Makiþ Me Geld from the early fourteenth century animates the refrain voiced in the late Roman republic by Cicero and the early empire by Seneca: if men desire to be old, why is old age hated?37 One might answer this question a number of ways. The desire for old age is actually a desire for extended life, and, like Tithonus, those seeking a long life also desire a long youth. But it is not as simple as declaring old age to be brutish, nasty, and short. Old age, like the past and the golden age to which it often is tied, can also be viewed as a time of unparalleled wisdom. In De Senectute, old age, Cato argues, has made him stronger, releasing him from the bonds of lust and physicality. For Chaucer and Gower, they imagine the oldness of books and authorities to be a signal that they possess real authority and power; Hoccleve can reimagine Chaucer and Gower, supposedly his old masters and teachers, to be giants upon which newer practitioners of poetry must work; Caxton repeatedly uses his new technology to print classical narratives of the past; and, finally, Shakespeare uses an old poet to physically bracket his use of a medieval and classical source in Pericles, imbuing an old figure with authority. Common here is a litany of bodily woes and their various impairments, producing narratives that centre on their inutility. Simultaneously, these aged figures still appear useful, either for wisdom or as go-​betweens, vacillating between positive and negative roles in literature, also using narratives, bodily centred, to guide characters to other ends. But for either view, what seems true is that the elderly are connected centrally to narrative. And that is precisely what Writing Old Age tracks in the depictions of old age from Elde in Parlement of the Thre Ages to Gower in Shakespeare’s Pericles: the close 36 “medieval,” s.v:  Oxford English Dictionary www-​oed-​com.ulm.idm.oclc.org/​view/​Entry/​ 115638?redirectedFrom=medieval#eid 37 This short anonymously authored lyric is based—​in part—​on the Elegies of Maximianus and is found in the Kildare MS. For the edition I cite, see Wilhelm Heuser, Die Kildare-​gedichte; Die ältesten mittelenglischen Denkmäler in anglo-​irischer überlieferung (Bonn: Hanstein’s, 1904), 170–​72.

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connection among old age and narrative and the latter’s tight link to that aged body. Indeed, this connection is an old one even in the Middle Ages, as Aristotle’s remarks about the old speaker in his Rhetoric make clear: The character of Elderly Men—​men who are past their prime—​may be said to be formed for the most part of elements that are the contrary of all these [of Youth]. They have lived many years: they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-​do everything. They ‘think’, but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything in this way and nothing positively.38

Aristotle’s depiction of elderly diction foregrounds its uncertainty and its negative character. By thinking, rather than knowing, old men and their speech reinforce that a life, long-​lived, has not made them sure of anything. Adding qualifiers of fact and truth to every statement, these old men speak of wisdom tentatively. In fact, living by “memory,” rather than by “hope,” old men, according to Aristotle, see life as essentially empty because what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past. This, again, is the cause of their loquacity; they are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering it, which Caxton characterizes as powerful in his prologue to The Polychronicon. Their fits of anger are sudden but feeble. Their sensual passions have either altogether gone or have lost their vigour: consequently they do not feel their passions much, and their actions are inspired less by what they do feel than by the love of gain.39 This emphasis on anger, loquacity, and the feebleness of the former highlight what is common to the old speaker in late medieval and early modern English literature. Speaking of the past, remembering only the past, these garrulous old men speak too much and say too little. Aristotle’s use of “feeble” and “vigour” recall that he traces a paradoxical relationship between ability and impairment that also reflects the paradoxical status of the aged: held up for their wisdom, castigated for their greed, old men in both their speech and actions are powerful in the past, and weak in the present. And so, following Aristotle, at first glance, it does seem that the focus of Writing Old Age is somewhat obvious: old people use narrative to compensate for a loss of bodily power and mental acuity. Following Aristotle, other classical thinkers echo this point, as Cicero argues in his De Senectute: old people are predisposed to complaint and noise. But there is a particular connection here, between body and voice, which demands more careful introspection. The specific relationship that I  trace here is one which is prosthetic:  that is, these narratives about the old body highlight the impairments, corporeal and mental, of those bodies while nevertheless functioning as an additive to complete the unwhole bodies. These characters use these narratives of impairment to gain authority and audience, which the elderly speaker nevertheless disclaims 38 Aristotle, The Rhetoric, printed in The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W.  Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1984. First Published in 1954), 123–​24. 39 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 124.

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by demonstrating their debility. And this prosthetic relationship goes beyond those individual bodies—​this image of prosthetic narrative and old bodies becomes even more important when used to view the classical and early medieval sources which these late medieval texts build on. These sources likewise are often viewed as incomplete, and yet their use, however incomplete, demonstrates their power. In short, for old bodies, of figures within the texts, and the old texts themselves, narratives of impairment and incompleteness prove powerful. And nowhere are these connections clearer than in Cicero’s De Senectute. Cicero’s Cato is of course one of the central documents describing the journey into old age, a point that Cicero makes clear throughout the entirety of the text, which centres on the imagined dialogue among Cato the Elder, Laelius and Scipio. In a work that self-​ consciously seeks to elevate the status of old men, Cato produces a short digression on the orator as an old man in which he speaks first of his worries about the old orator, together with the advantages of old oration. The orator, I  fear, does lose in efficiency on account of old age, because his success depends not only upon his intellect, but also upon his lungs and bodily strength. In old age, no doubt, the voice actually gains (I know not how) that magnificent resonance which even I have not lost, and you see my years; and yet the style of speech that graces the old man is subdued and gentle, and very often the sedate and mild speaking of an eloquent old man wins itself a hearing. And although one cannot himself engage in oratory, still, he may be able to give instruction to a Scipio or an Aelius! For what is more agreeable than an old age surrounded by the enthusiasm of youth? Or do we not concede to old age even strength enough to instruct and train young men and equip them for every function and duty? And what more exalted service can there be than this? For my part, Scipio, I  used to consider Gnaeus and Publius Scipio and your two grandfathers, Lucius Aemilius and Publius Africanus, fortunate in being attended by throngs of noble youths; and no teachers of the liberal arts should be considered unhappy, even though their bodily vigour may have waned and failed.40

These lines encapsulate one of the central aims of Cicero’s Cato, who in his confessional way, both highlights the weaknesses of age (which are bodily and medical) and the strengths (which are oddly corporeal as well). Cato, in the twenty-​eighth and twenty-​ ninth sections of De Senectute, explains both a fear which he apparently has, and apparently, one which he has no cause to have. He fears the orator weakens. Yet this fear, while apparently true, has no bearing on the actual consequences of the oration he gives. He explains away corporeal weakness and decay by changing a bitter tune of impairment to a sweet melody of influence and strength. The old orator, because his voice has become more mild and constant, renders his speeches in such a way that they win not by level of sound or gesticulation of the body, but “very often the sedate and mild speaking of an eloquent old man” captivates an audience. The lack of what one can only call lung strength produces a contradiction in the description of bodily impairment: impairment causes the old man to sound harmonious, as he is in agreement with his old age, and 40 Cicero, On Old Age, on Friendship, on Divination, trans. W.  A. Falconer (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1923), 9–​99 at 37 and 39.

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the lilting sounds of his voice match the quiet range of his topics and assertions. In this sense, narrative fully meets one of its most canorous depictions in this short description of the orator, as Cicero and Cato present him. Rather than fight against what is lost, in the context of claims of impairment, the old man manages to continue to win favor and success. Cato, himself, personalizes this bargain, as his speeches continue to drive the agenda of the Senate—​a point he makes elsewhere—​in spite, or because of his years. And finally, as my continuing examination of old age and narrative will show, it is both the personal and quasi-​universalizing impulse of Cato to see in criticisms of old age both an attack on his mode of existence, as he uses that specificity to advance how all old men should conduct themselves. At the end of his assertions cited above, he gives room for old men to both be unable to do as he does—​owning audiences with his well-​measured senescence—​and to do something that touches upon the same territory. It is the teaching posture of the old man with which Cato consoles those cantankerous colleagues of age whose voices and presentations are not sonorous and who wear age more roughly. Cato locates pleasure, an undergirding concept of De Senectute, in the instruction of young men in the vein of Laelius or Scipio, as nothing is perhaps more enjoyable than the arrangement of youth and age together. This celebration of pedagogy colours, if negatively at times, the deployment of old age as teaching tool in literature of the later Middle Ages and early modern period. The gruff and grizzled speaker with a litany of woes and cries about a life well-​wasted demonstrates that Cato’s lesson is learned, in a fashion, perhaps differently than this speaker would have liked. But the centrality of impairment and loss to the position of old teacher in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Hoccleve’s works and Shakespeare’s Gowerian resurrection prove a Cato-​like content for tutelage and instruction that often defines this prosthetic connection between old age and narrative of impairment. The context of Cato as advisor of old age and old age man both is reflected and twisted in important ways in works that follow Cicero from the late-​antique poet Maximianus to alliterative works of late medieval England which focus, in part or whole, on old age.41 For Maximianus, the defining characteristic of old age, its simultaneous destruction of corporeal health and creation of literary record of that bodily decline, finds widespread and influential expression through the Elegies of Old Age, a series of narrative poems that chronicle the old-​age pains of the I-​persona of the poet. It is likely that from Elde to Chaucer, Gower to Shakespeare, the poems of Maximianus were well known and influenced the narrating of old age. The echoes of Maximianus’s woeful treatment of age are much easier to trace in a short work which predates Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. Elde Makiþ Me Geld details in plaintive tones the aging process. Preserved in MS Harley 913 (along with the more famous Land of Cokayne), Elde is in some ways a highly conventional poem about the nuisances of aging. The artistry 41 See Juanita Feros Ruys, “Medieval Latin Meditations on Old Age: Rhetoric, Autobiography, and Experience,” in Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 171–​200, especially 176–​79 for a discussion of The Elegies of Old Age.

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of the poem, particularly in the fifth stanza, which amplifies the state of complaint about age to a collection of onomatopoeic woes, combined with its common lexicon with other more famous age-​related complaints, however, renders the poem worthy of further study. Paired in a manuscript with the better known Land of Cokayne, the alliterative Elde Makiþ Me Geld depicts the speaker of the poem as an old man who condemns the horrors of old age through graphic descriptions of a failing body and the narrative of grief which this body produces: “I grunt, I grene, I groan, I gruche” (57). The alliteration of the verbs signals their near equivalence. All words denoting verbal or written complaint, they are tied together in a constellation of negative affects, affected by age. Indeed, the speaker is clear: “And al þis wilneþ eld” (59). Elde, that allegorical construction of old age, is the active agent who desires this degradation of the speaker’s body, and the language of complaint which issues forth. Although these lines do express inevitability, they do so in an odd way: the use of “wilniþ” imbues the lines with a sense that Elde itself is desirous of these changes. These lines cannot help but recall the Ciceronian judgment about old age and man’s desire for it, offered through Cato in Cato Maior De Senectute: “To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained.”42 Like Elde, De Senectute is a work that approaches old age from an affective frame of reference: De Senectute attempts to make old age more palatable, to give ease and respite to those in old age, and to raise the esteem of the elderly in the eyes of the young. The affective approach to old age that Elde takes, however, cannot be more different. Although it refracts some of the Ciceronian heritage on age, the focus of Elde is firmly on the negative affects of the aging, and the negative effects of Elde working on the speaker’s body. Given their use in grammar school curricula, the age-​old imagery of Maximianus’s poetic complaints would have been well-​known most likely to Chaucer, Gower, and other fourteenth-​ and fifteenth-​century poets. Before the twelfth century, according to Winthrop Wetherbee, “a literary canon has been established which includes traditional beginners’ texts like the Disticha Catonis and the Fables of Avianus, now often augmented by the Ilias latina and the elegies of Maximian,”43 an assertion confirmed by Vincent Gillespie.44 Like Wetherbee, Gillespie notes the structure of these schoolbooks as one that includes both Disticha Catonis (the “Distichs of Cato”) and the Elegies. And though these books are obviously meant for schoolboys, their influence can be felt in the work of aged authors and speakers: the rehearsal of these aphorisms learned in youth reflects in the prosthetic words of the aged figures of this Middle English poetry. Chaucer’s 42 Cicero, On Old Age, 13. 43 Winthrop Wetherbee, “From Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Literature Criticism, Vol II: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 99–​144 at 122.

44 Vincent Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century to c.1450,” in The Cambridge History of Literature Criticism, Vol II: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 145–​235 at 153.

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Reeve, for example, is responding to the Miller’s Tale, a work that is introduced by the Miller’s observation that youth and age are ever at debate. Tellingly, the Miller states in his tale that his constructed Reeve does not know his “Catoun.” Indeed, Chaucer’s Reeve, as opposed to the Miller’s Tale’s Reeve seems to know his Cato, or at least one of those Sex autores, namely Maximianus. His prologue is an extended reflection of materials on old age and its lamentations, many of which appear identical to those contained in Le Regret de Maximian, found in Digby MS 86. In fact, as a source for teaching the young, the Elegies with their plaintive tone and frank discussions of sexuality and disgust are somewhat of an oddity, as much as the Reeve’s Prologue is, according to the Host, ill-​ suited to their narrative needs. Gillespie notes as much: The Elegies of Maximian, for example, with their laments for old age and lusts for young flesh, are not the most obviously appropriate subjects for study by impressionable schoolboys.45

In fact, the lesson these Elegies might reflect is one which Hoccleve as teacher might also demonstrate: old age can be both a source of folly and wisdom, powerless and potent, and in spite of claims of impairment, an able source of learning and knowledge. These mournful accounts of age in Elegies present an almost wholly negative view of old age, themselves echoing, indirectly to be sure, Juvenal’s Satires, an influential description of the horrors of old age. While works predate his “Satire X” that touch upon old age, his contempt of human wishes, in particular, the wish for a long life, finds voice in later medieval works, voicing a familiar refrain of contempt for the world. In “Satire X,” at line 188, Juvenal writes that man asks for long life. “Da spatium vitae, multos da, Iuppiter, annos.”46 With these words—​Give me a spacious life, Jupiter, give me many years—​man unwittingly repeats the mistake of Aurora, who wishing for a long life for Tithonos, forgets to wish for eternal youth. What is the use of a long life, if that long life produces misery, pain, and debility? This question is precisely the one that animates lines 188–​288 of “Satire X.” Juvenal’s reflections on the horrors of old age begin naturally with a close up on the old face, and its purported jowls, wrinkles, and waste. Juvenal’s powers of description here are general, and rightfully so, for he argues each young man is different and varied—​one is less handsome, one has a different body—​but every old man resembles the other. His comments that old age looks the same suggest that these complaints of impairment function both as bodily truth and rhetorical strategy and foreground old age as a period of sameness, where difference melts away through the years. Innocent III’s De Contempu Mundi revels in many of the same themes, and seems to have borrowed extensively from “Satire X.” It is Innocent’s text that seems to have exported much of this imagery of decrepit and impaired old age to Chaucer, his 45 Gillespie, “Twelfth Century,” 156–​57.

46 Juvenal, “Satire X,” in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), line 188. All citations of Juvenal refer to this edition by line number.

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contemporaries, and poetic descendants. Indeed, Chaucer mentions his own translation of Innocent’s text, not extant, in Legend of Good Women. Further printed copies of De Contemptu date from 1473 and over 500 manuscripts exist, and a fifteenth-​century Irish translation survived.47 “Satire X” and its contempt for worldly vanity, then, is undoubtedly a source for medieval authors, refracted through Innocent’s text and his survey of pains and effects produced by extreme old age. Innocent’s De Contemptu Mundi offers a brief summary of what Juvenal has written, and the difficult position of being in the world, while railing against that world, reflects the contradictions inherent of wishing for an old age that is beset by impairments and debility: But even then, if any one does reach old age, his heart weakens, his head shakes, his vigor wanes, his breath reeks, his face is wrinkled and his back bent, his eyes grow dim and his joints weak, his nose runs, his hair falls out, his hand trembles and he makes silly gestures, his teeth decay, and his ears get stopped with wax. An old man is easily provoked and hard to calm down. He will believe anything and question nothing. He is stingy and greedy, gloomy, querulous, quick to speak, slow to listen, though by no means slow to anger. He praises the good old day and hates the present, curses modern times, lauds the past, sighs and frets, falls into a stupor and gets sick. Hear what the poet [Horace] says: Many discomforts surround an old man.

But then the old cannot glory over the young anymore than the young can scorn the old. For we are what they once were; and some day we will be what they are now.48

Innocent’s judgments of the horrors of old age concentrate first on the physical infirmities of the old man: weakened throughout, his body shows the visible signs of age. In addition to internal changes such as loss of natural heat, then, old age is a collection of visible impairments that strike foremost at those organs of sense and movement. But this description strikes at the heart of what it means to live with both the causes and symptoms of old age, all of which can be found in medical treatises through the Middle Ages. Precisely because old age’s cause was often the loss of natural or innate heat, manuals exist that seek to treat both the cause and effect, such as On Tarrying the Accidents of Age, attributed to Roger Bacon.49 There before he offers questionable or commonsense cures, often couched in the language of the occult or secrecy, Bacon outlines the general conditions of old age such as pallidnes of spirite, moche icchyng and cracchyng, short and stynkkyng breth, blerid eyen, slumber, wrath, and vnrest of soule, hurt of instrumentis of wittis in whom lifly vertu werkith.50

47 Donald R. Howard, “Introduction,” in Pope Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition, ed. Donald R. Howard, trans. Margaret Mary Dietz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1969), xiii–​xv. 48 Pope Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition, 13.

49 For a concise summary of Bacon’s work, see Shalamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: “Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain” (London: Routledge, 2005), 60–​62.

50 “On Tarrying the Accidents of Age,” 163.

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Not only does the old man suffer from all manner of outward infirmities, his capacity for virtue and goodness diminishes, just as surely as the innate heat which keeps the body youthful.51 Building upon the “concept of the person as a psychosomatic unity of two linked entities, body and soul,” this litany of age-​related issues strikes at the heart of the mental and emotional signs of age which Innocent describes and which Writing Old Age treats in the chapters that follow: the old man demonstrates a propensity to anger, together with a gullible nature.52 He argues with everything, yet accepts everything: a creature of praise for the past and condemnation for the present and future. The confines of narrative that is prosthetic are clear here: though he is weakened, with head shaking and hand trembling, the performance of the old man is centred on movement and sound. He speaks, in sighs, and frets, always “quick” to speak. This portrait is clearly influential. One need look no further than the anger and “grucche” of Chaucer’s Reeve, or the dim-​eyed, enfeebled Elde of Parlement of the Thre Ages:  these characters perform and flesh out the skeletal themes of Innocent’s judgment on old age. More timely, however, might be the ending lines, a reflection, one might argue, of Innocent’s own tender age when he composed this text. He was never, according to a modern cultural standard or to his own, old. At thirty-​nine, he was the youngest member of the curia when he was elected pope, and unlike the most recent abdication, of Pope Benedict in 2013, Innocent died a fairly young man still pope.53 These are the “facts” of biology. But Innocent’s ending line—​“For we are what they once were; and some day we will be what they are now”—​posits a cyclical nature to old age and youth, and gives perspective to the grouchy old man and the young man, who feels no sympathy for the former. Innocent’s text makes the importation of a rhetorical depiction of old age possible—​his descriptions of extreme old age surely foreground Chaucer’s and Gower’s postures of old men who complain of impairment but still produce action. Like Juvenal, Seneca, and Cicero, all of whom use old age to evoke the past as a golden age with its catalogue of exemplary ancient men and the aging body with its ailments, impairments, and weaknesses, late medieval and early modern English writers employ these narratives of old age to advance a more volatile and unpredictable view of old age, which shifts constantly between encomium and invective. More than just a view of old age, and a set of rhetorical features associated with garrulousness and complaint, however, this weakness is a pose, if a completely necessary one: authors and speakers in these texts style themselves as old men, bemoaning a lack of beauty and strength. In this way, this stance seems akin to a modesty topos, but unlike the author or speaker proclaiming a false modesty, this stance invokes a past period of power now lost, which 51 Sears, The Ages of Man, 12–​13 for a discussion of humoural theory pertinent not only to aging but also to its broad categorization within the Ages of Man.

52 Shalamith Shahar, “ ‘All Want to Reach Old Age But Nobody Wants to Be Old’: The Middle Ages and Renaissance,” in A History of Old Age, ed. Pat Thane (Los Angeles: Getty, 2005), 70–​111 at 83. For further detail on the medieval medicalizations of the body, see Shahar, Growing Old, 51. 53 Howard, “Introduction,” xxii–​xxiii.

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itself conveys authority. Although this pose of the old speaker is related to the modesty topos, it is markedly different in its construction and its aims and consequences. Whereas the modesty topos hides actual ability beneath a posture of inability, this prosthetic narrative about age does not just simply change expectations for its reception, as is so often the case for the modesty topos. Instead these impairments are often real for the speakers, such as the Reeve, and they exist in some form outside the text—​even textually—​and are meant to be taken seriously, for their existence is a sign of the speaker’s weakness and power. Ultimately—​and this is the difference between the reliance on narratives of impairment for the elderly and the modesty topos—​these narratives are prosthetic because they are so integral to the quality of oldness for their speakers. Without these utterances of pain, debility, and woe, the aged would not be aged. In tracing the prosthetic functions of these old narratives, Writing Old Age begins with a discussion of Parlement of the Thre Ages, a poem extant in two versions, complete in British Library, MS Add. 31042, a manuscript compiled by Robert Thornton in the fifteenth century. Parlement is central to this view of old narrative, as it advances just how embodied and embodying narrative becomes to Elde in his descriptions of the Nine Worthies, and, likely by accident, this emphasis on narrative’s importance to the elderly continues in the poem which follows Parlement, as the first fitt of Wynnere and Wastoure contrasts the embodied narrative of the old minstrel with the empty jangling of the new one. Both the first fitt of Wynnere and the whole of Parlement which precedes it suggest narrative is more central to old speakers, especially narratives like the fall of Troy or the amplification of the Nine Worthies. Next, I  turn to the Reeve, another figure of age, who uses narrative both to make clear that his impairments make “pley” impossible and to create space for the aged to appear as “mirrours” to the young. Chaucer’s Reeve, who presents himself in his self-​ effacing prologue as aged, reflects much of the same inevitability of age as Parlement’s Elde. However, the Reeve uses narrative age and his own embodied truth of it to metaphorically touch what his weakened body can no longer touch:  the supposed invulnerability of youth. Focusing on echoes of De Senectute as well as Walter of Henley’s Husbandry in the Reeve’s materials, this chapter describes the use of the old man as narrator and plot mover who exemplifies the prosthetic nature of narrative to the old speaker, both narrator and narrated. What the Reeve points to in the aging of Symkyn introduces Thomas Hoccleve, the “old, poor versifier,” whose works consciously attempt to graft themselves onto the Ricardian legacies of Chaucer and Gower. Moreover, in terms of the prosthetic relationship between narrative and age, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes suggests that the role of the tutor is one that both assumes and troubles the category of old age, as Hoccleve inhabits simultaneously the role of student and teacher, youth and old man. Arguing that Regiment exists as partially erased prologue to Caxton’s paratexts, with Hoccleve’s La male regle, I  argue the embodied Elde-​character who appears in the prologue of Regiment anticipates Thomas Wilson’s mid-​sixteenth-​century definitions of prosthesis as a rhetorical term: an addition at the beginning which alters the meaning

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of that which follows. As a supplement to Caxton’s exposition of his body and print, Hoccleve’s prologue seemingly guides Caxton’s narratives of his body and offers an opportunity to track autobiographical costs of print and manuscript production, which he couches in terms of age-​related impairments. As perhaps the central figure of the later fifteenth century in terms of print production, Caxton is an ideal figure to show how these prosthetic narratives that centre age-​related impairments continue to shape the discourse about aged bodies and their connections to literary history. Concentrating on his revision of script and print in terms of his rhetorical claims of impairment and his use of quasi-​medical terminology to convey translation, I  read his imprint of De Senectute, a text which weaves independently through each chapter, as a late example of the earliest notions of an impaired, yet active age, because of those impairments. Reflecting the contradiction of old age as evocative of ability and impairment, Cicero’s text in translation continues the depiction of the prosthetic relationship between age and narrative, as English readers meet the “reducying” of the original Latin and the wisdom of Cato to his younger interlocutors. In the final chapter, I  interrogate the role of Gower in Shakespeare’s Pericles as reflection of Gower’s own construction of himself as old man in Confessio Amantis. By reading this material through Shakespeare’s construction of Gower in Pericles, I argue that an emergent definition of “prosthesis” as textual addition in the sixteenth century guides Shakespeare’s reading and use of the old author, imbuing his choral construction of Gower as a revisionary figure, in both Aman’s new vision of himself as old and in-​ text Gower in Confessio Amantis. Both Hoccleve’s and Shakespeare’s constructions of old men in their prologues enliven the rhetorical definition of prosthesis while also making clear the logic of these prosthetic narratives. While the choice of texts might seem arbitrary for Writing Old Age and Impairments, no selection of texts would be perfect: indeed, the subject of this monograph is capacious, and it is my aim to highlight how Middle English texts depict old age and its function rather to describe any exhaustive catalogue of its portrayal. So, in the following chapters, I  follow a specific though idiosyncratic logic:  moving from an anonymously authored alliterative text to Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, Hoccleve’s Regiment and Caxton’s imprintings, and Gower’s textual afterlives in Shakespeare’s Pericles, I map out a certain narrative of narratives that feature these old speakers and characters and how they are characterized and characterize old age. Surely, I will have left out important texts—​why not Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale or Lydgate’s poetry instead of Hoccleve’s? Perhaps someone will see the absence of Piers Plowman as a failure. Any one of these choices might have improved the following chapters, but this book, a blending of Middle English literature; late medieval history, culture, and medicine; and insights culled from Disability Studies is not meant to be definitive but rather to open new avenues for considering the old subject of the old man.

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Chapter 1

CROOKED AS A STAFF: NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND THE DISABLED BODY IN PARLEMENT OF THRE AGES

As I make

Life’s race-​course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age —​each bears some of Nature’s fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.1

clear in the introduction, narrative has a specific prosthetic function for those speakers who use it both to claim debility and to use those claims to achieve authority and some measure of bodily and mental coherence. What is at stake is not primarily whether or not the disability is real—​the question of whether old age brings impairment for many of those who reach old age is insurmountable and undeniable—​ but rather how this impairment both creates the occasion for narrative and how that narrative augments the aged, impaired body. To that end, I turn to the alliterative poem Parlement of Thre Ages for its creation of a figure of old age, who debates within a dream space, occasioned by a hunter (or poacher) who falls asleep. This figure, who echoes then-​contemporary depictions of allegorical Elde, debates Youthe and Medill Elde and narrates a tale of his body’s physical weaknesses alongside a retelling of the Nine Worthies. While this poem has been the subject of many scholarly interventions, few have noticed how the poem links directly—​and accidentally—​to the first fitt of Wynnere and Wastoure, another debate poem which follows Parlement in one manuscript, British Library, MS Add. 31042, the so-​called London Thornton manuscript, in their handling of connections between age and narrative. This similarity creates an almost prosthetic relationship between the end of Parlement and the beginning of Wynnere, serving as an additive for both poems. In order to illustrate not only the prosthetic relationship that exists between old age and narration, but also between the two poems, this chapter discusses the links created by the manuscript’s owner and scribe briefly, before centring the rehearsal by this old speaker of the Nine Worthies and its ties to Wynnere and Wastoure’s discussion of narrative and old and young speakers. Elde in this poem uses the Nine Worthies in order to argue for the power of his own body and age to function as “mirrour,” while simultaneously expressing the great powerlessness of his own body. This embodied narrative is echoed in the first fit of Wynnere as the poem’s famous opening warns against young janglers 1 Cicero, On Old Age, 43.

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24 Crooked as a Staff and their vapid repetition of rehearsed rhymed material—​together, both tales suggest that the old body, impaired, needs these declamations of impairments and historical recounting of the fall of great figures.2 These words function prosthetically—​both calling attention to the limitations of the old body while nevertheless papering over that bodily difference. Approaches to these poems take various forms, although the possible readings between the two poems have been much less explored.3 Instead, modern critical treatments have concentrated on the “apparently” problematic version of the Nine Worthies in Parlement, the problematic first fitt of Wynnere, and the lack of consensus concerning the date of the composition of Wynnere.4 The approach I take can, however, also address all these apparent issues, through looking at the prosthetic nature of narrative and old age, probing the centrality of Elde’s rehearsal of the Nine Worthies, and of their fortune and fall, to both Parlement and Wynnere. The two poems are copied at the end of the manuscript, as we have it. Parlement precedes Wynnere and the latter remains unfinished, as does the debate that rages within the latter poem. A short amount of space separates the two works; they are written in the same hand, and the first fitt of Wynnere is written in single columns, just as Thornton had copied Parlement.5 This placement produces a potentially continuous reading in which the age-​related material 2 While this chapter argues that Wynnere continues the prosthetic function of old age and the narratives that describe it, I  cannot argue for more than an incidental relationship between the two texts. The placement of Parlement and Wynnere in the London Thornton manuscript might be intentional, but that intention and its recovery is beyond my range here. 3 Thomas Bestul’s Satire and Allegory in Wynnere and Wastoure (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974) is somewhat of an exception, which explores similarities in meter, language and dialect (83) as well as common elements, such as May and description of the disputants (45).

4 Britton Harwood has written extensively on the ill-​fitting first fitt in both “Anxious over Peasants: Textual Disorder in Winner and Waster,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36 (2006): 291–​319 and “The Displacement of Labor in Winner and Waster,” in The Middle Ages At Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 157–​77. Thorlac Turville-​Petre gives a short account of the “prologue” of Wynnere and Wastoure in “The Prologue of ‘Wynnere and Wastoure,” Leeds Studies in English 18 (1987): 19–​29, in which he attempts to tie the first fitt more closely with the debate which follows. For Elde’s teaching and errors in presenting the Nine Worthies, see Donald K. Fry, “The Authority of Elde in The Parlement of the Thre Ages,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen D’Amico (Albany: SUNY, 1989), 213–​23; Lisa Kiser, “Elde and His Teaching in The Parlement of the Thre Ages,” Philological Quarterly 66 (1987):  303–​14; Thorlac Turville Petre, “The Ages of Man in The Parlement of the Thre Ages,” Medium Ævum 46 (1977): 66–​76; and Steven K. Wright, “Historical Inscription and Confessional Erasure in the Parlement of the Thre Ages,” Fifteenth-​Century Studies 23 (1996):  1–​12. Finally, David V.  Harrington discusses indeterminacy in both poems in “Indeterminacy in ‘Winner and Waster’ and ‘The Parliament of the Three Ages,’ ” The Chaucer Review 20 (1986): 246–​57. 5 See George R.  Keiser, “Thornton:  Gentleman, Reader and Scribe,” in Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 67–​108.

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of Parlement segues into the first fitt of Wynnere and its focus on and distrust of young minstrels. This is more chance than design, which can’t be known: “Because it is unlikely that Thornton had a full set of exemplars before him as he copied texts for his books or that he always knew far in advance what might be available, his design must have been evolving as he carried out his compilation.”6 In this reliance on the texts themselves, in the condition in which they are extant, lies a principle that might please angry Elde and the cranky, old minstrel of Wynnere:  a concentration on the textual elements of their works corrects the thematic elements, allowing the reader to engage with their extended meditations on age and history. The placement of the two texts by Thornton allows for a productive comparison of and reflection on different modes of history-​telling, for different purposes, both showing an opposition between “trivial” tale-​telling (Youth and Medill Elde; the beardless young minstrels), and “important” tale-​telling, exemplified by Elde’s discussion of the Nine Worthies and the narrator of the first fitt of Wynnere. This presentation of age-​related impairments functions as an introduction to Elde’s monopoly of the remaining text. More than 300 lines remain, and Elde uses them to narrate a tale of the Nine Worthies, which continues through into the first fitt of Wynnere and Wastoure, a poem which only appears in the Thornton London manuscript, directly after the best copy of Parlement.7 As I  will show below, the placement of Parlement before Wynnere can help to explain and prepare for the abrupt irresolution at the end. Narrative prosthesis further characterizes Parlement in an internal sense. All of the figures in Parlement are defined by narratives, but Elde especially uses narrative as a necessary extension of “ableness,” forcing his younger interlocutors to see him as they might see their future. Elde’s prosthetic narration then is one that stresses the transitory nature of the fictive able body. While the aged speaker has lost much bodily power, except one that creates narrative, either of the de casibus or confessional variety, this textual creation papers over his feeble body. The majority of the debate in Parlement, therefore, concerns Elde and his speech, and the centrality of his narration is not contested. But throughout the poem, narrative and its performance and production are tied to age. In this way, Parlement anticipates the first fitt of Wynnere, which follows directly after in the London Thornton manuscript, emphasizing again a debate between youth and age in terms of textual creation, performance, and enjoyment. Indeed, both Parlement and Wynnere connect narratives of fortune and fall to old age. In Parlement, Youth fashions narrative not for itself, but as an end, anticipating the transactional 6 Keiser, “Gentleman, Reader and Scribe,” 76.

7 For Thornton’s bibliography, George Keiser’s account, published in two essays, is still definitive:  consult both “Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91:  Life and Milieu of the Scribe,” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 158–​79 and “More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton,” Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983): 111–​19. See also Michael Johnston’s “A New Document Relating to the Life of Robert Thornton,” The Library 8 (2007): 304–​13. In Robert Thornton and the London Manuscript (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), John J. Thompson has compiled a comprehensive account of MS Add. 31042, the London Thornton MS, so called to differentiate it from Thornton’s other miscellany, Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91, the Lincoln Thornton MS.

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26 Crooked as a Staff nature of the narrative performed by young minstrels in Wynnere: the procurement of lovers, the recording of battles, and the description of a chivalric fantasy. For those in the prime of their existence, in terms of financial and physical ability, known in the poem as Medill Elde, narrative seems only important where it might record wins or losses.8 But for both Elde and the seemingly resentful narrator of the first fitt of Wynnere, narrative is everything: the balm that soothes the loss of activity, even as its presence somewhat negates that loss, functioning as prosthetic. My definition of narrative prosthesis for these two poems—​where narrative itself attempts to create wholeness and health, or at least some semblance therefore—​is a spoken and written addition to a body that is aging, impaired, or lacking in physical ability.9 And this definition is one which both builds upon and breaks away from modern usages of “narrative prosthesis.” Narrative prosthesis is this “perpetual discursive dependency”—​both imaginations of disability as “a stock feature of characterization” and as an “opportunistic metaphorical device.”10 In fact, disability is “tethered to the act of meaning-​making itself,” creating literary portrayals of disability that are defined both by writing—​depictions of difference and limitations—​and an erasure—​the disabled body ceases to signal its own identity and becomes emblematic of a larger narrative.11 Disability suffers no lack of representation, but instead is restrained to literary portrayals while it is simultaneously erased socially.12 Texts, therefore, may speak and describe disability, impairments, and the non-​normative body, but these depictions obscure how the role and visibility of disabled bodies outside the text is limited or non-​existent by occluding the individuality of the disabled figure. Nowhere would the stock features of such a disabled figure be clearer than an allegory of a debate among the ages, where the embodiment of each major station on the lifecycle speaks for itself. Indeed, recent medievalist inquiry into premodern conceptions of disability and impairment has shown the importance of narrative prosthesis to such topics as the textual relationship between Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid or 8 This reliance on rents and accounts resonates somewhat with Chaucer’s Reeve, the subject of the next chapter, who, like Medill Elde, uses narrative to balance credits and debits.

9 And surely if Thornton’s selection of texts can serve as evidence, then his inclusion of medicalizing texts can also demonstrate that the condition of the body itself is an interest for the manuscript maker:  Julie Orlemanski argues that “readers and writers like Thornton, who were not medical specialists, nonetheless sought out and produced works of regimen, diagnosis, prognosis, pharmacopeia and cure. In so doing, they helped to shape the fields of practical and scientific knowledge for English audiences. As is generally the case with Robert Thornton, his writings register significant trends in late medieval textuality and do so in a singular manner.” See “Thornton’s Remedies and the Practices of Medical Reading,” in Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 235–​55 at 236. 10 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47.

11 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6.

12 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 51–​52.

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readings of troubadour poetry.13 The term “narrative prosthesis,” however, maintains an elasticity in all of these uses. Building on Mitchell and Snyder’s definitions, I  view these narratives as prosthetic as they substitute a term for physical action or corporeal strength, account for deviance from a supposed normal body, and call attention to these impairments and deviations. From Elde’s urging of confession to the Wynnere’s opening complaint of narrative’s misuse by young mistrals, old age’s relationship to embodied narrative (old age literally writes on the body) demonstrates that narrative becomes integral to the old body. Indeed, Elde’s tale, with its amplifications and extensions of the Nine Worthies, makes clear that the “normative” body is vulnerable to age and death and that his body, seemingly useless in this martial context of the Nine Worthies, is a powerful supplement to those narratives. This complex relationship between narrative and body is one that Elde’s narrative makes clear:  prosthesis (narrative, bodily) clarifies the relationships texts create or depict between aged speakers and their narratives. These narratives are prosthetic, as they serve as additions for impaired speakers, but announce that impairment is known primarily through the narrative itself. Prosthetic narrative then becomes the signal of the lack exhibited by these speakers along with the element which furnishes what that lack signifies. In short, narratives of impairment are a tool used by aged speakers but also the necessary element that defines these old speakers. Quoting David Wills, Jay T. Dolmage recalls that Wills himself wrote that “writing is prosthesis par excellence” (1995, 27). The body and word relate, not in direct reference but in a series of prosthetic poses, “constantly shifting relations” (ibid., 249). The fact that discourse needs prosthesis, needs supplementation, reveals an imperfection that might be valued as a reflection of our partial, leaky, abnormal bodies.14

Like Elde, Dolmage’s work on prosthesis here and “Disability Rhetoric” remind us that all bodies veer from the normative, because to be normal is to have these “partial, leaky, abnormal” bodies. This axiomatic, abnormal, partial, and leaky body finds voice in the expansive and rambling narrative of the Nine Worthies, which in its discussion of death’s inevitability mirrors Elde’s own superannuated body.

The Timeliness of Age: Narrative Economies and Young Minstrels in Wynnere

The discussion of Elde’s mistakes in narrating the twisted fates of the Nine Worthies perhaps misses the point of why Elde tells the tale. It is not, it seems, about the veracity

13 Andrew Higl, “Henryson’s Textual and Narrative Prosthesis onto Chaucer’s Corpus: Cresseid’s Leprosy and Her Schort Conclusioun,” Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua Eyler (New York: Routledge, 2010): 167–​81 and Julie Singer, “Playing By Ear:  Compensation, Reclamation, and Prosthesis In Fourteenth-​Century Song,” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua Eyler (New  York:  Routledge, 2010): 39–​52.

14 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 110.

