Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney 1009223747, 9781009223744

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MATTER AND MAKING IN EARLY ENGLISH POETRY

What is literature made from? During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this question preoccupied the English court poets, who often claimed that their poems were not original creations, but adaptations of pre-existing materials. Their word for these materials was “matter,” while the term they used to describe their labor was “making,” or the act of reworking this matter into a new – but not entirely new – form. By tracing these ideas through the work of six major early poets, this book offers a revisionist literary history of latemedieval and early modern court poetry. It reconstructs premodern theories of making and contrasts them with more modern theories of literary labor, such as “authorship.” It studies the textual, historical, and philosophical sources that the court tradition used for its matter. Most of all, it demonstrates that the early English court poets drew attention to their source materials as a literary tactic, one that stressed the process by which a poem had been made. Tay l or Cow dery is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work on late-medieval and early modern poetics has appeared in Studies and the Age of Chaucer and ELH.

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C A MBR IDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVA L LITER ATUR E Founding Editor Alastair Minnis, Yale University General Editors Marisa Galvez, Stanford University Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford Editorial Board Anthony Bale, Birkbeck, University of London Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Cambridge Christopher C. Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University Mary Carruthers, New York University Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania Roberta Frank, Yale University Marissa Galvez, Stanford University Alastair Minnis, Yale University Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in the major medieval languages – the main European vernaculars, and medieval Latin and Greek – during the period c.1100–1500. Its chief aim is to publish and stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them. Recent titles in the series Olivia Holmes Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature: Ethics and Mischief in the Decameron Joseph Taylor Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages Mark Faulkner A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature Between Old and Middle English Mark Chinca and Christopher Young Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages Andrew M. Richmond Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World David G. Lummus The City of Poetry: Imagining the Civic Role of the Poet in Fourteenth-Century Italy Richard Matthew Pollard Imagining the Medieval Afterlife Christiania Whitehead The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500 Orietta Da Rold Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions

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Jonathan Morton and Marco Nievergelt (eds.) The Roman de la Rose and Thirteenth-Century Thought George Corbett Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts Andrew Kraebel Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation Robert J. Meyer-Lee Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker (eds.) Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion Lawrence Warner Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 A complete list of titles in the series can be found at the end of the volume.

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M AT T E R A N D M A K I NG I N   E A R LY E NG L I S H P OE T RY Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney TAY LOR COW DERY University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009223744 doi: 10.1017/9781009223768 © Taylor Cowdery 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Cowdery, Taylor, 1986– author. title: Matter and making in early English poetry : literary production from Chaucer to Sidney / Taylor Cowdery. description: Cambridge ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | series: Cambridge studies in medieval literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022057057 | isbn 9781009223744 (hardback) | isbn 9781009223768 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: English poetry – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and criticism. | English poetry – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. | Literature and society – England – History – To 1500. | Literature and society – England – History – 16th century. | lcgft: Literary criticism. classification: lcc pr311 .c69 2023 | ddc 821/.109–dc23/eng/20230119 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057057 isbn 978-1-009-22374-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgments page viii Abbreviations and Editorial Conventions x

Introduction

1

1 Words and Deeds in Chaucer

15

2 Gower and the Crying Voice

52

3 Hoccleve and the Force of Literature

83

4 Lydgate and the Surplus of History

111

5

139

Copy and Copia in Skelton

6 Wyatt’s Grace

174

Epilogue

204

Notes 210 Bibliography 283 Index 318

vii

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making. James Simpson and Nicholas Watson, my graduate advisors, were the first to shape its ideas. I could not have asked for better mentors, and I remain the beneficiary of their warm encouragement, generous criticism, and unflagging support. Many other friends and mentors taught me how to write, think, and conduct research. Stephen Greenblatt sharpened my prose and showed me how to ask good questions. Michelle Karnes encouraged me to think seriously about philosophy and literature in the Middle Ages. D. Vance Smith and Christopher Cannon got me to focus on the methodological implications of what I was doing. Jessica Wolfe inspired me with her kindness, learning, and wit. And Spencer Strub was a source of boundless generosity in matters both personal and intellectual. Institutional aid for the book was provided by the Institute for Medieval Studies at Notre Dame, where I had the good fortune to spend a year writing and getting to know a wonderful community of medievalists and early modernists. For their intellectual generosity and very good company, thanks especially to Chris Abram, Ann Astell, Tom Berman, CJ Jones, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Robert Goulding, Tim Machan, Margaret Meserve, Amy Mulligan, Viveca Pattison, and Denis Robichaud. At Cambridge University Press, Daniel Wakelin served as an exemplary and supportive editor, while Emily Hockley was a model of professionalism throughout the review process, and Amala Gobiraman lent an expert hand to the copy editing and the review of the proofs. Jane Griffiths and Kellie Robertson, readers for the press, offered keen critiques that helped to mold the manuscript into its final form. I’m very grateful to both of them for their generous and thought-provoking responses. Further assistance came in the form of a grant from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, and through the opportunity to present selections from the book to audiences at Harvard University, Duke University, the University of Virginia, viii

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Acknowledgments

ix

the Triangle Medieval Studies Seminar, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Middle English Working Group at Notre Dame. I am very grateful to the IAH for its largesse, and to the audiences and the organizers of these sessions for their encouragement, feedback, and support. Parts of the third chapter appeared in another guise in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38, as “Hoccleve’s Poetics of Matter.” An earlier version of chapter four can be found in ELH 85.3, under the title “Lydgate and the Surplus of History.” Thanks to the editors of those journals for permission to reprint material here. I have been very lucky in my friends. Cristina Maria Cervone, Julianne Werlin, and Mary Floyd-Wilson improved this book through their generous feedback and criticism: thanks to all of you. Thanks as well to Sarah Baechle, Arthur Bahr, Reid Barbour, Alexis Becker, Seeta Chaganti, Aparna Chaudhuri, Susan Crane, Daniel Davies, Daniel Donoghue, Florence Dore, Shane Duarte, Mimi Ensley, Maj-Britt Frenze, Maggie Fritz-Morkin, Bruce Holsinger, Casey Ireland, Anna Kelner, Jim Knowles, Andrew Kraebel, Michael Johnston, Shayne Legassie, Ingrid Nelson, Jenni Nuttall, Patrick O’Neill, Julie Orlemanski, John Parker, R. D. Perry, Dan Remein, Will Rhodes, Steve Rozenski, Leah Schwebel, Sebastian Sobecki, Fiona Somerset, Joe Stadolnik, Zach Stone, Elizaveta Strakhov, Teresa Trout, Rick Warner, David Watt, Erica Weaver, Bret Whalen, and Cornel Zwierlein. Graduate students in the English Department at the University of North Carolina frequently bore with me while I tried out – often without great success – some new idea or another. For their patience and insights, thanks especially to Ariel Bates, Toni DiNardo, Izzy Howard, Jillian Kern, Hannah Montgomery, Lindsay Ragle-Miller, Josy Raheem, Rory Sullivan, and Emily Youree. I also owe a deep debt to my family. Mom, Dad, Collin, and Maggie, thank you for your love and encouragement. No one writes alone, and that has been especially true in my case. Harry Cushman is a force of nature. Whenever my work needed a gentle push – or in some cases, a friendly shove – his thoughts and support were at its back. With love, gratitude, and deep admiration, this book is for him.

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Abbreviations and Editorial Conventions

CCSL CSEL CWE DNB EETS e.s. EETS o.s. ELH HLQ JEGP LCL MED OODE PIMS PL PMLA RES SAC STC

TEAMS

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Collected Works of Erasmus, gen. eds. Richard J. Shoeck and Beatrice M. Corrigan, 86 vols. (Toronto, 1974–) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Henry Colin Gray Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004–) Early English Text Society, extra series Early English Text Society, original series English Literary History Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of English and Germanic Philology Loeb Classical Library Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath (Ann Arbor, 1956–) Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, 50 vols. (Amsterdam and Leiden, 1969–) Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Patrologia latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1844–64) Publications of the Modern Language Association The Review of English Studies, new series Studies in the Age of Chaucer A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, et al., revised and enlarged second edition (London, 1926–1991) Teaching Association for Medieval Studies

x

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Abbreviations and Editorial Conventions

xi

I have preserved the original spelling and orthography in my citations of primary sources, with certain exceptions. To make the text more legible to the modern eye, I’ve consistently replaced “j” with “i,” thorn (“þ”) with “th,” and yogh (“3”) with “gh,” “y,” “w,” or “z” as the case demands. I’ve also silently re-punctuated quotations as they appear in manuscripts and printed editions to clarify syntax and sense. In those instances where the original employs abbreviations, I have expanded them silently. Unless a reference is made in the notes to a translated version of a text in a language other than English, the translation provided is always my own.

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Introduction

This book is a study of early English literary production. It is not a study of early English authorship, although it could easily be mistaken for one, for it focuses on six medieval and early modern poets who have often been identified as authors; it asks why these poets made the formal choices they did; it measures their claims to originality, creativity, and authority against the conventions of the literary traditions in which they wrote; and it situates their texts within the different intellectual, political, and historical currents that shaped their working lives. But where a study of authorship would offer a portrait of the great writer, whose autonomous genius is presumed to be the singular origin of great writing, this study has a different end. It aims to paint, not a portrait, but a landscape, one that puts before the eyes of the reader all the materials and labor, both imaginative and physical, that have produced the literary text. There is no author in this picture. Instead, there are makers, and materials, and the several energies that have brought them together: a distribution of the literary work across the landscape, instead of its concentration in the hands of a solitary figure. If the distinction between “authorship” and “literary production” appears merely semantic to us, it would not have seemed so during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. This is because the word “author” carried great weight in the literary culture of that time. According to the Scholastics, as Alastair Minnis has observed, the auctor was a writer of the highest power and privilege. In contrast to the scribe (who copied the words of others), the compiler (who gathered the words of others), and the commentator (who explicated the words of others), the auctor alone was licensed to voice his views without reliance upon some pre-existing textual authority.1 Only the auctor, as Bonaventure put it, could compose a text in which his own words formed “the principal part,” with the words of others “being annexed merely by way of confirmation.”2 The scholastic model of authorship was thus hierarchical in its assignment of literary rights, in two respects. On the one hand, the auctor was the only participant in this 1

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

system who could claim that his discourse proceeded from himself alone. He was, as Minnis puts it, the only writer who could assert the right to bring new texts, or at least new parts of texts, “into being.”3 But on the other, the auctor was also the sole figure allowed to appropriate the words of other discourses, and to bend those words to what Robert Edwards calls his “agency” and will.4 Originality and agency: these were the values that defined the work of the scholastic author and distinguished it from the labor of lesser writers. The scholastic model of authorship has been durable in scholarship on late-medieval literary culture, and this is surely because in some contexts, it makes excellent sense. Certain academic philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas or John Duns Scotus, can obviously be called auctores, and certain poets, such as Dante Alighieri, clearly sought to position themselves as literary auctores in turn.5 But when one moves out of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, and out of Latin and into the vernacular, the model works less well, for four reasons. First, much of the English literature to which it has been applied was written from the late fourteenth century onwards, after the dominance of Scholasticism had already begun to wane. Second, the model hails from a decidedly academic milieu, while most vernacular literature was written in cities, towns, cloisters, and courts. Third, the conventions and customs of early literature vary from place to place and language to language, and so it is unlikely that different vernacular writers understood their work in the terms of a single theory of writing – or at least, that they all understood that theory of writing in the same way. Did Geoffrey Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps believe they were auctores, in the specifically scholastic sense of the term? They certainly did not call themselves by that name, but by others, such as “faiseur,” “poete,” “makere,” and “translateur.”6 Fourth, and finally, the relationship of the Latin term auctor to the modern concept of authorship is by no means clear, for the word “authorship” appears in western vernaculars only at the turn of the eighteenth century. No doubt, medieval literary writers did many of the same things that modern authors do, but we risk a certain critical anachronism if do not inflect our accounts of early literary practice in light of the terms and tropes that premodern writers used to define it for themselves. For all these reasons, this book will propose a different hermeneutic for the study of early English poetry, one that hinges, not upon the notion of “authorship,” but upon two other ideas drawn from premodern literary theory: “matter” and “making.” By “matter,” I refer to something close to what a modern writer would call the “source” or “content” of

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Introduction

3

a piece of writing – but not exactly. This is because, in medieval Latin, Italian, French, and English literature alike, the word “matter” at once denoted the source of a literary text, the topic of that text, and the physical, conceptual, and historical materials out of which the text had been made. The word was thus more capacious than either “source” or “content,” and so it is best understood, as I explain below, as a relational term. By “making,” I refer to literary composition as it was conceptualized and practiced by western European poets at work in the courts of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. As we will see, English “making” in particular was grounded both in the precepts of classical rhetoric and in the practice of the French makers, or “faiseurs.”7 A maker began by finding a set of materials on which he proposed to work, and then disposed and ornamented those materials so that they took on a new shape and feel. The narrative could be reordered, or certain passages in the source could be expanded or compressed, or the diction, verseform, rhyme, and meter of the original could be changed. In each case, however, these changes could only go so far, and they do not seem to have been understood, either by the makers or their readers, to represent the only form that the matter in question might take.8 In the broadest terms, this book will understand “authorship” as a productoriented mode of writing, one wherein matter is given an authoritative and superseding form by a single, authoritative figure. It defines “making,” by contrast, as an ongoing process of labor, one wherein matter is continuously remade by many hands and for different contexts. The ideological differences and differing methodologies implied by these two attitudes towards writing may explain why the appeal of making is often to be found less in any projection of aesthetic autonomy than in the propulsive energies of the making process itself. Again and again, the poetry of the makers directs our eyes toward its formal and material debts – toward the pre-existing ideas, texts, contexts, and histories that it has reworked into some apparently new form. Again and again, it tells the story of its own becoming, through the attention it draws to the ductus of its composition, as Mary Carruthers might say, or through the narrative interest it displays in its own “formation,” as Kara Gaston puts it.9 In making, in other words, the literary product does not alienate itself from the history of its own production.10 It does not conceal the genesis of its materials, or its ties to its contexts, or the traces of the hands that have made it. Instead, it opens itself up to its readers, so that they might see what it was made from and how it was made. Let’s begin with the term “matter.” When early writers refer to the “matere,” “materia,” “matter,” or “matiere” of a text, they typically have one

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

of three things in mind. The first is the words of the text, and by extension, the things that those words denote: plots, themes, characters, settings, and the like. This is what Middle English writers usually mean when they refer to “my matter” or “this matter,” or when they identify a certain text as the “matter” they plan to use as the basis for some new work. A second sense of “matter” persists in English to this day, and refers to the subject matter, or topic, that a text handles – the “matter” of a commonplace theme, such as anger or lust, or the “matter” of a well-known storytelling tradition, such as the “matter of Britain” or “matter of Troy.”11 In its third and last sense, “matter” denotes what Aristotle terms the substratum of an individual thing: the underlying stuff in which the form of a particular inheres.12 Geoffrey Chaucer uses the term in this sense when he writes that “mater apetiteth forme alwey,” as does Edmund Spenser when he envisions creation as a two-part process, one wherein each particular first gathers its “matter” from “Chaos” before it is then bound together with what he calls “forme and feature.”13 As Kellie Robertson has observed, these three senses of literary “matter” – textual, topical, and philosophical – have their roots in the Aristotelian culture of the later Middle Ages, and indeed in the philosophy of Aristotle himself, who did not shrink from stating that words, like all created things, should be understood as hylomorphic compounds of matter and form.14 Following this line of thought, literary critics working in the scholastic tradition often analyzed texts in relation to the four Aristotelian causes – the final, efficient, formal, and material cause – even though they did not always agree on what the material cause of a text might be.15 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, for example, sensibly suggests that the material cause of poetry is its words, which he likens to “mater hyle,” or “prime matter,” before it has been bonded with form.16 But other thinkers were more idiosyncratic in their definitions of literary matter, which they saw, alternately, as the topic a text proposed to treat, the things and persons that text represented, the events recounted in a narrative, or even the physical stuff – the “parchment [pergamenum] with marks [notulis] on it,” as Conrad of Hirsau flatly puts it – from which books were made.17 The scholastic tradition thus offers us little consensus on the question of what literature was understood to be made from, and this lack of consensus appears to have prompted two responses in the vernacular literary culture of premodern England. The first was to embrace the ambiguity latent within the term “matter,” and to play upon it to clever effect. Some early poets do this by analogizing their labor to more obviously physical kinds of work. Writing a text, they suggest, is akin to building a house; to molding clay upon a potter’s wheel; to impressing a shape upon a coin;

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Introduction

5

to plowing or harrowing a field; to framing materials within or upon a structure; or to winnowing wheat from chaff.18 Other poets prefer to joke about the purported physicality of language. Chaucer, for instance, pokes fun at friars – who were stereotypically thought to possess an enormous appetite for matters of the intellect and the belly alike – by punning upon the different sorts of matter into which the mendicants dipped their fingers at the table. “A flye and eek a frere,” he remarks, “wol falle in every dyssh and eek mateere.”19 Two hundred years later, Shakespeare’s Hamlet makes a similarly punning joke when Polonius happens to ask the prince what he’s reading. Hamlet: Polonius: Hamlet: Polonius:

“Words, words, words.” “What is the matter, my lord?” “Between who?” “I mean the matter that you read, my lord.”20

“Matter,” here, could refer equally to the “words” that Hamlet mutters, to some topic or “matter” of concern, or to the book in Hamlet’s hands, itself composed of physical “matter,” and so the ambiguity of the term offers the prince ample room to dissemble at the old courtier’s expense. Jokes and metaphors, then, are one way that early writers responded to the polysemy of “matter” as a term. Their other response was to subject it to intense literary-critical scrutiny, and especially, to subdivide the general category of “literary matter” into its particular types and kinds, usually on the basis of what they believed its genre, affect, or ontology to be. Once again, this drive to taxonomize the matter of literature likely stems from the prevailing Aristotelianism of late-medieval intellectual culture, wherein meaning was typically understood in essentializing rather than relational terms. A good example of this line of thought can be found in Chaucer’s translation of “maestos … modos” from the start of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Here, Chaucer renders the Latin not as “grim modes” or “sad manners,” but as “sorwful matere,” and so Boethius’s words are implicitly understood to be “sorrowful,” neither because they are sung in a melancholic style, nor because Boethius intended them to convey melancholy, but because their substance is held to be melancholic.21 Similarly essentializing points of view often led premodern writers to insist that different genres of literary matter demanded different kinds of formal treatment, or formae tractandi.22 Giles of Rome, for instance, claims that “moral mater,” the matter of “rethorik and the politik,” and “mathematik matir” all require a different “maner of processe,” or expository mode, and comments of this sort are ubiquitous in later English writing as well.23

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

We read of “perilous matter,” “virtuous matter,” and “historical matter,” of “holy matter” and of “hard matter,” each one possessing its own character and demanding – so we are told – its own, peculiar treatment.24 By the late sixteenth century, early English literary culture had been shaped by more than two hundred years of this thinking, and it shows. Spenser and Sidney, for example, continue to taxonomize and classify the kinds of matter with which they work, and Shakespeare seems to have been especially fond of the many inflections that “matter” could carry. He uses it twenty-eight times in Hamlet, and in such a pointed way that the tragedy seems to produce, as Margaret Ferguson once put it, “a curious effect of materializing the word” itself.25 The long history of the term and its wide range of uses, however, presents no small problem to scholars, because we cannot be certain, either on the whole or in the case of particular writers, whether the word “matter” meant the same thing to poets at work in different places and at different times; whether the matter of a word was held to be identical, or merely analogous, to the matter of a thought or the matter of a physical thing; or whether the character and power of certain types of matter were understood to stem from that matter’s source, from its topic, or from some mysterious force lodged in the very words themselves. For all of these reasons, this book will follow Aristotle in arguing that “literary matter” is best understood as a relative term, one that designates whatever a given text was understood to be made out of.26 To play upon the philosopher’s own example, the “matter” of a bronze statue of Apollo is, depending upon one’s point of view, the torso, head, legs, and arms that make up the god’s anthropomorphic figure; or the bronze out of which these membra have been forged; or the copper and tin out of which the bronze has been alloyed; or the matrices of atoms that serve as the substrata of the copper and tin.27 In a similar way, the “matter” of Chaucer’s Troilus can be understood, variously, as the words out of which the poem’s clauses are constructed; or the ink and parchment in which the words have taken shape; or the literary sources from which the poem’s characters, plot, and themes are drawn; or even the ideas, feelings, and historical situations that shaped Chaucer, consciously and unconsciously, while he wrote his poem. Matter, in other words, is a term that only holds meaning when it is construed in relation to the form that a given thing possesses at a given time in its process of formation. It does not simply designate “physicality” or “materiality” in our colloquial sense of those words, but rather designates at once the elements out of which a thing has been made and the specific part of a thing in which its form is understood to inhere at a given moment, and which that form requires in order to persist. The word