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28 Crooked as a Staff of specific details, nor is his performance one that should be considered a success or failure based on adherence to other textual sources or accepted dates and timelines. Rather, the power of Elde’s speech is one based on the working of his body and the truth of that failing body, and this tie between the old body and narrative continues through the following first fitt of Wynnere. Suggesting that the placement of these two poems is more than chance is not possible. It does seem, however, that this call to confession creates the opportunity for the first fitt of Wynnere, where the narrator, unnamed, and speaking in a fatherly voice, rehearses the complaints of their age, including the anxiety of the young rehearsing what is simply memorized rather than what is properly known (in the bones, Elde might say). Recent treatments of the poem have concentrated on a variety of approaches, many of which attempt to date or give some historical context to the poem, but which also give shape to some of the poem’s inner concerns.15 From Eleanor Johnson’s articulation of the work’s creation of a “poetics of waste,” to Joyce Coleman’s revised work on the depiction of misperformance in the first fitt and Harwood’s concentration on anxieties around labour, critics have highlighted the poem’s central concerns with waste, production, and labour. Central to these concerns is the poem’s beginning construction of old age and its relationship to narrative, because, as I argue, Parlement’s insistence on viewing narrative as tied to old age and narrative prosthetic is also voiced in the lines which introduce the debate between spending and saving which follows. Wynnere reinforces the connection between age and the production of narrative that Parlement produces:  narrative is incidental to youth, useful, but not essential; for the old man, however, narrative is a necessary prosthetic. A strategy that emphasizes age-​related discourses in Parlement is not, as the above section demonstrates, terribly new. The poem has been interpreted in the context of its discourse about age, a strategy dictated to some extent by its structure, which features a debate among the allegorical ages. Wynnere has largely escaped a similar interpretative strategy, because the poem seems mostly concerned with economics: saving or spending, rather than age. Wynnere, however, is not silent on age, but voices anxieties about old age that are tied to questions of labour:  young minstrels, as opposed to aged minstrels, do not know their material and merely jangle and rehearse. But even if the terms of this discussion remain couched in language describing labour, these opening lines begin with an invocation of the many selcouthes witnessed since the fall of Troy, a narrative of destruction and subsequent foundation which features the first of the Nine Worthies, Hector. Here, in the discussion of this first fitt, we might see the nexus of associations the Parlement-​author implicitly outlines in their discussion of old age and narrative: the rehearsal of ancient history and narratives of fallen glory narrated by an aged speaker who has witnessed the decline of their own bodily power. 15 Harwood sees anxiety over peasants as key to tying the opening fitt with its emphasis on minstrels, selcouthes, and age to the later two which describe the battle between the armies and the debate proper between Wynnere and Wastoure. See Harwood, “Anxious over Peasants,” 291–​319 (cited in n. 4).

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The ancient founding of England, through destruction and treachery of another empire, and the various marvels, “selcouthes,” ties the present of the poem to the past history, as the poet adds there have never been so many as now, whatever that now is.16 The downfall of this ancient empire eventually is linked to the downfall of another aged figure, the old ­figure who There hathe selcouthes bene sene in seere kynges tymes, Bot never so many as nowe by the nyne dele.17

It is a commonplace to begin with the fall of Troy and the appearance of “selcouthes,” yet this strategy also reinforces that the narrative of the Nine Worthies is still very much part of the narrator’s discussion. Of course, discussion of the past is a feature, not a bug, of alliterative poetry, as Christine Chism has shown, but what seems more unique here in both Parlement and Wynnere is the direct linking of narratives about the past to aged figures.18 So, while the narrator of the poem’s beginning lacks a name or characteristic beyond his age, it is clear that, in the choice of his subject matter, no introduction is necessary. Positioned similarly to the allegorical Elde from Parlement, this old man recalls the close connection between an embodied narrative that the old speaker of Parlement offers in the context of the Nine Worthies. In fact, by linking the process of translatio of empire in the past to the act of writing in the future, Wynnere suggests that everything old is, in fact, new again, as the ancient treachery that produced the empire has returned but also that more importantly the old speaker has this citation ready in his memory and material. As a characteristic that can define much of the alliterative tradition in the fourteenth century, “coming to life in the risky transactions constituting old against new, past against present, predecessor against successor.”19 Indeed, this emphasis on newness, innovation, treachery, and indeterminacy is an amplification of an old impulse.20 Pointedly, this old impulse recalls the critical treatment of Elde’s speech in Parlement; there, Elde’s narrative of the Nine Worthies in fact concerns “the validity of the truth-​ claims advanced by historical and scriptural narratives, and the mutability of language and the concomitant impermanence of the events that it purports to describe.”21 The mutability of language and impermanence of events are central to the opening fitt of 16 The explosion of marvels in the land of England recalls “selcouth” use in another alliterative work, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” where King Arthur, child-​like or childish, begs for a “selcouthe” at a feast during Christmas.

17 Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), lines 3–​4. All future citations refer to this edition by line number. I  have maintained Trigg’s formatting of alliterative half lines throughout. 18 Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 7. 19 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 2.

20 Indeterminacy, it has been argued, is one of the links between Wynnere and Parlement. See, for example, David Harrington, “Indeterminacy in ‘Winner and Waster’ and ‘The Parliament of the Three Ages,’ ” cited in n. 4. 21 Wright, “Historical Inscription and Confessional Erasure,” 1.

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30 Crooked as a Staff Wynnere. It is precisely this inscription and erasure in a political and social context that begin Wynnere and arguably end Parlement. The writing and rewriting of history, in which Elde in Parlement is so heavily invested and which opens Wynnere, is a phenomenon that touches not only on the tension between old and new, but also between old and young, a point alluded to by the injunction to Western men which follows: Dare never no westren wy while this werlde lasteth Send his sone southewarde to see ne to here That he ne schall holden byhynde when he hore eldes. (8–​10)

The point is simple:  Western men should avoid allowing their sons to see London, because they will lose their progeny to the capital. These lines present London as an obstacle to good familial governance, pulling sons from their fathers, and keeping those men away during a time of need as these men face an aging process (“hore eldes”). The pull of the capital is described in the lines above, which begin with the founding of Britain and the destruction of Troy, the historical existence of “selcouthes,” marvels and wonders, and the frequency currently of these signs, surely a portent of the unraveling of creation. The lines directly before the warning against the south offer a particular form of this selcouth: “For nowe alle es witt and wyles that we with delyn,/​Wyse words and slee, icheon wryeth othere” (5–​6). Much is unclear in this discourse of wonders which directly follows Elde’s display of human wonders, exemplified in the Nine Worthies, and inevitable bodily decline, also exemplified by the Nine Worthies. Whylome were lordes in londe þat loued in thaire hertis To here makers of myrthes þat matirs coude fynde And now es no frenchipe in fere bot fayntnesse of hert, Wyse wordes withinn þat wroghte were neuer Ne redde in no romance þat euer renke herde Bot now a childe appon chere withowtten chyn-​wedys þat neuer wroghte thurgh witt thies wordes togedire Fro he can jangle als a jaye and japes telle He schall be lenede and louede and lett of a while Well more þan þe man that made it hymseluen. (19–​28)

The minstrel who relates the debate between lords of great houses showed their appreciation toward “makers of myrthes” who created tales, not merely rehearsed them, with the love in “thaire hertis.” According to the minstrel speaking, of course, only the young speaker would have any success. Though they “jangle,” “jape,” and do little more than make noise through repeated performances of texts they do not compose themselves, these young minstrels are held in higher esteem.22 They write and perform and uncover no real meaning, pointing perhaps to the contradiction of the poem: property must be made legible but keep secret from taxation and other interference.23 But aside from property, in terms 22 Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 57. 23 Hersh, Cara. “ ‘Wyse Wordes Within’: Private Property and Public Knowledge in Wynnere and Wastoure,” Modern Philology 107 (2010): 507–​27, especially 515–​16.

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of literary production and age, it seems there is no real debate between Wynnere and Wastoure. Neither has the love in “thaire hertis” toward anything but hoarding or spending. While Wynnere would not likely fund the old minstrel, neither would Wastoure pay for the timeless teaching from the old man. He would spend prodigiously on the new jangler, seeing in the newness of the man and the song, the fruits of his own labour. It is here that the old minstrel from Wynnere most fully aligns with Elde, who according to Kiser, must in his exemplary use of the Nine Worthies defeat both the joust-​ loving Youthe and the rent- and land-hoarding Medill Elde with the timelessness of his message. As with the old minstrel, Elde himself is incapable of seeing how the terms of his critique are apropos of his own situation, casting none of the “three ages” as “fully adequate to the moral rightness the poem finally advocates.”24 In his exploration of a “seigneural poetics” in Parlement, Grady notes that neither Youthe nor Medill Elde have the opportunity to respond to Elde, and that of the three speakers, Medill Elde speaks the least. A victor is not clear, and both are sent from the king’s presence. As Elde predicted, neither response proves sufficient or strong enough to sway the king.25

Narrating Age: The Old Stories of Elde

The mention of disability necessarily presents the scholar of medieval texts and contexts with a problem: not one mention of “disability” occurs in medieval records.26 But whereas lacunae exist in terminology, evidence of disabling conditions appear throughout medieval literature, and one notable example is the figure of Elde. Roughly midway through Parlement, Elde offers a twisted bit of counsel to his opponents in the age-​related debate that serves as thematic centre of the poem. Age destroyed Elde, an embodied fact he implores his younger rivals to see. Bot Elde undireyode me are I laste wiste, And alle disfegurede my face and fadide my hewe; Bothe my browes and my berde blawnchede full whitte, And when he sotted my syghte than sowed myn hert, Croked me, cowrbed me, encrampeschet myn hondes,

24 Kiser, “Elde and His Teaching,” 304. 25 Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 79–​81.

26 The discussion of appropriate vocabulary for describing what might qualify now as disability is an ongoing one. For example, in Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–​1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006), Irina Metzler has advanced impairments as a proper choice, arguing it is “preferable to speak of ‘impairment’ during the medieval period rather than of ‘disability,’ which implies certain social and cultural connotations that medieval impaired persons may not have shared with modern impaired people.” Edward Wheatley, in Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), has defended her choice (and quoted her above rationale), stating that “the distinction between disability and impairment is useful in the present work because of distinctly medieval constructions that did not grow of the nature of the impairment but made it a disability in ways specific to that era.”

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32 Crooked as a Staff That I ne may hefe tham to my hede ne noghte helpe myselven, Ne stale stonden one my fete bot I my staffe have. Makes youre mirrours bi me, men, bi youre trouthe: This schadowe in my schewere schunte ye no while. (283–​91)27

“Read me,” goes the advice, given by Elde to Medill Elde and Youthe, after they announce the advantages of their ages. Rather than lands to own and people to control (Medill Elde) or songs to sing and women to woo (Youthe), Elde offers a more immediate object of desire.28 He cautions his younger interlocutors to watch him, to see him, and to understand that old age has ruined his body, and “insistently connects its characters not only through likeness and reflection, but also genealogy.”29 And here we can see the frequent and commonplace complaints of old: Avicenna, for example, describing humoral theory and phlegm, the humour associated with old age, writes of the patient with an abundance of phlegm: “his intelligence is slow … has a swollen face, his shade is dull; the pulse is slow and thick.”30 With his disfigured face and faded hue, Elde reflects much of what could be described as the chronic symptoms and conditions associated with old age, even if they seem cosmetic, as Tarrying’s discussions of the accidents of age make clear.31 But what is more than cosmetic or appearance is the loss of physical and sensory abilities which Elde claims: his hands are cramped and have lost most of their power and he cannot walk without his staff: his body is literally twisted. Of all Elde’s bodily complaints, however, most poignant for his discussion seems to be his loss of sight. In a statement imploring his younger companions to use him as a mirror for truth, Elde’s own loss of eyesight, beginning as it does his slow decline into decrepitude, appears most germane to his advice. Read while you can, Elde warns, before age surprises as it surprised him and the power to look and read has vanished. But Elde’s prosthetic function goes beyond his staff. Indeed, the number of stanzas (“staves”) that he marshals in order to win a debate which he cannot physically win are a clue for the reader that the old man himself functions as a prosthetic for a debate (which is undoubtedly one-​sided) as a metaphor for the loss of power and of history. There is a moral clarity to Elde—​indeed, he suggests something of an easy choice (life or death) and privileges death and decay over life, growth, and accumulation. Yet, in this skeletal description of Elde’s narrative, much is actually lost. Elde simultaneously inhabits a position where his narrative is timeless (even as it is timely) and productive and generative (even as he uses it to warn of death). The narratives of the Nine Worthies 27 The Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsburg (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1992), lines 283–​91. All further citations of Parlement refer to this edition by line number.

28 Wanchen Tai, “ ‘Al We Wilniþ to Ben Old. Wy Is Eld Ihatid’: Aging and Ageism in Le Bone Florence of Rome,” Studies in Philology 112 (2015):  656–​79, especially 659–​61 for a discussion of Elde’s appearance as opposed to that of Youthe. 29 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 142.

30 Avicenna, Avicenna’s Poem on Medicine, ed. Haven C. Krueger (Springfield: Thomas, 1963), 43. 31 “On Tarrying the Accidents of Age,” 163.

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expand and digress, almost as if these narratives give life to their teneful speaker. Like Elde, this twisted corpus of texts gains its thrust from its recognition that decay and death are unavoidable.32 In fact, what this connection between speaker and narrative makes clear is that, even as he speaks from a body which has lost power, it is also a body that retains power because these impairments produce the moral authority of Elde—​ Youthe might read the romances, but Elde shows the fact in the fictive stories—​as his handling of the Nine Worthies multiplies their twisted and crooked path. The beginning of Parlement opens with a description of hunting that concludes with the large and older stag falling to the hunter, who in actuality is a poacher, breaching the boundaries of protected forests and animals.33 After finishing the process of stripping the stag, the poacher falls asleep, and witnesses a debate between the ages and their advantages:  Youthe has arms and battle, Medill Elde has lands and rents, and Elde has narrative, or so it seems. Although narrative and its performance are at the centre of Elde’s activities and his description, narrative itself is a concern for the two other disputants. Youthe, in fact, sees romance and textual production as one of the signal advantages of his youthful court. Besides ladies and dancing, Youthe claims he will have Riche romance to rede and rekken the sothe Of kempes and of conquerours, of kynges full noblee, How thay wirchipe and welthe wanne in thaire lyves; With renkes in ryotte to revelle in haulle, With coundythes and carolles and compaynyes sere, And chese me to the chesse that chefe es of gamnes: And this es life for to lede while I schalle lyfe here. (250–​56)

Seemingly, while Youthe chooses action over talk, war over lands and rents, consumption over preservation, he also marks out the importance of narrative for the life he will lead while he “schalle lyfe here.” In the here and now, Youthe mentions literary activity, the enjoyment of songs, and the “riche romance” as secondary enjoyments for a courtly existence that favours knights, ladies, and the pursuit of chivalric gain. Indeed, “romance caters to readers of a specific age group but also … it is heavily characterized by age discrimination.”34 As an echo of the initial complaints of how youth handle narrative given in the first fitt of Wynnere, Youthe’s views on reading and performing narrative as ornament, and this unfolding of narrative’s place, are undercut and answered by Elde’s own performance, which highlights the familiar fall of famous figures, all by heart.35 32 The inevitability of death is a common motif in late medieval English literature, with expressions almost too numerous to list, but surely examples would include Prick of Conscience and Piers Plowman. In addition, the penitential tradition, undoubtedly a source of Elde’s injunctions to read him, is a source for this axiom. 33 Randy Schiff, “The Loneness of the Stalker: Poaching and Subjectivity in The Parlement of the Thre Ages,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51 (2009): 263–​93.

34 Tai, “Aging and Ageism in Le Bone Florence of Rome,” 660.

35 Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008)  notes that Aristotle variously writes that the

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34 Crooked as a Staff Indeed, while the series of exempla supplied by Elde seemingly mirror the descriptions of his body, his authority is self-​claimed through this narrative. The function of Elde’s tales to augment an impaired body highlights that Elde’s textual moves anticipate Wynnere’s criticisms of youthful minstrels who cannot remember from heart the songs and stories they tell. For Elde does precisely that, as he retells his narrative without outside help or assistance, speaking from an embodied knowledge. Youthe’s imagining of a lettered court exposes that his relationship with narrative is one shared by Medill Elde, both of whom hold narrative as important enough to enumerate, yet an activity altogether subordinated to other desires and ends. Youthe’s line, “Riche romance to rede and rekken the sothe,” employs a synonym for narrate, “rekenen,” which becomes “reckon” in Modern English, and used with “the sothe” communicates that, for Youthe, these chivalric texts tell the truth.36 Elde’s narratives defy this optimistic view of the outcome of romances, as his unfolding of these past figures’ stories show their inevitable falls. But “rekken” is used elsewhere in the poem. In the description of Medill Elde, which precedes this use of “rekenen,” the narrator portrays Medill Elde’s relationship toward money and property using this verb of narration: “One his golde and his gude gretly he mousede,/​ His renttes and his reches rekened he full ofte” (140–​41). In thinking about and through his goods, lands, and coin, Medill Elde, the poem suggests, creates a narrative about actual accumulation of wealth and property, and that narrative metaphorically enacts the relations to material goods it describes. Linked by a common preposition, the next seven lines of his introductory portrait flesh out the kind of detail Medill Elde supplies in his accounting, in narrative form, of his riches. At the end of the initial portraits given by the narrator, he too takes the terms of narration that he later gives Youthe in order to make good his promise, given at line 103, “the sothe I schall telle” of the scene he witnessed in his dream. Announcing his presentation of the disputants, the narrator claims Now hafe I rekkende yow theire araye redely the sothe, And also namede yow thaire names naytly thereaftire, And now thaire carpynge I sall kythe –​knowe it if yowe liste. (166–​68)

Perhaps Elde does need assistance, as several critics have noted, beginning with Israel Gollancz in his 1915 edition of the poem.37 But as William Kuskin has shown in his discussion of Caxton’s use of the Nine Worthies late in the fifteenth century, “Rather young and old have poor memories, because their humours are in flux and that sometimes those with humoral imbalances produce long-​lasting memories (60–​61).

36 rekenen, s.v. Middle English Dictionary (MED): http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​cgi/​m/​mec/​med-​idx ?type=id&id=MED36605&egs=all&egdisplay=open.

37 See for example, Fry, “The Authority of Elde”; Kiser, “Elde and his Teaching”; David E. Lampe, “The Poetic Strategy of the Parlement of the Thre Ages,” Chaucer Review 7 (1973): 173–​83; Beryl Rowland, “The Three Ages of The Parlement of the Three Ages,” Chaucer Review 9 (1975): 342–​52; Turville-​Petre, “The Ages of Man”; and Wright, “Historical Inscription and Confessional Erasure.”

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than insisting upon a unified meaning, an overall sententia, the Worthies’ structure is capable of presenting separate readings.”38 The presentation of these figures, then, is quite elastic. And while Elde’s textual performance may rely on a collapsing of biblical chronologies and events and an all-​consuming confessional narrative that constantly reminds its hearer/​reader of the body’s transience, this narrative might answer Youthe and Medill Elde and it asks the reader what these modifications actually do.39 Built into Elde’s narrative, however, is a logical contradiction: how can one be moved to confession and a more holy ideal by a speaker whose name is given in a line that ascribes envy and anger, two seven deadly sins, to his character?40 And, as medical treatises often claim, old age impacts both morality and memory.41 Yet the physical description of Elde points not only to the connections between his body and his narrative, but the actual affective and physical corroboration of his main, yet simplified theme: all is vanity, and all passes away. A beryne bownn alle in blake with bedis in his hande, Croked and courbede, encrampeschett for elde; Alle disfygured was his face and fadit his hewe His berde and browes were blanchede full whitte, And the hare one his hede hewede of the same. He was ballede and blynde and alle babirlippede, Totheles and tenefull, I tell yowe for sothe; And evere he momelide and ment and mercy he askede, And cried kenely one Criste and his crede sayde, With sawtries full sere tymes to sayntes in heven; Envyous and angry, and Elde was his name. (155–​63)

The description of Elde conveys the disordered physical, spiritual, and affective nature of his body. Anticipating or following other late-​medieval depictions of the body in time, the poet describes Elde’s face as disfigured, his skin as pale and lacking colour, and beard, hair, and brows as white. These are all common descriptions of old age—​and seem symptomatic of the drying of the body associated with old age.42 In fact, Elde’s portrait emphasizes qualities that touch also upon his method of narrating:  his body is cramped and “croked,” characterized by moans and cries of impending death, just as his progression of history is crooked and populated not by glories of empires, but cramped with figures of the fall. History, and the history of the fall of great men to death and destruction is his theme, and in his portrait, it describes his face: “Alle disfygured,” 38 William Kuskin “Caxton’s Worthies Series:  The Production of Literary Culture,” ELH 66 (1999): 511–​51 at 514. 39 Randy Schiff, Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (Columbus: Ohio State, 2011), 271.

40 Warren Ginsberg, “Introduction,” in Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsburg (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1992), 7. 41 Shahar, “The Middle Ages and Renaissance,” 83.

42 Carol A.  Everest, “Sex and Old Age in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Prologue,” The Chaucer Review 31 (1996): 99–​114, especially 100–​103 for a discussion of desiccation and the loss of “innate heat.”

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36 Crooked as a Staff and faded to white, just as his subject is faded into the narratives of history. He sees singularly and inwardly the central truth of his narratives: all is vanity and passes away. As with his tale, his moment is not one of the present, but of thoughts of his death, and of his previous sins. But even here, in his concentration on the past, Elde’s problematic description and debate furnishes proof of his fallibility. “Envyous and angry,” he is doomed to negative emotions about his lack of bodily strength, worldly goods, and certainty of life as he witnesses the reflection of those bodily and material goods lost to him through the debate of Youthe and Medill Elde. In fact, this image of Elde as envious and angry might be tied to the perspective of the narrator and dreamer, who as a poacher, might not be the person in a position to appreciate the spoils of his hunt: Finally, if Elde is actively envious and angry it is not apparent in his speech. Indeed, the whole purpose of his long recit, his resolution of the quarrel between Youthe and Medill Elde, shows his realization of their envious and angry folly. Like the figure of old age described by Horace and Richard Rolle, Elde does recall the past, but not simply to praise it. For when he does recall the past he does so to insist upon the limitations of human mortality in the careers of the Nine Worthies, the famous wise men of the past, and especially in the ‘misadventured piteous overthrows’ of famous lovers.43

David Lampe’s insights into the poetic technique of the Parlement-​author largely emphasize the natural depictions and the incongruent role of the poacher, who, as someone hunting illegally, misreads as he mis-​hunts, aiming for targets that are not his right—​indeed, Lampe’s examination, then, ties the poacher to Youthe and Medill Elde: “the fact that the narrator’s own vices blind him to the real nature of the first two figures suggests also that they may blind him to the real nature of Elde,” who seems resigned rather than angry by his participation in a moral world that is transitory, where death levels all distinction.44 This narrative is bound up with a body which emphasizes its own closeness to death and exile from a world of love, physical ability, and material accumulation. The vision that the narrator gives of Elde is one that foregrounds his visible age and connects him intimately to his material prosthetic:  “I helde hym be my hopynge a hundrethe yeris of age,/​ And bot his cruche and his couche he carede for no more.” Even as the narrator describes the sins of Elde, Elde’s use of textuality gestures toward his role of ad hoc confessor for the poem, a position in which his textuality serves as impetus for change of behavior and recognition of the transience of life. And this transitory nature of life is conveyed through a poem which introduces its dreamy debate material through depictions of porous bodies represented by the flayed animals that occur before the dream of the Three Ages, and which implicitly show how narrative and incomplete bodies work together. And so we might look from these porous, flayed bodies to the narrative Elde produces, with its own leaky boundaries and border: while “the numerous errors in Elde’s stories serve to underscore the recognition that textuality does not ensure authenticity,” the use of those stories serves as “pretext” for his true 43 Lampe, “Poetic Strategy,” 182.

44 Lampe, “Poetic Strategy,” 181–​82.

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aim: to convince his audience in the present that even the histories of great men can be wrong, and even when right, record not just success but failure and death as well.45 In other words, these supposed errors—​the amplification of various stories, the addition of figures not mentioned in the “original” version—​are not actually errors, but signals of how narrative can both demonstrate the inevitable debility and death of the body while augmenting Elde’s weakened body, a connection made by the poem’s investments in the poaching and flaying of animal bodies, which beyond the porous boundaries between body and text, also “celebrates and condemns the aristocratic ‘lifestyle.’ ”46 Quoting Lucretius and discussing fable, Isidore of Seville explicates the Ages of Man in terms of animal imagery, a useful link for considering the intersections among texts, ages, and animals: With this, people intend to distinguish the ages of man: the first, adolescence, is ferocious and bristling, like a lion; the midpart of life is the most lucid, like a she-​goat, because she sees most acutely; then comes old age with its crooked happenstances –​the dragon.47

The links here between the ages at debate in Parlement is hard to miss, even as this connection is not meant to invoke an ableist link between disability and animals, suggesting that disabled bodies are not human. Instead these poached animals are perhaps an extension of all bodies (Youthe, Medill Elde, and Elde) in the poem: none are self-​contained, abled bodies.48 The Ages of Man scheme undergirding the poem’s presentations of bodies means that each body always has the potential for disability and a temporary fiction of the abled-​body might be shattered at any moment.

Worthy Narrations

Following Elde’s discussion of his body as mirrour, he proceeds to introduce the Nine Worthies, which he casts as a narrative connected to death. At death’s door, anticipating the end, Elde discusses men greater than he who likewise could not avoid death. And now es dethe at my dore that I drede moste; I ne wot wiche day ne when ne whate tyme he comes, Ne whedirwardes, ne whare, ne whatte to do aftire. Bot many modyere than I, men one this molde, Hafe passed the pase that I schall passe sone, And I schall neven yow the names of nyne of the beste That ever wy in this werlde wiste appon erthe, That were conquerours full kene and kiddeste of other. (292–​99)

45 Wright, “Historical Inscription and Confessional Erasure,” 6–​7.

46 Frank Grady, “Seigneurial Poetics, or The Poacher, the Prikasour, The Hunt, and Its Oeuvre,” in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 195–​213 at 200. 47 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 66.

48 See Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 76–​77n9 for a discussion of the troubling history between Disability and Animal Studies.

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38 Crooked as a Staff When Elde tells his other two companions to make him their mirror, clearly he is suggesting that they look to his body, its twists and crookedness, to see the truth that bodily strength is vanity. But his meaning goes farther, as the narrative he produces—​ which constitutes the bulk of the poem—​is seemingly connected to Elde’s body and identity. Elde has emphasized the impairments in his body and his weakness, suggesting he is both far from the potency of Youthe (his body clearly cannot physically love any longer) and Medill Elde (his destitute state is much removed from the riches of his younger interlocutor’s rents), but that his weakened state gives him the eternal truth these other powerful figures eventually faced. He furnishes a narrative of great figures and their falls, which aligns his narrative technique not only with a kind of grand historicizing but also with an anticipation and criticism of what Siebers has articulated as the “Ideology of Ability”: see in the aged body that deviates from the normative, the inevitability of every body. Eventually, Elde conveys, death levels the rank of bodies and heroes to the same end, which is unexpected and unknown, and no human power can discern its arrival. In arriving at this conclusion, Elde again recalls Dolmage’s image of all bodies as porous, leaky, abnormal things that use writing as prosthetic, even as writing demands these bodies as its own supplement. The repeated citation of the inevitability of death and the loss of strength points to both the body’s transitory nature and the additive power of narrative, because, in fact, Elde’s main “crutch” might be his rehearsal of narrative, which focuses on different materials than those of his younger interlocutors. Rather than waste time with love, as Youthe does, or with documents and rents, as Medill Elde does, the oldest of the narrators speaks of history and something beyond history, the reversal of fortune, youth, and power implicit in the story of the Nine Worthies. These figures speak to the inevitability of death and loss, as they convey, through their falls, the workings of Fortune and the transitory nature of life. But the narrative Elde rehearses is one which is worth discussing in depth, because it so clearly offers evidence of the prosthetic relationship narrative and old age share, especially narrative detailing the pains and impairments of old age. Of course, Elde is not the first to narrate these stories; they were, of course, widely disseminated, portable reminders of the frailty of human life and the reminder that power and glory could be quite temporary. Traditionally, the narrative has been traced to Jacques de Longuyon’s Les Voex des Paon. According to Israel Gollancz, the list of the heroes and heroines of romance enumerated in The Parlement of the Thre Ages is by far the fullest to be found in Middle-​English literature, and forms a valuable supplement to the account of the ‘wyghes that were wyseste’; both sections are evidently an extension of the author’s original scheme to write in the grand style a panegyric on ‘The Nine Worthies.’49

49 Israel Gollancz, “Introduction,” The Parlement of the Thre Ages (London:  Oxford University Press, 1915), vii–​xx at xvi.

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And a quick look at Longuyon’s text illustrates the tidy dimensions of this short narrative: In an excursus in the description of the battle between Porus and Alexander, which Alexander wins, Longuyon offers nine heroes (three classical heroes, three figures from Jewish and biblical history, and three Christian figures). Beginning with Hector, Longuyon then describes the exploits of Alexander and Caesar. Following these heroes, he then describes Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, before moving on to the figures which are connected to Western Christendom: Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. These figures, of course, move from the earliest histories and from pagans to Jews to Christians. Linking them is a common thread, highlighted by Longuyon: Now I’ve set forth in clear order the nine worthiest men who have lived since God created the heavens and the earth and the winds. They all excelled for a fair while; but never in their lives –​ at least, not on any one day –​ did they endure such toil and trouble as did Porus on the day that I’m describing.50

Although Porus loses the battle, he behaves with such bravery facing his defeat that he is saved from defeat and ignominy by Alexander, and implicitly this logic—​bravery in the face of defeat—​is shared by Elde, who counsels patience and preparation for the inevitable defeat that death brings. Of course, Elde emphasizes elements of Longuyon’s narrative and adds his own specific directions to highlight the transitory nature of bodily strength and to craft narrative that “mirrours” his own admittedly crooked body. What have been characterized as Elde’s errors are primarily his additions and a possible sign of his old age and the loquaciousness associated with it by authorities such as Cicero. These amplifications which change a brief excursus in Longuyon’s text to a large portion of Parlement serve Elde’s larger point about the transitory nature of corporeal strength, but they also mimic or reflect the status of Elde’s own body, which embodies what Dolmage has traced in interpretations of Hephaestus: a “crooked body that can be laughed at and should be distrusted. The easy interpretive route is to ally ‘bad’ thinking with ‘bad’ bodies.”51 These amplifications are key to the way in which Elde’s non-​normative and impaired body can reinscribe strength, and his body and his text can be viewed in a similar way. Given his status as embodied, elderly, impaired narrator, Elde’s handling of narrative is not characterized by errors but rather by the embodied truths he finds in these prosthetic narratives.52 The mirroring function of his own body and the imperative he gives to Youthe and Medill Elde to read in him are what his narrative makes legible and these amplifications and supplements to a brief and concise narrative only make 50 Jacques de Longuyon, “Appendix 3:  Jacques de Longuyon’s excursus on the Nine Worthies [from Les Voeux du Paon (‘The Vows of the Peacock’), c.1310],” in The Medieval Romance of Alexander: Deeds and Conquests of Alexander the Great, ed. Jehan Wauquelin (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2012), 305–​6 at 306.

51 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 160.

52 Grady, “Seigneurial Poetics,” 201. Grady sees in the “reconstruction of a new poem out of disparate parts” the “deft dismembering of the deer that is one measure of the poacher’s expertise.”

40

40 Crooked as a Staff visible the prosthetic methods of the author and narrator of Parlement as well as Elde.53 Turville-​Petre very much sees Elde as the embodiment of a medieval view of the schema of the Ages of Man, as a reminder to prepare for death. In this way, Elde, lingers somewhat between negative and wise depictions of old age, while nevertheless serving as “arbiter” of the debate between Youthe and Medill Elde, which he ultimately judges as unimportant in the face of death. And so, beginning with Hector, through to Charlemagne—​Elde switches Godfrey and Charlemagne—​and beyond to figures of wisdom and pride, Elde shows how this narrative of serious classical, biblical, and Christian history also prepares its audience for death. Preparation, however, comes as the narrative augments his own weary body, even as his body augments the power of the Nine Worthies. After all, who is more effective in telling these narratives than someone who is grappling with its main truth claim? Beginning with Hector, Elde says The firste was Sir Ector and aldeste of tyme, When Troygens of Troye were tried to fighte With Menylawse the mody kynge and men out of Grece, That thaire cité assegede and sayled it full yerne, For Elayne his ownn quene that thereinn was halden, That Paresche the proude knyghte paramours lovede. Sir Ectore was everous als the storye telles, And als clerkes in the cronycle cownten the sothe: Nowmbron thaym to nynetene and nyne mo by tale Of kynges with crounes he killede with his handes, And full fele other folke, als ferly were ellis. (300–​310)

This description of Hector highlights his worthiness and value by way of his connection to death and warfare—​as though the speaker rehearsing these lines is at pains to highlight that killing in warfare makes one great. However, in this first portrait, he is nonetheless adamant that no one escapes death in the lines that follow his discussion of the Nine Worthies. Where he concentrates on those figures commonly associated with the Nine Worthies, Elde largely maintains the order of the Nine Worthies, and the switch in the order of the final two Christian figures cannot rise to the level of error. However, even with those figures that Longuyon briefly describes, Elde makes amplifications and additions, and, in every case, Elde fleshes out the detail of each description, adding a note of memento mori to each figure. But perhaps most importantly is how Elde is able to read himself and his companions in any of the worthies he mentions, whether they are classical, Jewish, Christian, or his expansions into wise figures or famous lovers. Indeed, the addition of “aldeste of tyme”—​a detail that applies to Elde as well in the debate with Medill Elde and Youthe, is an important change: used to introduce the Worthies at the beginning of Elde’s description of the Nine Worthies, it aligns the narrative and each of these groups of three to be “mirrours” for the interlocutors of youth, middle age and old age—​just as surely as the “aldeste of tyme” will fall, so will Elde, but each will be 53 Turville-​Petre, “Ages of Man,” 71–​76.

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followed by their more youthful counterparts. In other words, Elde has been keen to have Medill Elde and Youthe see their reflection in his body, and this reflection appears again in Elde’s extended meditation on the Nine Worthies, as it offers powerlessness, debility, and death as the inevitable end of action, learning, and loving. Of the thre Cristen to carpe couthely thereaftir, That were conquerours full kene and kyngdomes wonnen, Areste was Sir Arthure and eldeste of tyme, For alle Inglande he aughte at his awnn will, And was kynge of this kythe and the crowne hade. (462–​66)

After Elde has given examples of the classical and Jewish worthies, he then pivots to a discussion of the three Christian worthies, and his choice of words here again links his subject matter and style to those old minstrels of the first fitt of Wynnere: offering to “carpe” of them knowledgeably. “Carpen” seems invested in the kind of talk or speech which both Elde and the aged minstrels of Wynnere would offer: as a verb, it is often used to describe minstrels and is used quite often for complaint, which situates this speech again in the register of old age, at least as the last two surviving texts of Thornton’s London manuscript present it.54 And again, Elde reinforces the “Ages of Man” in his discussion of the Christian worthies, just as he did with the classical worthies, presenting Arthur as the “eldeste of tyme,” a detail that encourages the reading of Youthe, Medill Elde, and Elde into these three figures. While Elde might characterize this discussion as “carping,” he clearly also uses the reflection of these figures to tie them, like a “mirror,” to his younger interlocutors and himself, while tying the age of his body to the age of this narrative, as both are invested with power by dint of their age. His knowledgeable carping, however, connects further to age and the minstrelsy of old age in his discussion of the Worthies, as his citation of Gawain mentions, in a possible echo of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the “selcouthes” that he could tell. Linked too to the mention of “selcouthes” in Wynnere, this repetition of vision and wonder reminds the reader that the production of wonders is an old business in England, one which the old poets with their embodied experience of debility and pain are best situated to tell.55 And when the felde was flowen and fey bot thaymselven, Than Arthure Sir Wawayne athes by his trouthe That he swiftely his swerde scholde swynge in the mere, And whatt selcouthes he see the sothe scholde he telle. (498–​501)

54 “carpen” (v), Middle English Dictionary:  https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​ dictionary/​dictionary/​MED6853/​track?counter=1&search_​id=1461098

55 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 138. His discussion of anmut—​“the ability to make his body signify in relation to the bodies in his audience”—​here is instructive for considering how the Parlement-​ author is able to use a non normative, disabled, or imperfect body to convey this narrative: “Both aphrona and anmut radically revise our accepted rhetorical tradition, in which we have come to believe that the more perfect a body is, the more perfectly it can speak or signify. Anmut offers a way to reconsider disability—​not as something an audience will reject or stigmatize, but as something that a diverse audience is receptive to and accepting of.”

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42 Crooked as a Staff Ending with Charlemagne and the Christian worthies, Elde explains that he has given the best nine who “ever were in this werlde wiste appon erthe,/​And the doghtyeste of dedis in thaire dayes tyme,/​Bot doghetynes when dede comes ne dare noghte habyde.” Central, I  would argue, to Elde’s amplifications are his additions to the narratives of active, physical bodies in the Nine Worthies, especially when wisdom is the focus of his additions, as is the case with Aristotle, Virgil, Solomon, and Merlin, whose value lies in their wisdom or otherworldly powers. Together with the lovers, these additions speak to the ways in which Elde reads ability and time’s explicit demands on that ability: indeed, if Virgil and Merlin could use magic for giving voice to inanimate objects and speaking to the dead and they could not defeat time and old age, then Medill Elde and Youthe can fare no better. But perhaps most importantly, Elde’s description and inclusion of Alexander’s teacher Aristotle reinforces the alchemy of old age’s impairments into narrative potency. Indeed, according to Elde, Aristotle apparently supplied Alexander with gold whenever he “liste,” and as many texts of the Secretum Secretorum make clear, the gold might be the advice that Aristotle gives his younger pupil which he offers in written view, owing to his weak and feeble body which makes travel impossible.56 And this arrangement—​the old, impaired man teaching his younger, more able pupil—​finds voicing throughout Elde’s speech but implicitly here, as Elde promises to “schortly … schewe” his “sone” before he concludes forever (schutt me ful). In a fitting metaphor for what narrative can offer the old body though, before he concludes, Elde offers a rich description of these wise figures from history and legend, the wisest one will hear of, performing their alchemical wonders. But the biggest “selcouthe” here is the way in which these narratives draw attention again and again to Elde’s weakened state and his impending death, even as these narratives add new abilities to old bodies and create new and renewed authorities. It is no coincidence that the wisest figures in the poem appear at the end and demonstrate how powerful those abilities are which are not necessarily contingent on the temporary fiction of the able body. Of wyghes that were wyseste will ye now here, And I schall schortly yow schewe and schutt me ful sone. Arestotle he was arste in Alexander tyme, And was a fyne philozophire and a fynour noble, The grete Alexander to graythe and gete golde when hym liste, And multiplye metalles with mercurye watirs, And with his ewe ardaunt and arsneke pouders,

56 See John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh, Secrees of old Philosoffres, ed. Robert Steele (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1894), lines 52–​56: In whoos worshepe /​compyled was this book By Arystotyl/​whanne he was falle in Age, Had set asyde /​by vertu al Outrage, Inpotent to /​Ryden and to travaylle; ffor febylnesse /​to counsayl in bataylle.

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With salpetir and sal-​jeme and siche many othire, And menge his metalles and make fyne silvere, And was a blaunchere of the beste thurgh blaste of his fyre. (584–​93)

But this narrative of death and debility and disability is not just an extended memento mori given by a character representing all the effects of old age and who is, by his own admission, soon to die. These narratives are contextualized for Elde as his prosthetic power—​given that his body is impaired, these exempla point to the first fitt of Wynnere, where the old minstrels are valued precisely because narrative is tied to their bodies and experience. This version of the Nine Worthies becomes, like the “selcouthes” these aging poets in Wynnere might tell, stronger and more effective precisely because the speaker is weaker corporeally, reflecting the truth claims of each story. That is, ability can be defined in a number of different ways, and this old age represents a reducing of the aging person’s strength and power in terms of physical activity. But this loss of physical strength and life creates authority and power with narratives that concern those figures who are “aldeste of tyme.” But more than history, they are, as Kiser has demonstrated, timeless:  passed down through time, these narratives survive where physical bodies decay and wither. This is of course Elde’s final point, which his impending death punctuates with a period. At the end of Parlement, Elde has one final bend in his crooked and uneven progression of narrative. Elde promises to tarry no longer, and plainly speaks the point of his narrative to Medill Elde and Youthe. Death conquers all, whether one has pride, rents, or lovers, Elde contends, reflecting a commonplace associated with old age.57 The only right choice of action, then, is confession, a narrative that, like his depiction of the Nine Worthies, is embodied and tied to the speaker’s apparent weaknesses. It is a moment of abjection, where one announces what one lacks in terms of spiritual fortitude, and matches in its aim the narratives that Elde shapes as he enlarges and amplifies the Nine Worthies. Ecclesiastes the clerke declares in his booke Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas, That alle es vayne and vayntes and vanyte es alle. Forthi amendes youre mysse whills ye are men here, Quia in inferno nulla est redempcio –​ For in Helle es no helpe, I hete yow for sothe. Als God in his gospelle graythely yow teches, Ite ostendite vos sacerdotibus To schryve yow ful schirle and schewe yow to prestis. (638–​46)

As a motivation to require his younger counterparts to confess and clean their souls, this injunction to find priests and narrate their sins is couched in the imagery of the transience of earthly fame and goods. If death struck the Nine Worthies, then too, it will strike Youthe and Medill Elde, a point which Beryl Rowland has described in the biblical terms of the parable of the sower: 57 Shahar, Growing Old, 45–​47.

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44 Crooked as a Staff The protagonists have sprung from the seed which fell on barren ground; their ages may represent degrees of perfection but their activities reveal how far they have fallen short and transgressed against God. Their lives, like those of the Worthies, prepare for the inevitable conclusion that, in the face of death, “the wele of this werlde worthes to noghte.”58

The impetus to confession in light of the vulnerable, leaky, aging body drives Elde’s final thoughts, functioning as “an injunction to his listeners that they should become storytellers too,” one that acknowledges implicitly that Youthe and Medill-​Age are both aging.59 Elde’s point is perhaps also beyond confession, even as it makes the Nine Worthies into a call for just such a confession: this is a narrative that demands a link with the body, one which is inevitable. Narrative, Elde counsels, will become a necessary prosthetic for the body as it ages, just as this aging body becomes essential for the historical narratives. Then, in spite of Kiser’s assertion that the “poem prepares us well for the possibility that a severely flawed character (like Elde) can formulate impeccable moral truths,” these lines extolling the wisdom of the Nine Worthies match the wisdom and knowledge one perhaps expects from old age, wisdom that is tied directly to the prosthetic nature of narratives spoken by these old men.60 In the last lines, Elde makes this clear by prompting Medill Elde in particular to take his narrative spot, pointing to the genealogical relationship between Elde and Medill Elde: Thou man in thi medill elde hafe mynde whate I saye! I am thi sire and thou my sone, the sothe for to telle, And he the sone of thiselfe, that sittis one the stede, For Elde es sire of Midill Elde, and Midill Elde of Youthe. And haves gud daye, for now I go—​to grave moste me wende. Dethe dynges one my dore, I dare no lengare byde. (649–​54)

In the next lines, the dreamer awakes, pulled from sleep by the sound of a horn, torn between wakefulness and sleep, but this moment is conclusive for Elde, who arrives at his grave. As a newly inspired prophet, reflecting the call to confession and the inevitability of decline and debility which his version of the Nine Worthies reflects, Elde positions himself as a weakened, barely alive figure who nevertheless attempts to guide his younger interlocutors to a good death. His focus and emphasis on narrative, both in terms of the Nine Worthies and confession, highlights how the aged, impaired body finds narrative a useful tool both to highlight that lack of ability and to supplement the loss of a so-called body. Elde through his fictions highlights the temporary fiction of the able body, a connection that, in the next chapter, Chaucer’s Reeve weaponizes.

58 Rowland, “The Three Ages,” 348.

59 Wright, “Historical Inscription and Confessional Erasure,” 7. 60 Kiser, “Elde and his Teaching,” 304.

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Chapter 2

A RECKONING WITH AGE: PROSTHETIC VIOLENCE AND THE REEVE

Elde’s staff and his babbling narrative in Parlement of the Thre Ages demonstrate

how old age can function as a prosthetic for a group of texts, joined by chance or opportunity together in a manuscript. But this connection lives on outside of the London Thornton MS. Indeed, outside of London lies Norfolk and the home of Chaucer’s Reeve, a fictive figure heading to Canterbury whose exclamations of age-​related impairments and inability to act reinforce just how powerful those narratives of impairment can become. But whereas Parlement’s Elde harnessed an aging body to mirror the embodied truths of his narrative and vice versa, the Reeve accounts for age in different, but equally powerful and discursive ways. The Reeve, once a carpenter and now a figure of manorial power, utilizes the debate between the ages, trickery, greed, and finally, old age’s inevitability to go beyond Elde’s confessional tale.1 An actively hostile and deeply personal tale that strikes at the youth of the Miller, arguing both against his drunken outburst and the Reeve’s own self-​presentation, this narrative ultimately echoes the best advice of Cato in Cicero’s De Senectute, which implicates both the tale teller and its target: old age’s best advantage is its release of the aged from the shackles of desire. By using narrative to personally depict the Miller’s descent in aging, the Reeve shows how narratives about the conditions of old age—​from loss of innate heat to loss of hair, desire, and physical ability—​replace some of that bodily force, making good on the Reeve’s promise in his prologue to meet force with force. But this force rebounds. Acknowledging that the Reeve’s tale actually condemns him is a well-​worn path—​and one that his narrative confirms. Yet simultaneously the Reeve also accounts for how old age represents both impairment and potency, demonstrating how age and narrative prosthesis operate throughout the tale.2 Because aging is inevitable

1 See David Stone, “The Reeve,” Historians on Chaucer: The “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with assistance of Alastair J. Minnis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014):  399–​420 for a discussion of what might be meant by manorial power and the tensions apparent in the construction of the Reeve’s General Prologue portrait. In “The Reeve’s Tale: Chaucer’s Measure for Measure,” Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 1–​17, Paul A. Olson offers a reading of how this identity informs not only that portrait but also the Reeve’s Prologue and Tale. 2 Some of the most recent work on the Reeve has touched on the tale’s connection to that of the Miller: for instance, in their study of social aspirations of the characters of the Reeve and the Miller, Michael W. Twomey and Scott D. Stull, in “Architectural satire in the tales of the Miller and Reeve,” The Chaucer Review 51 (2016): 310–​37, suggest how the study of spaces in these tales via both literary criticism and archaeology highlight the satire in the presentation of the characters’ social pretensions. And then there’s taste:  Craig T.  Bertolet examines Symkyn’s wife’s red dress and bad taste in “Dressing Symkyn’s Wife: Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and Bad Taste,” The Chaucer Review

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and the decline associated with it as well, the narrative he gives must implicate him. But from the lexicon of age-​related complaints comes not only a leveling—​all must age if they live—​but also a signal that these narratives of impairment and age take on this potency for the Reeve and others like him because they condemn him to debility and inactivity. Who better to show the power of aging and deploy it against a more youthful rival than one who has seen their tap run almost empty? What remains full is the Reeve’s command of sources: first his array of religious and medical imagery describing the generic conditions and symptoms of old age, many of which echo the ancient authorities outlined in the Introduction; and second, in the tale, a blending of the French fabliaux and other continental sources including, as Nicole Nolan Sidhu has deftly suggested, a reflection of classical sources.3 Indeed, in the Reeve’s effort to blindside the Miller and serve a balanced account, he epitomizes what Derek Pearsall has characterized as a “sleight of hand,” a tricky move to put the dirty words of an upper class entertainment in the mouths of the “cherles.”4 Begin, like the narration of the fabliaux of the Miller, the Shipman, and the Merchant, the Reeve’s own tale, in particular, participates in a similar textual economy as the author of the Tales, as the Reeve blends English, French, and Italian sources for the presentation of old age who, like the Reeve, seem preoccupied with the dirt of age.5 Blending together the classical sources of the Knight’s Tale and the fabliaux of the Miller’s, the Reeve responds to the beginning of the first fragment, showing how these narratives about old books and old men perform and punish prosthetically.6 In fact, the Reeve offers a brutal prosthetic to the incompleteness 52 (2017): 456–​75. But other senses are certainly not left out: In “Snub and White; Chaucer, Logic, and Strode,” Journal of Germanic and English Philology 117 (2018):  185–​211, Glending Olson discusses Symkyn’s nose and the violence at the end of the tale in the context of the tale’s depiction of town/​gown politics and a fleshing out of Chaucer’s relationship with Ralph Strode. Published in 1991, Susanna Fein’s work on the Reeve as a reflection of the puer senex remains important for my aims here: In “Lat the Children Pleye: The Game Betwixt the Ages in The Reeve’s Tale,” in Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 1991): 73–​104, Fein locates within the Reeve a fitting symbol of the man stuck in time in the Tales, who “refuses to accept his time-​bound experience in the world and hence lives a sort of death in life” (78). I follow Fein in reading the Reeve’s use of a plural pronoun in discussing those affected by old age as indicative of an urge, perhaps, to “speak for all the offended old men who make the mistake of not turning over the leaf to pass over The Miller’s Tale” (76). 3 Nicole Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 80. 4 Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 237–​38.

5 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 273–​77.

6 The charges of misreading in the Reeve’s Tale are not unfounded of course, and Elizabeth Scala has offered a compelling reading of the Reeve’s own misreading and the role it plays in the larger structure of the Tales in Desire in the Canterbury Tales (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2015). Scala argues that the “Reeve responds to the Miller’s story in anger, personally insulted by his tale of a naïve carpenter outwitted by a clever young clerk. Chaucer thereby dramatizes more than a competitive reply to the Miller’s story in the Reeve’s fabliau; he stages a crucial scene of

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of the first fragment, fleshing out the real violence which is stylized in the Knight’s Tale and made comical in the Miller’s. By using narrative to personally depict the Miller’s descent in aging, the Reeve shows how narratives about the conditions of old age—​ from loss of innate heat to loss of hair, desire, and physical ability—​replace some of that bodily force, making good on the Reeve’s promise in his prologue to meet force with force. Anticipating the hollow vice of youth that the Cook’s Tale presents, the Reeve’s narrative implicitly calls to mind that one of the advantages of age is its release from youthful desire and impulse. Even so, the Ciceronian defense of age—​as Cato argues in De Senectute, age is a reprieve from the desires of youth—​falls rather flat in the prologue of the Reeve and the narrative which he supplies, but this apparent contradiction can be read as another way that complaints of age remain powerful. This visceral violence emanating from the Reeve is made visible in the image of a staff, which Symkyn’s wife uses to end that tale, and to which the Reeve’s body is compared in his General Prologue portrait.7 From the General Prologue on, the Reeve functions as a symbol of manorial authority and authorial persona, suggesting that the Reeve’s own cries of impairment are as hollow as the body he criticizes, a connection I trace through Walter of Henley’s Husbandry and its discussion of reeves and other farming knowledge framed as the advice from an old man to his son. And certainly this mode of authority can help shape how Thomas Hoccleve and William Caxton highlight their own age and dullness, tying themselves to the same narrative energies behind Chaucer’s cranky creation as they seek to authorize their works and cement power, prestige, and position. Impairment, in this way, is its own source of power.8 misreading and misrecognition that disables any widespread deployment of a dramatic principle from the very start” (88). Scala’s argument is both compelling and central to my discussion of the Reeve here, especially her concentration on the Reeve’s anger connected to his old age late in her chapter on the Reeve.

7 Mitchell and Snyder’s image of “narrative prosthesis” as “crutch” in Narrative Prosthesis has been central for this thinking on the Reeve, especially as their definition echoes the contours of the Reeve’s own body and its status as lean, old man: “Our phrase narrative prosthesis is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight. Bodies show up in stories as dynamic entities that resist or refuse the cultural scripts assigned to them” (49).

8 My thinking about the genealogy of medieval poetic authority—​a concern for poets of the fifteenth century and their critics—​has been guided by Vin Narduzzi, “Disability Figures in Shakespeare,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016):  455–​67, especially 461–​62:  In thinking through the roles of Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida and the Duchess of York in Richard III, Narduzzi writes, “The latter two Shakespearean instances heighten the sense of genealogical catastrophe because, in figuring heirs as crutches, they literalize and particularize in early modern terms which Lee Edelman has called the ‘reproductive futurism’ of modern day politics. In this ‘secular theology’, which, according to Edelman, ‘shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning’, the sacred and imperiled figure of the Child serves as the durable ‘prop … on which our social reality rests’. Whereas Edelman proposes that ‘we might do well to attempt which is surely impossible—​to withdraw our allegiance, however, compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism’, Shakespeare

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Contradiction is of course central to the Reeve’s presentation. His pretensions—​ clerical, social, and biological—​situate him as a figure who appears like a priest but is not. He embodies the “disunity among the peasants,” identifying as a carpenter and working for the landed classes, figuratively beating labour and worth out of the peasants he oversees and tricking the lord he serves.9 And he bemoans his age while he claims a colt’s tooth, aligning himself implicitly with the Wife of Bath, who makes similar claims about her age and body. But central to all these roles is their association with narrative—​from clerical roles (the kind the Wife of Bath criticizes) to aged go-​betweens and narrators and reeves keeping records and accounts, the construction of a story and its power is fundamental to all the positions to which the Reeve either holds or to which he aspires. Echoed throughout these characteristics, though, are the similarities to Cato’s defense of old age in De Senectute: old age is honoured only on condition that it defends itself, maintains its rights, is subservient to no one, and to the last breath rules over its own domain. For just as I approve of the young man in whom there is a touch of age, to I approve of the old man in whom there is some of the flavour of youth. He who strives thus to mingle youthfulness and age may grow old in body, but old in spirit he will never be.10

And the Reeve takes this very nuanced discussion of the youthful old man to its very extreme, evincing the same kind of brutal interpretation he employs with the social dramatizes immense genealogical collapses when the parents of Hector, Clarence, and Edward—​ all of whom are imagined as men—​children in these passages—​are no longer propped up by their crutches. For these Shakespearean noble families there is no (immediate) genealogical future.” In figuring “heirs as crutches,” Narduzzi highlights the dependency of disability, both as metaphor and reality, on the future of heirs and the persistence of rule in these two plays that deal either with a medieval source—​Troilus—​or with a medieval subject and king—​Richard III. I would also suggest that this image of disability and prosthesis is at play in the machinations following Henry IV’s usurpation of the kingdom from his boy cousin and king. John Hardyng, The Chronicle of John Hardyng (New  York:  AMS, 1974, first pub. London, 1812), 354. Buried in a footnote, Hardyng relates that the next in line was of course the Earl of March. When asked, “who durst disable the kynge of issue, he beynge yonge and able to have children,” the duke of Lancaster “wase so putt bie, he and his counsell feyned and forgied the seide Cronycle that Edmund shuld be the elder brother to make his son Henry a title to the croun,” a move that is refused. The language of disability is very openly invoked: the Earl is young and able, and capable of producing children and perpetuating the line of kings. That the language of removing the immediate heir to the throne (Richard was without issue) is couched in terms of disabling is proof that the discursive acts surrounding the deposition of Richard should be read as the language of disability. This episode occurs before the deposition of Richard; it is the disinheriting of Henry, who strove for a much larger inheritance, that arguably causes the fall of Richard II. The descriptions of Richard and the Earl are similar here: both are young and fruitful. It will fall to Henry to disable Richard through a calculated campaign of warfare and chronicle production. For the aftermath of this effort (Hardyng presents the story before the deposition of Richard) see The Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. and trans. Chris Given-​Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65. Usk here notes that the Crouchback legend is given consideration as a reason for deposing the king, post-​deposition. 9 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 274.

10 Cicero, On Old Age, 47.

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identity of the Miller or the Knight’s use of classical sources. Throughout the prologue he marshals a language of violence to substitute for a weakened body, harnesses lust and images of rot to account for his presumed loss of sexual ability, and substitutes vengeance and the four embers of negative emotion for wisdom. In short, the Reeve defends old age by offending youth, changing this Ciceronian echo into a prologue which fleshes out the outlines of a speaker who appears as an example of a very dirty, very old man: For whan we may nat doon, than wol we speke; Yet in oure asshen olde is fyr yreke. “Four gleedes han we, which I devyse –​ Avauntyng, liyng, anger, coveitise; These foure sparkles longen unto eelde. (I.3881–​3385)

The temporal dimensions of old-​age impairments and limitations are obvious in these lines. When we cannot do, then we speak. Narrative takes on a prosthetic function here, replacing lost ability, and modifying the embodied reality of the aged. It is, however, an odd statement to give in a contest that leaves aside real action, and concentrates instead on appearances, their descriptions, and the narratives. Elizabeth Scala articulates some of these dimensions of textual punishment in her recent work on desire and the Tales: While the grouchy sentiment of these lines has been noted, their exact sense is elusive and their relation to the tale unclear. Anger provokes him to retaliate, but he denies the power to do so. Avowing his age and infirmity, he stumbles upon an image that licenses his aggression: old men are like medlars, not ripe until rotten (1.3875). This paradoxical image gives him a chance to assimilate desire to his powerlessness, which emerges in speech: “For whan we may nat doon, than wol we speke” (1.3881). This sermonizing on age is largely a logical diversion, located between a disavowal of his desire to retaliate and a slight apologia in advance of doing so.11

Scala’s lines here get to the centre of the Reeve’s prologue-​logic and the way in which his defense of age wed his desire to act with his powerlessness. Perhaps though we might see how this “sermonizing on age” is not merely a logical diversion, but one which is rooted in the very historical nature of extant sermons on age, classical, biblical, and early medieval, as this union of force and impotence echoes existing material from Cicero, Juvenal, and Maximianus, among others. In fact, besides the aging authorities quoted in the Introduction, there are clear similarities between the Reeve’s powerful embrace of impotence in his prologue and Seneca’s meditations on age in Epistle 26: Nevertheless, I offer thanks to myself, with you as witness; for I feel that age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution. Only my vices, and the outward aids to these vices, have reached senility; my mind is strong and rejoices that it has but slight connexion [sic] with the body.12

11 Scala, Desire, 121. 12 Seneca, Epistle XXVI in Epistles 1–​65, trans. Richard M.  Gummere (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1917), 64–​73 at 65.

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While the Reeve announces the failure of his body in a negative fashion, Seneca embraces the failure of his body, because, like Cicero’s Cato, desire has released him from the vices of the body. But tellingly, this release is voiced in terms that recall the logic of prosthesis, if inverted: old age has weakened Seneca’s vices and “the outward aids”—​the bodily power which helps to augment the vices themselves in order to perform wicked deeds—​and the loss of the connection between mind and body that the Reeve grieves is yet another voicing of how the mind for Seneca supplements his body in wicked, youthful behaviors. And these developments are those which the Reeve fights against—​as opposed to Seneca, the Reeve twists the aging of the body that can help vice into a narrative which forces other pilgrims to hear his full vicious tale. And as Chaucer’s own narratorial presentation in Envoy to Scogan makes clear, the link between aging bodies and narration is a comfortable one for Chaucer:  evidently an old man, playfully announces the end of his writing career, declaring that his muse rusts in its sheath, a fitting echo of the Reeve’s refusal to play. The sexual connotations of these metaphors cannot be missed, central to a right reading of the claim that age stops narration, symbolized by the rust and disuse of Chaucer’s “muse” and the Reeve’s desire to play. The I-​persona’s description in elegant verse of this muse’s inertia and senescence actually reinforces the idea that old Chaucer never stops writing, and that age supplies the real subject of the envoy. These plaintive notes of resignation, given in the context of old or somewhat-​ impotent bodies, find expression in Scogan. Scogan, like Chaucer, is immune from love, apparently because of age and rust, as the God of Love wol nat with his arwes been ywroken On the, ne me, ne noon of oure figure; We shul of him have neyther hurt ne cure. (26–​28)13

To Scogan, to Chaucer, and to all others of their “figure,” love will not waste arrows. Cupid is entirely removed from their realm, even as like the Reeve, the persona of this lyric delights in describing shades of his own cupidity. As the lines, however, make clear, Scogan and Chaucer shall have no hurt (no arrow of love) and no cure (resolution of that love-​hurt). As figures of age, they are apparently exiled from the game of love; my use of figure, however, like Chaucer’s proves one full of possibilities: in the next stanza, indeed, the reader finds out how full.14 The word refers not only to the category of people such as Chaucer and Scogan, men of rents and not of love, but also to those who are “hoor and rounde of shap” (31). Old, round men who have left the arena of love embody the position of this textualized Chaucer and his addressed Scogan, whose reply 13 Geoffrey Chaucer, “L’envoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 655. 3rd edition. All quotations of Chaucer refer to this edition.

14 Jane Chance, “Chaucerian Irony in the ‘Wordes Unto Adam,’ ‘Lenvoy a Scogan,’ and Lenvoy a Bukton,’ ” Papers on Language & Literature 21 (1985): 115–​28 at 122–​23. Chance reads the scene of the “aged and fat persona” of Chaucer as one which has missed courtly love and advises Scogan to find a higher love (which Chance ties to the writing of the Marriage Group, texts she argues follow this “fallow” period of love and activity).

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is given in the below lines: “Lo, olde Grisel lyst to ryme and playe” (35). Play, it must be remembered, can refer to bookish and sexual enjoyment, and as the lines which follow make clear, both these meanings are in play. Ne thynke I never of slep to wake my muse, That rusteth in my shethe still in pees While I was yong, I put hir forth in prees; But al shal passe that men prose or ryme; Take every man hys turn, as for his tyme. (38–​42)

The dimensions of the connection between Chaucer’s textualized sexual organ and his writing instrument are made clear in these lines through the contrast of the young and old man. The display of the speaker’s muse in public as a young man, indicative of the role of a public poet, and the rust of that muse, now sheathed, casts a mock-​serious shadow on the sentiments of Olde Grisel, mentioned earlier, which the I-​persona ascribed to Scogan. The old man’s “sword” rusts in its sheath, an instrument that he once put forth in public, just as surely as the sexual abilities of the old man have dimmed and left. But is this farewell any more convincing than the Reeve’s later exasperated claim that he cannot “play” because age is too much with him? That the persona of Scogan finds expressions and words useful that are common to the Reeve, both as he “uses” them, and as they are used on him, posits a linkage between Chaucer’s Scogan and Chaucer’s Reeve. These late lyrics map well onto the activities of the Reeve, even if these connections are suggestive. In particular, Envoy to Scogan echoes the Reeve’s General Prologue-​portrait through the work of age and through work, as the Reeve’s profession as Reeve reflects so closely with Chaucer’s outside the text. The Reeve, in a position similar to Chaucer’s custodial position of the king’s works, accounts not only for the lord of his manor, but also for the peasants over whom he lords. It is this middling and middle position, as a guardian of transactions and balance, that strikes closest to both the Reeve’s beginning portrait as an aged man, and the position which Chaucer claims in Envoy to Scogan. Like the Reeve, who engenders fear in those over whom he has power, part of Chaucer’s duties as clerk of the king’s works might have been one of enforcement and arrest: while “the records are not detailed enough to show which or how many subversives Chaucer may have had to arrest and hold on the king’s behalf,” he nevertheless took an oath to do just that.15 In fact, according to Carlson, “Chaucer was the police, not in an attenuated or metaphoric sense: in the better part of his mature employments, he was an official of the repressive apparatus of the state.”16 First Osewold speaks to the infirmities one might expect from an apologia of age, and then twists that defense. Oure olde lemes mowe wel been unweelde, But wyl ne shal nat faillen, that is sooth.

15 David R. Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 30.

16 Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs, 1.

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A Reckoning with Age And yet ik have alwey a coltes tooth, As many a yeer as it is passed henne Syn that my tappe of lif bigan to renne. (I.3886–​90)

What should not go unnoticed in these lines is that the Reeve speaks for all old men, or at least attempts it. His use of the first personal plural possessive pronoun indicates a generalizing characteristic that he shares with the other old men, as well as the maintenance ever of the will. The truth is that the body will fail, but the animating force will not. “Elde” of course manages the opposite: the body fails because the will does, it is away because old age hijacks the body. After this expression of solidarity, the Reeve introduces his “coltes tooth,” that preservation of youthful power and promise that has lasted from birth till now.17 So, even as his tap runs almost to the end, his youthful vigor remains.18 Brandishing his power as surely as allegorical Elde in Elde or Piers Plowman, the Reeve manages to align himself with an old man, because he looks like one, and differentiate himself, because he retains the narrative power to age his textual subjects. So theek, quod he, “ful wel coude I thee quyte With blering of a proud milleres yë, If that me liste speke of ribaudye. (3364–​66)

He continues the language of contest and revenge, but also of legalistic revenge, with his mention of “quyte” here, and tells the Miller what he might do, if it pleased him. By framing the narratives in terms of equal action and reaction, through the use of “quyte,” the Reeve announces that through “ribaudye,” the Miller’s eyes can be bleared.19 Having himself been tricked, and his age apparently been made obvious, he would speak in low terms and talk about a miller who is deceived, and repay the wrong. Line 3364 of this passage is remarkable, given its invocation of supposed ability on the part of the Reeve, who alternatively, like the Chaucer’s narratorial persona, claims and refuses the ability 17 Carol A. Everest, “Sex and Old Age in Chaucer’s ‘Reeve’s Prologue,” 99–​114.

18 Carol Falvo Heffernan, “A Reconsideration of the Cask Figure in the ‘Reeve’s Prologue,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980):  37–​43, especially 40–​41:  “Oswald the Reeve is consciously concerned with physical life, of course, not with spiritual renewal, and with being able to continue the lascivious ways of the ‘coltes tooth’ (3887). His fear of the impotence that may accompany old age and perhaps, too, of being, like John the carpenter, cuckolded breaks through in the obvious, heavy-​handed phallic associations of the cask passage. This level of associations produces an odd counterpoint to the religious implications already discussed, but Chaucer’s world is characteristically comprehensive enough to embrace at once the obscene and the sacred.”

19 See Singer, “Playing by ear,” 39–​52. Julie Singer’s framing of prosthesis, impairments, and disability is useful here—​tracing the role blindness plays in fourteenth-​century troubadour song, Singer asserts that “medieval source materials, and literary texts in particular, tell us something different: in the face of an obstacle, an impairment does not necessarily become a disability. Rather than abjecting the impaired body, that obstacle may instead redirect the body toward a new, or renewed, ability … Impairment in the late medieval West, while less problematic, is best defined in tandem with a set of abilities, both complementary and compensatory” (40).

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to act and narrate. Chaucer’s dirty trick is apparent here. The blending of an Elde-​like character with the real-​to-​life Reeve is hidden in the very language of trickery, which ties the Miller and the Reeve. “Millers are not the only thieves abroad in the world,” as Susanna Fein’s reading makes clear and the General Prologue spells out the Reeve’s cunning and greed.20 Beyond that tie of trickery lies another commonality: the Reeve has aged and so will the Miller be one day. And the trick of the Reeve is to use the traditional powers of Elde to show the Miller this truth. Returning to the Reeve’s promise to “quyte” the Miller with the “blering of a proud milleres yë” demonstrates the medical notion of impairment that inheres in the trickery of the Reeve.21 Other English poems make the connection between bleared eyes and age: In Elde, one of the versions of Maximianus’s Elegies, one of the features of creeping old age is failure of sight. Old Age, animating the body of the speaker, causes changes in his eyes: “I blind, i bleri” (60). He grows blind, and his eyes retain excess water, a condition Hamlet later relates to Polonius as one of the slanders against old age. This condition both points to trickery here and to the powers of old age, for Elde takes over the body, sending its will away and ravaging a space not its own. While suggestive—​the blering of a proud milleres yë is on its face about trickery through blinding—​the age-​related dimensions here cannot be forgotten. This range of meanings in this usage is fairly common: indeed, the figure of Elde in Parlement of the Thre Ages, too, is bleary-​eyed. “He was bitel-​brouwed with twei blered eiʒen” (109) and this lack of clear sight produces a narrative of the Nine Worthies that is often twisted and supplemented by Elde’s own concerns, but carries a truth common to bodily realities: everyone ages and so do their bodies. But what if the narrative, rather than describe the age, could in fact seemingly age one’s opponent? The Reeve offers this implicitly in his prologue, as he begins with a recognition of his loss of physical ability and ends with a promise to quiet the Miller physically. Central to his threat is his identification with the status and position of the Miller, as he announces at the end of his prologue that “Right in his cherles termes wol I  speke./​ I  pray to God his neeke mote to-​breke” (I.3917–​18). The threat here is visceral violence with a connection to the use of the Miller’s own tools. Osewold prays for Robyn’s neck to break and implicitly this desire follows his promise to follow exactly in the Miller’s steps. The reflection of Chaucer’s narratorial persona in Adam Scriveyn appears closest to this desire: there, the threat too is equal and opposite and the “most” of Adam Scriveyn is used almost identically to the “mote” of the Reeve’s promise. These verbal cues reveal a similarity in the manner in which textual punishments are executed, both for the Miller and Adam. Calling attention to the power of the Tales to wield narrative both as prosthetic and weapon, the confluence of meanings attached to staff (letter, prosthetic, stanza) appear 20 Fein, “Lat the Children Pleye,” 75.

21 “On Tarrying the Accidents of Age,” 163.

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throughout the texts which describe the Reeve. For Adam Scriveyn, Chaucer echoes some of the threats the Reeve makes to his fellow churl:22 Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle, But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe, It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape. (1–​7)23

Writing and punishment are linked throughout this short lyric, as the apparently authorial Chaucer calls for his scribe Adam to be punished through contrapasso: where the skin from the manuscript must be rubbed away in order to erase Adam’s somewhat permanent mistake, and so Adam must rub away accumulating skin, a familiar punishment that Brendan O’Connell links to the fate of the falsifiers in Dante’s Inferno.24 And this connection is one which works well, considering the range and history of “scalle,” which, according to the OED, is likely related to the ON skalle, meaning bald head: both must remove skin, and the blankness of Chaucer’s vellum and the possible baldness of Adam’s head could be linked.25 And hair is certainly one of those things visibly affected by age: numerous references exist in both literature by Chaucer (such as the descriptions of the Reeve and Januarie) and literature contemporary to him (such as Gower’s Confessio Amantis) linking the changing of hair and its colour to the onset of old age—​indeed, Amans in Confessio Amantis notes that the writing of years is accomplished in part by the hair on his head. While baldness might seem inaccurate here, this curse might be linked to old age through its imagery and the punitive effects of accumulating skin. This imagery of scales suggests an overabundance of skin itself—​part of the flesh that Katie Walker has tied to prosthesis in the Middle Ages—​which in many ways can evoke the accumulation of years itself, that is, Chaucer could be subjecting this Adam to the experience of aging instantly, which would be indeed be a potent curse.26 The “scalle,” as Chaucer terms it, is no invention from his corpus. An actual medical condition, described in medieval 22 For a detailed reading of the genre of complaint poetry to which “Adam Scriveyn” might belong, see John Scattergood, “The Jongleur, the Copyist, and the Printer: The Tradition of Chaucer’s Wordes unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn,” in Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Dublin: Four Courts 2006), 115–​27. 23 Geoffrey Chaucer, “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn,” The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Ed., ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton, 1987), 650.

24 See Brendan O’Connell, “ ‘Adam Scriveyn’ and the Falsifiers of Dante’s ‘Inferno:’ A  New Interpretation of Chaucer’s ‘Wordes.’ ” The Chaucer Review 40 (2005): 39–​57.

25 “scalle” (n), Oxford English Dictionary:  www-​oed-​com.ulm.idm.oclc.org/​view/​Entry/​ 171785?rskey=TqwtlR&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid 26 Katie L. Walter, “Fragments for a Medieval Theory of Prosthesis,” Textual Practice, 30 (2016): 1345–​63.

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medical texts, the “scalle” seems closest to psoriasis or eczema, an inflammation of the skin that results in often dry and flaky skin. The Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Surgerie provides this description:  “the skalle is a skabbe of the hede wiþ flawes and wiþ crustes and wiþ some moysture and with doynge awaye of heres an wiþ an askisshe colour and with a stynkynge and with horrible lokynge.”27 This disgusting image of the “skalle” is useful, for its similarities to other depictions of age: hair is lost, the skin loses colour, becoming like ash, and the image and smell of the afflicted scalp is horrible. In addition, as Tarrying makes clear, the old body is prone to “moche icchyng and cracchyng,” which like Adam’s scalp will be characterized by wounds that fester and itch.28 Further, the image of the “skalle” as moist connects to a description of a medical “bleryng” of the eyes, all of which are associated with old age, even as the location of the ailment, the scalp, recalls manuscript materials: skin with hair removed. The apparently bald, or balding, head of the scribe, because of layers of flaky skin, makes one more connection possible: it is the moon reflected in Symkyn’s balding head at the end of the Reeve’s Tale which confuses his wife and offers the Reeve’s narrative version of his foe the physical violence that Osewold claims he cannot give. As with Chaucer’s curse, this punishment is tied to a text and results from the apparent misuse and abuse of textual elements. Age ideally constrains both Adam and the Miller, as the textualized Chaucer and the Reeve work through anger and physical change to punish those younger or more active for textual abuses. The accumulation of skin on Adam, and the forced scraping of skin on Chaucer’s manuscripts, brings into focus the very real effect of age on the creation of the Middle English canon, and the very real connections among negative affect, age, and authorial personae.29 The words further which surround this use of scalle are equally significant for tying this performance to age, anger, and the Reeve. The use of “most” in line 3 and the following use of “mot” in line 5 gestures to an ambiguity that is readily apparent though difficult to parse in the use of this modal verb. “Most” might seem a form of must and supply a reading along the lines of “you must have the ‘scalle’ because you copy these lines thus,” but this form of moten instead is not descriptive but prescriptive, indicative of Chaucer’s cursing words.30 You will get the “scalle” if you cannot copy faithfully. “Mot” in line 5 in contrast is a descriptive form, reflective of Chaucer’s past activities and interactions with Adam, which are nevertheless given in a temporal frame of presentness. This is of course a speculative reading, but one which ties the majority of the poem’s critical treatments, which centre on Adam and the biblical significance of that

27 The Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, ed. Margaret Sinclair Ogden (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 417. 28 “On Tarrying the Accidents of Age,” 163.

29 Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 4.

30 “moten” (v), Middle English Dictionary, see 12, c: http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​cgi/​m/​mec/​med-​ idx?type=id&id=Middle EnglishD28752&egs=all&egdisplay=open

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name, to the punishments which Chaucer has in mind for the scribe, referencing not only the sins of that name but also his age as well.31 And indeed, oldness itself is a concern for the poem, as Chaucer’s fear points to the writing “newe”—​again or new copies—​in a bid to replace the old copies ruined by Adam. In this constellation of images, we might connect the ending lines of the poem which concern not only the scribe’s “negligence and rape” but also the correction that Chaucer must perform. While these final lines do not evoke old age, they do imply punishment and, as I argue throughout this chapter, represent the terms of a textualized punishment inflicted by the Reeve onto the Miller that involves not only aging but also the abuse and rape of women. The idea that Chaucer needs to correct his texts is more here than an editing or remedying the errors of scribal labor. In fact, the connotations of “correcten” largely, especially when used in the Tales, revolve around punishment: either to repudiate, remedy, or rebuke a crime or sin.32 And behind this idea of correction lies the logic of the Reeve’s contradiction: while he is old and cannot play, he must, to meet force with equal opposing force. That opposing force, as his tale makes clear, is a kind of Elde-​like power to age his characters and show the Miller the reflection of his future, where he is weakened and powerless. But this narrative response is a wicked one, which turns on sexual assault and bed tricks, and the Reeve’s willingness to subject his female characters to textualized violence echoes in Chaucer’s valorization of his correct text and the rape of the text and its meaning by a negligent scribe. The Reeve’s inability to play and his willingness to do so, using the violence of the text, both in terms of age and assault, account for those similar images here, as the lines to Adam, Chaucer’s own scribe, echo those of Chaucer’s own tale.

31 Jane Chance sees “a highly compressed, humorous account of Original Sin and Redemption,” in the brief set of lines in her “Chaucerian Irony in the ‘Wordes Unto Adam,’ ‘Lenvoy a Scogan,’ and ‘Lenvoy a Bukton,’ ” 118. Glending Olson has examined the short lyric in terms of its genre in “Author, Scribe, and Curse: The Genre of ‘Adam Scriveyn,’ ” The Chaucer Review 42 (2008): 284–​97 for its inventiveness as a book curse which also, in its ingenuity, marks Chaucer as a particular kind of inventive auctor (292). Finally, Alexandra Gillespie’s “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism 42 (2018): 269–​83, responds to Linne R. Mooney’s investigation of the “real” Adam Pinkhurst and offers up possibilities for reading the poem: “Chaucer never says that Adam copies Boece or Troilus. He only imagines that possibility, which is a matter of conditionality, ‘if,’ futurity, ‘euer,’ and happenstance, ‘it þee byfalle.’ That is true of all worldly matters—​and what better texts to teach this than Boece or Troilus, which may be named in the poem for this reason? Their canonical status, their perfect completeness, is ironically undone by the transience and mutability that both poems theorize long before they come to be miswritten by Adam’s pen. And in Adam Scriveyn, ‘Boece and Troylus’ are chance embodied or voiced, for they are selected not only for their philosophical pertinence, but because together—​by chance—​the words form a regularly stressed, perfect five-​beat half-​line. ‘The tales of Canterbury’ could not possibly compete” (279).