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009223768.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

7

“matter” is thus something of a catchall in early literary culture, because it can and often does refer to the several combinations of textual, physical, and conceptual materials from which a given text was understood to have been made. As one etymologically minded early critic remarks, “matter [materia] is that from which everything is made up [unde constat quodlibet], and this is where it gets its name: it is just like [quasi] the mother of all things [mater rei].”28 “Matter,” then, was the blanket term that early English writers used to identify the set of diverse materials that they reworked into verse. “Making” was their word for this process of reworking. In the context of medieval philosophy and theology, “making” was often simply defined as the act of producing something out of pre-existing matter, as opposed to the act of creating something from thin air.29 The Lombard, for instance, remarks that “creation [creare] is properly to make something out of nothing [de nihilo aliquid facere], while making [facere] is to produce something [aliquid operari] not purely from nothing but out of matter [de materia].”30 In literary contexts, however, both the meaning and the range of practices associated with the term were more fluid. Some scholars, noting the similarity of English “makyng” to the work of the French faiseurs, have identified it as a relation of French courtly verse, one that draws attention “to its technical intricacy,” bases its “generic distinctions on prosody rather than content,” and makes use of “a polysemous discourse of riddles, doubles entendres, allegory, and allusion.”31 Others have pointed up the resonances between making and other modes of craftsmanship in premodern culture – by noting the kinship of poetic making with theories of the anthology, for instance, or by linking it to practices of manuscript production – while still others have understood it in light of views on generation and reproduction that were well-known in the theology, philosophy, and science of early Europe.32 Premodern definitions of the term are no less varied. In early English discussions of poetry, for instance, we find that “making” is now used as a term that broadly defines the labor of the poet; now as a term that designates literary technique as a particular kind of “crafft”; now as a general term that describes how a writer should manipulate his “mateer”; and now as a term for grouping together a set of writers who worked during a specific literary-historical period.33 As one might gather from this range of definitions, it is unlikely that a single, unified theory of “making” existed during the two-hundred years of writing between the reigns of Edward III and Elizabeth I. But the makers do adopt some common postures and make some of the same claims when they write about themselves and their work.34 First, they often position

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themselves as a mediating presence within the frame of their poems, after the manner of a storyteller. Where modern writers are sometimes said to represent the matter of their texts, premodern poets claim instead to mediate it – to “reherce” or “endite” their matter in new words, as they often say, for an audience of readers or listeners. Second, the makers often claim that their poems are compilations of pre-existing materials, rather than creations of the imagination.35 They typically assert – to a degree that may or may not be convincing in any given case – that they’re not simply making things up. This resistance to overt fictionality may also align with their tendency to traffic in intellectual and moral authority, or the useful information and “counsel” that, as Walter Benjamin once observed, the storyteller may wish to convey to us.36 Third, and finally, the makers often imply, or even state outright, that their poems are an imitation of something else, or some variation upon it. Indeed, these poets seem to have seen it as part of the literary game to invite their readers to compare what they read with its sources, models, and analogues – to hear “passa la nave mia colma d’ oblio” in one ear while they heard “my galy charged with forgetfulnes” in the other. None of these techniques, of course, are wholly unique to early English literature, and they do not always account for what a particular maker is doing in a particular poem. But they do tend to recur in those moments where premodern court poets tell us what they wish or intend to do, and so we may accept them as a reasonable guide to the attitudes of the makers on the whole. Mediation, compilation, and imitation: so much for “making” in theory. But how exactly was it practiced? To start, we might observe that the techniques of making recall those of classical oratory, and it was in fact a deeply rhetorical art, one that laid special stress upon the first three stages of rhetoric: invention, disposition, and elocution. Although no systematic Middle English treatise on making survives, we can get a good sense of how making and rhetoric are tied together if we examine the medieval Latin guides to the composition of verse. In these handbooks, which took direct inspiration from Ciceronian and pseudo-Ciceronian rhetoric, the process of writing poetry is usually divided into three stages.37 First, the poet decides upon the particular matter that he will work with. Typically, this is what is what Rita Copeland has identified as “common matter,” or “materia that has previously been realized in some kind of linguistic form.”38 Second, the poet reworks this matter so that its substance is preserved even while it takes on a new shape. A writer may rearrange the narrative order of the matter, abbreviate and amplify its different parts, and restructure it through division, provided that he does not obscure

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Introduction

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the overall subject or sense of the received matter.39 Third, and finally, the poet adorns and embellishes the matter he has invented and disposed. He clothes it in figures, improves its diction, and orders its meters, all while paying close attention to the greater balance, effect, and feel of the new text that he has made. For as Matthew of Vendôme puts it, just as the “matter of a statue [materia statuae] is rough and not outstanding in value until polished [expolita] by an eager artist,” so too is the “matter of language [verborum materia] rough and awkward” until the writer adorns it with “some figure or trope or rhetorical color [coloris rhetorici].”40 The artes poetriae exercised a considerable influence upon Middle English literary production, so much so that allusions to this three-stage method of writing often appear in English vernacular poetry from at least the midfourteenth century onwards – though instead of three stages, vernacular poets most often speak of two.41 The author of Wynnere and Wastour, for example, defines poetic labor both as the “mak[ing]” of “myrthes” and as the “fynd[ing]” of “matirs,” a procedure that involves the tying together, or “wroght[ing],” of old words to new forms.42 John Lydgate argues that poets “make and vnmake” pre-existing matter, first through its redisposition into some new narrative order, and then through its adornment with new figures.43 Philip Sidney suggests that, in addition to honing one’s style through practice, there are “two principal parts,” or stages, to literary composition: first, the invention of “matter to be expressed by words,” and second, the making of “words to express the matter.”44 And Ben Jonson argues, as late as the 1630s, that “to write well,” a poet must first “excogitate his matter,” and only after that move on to considerations of “what ought to be written, and after what manner,” and to what effect.45 I will admit that “making” may seem too rude and mechanical to account for how compelling poetry comes into being, for it is a procedure that locates the origins of literature, not in some enrapturing moment of inspiration, but in the tactical arrangement of contingent materials that have been selected, and remade, to produce a specific effect. This is no doubt why many critics have, over the years, sought to distinguish “making” from “authorship,” a word that better connotes the sort of wonder and magic – the feeling of discovering a new world, as John Keats memorably put it – that post-romantic readers have come to expect from encounters with the literary. In these critical accounts, “making” is usually declared to be a lesser form of poetic activity, one that early poets held subordinate to true “authorship” or true “poetry.”46 But the evidence for such a hierarchy of “making,” “poetry,” and “authorship” during the premodern period is very scant. For one thing, premodern writers typically use the word “maker”

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

as a term of praise or as a neutral term, and not as a term of denigration or condescension. For example, while Elizabethan critics certainly mark a distinction between “versifying” and “poetry,” they do so on the basis, not of literary technique, but of the character and source of the matter that the writer treats.47 In the medieval period, in turn, a range of bibliographical evidence suggests that, even if they were not identical in sense, the categories of “maker,” “poet,” and “author” were often interchangeable in the minds of poets, scribes, and illuminators, and what is more, the techniques purportedly associated with authorship were rarely divided from those associated with making in discussions of medieval literary theory.48 Indeed, the closest thing to a vernacular ars poetica that survives from the later Middle Ages, Deschamps’ L’art de dictier, defines its topic as “l’art de dictier et de fere” in its very first line, and Deschamps’ seeming ambivalence about the distinction between these two terms (“dictier” and “fere”) was echoed by his English contemporaries.49 Chaucer, for example, does not differentiate his own “makyng” from the work of those writers who are also renowned for their “poesye,” and Lydgate suggests that the classical auctores, such as Ovid and Cicero, “compiled” their books in the same way that medieval makers do.50 In approaching those rare cases where early English poets do make explicit claims to authorship, then, we should exercise some critical restraint. Chaucer calls himself the “auctour” of what he writes just once, immediately before he is carried up to the heavens by an eagle who lectures him on the principles of grammar.51 “Matter” and “making” were thus what Raymond Williams calls “keywords” in the early English literary system.52 On the one hand, the two terms marked out places in the field of cultural production where writers could find common ground with each other, and where their individual labors could be made legible in a shared idiom. On the other, they served as sites of contestation within that field – as places where these writers could argue with each other about the proper means, ends, and definition of literary work. The doubled role that the terms played in the production and reception of early literature certainly accounts for their prevalence in early English discussions of poetry, and for the varied way they were often defined in early literary theory. But how did these terms, and the notions of “matter” and “making” that they indicated, shape premodern literary practice? This book proposes two answers to this question. First, it argues that late medieval and early modern court poets followed the same basic procedure when they sat down to write a poem. All differences of style, genre, and theme aside, both groups broadly held that the composition of literature

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required (1) the use of pre-existing matter and (2) the remaking of that matter into some new form. In noting this broad continuity of practice, I am not saying that medieval court poetry is the same as early modern court poetry; or that English poetry is the same as French or Italian poetry; or that there are no differences of quality or character between the writings of the six early poets studied in this book. What I am arguing, rather, is that these differences in character and quality are due, not to any fundamental shift in the method guiding courtly literary technique during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, but to a host of other factors, for at least until the end of the Elizabethan period, this method did not really change. What did change – and this is my second assertion – were the theoretical claims that English poets made about their labor, and especially, about the role that pre-existing matter was understood to play in the making process. In Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, for example, we read that the poet alone “bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit.”53 Puttenham and Shakespeare echo Sidney in claiming that the poet “makes and contrives out of his own brain both the verse and matter of his poem” (Puttenham), or that he gives to “the forms of things unknown” and “airy nothing[s]” a “local habitation and a name” (Shakespeare).54 In all three passages, as Roland Greene has observed, we find a different account of invention than in medieval poetic theory.55 For Ricardian, Lancastrian, and early Tudor poets, literary composition begins with pre-existing matter. For Elizabethan poets, it begins with an idea, and only afterwards makes use of matter deemed apt for its expression. The result is a doubled change in the way that poets and critics describe the process of literary labor. On the one hand, matter is said to play a diminished and secondary role in the production of the literary text. On the other, making is recast in symbolic terms, as an act of “inspiration” or “authorship” undertaken in pursuit of what Sidney calls the “idea or fore-conceit of the work.”56 If the literary attitudes of Gower and Lydgate seem fundamentally different from those of Spenser and Shakespeare, then, it is because theoretical views on making and matter gradually shifted in this direction over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and not because early modern writers inaugurated a wholly new method of writing in practice. A poet such as Hoccleve, for example, actively draws attention both to the pre-existing materials out of which he makes his texts and the process by which he has remade them. A writer like Sidney, by contrast, actively seeks to do the opposite – to conceal his reliance upon received materials and to hide the traces of his labor, so that his poem seems to be a world

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unto itself, “another nature” with little relation to the origins of its production.57 What accounts for this change in attitude? Though there were many historical and cultural forces that shaped the aesthetic ideology of sixteenth-century court poetry, I would suggest that the biggest force of all was Elizabeth herself – or rather, the state apparatus that surrounded her. According to Pierre Bourdieu, the notion that the artist is an “author” or “creator” of the work of art and the belief that the work of art is “autonomous” are alike produced by the “artistic field.” This field, he explains, consists of “the entire set of social conditions which make possible the character of the artist as a producer of the fetish which is the work of art,” and, most importantly, “the entire set of the specific institutions which are a necessary condition for the functioning of the economy of cultural goods.”58 What, for the Tudor sixteenth century, was this artistic field, and what were the institutions that enabled it to function? This is no easy question, because institutions of art were only beginning to exist during this period. There were not yet critical journals, writing programs, literary prizes, or professors of vernacular literature – at least, not in any meaningful way. But there were an increasing number of institutions concerned with the regulation of vernacular writing in general.59 Printing and printers, for instance, were subjected to new oversight during the sixteenth century.60 Francis Walsingham’s intelligence service surveilled prominent poets, such as Christopher Marlowe and Walter Ralegh.61 In the midst of early disputes over what would soon be called copyright, figures such as Robert Greene began to make proprietary claims to the words they wrote.62 Most of all, an ever-growing reading public was invited, not just to consume literature, but to evaluate the quality of what they read, sometimes with the help of those writers, such as Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, who chose to hash out disagreements of taste in the public eye.63 In their aggregate, these factors subjected vernacular Tudor writing to an unprecedented and ever-growing degree of institutional regulation and control. Parliament, the Star Chamber, and new readers alike took a robust interest, albeit for different reasons, in what was written and read in English. In response, Tudor poets increasingly sought to differentiate their own sort of English writing from ordinary vernacular discourse, by constituting literature as its own, relatively autonomous institution, one whose symbolic value was opposed to its material or instrumental value, and one whose power was identified as the product, not of a concrete and historical process, such as “making,” but of an abstract and symbolic one, such as “authorship.”64 In other words, the institutionalization of vernacular discourse during the Tudor century gave rise to an antagonistic

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Introduction

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response by Elizabethan poets, one wherein the symbolic power of the literary text was gradually opposed to the material process that had made it. The modern notion of authorship was born, not from a break with earlier practices of making, but out of the mystification of making itself. This book pursues its argument across six interconnected studies, each one focused upon the writings of a single poet: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Skelton, and Thomas Wyatt. All six hold the same foundational beliefs about how to make poetry, even if they differ from each other with respect to their views on what proper “making” ought to entail and what the proper “matter” of poetry should be. All six have also long been received as the early foundation of a high-prestige English literary tradition, one associated with autonomy, originality, formalism, and a self-conscious “distance” from the material or the functional – the very qualities, in other words, that are most durably linked to modern notions of authorship and “high art.”65 For both reasons, the work of these writers provides us with an ideal site for a critique of premodern authorship, because they are the very poets who have most often been identified as “authors,” in both the scholastic and the modern senses of that term. Indeed, while premodern and modern critics differ in obvious ways, both have tended to follow these poets themselves in making, as Robert Meyer-Lee puts it, “implicit and often explicit claims” for the “cultural ascendancy” of their literary works – so much so that, if one regularizes the language, it is often difficult to tell which claims hail from the premodern era and which ones do not.66 Chapters 1 and 2 focus upon Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Gower’s Confessio amantis. Rather like Shakespeare and Jonson, these two poets are often put at odds with each other in the critical record. Gower is depicted as a stern moralist and mechanical craftsman, while Chaucer is figured as an impish genius, a breaker of rules and lover of art for art’s sake. I suggest that, despite the aesthetic differences of their poetry, both share a belief central to the ideology of making – namely, that literary language is always tethered to something outside itself, no matter whether this is a preexisting textual source, a historical event, or a physical thing. For Chaucer, this is because even the most autonomous-seeming poetry is made from words “cosyn” to some extraliterary “dede,” while for Gower, it is because literary matter is a prosthesis for the distant voices of those who cannot speak to us in the flesh. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Hoccleve’s Series and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. Both writers are so obviously concerned with the collation and arrangement of pre-existing materials that they have sometimes been called

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compilers or historians rather than poets. For this very reason, the work of each one casts valuable light on the central role that pre-existing matter was understood to play in Lancastrian verse. For Hoccleve, literary matter possesses a special kind of linguistic force, or “vertu,” one that must remain unaltered by the process of making. Lydgate, by contrast, conceives of this matter as an inexhaustible reservoir, or “surplus,” of stories whose total meaning can only be expressed in part. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the work of Skelton and Wyatt. In response to Italian literary fashions and shifting winds at the Tudor court, both writers take a newly skeptical view toward the role that pre-existing matter ought to play in their poetry. In “Speke, Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” Skelton is suspicious of its capacity for mimetic representation, while Wyatt’s lyrics display a relentless pessimism about its capacity to convey meaning reliably. Nonetheless, both writers continue to make their poems out of received textual materials, even if they use these materials in new ways. For Wyatt, clichés and commonplaces offer the poet a way to communicate his meaning indirectly. For Skelton, the copious style provides the poet with a way to evoke the motion and energy of physical matter itself. Last but not least, a note on method. Each chapter in this book can be roughly divided into two. In one part, I consider how a particular writer conceived of the matter of his poetry, while in the other, I examine how that writer manipulated and remade that matter in practice. In adopting this bifurcated method, I have hoped to respond to Steven Justice’s onetime call for a more materialist sort of literary criticism, one that would take more seriously the work of “empirical” disciplines that “search out the matter of which texts were made.”67 For Justice, these disciplines were historical linguistics, book history, social history, and close reading. In this book, close reading and source study predominate, though there is also a good deal of intellectual and social history as well. At certain moments, the book also draws upon Marxist theory. Critique, in Fredric Jameson’s words, must balance the “investigation of the historical conditions of possibility of specific forms” with “assessments of a sociopolitical kind that interrogate the quality of social life itself by way of the text or individual work of art.”68 Since it is the contention of this book that the makers were highly attuned to the social and historical processes that shaped their lives and their works alike, I’ve usually relied upon this tradition of thought in those moments where I felt that some theory could be helpful.

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chapter 1

Words and Deeds in Chaucer

Near the end of the General Prologue, just before the Host explains the rules of the tale-telling contest to the Canterbury pilgrims, Chaucer pauses to outline the rules of his own, more literary game. The twenty-nine pilgrims here assembled, he tells us, are diverse in every respect. They work different jobs, come from different regions, inhabit different identity positions, and belong to different classes in medieval society, and so it is possible that some of them may say things that will offend us. Norms of good taste, after all, are as diverse as the pilgrims themselves. Chaucer could choose to intervene whenever these men and women speak “rudeliche and large.”1 But to do so, he suggests, would be to break with his duty as a maker, for as he explains, this ye knowen al so wel as I: Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe. He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother; He mot as wel seye o word as another. Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ, And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.