32 “correcten” (v), Middle English Dictionary:  https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​ dictionary/​dictionary/​MED9822/​track?counter=1&search_​id=1736688

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General Portraits of Age and Ability Feared by the peasants almost as much as the plague, the Reeve appears in the General Prologue as a man well versed in deceit and guile. Simultaneously carpenter and reeve, Osewold extracts his wealth from both the peasants over whom he lords, and the lord whom he plunders. He looks like a cleric, accounts like a Reeve, and is a carpenter by trade.33 He is unmarried, yet feels the sting that attaches to a fabliau, describing the folly of an old husband. His sermonizing pits him against the judge of the Tales, who urges him not to waste time. The injunction to speed things along highlights the awkward temporal position to which old age has relegated him, and yet Osewold doesn’t drag his feet in his tale, as he advances rhetorically the age of the Miller, fulfilling his promise to meet force with force. Even as he complains about his wrongs, his own sins and inconsistencies are manifold: his avarice and ruthlessness in extracting money engenders fear in the peasants and wins him the trust of a lord, who is unaware of the Reeve’s theft. Osewold travels slower than all the pilgrims, though he rides a capable horse. With rusty sword at his side and closely shaven beard, Osewold defies categorization, both as a pilgrim, and as a psychological type. He is deeply resentful and evinces a propensity to anger. After the teasing of the Miller, the Reeve launches into a prologue that in its rather deep discussion of negative affect and Latinate views of old age motivates the Host’s use of his veto power to urge an old man not to waste time. Describing it this way, echoing the kind of critique which Jill Mann applies to the General Prologue, makes central how this band of pilgrims would be beset by social conflict.34 As Lee Patterson has pointed out, the Reeve’s actions suggest the lack of a unity among the peasants—​he works as a Reeve, having left carpentry, and this position, as the General Prologue-​narrator points out, is well-​suited to theft and corruption. And this liminal position—​as a Reeve—​deserves further consideration, suggesting other connections with the Reeve’s age. As a figure who will later in the Tales claim both youth and age, it is not surprising that he would also occupy a position that, while still an opportunity for a peasant, might also give him some power and sway as he accounts and creates manorial accounts about profit and loss. Indeed, the role of Reeve is central to the workings of old age in the portrait of Osewold in the General Prologue. Much remains unknown about the role of the Reeve, but Chaucer’s description gives us a portrait of a

33 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 274. 34 See Jill Mann’s discussion of the Reeve in Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 163–​67. In order to track the nature of conflict in Chaucer’s works, see Marion Turner’s Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Fourteenth Century London (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 2:  “Chaucer’s texts, unlike those of his contemporaries, propose no social solutions, no Golden Age, no hope of progression. Instead, his poetry and prose are concerned with depicting the inevitably destructive nature of human fellowship and society.”

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grasping, ambitious man, who aspires well beyond his estate, one whose background might be found in Walter of Henley’s Husbandry.35 Walter of Henley’s Husbandry is a thirteenth-​century treatise, composed in Anglo-​ Norman, and, apparently, a text of some influence. With thirty-​eight extant manuscripts, Husbandry is likely a text that would have been available to Chaucer, a possibility implied by the number of echoes from Husbandry to the General Prologue: indeed, “the portrait of the Reeve suggests that Chaucer directly summarized some elements of Walter of Henley’s advice and warnings.”36 Many of these echoes have been traced already, and deal not only with the fear of the “hynes” toward the Reeve but also the suspicions of theft lords might have toward reeves and bailiffs.37 In addition to these similarities, the framing of the advice contained within Husbandry gives yet more evidence of the source of the Reeve’s General Prologue-​portrait and his concentration on old age: The father having fallen into old age said to his son, Dear son, live prudently towards God and the world. With regard to God, think often of the passion and death that Jesus Christ suffered for us, and love Him above all things and fear Him and lay hold of and keep His commandments; with regard to the world, think of the wheel of fortune, how man mounts little by little to wealth, and when he is at the top of the wheel, then by mishap he falls little by little into poverty, and then into wretchedness. Wherefore, I pray you, order your life according as your lands are valued yearly by the extent, and nothing beyond that.38

Framed by the desire to see in old age the wisdom of years, the opening to Husbandry anticipates much of the debate between age and youth that characterizes the Reeve’s Tale, along with the workings of fortune and inevitability of death that are so central to his presentation here and in his prologue. With a touch of sermonizing not unlike that of the Reeve in his prologue, this old father attempts to guide his son’s reaping and sowing, uniting the literal management of his lands with the cultivation of his soul. An inverse of the position, in some ways, of the Reeve—​an old manager helping to steal from his younger master—​this opening nevertheless ties the transience of life to the fickleness of fortune in farming, suggesting that the agricultural metaphors of the Reeve’s old age in his prologue have an even deeper meaning. Just as the opening of Husbandry helps to elucidate the position of the Reeve, the ending remarks about honesty and management of the Reeve and those the General Prologue calls the “hynes” further clarifies the Reeve’s position in the Tales: Those who have the goods of others in their keeping ought to keep well four things: To love their lord and respect him, and as to making profit, they ought to look on the business

35 Bryan Carella, “The Social Aspirations and Priestly Pretense of Chaucer’s Reeve,” Neophilologus 94 (2010): 523–​29. 36 Stone, “The Reeve,” 405.

37 Stone, “The Reeve,” 409–​10.

38 Walter of Henley, Walter Of Henley’s Husbandry Together With An Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie And Robert Grossteste’s Rules, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Lamond (London: Longmans, Green, 1890).

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as their own, and as to outlays, they ought to think that the business is another’s, but there are few servants and provosts who keep these four things altogether, as I think, but there are many who have omitted the three and kept the fourth, and have interpreted that contrary to the right way, knowing well that the business is another’s and not theirs, and take right and left where they judge best that their disloyalty will not be perceived. Look into your affairs often, and cause them to be reviewed, for those who serve you will thereby avoid the more to do wrong, and will take pains to do better.39

Reminscent of the four embers that still burn inside the Reeve, the ending of Husbandry voices the four obligations of the lord’s servants and details the breach of trust in the accusations against Osewold found in his portrait. The Reeve, here, is one of many who “have omitted the three and kept the fourth,” that is skimmed profit in their position in the middle, an offense which might not rise to the level of criminality that has been read into the Reeve’s portrait.40 Yet, even from this early position in the Tales, it is clear that the Reeve implicates himself in his own tale and punishment, as his theft appears no different from that of Symkyn in the Reeve’s Tale. But the Reeve, apart from his sermonizing and his ties to the moralizing of Husbandry, is not about morality so much as accounting—​as the excerpt above makes clear:  the portrait accounts for his many different characteristics, many of which seem contradictory, in order to occasion interpretation:  “Chaucer clothes the Reeve’s behaviour in the same kind of ambiguities as he used throughout the Prologue.”41 He is, above all else, an object that forces interpretation for his liminal position as overseer of his lord’s lands socially isolates him from the “hynes,” even as they are allied in their theft and wrong-​doing, which the Reeve also participates in, by stealing from his young lord.42 Indeed, they fear the Reeve and his machinations as much as the plague, as the Prologue-​narrator explains. “They were adrad of hym as of the deeth,” implying a feeling so strong that it matches fear of a disease that decimates the population of rural England and urban London. While the social and political implications of this isolation are great, what is most interesting is the embodiment of the plague as the Reeve, which the emotive weight of this common fear, “adrad,” makes clear.43 The Reeve is as hurtful to the population as the plague.44 Central to an understanding of the Reeve and his old age, the plague reference could have some purchase on a reality outside the text. Marilyn 39 Walter of Henley, Walter of Henley’s Husbandry, 35. 40 Stone, “The Reeve,” 412.

41 Mann, Medieval Estates Satire, 165. 42 Mann, Medieval Estates Satire, 165.

43 Alcuin Blamires, “Chaucer the Reactionary:  Ideology and the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales,” The Review of English Studies 51 (2000): 523–​39. “Let me say immediately (ruining the suspense of my presentation in advance) that the officer who comes closest to making the people squeal in the General Prologue is the Reeve. What the archdeacon and the Reeve perhaps share is that they function as post-​rebellion scapegoats. In the ideology inscribed by Chaucer they constitute the dumping-​ground for antagonisms about abuse of power” (525). 44 Stone, “The Reeve,” 419–​20.

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Sandidge argues that Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s textual trajectories and depictions of youth in the former and age in the latter are informed by demographics, and by those age groups most affected by plague.45 Sandidge’s tie of Chaucer’s own old age to the depictions of old age in the Knight’s, Miller’s, and Reeve’s Tales also historicizes those tales’ depiction of old age—​just as the plague increases the space for debate between youth and age, the generational differences in depictions of Richard II’s court are a phenomenon that helps clarify these depictions of the impaired old body. Indeed, far from being unique in its isolating force, this plague reference appears to fit the other images of the Reeve and his demeanor. The Reeve seems relegated to the end in the General Prologue—​as he literally rides behind everyone else. As the opening lines suggest, the General Prologue describes a spring awakening, ripe with sexual desires and evocations of life and youth. As one of the most well-​known examples of chronographia, these lines extolling spring, youth, and rebirth are implicitly and diametrically opposed to winter, both in seasonal and embodied times. Winter figuratively stands in for the period of age in medieval literature, linked by qualities of cold and dryness of the environment that find parallels with the old body in medieval humoral theory. Chaucer’s use of the chronographia is an expression of “an older tradition of scientific-​philosophic seasons description derived from classical sources and from encyclopaedic treatises such as the Secreta Secretorum.”46 In fact, John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of Bartholomew Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, one of these “encyclopaedic traditions,” features the allegorization of February as an “olde man sittinge by the fire hetynge and warmynge his feet and hondis.”47 That the Reeve could stand in for a certain formulation of February is telling, for the poem opens with the gifts of spring and the temporalizing mention of “Aprille.” As with the body he inhabits, his presence, prologue, and tale are apparently on the margins of acceptability. From the last line of the Reeve’s portrait in The General Prologue it is clear that he has isolated himself from the rather rowdy group of pilgrims that travel toward Canterbury, which is, according to Scala, one of the signals of the Reeve’s “alienated positions” in the Tales.48 “And evere he rood the hyndreste of oure route,” a position certainly not required by his horse, which is described as “ful good.” The employment of “evere” in a temporal sense is telling here; indeed, the word communicates the constancy of the Reeve as the last in line. While he certainly has the capability to join, he does not. This position, as last in line, is potentially indicative of not only the Reeve’s social station, but also his position in a Latinate ages of man schematic, in which old age and feebleness directly precede death. But we might see in “hyndreste,” the evocative sense of posterity and of history. Besides embodying a stigmatized position at the end of life, of use, and of body, 45 Marilyn Sandidge, “Forty Years of Plague: Attitudes toward Old Age in the Tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer,” Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 357–​73.

46 Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 171. 47 Pearsall and Salter, 134–135. 48 Scala, Desire, 112.

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this sense of history calls attention to the role old men often had in the Middle Ages, as figures “giving evidence on past customs and events.”49 Certainly, his portrait in the General Prologue gestures to this notion of history, as giving evidence of “a portrait of an estate official of this status and ambition would not have resonated with such clarity” a few decades after the Tales was written.50

Dirty Tricks and Textual Transgressions

His prologue is interpreted by the Host, only the Cook responds to his tale, and he himself rides apart from the rest of the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, as the ending lines of his General Prologue-​portrait make clear. Readings of the Reeve emphasize the bleakness of the tale and the brutal violence it portrays. Lee Patterson comments that the Reeve’s “vision of life [is] haunted by an awareness of the end to which all things come.”51 William F. Woods notes that the “logic of deprivation” governs the tale, with the Reeve’s Tale opposing the Miller’s Tale’s imagery of plenty with plunder and “predation.”52 More recently, Holly Crocker has traced the creation of a “cherl masculinity” in the Reeve’s Tale and an affective movement of politics back to the countryside following the events of 1381.53 According to Nicole Nolan Sidhu, “the Reeve’s Tale portrays instead a complex, anxiety-​ridden world where men battle one another for social status and women are pawns manipulated and damaged in the men’s violent contests.”54 Sidhu highlights not only the power of taboo in the tale but also its engagement with classical sources. She invokes the specter of Ariadne in exposition of Symkyn’s daughter, Malyne, in her unfolding of the Reeve’s Tale and views the Reeve’s Tale as responding directly to Theseus and the Knight’s Tale. Indeed, according to Sidhu, “Chaucer’s use of classical legend is so extensive in the Reeve’s Tale that the work is more accurately described as a fusion of classical legend and fabliau than as a faithful rendition of the Old French genre.”55 And much of what is fused to fabliau is material that highlights the brutality and violence that might be unaccounted for in fabliaux themselves.56 What ties this tale to the Reeve’s portrait in the General Prologue and the discussion of his old-​age-​related woes of his own prologue is how the tale accounts for the Miller’s and Knight’s narratives, with regards to the depiction of old age. So where Writing Old Age departs from Sidhu’s study of the 49 Shahar, Growing Old, 82. 50 Stone, “The Reeve,” 420.

51 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 276 52 William F.  Woods, “The Logic of Deprivation in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 150–​63 at 151–​52. 53 Holly A.  Crocker, “Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale:  ‘Cherl’ Masculinity after 1381.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29.1 (2007): 225–​58 at 227. 54 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 77. 55 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 80. 56 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 77.

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obscene is to connect the first three tales of the first fragment through their illustrations of old age—​from the chaotic and violent machinations of Saturn in the Knight’s Tale to the foolish old man of the Miller’s Tale. There exists no defense against cuckolding for men in a world where everyone ages and weakens, so the imagined slight of the Miller’s comical narrative is returned with brutal force. And where the fate of Emelye in the Knight’s Tale is ultimately decided not by the agency of young men, but by the power of Saturn and all the horrors of Elde and chaos, likewise in the Reeve’s Tale, the old teller orchestrates the assault of these women, young and middle-​aged. Indeed, the conclusion to the Reeve’s Tale and its rape of Symkyn’s daughter and wife is not one that would be glossed as anything but rape57—​in spite of Malyne’s apparent lack of protest following the sexual act, and the lack of condemnation from the women involved, the punishment demonstrates a brutality that is difficult to explain. It is effected through a bed trick and the movement of the crib that holds Symkyn’s infant, which introduces the appearance of all stages of the Ages of Man in the narrative. Indeed, it is a well-​worn observation that the Reeve’s Tale involves every position of the lifecycle. From the baby whose crib and its placement makes the fabliau possible, to the aging Parson and his on-​stage manipulations, it is clear that the tale furnished by the Reeve involves more than just “youthe and elde is often at debaat.”58 The Reeve’s Tale begins with a locatable space, delineated by the Reeve in minute detail. Set near Cambridge and its university, it fits in opposition to the Miller’s Tale, which takes Oxford as its setting. Unlike the Miller, the Reeve does not simply mention a name but instead places his tale “At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Canterbrigge,” where Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle; And this is verray sooth that I yow telle: A millere was ther dwellynge many a day. (I.3922–​25)

The amount of detail which the Reeve supplies echoes back from his prologue, where the Host accuses him of sermonizing, wasting time, and wasting words. These characteristics of linguistic and spoken overproduction recall the contours of old age which Maximianus supplies in his Elegies even as the amplification of narrative given by the Reeve displays a kind of additive quality one can see in prosthesis. Location is an important feature of Chaucer’s style and here I  want to advance that the Reeve’s use of such detail should bring to the fore that Chaucer himself as clerk of the king’s works would have been tasked with such detailed descriptions, a fact supported by Chaucer’s limited use of distinct place names within the Tales. Indeed, in the midst of this accusation of temporal profligacy, given by the Host, he notes a specific location. In the turning of an old commonplace of old men—​their incessant speaking—​Chaucer locates not only the Reeve’s tale and age. 57 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 93. 58 Fein, 92–​94.

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If the reader of the Reeve can touch the setting for his tale, it appears it is the only construct for which that is possible. The man at the centre of the narrative, the treacherous Miller, is a man who “no man, for peril, dorste hym touche” (I. 3932). He is armed, and like the Miller of the pilgrims traveling to Canterbury, he is a substantial man, “capable of immoderate violence,” who “compels submission from those who reside in his domain.”59 But for a reading of old age the tale revolves around this line and its ultimate reversal:  everyone is touchable by age and death, and so the Reeve begins his tale with a character who is said to be the most able, yet is defeated—​knives and all—​by two (young) impoverished scholars. The importance of the line, and the impotence it ultimately disguises, seems clear when the Reeve repeats the line five lines later: “Ther dorste no wight hand upon hym legge,/​ That he ne swoor he should anon abegge” (I.3977–​78). The competition of the Tales and the Reeve’s obsession with payment find full expression here. There is an equation implicit in these lines:  touch the Miller and he will pay you back. Yet more to the point is the suggestive quality these lines impart of the Miller’s invincibility and the Reeve’s implicit characteristic powers of narrating. As an old man, both in his prologue, and here, telling his tale, Osewold gravitates towards a fullness of description, a repetition of lines, and a sense that, as the old men of antiquity, he speaks too much. But there is more here: the way in which Symkyn is touched echoes material from the Knight’s Tale and the insertion of Saturn into the younger gods’ activities, with Saturn symbolizing much of the power of Elde:60 Til that the pale Saturnus the colde, That knew so manye of aventures olde, Foond in his olde experience an art That he ful soone hath plesed every part. As sooth is seyd, elde hath greet avantage; In elde is bothe wysdom and usage; Men may the olde atrenne and noght atrede. (1.2443–​2449)

This invocation of Saturn in the Knight’s Tale echoes an important distinction in depicting old age that helps to frame this illustration of Symkyn. As Harry Peters has argued, Ptolemy associates Jupiter as the planetary influence over what might be characterized as the active old age, while Saturn governs the last part of life, so often associated with decrepitude.61 Symkyn, while still physically strong, is aging and heading toward the phase of life controlled by Jupiter, but must one day be ruled by Saturn, if he should live to see old age. So, while no one may touch the ripe, and almost rotten, masculinity of Symkyn, like Saturn, the Reeve shows how “elde hath greet avantage”: by striking at everything that supports that posture and position, the Reeve demonstrates how one might “atrenne” the aged by means of physical force and strength, but not “atrede” them—​for wit, experiences, and the many “aventures olde” 59 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 234.

60 Peters, “Jupiter and Saturn,” 375–​91. 61 Peters, “Jupiter and Saturn,” 383.

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faced both by Saturn and the Reeve define them as untouchable opponents in texts and narrative.62 So, this fullness of detail and narratorial power, reflective here of the ripeness of age, and the portrait of senescence which the Reeve himself describes in his prologue, continues to drive the narrative which the Reeve creates. Introducing Symkyn’s wife, the tale gives signal after signal that she views her social position, while elevated, inappropriately highly: she is “proud, and peert as is a pye” (I.3950); she “was a digne as water in a dich” (I.3964); “ful of hoker and of bisemare” (I.3965); she “thoughte that a lady sholde hire spare” (I.3966). One of these phrases might have been enough to convey one of the central truths that the Reeve attempts to communicate: that even as Symkyn’s wife hangs tenaciously to a status on which she has no real purchase, all is vanity, and all passeth away.63 If the Miller imagines himself immune to corporeal wounds, the wife broadcasts her imperviousness to poverty and ill breeding, all the while being set up to face the brutal loss for both the Miller and his wife. It is, in fact, Symkyn’s one apparent weakness that he has implicit fear of poverty and social degradation, For Symkyn wolde no wyf, as he sayde, But she were wel ynorrished and a mayde, To saven his estaat of yomanrye. (I.3947–​49)

These lines make clear how, from the outset, Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale shows that miller-​ Symkyn attempts to gain social respect through the manifest governance of his household.”64 But this governance is tested by youth in the form of the clerks, who are also “motivated by social ambition.”65 The potential for Symkyn to lose is also a signal that eventually, he must, as the process of aging cannot be stopped. Neither can the clerks, at least momentarily. Described as “Testif and lusty for to pleye,” they ask for time to have their corn ground, and swear to the master of the college that the “millere sholde not stele hem half a pekke/​ Of corn by sleighte, ne by force hem reve” (I.4010–​11). Here we might see the reflections of the Reeve’s own prologue—​where he disavows “pleye,” even as he returns textual abuse to the Tales’s Miller. Foregrounding the tensions between the young scholars of Cambridge and the Miller of Trumpington is the escalation of the Miller’s thievery, made possible by the near death of the maunciple, an explicit guard to outrageous theft. While the head of the scholars’ college at Cambridge openly rebukes Symkyn, he “craketh boost, and 62 Alan T. Gaylord, “The Role of Saturn in the Knight’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 8 (1974): 171–​90. One of the most extended discussions of Saturn’s role in the Knight’s Tale argues that the god should be understood not as a central force, but rather an “adjunct” to the Boethian sense of providence (174). Central, however, for this understanding of the Reeve is the old god’s supplemental, almost prosthetic, role to the workings of Jupiter and the rest of the gods. 63 Bertolet, “Dressing Symkyn’s Wife.” Bertolet argues that Symkyn’s wife should be read as bad taste: “While Symkyn is a figure of fraud, deception, and cruelty, Symkyn’s wife in her red gown is a figure of a different social vice: bad taste” (457). 64 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 231. 65 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 91.

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swoor it was nat so” (I.4001). Here, recalling Pearsall’s discussion of Chaucerian fabliaux and its innovation as “cherles termes,” the clerks deny to the Warden that they will be robbed (reve) by either hook or crook. After setting up the tension between town and gown which animates the tale of the Reeve, the Reeve pivots once more to location. It is fitting that regions and lands define so much of what the Reeve narrates. As the overseer of large estates, he would have been versed in the lexicon of buildings and landscapes, but the Reeve can only say, “Of o toun were they born, that highte Strother,/​Fer in the north: I kan nat telle where” (I.4014–​4105). Of course, professed inability is often a marker of the opposite for the Reeve as exclamations of weakness or expressions of the modesty topos create knowledge, ability, or authority. But what the Reeve can tell is how this narrative ends and one of the final bits of violence ties the Reeve both to his prologue and to a hazy description of something close to the act of writing. At the close of the tale, Symkyn’s wife tries, in vain, to take revenge, and like Malyne only helps the clerks. For at an hole in shoon the moon bright, And by that light she saugh hem bothe two, But sikerly she nyste who was who But as she saugh a whit thyng in hir ye. And whan she gan this white thyng espye, She wende the clerk hadde wered a volupeer, And with the staf she drow ay neer and neer, And wende han hit this Aleyn at the fulle, And smoot the millere on the pyled skulle, That doun he gooth, and cride, “Harrow! I dye!” (I.4298–​307)

Symkyn is not dead but apparently touched and toppled not only through the rape of his wife but also through the violence done to him by her in this ending scene. She believes (“wende”) that she has struck at Aleyn, the clerk who rapes her daughter, but instead, due to the light of the moon, misreads the aging Miller for the youthful assailant. Believing her husband’s shiny, bald head to be Aleyn’s “volupeer,” Symkyn’s wife strikes him with a staff. Reading hairloss, here a marker of age, as a signal of identity, she comes close to the Reeve’s prayer by reading the Miller’s age as a sign that he should be punished.66 The cries of “I dye” link with the anticipated death of the mauniciple at the beginning of the tale, signaled by the use of “wenden” and Symkyn’s wife, who “wende” that she has hit and hurt Aleyn. But the Reeve, within the tale, is ever apparent and the textual curse—​break Symkyn’s neck—​is affected through a “staf.”67 The Reeve in his General Prologue-​portrait is likened to a staff, long and lean without musculature or definition. While I would avoid 66 “On Tarrying the Accidents of Age” lists “ballidness” as one of the first accidents of old age (163).

67 Twomey and Stull, “Architectural satire,” call attention to the staff in the Miller’s Tale, noting that John’s servant Robin is commanded by John, the carpenter and cause of the Reeve’s ire, to grab a staff to enter Nicholas’s room: “ ‘Get me a staf, that I may underspore, /​ Whil that thou, Robyn, hevest up the dore’ (I 3465–​66). The carpenter then sets himself before the chamber door while the servant, ‘a strong carl for the nones, /​ … by the haspe … haaf it of atones; /​ Into the floor the

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arguing that literally Symkyn’s wife uses the Reeve to beat the Miller in the text, this narration of a staff recalls the thick meaning of this thin rod. It is after all, a shepherd’s crook or a weapon for fighting. “Staf” can also stand in for land measurement or an alphabetic character, and while these meanings might inhabit the background of the word’s use here, the imagining of this “staf” in terms of land surveys and written texts refers the word back to the Reeve, who keeps account of his lord’s lands and moveables but also threatens textual punishments. The figure of the staff can be a prosthetic one.68 The staff serves to augment, replace, and empower the normative body, which is made clear by the Host following The Tale of Melibee. Within the first few lines of The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale, Harry Bailey, the Host and judge of the narrative contest, blithely misreads The Tale of Melibee, an allegory of temperance, prudence, and justice which he and the other pilgrims have just heard. Rather than see the virtues the tale has emphasized, Harry remains lodged in his own personal narrative: he has a terrible, shrewish wife, whose virtues are nothing like Melibeus’s Prudence or her own prudence. Indeed, rather than stop violence and enlarge peace, the Host contends his wife abets his own petty and destructive violence: By Goddes bones, whan I bete my knaves, She bryngeth me forth the grete clobbed staves, And crieth, “Slee the dogges everichoon, And brek hem, bothe bak and every boon!” (VII.1897–​900)

This passage is in many ways unremarkable precisely because of his repetition. At almost every opportunity, the Host takes his textualized wife to task, a feat that the oft misogynistic narrators of the Tales make easy. Yet, in terms of prosthesis, these words do in fact rise above the level of the Host’s often crude performance. Tying “staves” to violence, these words tie the violence of Melibee and the female-​mediated peace the tale highlights to the Fortune-​controlled destruction that the Monk will highlight, linking together two textual bodies, which begin with the wounding of a body and end with depiction of wounded body after wounded body. dore fil anon’ (I 3469–​71). This means that Robin goes up a stair to the upper floor, where there is an upright door to Nicholas’s room. There is a hole towards the bottom of the door where the cat goes in and out. Applying himself to the hasp while John uses a staff to pry the door up from the bottom, Robin lifts the door off its hinges. Apparently we are meant to assume that immediately after John enters the room, Robin replaces the door on its hinges, for barely thirty lines later, Nicholas shuts the door (I 3499) so that he can talk privately with John about his plan” (321). This long quotation from their essay demonstrates the layout of John’s house, useful in their discussion of social pretension and space, but I would call attention to the way in which the Miller’s Tale uses a staff to augment and supplement the power of the old man in the tale, a man in whom the Reeve sees his reflection, explicitly, because of a similar profession, and implicitly due to the age.

68 “staf” (n), Middle English Dictionary: https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​dictionary/​ dictionary/​MED42552/​track?counter=1&search_​id=1768956. See especially definitions 1b. and 2. “staff” (n), Oxford English Dictionary: www-​oed-​com.ulm.idm.oclc.org/​view/​Entry/​188624?rsk ey=uKBjoi&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Definitions 1a., 4a., and 18a. and b.  are germane to this discussion.

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“Staves” does something more: its placement here is a clue, a signal of the power and meaning behind this word. Indeed, here a staff is connected to literal bodily power and violence—​it helps augment one body and destroy another—​and it serves as a link between the two bodies. Because it can cause one body—​that of the Host—​ to grow stronger and fiercer and cause another body—​that of the knave—​to grow weak and damaged, staff here again embodies the logic of textual prosthesis: making the body whole, simultaneously signaling the body’s weakness or incompleteness. And staff conjures up in medieval texts, especially in the Canterbury Tales, a network of different meanings and connotations for staff that signal this prosthetic connection. From shepherd’s crook to walking aid to alphabetic character, “staf” has had multiple, interconnected meanings from its earliest witness in Middle English literature. And in this network of meanings, one can often see the logic of prosthesis, making bodies and texts whole while nevertheless calling attention to their incompleteness. This staff, after all, might be a letter.

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Chapter 3

THE PAST IS PROLOGUE: FOLLOWING THE TRACE OF MASTER HOCCLEVE Both the Reeve’s Tale and the Host’s comments following the Tale of Melibee end with a discussion of a staff—​for the Reeve’s Tale, it is the weapon Symkyn’s wife uses in the final bit of textualized violence, fully repaying the Reeve’s enemy for his fabliau. For the Host, it is the “the grete clobbed staves” his wife brings to him to beat the knaves. As the Tales are recopied and then, finally, printed, solidifying the reputation of Chaucer as the first “fyndere” of English verse, these narrative punishments, for me, echo across the fifteenth century in the exemplum “Tale of John of Canace,” included in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment and printed by William Caxton. What is first a mace and then a club in Caxton’s version highlights similar energies of punishment and prosthesis. But the common exemplum and its revisions also introduce that Hoccleve is erased for Caxton, even as he functions as a prologue for print, indeed “Hoccleve is at once everywhere in Caxton … yet nowhere to be found in portfolio.”1 In fleshing out this absence and erasure, I touch first on Caxton’s printing of the Book of Curtesye with its small description of Hoccleve’s Regiment. Arguing that the Regiment serves as supplement to the conception of old age and print in Caxton’s paratextual materials, I then turn to a discussion of “John of Canace,” uncovering the inscription and staff in an otherwise empty chest. This link between Hoccleve and Caxton helps to reframe some of the exclamations of age-​related impairments in Caxton’s paratextual material, which I  trace in a number of different texts and translations, beginning with Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and ending with Polychronicon’s textual substitution for embodied old age.2 It would be difficult to find a better model for embodied old age and its similarities to writing than Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes—​the end of the prologue to Regiment makes this model valuable, even as the end of the advisory text and the inclusion of “John of Canace” suggests the model might have been used by Caxton. When Thomas Hoccleve 1 William Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor: Hoccleve, Caxton, and the Information Age,” in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 229–​260 at 240.

2 See Andrew Zurcher, “Deficiency and Supplement:  Perfecting the Prosthetic Text,” SEL 52 (2012):  143–​64, who uses a notion of prosthesis to “interrogate, in brief and using only a few illustrative examples, the ethical and economic construction of the editorial role, first in the early modern context, but chiefly in our own approach to early modern literary texts” (145). Here in and in the next chapter, I build on Zurcher’s use of supplement and prosthetic in relation to early modern studies and editing. His discussions of Ralph Knevet’s supplemental poem to Spenser’s Faerie Queene highlight not only the way in which a later supplemental text corrects a work that is found lacking but also how that supplemental text can show how the original “defective” text is itself prosthetic.

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writes of his return home, near the end of the prologue, he describes a literal journey that is also meant to serve as a figurative homecoming, a move toward patronage from the prince. There, at the conclusion of the Old Man’s wisdom, Hoccleve again discusses the material circumstances of his writing, after Recordyng in my mynde the lessoun That he me yaf, I hoom to mete wente. And on the morwe sette I me adoun, And penne and ynke and parchemeyn I hente, And to parfourme his wil and his entente I took corage, and whyles it was hoot, Unto my lord the Prince thus I wroot. (2010–​16)

Old age is somewhat terrifying for Hoccleve here at the end of the prologue—​and the glimpse of future financial woe and age-​related impairments spur Hoccleve to take “penne” and “ynke” and write while his “corage” was not lacking. These terms anticipate the weary pen of Caxton as he seeks a new way to record texts that will accommodate his age, but these accountings for age do not add up for Caxton, just as they do not for Hoccleve. As I show below, print is labour-​intensive and, as Hoccleve’s discussion of old age makes clear, it is writing itself that charges the body and depletes its account. So, the lesson given by the Old Man is one which is only partially successful, and Hoccleve “chooses to represent himself as having found consolation … in the impossible world of textuality,” a world Caxton also never leaves, in spite of his new methods for text-​making.3 These lessons of old age remain potent, however, and it is perhaps more than coincidence that Hoccleve’s lone explicit mention by William Caxton occurs in a book centred on teaching right conduct, a text that serves as the knitting up of Hoccleve’s impairing poetics here.4 Caxton’s Book of Curtesye exists in two manuscripts which are printed in a facing-​page edition in one volume, edited by Frederick Furnivall. In his introduction, Furnivall remarks on the conditions of what he calls Caxton’s copy, and Furnivall’s chance find of a better copy, found at the end of Piers Plowman. Here the older copy is better than the newer and follows the logic of the text itself, which seeks “to styre & remeue” John from vice and to “adresse” virtue as “one to folowe.”5 Then, as a “maistir” without students, other than himself, Hoccleve’s lone mention offers a fitting conclusion to a reading of old age and patronage that functions prosthetically for the old “maistir,” “making them the only place in all fifteenth-​century verse where Hoccleve is explicitly named by someone other than himself.”6 Chaucer receives praise 3 Ethan Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Penn State, 2001), 106.

4 Charles Blyth, “Introduction,” Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles Blyth (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 1999), 1–​37 at 1.

5 William Caxton, Book of Curtesye, ed. Frederick Furnivall (London: Trübner, 1868), 3. All citations refer to page numbers in this edition. 6 Robert J. Meyer-​Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170.

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as a father of English verse, but Gower is mentioned and receives his own adulatory stanza. These stanzas are the staves that might support different histories of English literature and its genealogy, participating in the same kinds of energy as Dolmage’s crooked histories of rhetoric. Responding earlier to similar concerns, Ethan Knapp urges his readers to see past traditional conceptions of literary histories, past “where the courtly tradition has its history confirmed and reinforced by the canons of literary genealogy,” to “bureaucratic art” which “always risks appearing as the production of scattered and marginal eccentrics.”7 A more apt description of Hoccleve perhaps is unthinkable. Scattered, marginal, yet central defines much of Hoccleve’s works through the emphasis of age, ability, and impairment offered through narrative prosthesis. Curtesye, in fact, does relegate Hoccleve to the margins. Writing of “bookes enornede with eloquence,” the author first discusses Gower, then Chaucer and Hoccleve, and finally Lydgate, reserving more than half of this section for him. Furnivall’s displeasure at this last contribution is palpable, marking the judgement of Lydgate as a sign of bad taste.8 Even as this speaker tells the child what to read, he also manages to confess his age, and based upon his elderly station, leave interpretation of that age to the young. The speaker advises that the reader should Beholde Ocklyf in his translacion In goodly langage/​& and sentence passyng wyse How he gyueth his prynce/​such exortacion As to the hyest/​he could best deuyse Of trouthe. pees. mercy. and Iustise And vertues/​leetyng for no slouthe To do his deuoir & quite him of his trouthe Requirede him/​as ayenst his souerayne Most drade & louyde.​9

Hoccleve, necessarily for this example, merits only the attention of his “translacion,” which means of course the Regiment. Hoccleve’s role here, in his translation of exempla, is one that is required, not marked by “slouthe” and dedicated to a search for “trouthe,” leaving aside any “evidence of Hoccleve’s rambling, self-​absorbed prologue, and no indication of the Lancastrian author’s social identity as privy seal clerk.”10 So while it is a depiction of a work that is not printed by Caxton, it is also not the depiction of Hoccleve’s work, which though unnamed by Caxton functions as prologue and prosthetic for his printed paratexts; indeed, these figures are united in how their weary bodies create conditions for preferment and patronage. These bodies further serve as the link between this patronage and writing—​their bodily woes require the former because the 7 Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 186. 8 Furnivall, Book of Curtesye, ix. 9 Caxton, Book of Curtesye, 37. 10 Meyer-​Lee, Poets and Power, 170.

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latter has wearied their body, even as it is central to winning more favour.11 Hoccleve’s old body emphasizes labour, while Caxton’s “erases the material labor behind his text.”12 And this representation of texts, erasure, and labour perhaps finds voicing in Curtesye through the conduct manual’s first, and ultimately governing metaphor: “But as waxe resseyueth prynte or figure/​ So children ben disposide of nature.”13 Children, the narrator of Curtesye affirms, are like wax tablets, which offer no resistance to print and textuality, and this link might be pushed even further, as it foregrounds that imprints before 1500 are called incunabula and thus are children themselves.14 But Hoccleve is also lost, just as an image in a wax table.15 Hoccleve exists as a cipher in this text, an author one ought to know, if no way exists for that knowledge. While Caxton never chose to print Hoccleve in part or his work in its entirety, he does translate and remake Jacobus de Cessolis’ De ludo scacchorum in the Game and Playe of the Chess, a text used also by Regiment of Princes and a place where one could read the exemplum of “John of Canace.”16 Caxton chooses instead to erase Hoccleve from his version of English literary history, ignoring that Caxton is retracing in many ways the footsteps of Hoccleve. And this concentration on the long-​buried, almost forgotten, link with a rhetorical pose embodied by Hoccleve offers opportunity to show how the hollowness of Hoccleve’s formal and textual elements, along with his repeated ties of the aging, impaired body to action and narrative, actually doubles back to a previously explored area of poetic engagement with the world, the text and forward to a new world of printing, which is as arduous to the body as the scribal labour it helps to first supplement and, later, largely supplant. So, I begin to shift the way Writing Old Age looks at prosthesis and old age—​adding to Parlement’s and Chaucer’s Reeve’s emphasis on narrative creating old age, where narrative functions as a prosthesis, one which both articulates the lack and debility that defines old age and that serves to paper over those impairments—​to a notion of prosthesis that anticipates the sixteenth-​century conception of prosthesis found in rhetorical handbooks, articulated by Thomas Wilson. This latter notion of prosthesis refers to the addition of an initial syllable which changes the quotidian use and meaning of a word, which I use in Chapter 3 and 4 to signify how prologues function akin to these initial syllables, adding and changing how the material they supplement is understood. Indeed, prosthesis in these mid-​sixteenth-​century rhetorical strategies is fleshed out, 11 William Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor,” 245.

12 Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor,” 245. Emphasis is Kuskin’s. 13 Caxton, Book of Curtesye, lines 6–​7.

14 William Kuskin, “Introduction,” Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 1–​31 at 5.

15 For a discussion of wax tablets, albeit for a century later, see Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J.  Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–​419. 16 Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor,” 248–​49.

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as David Wills has shown, before the first usage of prosthesis in the context of bodily addition or limb replacement. In these terms, prosthesis is not explicitly described until the early eighteenth century, but the intersection between rhetorical and bodily prosthesis is clear in the “medical renaissance of the sixteenth century” that “runs parallel with development … of humanist rhetoric.”17 What Wills traces and Wilson defines in his rhetorical manual are undreamt by Hoccleve and Caxton, but nevertheless, Wilson’s exposition of prosthesis clarifies how the addition of these textualized old bodies and prologues both call attention to a lack even as they paper over that lack. Hoccleve’s prologues, absent for Caxton, ignored or erased, nevertheless supplement Caxton’s paratextual explications of print and body.18 This connection between prosthesis and prologues remains a concern in Writing Old Age, as Chapter  4 reads the choral Gower of Shakespeare’s Pericles as prosthesis, prologue, and paratext for the play in terms of old age and impairment; Gower’s position in relating that material through old age; and the prosthesis of old age, as costume or effect for Gower and Amans in Confessio Amantis. Emphasizing representations of age in their prologues, as choral figures, and paratexts themselves first in the prologues of their respective works, this placement recalls that the past is both prologue and prosthesis for these authors as they mine the past—​either works or authors—​to show how a past with incomplete material and old sources—​old bodies—​is additive for a present, whether during the fifteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenth. These prosthetic prologues also highlight how these marginal voices work alongside a main text, simultaneously using the marginalized voices and bodies of the aged to speak to younger interlocutors, to advise those in power, and to cultivate patronage. Hoccleve shares these strategies with Caxton, whose prologues and epilogues later in the fifteenth century might be said to function akin to a “paratext,” which Gérard Genette describes as “a heterogeneous group of practices and discourses of all kinds” characterized less by their material forms (preface, epilogue, etc.) than by their status as a message, defined by its illocutionary effect and conditions of addressee and creator.”19 For example, the long prologue to Regiment offers itself up not only as an advertisement of Hoccleve’s lessons given in the body of the advisory text but also as a reminder of the prince’s obligations toward Hoccleve. Likewise, Caxton’s prologues advertise not only his imprints but print itself, as he uses these paratexts to create markets and demand which possibly do not yet exist for him. But the notion of paratext should not hide the fact that these materials maintain a close relationship with the so-​called main text, as Genette describes them as a “threshold” or 17 David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 218.

18 My thinking about prologues here has been shaped by Craig Dworkin’s “Textual Prostheses,” Comparative Literature 57 (2005):  1–​24; Andrew Higl, “Henryson’s Textual and Narrative Prosthesis”; and Andrew Zurcher, “Deficiency and Supplement.”

19 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.

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The Past is Prologue fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-​text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that –​whether well or poorly understood and achieved –​is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it20

In this way, of course, we can see how these prologues and epilogues to Caxton curate an audience and build demand and audience, using metaphors of an impaired old body. As Alexandra Gillespie argues, “Paratext made texts more marketable, but in his prologues and epilogues, Caxton divests each book of its status as a commodity and associates it with traditional literary values.”21 And perhaps one of these traditional literary values might be the incorporation of a previous textual tradition from Hoccleve, which he nevertheless also obscures by subsuming this prosthesis, not printing it.

Politics is Prologue

The specter of Ricardian England and its political upheavals and end in usurpation and partial erasure is itself a prologue to the fifteenth century, both in terms of governance and textuality.22 And much of this haunting can be seen in the proliferation of mirror literature, advisory texts written to rulers.23 Antony J.  Hasler writes that Hoccleve’s Regiment “is the earliest example in English poetry of a genre that was to become increasingly popular in the fifteenth century, that of advice to princes.”24 Grounding these “fictions of advice” in a prevalent and polyvocal imagining of age and counsel, counsel takes on what perhaps is an outsized function, because counselors were so necessary in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to Judith Ferster, Since Edward III was enfeebled by age in the last years of his reign, since Richard II came to the throne at the age of ten, since Henry IV was seriously ill several times during his reign, and since Henry VI came to the throne at the age of one year and as an adult suffered periods of insanity, there were long periods when the council was actually running the government.25

While a would-​be advisor, such as Hoccleve, would not have been part of the highest levels of government denoted by Ferster’s mention of “council,” these long periods of 20 Genette, Paratexts, 2. 21 Alexandra Gillespie, “ ‘Folowynge the trace of mayster Caxton’:  Some Histories of Fifteenth-​ Century Printed Books,” Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 167–​95 at 169.

22 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–​1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 102.

23 For a discussion of the tradition of mirror literature, see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania, 1996). 24 Antony J. Hasler, “Hoccleve’s unregimented body,” Paragraph 13 (1990): 164–​83 at 164. 25 Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 2.

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incapacitation nevertheless establish a context in which Hoccleve would be writing the prince and not the king. And past is again prologue here, as most of these figures are incapacitated in some way by age, from the elderly Edward III to the youthful Richard II. These counselors and advisors, even acting through supplemental roles, faced danger, even death and destruction. The fate of Simon Burley, Richard II’s tutor, is well-​known. He was both tutor and then sub-​chamberlain for the King, a Knight of the Garter, and a long-​serving attendant to Richard’s mother as well. As one of the Ricardian counselors sent to his death by the Lords Appellant in 1388, Burley’s fate was tied into a narrative, largely it seems, controlled by the Appellants. Although the St. Albans Chronicle records that Burley’s death was not decided unanimously, chroniclers who were not openly hostile to Richard such as the monk behind the Westminster Chronicle report similar portraits of Burley, as they incorporate contemporary reports of the parliamentary actions, word for word. And those words damn him in terms of how his actions affect Richard and the realm, in light of Richard’s age. The first charge, the umbrella accusation, accuses all of those tried with Burley of the same offense: in light of the “tenderness of the age of our lord the king and the innocence of his person,” his counselors obscured Richard’s own moral compass and through their enlargement of their personal and political prerogatives, reduced the king to a servile state.26 The charges that apply to Burley specifically roughly follow the same form. The seventh charge expands upon the discussion of Richard’s age, and Burley’s exploitation of his role. Also, whereas the said Simon was chamberlain of our lord the king in his tender age and bound to counsel him for the best to the profit of himself and of his realm, the said Simon by wicked design and procurement counselled our lord the king to have in his household a great number of aliens, Bohemians, and others, and to give them great gifts out of the revenues and commodities of the realm; whereby our lord the king is greatly impoverished and the people utterly oppressed.27

And the first part of the twelfth charge:

Also, whereas the said Simon remained in attendance upon the person of our lord the king in the days of his youth until a certain time when he was forbidden the king’s presence by the king’s good council owing to his evil government of the king’s person and to certain other misdeeds, he afterwards returned to the king’s company without the assent of the good council.28

The issues surrounding these charges are manifold, but the repeated utterance of Richard’s “tender” age is both surprising and inevitable, given the course of action that the Appellants follow. Christopher Fletcher has demonstrated that the exercise of government more directly and forcefully by the king and his counselors led to the return of the king’s youth during the crises of 1386–​1388. “It is important to note that this 26 The Westminster Chronicle: 1381–​1394, ed. and trans. L.  C. Hector and Barbara F.  Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 271. All citations from Westminster Chronicle refer to this edition. 27 Westminster Chronicle, 275. 28 Westminster Chronicle, 277.

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use of the king’s youth was not a continuity from the beginning of the reign but the revival of a theme which had faded out from public discourse in the early 1380s.”29 In fact, after this crisis, the ageist themes of criticism against the Ricardian regime are again muted, until the new explosions of royal prerogative in 1397. But what these chronicles and events show is that depicting age is political for much of the late fourteenth century, serving as prologue for the end of Richard II’s reign and his subsequent death, as the supposedly rash and immature youth is replaced by his younger cousin.

Hoccleve’s Trace and Empty Inheritances

These dynamics which surround the chronicle versions of the events from 1386 through the end of Richard II’s reign continue to operate in Henry IV’s reign, as the Regiment of Princes deploys common depictions of youth and age to claim authority and patronage for Hoccleve and to offer advice to the young prince and future Henry V. The Regiment’s blending of apparent autobiography and advisory text suggests first how rich a text it remains for ideas of prosthesis on the level of formal structures and generic expectations: the “Regement … is essentially a performative text. It performs not only the creation and life of a narrator persona that seems to mirror that of its author.”30 The prologue, oversized and indicative of a prolixity long attributed to aged speakers, anticipates the function of Wilson’s prosthesis, rhetorically understood.31 As with the letter added to the beginning of a word, which changes its meaning, the prologue forces a re-​evaluation of the advisory material, including the exemplum of “John of Canace,” a tale whose force is redirected by its inclusion in Caxton’s Game and Playe of Chesse. But prosthesis works further in Regiment: as recent discussions of scribal labour and the Old Man of the prologue make clear. This aged figure functions somewhat as a mirror for youth, advising Hoccleve himself on the state of the kingdom, the weariness of the clerk’s body, and the lack of possible avenues for improvement. Writing about the old body and Hoccleve’s own age allows the poet to flesh out a connection between the work of the scribe and the vulnerability and mortality of the human body, a connection in which we can read both a claim about the importance of writing as a technology for supplementing the body and also a corresponding fear that writing is made at the cost of the scribe’s body.32

This notion of supplement strikes at the heart of prosthetic thinking for Hoccleve. Indeed, as Knapp points out, there is a central contradiction in viewing extensive labour as that which augments the old body, even as it surely continues, even accelerates, that 29 Fletcher, Richard II, 153. 30 Elisabeth Kempf, Performing Manuscript Culture : Poetry, Materiality, and Authorship in Thomas Hoccleve’s “Regement of Princes” (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 2.

31 A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 135–​37. 32 Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 83.

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weakening. But perhaps, as I add, we might see how this contradiction is the source of power here:  by creating narratives about debility, which cause further debility, Hoccleve claims more space to argue for the financial support and patronage he will require in the future regardless. Power in Hoccleve often comes from the margins, from what is secondary:  And as a secondary concern, Knapp’s characterization of writing as “supplement” also brings to mind that Hoccleve’s positions of failing old age and laborious writing are grounded in either prologues to his texts (such as the Old Man in Regiment) or in works that function as prologues for later works (such as La male regle for Regiment) which are in fact often grounded in the lessons these old bodies can offer through this impotence and power. This imagery of writing as supplement happens in the supplemental, yet often central, parts of Hoccleve’s work. And to think of age-​related impairments and writing as similar in their disabling force brings to mind the essence of narrative prosthesis, which is “foremost about the ways in which the ruse of prosthesis fails in its primary objective: to return the incomplete body to the invisible status of a normative essence.”33 These complaints about writing and old age remain potent, yet remain as areas of announced debility, and Hoccleve “chooses to represent himself as having found consolation … in the impossible world of textuality.”34 As the above discussion suggests, the prologue to Regiment often voices the pains of old age and work, especially in its clerical or scribal contexts, as in the dialogue between the imagined Old Man and the anxious poet, which becomes almost a confession. Much has already been written of “travaillous stilnesse” of writing, especially the echoes here of the accidents of age and work’s articulation as connected to identity.35 Work, and writing in particular, becomes something of a substitute for the miseries of age, seen in the effect of writing on the body.36 Imagining writing as a warrior destroying his back, Hoccleve then runs through his body to his stomach, which likewise is grievously harmed by the stooping required to look at the blank parchment, which in turns affects his eyes. Indeed, Hoccleve links blindness and eye strain to writing and the white page, and this impairment, beyond the main effect of writing, according to Hoccleve, remains one of the iconic markers of age.37 But the unity of impairment mirrors the unity of body required for this physical labour: eye, hand, mind, all must work. And these three are 33 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 8. 34 Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 106.

35 See Isabel Davis’s treatment of these complaints in Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially 146. 36 Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 91.

37 For an extended discussion of blindness in medieval texts, its status as impairment, and its function, the following: of particular importance to Gower and his blindness, see Jonathan Hsy’s “Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, and Accessing John Gower,” Accessus 1, Article 2. Available at: https://​scholarworks.wmich.edu/​accessus/​vol1/​iss1/​2. Julie Singer treats poetry, medieval medical theories, and blindness in Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry (Cambridge:  Brewer, 2011). Finally, Edward Wheatley tracks blindness in late medieval England and France in Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind.

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in fact common casualties of the slide into old age. For medical treatises that theorize of a unity between body and soul, old age not only wrecks the body in appearance and physical capacity, but the memory and mental acuity as well, even as memory and mental acuity remain central to one of the roles of the aged in the Middle Ages, as guardians and custodians of the past.38 But, in portraying work as a as a kind of “prosthetic,” as work supplements and substitutes for the decay Hoccleve elsewhere ascribes to age, Hoccleve makes clear “writing is age.”39 In order to clarify Hoccleve as prologue and prosthetic for Caxton, we might flesh out the connections further in thinking through writing as substitute and supplement, that is, as prosthetic. These lines also gesture to previously discussed depictions of age in Writing Old Age. In particular, the resonances of this description of “travaillous stilnesse” bring to mind the description of Parlement’s Elde, whose self-​depiction anticipates much of Hoccleve’s complaint here: And when he sotted my syghte than sowed myn hert, Croked me, cowrbed me, encrampeschet myn hondes, That I ne may hefe tham to my hede ne noghte helpe myselven, Ne stale stonden one my fete bot I my staffe have. (286–​89)

Elde claims that old age has taken first sight, which is the source of much grief for Elde, whose heart is soured, but his transformation as he ages is matched externally by this internal change, linked by the loss of sight, which makes possible the documenting of these bodily losses even as it drives his affective change. The curving and crookedness of Elde’s body, from his back to his hands, as aging has “encrampeschet” them, renders a staff necessary, with its prosthetic function explicitly stated. Returning to Hoccleve’s depiction, then, we might see how the potential of these complaints suggests Elde’s twisted body, itself a kind of commonplace. Hoccleve suggests that the staff—​as prosthetic—​is made necessary by the staves of poetry, guidance, and bureaucracy that he completes. Aging, however, is unavoidable; even if he could sow a field or work in some other way, these pains remain.40 Writing here however has potential—​to age him faster but also to offer a kind of crutch to lean on when aging makes work impossible, through annuities or corrodies. In short, the implication might be that Hoccleve barters away his present for the potential of patronage and advancement—​these years are lost to a craft that might secure a future.41 As Kuskin has demonstrated, “the physical 38 Shahar, Growing Old, 82–​83.

39 Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 93.

40 Again, see Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, to see how Hoccleve’s connection here reflects how discourse needs prosthesis, needs supplementation,” and how this “reveals an imperfection that might be valued as a reflection of our partial, leaky, abnormal bodies” (110).

41 Julie Orlemanski, “Literary Genre, Medieval studies, and the Prosthesis of Disability,” Textual Practice 30 (2016):  1253–​72. Hoccleve’s plainly, if constructed, autobiographical poetry calls attention to the way in which disability, as a modern category, can itself serve as a “historicist prosthesis” (1253), according to Orlemanski who argues that “The close association of an embodied author and a first-​person literary persona brings along with it other literary traits, like extended

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and intellectual in ‘trauaillous stilnesse,” is “made tangible in Hoccleve’s body and the literary manuscripts formed by his labor, for the body and the manuscript are a subject to a system of production that is both autonomous and contingent.”42 Mirroring the connections between work and age, counsel and begging come together in Regiment, ensuring that the prince can see how tender his heart should become, even if it is “fool largesse.” And the securing of a future through patronage for Hoccleve is a vexed proposition, with the inclusion of the prologue’s Old Man functioning both as mirror of old age and necessary mediator: “the beggar’s praise of Prince Henry would have had the appearance of crass flattery had it been addressed to Henry directly by Hoccleve.”43 This stance, however, is also an old one: Anthony Hasler, in discussing the role of the aging poet, speaking to ageless or youthful power, begins with a discussion of Gower and Richard, including Gower’s old textual body—​discussed in Chapter 1—​at the end of Book VIII of the Confessio Amantis. In tying the presentation of Gower as a poet—​ aged and infirm—​to the majesty of first Richard and then England at the end of Book VIII of Confessio, Hasler confirms the frequency of this image throughout the fifteenth century, noting how the “subject’s body, feeble or old or indigent, is counterpoised to the glorified body of a patron who is beyond such constraints.”44 As a bridge between Hoccleve and Caxton, the exemplum of “John of Canace” and its depiction of avarice and prodigality is one that continues these discussions of old age and prosthesis, while accounting for the absence and presence of Hoccleve’s verse in Caxton’s print. The story of “John of Canace” is translated, retransmitted, and rewritten many times throughout the Middle Ages, proving how popular and useful this story of prodigal father, prodigal children, and wasted inheritance might have been. In fact, the narrative links Thomas Hoccleve and William Caxton through absence.45 While William Caxton prints the Game and Playe of Chesse, which contains a version of the story, he does not seem to ever have made an imprint of Hoccleve’s work. Referring back to the contours of a link between Hoccleve and Caxton is instructive: the inheritance for John’s children who prove neglectful is nothing. They open a chest, which is empty except for descriptions of first-​person experience; commentary on places, persons, and institutions that made up the author’s everyday milieu; the plausibility of assuming a single mind behind the text’s stylistic properties and ethical claims; and the availability of the authorial persona for readers’ empathetic regard. These characteristics of the genre open onto greater understanding of the lived experience of impaired persons in the Middle Ages and make the prosthesis of disability a good fit” (1258). Indeed, one of Orlemanski’s main examples is Hoccleve’s Series. 42 Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor,” 237.

43 Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The medieval exemplum and the Chaucerian tradition (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994), 306. “The beggar’s praise of Prince Henry would have had the appearance of crass flattery had it been addressed to Henry directly by Hoccleve.”

44 Antony J.  Hasler, Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–​7.

45 William Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor,” 246–​60.

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a mace that threatens people who despise him with the promise of violence—​and the implications for thinking through how narratives of old age function prosthetically are numerous. The exemplum itself for these reasons is worth unpacking. Possibly too prodigal, John is free with capital:  “That of despenses he was outrageous,/​ And of his good they were ay desirous” (4197–​98). Throughout his life, he gives his sons and daughters whatever they desire, to repay their “flaterie” (4196), and because his children “evere weren upon him greedy” (4200). But when the gifts diminish, so do his children’s affections, and “They wax unkynde unto him anoon,/​ For aftir had he cherisshynge noon” (4204–​5). John’s cure for this family disease is a loan from a merchant, “his trusty freend had been ful yore” (4209). After he convinces his children to stay the night with him, he allows them to hear and see him count the loan—​10,000 pounds—​and they are convinced to let him stay with him for the duration of his life. Thinking that the treasure is locked in his chest, they care for him the rest of his life. After another clever trick at his death, his children are compelled to give money to the Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans. Retrieving the key from the orders, the children discover John’s trick: there is nothing save a mace: In which ther gayly maad was and ywrought This same scripture: “I, John of Canace, Make swich testament testament heere in this place: Who berith charge of other men and is Of hem despysid, slayn be he with this.” (4350–​54)

Unlike John, Hoccleve, of course, doesn’t have the tools necessary to combat his age and poverty; John’s strategy turns on a network of connections and the old friend and the trust between them: He to a marchant gooth of his notice Which that his trusty freend had been ful yore, Byseechynge him that he wolde him chevice Of ten thousand pound ne lenger ne more Than dayes thre, and he wolde it restore At his day. This was doon; the somme he hente And to his owne hous therwith he wente. (4208–​14)

And here the similarities end between John and Hoccleve; Hoccleve has no trusty friend to loan him money to convince Henry to fund his annuity, secure him a benefice, or supply him with other material comforts. Famously and supposedly, Hoccleve’s friends had abandoned him after an acute mental breakdown, as he related in his Complaint, and he has no “trusty freend” of “ful yore.” The issue of trust and capital has been examined by William Kuskin who writes, “The Tale of John of Canace underscores that trust only masks the coercive power of capital, and that it is ‘foole large’ to believe otherwise.”46 If one were to follow the logic of Hoccleve’s implicit identification with John, then the aim and result of John’s use of trust in an old friend to produce payment for lack 46 Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor,” 250.

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of trust in his younger children touches again on danger for Hoccleve. The threat of violence assumed by this mace, “slayn be he with this,” produces an anxious extension of Hoccleve’s identification with John. If John is Hoccleve, and Hoccleve John, then Hoccleve’s care for Henry in the tutelage of his tender years unpaid will be violence unto Henry.47 Larry Scanlon interprets the mace “as a primitive weapon turned signifier of communal sovereignty” and as such “the mace embodies the power of ideology to material result.”48 This “wonderful emblem of the power” that Scanlon imagines Hoccleve offers to Henry can certainly be seen differently. In fact, the mace gestures to the same energies behind the textual creation of Hoccleve’s own poem to Henry, reproducing the impetus to first be a good ruler, and then, as that good ruler, pay poor Hoccleve. Written exactly in Hoccleve’s text as exactly as it was on the mace, this textual product, “scripture,” recalls not only the status of Hoccleve as compiler, taking textual bits from Secreta Secretorum as well as De ludo scacchorum, but also the prominent role of scripture proper within the Regiment. Again and again, Hoccleve uses the Bible as support for his teachings, and beats the expected reader with the knowledge that following his advice is to act the king, and to act the king is to be the king.49 In fact, Hoccleve’s interactions with the Old Man in the extended prologue to Regiment concern the very issues raised by a depiction of Hoccleve offering up his own empty chest to Caxton: inside the printer can only find a mace or a club, two weapons which resemble staves and which carry inscriptions.

Erasing Prosthesis: Printing Paratexts

But what if this empty chest, save mace or club, is instead the signal of the prosthetic relationship between poet and printer? Thomas Hoccleve’s weary discussions of writing and patronage depend on the relationship between old age and narrative, where the depiction of the aged scribe fleshes out how narrative works to highlight and hide the impairment of that old body, a position which haunts Caxton’s paratexts. Rehearsing an Hocclevean complaint about writing but revising it for the late fifteenth century, Caxton claims print as a substitute for pen and ink, a necessary supplement for the aging body that can no longer labour over the white parchment. This rhetoric of impairment is self-​effacing even as it demands an audience and economic market, mirroring Cato’s judgement of old men’s voices and their importance in Cicero’s De Senectute. This 47 For a reading that examines the ambivalence of the tale-​-​as both advice to the Lancastrians and as a narrative that uncovers their empty claim to the throne, see Paul Strohm’s England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–​1422 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1998), 196–​214.

48 Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 320.

49 Strohm remarks, in England’s Empty Throne, “A certain ambivalence or two-​sidedness has characterized this narrative throughout: implicitly loyalist in its advice about inveigling subjects into submission, it is recklessly irreverent in identifying the father as gylour and the chest’s promise as an empty one. It is undeniably shrewd, but also cynical, in its perception that even an empty vacuous centre can constitute subjects as good citizens so long as it engages their desires” (213).

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prosthetic claim achieves voicing in Caxton’s first imprint, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, and echoes throughout his corpus of imprints, implicitly and explicitly, a few of which I discuss below in greater detail. This claim, a rehearsal of the prosthetic connection between old age and narrative that describes the pains of old age, helps to continue to revise the old narrative about fifteenth-​century English literature:  once considered dull and unimaginative, a poor copy of the Chaucerian verse that proceeded it and a necessary purgatory that leads to the artistry of the Elizabethan verse, the fifteenth century became a kind of waiting room for the maturation of the earlier fruits of Ricardian verse.50 This narrative has been challenged on a number of different fronts, and, thankfully, the study of fifteenth-​century English literature has overcome this early view.51 But the basis for thinking the fifteenth century dull, old, and drab are the literal readings of many of the texts themselves, with poetic self-​fashioning that highlights age, impairments, dullness, and indigence: a kind of “beggar” poetics.52 Indeed, Caxton’s use of these narratives of old age demonstrates a continuity with some of the poetic strategies of the Ricardian figures in depicting old age, by adopting the prosthetic of old age—​whether factual or not. Following Hoccleve, Caxton, in his prologues and epilogues, claims impairment through old age and implicitly links himself genealogically to the poetic figures of the late fourteenth century. In claiming to be too old, too broken, too dull, Caxton here, uses a certain narrative of impairment to create further narrative. By fleshing out how these notices of impairment reflect what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have called “narrative prosthesis” and what Jay T. Dolmage has called “disability rhetoric,” I also show that they serve as a sort of power and ability. Narratives of impairment, in short, become a prosthetic (in the sense of addition or correction) for a declamation of impairment, both forcing the reader to read the impairment as lack and addition. This emphasis on old age also suggests a link between old stories and old writers, as that writer is beset with age-​related impairments, but also, as Alexandra Gillespie has shown, these old writers are the fourteenth-​ and early fifteenth-​century poets whose work Caxton prints.53 More than simply an argument that old writers produce material on old stories, the connection seems to be more active: old stories and the effort they require produce age, along with age-​related impairments. Work both makes Caxton impotent even as a different kind of work gives him power again. As the hazy terms of prologue and epilogue here signal, the use of age as an excuse is clearly no excuse at all and a good deal of caution should be utilized in reading this epilogue, which is also 50 See David Lawton’s “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54 (1987):  761–​99 for both a description of critical reactions of the fifteenth century, as well as a defense of the century’s supposed “dullness.” 51 William Kuskin, “The Fourth Generation:  Figuring Literary History out of the Long Fifteenth Century,” Reformation 14 (2009): 171–​78. 52 Meyer-​Lee, Poets and Power, 4.

53 Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473–​1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29.

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something of a prologue to a good deal of printing and textual production for Caxton.54 In fact, this bit of text reproduces the old body as site of impairment and inability while also implicitly using that old body as impetus to use new technologies, as old texts retain a good deal of economic power in this transition—​Caxton’s claims about the market for old stories printed in new ways.55 So, these inflections of old and new remain important for the imprints of Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and others: called incunabula, those newly born imprints also give space to the apparently autobiographical accounts of Caxton’s old age, inscribe on these youthful works a discourse that connects printing and texts to old age, ability, and impairment.56 Indeed, as William Kuskin has shown, Caxton’s biography is intimately and consciously connected to his books: Defined by the genre of romance, Caxton’s reflections appear the ruminations of the last medieval hero; viewed as part of a larger social economy transforming itself through its own terms, we can understand it as strategically connected to the development of authorship, class identity, and the personal library, what Caxton calls “his chambre or studye.”57

Kuskin’s reflection on Caxton as “last medieval hero” and framing of his reflections, especially those of his biography, as “romance” position Caxton as a figure stuck in between two periods, helping to form one that is defined by the value of books, both as material objects and the value they give to their owners as symbolic and cultural objects. That is, it takes literal capital to buy Caxton’s works and they serve as evidence of this material wealth. Yet owning them is also valuable in the sense that books mark one as cultivated and cultured. Kuskin expands this notion even more for Caxton, whose life and biography he describes as “bibliographical,” as the books he prints literally give him 54 N. F. Blake, “Caxton, William (1415x24–​1492),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Jan. 2008 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​4963, accessed July 1, 2013]. According to N. F. Blake, Caxton’s output was tremendous after this epilogue: “the various works he issued can be divided approximately as follows: eighteen he translated, printed, and published, though three works he translated he did not print; sixty-​eight he printed and published, though these often included his own prologues and epilogues, and some were edited by Caxton; ten he printed; and a few texts printed abroad were published by him.” 55 David R. Carlson has pointed to the ephemera—​such as pamphlets and handbills—​that Caxton likely relied on, together with a “speculative book market,” in “A Theory of the Early English Printing Firm: Jobbing, Book Publishing, and he Problem of Productive Capacity in Caxton’s Work,” in Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 35–​68. Useful here is his discussion of the printing of the Canterbury Tales, an endeavour that did not guarantee commercial success but would have likely spelled disaster for the press if it had not been profitable (49), but which spoke to a “preference … for safe titles already well established in the manuscript trade: Chaucer and Chaucerians, like Lydgate” (57). 56 https://​oed.com/​view/​Entry/​94138?redirectedFrom=incunabula&

57 William Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 31.

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his name as he inserts his name into his imprints. I would add that this bibliographical life of Caxton is also one that is framed throughout his prologues and epilogues in terms of old age and age-​related impairment: Caxton, throughout his printed corpus, uses a technological innovation—​the rise of moveable type—​to continue the use of old age as a pose and posture that at once announces its impotence and simultaneously uses that lack of power to claim authority. In this way, Caxton echoes Cato’s descriptions of age in Cicero’s text, by implying both that old age is often portrayed as weak and feeble, but almost always performs duties, including the production of a certain narrative about that inability; that the depiction of old age necessitates both the passage of time, in order to show how time affects the aging body, and the stopping of that time, to illustrate a body at a certain moment; and finally that old age is no more absolute than any other contested biological or social frame that is used to categorize and identity. Yet at the same time, these beginnings live with the end, as Caxton’s retirement from script marks the beginning of his print career, highlighting the contradiction in his relationship to history and innovation: at the same time that he “abandons” script, citing the bodily toil that this past technology takes on his body, he also concentrates on printing those texts that handle old events, narratives, and histories. In as much as the bodily urge to print is positioned as prosthetic to a failing body and a means of preserving ever-​diminishing ability in the epilogue to the third book of Recuyvells, print is also positioned as a way to find, conserve, and disseminate the old corpora of the classical and medieval pasts. Caxton’s discussions of script and print over his nearly twenty-​year span of printing appear over and over in the material which he often supplies to older works, both in and out of translation. But perhaps these exclamations of debility and endorsements of printing as prosthetic are themselves a script that offers Caxton some benefit, economic and otherwise: According to Daniel Wakelin, in “his famous prologues and epilogues, Caxton also expresses zeal to reproduce his works and accumulate readers, no doubt through a keen mercantile spirit.”58 Wakelin’s claim is sound, and Caxton’s cries of impairment and debility perhaps help to introduce and authorize a new technology, using an old body to authorize and familiarize it. Caxton, then, revises and continues to use an existing relationship between narrative and old age, where narrative performs prosthetically, highlighting the inability of that body while supplementing it, in order to connect that script to his imprinting of text. Put another way, these prologues and epilogues connect to each other through a constellation of similar imagery and framing, among which old age looms large, a point Kuskin makes in his tracing of Caxton’s depiction of the Nine Worthies—​who are discussed in Chapter 1. There, he asserts That Caxton frequently discusses the mechanics of printing in his writing is widely recognized; that he also uses his prologues and epilogues to map a series of bibliographical, thematic, and political connections between his texts is less so.59

58 Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature: 1430–​ 1530 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), 147. 59 Kuskin, “Caxton’s Worthies Series,” 511.

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Indeed, beyond the mercantile ideas undergirding the presumably expensive printing enterprise, Caxton’s prologues voice a connected and comprehensive vision of his own aged body and the bodies of other aged men, which finds expression in some of the translations that he chooses to print. In this way, Caxton creates texts that illustrate how a posture of age-​related impairment, coupled with an ability borne out through texts, changes in the decades following the Ricardian and Lancastrian poets. This persistence of the pen in print, both as a reason to print but also as the method that Caxton uses after he exclaims that he cannot highlights both the pen’s simultaneous prosthetic role and the reason for prosthesis. Caxton’s early printing cannot or will not shake the specter of script and must be understood within a hazy frame of old and new. Indeed, as others have noted, Caxton depends on old books and stories, and their more guaranteed profitability, even as his texts embrace a new method of creation.

Broken Bodies and Narrating Destruction: Troy and Caxton

According to the master narrative of printing, in 1474, William Caxton, diplomat and merchant, printed the first book in English. The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a translation of an earlier French work composed in the decade before by Raoul Lefèvre, is, like Troy, its subject, a monumental work. With one prologue and three books, each with its own epilogue, Recuyell offers ample space to write about and around the text. Caxton does precisely this, often framing his efforts with images of physical impairment, and finds within these moments of imagined or real inability the effort needed to complete his translation and printing. In the prologue, Caxton’s metaphorical handling of impairment—​the analogy of the blinded Bayard to his own blindness—​is enveloped by a discussion of sin and freedom and a tightly controlled scene of patronage and power.60 The prologue depicts Caxton’s choice to translate as a strategy to escape idleness and sloth, and uses this metaphor of blindness to explain his first forays into translation. Caxton finds the prose of the French text well-​written, and “forthwith toke penne and ynke and began boldly to renne forth as blynde bayard,” copying “fyue or six quayers,” until, seeing the poor quality of his prose, Caxton leaves the translation aside. In a meeting with Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, Caxton lets slip that he has begun this translation, which Margaret demands to see, corrects, and then orders completed.61 While Bayard might not reflect only impairment here—​like Chaucer, who, for example, uses the image of that particular horse to reflect uncontrollable lust in Troilus and Criseyde, Caxton employs it as a reflection for his desire for the book—​I would suggest that Caxton also understands the image more literally as a signal of actual blindness: rushing forward, like Bayard, Caxton cannot see the words on his page. 60 See Christine Weightman, Margaret of York: Duchess of Burgundy, 1446–​1503 (New  York: St. Martin’s, 1989) for a discussion of Margaret’s activities as patron.

61 Jennifer Goodman’s discussion of Caxton’s literary activities in Bruges is useful here—​see “Caxton’s Continent,” in Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 101–​23, especially 106.

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Beyond Caxton’s image of blindness and desire, elsewhere in Recuyell he articulates printing and its historical twists and turns within a framework of old age and aging bodies. In fact, Caxton uses his own old body to explain new technologies, as an image of impairment and prosthesis at the end of Recuyell. In contrast to the prologue, the final epilogue speaks more directly of Caxton’s own body, mostly shorn of this metaphorical context, cataloguing a familiar list of bodily woes and pains, connected, according to Caxton, to age and writing. Thus ende I this book whyche I haue translated after myn Auctor as nyghe as god hath gyuen me connyng to whom be gyuen the laude & preysyng/​ And for as moche as in the wrytyng of the same my penne is worn/​ myn hande wery & not stedfast myn eyen dīmed with ouermoche lokyng on the whit paper/​and my corage not so prone and redy to laboure as hit hath ben/​ and that age crepeth on me dayly and febleth all the bodye/​ and also be cause I haue promysid to dyuerce gentilmen and to my frendes to adresse to hem as hastely as I myght this sayd book/​Therfore I haue practysed & lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte after the maner & forme as ye may here see/​ and is wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben/​ to thende that euery man may haue them attones/​ffor all the bookes of this storye named the recule of the historyes of troyes thus enpryntid as ye here see were begonne in oon day/​ whiche book I haue presented to my sayd redoubtid lady as a fore is sayd.62

Central to Caxton’s decision to move to typesetting and printing is the labour necessary to write, pains that he equates implicitly with age. His pen is worn, his hand weary, and his eyes dim and unclear from hours spent staring at white parchment. Following this catalogue of cares is a signal that labour is not the only pressure upon Caxton, but also age, which “crepeth” on him daily and enfeebles his body. Age, like the labour of manuscript practice, weakens the body. This early apology—​both in terms of defense and defensive posture—​for the use of print seems very much scripted. As a farewell to script and an announcement that Caxton’s body is worn and used, this epilogue in the first book Caxton prints encapsulates perhaps too perfectly the movement between impairment and ability, and the use of narrative as a prosthesis for a body that either claims or embodies. As Caxton continues, however, it becomes clear that printing, while certainly in his view more time-​efficient, is also laborious and time-​consuming. Learning to print took practice and was achieved at his “grete charge and dispense,” and even with its advantages, Caxton apparently still is burdened with great demand from “dyuerce gentilmen” and “frendes” to send this book to them as quickly as possible. Printing, it turns out, is just as toilsome as the script Caxton’s wavering hand has left behind. Indeed, Alexandra Gillespie has pointed out the wide semantic range of Caxton’s “laboure,” which is described in the context of a set of social relations—​a gift economy in which the writer is supplicant, ‘bounde’ or seeking bondage within a system of noble patronage and reward; networks of fellowship and fraternity in which the desire of ‘gentilmen’ is met by the printer who can then identify them as ‘frendes’; a culture of Christian devotion that sets

62 William Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye: Written in French by Raoul Lefevre, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, PhD, vol. 2 (London: David Nutt in the Strand, 1894), 701.

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good works against ‘vices’ and labour against idleness; and finally a money economy, in which Caxton has ‘grete charge and dispence’ to make some books. However, the networks to which Caxton refers are literary and bibliographical as well as social.63

The range of meanings that Gillespie pinpoints in Caxton’s description of his labour are extensive, but do not include the explicit conditions which follow and contextualize that labour—​namely that age creeps daily upon Caxton’s body, a phenomenon that requires his labour be performed in a certain way. Namely, rather than use pen and ink, he must print.64 The amount of work he has yet to complete makes Caxton’s reader suspicious of his claims of impairment in Recuyell. By showing a continuous deployment of the old man as prosthetic and impairment, this study of Caxton outlines the movement from script to print, even as it reinforces the incompleteness of that development. Caxton himself could view the stubbornly new and old dimensions of print. In particular, the epilogue of its third book makes explicit the pains of Caxton’s body, even as that epilogue serves as prologue to a printing career. Its reflection in the image of the worn stylus connects the old man as prosthetic implement and site of bodily impairment. Stylus, with its connection to style, is an apt object and metaphor for foregrounding the role of the old man as text, as impaired and prosthetic that alleviates that impairment. In Middle English “stile” refers both to the pen and the form of writing that the pen creates.65 Linking both the formal elements of a stylized old age, together with the portrayal of an old pen and hand, “stylus” reflects the role of the old man and old text as impaired object and prosthetic addition. The fiction that Caxton implies in this short statement on printing is one that has coloured many histories of fifteenth-​century literature: first, that type supplanted script, immediately and totally, and second, that the latter was labour-​intensive and the former less so. After all, this epilogue justifies the future use of type as opposed to script on the grounds of age-​related ailments and creeping old age. Indeed, much ink has been spilled on the supposed difference between script and print as textual technologies, and the gulf of contrasts that their use supposedly produces. This is by now an old view; recent work has dismantled what Joseph Dane has termed, “the myth of print culture.”66 Like all myths, however, it has proven resilient, and surfaces in odd and small ways. Like many myths, it has a structure of belief behind it, and it has creators, one of whom is William Caxton, the first printer of English texts in England, and one of the most successful printers, whose work and choices in production span both late medieval ideas of texts 63 Gillespie, Print Culture, 28. 64 William Kuskin, Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 129.

65 “stylus” (n). See definition A: Middle English Dictionary http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​cgi/​m/​mec/​ med-​idx?type=id&id=MiddleEnglishD42945&egs=all&egdisplay=open (accessed June 1, 2013). 66 Joseph Dane, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003).

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and early modern ones, if such a distinction is even possible. Recently, critics like Daniel Wakelin, too, have warned against reading too deeply into a course of events that for Caxton were not connected into the hegemonic Tudor myth, created by Henry VII and VIII. “Yet we must be cautious in finding teleology in the supposed transition from ‘medieval’ to ‘Renaissance’: could Caxton know, in 1491, that Henry VII’s dynasty was secure and advancing toward absolutism?”67 What is sure is this:  Caxton’s prologue, epilogues, and other extra-​textual apparatus deserve ever more attention, here and elsewhere, for they demonstrate not only the origin of a supposedly original discourse on the use of print, and its gradual super-​succession of script, but also how evolving views of the body in time, such as those introduced through Disability Studies, can be viewed within a changing textual tradition. Examining these early imprints within the context of a fiction of “able-​bodiedness” dismantles the fiction of total innovation of print, as a way of producing texts without error or effort, while uncovering the past and Hoccleve as prologue.

Imprinting Age: Caxton’s  Cicero

Caxton’s imprinting of Cicero also foregrounds that the extra-​textual material introduced by Caxton imagines translation and the movement of texts through time as a process similar to that of the aging of a body. Indeed, the thematics of these material objects—​the discussion of old age and depictions of old age elsewhere in his corpus—​demonstrate that Caxton’s understanding of translation and printing is tied, perhaps implicitly, to the rewriting and erasure that age itself performs on the body. This connection between the corpus of the old man and the corpus of the old text often positions Caxton’s prologues, epilogues, and translations as evidence of the old body’s power as metaphor for the written text. Central to a new reading not only of the Middle English translation of Cicero’s De Senectute but also and especially William Caxton’s prologues and epilogues is the semantic range of the verb “reduce” and the related gerund “reducyng.” The Middle English Dictionary lists several definitions of the former and examples. The gerund has a more precise definition, and consequently fewer examples. Common to both is the denotation of a return to an original source and a surgical shade of meaning that refers to the setting of fractures and reduction of swelling. Indeed, the Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac’s book of surgery utilizes reduce and reducyng frequently in more than one usage. According to the Middle English Dictionary, “reduce” as it is used there refers not only “to bring (a part of the body) back to health; restore (a quality); reinstate (sb.) in the possession of a right; surg. set (a broken or dislocated bone), restore (an organ) to its natural place,” but also “to change (sth.) back; change (sth.), transform; alch. reduce; translate (a book); apply (sth. to a new or specific use); (b) to diminish (sth.); summarize (a discussion); (c) to reduce (a town to subjection).”68 67 Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 148. 68 Middle English Dictionary online: http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​cgi/​m/​mec/​med-​idx?type=id&id =MED36361&egs=all&egdisplay=open.