(1.730–42)

At first glance, the message of Chaucer’s apology seems clear enough: tell all the truth, and do not tell it slant. But a closer look prompts some questions. To start, we might wonder what literary techniques Chaucer has in mind when he states that he must “reherce” what his pilgrims say, “as ny as evere he kan.” One clue may be found in the poet’s terminology, which alludes to a range of representational tactics often discussed in medieval 15

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literary theory: the different levels of style appropriate to different classes of speakers (e.g., “rudeliche and large”), rhetorical theories of invention (e.g., “fynd[ing] wordes newe”), and literal, or word-for-word, translation (e.g., “he moot as wel seye o word as another”).2 The passage as a whole, however, leaves it to the reader to sort out which of these tactics, or which combination of them, Chaucer will employ. A second question has to do with the web of contexts and intertexts that lie behind the passage. Why, we might ask, does Chaucer derive his apology to the reader from a discussion of literary propriety in the Roman de la rose, but attribute it to Plato instead of Jean de Meun?3 Why does he allude to the practice of swearing oaths in his claim that a maker must stay true to the facts of what a person has said, even if that person is the writer’s avowed “brother” (1.737)?4 And why, finally, does he call to mind, as A. J. Minnis has noted, a conventional defense of the compiler’s right to record the “vileynye” (1.740) of his sources without blame, even though it would have been obvious to Chaucer’s audience that the Canterbury Tales were not an academic treatise, but a work of poetry?5 These are good questions, and previous responses to them have already produced a wealth of insights into the motives and procedure that lie behind the Tales. I will concern myself, however, with a different but equally important question in the chapter that follows, one which has less often been considered in the scholarly record and which concerns Chaucer’s literary materials rather than his making. This is the question of what he has in mind when he invokes the “dede” of his poetry – the matter, in other words, that he says the Tales are duty-bound to represent. I suggest that we may find an answer to this question by putting Chaucer’s preoccupation with “words” and “deeds,” both in the Tales and across his oeuvre as a whole, into its literary, social, and philosophical contexts. A distinction with its origins in late-antique rhetorical theory, variations upon the proverbial dichotomy of “word” and “deed” can be found in nearly every sphere of western medieval literary and intellectual culture.6 Theologians such as Augustine, for example, turned to the commonplace as a way of understanding the didactic work that exegesis could do. “All instruction,” he wrote, “is either about things [rerum] or about signs [signorum].”7 Grammarians and logicians employed it as a means for parsing the distinction between the signifier and the signified, or for clarifying the relation between a concept, a word, and a thing.8 Legal writs and guild by-laws used it to figure a contractual or quasi-contractual bond, one meant to guarantee the alignment of a person’s words with her actions.9 And literary writers, such as Dante Alighieri, John Gower, and Jean de Meun, often cited

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the commonplace in their accounts of a mythical past when words were believed to have shared a quality of essence with the things they denoted – a golden age of speech when, as Desiderius Erasmus would later put it, none had “need of grammar” because “all spoke the same language.”10 We cannot know with certainty which of these contexts informed Chaucer’s invocation of “wordes” and “dedes” in the General Prologue – or indeed, if any of them did – though many were familiar to the poet. It is also possible that, as a writer fond of what Charles Muscatine once called “the idiom of common life,” Chaucer used the phrase purely for stylistic effect – as a way of lending a folksy air to his diction.11 But evidence suggests that he was likely attuned to the philosophical, legal, and social affordances of the commonplace. For one thing, Chaucer was very fond of it even by medieval standards. He cites it, in one form or another, more than two dozen times in his works, with the lion’s share of these citations occurring in the Canterbury Tales.12 For another, the literary questions that the commonplace seems to imply – about the proper “dede” of a literary text, for instance, or the proper way to represent that “dede” in “wordes” – were clearly at the forefront of the poet’s mind during the 1380s and 90s, when he began to write in a new way, and about new topics. As scholars have long noted, Chaucer appears to have busied himself, particularly after he finished Troilus and Criseyde, with the attempt to compose a novel sort of literature, one that would move away from courtly tropes and themes and toward a different style of making altogether.13 Though Chaucer may have made this move for any number of reasons, there is little question that the poetry he wrote during this period often displays a keen awareness of the political and poetic constraints that the court had long placed upon his work – and even, perhaps, an awareness of the personal dangers that a continuing association with the court might pose during the turbulent 1380s.14 Consider, for example, Chaucer’s comments about his tenuous position in the Legend of Good Women. At the start of the prologue, a poet named “Geffrey” is accosted by a man of great authority, the God of Love. This God, a thinly veiled figure for Richard II, has been angered by the poet’s writings, which he believes to have slandered the lovers who are his “olde servaunts” (G.249), and so he seeks to redirect Geffrey’s future literary pursuits toward a more appealing end.15 At first, the God’s objections seem to target the poet’s negligent “makyng.” Like other courtly makers who, as Queen Alceste puts it, “make” poetry from old “bokes” without caring what their “matere” says (G.342–43), Geoffrey is accused of having attended to the “draf” of stories rather than their “corn” (G.312). But on closer inspection, it is not Geffrey’s “words” or style of composition that

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have truly inspired the God’s ire, but the particular “dedes” – the “matere” – that these words denote. As the God says, Was there no good matere in thy mynde, Ne in alle thy bokes ne coudest thow nat fynde Som story of wemen that were goode and trewe? Yis, God wot, sixty bokes olde and newe Hast thow thyself, alle ful of storyes grete, That bothe Romayns and ek Grekes trete Of sundry wemen, which lyf that they ladde, And evere an hundred goode ageyn oon badde. This knoweth God, and alle clerkes eke That usen swiche materes for to seke.

(G.267–79)

It turns out that, for the God, proper “makyng” does not merely require the use of certain forms of writing, such as “balades, roundeles,” and “vyrelayes” (G.411), but the use of a certain kind of matter, too – in this case, the “gloryous legend[s] / of goode women” (G.473–74) that, as Alceste later explains, Geffrey will need to employ as the basis for his future compositions if he wishes to remain in the God’s favor.16 By staging before its reader’s eyes what David Wallace calls the “claustrophobic and restrictive” conditions in which he felt he was forced to write, the Legend thus suggests, if only obliquely, that Chaucer believed the court had issued him something of an ultimatum during the second half of the 1380s: write what the court likes or leave the court altogether.17 The chapter that follows reads the Canterbury Tales as Chaucer’s complex and evolving response to this ultimatum, one that takes the commonplace notion that one’s “wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” (CT 1.742) as its occasion to explore two broader questions central to the making of literature: first, the question of literature’s relation to its matter, and second, the question of what that matter ought to be. As we will see, Chaucer initially proposes, in the General Prologue, an ambivalent relation between the “wordes” of literature and their “dede,” or still more precisely, a multivalent relation, one in which the literary text may properly employ many different kinds of “wordes,” and invoke many different kinds of “dedes,” without calling into question its status as literature. Where before, both the literary materials and the style of making that Chaucer adopted had been dictated, at least notionally, by the rigid aesthetic norms and social expectations of the court, now Chaucer insists that the duties of the poet oblige him to write about whatever “dede” a pilgrim-speaker deems appropriate and to employ whatever “wordes” and style she prefers, lest he be accused of “feyn[ing] thyng” or “fynd[ing] wordes newe” (1.736). This flexible attitude toward

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the rules of literary discourse, which critics have identified as a hallmark of Chaucer’s late style, has its corollary in the poet’s willingness, especially in Fragment One, to let his pilgrims say what they want in the way that they want, never mind how biased, false, indecorous, or even slanderous their words might be.18 As the Tales proceed, however, Chaucer finds this position increasingly difficult to maintain – and so he starts to backpedal. Rather than insisting that the “words” of literature need only be “cosyn” to whatever “dede” rings true to a particular pilgrim-speaker, the latter half of the Tales instead suggest that literature should not, and indeed cannot, possess a truly ambivalent relation to its “dede.” This is because literary discourse, never mind how autonomous or fantastical it might seem, is ultimately tied to the historical conditions that have produced its narratives, tropes, forms, and words. Chaucer comes to this insight over the course of Fragment Seven, and he confirms it in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which suggests that, at bottom, the matter of literature is as much the product of history as what one might read “in a cronycle” (7.3208). How one treats this matter remains a question of judgment and taste. The poet is free to ironize or obscure the relation of his language to the historical “dede” that is its genesis, and the reader is free to ignore the historical basis of the fictions that he consumes. But if either chooses to do so – and here is Chaucer’s great joke – then he risks following the example of Pertelote, whose belief in the possibility of pure fantasy leads her into spectacular and comic error. The chapter that follows sometimes works against the grain of previous scholarship, which has often cast Chaucer as a writer whose aesthetic ambivalence and powerful ironies signal an early and pioneering commitment to aesthetic autonomy, or the notion that literary discourse need answer only to itself.19 In my view, the Canterbury Tales instead suggest that literature cannot operate apart from the historical world that produces it, because the materials and forms of literature always retain a contingent historicity, even after they have been remade into the literary text. This is the case, I would add, not only when literature is at its most literary but especially at such times. For literature often discloses its historicity at precisely those moments when it seeks to suppress it with the greatest intensity – at those moments when, out of a desire “for release” from history, it insists upon the fiction that there is no world beyond the text.20 *** By the time Chaucer picked up the “words” and “deeds” commonplace, the cliché had already acquired a complex provenance. Variations upon the phrase had circulated in English as far back as its earliest recorded

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literature and would continue to circulate long after Chaucer’s death: we find references, for example, to “worda ond worca” in Beowulf, encounter the moral imperative for our “wordes” to “beon ischawet efter the werkes” in the Ancrene Wisse, and discover, in Lydgate’s Troy Book, the suggestion that “a word, discordaunt to the dede” is just like “a wynde, that no man may areste.”21 But while it may be true that the commonplace was wellworn by the time Chaucer came to it, the poet and his contemporaries redeployed it in new ways – partly because the ties between words and things seem to have fallen under renewed intellectual scrutiny during the fourteenth century, and partly because, like all commonplaces, the dictum could be easily applied to a mobile and evolving set of literary, social, and philosophical contexts.22 To illustrate this point, we might consider how four major poets of the fourteenth century – Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Jean de Meun, and John Gower – use this commonplace differently. Following the historian Sallust, Jean asserts in the Roman de la rose that words and deeds are “cousines” to each other, and that, because of this implicit blood-relation, they must somehow look like, or “resembler,” each other. Se dou veir ne vous veaut embler, Li diz deit le fait resembler; Car les voiz aus choses veisines deivent estre a leur faiz cousines.23 [… if anyone writes something without wishing to rob you of its truth, then what he says must resemble the deed. Words that are neighbors with things must be cousins to their deeds.]

In his translation of Boethius, Jean makes a similar claim for the blood relation of words and things but attributes it, not to Sallust, but to Plato: “you have learned, on the authority [sentence] of Plato, that it is fitting for words [paroles] to be cousins [cousinez] to the things [chosez] of which they speak.”24 Gower takes a more skeptical view of the relation of verba and res – for if it was once true, in the Golden Age, that “the word was lich to the conceite,” now, he tells us, language has come unstuck from its bond to the truth, with the result that even the terms of the law wear a “double face.”25 Dante prefers to adapt a term from medieval logic to figure the link between things and words in his Vita nova. “Names,” he writes, “follow from the things they name, as the saying goes: nomina sunt consequentia rerum.”26 And Boccaccio, finally, argues that there is little reason for his reader to take offense at whatever foul language may be found in certain parts of the Decameron. If there is indeed a “tiny hint of ribaldry” in the

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work, he explains, then it will only offend “your dyed-in-the-wool prude [spigolistra donna],” for “that sort of woman sets greater store by words than by deeds [più le parole pesan che’ fatti] and takes greater pains to appear virtuous than to be so.”27 Beyond their variety, what is remarkable about these different citations is that each one offers up a range of interpretive possibilities when it is read within the many contexts of fourteenth-century intellectual discourse. Jean’s statements on the relation of verba and res appear to be shaped, for instance, by two common views on the origin of language: conventionalism, which held that the meaning of words was established by convention rather than by nature, and naturalism, which held the opposite.28 Like many of his contemporaries, Jean adopts a split position on the matter. In one moment, he argues that the relation of words to things is determined by culture – that it is a conventional relation established merely for “nostre entendement.” But in the next, he instead states that words must, as I noted above, “look like,” and so bear a familial resemblance to, the things they denote.29 Gower’s invocation of “word[s]” and “conceite[s]” recalls the so-called “semantic triangle,” along with contemporary debates about how the triangle worked.30 While nearly every late-medieval philosopher agreed that words were signs of concepts in the mind, and that concepts in the mind were signs of things, Nominalists and Realists disagreed on the extent and nature of the correspondence between the three.31 When Gower complains, then, that proper relation between “word” and “conceite” has been perverted, or at least obscured, by a “semblant of deceite,” he is giving voice, even beyond his indictment of present-day hypocrisy, to anxieties about the apparent lack of correspondence between thought and word during his era.32 Dante’s use of the term consequentia points us toward the syllogism, and so his dictum may be understood in three ways: either as a claim that words and things participate in different aspects of the same essence, or as a claim for the decorous agreement of nomina with res, or as a claim that “names” are the logical consequences – whatever those might be – of “things.”33 And Boccaccio’s use of the commonplace responds, finally, to the ubiquitous medieval accusation that literature was immoral, offensive, or salacious. As he suggests, it is foolish to construe his writings in this way because the Decameron is a work of satire, and the satirist must always be free to represent vices in words if he hopes to turn his readers aside from performing those vices in deed.34 For these four poets, then, the res-verba commonplace serves as a point where philosophical, ethical, and literary concerns productively intersect. It serves an occasion to think, if only in a condensed way, about the

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relationship of literary discourse to the social, physical, and even metaphysical world. But how does Chaucer employ the commonplace in his own works? At first glance, his use of the phrase speaks to concerns of ethics and semantics that are very similar to those noted above. One recalls Gower in reading of the many instances, in the Clerk’s Tale, where Griselda assures Walter of her loyalty in “word and werk” (CT 4.167) or “werk” and “thoght” (4.363); Boccaccian concerns about the ethics of literature seem to animate the Physician’s claim that young women may read in Virginia, “as in a book,” every “good word or dede” (6.108); and the Host’s skepticism about whether the Canon’s “dede” really “accorde[s]” with his “speche” (8.638) raises, in the context of the Canon’s quackery, Dantean questions about the extent to which things really are the consequentiae of names. These consonances should not surprise us, for like the work of these poets, Chaucer’s texts display an obvious familiarity with the basics of medieval philosophy, and the poet was personally acquainted with Ralph Strode, who studied logic at Oxford during the 1370s before moving to London and taking up work as an attorney.35 But Chaucer’s use of the res-verba dictum also differs from what one finds in his contemporaries in a few key respects. For one thing, he often understands the bond between word and deed, not merely in philosophical terms, but in social or even legal ones, particularly with respect to the cultural obligations that are supposed to bind humans together. For another, he often employs the commonplace, not to affirm some relationship between language and reality, but rather to interrogate the conditions of its possibility. That Chaucer would understand the relation of word to deed in the terms of the law makes historical sense, for as Richard Firth Green has demonstrated, anxieties about false vows and broken contracts were widespread in fourteenth-century England.36 Chaucer certainly speaks to these anxieties in “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” where he uses the res-verba commonplace to deplore the lack of “obligacioun” that now characterizes – so he says – the promises his fellow citizens swear to each other. Somtyme the world was so stedfast and stable That mannes word was obligacioun, And now it is so fals and deceivable That word and deed, as in conclusioun, Ben nothing lyk, for turned up-so-doun Is al this world for mede and wilfulnesse, That al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse.

(“Lak,” ll. 1–7)

When Chaucer makes his half-serious claim, in the General Prologue, that he must repeat exactly what his pilgrims say without “spar[ing],” and notes that he would be bound to do so even if he were their sworn “brother”

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(1.737), this would seem to be the context he has in mind.37 But I would suggest that a second legal development shapes Chaucer’s many allusions to the bond of word and deed in the Tales: the widespread use of the socalled “writ of covenant.” From the thirteenth century onwards, as Michael Clanchy has observed, “a ‘deed’ was no longer the physical act of conveyance,” the transfer of land or property, but was instead a “sealed document which the donor made,” a factum or fet that guaranteed such a transference.38 Beyond its specific use in the conveyance of property, moreover, such written documents increasingly served as the guarantor of the legal obligations that individuals had to one another. As the fourteenth-century barrister William Herle puts it, a “special deed [fet especiale]” is needed if one wishes to bear witness to “the will of a man [volunte de home],” for without such a deed, “you have nothing but wind [ren fors ke vent].”39 These contexts cast new light upon Chaucer’s declaration that, as a maker, he has a quasi-legalistic obligation to “reherce” every word that his pilgrims say, “as ny as evere he kan” (1.732–33). They suggest that, if only in a fanciful way, Chaucer felt that he had signed a contract with his own characters. But they also cast light on the way that these characters understand human relations within the imagined space of the stories they tell themselves. Consider, for example, how the bond of word and deed shapes interpersonal obligations in the Clerk’s Tale. When Walter’s subjects request that he marry, he responds, first, by “reless[ing]” (4.153) them from the need to choose his wife for him, and then by placing additional conditions upon the bargain. But I yow preye, and charge upon youre lyf, What wyf that I take, ye me assure To worshipe hire, whil that hir lyf may dure, In word and werk, bothe heere and everywheere, As she an emperoures dogther weere.(4.164–68)

Here, the very phrasing, with its paratactic clauses stipulating a wide range of conditions, recalls nothing so much as a legal contract, and when Walter proposes marriage to Griselda, she responds to his contractual “demandes” (4.348) with an oath of her own. “Heere I swere,” she says, “that nevere willyngly, / in werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye” (4.362–63). What is more, the legal valences of the bond between Walter and Griselda take on a metapoetic significance in light of what Chaucer tells us about the Clerk’s own literary values: he is a speaker who prizes “studie,” “forme,” “reverence,” and the imperative not to say “o word” more “than was neede” (1.303–5). The reader is thus primed to expect from the Clerk’s Tale a close and even contractual fidelity to the “wordes” and “werk” (4.28) of

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the Clerk’s source, Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis, and for the most part, as Carolyn Dinshaw has noted, this is exactly what the reader gets.40 Just as the body of Griselda is “translated” and “conveyed” (4.385–91) unchanged, out of one guise and into another, so too does the Clerk “conveyen” Petrarch’s “mateere” (4.55), or what he terms “the body of his tale” (4.42), out of Latin and into English as exactly as he can, without “thyng impertinent” (4.54).41 This is not to say, of course, that Chaucer himself agrees with the Clerk’s studious approach to making, or even that the Clerk’s own view of his Petrarchan source is wholly uncritical.42 The lenvoy appended to the Clerk’s Tale, with its suggestion that English women model their actions upon the Wife of Bath instead of Griselda (4.1177–1212), is obviously “impertinent,” both in its poetics and its apparent gender politics, toward what one finds in Petrarch.43 But it is clear enough that, at certain points in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses the bond of word and deed to adumbrate the literary obligation that a maker may feel he owes, rightly or wrongly, to the “deed” of his source. In addition to using the res-verba commonplace to ponder philosophical questions of language and reference, then, Chaucer also takes it as an occasion to think, in miniature, about the social, legal, and even literary obligations that bonds of word and deed might connote. This is the first way that his use of the dictum differs from what one typically finds in his contemporaries. As I noted above, however, he also uses the commonplace to interrogate the relationship between literature and reality in a broader and more abstract way. Sometimes, this questioning takes an openly satirical bent – as it does, for instance, in the absurd account of semantics in the House of Fame, where “the Aeneid and flatus,” as John Fyler memorably puts it, are held to be “essentially the same thing.”44 But at other times, it is more serious. At the start of the second book of Troilus and Criseyde, for example, Chaucer offers up a meditation on language and reference that speaks directly to the thematic concerns of a poem that often muses over how true, or “untrewe,” covenants of “word” and “dede” might be (TC 3.1053–54), particularly in matters of the heart.45 As Chaucer writes, Ye know ek that in forme of speche is chaunge Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do; Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages, In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

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(2.22–28)

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At first glance, Chaucer’s meaning seems straightforward enough. If the love-talking of Troilus and Criseyde seems “straunge” to us today, then this is merely because words for expressing love have naturally changed over the course of “a thousand yeer”; because customs of dalliance differ from place to place, language to language, and culture to culture; and because different individuals have sharply different experiences of romance itself. “Scarsly ben ther in this place thre,” Chaucer remarks a few lines later, “that have in love seid lik, and don, in al” (2.43–44). All of this is true enough, but it prompts a second question. When we use the word “love,” we may ask, how can we be sure that we mean the same thing as other people do? Chaucer had recently considered an analogous problem in the Boece. In the fifth book of that work, Boethius asks Lady Philosophy about the meaning of the term “hap,” or “chance.” Do you believe, he asks her, that “hap” is “anything in any weys; and yif thou wenest that hap be anything, what is it?” (5.p1, ll. 9–11). Philosophy responds by stating that “hap” is nothing but an empty word: “hap nis but an idel voys (as who seith, but an idel word), withouten any significacioun of thing summitted to that voys” (5.p1, ll. 36–39). As in Dante, Chaucer’s opposition of “significacioun” to “submissioun” recalls terminist logic, and in particular, the distinction between “signification” and “supposition” – the semantic difference, that is, between a word that merely calls to mind (or “signifies”) an idea and a word that really stands (or “supposits”) for the thing that it signifies in a logical proposition.46 For Lady Philosophy, “hap” is a useful concept to think with, because it signifies the slippery idea of chance. But because “chance” does not really exist – for after all, God’s providence is the only power that truly shapes the course of our lives – the word “hap” has no authentic force of supposition. An “idel voys,” it does not stand for any really existing thing. When something happens in the absence of any apparent design – as, for example, when a farmer plows his field and discovers a golden cup without the expectation of finding one – this “is clepid hap” (5.p1, l. 69) or “semeth to han makid hap” (5.p1, l. 76). But, as Philosophy insists, to call this event “hap” is only to employ a manner of speaking. When Chaucer writes of the “love” that Troilus and Criseyde feel for each other, then, does he also wonder if his word for their passion is merely a conventional one – an “ydel voys” that is nothing but a convenient turn of speech? At the least, this is a question that his characters often seem to pose to themselves.47 In his famous Petrarchan address, for example, Troilus wonders aloud about what sort of “thing” love might be. “If no love is,” he cries, “O God, what fele I so? / And if love is, what thing and which is he?” (1.400–1). Later on, overwhelmed by the presence

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of Criseyde’s body, he cries – in a moment that may allude to the euphemistic sense of “thing” in Middle English – “O mercy, God, what thyng is this?” (3.1124).48 Priam, puzzled at Troilus’s deterioration after the collapse of the affair, asks aloud, “what thyng was the cause of al his peyne?” (5.1229). And Criseyde, burning with curiosity, demands to know “what thyng” Pandarus means (2.127) after he tells her that he has come into possession of a scandalous bit of erotic gossip. Tho gan she wondren moore than biforn A thousand fold, and down hire eyghen caste; For nevere, sith the tyme that she was born, To knowe thyng desired she so faste.