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Both usages of “reduce” in de Chauliac’s work (or rather the translated, interpreted, and intermediated work of de Chauliac) refer to specifically medical contexts; however, in the second example, it is clear that the Middle English word can also refer to more textual situations such as summation and translation. Reducing the layers of meaning around a text by Cicero becomes analogous to the healing and diminishing of age and age-​related ailments. In this context of medical text, I argue the metaphors that can attach to Caxton’s work flesh out further Caxton’s own body, and the textual position he assumes. In Recuyvells, Caxton is clear when he blurs the boundaries between the page and his body, linking them together as surely as his pen and hand are connected. For De Senectute and Eneydos, Caxton’s use of “reduce” allows old age to be used not only as a medicalizing corrective, but also as a return to textual beginnings, moral clarity, and earlier times, all connotations that the Middle English “reduce” carries. The French version of De Senectute, according to de Premierfait, is made into French for the Duke of Bourbon; the Middle English, according to Caxton in his prologue, is composed for John Falstof, whose will and estate figure large in the famous letters of the Paston family.69 John himself is characterized in terms of age and time: whiche book was translated and th’storyes openly declared by the ordenaunce and desyre of the noble auncyent knyght Syr Iohan Fastolf of the countee of Norfolk banerette, lyuyng the age of four score yere, excercisyng the warrys in the royame of Fraunce and other countrees for the diffence and unyuersal welfare of bothe royames of Englond and Fraunce by fourty yeres enduryng /​ the fayte of armes hauntyng, and in admynystryng justice and polytique gouernaunce under thre kynges, that is to wete Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fyfthe, Henry the Syxthe; and was governour of the duchye of Angeou and the countee of Mayne, capytayn of many townys, castellys and fortressys in the said royame of Fraunce, havyng the charge and saufgarde of them dyverse yeres. ocupyeng and rewlynge thre honderd speres and the bowes acustomed thenne;70

Falstoff is called “the noble Auncyent knyght,” which recalls not only his great lineage and parentage, but also his age. Living to the age of eighty, John was indeed ancient by any measure. And within the already extant framework surrounding De Senectute, Fastolf’s commission follows the aims of the text by its own measure: a book about old men, for old men.71 As with the original, Caxton’s imprint, both the earlier translation and the later prologue, is both political and personal, related not only ideals of politics but also governance of the body. The old body should be regulated wisely, just as the state. Like the Roman senate, so called for the age of its members and their connection, implied and 69 Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 110–​11.

70 William Caxton, “Of Olde Age,” Early English Books Online, http://​eebo.chadwyck.com.proxy. library.cornell.edu/​search/​full_​rec?SOURCE=pgthumbs.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=99842238&VID= 173051&PAGENO=1&FILE=../​session/​1389023710_​12275&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&SEAR CHCONFIG=var_​spell.cfg (accessed June 10, 2013), 120–​21. 71 Hester Lees-​Jeffries, “No Country for Old Men? Ciceronian Friendship and Old Age in the Second Tetralogy and Beyond,” Review of English Studies 62 (2011): 716–​37, especially 716–​18.

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implicit, to age and wisdom, De Senectute both in Latin and in Middle English appears positioned as a text exalting age as a period of wisdom, centring itself as an old corpus that speaks to old corpora. Directly following the description of the text’s commission to Fastolf, who is implicitly situated as a modern Cato, Caxton reveals how he views this translation. The syntax becomes confused, as Caxton muddles whether it is John Fastolf; Thomas, Duke of Clarence; or John, Duke of Bedford and regent of France who compels the translation. It is impossible to parse because of the lack of internal guidance. Equally, none of these figures is alive and involved with Caxton’s literary activities in 1481. Nevertheless, he writes of the “commission” to take this reducyng pacyently and submyttyng me to the amendyng and correction of the reder and understonder that is disposed to rede or have ony contemplacion in th’ystores of this book which were drawen and complyed out of the bookes of th’auncyent phylosophers of Grece, as in th’orygynal text of Tullii: De Senectute in Latyn or specyfyed compendyously, whiche is in maner harder the texte. But this book reduced in Englyssh tongue is more ample empowned and more swetter to the reder, kepyng the juste sentence of the Latyn. Thenne for as moche as this book thus reduced into our Englyssh is with grete instaunce, labour and coste comen into myn honde, which I  advysedly have seen, overredde and considered the noble, honeste and vertuous mater necessarily requysite unto men stepte in age and to yong men for to lerne how they owght to come to the same to which every man naturelly desyreth to atteyne.72

Caxton gives much information here, and it is worth considering just what he may mean. Most importantly, for discussion of prosthetic narrative, is the use three times of “reduce” and “reducyng.” First, however, is the confusion of history and chronology, fitting enough for a text that means to unite men “stepte in age” with those desirous of the same years. Caxton cannot possibly have been commissioned or received a call to print this text from any of the figures that he lists, any more than he could have received patronage from Cicero. Yet, I would argue, that is precisely the point. The text has, indeed, not only become Cicero but also the long string of early fifteenth-​century political figures that he mentions. In fact, as an old man, steeped in age himself, Caxton seems to write that he submits not to any man in preparing this text but the text itself. Indeed, as he changes into the writer and aged man which De Senectute demands, he also creates in himself the paradigm of the reader whom he explicitly evokes. This reader is “disposed” to amend and correct and to have “contemplacion” with the ancient stories in the work. As the quotation above demonstrates, that portrayal of the reader occurs lines before Caxton claims to have done the same: Caxton has “seen, overredde and considered” the text and its material. But for what purpose? Contemplation involves more than reading; it also seems to signify the act of identification with De Senectute and its morals and aims. I would like to return to the act of “reducyng,” which is a word thick with meaning. Indeed, the semantic range for the Middle English “reducyng” is much 72 Caxton, “Of Olde Age,” 121.

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richer and offers many more avenues than textual summation.73 William Kuskin has drawn attention to Caxton’s use of “reducyng” and its unique force in his prologues and epilogues. “Reducyng’, on the other hand, is at once exclusively related to translation, and a more ambivalent term in general.”74 Demonstrating that “reducyng” seems tied solely to translation, Kuskin also acknowledges the other, different meanings that inhere in uses of “reducyng.” A  translation, correction to original text or idea, healing:  all of these senses are carried in the word, and this “reducyng” can and should be seen not only as the trace and development of the original theses about old age in the Ciceronian work, but also the textual healing which results from this text. For as the text moves along, it is clear that the vision of old age it presents is about health of the government, health of the individual, and the solace that accompanies recognition of and attention to a life well lived. This choice of word for a translation of a foundational treatise about old age locates the text at the crossroads of several discourses about old age: old age in an affective sense, old age in a biological and medicalized context, old age as a metaphor for texts and knowledge, and old age as a political category. This “reducyng,” rather than restrict the metaphorical image of old age, instead produces a wider set of semantic and contextual meanings and associations for old age, vivifying the depiction of an old body. Caxton’s prologue mimics the terms of Cicero’s own prologue, as Caxton rehearses the ventriloquism of the old body, a practice that he locates in his own “reducyng” of the text. Indeed, Cicero early in his text justifies the use of Cato as speaker for old age. Now on other subjects I  have said much and shall often have much to say; this book, which I am sending to you, is on old age. But the entire discourse I have attributed, not to Tithonus, as Aristo of Ceos did, (for there would be too little authority in a myth), a but, that I might give it greater weight, I have ascribed it to the venerable Marcus Cato; and I represent Laelius and Scipio, while at his house, expressing wonder that he bears his age so well, and Cato replying to them. If it shall appear that he argues more learnedly than he was accustomed to do in his own books, give the credit to Greek literature, of which, as is well known, he was very studious in his later years. But why need I say more? For from now on the words of Cato himself will completely unfold to you my own views on old age.75

As a point of comparison, see these lines in the fifteenth-​century translation that Caxton introduces. The author of this version writes But to thentente that our book may haue grettir auctoryte, we attribute & dyrecte all our woordys & speke to the olde Caton & not as dyd Aristotiles which in his book of age dyrectid his worde and speche to the kyng Tithonus brothir of Laomedon of which Tithonus the poetys haue feyned that by the grete age of hym he was chaungid in to a

73 “reduce.” Middle English Dictionary:  http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​cgi/​m/​mec/​med-​idx?type=id &id=MED36361&egs=all&egdisplay=open. c1450 Scrope Othea (Lngl 253) 2: “I..take vpon me..to translate ovte off Frenche tong..and to reduce into owre modyr tong a Book off Knyghthode.” 74 William Kuskin, “Reading Caxton: Transformations in Capital, Authority, Print, and Persona in the Late Fifteenth Century,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 149–​83 at 181. 75 Cicero, On Old Age, 11.

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The Past is Prologue Crikket, for oure present boke shuld be of lytel auctorite if we shulde attribue it to a man of whom men tellyn a fable or a feyned tale we make oure booke so compendyously that thies two noble yong men Romayns of noble courage Lelius and Scipion makyn emongys them merveilyng & questionyng how that duke Caton beryth & endurith so lightly & so easely his auncient age And after that we make that the olde Caton answerith to Lelius & Scipion by reasons and by exsamplis how age must be worshipped & recommended for many grete & necessary causes.76

As a “reducyng” of Cicero’s text, it is obvious that the Middle English version multiplies the information present in the Latin original. The brevity of Cicero’s words instead becomes a mass of sentences and thoughts that strive to clarify. But, for both sources, the act of putting words into Cato’s mouth becomes a necessary one in order to increase the authority of the wisdom concerning old age. Indeed, central to this book and its aims is the creation of authority through Cato’s explanations of his bearing of age’s burden. In this somewhat failed “reducyng,” it is clear that the depiction of both old sources and old speakers produces not only the loquacity so often attributed to old men but also the wisdom of accumulated years ascribed to them too. Cato’s role as mouthpiece, both in the original Latin version and the translated Middle English text, reinforces the prosthetic role of this authorizing gesture. Reinforcing that the detritus around the original source text must be cleared as it is transferred from one language to another, even as that target language must retrieve it from an intermediary, Caxton’s positioning of translation as “reducyng” demonstrates that the pastness of a text can be both a blessing and a curse. Indeed, the current textual nature of De Senectute is at once old and cluttered; only through a return to first principles and true meanings can the old body of the book be reduced, back to an even more ancient form. Indeed, the reduction of a text as a translation positions the oldness of a text as both impairment and prosthetic, both central to its debilitating present state and key to its revival. Again, as with figures of old age in history, Caxton presents how a proper relationship to history and its materials can heal the old body, even as that old body holds the key to health for its readers. In other words, old age is both health and cure here. Caxton’s use of “reducyng” is not unique to his imprint of De Senectute. His imprint and translation of Virgil’s Eneydos, which I  discuss below, makes use of this same construction of translation too. Out of Latin and French, he has produced a reducyng of the text, presumably to clear the meaning of the text for his English readership. Caxton’s use of words to describe translation encompasses more than simply this “reducyng,” including “translated and drawen out of frenshe” (The Recuyvell of the Historyes of Troye); “translated out of frenshe into maternal tonge” (Cordayle); and, among others, “this book is maad for nede and proufftye of alle god folke” (Reynart the Foxe, 1st ed., 1481). His use of “reducyng” suggests that Caxton’s labour was more intimately involved, as its 76 Caxton, “Of Olde Age.” For the sake of clarity, I have expanded all suspensions in the selection above. Further, considering the open question of an author for this fifteenth-​century imprint—​the best evidence is either Stephen Scrope or William Worcester—​I have used Caxton as the author.

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use often precedes his admission that the translation is his own. Indeed, considering the medical connotations attached to “reducyng,” Caxton’s own translating seems less a textual act than a medical one: an incisive cut into literary history that produces texts that will heal, and are healthy. Caxton’s use of “reduce” and “reducing,” as I have argued above, suggest how medical imagery often appears in his descriptions of texts and their translations and transmissions, especially in his use of the prologue and epilogue as prosthesis. From resetting a bone to excising tumors and draining toxins from bodies, the range of medical meanings associated with these words can also reflect creation or revision on a textual level, such as Caxton’s cutting away of the detritus surrounding Cicero’s De Senectute or his use of prologues as prosthesis for old texts and for his old body. And this “reducing” of the text to its correct version appears again in his prologue to the second edition of The Canterbury Tales.

Papa Don’t Preach: Correct Texts and a Genealogical Tradition

In the same vein as Chaucer’s Knight, who affirms the power of old stories, Caxton apparently saw value in old stories, and printed a great number of them, which include the Canterbury Tales, Gower’s Confessio, and versions of narratives about Troy. But the subject matter of these stories and their age position them as more than valuable commodities for a late fifteenth-​century reading economy. They also function, if implicitly and unplanned, as vehicles for describing old age as both impaired and powerful owing to the power of his anecdotes about the discovery of old texts and more faithful sources. These anecdotes from his imprinting of the Canterbury Tales and Eneydos highlight the enduring power of the aged body to move forward these narratives. Indeed, his sources and imprints bring to the fore how old sources and old bodies are tied. In one of the most curious narratives, he describes the twisted and corrupt state of the text, including his own first edition, and the remedy for that textual situation. Writing of the proliferation of editions, copies, and imprints, Caxton describes bookes so incorrecte was one brought to me vj yere passyd/​whyche I supposed had ben veray true 7 correcte/​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 Geoffrey chaucer had made/​To whom I answerd that I had made it accordyng to my copye/​and by me was nothyng added ne mynusshyd/​Thenne he sayd he knewe a book whyche hys fader had and moche louyd. that was very trewe/​ and accordyng vnto hys owen first book by hym made/​ and sayd more yf I wold enprynte it agayn he wold gete me the same book for a copye/​how be it he wyst wel/​that hys fader wold not gladly departe fro it. To whome I said. in caas that he coude gete me suche a book trewe and correcte/​ yet I wold ones endeuoyre me to enprynte it agayn/​ for to satysfye thauctor/​ where as to fore by ygnouraunce I erryd in hurtyng and dyffamyng his book in dyuerce places in settyng in somme thynges that he neuer sayd ne made. and leuyng out many thynges that he made whyche ben requysite to be sette in it/​And thus we fyll at accord.77

77 Caxton, “Proheme,” in The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.  J. B.  Crotch (London: Oxford University Press, 1928. Published for the Early English Text Society, no. 176), 91.

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Speaking of his own labour on Chaucer’s main work and his first and second editions, Caxton mentions two copies, the provenance of the first unclear and not supplied, with only a passive construction, “was one brought to me,” used to explain its origin. The suggestions of this narrative about the first copy and subsequent edition are tantalizing. This first copy is used as Caxton’s exemplar, for he thought it “veray true 7 correcte,” and the copies that it produces are sold to “gentyl men,” a marker of social distinction still useful and pertinent in the fifteenth century. It is precisely this trade to “gentyl men” that results in one such man returning to Caxton, complaining of the errors in Caxton’s work. This “gentyl man” knows that the copy is not a true witness to the original work, because his father has a better copy. This discovery too seems almost unbelievable, and, considering Caxton’s marketing prowess, it is easy to see why scholars have a difficult time accepting this as anything other than exaggerated labour or proof of Caxton’s own unreliability.78 But as Barbara Bordalejo makes clear in her study of the first and second editions of Caxton’s Tales, Caxton was accurate in his statement about the corrections introduced in his second edition of the Tales, and that he and his compositors were generally far more careful than some modern scholars have acknowledged.79

Caxton’s reliability in presenting his second edition—​evidence of which Bordalejo presents in her article—​suggests that the anecdotal nature of this textual provenance is accurate both in showing how Caxton’s editions are true and correct and in demonstrating the value of old age to the transmission of this fourteenth-​century text in the fifteenth century. And indeed, even if Barbara Boyd has criticized Caxton “conflating texts from different recensions and for not recognizing this fact,” the fact remains that Caxton’s prologues represent much of what is known about the trajectories of Chaucer’s texts in the fifteenth century.80 Boyd recognizes this in her edition of some of the later lyrics and dream visions, where she asserts that Caxton’s Chaucerian editions are part of the earliest history of the texts of Chaucer’s works, a history that remains unwritten because almost nothing is known about the circumstances under which the Poet’s writings were given to the public or about the state of the materials at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the earliest Chaucer manuscripts now extant were copied.81

Invented or not, this exchange of texts and copies highlights another important feature of Caxton’s imagined relationship to texts and history. The second, good copy, which returns him to the “true” meaning of the text (nothing added and nothing subtracted), 78 Beverly Boyd, “William Caxton,” in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman: Pilgrim, 1984), 13–​34. 79 Barbara Bordalejo, “Caxton’s Editing of the Canterbury Tales,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 108 (2014), 41–​60 at 42. 80 Bordalejo, “Caxton’s Editing,” 50.

81 Boyd, “William Caxton,” xix.

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has a circuitous journey, but ultimately is held by the “gentyl” man’s father, positing the old as de facto custodian of literary history. But this is not a straightforward reproduction of literary genealogy that one finds so often in discussions of the Chaucerian canon. Indeed, to posit the old man as somehow central to the transmission of history, culture, and literature is to conceptualize that transmission as non-​reproductive, tangential, even sometimes non-​productive. The good copy is held by the man’s father, and only is borrowed and must be returned. While copies are made, and reproduction of Canterbury Tales occurs, it does so in a circuitous way, with at least one false start. Caxton’s narrative indeed foregrounds the oddness of old age as a metaphor for cultural transmission. To use the old body as the linkage between these texts upends some critical assumptions about the nature of literary history, and the status of history as a conceptual framework in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.82 Depictions of the passage of time as embodied and history old are extremely common, but this frequency obscures how the use of that old body as a metaphor for time, history, translation, and source texts conveys the non-​normative status of these conceptions of the past, texts, and history. This copy, held by the man’s father, is promised to Caxton if he will run a printing of the Tales again. The terms of this borrowing are unique here, and suggest both the emotional parameters of the transaction, along with the affective economy in which the father has placed the book. In a prologue that seeks to define Chaucer as first “auctour” and to redress the harm done to his corpus, the second copy, “moche louyd” by the father becomes central to the correction of textual errors. The old father guards the text, for its own good and enjoyment. This prologue goes further than a rehearsal of the avarice of the old or the articulation of a non-​linear transmission of texts, as it illustrates the close connection between the correct text, the previous exemplar of a more faithful Tales, and the old man who seems to jealously guard it. Caxton is not advancing a one-​to-​one correspondence, certainly, but through images of affection for and violence toward a more perfected copy of Chaucer’s text arranges a connection between the old father and his text, which is imagined as an object of love. Caxton’s characterization of the old man’s positive affection for his text is implicitly compared to Caxton’s earlier violence for his text, and in that comparison, it cannot be forgotten that according both to his life records, and to his authorial persona, Caxton himself was then an old man. The agency of both toward the text is organized according to love or violence, but most importantly, central to textual transmission, imprinting, and dissemination is the role of the old man. 82 Kuskin, Recursive Origins, 20. For Kuskin, one escape from the “paradoxes of literary history” is through the figure of the book, which as a material object, cannot be contained or given periodization in the same way. The book is not tidy with its boundaries—​and this has seemed an apt metaphor for this project, especially as some much of this material from the Alliterative Revival to early modern England shapes metaphors of the book as bodies, especially old one that require supplement and addition.

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Caxton’s constructed old age assumes its inutility while highlighting the very able agency of those aged men to correct and make better the old texts that Caxton wishes to publish, firmly reflecting the contradiction inherent in Caxton’s rhetorical impositions of infirmity. It is not to innovation and youth that Caxton turns for assistance and improvement, but actually to an old man, a persistent metaphor for history and pastness in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. But this rhetorical construct—​the dependence upon the material and corporeal reminders and remainders of history—​ of the old man as guardian of true meanings is problematized by Caxton’s own usage. One salient fact remains that Caxton, in the text, in a moment of autobiography, turns to an old man for help in correcting his text. These remarks cannot be read separately from Caxton’s other performances in prologues:  indeed, his turn to printing is tied rhetorically and firmly to his body’s own dimmed strength and bodily wear. He turns to print precisely because the stylus takes too much effort, and the demand for his texts is too great. While this remonstrance against his body could be yet another example of Caxton using his voice autobiographically in the text as a sort of marketing technique—​ “I can’t copy enough texts, because so many want the works; perhaps I need to print.”—​I want to caution against reading Caxton too literally. Caxton, in fact, might not be telling the whole story. His move toward a newer textual technology, while at the same time grasping at a previous book production style in the body of a ventriloquized manuscript owner, confuses a purely progressive attitude toward print. And the material conditions of print at the time rule out any possibility that a change to print amounted to a much easier process. Indeed, I follow Joseph Dane in highlighting Caxton’s own role in construction of the “myth of print culture.” The paradox of early print, to rehearse Stephanie Trigg’s formulation, is to achieve authentication of a new technology through impersonation of the older one.83 It is obvious, I think, to view this paradox in terms of books and texts, but what about bodies? As the above narrative furnished by Caxton makes clear, the status of the old body was, for him, close to the old book: both serve as authorizations of current and future textual endeavours.

The Old Terms of Prosthesis

In order to both clarify and complicate Caxton’s copying, a turn to another foundation myth seems appropriate. Like the story of the old manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, this myth offers a corrective for Caxton’s own occluding of effort in early printing, and demonstrates how old age might be presented both as the site of power and as inability. In the prologue to Eneydos, the story of Troy’s fall and Rome’s foundation, Caxton’s prologue rehearses a familiar refrain of his mercantile situation: And whan I had advysed me in this sayd boke, I delybered and concluded to translate it into Englysshe, and forthwyth toke a penne and ynke and wrote a leef or tweyne which

83 Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 115.

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I oversawe agayne to correct it. And when I sawe the fayr and straunge termes therin, I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen whiche late blamed me sayeng that in my translacyons I had over-​curyous termes whiche coude not be understande of comyn peple and desired me to use olde and homely termes in my translacyons. And fayn wolde I satysfye every man, and so to doo toke an olde boke and redde therin; and certaynly the Englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele understande it. And also my lord Abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to me late certayn evydences wryton in olde Englysshe for to reduce it into our Englysshe now usid.84

The range of old as a description of language is appropriate for Caxton. He continues after these lines, recording how changeable the English are and how, like their language, differences across regions and periods of time proliferate. Eneydos demonstrates the weighted meaning that old has for Caxton: he mentions what is presumably some form of historical English earlier than Chaucer’s Middle English. Perhaps it is Old English literature and writing which the Abbot of Westminster presents to Caxton; that is unknowable. But this ancient writing serves as outer limit for Caxton’s discussion of “olde” terms. Caxton is defending the use of his vocabulary, which is often “straunge” and “over-​curyous,” but more understandable than the language of the abbot’s book. His words are new, and as he argues in the prologue, it becomes clear that old terms will not become any clearer. Lines later he will say the language used when he was born is now indecipherable. In this confusion of old and new, however, I stress that the prologue to Eneydos reinforces that Caxton’s retirement from script is in many ways a rhetorical construction, at odds with his actual practice. It is, in short, a script. Eneydos is printed in 1490, and Caxton will be dead by 1492, yet contrary to the declamation of inability concerning his pen in Recuyell, here Caxton alludes to handiwork. Taking his pen and ink, he proceeds to translate Eneydos into English. That Caxton would compose and translate using his own hand and then produce type and print a text is obvious, at least to the historian of print. But the recognition by Caxton that his pen, while deficient, still writes serves to remind the reader, both early and modern, that the excuses given in Recuyell for a retirement from script disguise that retirement is mostly rhetorical and never complete. The discussion of old materials for Caxton necessarily centres Troy and its fall: the bookends for this chapter are the discussion of Eneydos, produced at the end of the printer’s life, and Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, produced at the beginning of Caxton’s printing enterprise and the moveable printing of English texts. This focus necessarily ties this chapter to the examination of narrative as prosthetic and signal of the body’s vulnerability and the inevitable decline of the body, which Elde highlights in Parlement. As much as this material was valued in Parlement of the Thre Ages (Elde introduces Hector as the first of the Nine Worthies) and Wynnere and Wastoure (the “selcouthes” are traced back to the destruction of Troy), the appeal of Troy seems undiminished in 84 William Caxton, “Prologue,” Eneydos, in Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. N.  F. Blake (London:  André Deutsch, 1973), 78–​81 at 79.

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Caxton’s century. Indeed, work has long acknowledged the economic benefit of these old stories. Linking the power of old stories to the power of old bodies, Caxton’s imprints show how valuable these images of impaired figures and ancient stories remained in the fifteenth century. Caxton’s depiction of Anchises is indicative of this contradiction, namely that old, weakened bodies remain potent. In Chapter  2, Caxton writes that Anchises is impaired due to age and is therefore unable to walk. “[B]‌y olde age and lyuyng manye yeres, his blood was wexen colde soo moche that he myght not walke ne helpe hym selfe by moeuynge.”85 Dryness of the body and coldness of the humours and fluids are symptomatic of age-​related toil upon the body. Owing to this advancing age, Anchises cannot move himself, and so sits upon Aeneas’ shoulders. Yet, Anchises, like history, is not merely dead weight. He carried with him, a coffre well rychely adourned wyth many precyous stones in facyon and manere of a shryne, In the whiche were the goddes of Troye, and grete and diuerce relykes/​ which were the thynges/​In which the famylye of Troye/​the people and comynalte of Asie, hade fixed theyr socoures/​and thalegement of theyr anguysshous heuynesses.86

Although Aeneas must carry Anchises, literally, his own personal “heuyness,” Anchises takes with him, as his load, the accumulated and extant history of the Trojans. Carrying the only source of solace, hope, and healing for the Trojans, Anchises becomes the focal point of positive affect for the Trojans. He is an old man holding old materials, literally guarding their past, as he embodies it, impaired and torn from their place of origin. Anchises plays then a similar role not only to Cato, but also to De Senectute as a whole, as a personal and political symbol of the right relationship to the history and the past. Anchises demonstrates that the impaired old body often links to the images of the past, even as it maintains some measure of ability. Viewing this pose further requires a move to Polychronicon and its connection among old bodies, old texts, and the detritus of history. The portrayal of Aeneas’s aging father and his contribution to history reinforces the staying power of old age as metaphor, even as he laments that the text contains new terms that he cannot understand fully, and so must make use of “olde and homely terms” as a substitute. Within lines of mentioning Anchises, the “olde fader” who is instrumental in the foundation of Troy, Caxton pivots to a negative mention of age. Caxton points to an unfashionably old language which he has at his disposal, one that is unequal to the innovative tongue of the source text. Even as old can be read as rude and homely in Caxton, however, it remains true that old age cannot simply be thought of as temporal overhang of a less advanced age. Indeed, Anchises’s role in transmitting culture in Eneydos transforms the burden of old age, as surely as Aeneas carrying Anchises does. Anchises, in fact, supplements the young body of Aeneas, a connection Caxton frames earlier in his printing of Polychronicon. 85 William Caxton, Eneydos, ed. W. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall (London: Trübner, 1890), 14. 86 Caxton, Eneydos, 14.

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Polychronicon and Old Histories Nearly a decade before Caxton printed Eneydos, he printed Ralph Higden’s Polychronicon using the Middle English translation of John Trevisa.87 If Eneydos shows how old age might be both weak and valuable, then the Polychronicon with its emphasis on history and wisdom implicitly positions old age as necessary, both for wisdom and memory. Caxton, of course, makes these connections clear, both in his prologue and his epilogue to the seventh book, where he traces the long transmission of the chronicle from Higden to Trevisa to Caxton, “a simple persone” who has “endeuoyred me to wryte first ouer all the sayd book of proloconycon.”88 Caxton continues that he has changed the “rude and old englyssh,” a claim he also makes for Eneydos in its prologue, and he counts this labour as useful, in part because of the text’s “notable matters” and the small number of writers who “wryte in theyr regystres suche thynges as dayly happen and falle.”89 Ralph Waldron sees in these statements the measure of Caxton’s revision of his source text, especially in terms of “old” and “rude” with the former signifying the replacement of words which were, to Caxton, obsolete and hard to understand.90 Central, too, to Waldron’s discussion is the description of that revision, Caxton’s claim he wrote “ouer all” the text, further proof of the extent of the revisions and an echo of Caxton’s apparent interventions to Eneydos.91 Even as Caxton has removed the obscure and obsolete words that could hamper the then-​contemporary understanding of the Polychronicon, Caxton nevertheless implicitly defends old age in a proheme that explicitly centres on “the Infyrmyte of oure mortal nature.”92 In this context, the value that Caxton sees in history cannot be separated, nor does he try, from the experience of old men. Remarking that the experience of past men is a great benefit to those who subsequently read them, Caxton asserts that 87 For a discussion of the relationship between Caxton’s imprint and manuscripts of Trevisa’s translation, see Ronald Waldron, “Caxton and the Polychronicon,” in Chaucer in Perspective : Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. N. F. Blake and Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 375–​94. 88 William Caxton, “Polychronicon [Book VII. Epilogue],” in The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W. J. B. Crotch (London: Oxford University Press, 1928. Published for the Early English Text Society, no. 176), 68.

89 Caxton, Polychronicon, 68.

90 Waldron, “Caxton and the Polychronicon,” 386–​87.

91 Waldron, “Caxton and the Polychronicon,” 385. See also Lister M.  Matheson, “Printer and Scribe:  Caxton, the Polychronicon, and the Brut,” Speculum 60 (1985):  593–​614. “The wording suggests that Caxton undertook the enormous task of rewriting the whole text in his own hand, changing the ‘rude and old englyssh’ as he proceeded, rather than simply marking, altering, or inserting in his base manuscript of Trevisa” (601–​2).

92 William Caxton, “Polychronicon [Prohemye],” in The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.  J. B.  Crotch (London:  Oxford University Press, 1928. Published for the Early English Text Society, no. 176), 65–​66.

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the counseylles of Auncyent and whyte heeryd men/​in whome olde age hath engendryd wysedom/​ben gretely preysed of yonger men/​And yet hystoryes soo moche more excelle them/​ As the dyuturnyte or length of tyme Includeth moo ensamples of thynges and laudable actes than thage of one man may suffyse to see/​Historyes ought not only to be Iuged moost proffytable to Yonge men/​whiche by the lecture/​redyng 7 understandyng made them semblable 7 equale to men of greter age and to old men.93

This defense of old age and history is a curious one, as Caxton relates how old age, because it entails an accumulation of experience, events, and, ultimately, tragedies, gives old men wisdom, which is praised by young men. History is, according to Caxton here, similar to old men given wisdom through age and should be of similar worth to the young. However, history does not suffer from the “Infyrmyte of oure mortal nature,” and offers young men the wisdom without old age—​so that this book becomes itself a supplement to old age, even as it can and will, in Caxton’s words, substitute for the experience of age. The Polychronicon offers wisdom without age, erasing the difference between young and old men, in terms of experience. This text might fashion itself through Caxton’s prologue as a substitute for old age, replacing the pain of old age with a textual surrogate, but that history still depends on the existence of those old bodies—​as the history recalls the acts and tragedies of figures who are themselves “Auncyent and whyte heeryd” people. Further, the existence of this book is predicated on the agency of the aging printer, who Kathleen Tonry notes seemingly spares no effort in preparing, contextualizing, and compiling this text. In tracing the importance of “form” to Caxton’s changes and paratextual materials that he includes, Tonry describes the amount of effort that the aging printer completes for the text: Caxton offers, and he has also “added suche storyes as I  coude fynde.” These rather modest claims are true until one encounters the material evidence of the printed book itself, which is overlaid with a thick series of additional paratexts, among them a lengthy prologue, an epilogue, the first English printed index, and finally the Liber Ultimus, not only Caxton’s longest original compilation, but uniquely located as the eighth and final book of the Polychronicon.94

Caxton’s modest claim here, which casts doubt on the claims of impairment that appear in his first imprint, is part of “long-​established historiographical methods that understood the work of the historian as one of embellishing, adding to, and compiling older historical materials.” Nevertheless, these activities suggest a productive, Cato-​like old age, unlike the weakened state that Caxton has earlier claimed. And this contradiction is central to my aim here, which differs from that of Tonry, who examines the form of the history and the main text. Building on her approach to form, I see in these prologues and epilogues more of an answer to Caxton’s original declaration of impairment. In fact, like Eneydos, Caxton’s Polychronicon helps demonstrate how Caxton frames these texts, how 93 Caxton, “Polychronicon [Prohemye],” 64–​65.

94 Kathleen Tonry, “Reading History in Caxton’s Polychronicon,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 111 (2012): 169–​98 at 174–​75.

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the prologues and epilogues function, and how they convey a complicated vision of old age, where narratives both extol and condemn old age, for wisdom and debility equally, and ultimately paper over the existence of these age-​related impairments. Caxton’s biography and bibliography centre this old body, as his paratextual materials suggest that old age and impairment are not impediments to print or to pen. These prosthetic materials feature a scripted response that, while not denying the reality of old age or of Caxton’s body, continue to frame old age as both impaired and potent, linking the printer to Hoccleve’s prologue and advice as well as the ancient histories that outlast the infirmity of our mortal nature. This infirmity is central to how Caxton introduces Gower and Shakespeare in the next and final chapter, as Pericles features a vivified Gower, assuming man’s infirmities and assuming the role of chorus to sing an old history of Apollonius of Tyre.

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Chapter 4

PLAYING PROSTHESIS AND REVISING THE PAST: GOWER’S SUPPLEMENTAL ROLE

No doubt some mouldy tale, Like Pericles, and stale As the shrieve’s crusts, and nasty as his fish—​ Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub May keep up the Play-​club.1

In the final chapter of Writing Old Age, I examine how these prosthetic ideas of old

age reflect in the centuries following the rule of Richard II and the authorial activities of Caxton, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and the Parlement-​poet. It is clear that the age-​related anxieties associated with Richard’s rule extend into early modern depictions of his tumultuous reign, including the chronicles of Holinshed and Shakespeare’s Richard II.2 The age-​related anxieties of Richard II’s reign echo, but in reverse, with an aging queen reminding us that the intersections among politics, age, and ability remain potent concerns.3 Following the Earl of Essex’s staging of Richard II in the early seventeenth century, Elizabeth remarked to William Lambarde that, “I am Richard II, knowe ye not,” a

1 Ben Jonson, “An Ode to Himself Upon the Censure of His “New Inne,” Representative Poetry Online: https://​rpo.library.utoronto.ca/​poems/​ode-​himself-​upon-​censure-​his-​new-​inn#21.

2 See in particular John of Gaunt’s dramatic monologue at the beginning of Act 2: There he ties his name to his condition and to the impoverished state of England under Richard II. As he makes clear, this speech is an indictment not only of the young king, as the repetition and yoking of gaunt and old demonstrates, but also of Richard’s recklessness in sending Gaunt’s son away (and his own complicity there). O, how that name befits my composition! Old Gaunt indeed and gaunt in being old. Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast, And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt? For sleeping England long time have I watched; Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt. The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast—​I mean my children’s looks—​ And, therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones. (2.1.79–​89)

3 See Christopher Martin’s Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 30–​63.

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comment which makes this link undeniable.4 Indeed, as Christopher Martin has argued, “Elizabeth’s experience of age informed her expression, public and private, verbal and visual.”5 And Elizabeth was not the only figure negotiating anxious age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—​as the link between Elizabeth and Richard II implies, Shakespeare’s plays offer numerous portrayals of old age.6 But what about the prosthetic function of these poetic depictions of age-​related impairments, which seem tied to the valuation of old age in the late fourteenth century? The continuing importance of viewing old age both as site of impairment and prosthetic addition comes into focus in Shakespeare’s Pericles, one of his later, co-​authored plays and one which depicts medieval material in a style that calls attention to its medieval qualities.7 Reworking the narrative of Apollonius of Tyre, Pericles tells the story of a prince, named Pericles, who escapes certain death in Antioch when he discerns, in a riddle, that a princess he wishes to marry is in an incestuous relationship with her father. Fleeing for his life, he finds himself in Tarsus, where he marries another princess whom he subsequently loses to death, and who is later revived. Separated from his daughter, he manages to find her in a brothel, from which he rescues her and almost marries her, before he realizes she is his daughter. Pericles, wife, and daughter are reunited at the end. This narrative centres on incest, both the real incest in Antioch and the threatened incest of Pericles at the end. Yet, the centrality of Old Gower as narrator reflects the play’s investments in depictions of antique texts, languages, and bodies. In fact, as Roger Ladd has argued, given the old bodies of Gower and Antiochus, the “implicit contrast to young Pericles and Antiochus’ daughter reinforces the wrongness in Antiochus’ riddle,” supplementing the wrongness of incest with intergenerational copulation.8 This pairing of young and old, as Ladd remarks, likely also echoes the ending of Confessio Amantis and the old body of Amans at the court of Venus. Thus, for Old Gower, these antique texts also give opportunity to fashion antique bodies, including Gower’s, Helicanus and, arguably, Pericles himself, whose journey to the end of the play reflects much of the Ages of Man. But centrally it is Gower who fleshes out all the usages of prosthesis that have been linked to old age in the preceding chapters. The prosthetic role of old age—​that 4 Stephen Orgel, “Prologue: I am Richard II,” in Representations of Elizabeth in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11–​43 at 11–​12.

5 Martin, Constituting Old Age, 31.

6 Matthew Harkins, “The Politics of Old Age in Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 (2018): 1–​28, especially 3.

7 The consensus seems to be that the early portions of the play are the work of George Wilkins, with the remainder, beginning with Act III, accepted as the work of Shakespeare. See MacDonald P.  Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003). John Klause in “A Controversy over Rhyme and Authorship in Pericles,” Notes & Queries 59 (2012): 538–​44 has called attention to some of the problems with Jackson’s analysis. 8 Roger Ladd, “To Hear An Old Man Sing’:  Apollonius, Pericles, and the Age of Gower,” in Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festshcrift in Honour of R.F. Yeager, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cambridge: Brewer, 2020), 189–​200 at 196.

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narratives of age-​related impairment serve to stake out the contours of that debility while using it as an additive to power and authority—​is clear in Gower’s repeated insistence on the impairments of his own revived flesh, which both echo Gower’s own in-​text persona in Confessio and serve to move and create the old source material Shakespeare and his coauthor dramatize. Pericles then participates in the same energies as Gower’s own text, echoing the prosthetic functions of Amans/​Gower’s exclamations of impairment in Book VIII of Confessio, demonstrating again that the past is prologue for Shakespeare’s play.9 But the past is prologue in another way, as Gower’s narration also reflects the role of prosthesis, also associated with age in the previous chapters, that Thomas Wilson fleshes in his rhetorical handbook: prosthesis in Wilson’s handling refers to those letters which change the meaning of a word from its “vulgar” meaning to one which is odd, strange, or different. In this way, Gower’s handling of his “restorative,” seen largely in supplement or beginning material to Shakespeare’s writing, which generally begins with Act III, seems both prologue and prosthetic, giving shape to those textual elements which make this play a “mouldy tale.”10 Prosthesis then both highlights the impaired nature of Gower’s source material, which is depicted as old and lacking or incomplete—​and its power as a “restorative,” serving both as signal of incompleteness and supplement to that lack.11 Gower characterizes his own speech as such:  called a “restorative” by Gower, his opening speech highlights the power of age-​related impotence and the contradiction of rusty bodies, decaying with age: In order to sing a song that was sung From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming man’s infirmities To glad your ear and please your eyes. It hath been sung at festivals, On ember eves and holy ales,

9 Some of the issues at play here with the notion of prosthesis have been noted by readers of other continuations, such as Andrew Higl’s essay on Henryson’s Cresseid:  “narrative prosthesis, though grounded in introducing crisis, makes closure and wholeness possible. Paradoxically, the narrative is enabled through the prosthetic addition of disability. In Mitchell’s later essay, he states that ‘disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second as an opportunistic metaphoric device.” While Pericles is strictly speaking a revision rather than a continuation of Confessio, Gower himself seems to continue and augment his autobiographical role in Pericles, through the exposition of his extreme old age and narratorial activities. See Higl’s “Henryson’s Textual and Narrative Prosthesis,” 168.

10 “mouldy,” Oxford English Dictionary: www-​oed-​com.ulm.idm.oclc.org/​view/​Entry/​122847?rsk ey=yC5BCr&result=2#eid. Under definition 2a, “Worn out with old age, decrepit; outmoded, antiquated; (also) tediously academic,” Jonson’s use of “mouldy” in Volpone is listed. This characterization of old texts as decrepit and worn out with age reflects one of the main tensions that Writing Old Age highlights—​that old age might be both a marker of decay and strength and power through that decay. 11 See, for example, Gower’s use of restauratif in Book VI of Confessio when Amans discusses seeing his lady’s face and calls the “wordes of hire mouth” a “restauratif” (lines 859–​61).

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Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past And lords and lives in their lives have read it for restoratives The purchase is to make men more glorious, Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius. If you, born in these latter times When wit’s more ripe, accept my rhymes, And that to hear an old man sing May to your wishes pleasure bring, I life would wish, and that I might Waste it for you like taper-​light.

Within these lines, Gower announces his position as both a medieval poet and a narrator who exists in the present. The reflection of old age, however, is everywhere in these lines, including a link to Confessio in the song of an old man, mirroring the fact that Amans, an old man, is also narrating Confessio.12 Echoing Venus at the end of Confessio, who urges Gower to remember that he is old, Gower does, confessing that he is “an old man” and come from “the ashes,” and imagines time as “like taper-​light.”13 These references to the superannuated Gower recall a discourse of age that seems lifted almost directly from metaphors of old age—​as a cursory glance at the Reeve’s Prologue suggests. Still, the impression of Gower is clear from the beginning lines.  Assuming man’s infirmities, with a body that ages in time and exposes the temporary fiction of the able body, Gower nonetheless offers a contradictory stance that evokes the prosthetic nature of narratives that centre on age-related impairments: old age brings weakness and corporeal woes, yet the Latin citation—a good thing is better the older it is—is a linguistic signal of Gower’s own valuation of those antique corpora. Besides matching Gower’s own narrative strategy in situating the Apollonius of Tyre material—​Gower writes he found it in “a Cronique in daies gon”—​ this tagline neatly characterizes not only Shakespeare’s handling of plot and source in this play, as he mines old books for material, but also Gower’s insistence upon the power of old, if nameless sources.14 When Gower calls his speech act a restorative, the aims of his prosthetic agency become clear, as old words are key to new life.15 Of course, thinking about the original connections that Writing Old Age introduces between old speakers and their rhetorical style recalls that rhetorical manuals, from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s in the twelfth century to Thomas Wilson’s in the sixteenth century, build upon a long-​attested connection between oldness or old age and style. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, describing the “ornaments of style” in Poetria Nova, too suggests how old words might be rejuvenated in a section on style. Geoffrey writes 12 Ladd, “ ‘To Hear An Old Man Sing,’ ” 196.

13 Kreg Segall, “Gower and the Incestuous Father: The Intimate Author in Pericles,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34 (Winter 2008):  248–​70. He traces the possibility that taper is tied to papyrus, thus representing the burning of paper and the consumption of texts into fire. 14 Ladd, “ ‘To Hear An Old Man Sing,’ ” 191.

15 Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden, 2010), 198.

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In order that meaning may wear a precious garment, if a word is old, be its physician and give to the old a new vigour. Do not let the word invariably reside on its native soil—​such residence dishonours it. Let it avoid its natural location, travel about elsewhere, and take up a pleasant abode on the estate of another. There let it stay as a novel guest, and give pleasure by its very strangeness. If you provide this remedy, you will give to the word’s face a new youth.16

Central to the workings of style and its effect on old words is not a revision of the word’s inner meaning, but rather its outward appearance. The process by which the writer gives a word this new appearance is a change in location: by moving these old words to new soil, Geoffrey argues that the patina of age will change to “strangeness” and youth. As a study of how one might become a physician to old, ailing words, this short passage speaks to the nature of impairment and the opportunities it presents, first as weakness, then as authority. Reverberating throughout the play, then, Gower from the beginning foregrounds sickness and physic, and inward and outward appearances. In this context, the terms of Gower’s appearance are given in terms of an outward appearance that is mortal, fallible, and subject to corruption. He is ancient Gower, an old man telling an old story.17 The first appearance on the stage is of a medieval poet whose Confessio serves as a source for Shakespeare’s play, echoing much of what the Confessio itself produces:  a highly dramatized sequence of narrative and ethical healing for the old lover through both positive and negative exempla, even if ultimately failed. Gower’s agency throughout the play serves several purposes, one of which clearly is to highlight the ancient textual trajectory of the story of Apollonius of Tyre. Its textual tradition is older than Gower, of course, but his recurring role as prime mover of the play’s plot insures that the medieval nature of the tale is always remembered.18 According to Helen Cooper, Shakespeare “does know it [the tale of Apollonius] is older than Gower, as that first chorus makes clear, and his treatment is designed to reinforce that sense of antiquity,” even as “the few changes he makes to Gower’s development of the story almost all serve to add to its medieval qualities.”19 So, in “assuming man’s infirmities,” Gower is vivified, and made to speak the contours of a slightly changed tale from the one which he himself penned two centuries earlier. Gower, back from the dead, speaks in an archaic language, calling himself an old man, and invokes the common image of man’s life as a candle, burning to its end. 16 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, trans. Margaret F.  Nims (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967), 43. 17 Cooper, Shakespeare, 79–​80.

18 Elizabeth Archibald provides important detail on the medieval reception of the “Apollonius” narrative in Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991).

19 Helen Cooper, “ ‘This worthy olde writer’: Pericles and other Gowers, 1592–​1640,” A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), 99–​113 at 109.

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While it is clear that Gower stands in for a visual sense of antiquity and serves as a reminder of the play’s long textual history, his role in the play is more than stand-​in for a medieval past. Shakespeare might not have known Gower as we know him, as a prolific rewriter and reviser of his own works, a position that scholars today take as a rather uncontested point (contesting instead the extent of that revision, and whether by Gower alone, or accompanied by scribes or a scriptorium). John Fisher speculates that “we may assume Gower made use good of the library at St. Mary Overeys [where he is buried], just as he must later have made good use of its scriptorium.”20 Regardless of whether Fisher is correct, the importance of revision as both textual practice and thematic focus for Gower is rather assured.21 Indeed, found at the beginning, Gower’s role in the play is one which calls attention both to his extreme age and the oldness of the source material for the play, which is found in his Confessio. His seemingly impaired body appears at the beginning, introducing the revision of the Apollonius narrative from Book VIII, and which supplements the grief and wandering of Pericles throughout the play. This supplementary role augments the material of Pericles, serving to flesh out the history and performance of an ancient narrative. John Gower becomes an embodied form of prosthesis, added to the beginning of the play from a time period that precedes Shakespeare’s own, and frames the early modern English of the play with a form of archaic, pseudo-​Middle English, which Gower speaks contrary to the “vulgare and daily speache” of Shakespeare’s London. Central to this argument are the changes this choral Gower works on his material, which include tying the so-​called “dumb shows” implicitly to his own narratorial intervention, linking the impaired old body of the poet to shows which are silent (so deaf) and must be seen. In this way, this play calls attention not only to the senses but also to the nature of impairment and how its depiction papers over temporal distance between the old source material and its performance in an early modern present. To see Gower as both impaired—​as the resurrected yet ancient and anachronistic poet—​and prosthetic—​recuperating a medieval textual past and rejoining it to an early modern present—​reflects both the power and shortcomings of a “historicist stereotype” of Shakespeare and his early modern texts. Indeed, as Curtis Perry and John Watkins argue, in one of these stereotypes, “medieval Europe stands as paradise lost, with Shakespeare and his contemporaries cast in the role of postlapsarian moderns, brilliant, haunted, and skeptical, gathering up pieces of a broken world.”22 In this historical fantasy, Shakespeare and his contemporaries remake the world, giving form to what 20 John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1964), 93.

21 The claims concerning Gower’s dedicated use of a scriptorium have been proven unlikely by Parkes: Consult M. B. Parkes “Patterns of scribal activity and revisions of the text in early copies of works by John Gower,” New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in honour of A.I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and A. J. Piper (Ann Arbor: Scolar, 1995), 81–​121.

22 Curtis Perry and John Watkins, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–​18 at 7.

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has fallen apart; Shakespeare, in fact, constructs the medieval after the fact, fusing the disparate inheritances of the past together. Viewing Gower in the role of prosthetic addition, however, complicates this portrait, as it forces the reader to see how Gower completes what is broken for Shakespeare. The medieval, for which Gower stands, might be foreign for Pericles and spoken contrary to Shakespeare’s daily speech, but without it, the early modern experience of Apollonius of Tyre is as silent as the “dumb shows” that punctuate the play.23

Restoring Prostheses: Gower’s Old Speech Fills the Gaps

As I  have made clear in the preceding chapter, Thomas Wilson’s definition of prosthesis is one which helps guide how these depictions of old age work textually and prosthetically. From prosthesis to apocope, these figures are arranged, according to the part of the word they change or modify; Wilson begins by naming prosthesis and apheresis, which change the beginning, before moving to epenthesis and syncope, which transform the middle of words, and ends by explaining proparalepsis and apocope, which remake the ending of words. Within Wilson’s text, he uses prosthesis to describe the addition of a sound or letters at the beginning of a word to change its intended and primary meaning. Wilson’s example of prosthesis, however, suggests some kind of knowledge of Wilson’s text on Shakespeare’s part. The section defining prosthesis begins, “Of Addition,” and continues with the following example:  “As thus, he did all to berattle hym. Wherein appereth that a silliable is added to this worde (rattle).”24 “Berattle” is a curious word. Attested only twice in The Oxford English Dictionary, the word denotes a noisy attack or a clamour of sound.25 And this definition seems useful for Shakespeare’s works, including Pericles, as Wilson includes in his definition the word “berattle” as an example of prosthesis, which is rare and appears in Hamlet. Shortly after Hamlet’s encounter with Polonius at the beginning of Scene 2 of Act 2, during which Hamlet responds to Polonius’ questioning of his reading with the iconic line, “Words, words, words” (193), the prince speaks with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who offer him news of the players coming to perform at Elsinore. While it is not clear whether Shakespeare knew the exact moment that describes “prosthesis” in Wilson’s text, as a term contemporary to Thomas Berthelet’s printed edition of Confessio Amantis, prosthesis provides new insights into understanding and interpreting the role of Gower in Pericles. The study of Pericles brings to the fore those gaps that exist between early modern texts and their late medieval sources, along with the necessary interventions to close the gulf between what remains and what is lost. Indeed, recent work on the play has attempted to show what the play communicates 23 It is worth noting that George Wilkins’s The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre maintains John Gower as a narrator too, a fact that makes Wilkins’s collaboration with Shakespeare even more likely. 24 Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 176–​77.

25 “berattle, v.,” OED www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​17864?redirectedFrom=berattle#eid

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about performance of early modern textual artifacts, Shakespeare’s debt to medieval sources, and the construction of authors and authority on the early modern stage. Even so, the material sources of Pericles themselves demand renewal. Indeed, as late as 1985, critics could talk of the almost total neglect of Gower’s Confessio Amantis in discussions of Shakespeare’s Pericles, a point made by Richard Hillman in his study of the Shakespearean debt to Gower’s own compendious poem, who writes that in accepting, prima facie, Gower as chorus, readers “may also be lulled into accepting a significant aspect of the play’s originality.”26 In fact, the Confessio is often highlighted, even when Shakespeare writes in ways that seem to obscure the medieval underpinnings of his play.27 This, fortunately, is no longer the case.28 Because in fact, Gower’s choral role suggests Confessio’s importance for Pericles, as it is this material which functions as the source for Gower’s early modern prosthesis but also serves as a form of prosthesis for the medieval poet in his medieval poem. Indeed, where we might see a rupture or break between the medieval and early modern, Gower’s insertion bridges this gap, as “Gower’s role as chorus was embedded within the theatrical and cultural practices of both the medieval and Renaissance periods.”29 In this way, the gaps between performance and text and between medieval poet and early modern resurrection are necessarily filled by Gower, whose ghostly presence multiplies in early modern England.30 Evoking the sixteenth-​century usage of prosthesis, signaling the addition of elements to the beginning of words, also stresses that Confessio is not the only old book that illumines how Pericles operates as a play. Confessio, of course, is an old book when it is printed in the mid-​sixteenth century—​ and the imprint is old when Pericles is written and first performed in the early seventeenth century. The history of the imprint and the ways in which this printed Confessio functioned as an early modern object help to clarify the edition’s ties to oldness and status as an old book, a copy of an even older text. After Caxton prints the 26 Richard Hillman, “Shakespeare’s Gower and Gower’s Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 427–​37 at 427. 27 Hillman, “Shakespeare’s Gower,” 427.

28 See Cooper, “ ‘This worthy olde writer’: Pericles and other Gowers,” 99–​113, for example, for her argument against the view that authors such as Robert Greene were merely remembering the image of the poet and not his actual writings. In “Conjuring Gower in Pericles,” John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R.  F. Yeager (Cambridge:  Brewer, 2010), 315–​25, Martha Driver fleshes out the multiple media from which Shakespeare might have had knowledge of Gower. 29 Kelly Jones, “The Quick and the Dead’: Performing the Poet Gower in Pericles,” in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Play with Medieval Sources or Settings, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), 201–​14 at 203.

30 John Gower often appears alongside Chaucer, as he does in Robert Greene’s Vision and in Jane Scrope’s examination of English authors in Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe. Shakespeare’s Gower, then, is by no means the only “author-​function” of the poet to appear. For a fuller description of Gower’s fulfillment of the “author-​function” in Pericles, see Jeffrey Marsten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Confessio in 1483, Thomas Berthelette prints Confessio in 1532, which is reprinted in the 1550s.31 As Tim William Machan points out, Berthelette’s preface to the imprint fleshes out several concerns for the Confessio, from the construction of an audience that includes King Henry VIII but includes all of England to the merging of the literary and political that gives the copy “nationalistic as well as moralizing purposes.”32 But perhaps the most important function of this paratextual material is the link Berthelette creates between Gower and old words: As a model for the way writers ought to use language, Gower becomes a conservative voice speaking against the fashionable coinage of new words and to the broad spectrum of English society.33

What becomes a restorative for Pericles is here a bulwark—​Gower’s old speech defends the language from fashion and newness, what becomes the so-​called “riper wit” of Gower’s introduction in Pericles.34 Central here is how Gower’s oldness, whether defensive or quaint, retains a linguistic force that can either preserve a kind of English linguistic, nationalistic, and moralistic identity or serve, decades later, as a kind of textual healing. Prosthesis, of course, also works beyond these textual definitions for Pericles. The play itself discusses impairment and age in the depiction of Gower and the characterization of the source material as old and lacking. But prosthesis also seems useful for the play because of the way in which props might be necessary to mark out disability on the stage, because a disability needs to be performed and that much can be added to the performance, which is lacking in the written text, aligning the performance as a kind of “prosthetic augmentation.” Indeed, according to Genevieve Love, In their prosthetic augmentation, early modern disabled characters remind us of theatre’s need of supplementation, of compensation for its disappearances, its approximations. This book is about two kinds of work such characters perform. First, they embody a theatrical problem: that imitation is not identity. Second, they embody a textual problem:  that printed textual versions of early modern plays differ from theatrical performances, and, sometimes, from each other.35

This discussion of prosthetics and playacting foregrounds one of the central concerns of Pericles:  how Gower’s impaired and aged body might call forth Pericles’s need of “supplementation,” which can be seen not only in the role of the ancient chorus and his archaic Middle English but also in his narration of the various dumb shows, which are fully fleshed out in performance but spectrally present in the textual form of the play. 31 Tim William Machan, “Thomas Berthelette and Gower’s Confessio.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 143–​66 at 144. 32 Machan, “Thomas Berthelette,” 147–​48. 33 Machan, “Thomas Berthelette,” 149.

34 Ladd, “ ‘To Hear An Old Man Sing,’ ” 196.

35 Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (London:  Bloomsbury, 2018), 2.

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In this way, Love’s reading of prosthetic augmentation and Pericles’s own deployment of prosthesis match the contours of prosthesis as it has been discussed. As a term, it has expanded beyond the rhetorical meanings recorded by Wilson to encompass corporeal additions and medical devices. Bridging the gaps between rhetorical and material uses of prosthesis, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Synder, who, along with Jay Dolmage and others, have shown how narrative and/​or rhetorical prosthesis shapes the metaphors and disability, as the previous chapters have made clear. In Mitchell and Synder’s description of “narrative prosthesis,” the presentation of disability becomes central to a kind of in-​text prosthesis as disability is “tethered to the act of meaning-​making itself,” creating literary portrayals of disability that are defined both by writing—​depictions of difference and limitations—​and an erasure—​the disabled body ceases to signal its own identity and becomes emblematic of a larger narrative.36 By moving to the metaphorical role of the disabled within literature, their conception of “narrative prosthesis” reminds us that the rhetoric of form and changes on the textual level reverberate in larger contexts. In fact, their study of narrative prosthesis has given new life to this beginning addition and has proven that prosthesis has promise for study of medieval and early modern texts. A quick turn to props and performance reinforces that Love’s notion of prosthesis lives in Pericles, which also accentuates the age of the source material, emphasizing its medieval qualities. Bart Van Es, for example argues that the “depiction in Shakespeare’s Pericles of armour, tilting, and imprese, however, involves a distinctly ‘middle’ option: neither early modern, nor classical, but instead ‘medieval’ in feel.”37 Noting that Shakespeare would have read Berthelet’s edition, which is stubbornly humanist in its depiction of Gower as a proto-​humanist, Van Es advises that “For Berthelet, Gower was thus a pioneering humanist, not a semi-​comic relic of the long gone past.”38 This depiction of Gower as “semi-​comic relic” reads an impulse to see Gower as Gower presents both auctor and amans in Book VIII: very old men, revising and ambivalently accepting the weight of their age. Indeed, the implications of Gower’s first appearance suggest this very characterization: through his role as prime mover of the narration and explicator of the “dumb shows” throughout, ancient Gower actually revises his own tale, changing it for a later time, while reinforcing its pastness. The Pericles-​Gower does unknowingly highlight that “ancient” Gower was actually reviser Gower. And armour, as a supplement and a prop that props up this medievalness of the play, can be traced to Pericles’s rusty armour. In Act 2, a fisherman cries Help, master, help! Here’s a fish hangs in the net like a poor man’s right in the law:

36 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6.

37 Bart Van Es, “Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages,” Medieval Shakespeare : Pasts and Presents, ed. Peter Holland, Helen Cooper, and Ruth Morse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 37–​51 at 39; Cooper, Shakespeare, 200. 38 Van Es, “Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages,” 43.

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‘twill hardly come out. Ha! Bots on ‘t, ‘tis come at last, and ‘tis turned to a rusty armor. (2.1.121–​124)

Pericles notes that this suit of armour is his, part of his patrimony from his father, and covers himself in his rusty armour: Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself; And though it was mine own, part of my heritage Which my dead father did bequeath to me With this strict charge even as he left his life. (2.1.127–​130)

And after convincing the fishermen of his rightful claim, Pericles puts on the armour: By your furtherance I am clothed in steel, And spite of all the rupture of the sea, This jewel holds his biding on my arm. Unto thy value I will mount myself Upon a courser, whose delightful steps Shall make the gazer joy to see him tread. (2.1.160–​165)

The connections here between the reinforced pastness of the play, thanks to Gower’s narration, and the prosthetic roles that he fulfills as an impaired and aging figure in a prologue and as a prologue, are suggestive. Rust, as I have made clear, is often symbolic of old age, use, and decay, and is another synonym in the play for the “mouldy tale” it is and the Middle English one upon which it builds. The rust here and the age of the armour, belonging as it does originally to Pericles’s father, foregrounds its antique status, and, like Gower, seems visibly antique. But this suit of armour is further reflective of Gower’s role in the play, as Pericles’s donning of that old armour is central to his victory in the tournament and subsequent marriage to Thaisis. Indeed, like Gower, this is an old prosthetic that can be worn to establish an old lineage. Susan Harlan has examined what it means for this armour to be rusty in an examination that seeks to uncover what this prop might have looked like on the early modern stage, noting that in “the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the value of armour was increasingly symbolic, or ‘secondary’, as the use of gunpowder had rendered suits of armour virtually useless. In other words, a type of clothing that had originally been intended for protection of the self was being used for projection, or performance, of the self.”39 In Harlan’s discussion what seems clear is that the supplementary power of the rusty armour echoes what appears both unnecessary and impotent agency of the old body, even as that body, like the rusty armour, is that “upon which crucial relationships between textual and human bodies, between subjects and objects, and between historical pasts and contemporary moments are literally and figuratively inscribed.”40 I echo Harlan in seeing how the rusty suit of armour suggests another material metaphor for the aging body and the aging tale, and how the armour, like Gower, represents a pastness which can be put on and taken off. It looks worn and 39 Susan Harlan, “Certain condolements, certain vails’:  Staging Rusty Armour in Shakespeare’s Pericles,” Early Theatre 11 (2008): 129–​40 at 132.

40 Harlan, “Staging Rusty Armour,” 132

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decayed, but like the prosthetic power of the aging body, the armour embodies power in its decay and rust: “To claim the armor is to claim ownership of past literary forms and their present incarnations.”41

Remember Gower’s Old Body

Harlan’s astute reading of material props and the literary forms they represent demonstrates that the particular and specific histories of modes of textual production and transmission are often read through the whole and impaired old body, where that body functions as a metaphor for history and texts. In other words, just as this rusted suit of armour can represent both the prosthetic supplement to the shipwrecked Pericles and the literary material that Pericles recycles, so too can the old body serve as a medium and metaphor for this textual transmission. And this connection toward the beginning of Pericles is also one which Gower’s Confessio introduces in its beginning and which echoes throughout to the end from which Pericles recycles material depicting Apollonius of Tyre. The prologue to Confessio Amantis starts by discussing things both past and present, even as Book VIII, in ending his work, centres on old exempla of lechery and incest, and pivots to a vision and revision of Amans, as old in the present, rewriting John Gower onto that figure. It is the recall of old sources, however, with which Gower opens, as he advances his rationale for writing his book. Of hem that writen ous tofore The bokes duelle, and we therefore Ben tawht of that was write tho: Forthi good is that we also In oure tyme among ous hiere Do wryte of newe som matiere, Essampled of these olde wyse, So that it myhte in such a wyse, Whan we ben dede and elleswhere, Beleve to the worldes eere In tyme comende after this. (Prol. 1–​11)

Old books and old men:  this connection has been at the intersection of bodies and literature throughout each chapter, beginning with Parlement’s Elde and ending with Pericles’s Gower, and it seems only fitting to flesh out explicitly this link, in view of a then contemporary voice. From the beginning of Confessio, Gower romanticizes the past as one in which books were more important, even as he declares himself dull and unlearned. And natheles be daies olde, Whan that the bokes weren levere, Wrytinge was beloved evere Of hem that weren vertuous; For hier in erthe amonges ous,

41 Harlan, “Staging Rusty Armour,” 137.

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If no man write hou that it stode, The pris of hem that weren goode Scholde, as who seith, a gret partie Be lost; so for to magnifie The worthi princes that tho were, The bokes schewen hiere and there, Wherof the world ensampled is; And tho that deden thanne amis Thurgh tirannie and crualté Right as thei stoden in degré, So was the wrytinge of here werk. Thus I, which am a burel clerk, Purpose for to wryte a bok After the world that whilom tok Long tyme in olde daies passed. (Prol. 37–​55)

This rhetorical positioning of the book, caught between the quick and the dead, recalls the old body of Amans at the end of Book VIII of Confessio Amantis, who hovers between living and dying in his old age. Looking into a mirror, Amans reads himself and sees the traces of corporeal inscription that reflect old age. Here, at the beginning of Confessio, Gower too reads into old age, and like Amans seems transfixed by the past. Recalling that books were loved (levere) in “daies olde,” and filled with stories and narratives that sampled the world, Gower attempts a similar sort of temporal disinjunction. Amans strives to stay young and inhabit a world of courtly love, one commanded by Venus, where the old man views his young body, which as a function of being his past body is also an old one. Gower, as not yet Amans, attempts to go back similarly into the past to retrieve something both old—​the attitude of an older culture to books—​and new—​his newest creation follows the trace of the master paradigm. And indeed, this blurring of old and new, and the persistence of the past in the present, is a facet of Gower’s verse as Malte Urban has made clear: concentrating on Gower’s Latin poem Vox Clamantis, he argues Vox is “informed by a cultural agenda that sees the present as corrupted in the sense that it still carries at least traces of the qualities of the past” while having “lost all cultural memory of these traces.”42 And, telling, Confessio is bookended by a similar union between the past and present, with the prologue’s insistence on the value of old books and the emphasis at the end of Gower’s present age and expulsion from the court of Venus. Gower’s role throughout Pericles and as Amans at the end of Book VIII of the Confessio reminds his reader that features of his presentation in Pericles evoke a medieval textual past. From the ashes of these old formal characteristics, Shakespeare’s Gower comes blazing forward to 1609, entertaining an audience with more ripe wit to the retelling of an old story by an old man, whose husk of a body struts and frets upon the seventeenth-​ century stage. The Apollonius material is the longest of the exempla that Gower 42 Malte Urban, “Past and Present:  Gower’s Use of Old Books in Vox Clamantis,” in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 175–​94 at 176.

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provides in his Confessio and serves as the first extended narrative of the final book of the Confessio. Long absent from considerations of Pericles, the ending of Book VIII of the Confessio takes its central position in this article, as I contend that Gower’s speeches and words in Pericles reflect the beginning, as much as they do the end of Book VIII. Gower’s language of impairment and age, which surround the action of Pericles, serves as a reminder that Shakespeare’s play contends with the portrayal of old age, old stories, and old authors that Gower constructs at the end of Confessio. Concentrating on the portrait of Gower throughout Pericles within the context of Gower’s surprise appearance at the end of Book VIII of Confessio helps to give new contexts to moments of re-​vision within Shakespeare’s own text. As readers of Confessio are surely aware, the appearance of a textualized Gower at the end of Confessio is itself a re-​vision, one which is dramatized through the stages of confession and given in the gap between authorial identity and constructed persona. The revision of Amans into Gower, figures of penance and writing, dramatizes the recognition of both Amans’s old age and his identity, as John Gower suddenly surfaces in the reflection of Amans’s old face in the mirror of Venus. Venus reminds Amans of the salient fact that he seems to have forgotten, and Gower has forgotten to mention. Venus takes the Lover to a mirror Wherinne anon my hertes yhe I caste, and sih my colour fade, Myn yhen dymme and al unglade, Mi chiekes thinne, and al my face With elde I myhte se deface, So riveled and so wo besein, That ther was nothing full ne plein, I syh also myn heres hore. (8. 2824–​31)

The Lover looks at the mirror, but it is with the eye of his heart, and sees truly what he is: old. What Gower means here by “myn hertes yhe” is not totally clear. Is it some inward vision, or his eyes seeing what they should have seen intuitively from the beginning? Nevertheless, it is his physical appearance that prompts his change (see line 2859: “I was out of mi swoune affraied.” Fear of his physical appearance causes the Lover to break out of his coma-​like state), for he sees all the changes wrought by age. His eyes are dull and lack joy (2826), his face is thin and wrinkled (lines 2827–​29), and his hair has turned white (2831). The beginning of Pericles, likewise, mirrors the inward eye of Gower at the end of Confessio. There, Gower begins to introduce the narrative movement of Pericles, as he assumes what he calls man’s infirmities from the beginning, and what are many of the same signs of age pulled from Confessio, through the revived author’s rehearsing of a version of the Apollonius of Tyre narrative that begins Confessio’s last book. Both central to the play—​his narrative serves as one of the probable sources for Pericles—​and set apart from the action—​he consistently attempts to downplay his role in the text—​Gower and his choral function recall that Amans both exists centrally as participant in a structure of confession that necessitates the production of exempla even as he is removed from the heart of these stories.

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Indeed, from the opening lines of the play, during which the medieval poet assumes man’s infirmities (again), Gower’s position is one defined both by his centrality as old narrator and effacement of that role through repeated mention of his ancient age. He is the explicator of the dumb shows and in spite of his frequent insistence that his words are unnecessary, he speaks them. In fact, throughout the play, Gower is presented as a very old poet who is somewhat out of time as he dons once again the mortal body of man, depicting the struggle of Apollonius (changed in the play to Pericles) to regain his wife and daughter.

“This ’longs the Text”: Gower as Medieval Prosthesis

Out of time and appearing at the beginning of a play almost two centuries after his death, Gower makes clear how his aged body, itself a bridge between the medieval past and the early modern present, serves as prosthetic for the play. Supplemental as the dumb shows he narrates, this superannuated Gower appears to fill in the gaps of a performance he watches and supervises off and on the stage. Prosthetic as a paratextual apparatus and prosthetic as a body which both calls attention to its impairments and serves as addition for that lack, Gower likewise serves as a prosthetic for early modern literature which augments source material and its revision using narratives of impairment which he voices both in Pericles and his own poetry. In other words, by foregrounding Gower as an impaired and able narrator, Pericles not only echoes Gower’s own vision of his activities, but also invites the medieval poet to fill in the gaps with this old “mouldy” tale. My primary aim in returning to this fruitful encounter between early modern stage and late medieval text is to highlight that an empty space, a gap, still exists in treatments of this play and its medieval (and earlier) genealogy. Old age and its role have been treated by a number of critics. Segall, for example, notes, “One way to approach Pericles is via a classically comical treatment of generational sexuality, in which the young lovers seek to bypass the obstacles of the previous generation, often the senex, the old man.”43 This argument, I would note, seems as apropos of the play as it does of Confessio’s ending. The senex, routed in the battle of love, leaves the path of love for a more restful arena. Yet old age, in the play, and in the poem, claims a certain amount of power. As a marker of authority—​a good thing is better the older it is, as Gower announces at the beginning of Pericles—​old age claims for itself a space of wisdom, authorizing itself through its narrative of pain and suffering. Yet this narrative also brings to light that the aging process is illustrated with all the costs of that wisdom:  the old are impotent sexually, their hands waver, their voices quiver, and bereft of bodily definition, these figures of old age disturb us with images of bodily corruption and decomposition. Midway through Pericles, John Gower embodies this relationship between pain and authority, which old age brings together. The resurrected medieval poet and embodied 43 Segall, “Gower and the Incestuous Father,” 252.

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chorus claims the space to make narrative interventions in the Shakespearean retelling of his material together with the necessity for doing so. Pleading with his audience to connect with him, a metonymic figuration of the past, Gower asks those hearing him, “To learn of me, who stand i’ the gaps to teach you/​ The stages of our story” (4.4.8–​9). These lines, with their play on “stages,” and “gaps” as physical spaces, suggest not only the performative aspects of the play but also its status as text.44 Gower, of course, must make clear that the often confusing narrative of Pericles has stages. From the court of Antiochus and Pericles’s discovery of Antiochus’s incest, through careful reading of the sinful king’s own riddle, back to Tyre, and then away again across the sea, Pericles makes central that its twisting narrative reflects a display of twisted subjects:  actual incest and the seemingly ever-​present threat of future incest; murder, realized and attempted; and prostitution, performed and threatened. Beyond the image of stages as narrative marked through time, Gower’s use of stage must also refer to the text as object performed. It becomes almost impossible to deny that Pericles exists as a popular and frequently performed work on the early modern English stage, a fact made clear by the title pages of the earliest extant editions of the play. Announcing the play as the “Late, and much admired Play,” these title pages, the earliest dating from 1609, describe not only what the play is about but also how frequently it has been performed. Indeed, as chorus, Gower’s mention of stages cannot help but reinforce that the play was relatively popular, even as it does not exist in the first or second folio. This discussion of stages as narrative progression and indication of the text and its performance brings to the fore a third meaning. Uttering the word “stages,” Gower calls attention to the corpus of his own work, which he purportedly revised and reworked, even blind and infirm. Following the work of Peter Nicholson and M. B. Parkes, I read “stages” as a spatial evocation of the editing process. In fact, the mention of Gower working in and through the gaps in Shakespeare’s play highlights both the textual traditions of Pericles and the copies of Gower’s own works, which, from Vox Clamantis to Confessio, are often categorized as stages of authorial and rolling revision.45 These lines then transport their hearer both to the early modern play and the medieval poem, bridging the gap between what critics like Deanne Williams have called “late medieval reading practice,” and the construction of authority in the early modern performance of texts and authors long dead.46 This Gower, in the gaps, remains suspended in time between the composition of Confessio and Pericles. Indeed, Pericles renews the story of Apollonius of Tyre, given in 44 Harry Berger’s Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1989), for example, discusses the distance between readings of Shakespeare’s plays as texts and as performances.

45 See, for example, Peter Nicholson, “Gower’s Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 75–​86 and Parkes, “Patterns of Scribal Activity,” 81–​121.

46 Deanne Williams, “Papa Don’t Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles,” University of Toronto Quarterly 71 (2002): 595–​622 (602).

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the first portion of the last book of Confessio, and Shakespeare’s Gower cannot help but recall that the end of Book VIII features an in-​text revision, present in all versions of the Confessio, of Amans into John Gower, an I-​persona that appears tantalizingly close to the Gower who exists outside the poem and Shakespeare’s play. In fact, in Gower’s handling of Apollonius in Confessio, the enduring image of the old book resurfaces again, after Apollonius’s undead wife washes ashore. After Apollonius’s wife “dies,” the sailors insist her body be thrown overboard and the body buried at sea. Moving back to an older source, the narrator returns to his … matiere ayein, To telle as olde bokes sein, This dede corps of which ye knowe With wynd and water was forthrowe Now hier, now ther, till ate laste At Ephesim the See upcaste The cofre and al that was therinne. (8.1149–​57)

The movement that this stanza reflects also reflects the back and forth of the narrator as he moves from one stage of the tale to the next. Appropriately enough, this movement back to the old sources—​ his “matiere” together with the temporal adverb “ayein”—​ gestures to a genesis not only of the Confessio as it reworks what “olde bokes sein,” but also Pericles as it returns again from a moment even farther in the future, like the waves of the sea and the movement of Apollonius’s wife in her “cofre.” This chest, like the confines of the book, contains material that is revised and revived; indeed, “cofre” as a storage space suggests a means not only of securing relics, the dead, and gold, but also books, a usage common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Common both to Confessio and to Pericles is the undead quality of Apollonius’s and Pericles’s wife: in both texts, she is brought back from the dead, in a similar fashion to Gower’s own restoration. This old story which he will relate, like the poet who stands before the early modern audience, is one which concerns restoring and revivification. In Confessio, Apollonius’s wife is discovered by a physician who, finding signs of life, enables her full recovery, which importantly begins with the return of her vision. We might see this recovery of life and text as narrative strategy, one which Shakespeare himself writes into Gower’s part. As a signal that Shakespeare has read his Gower, the medieval poet’s explanation of the original incest is worth noting. Offering to “tell you what mine authors say” (1.0.20), Shakespeare’s Gower relates the king’s choosing of a wife—​using “fere,” a rather obscure Middle English word for wife—​this early modern Gower, like his premodern counterpart, returns to his old sources in order to craft a revised tale. Indeed, as these lines from Confessio and Pericles make clear, in terms of restoratives of lives and books, both poem and play utilize re-​vision and revision. Gower, as critics have rightly noted, was a consummate reviser of his own works, even as they themselves toy with revision as both theme and textual practice. In fact, the terms of that stance of reviser, however, go past the strict confines of Gower in this play. While “Moral Gower”

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was a clearly a well-​known figure in the Renaissance, the donning of “man’s infirmities,” and the posture of old age assumed by the narrative Gower flesh out the contours of an earlier rhetorical stance taken by Gower himself.47 And regardless of Shakespeare’s particular knowledge of that autographical accounting of Gower’s revision or lack of vision, he does function, in fact, as a Shakespearean vates in Pericles.48 With all the knowledge and vision of the action of the play that his extraspatio-​temporal position gives him, Gower is able to see beyond the accelerating pace of disguises and schemes that characterize the narrative progression of Pericles. The first dumb show occurs at the beginning of Scene 5, after Gower’s second speech, one which announces implicitly his otherworldly sight of the action, as he continues to drive this reworked version of his own previous tale. I’ll show you those in trouble’s reign, Losing a mite, a mountain gain. …

But tidings to the contrary Are brought your eyes. What need speak I? (2.0.7–​8 and 15–​16)

This emphasis on sight throughout the play, reminiscent of Gower’s own obsessive words of his own sight, Amans, and other characters throughout Confessio, cannot stifle what Andrew Hiscock has called Pericles’s “own appetite for generating narrative, even

47 See R.  F. Yeager, “Gower in Winter:  Last Poems,” The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R.  F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 87–​103, for Gower’s role as old and moral poet. Yeager notes that while evidence of illustrations of younger Gower exists, with the burial effigy looming large, Gower and Amans, the titular character of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, largely appear as old men. 48 In “Quicquid Homo Scribat,” one of his later Latin lyrics, Gower describes the loss and his own vision, an impairment that Nature uses to limit his writing. However, as in Pericles, this moment of cessation is seemingly eternally delayed, as the poet is writing the end to his writing (John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, trans. R. F. Yeager and Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005), 46–​47.     It was in the first year of the reign of King Henry IV When my sight failed for my deeds. All things have their time; nature applies a limit, Which no man can break by his own power. I can do nothing beyond what is possible, though my will has remained; My ability to write more has not stayed. While I was able I wrote, but now because stooped old age Has troubled my senses, I leave writing to the schools. Let someone else more discreet who comes after me write, For from this time forth my hand and pen will be silent. Nevertheless I ask this one final thing, the last of my words: That God make our kingdoms prosperous in the future. Amen. (1–​12)

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in its closing moments.”49 As a continuation of the opening scene with its decapitated heads, killed by a riddle that the suitors either cannot or will not answer, Gower seems to privilege the sight of those who can no longer speak or will not speak as narrative movement. But like the circular riddle which produces these visions of horror that no longer see, Gower’s need to speak is only rhetorically unnecessary. Although here Gower does not recognize his speaking potential, it cannot be forgotten that the bulk of long speeches belong to him. Besides Pericles, he appears the most important player of the play. Yet, his “dumb shows” routinely impart through sight what Gower offers in speech, and as Hiscock has firmly noted, the play recalls that narratio was part of the bedrock of Tudor curriculum and the classroom.50 Without repeating and rehearsing a distinction that has consumed parts of early modern scholarship—​the differences between texts and performances—​Gower’s “dumb show” blurs further the boundaries between text and play as it highlights certain aspects of the medieval poet. Indeed, Gower’s introduction of this first dumb show valorizes the visual aspects of the performance that the aged, blind, biographical Gower would have necessarily lost; even brought back from the dead, this Gower depends on a sort of visual substitute, a prosthetic for his narrative verse and bodily sight. He mentions in the last lines before the stage directions for the dumb show the reversal of fortune that is to meet Pericles. Pericles’s knowledge and discernment in discovering the incest of Antiochus has made a return to Tarsus dangerous and the voyage of Pericles must continue. Gower, ceding his vocal authority to this show, rhetorically wonders what need of speech exists for him, when the visualization of action—​in short, a re-​visioning of actions apart from the world of the stage—​occurs. Following the stage directions are Gower’s need to speak: for twenty-​four lines, Gower explicates the narrative that this “dumb show” explains. Shipwrecked at the end of this pantomimed performance, Pericles enters at the end of Gower’s speech, and Gower’s goodbye, for now, is pregnant with possible meanings for a resurrected medieval poet whose own works signal the importance of textual revision. “And here he comes. What shall be next/​ Pardon old Gower; this ’longs the text” (2.0.39–​40). What seems perfectly clear and succinct, instead, can take on differing shades of meaning. The deletion of the presumed first syllabus of ‘longs” functions as aphaearesis, the opposite of prosthesis in rhetorical terms. Like prosthesis, though, this deletion creates new meanings, and the reader of these lines is confronted with a range of connotations that move from an enlargement of the text to possession (the act of belonging to the text). Gower’s speech is at once perhaps too long: its length causes an expansion of the text and Gower, in this play and in his own works, is ever mindful of the text as object needing correction and reworking. The stopping of Gower’s speech might here be read as revisionary impulse, the artistic motivation to improve and rectify the 49 Andrew Hiscock, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Pericles, Prince of Tyre and the Appetite for Narrative,” in Late Shakespeare: 1608–​1613, ed. Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 35. 50 Hiscock, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” 22.