(2.141–44)

But Criseyde never learns what this “thyng” is, and neither do we. So far, I’ve argued that fourteenth-century philosophy, literature, and legal discourse often invoked the maxim that words and things should be kindred to each other; that Chaucer’s poetry displays his knowledge, not just of this maxim, but of its import in these different contexts; and that Chaucer uses it in his poetry, not merely for stylistic color, but to raise metapoetic questions about the “dede” to which literary “words” might or might not be “cosyn,” and about the proper relation of those “words” to the “dedes” they denote. I would now like to return to Chaucer’s discussion of language and reference in the General Prologue. Here, Chaucer presents his reader with a grab bag of the different philosophical, literary, and legal justifications that medieval poets often used to defend their tactics of representation. Consider again the very end of the passage. He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother; He moot as wel seye o word as another. Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ, And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.

(1.737–42)

As I noted in my introduction to this chapter, Chaucer pre-emptively defends his style of making by alluding, in quick succession, to the fidelity that a compiler owes to his source texts (“o word as another”), the license afforded to the truth-teller or the satirist (“Crist” and “vileynye”), the obligations of the sworn oath (“brother”), and the philosophical demand to make language adequate to reality (“Plato”). But rather than drawing these justifications together at the end of the passage, Chaucer keeps his syntax deliberately paratactic, a fact underlined by the presence of “eek” at the start of line seven hundred and forty-one. Instead of marshalling them

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together under the banner of a single literary apologia, in other words, Chaucer simply lists these justifications, one after the other, without indicating which one – or which combination of them – will guide his pen. What this famous passage from the General Prologue really asserts, then, is not the subordination of the poet’s language and method to the norms of any one discourse. Chaucer is not here signaling, as critics have sometimes suggested, his commitment to the rules of any particular mode of verbal representation – to literary verisimilitude, for instance, or to philosophical realism.49 Rather, the passage represents a claim for poetic carte blanche, in two respects. First, it affords Chaucer an almost unlimited degree of latitude as a writer, both in terms of the matter he may use for his Tales and in terms of the range of “registers and styles” that Chaucer may “ventriloquize,” as Marion Turner aptly puts it.50 The God of Love may once have commanded Chaucer’s alter ego to use only “good matere” (LGW G.270) and to set aside “the draf of storyes” (G.312), but the General Prologue places no such constraints upon the poet. Its proper “mateere” (CT 1.727), and its proper style, is left without specification. Second, the passage insists that literature traffics in truth even while refusing to specify what kind of truth that might be. Is the truth of literature, we might ask, to be found in its fidelity to what its sources say – in how closely it “telle[s]” its “tale after a man” (1.731)? Or in its epistemological accuracy – its refusal to “feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe” (1.736)? Or even in its ethical bravery – its willingness to speak, after the example of “Crist,” hard truths “ful brode” (1.739)? Chaucer gives us no answer to these questions in the Prologue, but he does return to them in the Tales that follow. For as we will see, the Tales are among other things a metaliterary experiment, one that repeatedly queries what the proper rules and object of literary discourse ought to be. *** Scholars have often claimed that the Canterbury Tales engineer a discursive space wherein each pilgrim is given a position, and a voice, of equal importance to every other pilgrim.51 This reading has its basis in Harry Bailly’s remarks about the tale-telling game at the end of the General Prologue, where the Host says that the game will have three, and only three, rules. First, everyone will get a turn to speak. Each pilgrim will tell “tales tweye / to Caunterbury-ward” (1.792–93) and two stories on the way back. Second, the stories need not follow any particular form or treat any particular kind of matter. Instead, they need only aim for a kind of generalized literary excellence, or what Harry terms “best sentence and moost solaas” (1.798). Third, and finally, each pilgrim must recognize the Host as

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the “juge and reportour” (1.814) of the Tales – as a moderator who has the power to stick anyone “rebel” to his “juggement” (1.833) with the bill for their collective supper. The Host’s speech aims to ensure that, in theory, the pilgrimage will be a space where no one discourse may dominate any other, and where any and all kinds of discourse are licit – a kind of utopian agora where all speech is a priori permissible, all speakers considered a priori equal, and all matters, as Hannah Arendt once put it, “decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.”52 This view of the Tales has been very durable in the scholarly record, probably because Chaucer’s poem does seem, at least at first, to permit its pilgrims not only to tell different stories in their own way, but even to propose, in implicit terms, different theories of literature while they do so. From the remarks of the scholarly Clerk and the authority-loving Squire, for example, we might intuit that literature should be bookish in origin – that its matter must be “cosyn” to the matter of older books, even if it reworks that matter into a new form through a process of relatively exact translation (one that will eschew what the Clerk terms “thyng impertinent”) or through a process of rhetorical elaboration (the sort of labor that the Squire associates with a “rethor excellent”).53 In the case of the Knight, by contrast, it may seem that the structures of a literary text should be “cosyn” to the patterns of order that run throughout the universe – the honorable “cheyne of love,” as he puts it, that binds together all things.54 The pious Man of Law seems to think that literary plots ought to disclose the providential traces of God’s hand in creation, a hand which shapes our lives as surely as it arranges the “sterres” in heaven (2.194).55 Evidence from his tale implies that the Merchant sees the words of a literary text as a kind of foolish contract, one that, like the “scrit[s]” and “bond[s]” and enfeoffments (4.1697–98) with which January tries (and fails) to purchase May’s affections, invariably binds its author to his own “heigh fantasye and curious bisynesse” (4.1577), without the security of real collateral.56 The Franklin’s concluding words suggest that, like those gentils who are truly “fre” toward their friends (5.1622), great storytellers may generously release their characters from the constraints of social and legal obligation, bonds of “word” and of “werk” (5.985), with a single stroke of the pen.57 And the Miller, finally, appears convinced that, in its tactics of representation, literature ought to display the physical world in all its naturalism, no matter what norms of literary decorum or Christian morality may dictate.58 Depending upon their own values, readers will likely find some of these theories of literature more persuasive than others. But my point is that,

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within the confines of the tale-telling game, no one of these theories may be held absolutely correct or incorrect, both because the Host vouchsafes the pilgrims’ “obedie[nce]” to the “foreward” they have made to each other by “free assent” (1.851–52), and because in any event, the “sentence” and “solaas” of each Tale may only be evaluated in a relative way, in keeping with the particular rules of literary discourse – and as Robert Meyer-Lee observes, the particular constellation of socio-literary values – adumbrated by whichever pilgrim narrates it.59 As the Tales continue to develop, however, two problems emerge with respect to this scenario. The first is that Chaucer’s pilgrims are not nearly as openminded or obedient to their “foreward” as the Host might wish. They take stories personally, object to them on ideological grounds, and use them as a pretext for insulting each other, all while bucking the Host’s regular pleas to remain civil and allow each man or “womman” to “telle hire tale” (3.851). The result, of course, is the disintegration of the tale-telling game into the quitting contest, which reimagines the Host’s agora as an agon, and which affords each pilgrim the chance to attack both the “dede” and the “words” of other pilgrims with venom.60 Though examples of this phenomenon abound in the first three fragments, its most obvious instance is to be found in the Miller’s Tale. It is well known that this story is a satirical appropriation of the plot materials of the Knight’s Tale, which the Miller takes no small pleasure in burlesquing. Palamon and Arcite become Absolon and Nicholas, Emelye is transformed into Alisoun, and the gentleman’s “noble storie” (1.3111) is ultimately shown to be no different, either in form or in matter, from the most common of lovers’ quarrels.61 What is less often remarked, however, is that the Miller burlesques, not only the “dedes” that the Knight recounts, but the very “words” that he uses to recount them.62 Consider, for instance, the diction of the Miller’s interruption. The Millere, that for dronken was al pale, So that unnethe upon his hors he sat, He nolde avalen neither hood ne hat, Ne abyde no man for his curteisie, But in Pilates voys he gan to crie, And swoor, “By armes, and by blood and bones, I kan a noble tale for the nones, With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale.”

(1.3120–27)

Along with a third key term, “hende,” two of the terms in this passage, “noble” and “curteisie,” possess a strong socio-political valence in the discursive world of the Knight’s Tale. They connote an ideology of honor and service. In the discursive world of the Miller’s Tale, however, these words

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are mere tokens of class distinction. In his sardonic remark that Alisoun’s “hewe” is brighter than a “noble yforged newe” (1.3255–56), for example, the Miller redirects the semantic force of “noble” so that it signifies, not chivalric or moral worth, but monetary value.63 By invoking “curteisye” in her demand that Nicholas “do wey” his “handes,” at least until the two of them find “leyser” to dally apart from the eyes of her “jalous” husband (1.3284–97), Alisoun implies, with some justification, that courtly love is merely a game of kinky role-playing, and not an elevated and spiritual form of companionate affection.64 The term “hende,” finally, serves as the Miller’s mockheroic epithet for a protagonist who is not “hende” but handsy (see, e.g., 1.3275–76) – a clerk whose “queynte” terms properly denote, not heavenly “pryvetee[s],” but secrets of an earthier kind (1.3162–63).65 In these and other cases, the very idiom of the Knight’s Tale is revealed, at least in the Miller’s view, to be nothing more than a veneer that the ruling classes use to mystify the naked exercise of their power – monetary power (“noble”), sexual power (“curteisye”), intellectual power (“queynte”), and the power of rank (“hende”). What is more, other pilgrims soon follow the Miller’s precedent by objecting, not just to the matter of tales that displease them, but to the style in which these tales have been told. The Reeve, for example, shortly attacks both the “dede” and the “words” of the Miller’s Tale in the same way that the Miller had attacked the Knight: “Right in his cherles termes wol I speke” (1.3917).66 And in Fragment Three, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, and the Summoner all bicker with each other about the social and literary force of the keywords (such as “glosyng,” “expres,” and “jurisdiccioun”) that have featured in their respective stories.67 Over the course of the first three fragments, then, the assembled pilgrims gradually reject the rules that the Host initially proposed for the tale-telling game, for despite his recurrent insistence that the game is only a “game” (see, e.g., 1.4353–55) – and despite his early effort, as Jill Mann has observed, to define this “game” as an aesthetic space in which “the possibility of moral judgement” must be categorically suspended – the pilgrims quickly recognize that literary discourse, like all discourse, is invariably shaped by power relations.68 Indeed, in the many squabbles that arise between them in the links, they roundly reject the idea that any tale could be truly ambivalent either in ethical or in aesthetic terms – for if language is obviously the product of contingent socio-political arrangements, then it is equally true that claims to aesthetic ambivalence often paper over the self-interest of an author or group. Lions, as the Wife of Bath reminds us, do not paint themselves.69 But this line of thinking leads the pilgrims, and Chaucer’s readers, to a new question. If literature is not, as the Host

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imagines it, a purely aesthetic or ambivalent discourse, then is it a purely instrumental one instead? Is it simply a device, that is, to advance its writer’s self-interest, or the interest of the class to which that writer belongs? This question casts a long shadow over many of the Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer’s pilgrims often tell stories that align remarkably well with the ideological views notionally represented by their different positions in latemedieval society, so much so that, at times, the differences between their aesthetic priorities and their personal values may be hard to discern.70 Consider, for instance, the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. Here, Chaucer tests to destruction the idea that literature is purely an instrument of its author’s self-interest, its words “cosyn” to nothing save that author’s desires. The Pardoner, we may recall, informs his audience from the outset that he speaks in bad faith. He preaches, he says, “nothyng but for coveitise” (6.433), and his “entente” is “nat but for to wynne” (6.403). He is happy to misrepresent his intellectual credentials, by using “a wordes fewe” of Latin to signal authority where there is none (6.344), or by presenting “pigges bones” (1.700) as “relikes” (6.349), or even by producing bogus documents to warrant his claims (6.336–43).71 Most of all – and of special importance for my argument here – the Pardoner takes a nihilistically rhetorical view of the relation between “words” and “dedes,” one that is grounded in his belief that literary discourse serves no end other than to manipulate its audience in the pursuit of a payday for its maker. Critics have sometimes seen the Pardoner’s Tale as a genuinely “moral tale” (6.460).72 A closer look reveals that it is in fact an amoral collection of the kinds of rhetorical gestures, both verbal and performed, that medieval theorists of preaching had long identified as the hallmarks of pulpit abuse.73 Such abuse is easy enough to see if we examine the Pardoner’s lengthy diatribe against swearing, gluttony, blaspheming, three of the socalled “tavern sins.”74 These sins have little to do with the stated theme of the Pardoner’s sermon – which is cupiditas, or greed (6.333–34) – and so we may wonder why he makes so much of them in his prologue. If we discard the idea that the Tale has a good-faith aim, however, the Pardoner’s invocation of these sins makes good sense, for to inveigh against them was an old trick of Middle English preaching, one designed to provoke feelings of guilt and shame in one’s audience.75 The author of the Worcester Sermons, for example, also rails against “excesse in etyng and dryngkynge” and “euel speche and bakbytyng,” and notes that gluttons are as “vowl” and “orrible” in “the si[h]te of God” as a “lepur” is “in owr sichte.”76 Because nearly everyone worries at some time or another that she or he eats too much, or drinks too much, or gossips too much, nearly every person in a

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Sunday audience will hear something to prick the conscience if a preacher harps upon these sins, and this is surely why the Pardoner takes such time, in the lead-up to his Tale, to rail against his audience’s “abhominable” swearing (6.631), their “foul” drinking (6.524), and their gluttonous bodies, stuffed full “of dong and of corrupcioun” (6.535). A similar rationale likely accounts for the Pardoner’s choice of narrative, for with respect both to its dark theme and the menacing connotations of its low-country setting, at least in a medieval English context, the exemplum of the Three Rioters affords him many opportunities to play upon the cultural and religious anxieties of his audience.77 Consider, for instance, how the young tavern boy describes Death’s workings to the three protagonists. Just two hours ago, the boy tells them, an “old felawe” (6.672) of theirs was drinking in this very tavern, “on his bench upright” (6.674) – but then, without warning, the man “sodeynly” was “yslayn” (6.673) by a highwayman who has recently begun to walk the roads in Flanders, a privee theef men clepeth Deeth That in this contree al the peple sleeth, And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo, And wente his wey withouten wordes mo. He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence.

(6.675–79)

This passage employs what D. Vance Smith has identified as the conventional “medieval iconography of death” – a “theef” who carries a “spere” and strikes at random – to stoke fear, and thus a desire to repent, in the Pardoner’s audience.78 Indeed, the tavern boy decries the suddenness of Death; he notes its ubiquity in a time of “pestilence” (6.679); and, in a moment of considerable irony, he counsels the rioters to “be war of swich an adversarie” (6.682).79 Rather than urging his own audience to do good works to prepare spiritually for their ends, however, the Pardoner instead urges them to purchase for themselves the “seuretee” (6.937) of one of his pardons before it is too late. For the road to Canterbury, he reminds them, is long and perilous, and if “oon or two” of them were to fall from their horses and “breke” their “nekke atwo” along the way, such a “seuretee” might be the only thing standing between their souls and an eternity of torment (6.935–36). It is in these respects that the Pardoner’s Tale, and perhaps even the person of the Pardoner himself, figures a highly instrumental or even casuistic view of literary discourse.80 The Pardoner’s language may not quite be “emptied of any stable meaning,” as Anne McTaggart suggests, but it is without question a language whose primary end is the manipulation of the hearts and minds of the pilgrims in pursuit of monetary gain.81 For if the Pardoner preaches “of no thyng but for coveityse” (6.424), we should recall that he

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also preaches “nothyng but for coveitise” (6.433). In his view, a “moral tale” (4.460) is simply one of the many tools that a canny speaker may employ to play upon the passions of his audience. The bluntly instrumental aim of the Pardoner’s discourse may explain, moreover, why he concludes his Tale, not with a conventional recapitulation and meditation upon the thema of his sermon, but with a list of the many sins that might lead the assembled pilgrims into peril. As he exclaims, O cursed synne of alle cursednesse! O traytours homycide, O wikkednesse! O glotonye, luxurie, and hasardrye! Thou blasphemour of Crist with vileynye And othes grete, of usage and of pride! Allas, mankynde, how may it bitide That to thy creatour, which that the wroghte And with his precious herte-blood thee boghte, Thou art so fals and so unkynde, allas?