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errors of a first draft. But the drafty speech of so old an author, with its archaizing meter, might also give another meaning, a third usage, to “’longs to the text.” Gower might again be privileging a sight which he in his old age has lost.51 Longing himself to see, Gower wishes for the audience to pardon him, an indication that the visual is still valued, both as the text is performed and as a text, with visual markings on a page. Nevertheless, the drafty voice of old Gower interferes with the visual aspects of a text and performance that is of another time. I will conclude here with Gower’s marriage of visual and textual culture, a corrective no doubt to a schism of texts and performances, and a union that makes clear that Shakespeare’s view of Gower is bound up in conceptions of creation, revision, and age.

And ending thus:

Be attent, And time that is so briefly spent With your fine fancies quaintly eche What’s dumb in show, I’ll plain with speech. (3.0.11–​14)

The lady shrieks, and well-​a-​near Does fall in travail with her fear, And what ensues in this fell storm Shall for itself perform; I nill relate; action may Conveniently the rest convey, Which might not what by me is told. In your imagination hold This stage the ship, upon who deck The sea-​tossed Pericles appears to speke. (3.0.51–​60)

While this in-​text Gower appears to cede his authority to narrate, it is his lines “plain with speech” which are performed and visually consumed. This dumb show, in short, will be read not only by the audience but also by Gower, whose revisions to the action appear in textual, albeit technically spoken, form. But this speech goes further: its use of “eche,” an archaic verb, meaning to augment, demonstrates a suggestive connection for Gower’s own narrative activities in Pericles that I argue should be viewed as a reflection, indirect and implied, from the Confessio Amantis.52 Gower offers by way of his speech to augment the visual aspect of the dumb show. More than just a summation, this relationship 51 Orlemanski, “Literary Genre.” Gower’s disabilities bring to the fore Orlemanski’s claim that “I explore the claim that ‘disability’ functions as a historicist prosthesis. The word extends the conventional reach of medievalist inquiry, even as its dissonant modernity prevents its naturalisation to the seemingly integral totality of the past … I argue that the historical hybridity embodied by ‘medieval disability’ is finally inseparable from the hermeneutic and anachronistic interface of reading itself, where present and past meet” (1253–​54). For a comprehensive discussion of Gower’s blindness see, Hsy, “Blind Advocacy.”

52 “eche” (v),  Oxford English Dictionary www.oed.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/​view/​Entry/​ 59294?rskey=SJiDX1&result=4&isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed June 1, 2013).

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between Gower’s narratio and the show theatergoers can see but not hear brings to mind Amans’s inward seeing (through the “yhe” inside) as a prosthesis to powers of sight which implicitly are not adequate. The shows are not long, and like Gower’s own vision—​the Gower outside of the play—​the dumb shows do not last: their time, like his eyesight, is brief. Likely, blind and aged, this poet, resurrected in 1608, augments the visual with his own words. This Mortal Gower is the Moral Gower of Confessio. Indeed, the Gower of Pericles might haunt our reading of the older text and the older Gower. At the end of Book VIII of Confessio Amantis, the image of Amans, in his own assumption of man’s infirmities, forces not only the recognition of his own old age and subsequent eviction from the game of love but also the admission of aged Gower, lamenting both his corporeal conditions and the state of the body politic of England, a discourse of debility that reflects both the aging body of Gower and the disordered state of England. Both images recall the trace of an image of the enfeebled Gower, mouthing the words of new and old works, creating and revising, as the revisions of the Confessio maintain the discursive treatments of Gower’s age-​driven impairments. As Shakespeare’s spectral construction of Gower illustrates, the contours of such a link among age, impairment and revision continue to haunt discussions of Gower from Gower to the present. Perry and Watkins, in their introduction to Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, too, make the connection that early modern authors and texts facilitate our continued enjoyment of medieval literature, as their revisions and erasures create the Middle Ages as a period to be experienced and a prosthetic to be utilized: While historians have concentrated on refuting Shakespeare’s distortions of the Middle Ages, they have neglected the larger question of Shakespeare’s role in defining their field in the first place. Shakespeare stands in some profound sense prior to our modern experience of the Middle Ages, despite our attempts at historiographical rigor. This priority explains the persistence of Shakespearean interpretations despite historians’ efforts to put them to rest. Even if we know that Shakespeare gave the wrong answers, he asked the right questions, or at least asked the questions that still shape our sense of what mattered during the Middle Ages.53

In fact, by drawing attention to the layers of texts and borrowings in his play, Shakespeare models that which Gower creates in his own text. Indeed, John Gower stands at the centre of the critical enterprise that viewed Gower as an aging, blind poet to advance critical claims that focus mainly on the process of revision and manuscript-​ level revisions and emendations for his corpus of work, as this characterization of the poet as aged, infirm, and blind is one that he himself articulates and invites. And this claiming of impairment returns us to the ends of narrative, a topic that Chapter 1 described in some detail. There, I showed how Parlement’s Elde creates an embodied link between old age and narrative, leaning on the crutch of narratives and their conclusions to read in them the inevitability of death, decay, and possibly disability. These reflections of mortality offered Elde a space to teach his younger interlocutors and the opportunity to read in his “mirrour” the embodied truth of the temporariness 53 Perry and Watkins, “Introduction,” 3.

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of the fiction of the able body. This fiction of the able body is further shattered by the assumption of man’s infirmities by a revived and revised Gower in Pericles—​ however what remains united in Gower, medieval and early modern, is his uniting of storytelling and the body and the ends of both. What the end of Confessio shows and what Shakespeare’s play echoes from that ending is how old age and what Helen Cooper has called “the ends of storytelling” can be understood in similar ways. In her reading of Venus’s exclamation to the aged Gower in Confessio, Cooper shows that “Gower is being true to the deep roots of the form in ways we do not normally think about. Ideas of mortality, the end of life, and the ends of storytelling are closely linked.”54 These textual connections, suggested by Cooper, ultimately reinforce that Gower in the Confessio and in Pericles highlights the transitory nature of the able body, depicting it as a temporary fiction, one which transforms into a confession of impairments and debility, all of which serve as the staff for the old man.

54 Helen Cooper, “Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling,” John Gower: Others and the Self, ed. Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2017), 91–​107.

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EPILOGUE: IMPOTENCE AND TEXTUAL HEALING I conclude Writing Old Age with one last stanza, the last stage of playing voiced by Jaques in As You Like It. There, he ties the depiction of age on the stage with the well-​worn conventions of the “Ages of Man.”1 It is useful to consider how this depiction fossilizes the decay of body and mind driven by the weight of years.2 … The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (2.7.164–​73)3

Moving from middle age to old age, Jaques’s description of the aging body on stage “shifts” first the physical dimensions and abilities of the body: the vision is blurred and weakened, making “spectacles on nose” a necessity, recalling the failing vision of the author and scribe, as Hoccleve and Caxton portray them.4 Those well-​fitting hose as well slip off the newly shrunken body, whose legs resemble those of Chaucer’s Reeve with his staff-​like legs. The voice, which once boomed and commanded, presumably, attention 1 As the introduction makes clear, the so-​called “Ages of Man” have been examined by many critics, and the following texts are essential reading for thinking about the role of these schema in the European Middle Ages: J. A. Burrow’s The Ages of Man; Mary Dove, The Perfect Age of Man (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man. Chap.  1 and 2 of Sears’s book are especially helpful for their discussions, respectively, of the physical signs of aging as the seasons of life and the categorization of the Ages of Man as seven stages and the documentary evidence for these categories.

2 Narduzzi, “Disability Figures,” 458:  “For from Suffolk to Jaques, ‘to be disbled’ is, with one exception in the dramatic canon, a state that male characters wilfully bring upon themselves.” 3 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019).

4 Alan Taylor Bradford, “Jaques’ Distortion of the Seven-​Ages Paradigm,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27 (1976): 171–​76. Bradford sees in Jaques’s twisting of the Ages of Man an error—​the divorce of this scheme from the Ptolemaic universe—​an individual response to what seems the absurdities of life. Bradford argues that “should be noted that this scheme is relatively inflexible, that it admits of variation only in its details and not in its framework. To manipulate the latter –​ by altering the sequence of the ages or interchanging their characteristics, for instance –​would be, by analogy, to juggle the spheres –​and thus disrupt the stability of the Ptolemaic universe: which is exactly what Jaques does in order to accommodate his own perverse and eccentric view of life” (173).

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126 Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing and audience, wavers and trembles, eventually going silent in the final stage of death, echoing the strange and antic voice of Pericles’s Gower, who assumes “man’s infirmities” so that an early modern audience can “hear an old man sing.” The end of this “strange eventual history” is oblivion and the loss of all sensory experience, which brings to mind the end of Parlement, as Elde, who has marshaled narrative after narrative stressing the end of ability and strength, himself moves to the grave. While this speech highlights the weaknesses associated with old age and makes central how old age is defined both by narrative and that narrative’s depiction of impairment, it does not voice the advantages and powers associated with that narrative of old age. As the resurrected Gower in Pericles makes clear, narrative becomes more than important for the old figure in literature of Late Medieval England, even if that literature merely evokes this medieval past. These figures depend on narrative first to mark off their lives as marked by frailty, debility, or impotence; then narrative is used to augment those infirmities without erasing these impairments; and finally, narrative very much is a sign itself of age, as these prosthetic complaints of pain, woe, and inability ultimately mark what age is. And throughout Writing Old Age, I have chosen from a body of literature too numerous to describe, with texts innumerable depicting not only the horrors of old age but also the myriad ways that narrative describing these horrors highlights a lack of bodily power, even as that narrative itself is powerful, offering the old speaker another chance to “pleye” if Chaucer’s Reeve is to be believed. Seeing that narrative and impairment are linked in the depiction of old men and their complaints has been the primary consequence of reading these late medieval and early modern English texts. But, as Writing Old Age makes clear throughout, this narrative connection is not just about the narratives which prove necessary to produce old age—​indeed, these narratives are important for old speakers in two other different, yet related, ways. First, these texts demonstrate the connection between staves and stanzas—​that poetry has a prosthetic function for these figures who claim their disability, who excuse their impairments, based precisely on the complaints—​ so that acknowledgements of impairment actually have power and force. But these prosthetic narratives have other force as well, especially as they offer something of a symbol for the state of old sources and books—​that is, when these speakers use narratives of impairment and debility to speak about their age, they often use classical and early medieval sources. But the connection works the other way too: their bodies are authoritative by virtue of their incompleteness and this offers a fitting narrative to old books—​often incomplete or missing something essential, but those inadequacies are often a sign of their authority and power. The point of this rather extended meditation on time, print, and text is to emphasize the expanse of history and the past in the writing of old age from the Alliterative Revival, Chaucer, and Gower to Hoccleve, Caxton, and Shakespeare. The prevalence of a discourse of old age and a rhetoric of age-​ related impairments and conditions reflected by their texts suggests that the need for prosthesis offers some explanations for the frequency of formal and thematic elements that emphasize old age, reflecting not only bodily age, but also historical events, places, and past authors. Surrounded by the detritus of the past in the city of London and the precincts of Southwark and Westminster, together with levels of narrative, history, and

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sources contained in past works, certain texts from the mid-​fourteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth demonstrate a remarkable interest in a similar discursive treatment of old age. From Elde in Parlement of the Thre Ages to Shakespeare’s construction of ancient Gower in Pericles, what I have attempted to demonstrate is a new reading of masculine old age in Late Medieval England. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated how Parlement’s Elde emphasizes the tie of his classical and biblical narratives to his weakened body, as he offers the desolation of his body to his younger interlocutors, in a text that implicitly and unconsciously offers a twisted version of Cato’s wisdom in Cicero’s De Senectute. These narratives, expanded and amplified from other versions of the Nine Worthies, foreground how narrative works as a crutch for the impaired and decrepit Elde, which links Parlement, most likely by accident, to Wynnere and Wastoure and its first fitt. There, the narrator voices the “selcouthes” and wonders seen since Troy, and the overthrow not only of the ancient city but also of the old court poets, whose knowledge was not mere jangling but deeply known and embodied. Next, in Chapter 2, I moved to a discussion of some of Chaucer’s later lyrics and the Reeve’s Prologue and Tale in order to show how amidst the Reeve’s age-​and impairment-​related apologia, he nevertheless uses narrative as a weapon, which proves the emptiness of his earlier claims of debility. Described as a staff in his General Prologue-​portrait, the Reeve ultimately ends his tale with its subject wounded by a staff—​tying the power of the Reeve’s thin and withered body to the actual violence and his tale, and evoking the multiple meanings of staff in the late medieval ages—​both walking aid and synonym for stanza. These moves suggest something authorial of the Reeve, a claim that helped to flesh out how Adam Scriveyn and Envoy to Scogan participate respectively in textual punishments and the language of impotence and power in depictions of old men. The rest of Writing Old Age dealt largely with how this discourse of age traced in fourteenth-​century texts and reflective possibly of the devaluation of youth in depictions of Richard II appeared in texts and narratives of Thomas Hoccleve, William Caxton, and William Shakespeare. Chapter  3 fleshed out how Hoccleve’s Regiment serves as prologue and prosthetic for William Caxton’s paratexts that describe his age-​related excuses for choosing print over manuscript, claims which largely lack evidence. As another instance of how age-​related complaints become prosthetic and powerful, these paratexts nevertheless highlight debility and weakness. Coupled with this discussion, I looked to Caxton’s imprinting of Cicero’s De Senectute, finding in this text echoes of how narratives describing old age both claim debility and serve as substitute for that weakness. In Chapter  4, I  looked to Gower’s resuscitation in Shakespeare’s Pericles as a symbol of how early modern England often uses a broken, ancient, feeble image of the Middle Ages to augment texts and authors. Together with this claim, I likewise demonstrated that Gower’s appearance in the play as a “restorative” emphasized the power of the weakened, ancient presence both in the play and the texts which precede Pericles in Writing Old Age: mirroring not only the role of Amans/​John Gower in Confessio Amantis, but also evoking the role of the aged man in every previous chapter. This book, however, did not take up old age and impairment in all the ways it could have. Certainly, texts were not discussed, among which one might count Piers Plowman

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128 Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing and many of the other Canterbury Tales. Nor did this examination reach farther than Pericles in early modern England:  Richard II and King Lear are two texts which seem promising for this prosthetic view of old age, both in the newly inspired prophet that Gaunt becomes in Act II and in the reclamation of authority occasioned by Lear’s weakness and lack of power. Finally, the focus of Writing Old Age was set squarely on those old men, dirty and otherwise, who serve as both authors and speakers—​ depictions of old age that centre on non-​male figures are important, but outside my purview here. The absence of women throughout as a focus should not be read as either a lack of interest or of usefulness. Rather, aging and its effects cannot be addressed in such a volume for women and men; however, it is my desire to continue this examination for female figures, not only authorial but also in-​text. Thinking about how such a project would work has driven my analysis here, however, as I have been guided by work on the role of age in the lives of women not only in The Romance of the Rose but also in works such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations and The Book of Margery Kempe.5 And though throughout this project I  have focused on age, impairment, and masculinity, I have nevertheless been committed to citing in a fair and equitable way, citing with an eye both to good scholarship and gender parity in those citations. In this way, I can think of no better final statement than one which treats how a real woman—​Christine de Pizan—​and a fictive one—​the Wife of Bath—​imagine this masculine old age as a site of narrative and impairment, with the latter anticipating the former. In tracing the complex ways in which narratives about old age and impairment serve as prosthesis for these aged, impaired bodies, the Wife of Bath, herself an aging figure, centres this connection at the root of misogynistic literature and the impetus for the Knight’s response to the figure of the aged crone in her tale.6 This reading of male-​centred and impaired old age highlights that the Wife also shares many verbal echoes with the Reeve and has been a central figure for Chaucerians and their criticism. The Wife, in her own ways, describe old figures through their close, prosthetic relationship to narrative—​either narrative is the arena of ability to which they turn after a loss of bodily strength and power (the Wife) or it is narrative which defines the old man. And it is through the Wife of Bath that we might see these uses of narratives of old age, both in her prologue and later in her tale. 5 Of utmost importance here is Middle-​Aged Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Sue Niebrzydowski (Suffolk:  Boydell and Brewer, 2011). In particular, Niebrzydowski’s “Late Hir Seye What Sche Wyl’: Older Women’s Speech And The Book Of Margery Kempe” (101–​14) and its focus on age and sociolinguistics has suggested to me that effect of old age on direct speech and some of the evidence which might be recoverable from that effect.

6 Judson B.  Allen and Patrick Gallacher, “Alisoun Through the Looking Glass:  Or Every Man His Own Midas,” Chaucer Review 4 (1970): 99–​105. Lee Patterson also contextualizes the Wife through the Old Woman in Romance of the Rose:  “For the Wyves Love of Bathe’:  Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman De La Rose and the Canterbury Tales.” Speculum 58 (1983): 656–​95. For a discussion of her impairment, see Edna Edith Sayers, “Experience, Authority, and the Mediation of Deafness: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” Disability in the Middle Ages : Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua Eyler (Farnham, Surrey: Routledge, 2010), 81–​92.

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      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.       The children of Mercurie and of Venus       Been in hir wirkyng ful contrarius;       Mercurie loveth wysdam and science,       And Venus loveth ryot and dispence.       And, for hire diverse disposicioun,       Ech falleth in otheres exaltacioun.       And thus, God woot, Mercurie is desolat       In Pisces, wher Venus is exaltat,       And Venus falleth ther Mercurie is reysed.       Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed.       The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do       Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho,       Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage       That wommen kan nat kepe hir marriage. (693–​716)

These lines, which detail the perspective of the medieval misogyny to which Jankyn subjects her, follow her promise to explain why she “rente out of his book a leef,/​ For which he smoot me so that I  was deef” (673–​74). Linking the damage she does to Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves to the damage done to her by his violent reaction, the Wife here echoes what the Reeve has promised about equal force and the threat of textual punishment, even if that power is reversed. And in the subsequent lines, the Wife indeed thinks through what would occur if women could punish men through texts—​as she herself muses, “if wommen hadde written stories,” they would have more than compensated for the lack of discussion of men’s vices. It should be clear by now that the Wife is keenly describing the textual connections between lack and impairment and age in these texts written—​largely—​by old men. Her linking of their impotence—​ the failure of these old clerks to perform “Venus werkes worth his olde sho”—​and their textual composition is the very image of what the old Reeve has done as he writes in “his dotage” about assault and violence toward women. The Wife, in attempting to undo this writing, which serves as a prosthetic for the impotence of the old clerk, also seemingly undoes the logic of this prosthetic link—​tearing up a text results in an uneven and unjust response, as Jankyn seeks to strike her, leaving her impaired. Likewise, Christine de Pizan’s L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amour centres the prosthetic of narrative, especially misogynistic narrative, for the impotent old body, echoing many of the contours of the Wife of Bath’s description of the same connection. That the prosthetic between narrative and old age might produce violence, vice, and vituperation is echoed in her text, a letter extolling the virtues of women that casts doubt on the age-​old complaints of misogynistic literature.7 Throughout, old texts are a concern: as 7 Christine de Pizan, “The God of Love’s Letter,” in The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan: New Translations, Criticism, ed. Rante Blumenfeld-​Kosinski, trans. Rate Blumenfeld-​Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee (New York: Norton, 1996), 15–​29.

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130 Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing de Pizan makes clear, “ladies complain of the many clerks who accuse them in prose and verse books … and they give these books as school texts to their young, beginning students, by way of example and doctrine, to be retrained into adulthood.”8 What this intellectual genealogy suggests is not only the timelessness of such a violent and harmful textual tradition, but also the necessity of it to discussions of the “Ages of Man.” That is, de Pizan, like the Wife of Bath, ties normative aging to a textual tradition which seems borne out of age-​related impairments exclusive to those who tie masculinity to sexual ability. Even before these men become unable to interact sexually, de Pizan argues they are inculcated into a tradition built on that impotence. And what does this tradition look like? It is remarkably similar to the one which the Wife of Bath describes, with historical examples—​old texts—​forming the base and authority of this anti-​ feminist tradition: “some tell in verse how Adam, David, Samson, and many other men were deceived by women both early and late,” effectively rehearsing the Wife of Bath’s discussion of classical and biblical foundations of this textual enterprise.9 The reasons, too, that such a repetitive and slanderous tradition exist mirrors the verses of the Wife of Bath; throughout the letter, the God of Love voices many of the concerns earlier voiced by the Wife of Bath. Tying the lasciviousness of youth to the impotence of old age, and the textual shaming which results from this lack of sexual ability, the God of Love asks, “Is it right for a skirt chaser to have a noble woman, when he adds all women to his list, then thinks he can up his shame in impotent old age by blaming them with his subtle reasonings?”10 The God of Love obviously throughout the letter regards such men with disdain, remarking that, in effect, an exile from his arena of love and ability hates women most: There are some men who were formerly my servants, but they became weary of love, either through old age or lack of courage, and they do not want to love again at any price, and they are pleased to deny me in every respect, and reject and deny my power, like wicked and rebellious servants. And such people recount their opinions to everyone, condemning and blaming me and my activities; defaming women because they can no longer pursue them, or because they want to empty their hearts of me. And they think that they can make others dislike women by blaming them, but this they cannot do.11

The God of Love in de Pizan’s letter again expounds on the relationship between sexual impotence and power, reinforcing that the age of the disappointed lover often produces prodigious amounts of narrative—​as these lovers recount their failures to everyone. But the key to this selection and its use to Writing Old Age’s argument is the implicit power of these narratives, not only in the range and amount but also in their efficacy. The God of Love’s refusal of that power—​what these old or disappointed lovers cannot do—​is 8 De Pizan, “The God of Love’s Letter,” 20. 9 De Pizan, “The God of Love’s Letter,” 20.

10 De Pizan, “The God of Love’s Letter,” 21. 11 De Pizan, “The God of Love’s Letter,” 24.

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itself a pose. This letter exists primarily to defend women, whose agency and character have been tarnished unfairly. This prosthetic connection in de Pizan’s text connects even more deeply to Writing Old Age with Thomas Hoccleve’s Middle English translation. While Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes is central to Chapter 3, his translation of de Pizan’s Epistre, whether anti-​feminist or feminist, is one which stresses and supplements with greater detail the textual and sexual link between narrative and old men:12 Whilom ful many of hem were in our chaine Tied and – lo! – now what for unweeldy age And for unlust may nat to love attaine And sayn that love is but verray dotage; Thus for that they hemself lakken corage They folk exciten by hir wikked sawes For to rebelle again us and our lawes. (225–​31)13

In his translation of Christine de Pizan’s text, Hoccleve makes clear many of the central claims I have made in Writing Old Age. Focusing on the ways in which old speakers use (and sometimes abuse) narrative, Hoccleve demonstrates how narrative is more than a tool: it becomes constitutive of the old man. Indeed, the age-​related impotence (“unweeldy age” and “unlust”) causes old men to write off love and the active pursuits associated with love. In their place, these men “sayn that love is but verray dotage,” linking love to a kind of age-​related debility. As I  have made clear in the previous chapters, “dotage” and its companion “dotard” signify a kind of old age beset by mental and bodily impairment. More importantly though, this passage introduces again the ways in which narrative can overwrite impairment, even as it centres and emphasizes the existence of those impairments.

Words, words, words

But the impotence of these figures of masculine old age are potent, even as much of that potency is couched in terms of decay or violence. From Parlement’s Elde to Chaucer’s Reeve to Shakespeare’s Gower, these figures of advancing age offer in their presentation a model for imagining literary histories differently. What might it mean for a narrative of literary relations of late medieval authors if critics took note of the repeated use of the old body as an image both sterile and generative rather than a linear progression of fathers to sons? Hamlet gestures to what this rewriting of literary history could be:  “Words. 12 See Karen Winstead’s contextualization of Hoccleve’s version of Pizan’s text alongside female-​ centred texts in the Series in “ ‘I am al othir to yow than yee weene’:  Hoccleve, Women, and the Series,” Philological Quarterly 72 (1993): 143–​55. Rpt. in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 75 (2002): 81–​86. See also Knapp’s discussion of de Pizan and Hoccleve in Bureaucratic Muse, 45–​51. 13 Thomas Hoccleve, “The Letter of Cupid,” in Hoccleve’s Minor Works, ed. Frederick Furnivall (London: Oxford University Press, 1892), 72–​92.

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132 Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing Words. Words.”14 In Act Two of the 1623 First Folio edition of Hamlet, Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’s question concerning the matter of the book he reads is characteristic of the Hamlet who speaks both of the “tables of his memory,” and the “book and volume of his memory.” Seemingly more comfortable in the academic exercise of plotting and rationalizing Claudius’s death than merely striking down the murderous king, Hamlet here offers further evidence of his reflection of early modern textual practices. This reply, too, is indicative of a Hamlet intending to prove his insanity and make clear that in the playing of his foolishness, he can find truth. Indeed, in the midst of this scene, in which the King, Gertrude, and Polonius attempt to trace the cause of Hamlet’s “madness,” Gertrude herself notices both Hamlet’s bookish attitude and his unhappiness. “But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading” (2.2.165), she notices, as Hamlet walks onstage. Pressed by Polonius, Hamlet gives a fuller answer: Slanders, sir. For the satirical slave says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber or plumtree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with weak hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down. For you yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward. (2.2.194–​202)

The matter of the page, here, has real consequences for how old age is depicted in medieval and early modern English literature. Speaking to an old man, Hamlet highlights the negative portions of these portrayals, calling them “slanders,” and rehearsing a familiar image of decrepitude and inability. This blazon, beginning with a description of grey beards, “wrinkled faces,” and eyes, oozing gum and amber, reflects a heritage of negative portraits of aged men. Remarking upon the implicit blindness of old men—​their eyes water with a rheumatic tradition that recalls the “bleryng” of an eye mentioned by the Reeve in Canterbury Tales and the illustration of the pains of old age in The Parlement of the Thre Ages—​Hamlet’s book sees in old men a failure of potency, both bodily and mental. Lacking wit in mind and strength in body—​their “hams” are weak—​Hamlet reads this portrait as both dishonesty and something which he believes, powerfully and potently, offering in his belief an opposite image of what he reads of the old man. Neither powerful nor potent, the old man in Hamlet’s reading is nonetheless wronged by the image, written on the page. This twist, between inward belief and inappropriate or unbelievable writing—​slander, after all—​animates Hamlet’s explanation of his reading, one which he nevertheless feels pertains to him. Speaking to Polonius, Hamlet announces that the old counselor, if he could move backwards like a crab, should be old like Hamlet. Rather than imagine time and 14 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: The First Folio (1623) in Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Taylor and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 172–​360 (2.2.190). All citations of Hamlet refer to this edition, by act, scene, and line number.

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movement as progressive, this odd statement assumes that this slander of the old man, as out of strength and wit, is honest given its appropriateness to Hamlet’s own condition. These descriptions, as I  have demonstrated, are common to a body of literature produced from the late fourteenth century through to the early seventeenth and illustrate both the cyclical nature of depictions of the lifecycle and the stubborn way in which literature centred on old men imagines time not as linear but sideways, like the movement of a crab. Crabby, too, is the attitude that Hamlet takes, and one, too, that authorities from Aristotle have assigned to old men. As the Introduction makes clear, one facet of senex style is the feeble anger of old men. Like the crabbed movement of Polonius from outwardly old to young Hamlet’s claimed inner old age in Hamlet, literary history might be imagined backwards, sideways, not simply progressive. Chaucer and Gower and their construction of the aged speaker recall that Hoccleve and Caxton too invest much of their poetic output with a similar tension between aging impairment and ability, and Shakespeare’s Gower makes flesh and blood medieval imagery of age and age-​related complaint. It is possible to connect a different constellation of authors in a new way through the old body, regardless of gender, and construct literary histories that disregard the crutch of a literary “reproductive futurism” for a prosthetic relationship that views bodies and writing as mutually dependent.

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INDEX

ability and age, 3, 10, 21 and the body, 5–​6. See also the ideology of ability and prosthesis, 7–​12 as temporary, 37–​38, 44. See also temporary fiction of the able body ableism, 8 age, 7, 10, 23 accidents of, 6n15, 19, 32, 53n21, 55n28, 65, 77 biological, 3–​6, 11–​12 as socially constructed, 3, 6, 17 advice. See also counsel age and, 32, 42, 45, 47, 58, 74, 76, 81, 101 Ages of Man, 4–​8, 40–​41, 44, 125–​26 and the seasons, 60. See also humours allegory, 24, 26, 30–​31, 66 Alliterative Revival, 29, 32, 35, 95, 126 annuities, 5, 78 antiquity, 63, 107–​8. See also authority: Classical Apollonius of Tyre, 101, 104–​9, 114–​19 Archibald, Elizabeth, 107 Aristotle, 7–​8, 13–​14, 33, 42. See also authority: Classical ​ See also props armour, 113–14. authority age and, 1–4, 11–14, 21–24, 33–34, 43, 47, 65, 76, 79, 81, 84, 91–92, 105, 107, 110, 117–18, 121–22, 126, 128, 130 Classical, 13–21 Avicenna, 5, 32 Bacon, Roger, 5–6, 12, 19 Bayard, 85 blindness, 52, 77, 85–​86, 122, 132. See also travaillous stilnesse

Book of Curtesye, 69–​72 books, 13, 17, 24–​26, 46, 72, 74, 83–​89, 91, 106, 108, 114–​15, 119, 126, 130 body and its limitations, 24, 26, 36, 49, 112. See also ability and the body; ideology of ability

Cato, 1n1, 4, 8. See also Cicero and Caxton, 4, 13, 22, 47, 81, 84, 90–​92, 98, 100, 127 and De Senectute, 13–​17 Caxton, William, 69–​101. See also Book of Curtesye Eneydos, 92–​93, 96–​100 Of Olde Age, 84, 89–​92 Polychronicon, 99–​101 The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, 82–​87 Chaucer, Geoffrey. See also Book of Curtesye Adam Scriveyn, 54–​56 Envoy to Scogan, 50–​51, 56 The General Prologue (Reeve Portrait), 57–​61 The Knight’s Tale, 1–​3 The Miller’s Tale, 2, 9, 18 The Reeve’s Prologue, 49–​53 The Reeve’s Tale, 61–​67 The Wife of Bath’s Tale, 128–​30. See also women: The Wife of Bath’s Tale Cicero, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13–​17. See also authority: Classical; Caxton, William: Of Olde Age complaints, 7, 12, 17–​18, 32–​33, 46–​47, 77–​78, 126–​29 counsel, 31, 39, 44, 74–​75, 79 debate, 2–​3, 23–​28, 30–​33, 36–​37, 40 demographics, 6, 60 desire, 2, 13, 32, 34, 45–​50

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disability, 6–​10 and rhetoric 8–​10, 27, 37–​39, 41, 71, 78, 82, 112

Elizabeth I, 103–​4 erasure, 69, 72, 74, 88, 112 estate as a location, 61, 65. See also Walter of Henley as synonym for status, 58–​59 exemplum of John of Canace, 72, 76, 79–​80 fabliau, 2, 46, 57, 61–​62, 65 Fastolf, John, 89

Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 106–​7 Gower, John, 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16–​17, 20–​22, 71, 73, 103–​19 as Amans, 54, 73, 104–​6, 112–​23 and Book of Curtesye. See Book of Curtesye Confessio Amantis, 22, 54, 93, 114–​19 Guy de Chauliac, 55, 88–​89. See also Caxton, William: Of Olde Age; Chaucer, Geoffrey: Adam Scriveyn; reducyng Henry IV as compared to Richard, 3 and impairments, 74. See also Lancastrians Henry V, 74–​79 history, 1–​2, 8, 108, 110, 125–​26, 131, 133 and age, 4–​8 and impairment, 6, 42, 46–​47, 69, 85–​86, 92, 101 Hoccleve, Thomas, 21, 47 and Book of Curtesye. See Book of Curtesye La male regle, 21, 77 The Letter of Cupid. See women: and Hoccleve Regiment of Princes, 69–​79 humours, 32, 34, 60 ideology of ability, 7n19. See also ability: and the body impairment, 5–​6, 9–​19 impotence, 125–​33. See also masculinity

incunabula, 72, 83. See also Caxton, William; print Isidore of Seville, 4, 37 Jonson, Ben, 103, 105n10 Juvenal, 18–​20, 49. See also authority: Classical

Lancastrian, 71, 81n47, 85. See also Henry IV; Henry V London, 5, 30, 59, 108 London Thornton Manuscript, 23–​25, 41, 45. See also Thornton, Robert Longuyon, Jacques, 38–​40. See also Nine Worthies Lydgate, John, 42n56, 71. See also Book of Curtesye masculinity, 61, 63, 77n35, 128, 130. See also impotence Maximianus, 16–​18, 49, 53, 62. See also authority: Classical memory, 3, 7, 14, 29, 33n35 and humoral theory, 35, 78. See also humours

narrative prosthesis, 8–​10 and Caxton, 82 and Parlement of the Thre Ages, 25–​27 and Pericles, 112 narrator, 50, 52, 53–​54, 66 and Gower. See Pericles as Old Man, 39–​40, 104–​9, 117, 119, 127 Nine Worthies. See also Longuyon, Jacques and Caxton, 84 and Elde, 21, 23–​25, 27–​31, 36–​49, 53, 97

paratexts, 73. See also prologues and Caxton, 21 and Genette, Gérard, 74n20, 81, 100, 127 Parlement of the Thre Ages, 23–​43. See also Nine Worthies; Wynere and Wastoure Pinkhurst, Adam and Chaucer, 56n31 and skalle. See Guy de Chauliac de Pizan, Christine, 129–​31 and Hoccleve, 131

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power, 1–​2, 9–​14, 40–​43, 46–​53 and narrative, 63–​64. See also narrative prosthesis; prosthesis Pope Innocent III, 63–​64. See also Juvenal prologue, 22, 72–​77, 82–​85, 88, 91, 100–​101. See also paratexts props, 111–​12, 114. See also armour prosthesis, 5, 7–​12 as narrative, 26. See also narrative prosthesis and politics, 74–​76 as rhetorical term. See disability rhetoric; Wilson, Thomas Puttenham, George, 10 and staves, 10–​11. See also prosthesis; stanzas reducyng, 22, 88–​93 and Of Olde Age. See Caxton, William reeves, 47–​48, 58. See also Walter of Henley restorative and Pericles, 105–​6, 111, 119, 127 revision, 22, 69 and Caxton, 93, 99 and Gower. See Shakespeare, William: Pericles Richard II, 3, 8, 10, 12, 47n8, 60, 74–​76, 79, 103 romance, 83 and youth, 33–​34, 38 rust, 50–​51, 57, 105 and armour, 111–​12, 114. See also props and old age, 50–​51. See also Chaucer, Geoffrey: Envoy to Scogan and The General Prologue (Reeve Portrait) Saturn, 1, 62–​64. See also Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale script, 9–​12 and print, 83–​88. See also Book of Curtesye Seneca, 13, 20, 49–​50. See also authority: Classical Shakespeare, William, 16, 22, 47n8 As You Like It, 125–​26

Index

149

Hamlet, 53, 109, 131–​33 Pericles, 2, 7, 11, 13, 101–​24 staff, 10–​11. See also prosthesis; Puttenham, George; stanzas and the Reeve 45, 47, 53, 66–​67 stanzas, 11, 53, 71, 126 stomach. See travaillous stilnesse supplement, 7, 12 and prologue, 73, 75, 77–​78 as prosthesis, 22, 27, 50, 66, 69n2 temporary fiction of the able body, 7n19, 42, 44, 106, 124. See also ability and the body; ideology of ability Thornton, Robert, 21, 25n7, 26n9 tradition, 29, 33, 41n55, 60, 71 and Classical depictions of old age. See authority: Classical translation, 19, 55, 60, 69, 71 and Caxton, 84–​85, 88–​93, 95, 99 travaillous stilnesse, 77–​78 Usk, Adam, 48n9

Walter of Henley, 47, 58–​59. See also reeves wax, 19, 72, 80. See also Book of Curtesye; Caxton, William; print Westminster Chronicle: 1381–​1394, 75 Wife of Bath, 48, 128. See also Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Wife of Bath’s Tale; women: The Wife of Bath’s Tale Wilson, Thomas, 8, 21, 72–​73, 76, 105–​6, 109, 112. See also paratexts; prologue; prosthesis; supplement women, 5, 32 and Hoccleve, 131 and the Reeve, 56, 61–​62, 128 and The Wife of Bath’s Tale, 129 Wynnere and Wastoure, 2, 21, 23, 24–​27 and Parlement of the Thre Ages, 28–​31 youth, 2–​7, 12–​18, 28–​50, 60, 62, 64–​65, 75–​76, 79, 83, 96, 107, 125, 127, 130. See also romance Zerbi, Gabriele, 12

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