(6.895–903)

Murder, treachery, gluttony, luxury, gambling, blasphemy – which one is this “cursed synne of alle cursednesse”? The range of possibilities is nearly comic. But the list also has a rhetorical point, for as the Pardoner assures us, any one of these sins can be swiftly redressed if the sinners in his audience simply step forward to purchase a “hooly pardoun” for the one-time price of only a few “nobles or sterlynges” (6.906–7). Here again, a comparison with the Worcester Sermons proves useful, for that preacher employs the same trick, but to quite different ends. I speke noyther of Richarde, nor of Robert, nor of William, nor of Dan Ion; and t[h]ervorin no man ha me su[s]pect that i speke of hym, but yif it be swich an vnthrifti man that be gilti e this same synne that i speke of. Vor wite he wel, of him i speke and of no other. This t[h]anne is a vowl scabbe, this is a vowl lepir. Vor as i seide befor, it nat onliche infectis hym that doth it, but also hym that herith it, yif a be consentynt ther-to, and so makis h[e]m bothe valle e dedli synne.82

The precise context of this excerpt is a discussion of slander, but the familiar names used in this passage (Richard, Robert, William, and Sir John) and the vague way that the preacher refers to the sin under discussion (“this same synne that i speke of”) produces an effect identical to the Pardoner’s appeal to his audience. Or rather, an almost identical effect, for while the Worcester-preacher certainly demands, like the Pardoner, that his audience repent, he asks them to do so, not merely by opening their wallets, but by renewing their commitments “to abstinence,” “to clene rule oth yursilf,” and to “sum other good ocupatiun.”83

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The Pardoner’s Tale is not well received. The Host responds to it with anger and profanity, and, given the Pardoner’s taunting of his audience and his derisive attitude toward the very notion of “felaweshipe” or “compaignye,” it seems likely that the Host speaks for many of the other pilgrims in his outrage.84 No doubt, this outrage is partly motivated by the Host’s hostility toward the ambiguously queer sexuality that the Pardoner represents, and to which the Host euphemistically alludes with his shouting about “fundement” and “coillons” (6.950–52).85 But the intensity with which the Pardoner’s Tale is rejected may also be read as a symptom of a bigger problem latent within the tale-telling game itself. At the start of the game, we will recall, the Host had proposed an ambivalent and aestheticizing view of literature as its premise, but over the course of Fragment One, the pilgrims rejected that premise because, in their view, literary discourse is always beholden to the self-interest of its writer or that writer’s class. Now, having been put face-to-face with a vision of literature that casts it instead as a purely instrumental expression of self-interest, they reject that vision too, and with considerable force. But where does this leave us? If literature is neither purely aesthetic nor purely instrumental in the eyes of Chaucer’s pilgrims, then what do they think its proper “dede” and proper mode of representation might be? It seems to me that Chaucer returns to this question in Fragment Seven. This Fragment, which Alan Gaylord once characterized as an investigation into “the art of story telling,” responds to the Pardoner’s precedent by suggesting that, in the last, the materials of literature are produced and controlled, not by individual authors or even individual wills, but by social, cultural, and historical forces.86 This questioning comes to a head in the final two tales of the Fragment, which are especially concerned with the relationship of “words” and “dedes” to history. Before I turn to the Monk’s Tale and Nun’s Priest’s Tale, however, some preliminary discussion of the Fragment as a whole will be necessary. Christopher Cannon has termed Fragment Seven the “language group” of the Canterbury Tales, and with good reason, for across its six tales, Chaucer interrogates at once the relation of ordinary discourse to its social context and the relation of literary discourse to ordinary discourse.87 Consider, for instance, the Prioress’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale. For the Prioress, holy words can exercise social and even intercessionary force even if the speaker doesn’t know what they mean. Indeed, as the Prioress notes, the “litel clergeon” (7.503) who walks the streets singing the Alma redemptoris mater does not know enough Latin to parse the sense of the hymn, and so he learns the Alma by memory, or “al by rote” (7.522).88 But this hardly

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prevents his words from having an obvious effect. Indeed, they prompt sectarian violence, lead the townspeople to the site of the clergeon’s body, and solicit the “help and socour” (7.534) of the Virgin herself, all without the clergeon really knowing what he is singing. In the Shipman’s Tale, by contrast, the power of ordinary language stems, not from its religious or cultural force, but from its practical utility as a standard of commerce. In the world of this tale, language works in the same way as money. A word is a cipher whose value has been fixed by collective agreement, and so, even in the absence of a clear referent, it may still serve as a kind of “sociosemantic” coin.89 Like the one hundred franks that are used, at different points in the Tale, to appraise the value of “arraye” bought on credit (7.179), of “certein beestes” that Daun John says he will purchase (7.272), of one night of sex (7.314–17), and of “certeyn tokenes,” or documents, that indicate proof of payment for services rendered (7.359), language possesses value, not because of what it designates, but because a community of speakers has agreed it is worth something – that it has some kind of value in exchange. In both tales, then, the communicative force of a word hinges, neither upon some intrinsic property of signification nor upon the intention or even comprehension of an individual speaker, but upon its perlocutionary effect within the language system of a given social context. Like the singing of the clergeon, which exercises force despite his incomprehension of its meaning “fro word to word” (7.547), the oaths of “cosynage” and “bretherhede” (see 7.36–42 and 7.134–42) sworn between the characters of the Shipman’s Tale are held meaningful, not because they are “tied to an extralinguistic reality from which they receive their value,” as Lee Patterson notes, but simply because the characters in this Tale have agreed that they possess value.90 Chaucer continues to explore the social valences of both literary and ordinary discourse in the next two tales of Fragment Seven, albeit from a different point of view. Let’s begin with the Tale of Sir Thopas. Here, literary discourse appears to have nothing to do with social reality – or indeed with any reality at all. Instead, it seems to grow purely out of other books, for as scholars have long recognized, the matter of the Thopas consists almost entirely of clichés and hackneyed tropes drawn from fourteenth-century romance, with all its overdrawn knights and sentimental courtly behavior and “drasty” tail-rhyme (7.930).91 This explains the drum-beat of filler-lines, the inane descriptions, and the many allusions that the Thopas makes to other romances, for all of these “relentlessly aesthetic” elements, as Eleanor Johnson puts it, seem designed to remind Chaucer’s audience that they are reading, in the end, a collection

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of apparently empty words referring to other apparently empty words.92 Obviously, the Tale is not to the taste of Harry Bailly, who remarks that its language is “nat worth a toord” (7.930) – that, in an elaboration upon the central joke of the House of Fame, it is a fart without the ensuing substance. But ironically enough, the words of the Thopas are more substantive than the Host thinks. As Arthur Bahr observes, “imitation is key to the humor” in this story.93 The Thopas is only funny, that is, if its audience recognizes the literary conventions that it plays upon, for even nonsense must rely upon a social context for its semantic and rhetorical operation. Without clichés to repeat, and “lordes” to “listeth” (7.712) to them, the humor of the Thopas could not succeed. The language of the Melibee, by contrast, appears to be concerned with nothing but substance: insofar as it embellishes its lines with the occasional literary flourish, it seems to do so only to convey information to the reader in as straightforward a way as possible. In Prudence’s view, for instance, the object of the Melibee is to “restreyn[e]” her husband’s “wikked purpos” by “reson and by good conseil” (7.1091), and this “conseillyng,” in the Tale, typically involves an appeal to common sense ideas, or what she terms “resouns” (e.g., 7.1870–73). In presenting these “resouns,” Prudence takes care to avoid elaborate language, selects authorities that she imagines will best persuade her husband, and most of all, employs a style that prizes the exact correspondence of a single word to a single thing. As Patterson puts it, “res is everything, verba nothing; the nucleus of the sententia remains the same regardless of the cortex in which it is encased.”94 These spartan literary choices might lead us to believe that the Melibee is a kind of anti-literary text – that, as Alfred David once argued, it is a work of “pure sentence” meant to contrast with the “pure solaas” of the Thopas.95 But we would be mistaken in this belief, for the Melibee is in fact highly literary, both at the level of the line and with respect to its genre. It plays self-consciously upon the tropes found in advice literature, upon the style of curial documents, and upon schoolroom proverbs, and so it is not an anti-rhetorical text so much as a text that uses rhetoric to apparently anti-rhetorical ends – a text whose rhetorical tactics are designed, it seems to me, to contrast with those of the Pardoner’s Tale.96 Literature, it suggests, is not made literary through its misrepresentation of what it says. On the contrary, by appealing both to what is notionally true and to what one might term the “common sense” of its audience, the literary text will amplify its social and aesthetic power, not diminish it.

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If ordinary discourse was shown to be a social animal in the Prioress’s Tale and Shipman’s Tale, then both the Thopas and Melibee suggest that literary discourse is also produced by social forces – and, moreover, that the power of literary “words” lies in their mediation of a “dede” that draws its force either from an ordinary language context or from the power afforded to it by some socio-cultural formation, such as bourgeois common sense. With both of these insights in hand, I’d like to turn now to the last pair of tales in Fragment Seven, the Monk’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Like the stories before them, both consider the relation of literature to ordinary language, literary convention, and the social world. But both also differ from their antecedents in their marked concern for the relationship of literature to history in particular. This relationship is, of course, a dominant theme of the Monk’s Tale, which is centrally preoccupied, not only with the proper use of historical matter that is “trewe and olde” (7.1998), but with the use of literary forms found in “olde bookes” (7.1974), and especially, the form of “tragedie” (7.1973–82).97 With respect to their treatment of historical matter, the Monk suggests that literary texts should bind their words as closely to historical fact as possible, by making it clear that the words of those texts can be traced, in genealogical fashion, back to a single, originary witness to a historical event.98 This is why the Monk frequently refers his reader to the historical sources he chooses to use (“Swetonius,” “Machabee,” “Lucan,” and so on), and it may also explain the Host’s attraction to his virile physique – for it would seem that, in the Host’s view, strong words, like strong children, derive their strength from a potent father–figure (see 7.1954–58).99 With respect to questions of form, in turn, the Monk’s Tale suggests that literary texts ought to adopt a mode of writing that puts the stress, not on the expressive and mediating qualities of literary language, but on its denotative power. Indeed, as J. A. Burrow has noted, the Tale is written in just such a mode, one that is “obscure or alembicated” and that favors, at nearly every instance, the denotative and declarative over the expressive or suggestive.100 On the whole, the Monk does not evoke or characterize. Instead, he lists, he counts, he assesses, and he measures.101 This “alembicated” style may have its roots in the annales school of historiography that had been dominant in English monasteries just a few centuries earlier, and it is certainly related, in any event, to the sermo humilis, or “humble style,” that was often held to possess the proper tone and matter-of-fact simplicity required for history-writing.102 In any event, the style clearly aims for a kind of linguistic exactitude, one

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wherein each verbum refers absolutely, and only, to the particular res it denotes. Consider, for instance, the way that the Monk lists the deeds of Hercules early on in his Tale. He slow the crueel tyrant Busirus And made his hors to frete hym, flessh and boon; He slow the firy serpent venymus; Of Acheloys two hornes he brak oon; And he slow Cacus in a cave of stoon; He slow the geant Antheus the stronge; He slow the grisly boor, and that anon; And bar the hevene on his nekke longe.

(7.2103–10)

Or consider the matter-of-fact tone that the Monk adopts in his description of Nebuchadnezzar’s transformation. And lik an egles fetheres wax his heres; His nayles lyk a briddes clawes weere; Til God relessed hym a certeyn yeres, And yaf hym wit, and thanne with many a teere He thanked God, and evere his lyf in feere Was he to doon amys or moore trespace; And til that tyme he leyd was on his beere He knew that God was ful of myght and grace.

(7.2175–82)

In each case, the Monk draws his reader’s attention, not to the sound and feel of the language he uses, but to the historical acts to which these words refer – so much so that, with its monotone rhymes, anaphora, deadpan literalism, and end-stopping, the style seems designed to present the reader with one, and only one, factual statement per line. This, as Kara Gaston writes, is “a world organized according to a single interpretive principle,” one in which literary “words” must sacrifice every flourish and figure in order to bind themselves as closely as possible to the “dede” of what really happened.103 Or is it? It is true that critics have often seen the Monk’s Tale as a remarkably dull sort of literature, or even as an anti-literary text. Robert Root, for instance, once remarked upon its “essential literary badness” and concluded that its sequence of casus-narratives had, with few exceptions, “no literary merit.”104 But upon closer inspection, the Monk’s Tale is more literary than it may appear. At a few key moments, the Monk puts aside his rather dry source, Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, and instead works from books, such as the Roman de la rose, that take a more expressive and imaginative approach to the representation of history.105 In the story of Croesus, for instance, a list of purportedly

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objective facts (see 7.2727–32) quickly evolves into a kind of psychodrama, one wherein the Monk tries to imagine what Croesus thought, and how he felt, as his life neared its end. Croesus “wende wel,” as the Monk tells us, that “of his foos he myghte nat be slayn” (7.2737–39), and he also has a delusional vision in which, “as that hym thoughte,” he is washed by Jupiter’s own hands and dried with a towel handed to him by Apollo (7.2743–46). In the story of Nero, in turn, we see a similar evolution: a list of “vicius” (1.2463) actions committed by the emperor ultimately gives way to the Monk’s subjective characterization of Nero’s state of mind as he runs from the Roman citizens who pursue him. The peple cried and rombled up and doun, That with his erys herde he how they seyde, “Where is this false tiraunt, this Neroun?” For fere almoost out of his wit he breyde, And to his goddes pitously he preyde For socour, but it myghte nat bityde. For drede of this hym thoughte that he deyde, And ran into a gardyn hym to hyde.

(7.2535–42)

This is hardly the narration of facts and facts alone. It is, instead, a literary projection that builds an empathetic and psychologizing characterization of Nero upon the facts that the Monk has found in his source. Even if the Monk’s style usually insists, then, upon the precise correspondence of “word” and “dede,” this does not preclude its literary amplification in those moments where a full account of history demands more, in the Monk’s opinion, than a simple catalog of places, dates, and events. To grasp history in an authentic way, he suggests, we must feel it and think it at the same time, and this doubled approach to the literary representation of the past is especially clear in the most imaginative casus of his Tale: the grim story of Ugolino della Gherardesca.106 Here, the Monk directs his reader, not only to take note of the historical facts of Ugolino’s imprisonment, but to empathize and identify with Ugolino in his despair. He wants us to hear what the chained man hears, to see what he sees, and feel what he feels. This, for example, is how the Monk describes Ugolino’s state of mind while he listens to the jailer nail shut the door to his cell. And on a day bifil that in that hour Whan that his mete wont was to be broght, The gayler shette the dores of the tour. He herde it wel, but he spak right noght, And in his herte anon ther fil a thoght

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry That they for hunger wolde doon hym dyen. “Allas!” quod he, “Allas, that I was wroght!” Therwith the teeris fillen from his yen.

(7.2423–30)

The point of this passage is not simply to convey historical fact, but to build a subjective characterization upon what we know – even if we only know very little – from our study of the historical record.107 A similar point could be made about other details that the Monk seems to include in his version of the Ugolino narrative for literary rather than historiographic ends.108 There is no purely factual reason to report, for example, that Ugolino’s three-year-old remarks to his father, “I am so hungry that I may nat slepe” (7.2435), or to note that, after the first child dies, the other children suppose that their father gnaws his arm out of “hunger” rather than “wo” (7.2447–48). History, it would seem, has here been taken as the occasion for the imaginative work of literature, for it is – so the Monk seems to say – only by imagining the felt implications of historical events that we can grasp their significance in human terms. The Monk’s Tale thus suggests that the opposition between history and literature is hardly absolute, for even if literature ought to be rooted, in the Monk’s view, in some set of historical “dedes,” those “dedes” may themselves serve as an occasion for imaginative literary invention. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale builds upon this idea even while it makes a bolder claim for the historicity of literary discourse itself. I will admit that to assert the “historicity” of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale may seem an odd thing to do, for as scholars have long observed, the Tale goes to great lengths to conceal its debts, not just to history per se, but to any sort of historical reality at all. It is, according to a range of views, “the most consciously aesthetic of Chaucer’s productions”; a story that “is artifact itself, exuberantly released from the pretense that literary texts imitate organic form”; and a “literary parody” or “meta-fictional artifact.”109 What is more, the story of Chauntecleer and the Fox has often been cast as the star witness for what Muscatine once called Chaucer’s “humane vision,” that self-conscious celebration of irony, ambivalence, relativism, tolerance, and multiplicity of perspective that has often led scholars to make claims, both implicit and explicit, for the poet’s liberal humanism avant la lettre.110 Such views certainly make sense if we focus exclusively on what the Tale says it is doing, for with respect to its framing, its self-identified genre, and the materials out of which it is comprised, this story seems to take pains to declare itself a work of pure art. It begins, for instance, with a riposte against the methods and topic of the Monk’s Tale, which

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comes to an abrupt end when the Knight cuts off the Monk, perhaps because he has heard one too many stories about fallen aristocrats.111 As the Knight exclaims, I seye for me, it is a greet disese, Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese, To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas!

(7.2771–73)

Perhaps, he suggests, the Monk might tell a few stories about gentils whose lives have followed the converse trajectory – stories about noble men and women who “clymbeth up” and then “abideth in prosperitee” (7.2776–77)? The Host concurs, for even if Harry Bailly dislikes the Monk’s Tale for different reasons – he has clearly found it boring, which is why he can recall only a few of its commonplaces about “tragedie” and “Fortune covered with a clowde” (7.2782–83) – he dislikes it with a similar intensity. “Sir,” he begs the Monk, “sey somwhat of huntyng, I yow preye” (7.2805). Once it has become clear that the Monk will not be telling any tales of hunting, the Host then calls upon the Nun’s Priest to tell a different and more pleasing kind of story, and the Priest appears happy to oblige. “Yis, sir,” he exclaims, “yis, Hoost, so moot I go, / but I be myrie, ywis I wol be blamed” (7.2816–17). The Nun’s Priest’s fawning embrace of the “myrie” mode is designed, I think, to prime audience expectations – to invite the reader to expect a Tale that rejects, not only the historical topic of the Monk’s Tale, but its somber and historical mode of telling. And at least at first glance, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale seems to fit this bill. Consider, for example, the setting of the tale, a country farm that is home to a poor widow, her daughters, and a community of happy animals. While it is true that some critics have seen in the farm a “disturbing tableau” of working-class life, I think the setting is properly understood as sentimental in character.112 The widow is indeed “povre” (7.2821), but her poverty is presented as the source of her honesty and virtue, and not as a burden she must bear. She lives, so the Nun’s Priest tells us, a “ful symple lyf” in “pacience” (7.2826), one whose simplicity is framed not in terms of lack but in terms of prudent moderation: “repleccioun ne made hire nevere sik; / attempree diete was al hir phisik, / and exercise, and hertes suffisaunce” (7.2837–39).113 She is clearly fond of her animals, so much so that she gives them fanciful names – the sheep is called “Malle” (7.2831), the rooster, “Chauntecleer” (7.2849) – and the pleasure she takes in what little she has is reflected in the Nun’s Priest’s rather over-cute enumeration of the details of her life. “Thre large sowes hadde she, and namo” (7.2830), he says, and sometimes, on a good

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day, she would eat “an ey or tweye” (7.2845) as a treat. These details have little to do with the historical conditions in which medieval peasants really lived. Instead, they are designed to prompt a sentimental response in the reader, in the way that a chubby baby or a floppy puppy might do. The irreality and sentimentality of the setting find their corollary, moreover, in the peculiar sort of matter that the Nun’s Priest uses as the basis for his Tale, for the greater part of this matter purports to have its origins in sources with an uncertain relation to historical reality – in dreams, for example, or in literary conventions, or even in the words of still more books. To start, we might consider the long debate in the Tale on the veracity of dreams, and in particular, on the question of whether nocturnal visions might have some bearing upon present or future events.114 Chauntecleer, we may recall, awakes one night from a terrifying dream of a beast that threatens him with grave danger – a beast, he tells Pertelote, with a color “bitwixe yelow and reed,” a tail and ears that are “tipped” with “blak,” and a “snowte smal, with glowynge eyen tweye” (7.2902–5). But Pertelote quickly dismisses the vision. In an echo of the Host’s scatological reaction to the Thopas, she suggests that Chauntecleer’s dreams are merely the product of digestive gas, or “fume” (1.2924). To underline the point, she then proclaims that “nothyng, God woot, but vanitee in sweven is” (7.2922) and proceeds to cite a series of medical authorities on the unreliability of visions (see 7.2923-39).115 While Pertelote is obviously dismissive of Chauntecleer’s description of the fox, we should note that she objects, not to what her paramour has seen, but to where he has seen it. Indeed, the rooster’s description of this menacing animal is rejected because Pertelote believes it to stem from an unreliable source, and not because the description paints an inaccurate picture – for indeed, the picture is quite accurate. What is more, the academic character of Pertelote’s critique, which rejects the speculative insights of prophecies and visions in favor of Vincent of Beauvais, would seem to index the Nun’s Priest’s own tendency to draw, at least at certain moments, upon learned authorities for the matter of his Tale. In his descriptions of Chauntecleer’s pecking and crowing, for instance, the Nun’s Priest observes that the rooster sings, not like some barnyard chicken, but like the mermaids described by the Physiologus, and elsewhere in the Tale, we learn that Chauntecleer’s father once had a starring role in Nigel de Longchamps’ Speculum stultorum.116 For its characterization of Chauntecleer as a haughty knight and Pertelote as a courtly lady, in turn, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale likely takes inspiration from passages found either in Jean de Condé’s Dis du Koc or in Bartholomeus Anglicus, as Jill Mann has demonstrated.117 For

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its moralizing material, finally, the Tale draws extensively upon what has already been said in the previous stories of Fragment Seven. The Monk’s Tale is recalled, for instance, in the allusion to the figure of Croesus, the Melibee in debates about “womannes conseil,” and the Prioress’s Tale with the nod to St. Kenelm.118 The world of Chauntecleer and Pertelote thus brings to mind nothing so much as the world of the medieval classroom – a place where everything is textual, and where reality has been supplemented, if not wholly displaced, by the representations found in books.119 For all of these reasons, we might well conclude that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is indeed a paradigmatic “fable,” in the specifically medieval sense of that term.120 A text that appears to be written “in an ultraliterary register that no longer even purports to reflect social reality,” as Paul Strohm once put it, one could hardly expect this narrative to concern itself with anything beyond metadiscursive allusion and intertextual play.121 But as we will see, this is precisely why the historicity of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is so striking and effective, for upon closer inspection, it discloses a much more intimate relationship to history than its self-positioning would suggest. It is indeed a fable, but the sort of fable, as Priscian has it, whose “fictive discourse [oratio ficta] exhibits for us the image of truth [imaginem … veritatis] through its verisimilar mode of representation [verisimili dispositione].”122 How does the Tale do this? One way is through its recurrent use of imagery that its reader would have recognized as true to historical life. Most often, this imagery is drawn from nature. Even though they talk and act in an “amusingly human” manner, for example, Pertelote and Chauntecleer are also, as D. W. Robertson once observed, “amazingly convincing as chickens.”123 Chauntecleer “chuk[s],” pecks at “corn,” prances about upon his “toos,” and “fether[s],” rather than embraces, his sweetheart (7.3172–83). These details make it difficult to sustain the illusion that we are reading about a person rather than a bird, and so it should not surprise us that scholars of the Tale have often tried to identify, on the basis of its details, exactly what kind of chicken Chauntecleer and Pertelote were.124 Despite its irreality, in other words, the Tale works quite hard to make its fantastic and absurd moments seem true and real by making them recognizable – by speaking about them “in terms of familiar things, in terms of earth, rural nature, the human body.”125 Rather than describe Chaunctecleer’s spectacular voice by noting its range or timbre, the Nun’s Priest compares it to a familiar sound: “the murie orgon / on messe-dayes that in the chirche gon” (7.2851–52). Rather than call his marvelous comb “crenelated” or “cerise,” the Nun’s Priest likens it to a more familiar color and shape: it is “redder than the fyn coral, / and batailled as it were a castel wal” (7.2859–60).

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Such imagery recalls the specifics of a historical world that would have been recognizable to most, if not all, of the pilgrims in the Nun’s Priest’s audience. But his Tale also asserts its connection to history in a second and more profound way: through its allusions to events, people, and places from both the recent and the distant past. It makes reference, for instance, to Classical and Biblical history by naming figures such as Sinon the Greek and Judas Iscariot (see 7.3227–29). It calls antiquity to mind by naming Carthage, Rome, and Troy (see 7.3355–73). It features a lament, mediated via the writings of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, upon the death of a different king Richard – the first, not the second.126 Most of all, it brings before the eyes of its audience a historical event that most of them would have lived through – and, because I will dwell upon it at some length below, it is worth citing this allusion in its full context. As the Fox carries Chauntecleer away on his back, the other chickens raise the hue and cry, and the barnyard soon gives chase. Here is how Chaucer describes it. … after hym they ran, And eek with staves many another man. Ran Colle oure dogge, and Talbot and Gerland, And Malkyn, with a dystaf in hir hand; Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges, So fered for the berkyng of the dogges And shoutyng of the men and wommen eeke They ronne so hem thoughte hir herte breeke. They yolleden as feendes doon in helle; The dokes cryden as men wolde hem quelle; The gees for feere flowen over the trees; Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees. So hydous was the noyse—a, benedicitee!— Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille, As thilke day was maad upon the fox.

(7.3381–97)

“Jakke Straw” is the name, or at least the nom de guerre, of one of the peasants who led his fellows through the streets of London in early June of 1381, burning houses, seizing property, and murdering Gastarbeiter from the Netherlands, whom the rebels believed had deprived native-born Londoners of work.127 Neither the slain Flemings nor the name “Jakke Straw” are Chaucer’s invention. Chroniclers often refer to a person of the same name as one of the rebel leaders, and Chaucer may well have come to know of “Jakke” firsthand, either through word of mouth or through

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his own experience of the Rising.128 We might recall that he lived above Aldgate, one of the two gates through which the Kentish rebels stormed into London on the eleventh of June.129 That Chaucer would repeat the name of one of the rebel leaders is telling, for even if he was only broadly familiar with what happened in London on that day, many elements in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale recall the specific forms, and even the specific language, that historical chronicles used to depict the insurgency. What is more, Chaucer seems to cue us to this fact, for as Ann Astell notes, the Nun’s Priest at one point comments that another writer might record the “sorweful cas” that befalls Chauntecleer “in a cronycle” (7.3204–9) – a statement that appears absurd at first, but that may be less ridiculous than it seems.130 Both Chaucer and the chroniclers, for instance, fixate upon the “noyse” (7.3393) that accompanied the events of June 1381.131 Thomas Walsingham, for example, likens the sound of the Rising to a “horrifying clamour [horrificos strepitus],” one that could only be compared to the “wailing [ululatibus] of the inhabitants of Hell,” or the “diabolical cries of peacocks [uocibus pauonum diabolicis].”132 Jean Froissart says the peasants made “such a noise [un si grant cri] that it seemed all the devils of hell [tout li diable d’infer] had been among them.”133 The Anonimalle chronicler reports that the chaos in London was accompanied by “hideous cries and horrible noise [hidous crye et horrible noyce].”134 And of course, John Gower, in the Visio anglie, fixates on the “row,” the “shriek,” the “brawl,” and the “frightful sound” of the peasants, who – like donkeys, oxen, pigs, boars, dogs, foxes, wolves, geese, bees, and lions – make an awful racket.135 “They shriek,” he writes, “and shout aloud with monster cries [monstrorum vocibus],” varying “pitch and volume, out of tune.”136 It is likely that the popularity of this troping accounts for the emphasis upon shouting, crying, yelling, and swarming both in the chase depicted in the Tale and in Chaucer’s other allusions to the revolt, where he likewise notes “the murmure and the cherles rebellyng” (1.2459), the “peple” who “cried and rombled up and doun” (7.2535), and “the noyse” of the “peple” (TC 4.183).137 What is more, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale also makes extensive use of two other literary techniques that the chroniclers employed when they wrote about the Rising. These are allegory (especially, the allegory of beasts run amok) and the dream vision (the Rising was often cast as bad dream from which the ruling classes could not awake). It is likely, of course, that Chaucer’s decision to use beast allegory in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale was partly a response, as Steven Justice has argued, to Gower’s precedent.138 But even if Chaucer did have Gower on his mind, Gower was hardly alone

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in employing these tropes to depict the Rising. Like Gower, Froissart also claims that the peasants were akin to dumb animals, unthinking creatures who “merely followed one another around like beasts [enssi que bestes].”139 The Westminster Chronicle informs us that, in Kent, the insurgents behaved as “the most rabid of dogs [rabidissimi canes]” and “ran wild over much of the county.”140 The Anonimalle chronicler and Adam Usk alike take pleasure, once Wat Tyler is dead, in watching the peasants rounded up “like sheep within a pen [come berbiz en caules]” or chased back to their houses “like foxes to their holes [uulpes ad foueas].”141 Henry Knighton more than once says that the peasants roamed the countryside like “packs of wicked wolves [turme nephandorum luporum].”142 And Thomas Walsingham, finally, concludes his account of the Rising with an extraordinary passage in which he likens the proper situation of the peasantry to that of a chained dog, kept “in an ignominious state of servitude [turpissima … seruitute]” by its master.143 Yet more striking than the prevalence of beast allegory in these accounts is the way that they employ the rhetoric of dreams and visions in their representations of the events of June 1381. For Gower, we may recall, the Rising was like a bad dream from which it was impossible to start, a “nightmare [visio]” seen not “in sleep” but while one is conscious.144 Here again, Gower’s troping finds its corollary in the writings of the chroniclers. Knighton, for instance, also doubts his senses when he sees the peasants clamber across the rooftops of London: “They also destroyed the houses of officials in the city, which, marvellous to relate [dictu mirum est], even the old and decrepit clambered over as agilely as if they had been rats [ratones], or were borne aloft by spirits [spiritu aliquo uecti].”145 The Letter Book H ranks the sight of peasants streaming through the streets among “the most astonishing [admiranda] and unheard of prodigies [prodigia] ever to occur in the city of London,” and further observes that the Rising was a “tribulation greater and more horrible than could be believed [credi potest] by men who had not seen it [non viderunt].”146 But it is Walsingham, most of all, who rubs his eyes in disbelief at this vision of a world turned upside down. “Who would ever have believed [quis unquam credidisset],” he exclaims, that peasants “would dare to enter the king’s chamber, and even his mother’s, with their vile staves,” uttering threats and “daring to pull or stroke the beards of some of the noblest knights with their rough, dirty hands [sordidissimis manibus]?”147 Who could believe they would execute abbots, or that the commons would “demand liberties for villeins [pro uillanis]?”148 So surreal were the events of June 1381 to the ruling classes, he reflects,

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that until an army of a hundred thousand peasants arrived upon their doorsteps, they were “like men snoring [uelut stertentes] while fast asleep,” fixed within a dream in which there was no need to “awake [euigilare]” and “oppose these evil acts.”149 History is no dream, but it can seem like one in the telling. This is Chaucer’s point. For what the Nun’s Priest’s Tale demonstrates is that even the most apparently fictional of forms – hallucinations, fables, allegories, and visions – are themselves the product of history and inflect history in its telling. If it seems to us that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is merely a work of fantasy, one that is more than happy to sustain its illusions until history rudely barges through the door, then we might recall that Walsingham himself called his account of the Peasant’s Revolt “a tragic story [historiam tragicam].”150 It may be difficult to perceive the historicity of the forms and tropes of fantasy at first glance, in other words, but this does not make them any less historical, even and indeed especially when they appear the most fantastical.151 After all, Chauntecleer is proven right. “Dremes,” in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, are without a doubt the “significaciouns / as wel of joye as of tribulaciouns / that folk enduren in this lif present” (7.2979–81). The “verray preeve” of Chauntecleer’s experience attests as much “in dede” (7.2983). It is with this last point in mind that I’d like to consider one final moment in the Tale, a passage that is famous for its self-conscious obscurity. As the Nun’s Priest concludes his narrative, he turns away from his story to address the audience directly and to offer them some advice – and perhaps a warning – on how to interpret the tale he has just told. But ye that holden this tale a folye, As of a fox, or of a cok and hen, Taketh the moralite, goode men. For Seint Paul seith that al that writen is, To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis; Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille.

(7.3438–43)

How should we read the Nun’s Priest’s words? On the one hand, this parting discussion of “wheat” and “chaff” is actually less opaque than it is often taken to be. Rather than a passage that insists upon its own undecidability and presents that undecidability to the reader as the occasion for an endless series of readings and rereadings, as Peter Travis has suggested, I believe the passage simply warns the reader not to mistake an amusing representation of history to be nothing more than an amusing

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representation.152 Enjoy the talking rooster, it seems to say, but don’t forget that the Tale is about more than that. On the other hand, it is also true that, if a historical reading of the Tale makes the reader uncomfortable, the Nun’s Priest’s lenvoy offers him plenty of room to ignore it. That reader could certainly take the whole thing as just another fable about a fox and a rooster, as the Host appears to do when he describes it simply as “a murie tale of Chauntecleer” (7.3449), or as Derek Pearsall may do when he proclaims that “the fact that the tale has no point is the point of the tale.”153 Alternately, the reader could embrace the allegory of the Tale, but orient that allegory in a wholly different direction, by interpreting different parts of it, for example, as what Walter of England would call its “fruit” and its “flower”; or by claiming, with Robertson, that it is a veiled piece of exegesis; or by holding, with Donaldson, that the “fruit” of the tale is in fact “its chaff.”154 If the reader does choose to dispense with the historical reading, however, she must accept a compensatory risk. This is that she may find herself playing the role of Pertelote, whose dismissal of the historical purchase of visions, fantasies, and dreams – even those that feature alarming images of “contek,” “arwes,” and “fyr” (7.2930–32) – leads Chauntecleer into disaster.155 I will admit that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale may be “trying out” my “solemnity” here, as Muscatine once warned, but I also think that to treat the Tale as all “game” and no “ernest” courts a still greater hazard, for it is precisely when literature is at its most absurd and fantastical – when Chauntecleer alludes to Macrobius, or Snowball and Napoleon debate the labor theory of value – that historicist critics should pay it the closest attention.156 The “chaff” of a story, after all, is no less the product of history than its “frut.” *** Chaucer returns to the question of words and deeds one last time in the Canterbury Tales. I am referring, of course, to the Manciple’s Tale, where the poet recounts a parable about the God Apollo and the talking crow that is his companion. The discussion of the commonplace comes early in the narrative, and concerns what, for the Manciple, are two interrelated issues: natural destiny and linguistic propriety.157 Nature, the Manciple argues, determines the behavior of living creatures over and above the intrusions of culture. Despite our domesticating efforts, caged birds still want to be free, and housecats still want to chase mice: “ther may no man embrace,” he insists, “as to destreyne a thyng which that nature / hath natureelly set in a creature” (9.160–62). For the same reason, he goes on, language ought

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to hew closely, not merely to what we believe the nature of things to be, but to what and how they really are. For as he writes, The wise Plato seith, as ye may rede, The word moot nede accorde with the dede. If men shal telle proprely a thyng, The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng.

(9.207–10)

In the Manciple’s view, it matters little whether we choose to call a thief a “titlelees tiraunt” or an “outlawe,” for outlaws and tyrants do the same thing, if on different scales and with different honorifics (9.223). A lover, in turn, may be called a “lady” or a “lemman” indifferently, for the one will be “leyn” as “lowe as lith that oother” (9.218–222). To the Manciple, then, it would seem that res, rather than verba, ought absolutely to determine the language one uses.158 The second half of the Tale, however, casts this position into doubt. Apollo’s wife, we learn, has been carrying on an affair. One day, the crow catches her and her lover in the act, and once Phebus returns home, he foolishly announces what he has seen to his master. “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” he cries (9.243). In a fit of rage, Apollo murders his wife and then turns the bird’s feathers from white to black – but not, in a departure from Chaucer’s sources, before he strips the crow of its ability to speak and insists that every word it said to him was a lie.159 “Traitour,” quod he, “with tonge of scorpioun, Thou hast me broght to my confusioun; Allas, that I was wroght! Why nere I deed? O deere wyf! O gemme of lustiheed! That were to me so sad and eek so trewe, Now listow deed, with face pale of hewe, Ful giltelees, that dorste I swere, ywys!”

(9.271–77)

Besides the intensity of its anger, and its horrifying description of the “pale face of hewe,” the remarkable thing about Apollo’s rebuke is that none of it is true.160 Indeed, the crow’s words have been precisely “cosyn” to the “werkyng” in this instance, for earlier in the Tale, we are told, he “biheeld” with his own two eyes the “werk” (9.241) that the lovers did in bed together.161 But this makes little difference, for in the world of the Tale, it does not matter that the crow speaks the truth: Apollo is the king, and “the sovereign’s word alone is legally final,” as Aranye Fradenburg puts it.162 In Phebus’s mind, his wife is guiltless, and so the crow must be a traitor, a “false theef” who is the purveyor of a “false tale” (9.292–93).

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The story of Apollo and the crow thus envisions, like the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the deadly consequences of saying or writing anything that a figure of sovereign authority might dislike.163 Only this time, those consequences are yet more extreme, for here, power does not merely shape the “matere” of the literary text into its preferred form, directing its “words” and “dedes” to their proper end. Instead, as we learn in the concluding lines of the Tale (see 9.318–62), it stamps out the possibility of literature altogether. Given their recursive character, it should not surprise us that Chaucer’s Tales return, at their end, to the same problem with which Chaucer began. But why do they do so? It may be that Chaucer chooses to revisit the question of words and deeds so that he can stress, with characteristic irony, the differences between the literary expectations of his simulated pilgrim audience and the audience of the Ricardian court. But I think the Manciple’s Tale also speaks to a broader question about Chaucer’s putative status as an “auctour newe / of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe” (1.359–60). For in the last, is Chaucer the “auctour” of the Canterbury Tales? Does he assert a right of dominion over that work, just as Apollo claims the right to dictate the ultimate form and even meaning of the discourse spoken in his presence? If the Tales are any guide, Chaucer doesn’t think so. Partly, this is because he knows – or at least, his work suggests that he knows – that the materials he works with are shaped by historical and social forces that belong to no one person, and so exceed the control of any one person. Indeed, as Stephanie Trigg observes, Chaucer’s poems feature many instances in which the poet “anticipates his own absence from his writing and can easily envisage it circulating without him.”164 But I believe that Chaucer’s skepticism of the ideology of authorship runs still deeper than this, for his Tales often question the motives of those individuals who adopt an authoritative pose in relation to what they write and read. The Knight, Pardoner, and even the Wife of Bath – all of these figures bear a discomfiting resemblance to Apollo in their insistence that “words,” and even “dedes,” mean only what they say they mean. And so it may be that the Manciple’s Tale is a warning, not just to those poets who must tread lightly at court, but to any writer who believes he can fully bend the matter of literature to his singular will. Chaucer’s own views aside, the Canterbury Tales imply as much, for as I’ve argued in this chapter, the Tales gradually move away from their initial position – that literature is a “game” to be played on purely aesthetic terms – and toward the view that literature is neither an instrument of its author’s wishes, nor a product of the imagination, but a discourse bound

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to history. And this view resonates, albeit in different ways, across the work of the later writers studied in this book. One perceives it, for instance, in Gower’s desire to preserve those writings that came “ous tofore,” or in Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetics, or even in Lydgate’s use of literary forms to practice historiography.165 Literature, as these writers knew well, is never purely aesthetic. It is hardy a “little music after supper,” as C. S. Lewis once wrote of Thomas Wyatt.166 On the contrary, it is a discourse whose power lies in its ability to mediate the history through which its audience has lived – a discourse that, in many cases, could just as soon be found in a chronicle.

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chapter 2

Gower and the Crying Voice

An archer stands beside the world. His bow is taut, a notched arrow aimed toward the globe – but he looks weary, as though the effort of the draw is nearly too much to bear. This world is smaller than the archer, and it is divided into three parts that represent, not the three continents known to medieval Europeans, but the earth, the air, and the sea. We expect him to release the arrow, but he remains still, waiting for us to read the verses above his head. At the world I send my darts and shoot my arrows. Where there is a just man, no arrow strikes. But I wound sinners and evil men—and so, He who is guilty should watch out for himself.1

Despite his confident aim, this archer is no soldier. Instead, he is the poet John Gower, whose long robes, close sleeves, and fashionable beaver hat set him apart from the ordinary longbowman.2 Gower oversaw the production of his literary manuscripts with care, and the iconographic consistency of this illuminated portrait, which can be found in several copies of his Vox clamantis, suggests that he may have been involved in its planning, or even its composition.3 What is more, Gower elsewhere depicts himself as an archer in his works, and passages in his poetry often claim, like the short poem above, that his verse targets individuals purely on the basis of their ethical merits and demerits.4 One is tempted to imagine that this portrait survives because Gower felt it was an apt self-representation – that he did indeed see himself as a kind of archer, and that he really felt it was his task to loose darts that would cut the world to its quick. Such a portrait of Gower will be familiar to readers of his work, for medieval and modern critics alike have often cast him as a strident moralist, one who longed to correct the abuses he believed were endemic to his age. Indeed, as Derek Pearsall once observed, it is nearly impossible to find Gower’s name in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century record unattached to terms such as “moral” or “moralitee.”5 Other critics have described the 52

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poet in a similar way. Gower, in these accounts, is held by turns to be “an advocate of a moral order”; a writer who condemns “contemporary betrayals of traditional social and ethical structures”; a “pungent” poet who attacks “his society’s ills and political malfeasance”; and a figure who levies “moral outrage” and “hatred” against the “lower-class people” whose actions challenge “the traditional ideal of the social order.”6 And there is some truth to this portrait. In all three of his long poems, Gower does claim that a plague of human sin is responsible for the declining world, and he certainly remarks, loudly and often, that this plague can only be dispersed through the vigorous reform of each individual sinner.7 “Whatever happens in the world [contingit in orbe],” he writes in the Vox, “we ourselves [nos sumus] are the cause of it [in causa],” whether “for good or evil” (2.629–30; p. 112). If this sounds rather preachy, then that makes sense as well. Like Gower, medieval preachers often figured themselves as archers, and Gower, in turn, often adopts both the techniques and the tone of the late-medieval homilist, for despite his professed commitment to a “middel weie” between “lust” and “lore” (CA Prol.17–19), he seems most comfortable in the guise of the moralizing polemicist.8 His primary job – so his poetry insinuates – is not to delight and instruct his readers but to indict those readers who have brought about the “bitter day” that “afflicts [torquet] the present” (VC 2.28; p. 99). If we don’t like it, then caveat lector: “He who is guilty should watch out for himself.” With respect to matters of ethics, then, Gower clearly positions himself as an authority figure, and so we might assume that he adopts an equally authoritative stance with respect to the business of writing poetry. After all, as A. J. Minnis has observed, literary and moral authority do seem to go hand-in-hand in Gower’s work. For example, Gower often likens the authority of literary writers to the auctoritas of clerics; he vouchsafes what he says by invoking the tropes of visionary authority; he is identified by the Latin glosses to the Confessio as its “auctor”; and he typically characterizes literary work as a labor of ethical proscription and correction.9 Just as the preacher reshapes the matter of the soul, he suggests, so too should the poet mold and “inform” his materials until they take on the proper aesthetic and ethical shape.10 But there is another side to Gower, too. We catch a glimpse of it when he praises Cupid’s “pité” in allowing Iphis to transform from a girl into a boy (CA 4.488–505); or when he defends Canacee despite her incestuous affair with her brother (3.232–43); or whenever he tells the reader, as he often does, that she should “tak pité and compassioun” upon the sins, crimes, and “passioun” of her fellow Christians (3.2720–24).11 This side of Gower, which prizes mercy over the proscriptions of authority,

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seems at odds with the Gower of law and order, and the seeming conflict between the two has prompted considerable debate. Some critics have suggested that Gower’s poetry displays a subtle resistance to the strictures of Christian morality, while others have claimed that he is a more ethically ambivalent poet than we have imagined, or even that his poetry proposes an incoherent system of ethics.12 Rather than assume incoherence or heterodoxy in Gower, however, I’d like to propose a different explanation in the chapter that follows. This is that the ethical system underlying Gower’s verse relies not merely upon rules and proscriptions for its operation, but upon seemingly spontaneous moments of affect – moments, as we will see, that typically center upon the voice of a political subject who cries out to a figure of authority for mercy. This voice, which I will term the crying voice, has received little notice in past scholarship on Gower.13 This is quite surprising, both because Gower’s interest in the category of voice is very well-established and because this specific kind of voice features prominently in a discourse that the poet knew well. Consider a sermon that the late-medieval firebrand, Thomas Brinton, preached on Good Friday at Rochester Cathedral, sometime between 1377 and 1382.14 The thema of Bishop Brinton’s sermon is “laboraui clamans,” from the sixty-ninth psalm, and its topic is the responsibility of the clergy to decry the abuses they perceive in their flocks. “We prelates [nos prelati],” he exclaims, “ought to be a voice crying out in the wilderness,” but instead, the clergy have become like “mute dogs [canes muti] who do not dare to speak the truth [non audemus vera loqui].”15 This silence is perilous in Brinton’s view, not just because it goes against the example set by Christ, but because, at the present time, there are so many crimes that “cry out to God in heaven [clamat ad Deum]” for redress.16 There are sexual indiscretions, particularly amongst the clergy. There is the casual “spilling of human blood [effusio sanguinis humani].”17 Gravest of all, there is the misery and suffering of lowly people – and, in particular, … the oppression of the poor [oppressio pauperum], whenever they are crushed by their rulers and by the rich. For in the figure [figura] of the poor we can see the people of Israel, who, when they were sorely oppressed [dure … affligeretur] by the labor of clay and bricks, cried out to God [ad Dominum clamauit], who freed them from their slavery to Pharaoh [servitute Pharaonis]. Nor should it surprise us that the psalmist should say, “the poor man has cried out [clamauit] and God has heard him [exaudiuit eum] and from all these tribulations,” and so on. But if the oppression of the poor generally [generaliter] cries out to us in this way, so much more does the oppression of widows and of other miserable persons cry out to us especially [multo specialus clamat]. And to demonstrate that this is true, Peter

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Damian tells us about a certain injured man [de quodam infirmo] who cried and wailed horribly [horribiliter clamante], and, when he was questioned about the cause of his crying by those present, he said that he had been gravely beaten at the hands of Saint Andreas and Saint Gregory because he had taken six coins [sex nummos] unjustly from a certain widow [vidua]. It seemed to those saints that, however many steps [quot passus] she had to take in order to earn back her money, so many blows [tot ictus] should he suffer as punishment. Therefore, I argue the following. If the good and most mild Saint Andreas took such vengeance upon this man for six denarii, let those who are like this man beware—those who make it a common practice, in our society, to deceive their neighbors and poor pilgrims by means of usury [per vsuras], or false contracts [falsa iuramenta], or the use of phony weights, measures, and mixtures.18

The miserable, the powerless, and the poor: these, in Brinton’s view, are the people whose cries most demand the clergy’s attention. But what is remarkable is that the voices of such people are not always audible. Indeed, in the exemplum that Brinton recounts, we hear only the wailing voice of the wicked man who cries out in physical pain. We never hear the pained cries of the poor woman whom he has swindled, and who will need to work many long hours – to tread “many steps,” as Brinton puts it – to earn back the same amount of money as was stolen from her. The true vox clamantis, Brinton suggests, is thus not always to be found in an articulate cry. It can be silent, or it can be suppressed, and this is why the clergy must strain their ears to listen for it. As Andrew Galloway has argued, Brinton’s vox clamantis bears a striking resemblance to Gower’s crying voice, and this suggests at the least that the “theme of a vox clamantis sounding the alarm” was hardly “unique” during the poet’s time.19 Indeed, medieval sermons very often took the crying voice as their topic, and the library of St. Mary Overie priory, in whose precinct Gower lived for the latter third of his life, itself possessed a manuscript containing an anonymous homily on the thema of “clama ne cesses” (Isa. 58:1).20 What is distinctive about Gower’s crying voice, however, is that he uses it to address problems of poetics and problems of ethics at one and the same time. As is well known, all three of Gower’s long poems lay out a comprehensive and even totalizing system of morality, one that is grounded both in religious and secular law and in Gower’s own interpretation of the underlying order of nature, or “the lawe which is naturel” (CA 3.2581). In all three, actions are judged to be moral or immoral on the basis of their concord or discord with various the rules of this layered system of ethics: the seven deadly sins, for example, or the precepts of human law, or even the principles of ethical behavior that, according to Gower, “weie of kinde scheweth wel” (3.2582).

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But in these poems, and especially in the Confessio, a simple adherence to such rules often produces results that are at once morally dubious and poetically unsatisfying, even in those stories where Gower’s characters try their best to do the right thing. This is because, as Gower himself suggests, any normative system of ethics can only guide ethical behavior so far. Human “lawe[s]” often “lacketh” (Prol.511), our interpretations of the laws of nature are always fallible, and in the end, only “God wot the cause to the laste / of every right and wrong” (Prol.250–51). To correct the shortcomings of his ethical system in these moments, Gower draws his reader’s attention to the crying voice, which intervenes into his problem stories and seeks to ensure, via its intervention, that both an ethical result and a satisfying narrative resolution remain possible at the story’s end. Gower’s use of the crying voice deserves attention for reasons political and literary-historical alike. When viewed in its political aspect, it may cast light on the poet’s opinions about contemporary history and royal policy. For example, the motif of a voice crying out for justice may well have recalled, for Gower’s readers, the reign of Richard II, who was infamous for his unwillingness to listen to anyone besides his minions. Indeed, according to Thomas Walsingham, it was the king’s refusal to take advice that drove the nobility, during the Appellants’ Crisis of 1388, to inform Richard that unless he agreed to talk with them, “they would elect another to be their king [eligerent alium sibi regem], who would be willing and under obligation to attend to the counsel [consiliis] of the lords.”21 The poet of Richard the Redeless offers a still blunter assessment. “All was felawis and felawschepe that ye with ferde,” he writes, so much so that “non of youre peple durste pleyne of here wrongis, / for drede of youre dukys and of here double harmes.”22 If the damning portrait of Richard in the Cronica tripertita is any guide, Gower agreed with these sentiments, and it is possible that his former king’s unwillingness to listen was an inspiration for the many scenes in the Confessio amantis in which political subjects cry out to secular rulers for justice or mercy.23 Beyond its importance as a political context, however, Gower’s use of the crying voice also matters for a second and more literary reason. As I’ve noted above, Gower has often been regarded as a poet who appropriates the voices of others. He has also been seen to be a writer who imposes a preconceived notion of form upon his materials – a poet who, rather like the figure of Arion, shapes and molds the matter of his verse until it manifests the aesthetic and ethical principles of order in which he seems to believe.24 Both characterizations have sometimes led scholars to claim that Gower sees himself as an auctor, in the scholastic sense of that term.25 But the evidence paints

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a different picture. Rather than imposing form upon matter, Gower draws form out of matter. Genius, we may recall, not only recounts the stories of the Confessio but also identifies the latent patterns and structures that run beneath the surface of each one. Poets, in Gower’s view, do much the same thing. They identify the messages and patterns they imagine to be latent in their materials and make those patterns and messages legible – or even audible – to their readers. In this respect, as Rita Copeland has argued, Gower’s understanding of literary labor is essentially exegetical.26 He reframes his materials; he comments upon them and sometimes embellishes them; but after isolating what he believes to be their salient points, he ultimately leaves them to speak for themselves. This view of literary work certainly accounts for his frequent use of the formal tools of exegesis, a point to which I will return shortly. But it may also explain his commitment, as Eve Salisbury has observed, to “animating voices from classical and scriptural texts” in his own poem.27 “I have not,” as he tells us in the Vox clamantis, “set down these lines in a book as an author [vt auctor]. Rather, I am passing on those things I heard [audiui] for you to read [legenda]. It is not my swelled head made me write them, for the voice of the people [voces plebis] put them in my ear [in aure]” (7.1445–48; p. 287; translation modified). Gower is only half-serious, of course. He knows that, at least in part, he is the origin of what he writes – that the voices he claims to hear in his materials are as much the projection of his imagination as they are traces of actual speech. And yet, his work returns so often to the conceit of the crying voice that it invites us to imagine a scenario in which these materials could speak to us directly. What if we could hear, buried within in the matter of literature, the distant voices of others? What if literature is a kind of prosthesis, one that lends a voice to those who cannot speak to us in the flesh? The voices of such people would persist in literature merely as representations. But in literature, representations of the dead and absent do seem to speak, at times, with an uncanny liveliness – not despite the absent life “they contrive to represent,” but precisely because “they compensate for the vanishing of the actual life that has empowered them.”28 *** At some point during the late 1380s, Gower took up lodgings in St. Mary Overie priory, a monastic community located on the southern bank of the Thames.29 Southwark Cathedral, to which the priory was attached, had been damaged in 1377 by fire, and it seems that Gower was granted a right to live within the priory precinct sometime afterwards, perhaps because he had contributed funds toward its restoration.30 The priory had a rich

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history, an impressive library, an active scriptorium, and an enviable location.31 It shared, as John Fisher notes, water stairs with the city residence of the Bishop of Winchester, from which Gower could take a ferry direct to the Inns of Court, and it also abutted Pepper Lane, a boulevard lined with taverns and inns.32 Gower had once been a lawyer and was perhaps a lawyer still, and so the quick commute to the Temple, and the many local diversions surrounding the priory, may have appealed to him.33 But choosing to reside at St. Mary Overie was likely more than a practical decision for the poet. After all, he had resolved to live as a layman among the Black Canons, and there is some evidence to suggest that he had experienced a genuine awakening of religious feeling at some point during the 1370s.34 “In my heart,” he tells us in the Mirour de l’omme, “I feel that that I have squandered [despendu si folement] my reason and my five senses … in olden days, I gave myself freely to wantonness and vain joy. I decked myself out in fancy clothes and composed foolish love ditties [fols ditz d’amours], which I danced about singing. But now I will take thought, and I will change all that [tout cela je changeray]” (27313–43; p. 358). No doubt, Gower’s comments on his wasted youth are conventional, and his choice to live as a layperson in a religious community was not as unusual as it might seem. It was customary to retire, if one had the means, to a Christian community at the end of one’s life: Chaucer did so, and Hoccleve could have done so had he wished.35 Still, Gower’s decision to take up residence in the priory at the peak of his middle age is striking, and it suggests that there is some truth to Chaucer’s claim that he was, at least in a certain sense, a “moral” poet. It is unlikely that he would have moved into the priory precinct, for instance, if he had not shared the orthodox values of the religious who lived there, and he certainly appears to have had few qualms about adhering to a relatively disciplined and devout way of life.36 What is more, we might recall that Gower often praises the rigors of monasticism in his writings. Across his three long poems in particular, he stresses again and again the value of discipline, self-correction, and devotion, reminding his readers about the daily battles they must wage against the assaults of the Deadly Sins, or the daily acts of piety, such as the recitation of holy names, that they should perform “for the remembrance,” “honor,” and “pleasure” of the Virgin and the saints (MO 29905–7; p. 395). We may wonder, then, if Gower’s unusual living situation speaks not merely to his personal religiosity but to the reverence for religious ideals of order that one so often encounters in his verse – the order laid out by God’s moral laws and the ordered rhythms of the monastic life, of course, but also the order that God has “ordained” for all of the created universe “from top

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to bottom.”37 Indeed, from the late 1370s onward, after he had put aside the “fols ditz d’amours” of his youth and began work on the poetry for which he is best known, Gower’s work displays a sustained interest, not just in the idea of divine order per se, but in the problem of identifying that order and delineating its precepts for the reader. Consider in this respect the ethical taxonomies that inform the structure of the three long poems. All three are organized, to a greater or lesser degree, around the seven deadly sins and their corresponding virtues, and so recall the tradition of late-medieval penitential and confessional writing that originates, in large part, with William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis, which served as the source for two other influential manuals of penance, Laurent d’Orléans’ Somme le roi and Michael of Northgate’s Ayenbite of Inwit.38 In this tradition, the process of ethical instruction depends upon the delineation of rules and precepts against which the reader must measure his own thoughts and behavior. Just so, the Ayenbite begins by recounting the story of the Ten Commandments given to Moses and explicitly defines itself as a tool for the reader to “maki ham klene” if he has broken any of the ten: “huo thet agelt ine enie of the ilke hestes, him ssel therof uorthenche, and him ssriue, and bidde god merci yef he wyle by yborwe.”39 What is more, Gower’s poetry displays more than a merely allusive debt to this tradition of proscriptive ethics, for if we examine the interpretive tools and rhetorical forms that he employs in his verse, we will find that they are often identical to the techniques and tropes used by preachers and exegetes to interpret the Bible, a text with which Gower engaged substantively in its own right.40 Of these techniques and forms, four are of special importance for my argument here: the exemplum, the figura, the distinctio, and the theory of the microcosm. Let’s begin with the microcosm. Although Gower treats this idea at length in all three of his long works, it is in the Mirour de l’omme that he offers his most thoroughgoing definition of it.41 Here is what he says. Together with the angels, man has within him the understanding of clear reason [resoun cliere] … together with the beasts, man has also the senses [sentement]; together with the trees, he also has growth [crescance]; and together with the stones, he has being [l’estre] … Master Aristotle the good scholar, who was expert in the sciences, called man the “microcosm” [le meindre monde] in one of the books he wrote … for man in his nature contains the entire world [car tout le monde … l’omme en nature de son droit contient]. Of this we were sure when God created human flesh, for He put in parts of all the elements [des elementz part y mettoit] … The flesh of our parents, Adam and Eve, was made by God, not in vain, of earth, weighty in itself, and of water, which is its neighbor. Afterwards He made human blood, which runs through the veins; and, so that man might be living,

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry He made him breathe air. And then man has the comforting heat of fire, which is the last … Therefore if man transgresses against God, he undoes everything [trestout desfait] by his sin—earth, and water, and sea, and fire. And God avenges the misdeed and withdraws their nature [leur nature ensi retrait] so that they are for some time as if lost. So, by reason you can see well that the world in its virtue goes more or less according to man [par l’omme vait]. And if any evil comes [si nul mal soit avenu], it is only from the evil that man does [du mal que l’omme fait]. (MO 26917–64; pp. 353–54)

Gower makes four claims in his discussion of the microcosm. First, man possesses all three modes of being that belong to the order of creation – existence, growth, and feeling – and he also shares with the angels a fourth power of being, which is the rational capacity to contemplate God. Second, because man contains each one of these modes of being in his very body, he can be termed a “microcosm” of the created world. Third, the four physical components that comprise the body of man are related, substantially and even physiologically, to the four elements that make up the created world. And fourth, because the mundus minor of an individual person is substantially linked to the mundus maior, each individual’s feelings and actions have a direct effect upon the world at large, even if we can only grasp this effect in an indirect and mediated way. Where did Gower find the theory of the microcosm, and why does he choose to highlight these four aspects of it? In the passage above, he claims he is following “Mestre Aristotle” (26929), and just beforehand, he attributes many of his points to a “sainte Omelie” authored by “Gregoire,” or Gregory the Great (26869).42 Scholars have also suggested that he took inspiration from Roger Bacon, or that his theory of the microcosm was indebted to the thought of the twelfth-century Neo-Platonists.43 None of these potential sources, however, contain two of Gower’s key points – namely, that the four humors that make up the body of man are substantially related to the four elements, and that all sin in the created world stems from man and man alone.44 For these notions, we must look a bit further afield, to contemporary discussions of the microcosm that Gower may have found in the St. Mary Overie library, either in complete form or in some florilegium.45 Honorius of Autun, whose Elucidarium was very popular in medieval England, offers us an example of the first.46 Man’s body, Honorius tells us, is composed “of the four elements, whence he is called a ‘microcosm’ or lesser world [microcosmus … minor mundus dicitur]. For he has his flesh from the earth, his blood from water, his breath [flatum] from the air, and his heat [calorem] from fire.”47 John of Bromyard’s Summa praedicantium provides us with

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the second. Sinners, writes John, “do not, as it is said, only harm themselves [non solum sibi ipsis … nocent], but damn the whole community by their act of sinning. For by however much he sins, the sinner destroys all created things [omnia … creata] and indeed the whole world … therefore sinners are just like the Sodomites, for however much sin they contain, by so much do they destroy the world [destruunt mundum].”48 Scholars have long argued that the theory of microcosm is the governing principle behind the layered allegory of Gower’s long poems.49 I would suggest that it is all that and more. As Gower explains in the passage I’ve cited above, the individual body, the body politic, and the created world do not merely resemble each other in figural terms. The microcosm is not just a metaphor. Rather, each level of the created universe actually and substantially manifests a different aspect of the same universal structures of creation – the God-given convenientiae, as Augustine would say, that order the totality of nature, culture, and history alike.50 The cosmos, in this conception, is what Judson Boyce Allen once termed a “normative array” or “structure in analogous layers,” with all the layers “mutually interpreting one another.”51 This is why Gower is so insistent about the substantial connection between the four humors and the four elements, for example, or about the idea that individual sin has a material, and not just a figurative, effect on the rest of the physical world. It is also, in my view, why Gower’s poetry often seeks to excavate an underlying and universal order from within its particular materials rather than to impose an artificial form on those materials from without – because Gower believes that those materials, like anything else in God’s creation, contain within themselves some aspect of this universal order. Text, history, and the created world are not merely allegorical shadows of each other: each one substantially contains within itself certain facets of the same latent pattern. How does Gower’s poetry perform this excavation? To answer this question, we must turn to two of the other exegetical forms that were well represented among the theological books found in the Mary St. Overie library, and that Gower put to a more literary end in his own verse.52 These are the figura and the distinctio.53 While both concern the identification and interpretation of patterns found in the created world, each one does its work in a slightly different way. The figura, to start, is what G. R. Owst terms a “similitude” from a “natural object,” wherein the various properties of that object are related, by analogy, to other things – usually, to certain passages from scripture or certain patterns found in creation.54 Most of the time, Gower’s own figurae rely upon simple comparisons. We read, for instance, that camels signify hatred, because they conceal their

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resentment until they see the opportunity to bite or kick without warning (MO 4417–28; pp. 64–65); that certain fish, which are happy in seaborne tempests, figure the patient man (MO 14077–88; p. 192); or that vultures symbolize those knights who desire bloody conflict, so that they might loot the battlefield of gems and arms afterward (VC 5.537–42; p. 208). But Gower sometimes employs figurae that are more sophisticated in their operation, and that ask the reader to juxtapose two sets of ideas at once. Just so, in the Mirour, he notes that “the rapacious man” is similar “in appearance [de sa semblance]” to the ash tree, “for so evil is the ash that no plant or herb will grow under its shade but will wither away. Likewise,” he continues, “a man of rapine leaves no garden, field, or vineyard from which he does not take his provisions. He leaves neither rich nor beggar alone, for he amasses everything for his purpose and lives by others’ substance” (6889–900; pp. 95–96). When he feels that a single figura does not possess sufficient explanatory power, Gower may expand it into a distinctio.55 This usually involves two things: first, the multiplication of the analogical senses that the figura is said to denote, and second, an attempt to link each of these senses with some textual citation drawn from scripture or the auctores. An early thirteenth-century English distinctio on “grass,” for example, suggests that “grass” may represent any and all of the following things: (1) the “mutability” and “transience” of man because grass, like the body, ultimately disintegrates into dust; (2) a person who is truly faithful and not merely faithful in appearance, because even while the “leaves of wheat and those of the weeds are similar,” only one of them provides genuine “sustenance”; (3) the “spiritual life of man,” because grass shows, by how much higher it may grow than the plants surrounding it, “the evil life of others”; (4) the pleasures of the flesh, because overgrown grass may easily conceal the presence of a serpent; and, finally, (5) six other senses that are not fully elaborated, but which include “the Word of God,” a pyrrhic victory, temporal goods, “a feeble beginning,” the seven virtues, and pleasure.56 Gower’s own distinctions are less rigid and more literary, but they often play upon the same matter as Scholastic distinctiones and typically adhere to the principles of resemblance and analogy that lie at the heart of the form.57 The lark, Gower tells us, shows us the nature of true contemplation, because it soars as high as it can go at midnight and flees those who are sick and near to death (MO 10705–16; p. 147). Virgins are said to be like

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eagles, because their spirits fly above the souls of others and because they rise, like roses, above the thorns of the world, but they are also said to resemble pearls, because they are most beautiful when they are kept enclosed (VC 4.657–62; p. 181). Bad priests are like salt, because they make the spirits of men barren, just as salt robs soil of its fecundity (MO 20605– 28; p. 275). And bees – in an extraordinary distinctio that is too long to discuss in full here – are said to be like “foolish prelates” on twelve points of comparison, including the fact that both consume “sweet flowers” (or rich food), that both sting others but hurt themselves in the process, that both build dark and cavernous houses, that both hate “smoke” (or prayer), that both flee from “odors” (or the errors of their parishioners), and that both live without companions (MO 19345–483; pp. 263–65). In figurae and distinctiones such as these, the point is not merely that the order of the natural world can tell us things about the bodies, characters, and habits of human beings, but that human behavior and the natural order are substantially linked. Because God is the author of morality and nature alike, spiteful men and camels really do share a physical disposition, and the greedy, like ash trees, cast a withering shade across the economic landscape in a actual sense, and not merely a figurative one. A similar point could be made about Gower’s use of the final exegetical technique that he draws from pastoralia and the preaching manuals: the exemplum, which excavates from history the hidden narrative logics by which God shapes individual lives.58 Defined by William of Auvergne as “a short and pleasing story [expositio] that narrates the life of the saints through their examples and their virtues [exemplis atque virtutibus],” the exemplum was a didactic form that proved to be very popular in latemedieval preaching and in devotional literature alike.59 This is probably because moral “tales,” as Giles of Rome observes, deal with “syngulers doyngs that ben ful vncerteyne,” and so exempla are ideal for teaching applied ethics, provided they are supplemented by commentary that takes pains to highlight the specific moral “points” in the story to which the reader should attend.60 Here is how Genius describes his own use of exempla, and his own practice of commenting upon them, to Amans in the first book of the Confessio amantis. Of my presthode after the forme I wol thi schrifte so enforme, That ate leste thou schalt hiere The vices, and to thi matiere Of love I schal hem so remene, That thou schalt knowe what thei mene.

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As Genius explains, he will tell stories about erotic desire that relate, or “remene,” the different points of the narrative “matiere” to the different sins and vices that Amans may himself have committed. By listening to these stories, and by attending to Genius’s commentary upon them, Amans will thus learn “what” these sins and vices truly “mene,” in terms that even a sinner who is “destourbed” of “herte” and “contourbed” in his “wittes” will be able to grasp (1.221–23). Sure enough, Genius subjects many exempla in the Confessio to just such a treatment: in each case, the “matiere” of a story is related, or “remened,” to the points of Christian ethics that are presumed to be latent within that m ­ atter. For example, the Tale of Demetrius and Perseus, which is concerned with slander, repeatedly compares the behavior of Perseus to that of a dog. Because he “berke[s] upon” his “brother bak” (2.1796–97), the death of his daughter’s similarly named hound, “Perse,” is a “prenostik” of how “an hound was to him lik” (2.1793–94) – a prophecy that is fulfilled at the end of the tale, when Perseus does indeed perish “lich an hound” (2.1858). The Tale of Spertachus and Thameris, in turn, illustrates the vice of cruelty by recounting the story of a duke who delights in the execution of prisoners. In an instance of contrapasso, he is later bled to death over a drinking vessel, because, as his enemies tell him, he never yet had his “fille” of “mannes blod to schede and spille” (7.3493–94). The story of Dives and Lazarus also employs contrapasso, though in a more ironic way. Dives, we’re told, once refused Lazarus even a crumb of his delicate food, and so in Hell, Lazarus refuses Dives a single drop of water to quench the heat upon his tongue (6.975–1150). The Tale of Julius and the Poor Knight, by contrast, illustrates the virtue of largesse. Julius, who is poor, is met with silence when he asks his lord for money, but after he notes that he once saved his lord’s life in battle, the lord grants him a generous annuity, so that he may live the rest of his days in comfort (7.2061–114).61 In tales such as these, Gower takes considerable pains, first, to identify latent patterns within his matter, and second, to make those patterns legible to the reader, so that she might see how everything, from stories to flowers to the structure of the cosmos, manifests a different aspect of the same divine order. In other words, rather than impose a moral truth upon his literary materials – as, for instance, the poet of the Ovide moralisé might do – Gower instead draws out of these materials a set of formal and structural principles, which then serve as the framework for an allegorical and exegetical elaboration upon some moral truth.62 But this procedure does not always work, because, as Gower often reminds us himself, the human ability to apprehend the divine is imperfect.63 As he writes in the Vox,

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Since it is not for us to know [nosse] the ages [tempora] of the world or the origin of creation [vnde creaturas], why does man labor to do so? … It is not the job of humans to rise up to the stars, to seek to grasp [capit] what mortal man cannot grasp through reason … it is not for men to know what God on high has ordained [construit] … Therefore, a man should acquire knowledge prudently. Let him entrust to faith what he would not have been able to trust to reason. Reason does not supply [non dat] what a firm faith should provide [det]. (2.451–66; p. 108 [translation modified])

Without the guidance of God and “firm faith,” in other words, even the best of minds will sometimes stumble in their attempt to parse the meaning of history and the created world – and as we might expect, the same can be said for Gower’s mind too. Consider again his use of figurae and distinctiones. As I argued above, these tools are designed to make legible the patterns that an exegete finds latent in some text or some aspect of creation, and then to relate those patterns, by analogy, to other forms found in the textual or physical world. The problem, however, is that the meaning of such patterns remains open to interpretation, so much so that Gower often drew different conclusions from the same distinctio at different moments in his career. In the Mirour de l’omme, for example, he uses a distinctio on the bee to parse the behavior of ill-behaved bishops. In the later Vox clamantis, by contrast, the bee is said to figure certain friars who hide away in dark places and adulterously “sting” women with their “swollen pricker[s]” (4.877–86; p. 186). In the Mirour de l’omme, again, Gower argues that bad clerics are like salt, because they strip the soil of its richness. In the Vox, by contrast, good pastors are said to be like salt, because the gospel teaches us that the virtuous are the salt of the earth (3.1997–2002; p. 161). If one compares the points that these distinctiones use as the basis for their allegories, one will naturally find a good deal of common ground. But the interpretive conclusions they draw are rarely in agreement, and such disagreements were, in fact, endemic to the form of the distinctio itself. If we compare three thirteenth- and fourteenth-century distinctiones on the lily, for instance, we will find similar differences of opinion with respect to the meaning of the traits and chartacteristics that all of them associate with the flower.64 All three commentators agree that the lily signifies spiritual beauty, but they disagree as to which color of the lily properly conveys that connotation. Two note that certain medicinal preparations of lilies soothe burned skin, but one sees this property as the gift of Mary, while the other suggests it is the doing of the saints more generally; and two note, again, that lilies grow among the thorns, but where the first sees this as a figura of the soul pricked by contrition, the other sees it as a symbol of the church,

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which is pricked by the teachings of the heretics. Like Gower, these writers appear convinced that the order of nature has something to teach us about God’s plan, but their interpretations of what they perceive in that order are rarely in step with one another. Still greater problems arise with respect to Gower’s use of the exemplum form, which purports to explain the ethical significance of historical sequences of events but often raises as many questions as it resolves. In one respect, as Helen Cooper has observed, this is because the morals that “are supposed to the very point” of Gower’s exempla are “often famously hard to remember,” particularly in those tales where the plot is less compressed, and more digressive, than in the exempla I’ve already considered above.65 But even when the moral is easy enough to recall, it is not always adequate to the narrative at hand. Consider, for example, one of the most morally recalcitrant stories in the whole of the Confessio: the tale of Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Exiled from Argos at birth, Orestes seeks to return to the isle now that he is a grown man. The problem is that Egistus, who long ago murdered his father and usurped the throne, still rules Argos. Unsure of what to do, Orestes makes a sacrifice to the oracle. The gods tell him to “do vengance” upon his mother “so cruel” (3.1999–2000) that she will be made an “ensample of alle londes” (3.2012): first, he is to tear off her breasts with his own hands, and then he must drag her body behind a cart and leave it unburied until “houndes” gnaw upon “hire bones” (3.2014). Though Orestes is “nothing glad” (3.2005) when he hears the advice, he abides by it. Having sacked Mycenae, he summons “the lordes” and “poeple” (3.2052–53) to the city square and then executes his mother in exactly the way that the gods have prescribed. Orestes’ actions lead to no small debate among the Greeks. “Some sein he dede wel ynowh, / and som men sein he dede amis,” writes Gower: “diverse opinion ther is” (3.2112–14). “Of comun assent” (3.2129), a parliament is called to discuss the matter, and Menesteus delivers a long speech in defense of Orestes. It was a “thing of the goddes bede,” he argues, “and nothing of his crualté” (3.2148–49), that led Orestes to kill his mother. The other lords are convinced, and the young man returns to Argos, where he is crowned the new king (3.2170–71). What could we possibly learn from this story? The tale not only makes it clear, as James Simpson observes, that “natural law is incapable of deciding certain cases,” but further demonstrates that a strict obedience to human law, and even to what Orestes takes to be divine law, may lead us into ethical error.66 This irony is not lost on Amans, who is confused by the tale and tells Genius that he “wolde lere / what is to done, and what to leve”

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(3.2204–5) – that is, that he would be glad to learn what the tale teaches him about what to do and what not to do. Genius, who seems confused himself, quickly reassures Amans that, in certain cases, “a man mai sle withoute sinne” (3.2232), but he appears dissatisfied with his own gloss.67 We may find ourselves disasstified with it as well, for even if it is true, as Genius argues, that Orestes did his “office” and kept the rule of “justice” in following divine command, neither the tale nor the gloss offer any explanation for why “merci” would not have “plese[d] God” equally in this case (3.2217–23) – particularly because, as Genius bluntly puts it, God “hath forbede” the crime of “homicide” (3.2253). We might conclude, then, that Genius’s powers of interpretation have simply failed him with respect to the story of Orestes, for if his goal is to act “as guardian of Gower’s argument,” then this tale suggests that he does not always succeed.68 What is more, if Copeland is correct to claim that Genius’s exegesis serves to mask Gower’s own “exegetical control over received materia,” then we might wonder if, in this moment, Gower has himself discovered the limits of an exegetical method that proceeds according to scientia and dialectic.69 Before we declare the defeat of Gower and his amanuensis, however, I would observe that this kind of exegesis  – a schematizing mode of interpretation that seeks to produce scientific knowledge through the use of figurae, distinctiones, and exempla – is not the only exegetical mode that Gower employs in the Confessio amantis. On the contrary, he also makes use of a different sort of exegesis, one that is concerned less with scientia than with sapientia – with “wisdom,” as he puts it (CA Prol.67).70 This mode of exegesis pursues feeling alongside thought. It often seeks to foster an affective connection between the reader and the text. And in Gower, it typically employs a peculiar tool to do its work: the voice of a literary character who cries out for mercy. *** In the middle of the thirteenth century, Alexander of Hales composed a quaestio on the different kinds of exegesis that a student of the scriptures might employ. Biblical interpretation, he argued, ought to rely upon two “modes of knowing” depending on the context. There is one mode of knowing [modus scientiae] which is the comprehension of truth through human reason [comprehensionem veritatis per humanam rationem], but there is also another mode of knowing which is the act of feeling holiness [affectum pietatis] with the aid of the Biblical record. The first mode is definitive, employs division, and uses deduction [definitivus debet esse, divisivus, collectivus], and such a mode ought to be employed in

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry the human sciences, because the apprehension of truth according to human reason is explicated through divisions, definitions, and syllogisms [ratiocinationes]. The second mode is instructive, exemplificative, exhortative, revelatory, and orative [praeceptivus, exemplificativus, exhortativus, revelativus, orativus], because all of these things pertain to the feeling of holiness … The instructive mode is to be found in both the Old and New Testaments; the exemplary mode in the historical books; the exhortative mode in the books of Solomon and the Epistles; the mode of revelation in the prophetic books; the orative mode [orativus] in the Psalms.71

For Alexander, good exegesis may draw either upon the resources of reason or upon those of affect. One way of making knowledge out of scripture, he suggests, is to subject it to dialectic. This procedure uses deduction, division, definition, and logic – the techniques of the “human sciences,” as Alexander puts it – to “apprehend” the truth contained within the Bible. But a second exegetical mode focuses instead upon the feelings that scripture may elicit from the heart. The historical books of scripture, for instance, may be understood as exempla designed to provoke feelings of praise or blame toward their characters, while the prophetic books are meant to evoke a sense of mystery in the reader, one that “pertains to the feeling of holiness.” Most of striking of all, perhaps, is Alexander’s claim that the Psalter employs the “orative” mode – a mode concerned with meditation and prayer, no doubt, but also with the affective power of David’s voice, which the psalms often figure in a decidedly embodied way. Was Gower thinking of the “orative” mode while he wrote the Confessio amantis? There is no evidence that he knew Alexander of Hales directly, though scholars have made reference to Alexander in their discussions of Gower’s method, and analysis of the different modi proper to exegesis – including the modus orativus – was common in thirteenth-century theology.72 What is more, Andrew Kraebel has observed that fourteenthcentury English commentaries on the Psalter often “gave particular attention to the identification of the voice (vox or persona) they believed David to assume in each psalm,” and it is possible that Gower’s crying voice owes something to this tradition of thought.73 Even if he was not familiar with the “orative” mode as Alexander describes it, however, the Middle English poetry of Gower’s time would have offered him many examples of a more literary kind of crying voice. Chaucer, for example, evokes it when, near the start of the Troilus, Criseyde falls to her knees before Hector and “with pitous vois, and tendrely wepynge,” begs for his “mercy.”74 Hoccleve puts his own version of it to use in his complaint poetry, and at the start of the Series, where he “braste[s] oute”

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into a lament about his miserable situation.75 But the closest analogue to Gower’s own crying voice may be found, as we might expect, in the political poetry of his time.76 There is of course Piers Plowman, in which Will twice falls upon his knees to cry out to Holy Church and which concludes with Conscience “gradd[ing] after Grace” until Will awakes, but in lesser-known works as well, instances of political crying abound.77 Mum and the Sothsegger, for example, considers at length the kind of voice that one should use – or not use – to cry out to figures of power.78 The Song of the Husbandman and The Simonie draw attention to the “mon” of the poor and the silenced “voiz” of the clergy.79 And in Piers the Plowman’s Crede, one finds a remarkable scene in which the narrator encounters on the road a group of impoverished peasants, starving and miserable, who “crieden alle o cry, a carefull note.”80 Gower may have drawn upon any number of these sources, but whatever his specific inspiration may have been, his poetry makes it abundantly clear that he believed the crying voice to be a powerful literary device. How exactly did he use it? To start, we might note that the crying voice differs in important ways from the other types of voice that Gower makes use of.81 Unlike the “comune vois” (CA Prol.124), it usually expresses the wishes of an individual person and not a general consensus.82 Unlike the vox populi, it can take the form of a command and need not be a complaint.83 Most of all, it derives its authority not from any secular means but from its implicit – and sometimes explicit – claim to mediate God’s will. Genius provides us with two good examples of this voice in the commentary that he offers to Amans immediately after the story of Orestes. The first is the voice that spoke to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, and that “hath forbede / be Moises” the sin of murder, “that ilke foule horrible vice / of homicide” (3.2252–54). The second is the voice of God’s “anglis,” which “the schepherdes herden singe” of peace, harmony, and the “lawe of charité” (3.2256–62) after Christ was born. Though these two voices carry different messages and speak in different tones, both possess an ethical force that overrules human law and precept. When the crying voice speaks, in other words, positive law must be suspended – and throughout the Confessio, this is precisely what occurs after such a voice is heard. The story of Mundus and Paulina, for example, resolves the injustice of Paulina’s rape through the passionate confession that she “compleigneth” to her husband (1.965). Despite her lack of evidence, he believes what she says, as do the emperor and “many a worthi citezeine” (1.1006), and Mundus is exiled for his crimes (1.1048–59). The Tale of Florent and the Tale of the Courtiers and the Fool each feature voices that persuade men of power to

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change their behavior merely on the basis of what is said: Florent abides by the “conseil” of the loathly lady (1.1546) and lends her his “hole vois” (1.1828), while the Fool persuades an arrogant king to listen to the “crie” of the “comun poeple” (7.4019). The same idea recurs in a serio-comic guise in the Tale of Nebuchadnezzar, which features an amusing scene in which the Babylonian king, now transformed into an ox, bellows out to God. Although he “lacke[s] vois and speche,” God hears him “wailende in his bestly stevene,” and magnanimously decides to return him to a “mannes forme” (1.3025–26, 3034). The story that best exemplifies the function and force of the crying voice in the Confessio amantis, however, is surely that of Constantine and Sylvester, which Gower found so compelling that he also alluded to it in his last major poem of political counsel, “In Praise of Peace.”84 Constantine, the pagan emperor of Rome, has been struck with leprosy. Having summoned his “grete clerkes” (2.3199), he takes “conseil” (2.3216) and is told that he must bathe in the blood of children no older than “sevene wynter age” (2.3207). Trusting the experts, the emperor demands that his citizens surrender their toddlers and infants for his bath – but once the children and their mothers arrive at his palace, Constantine is moved by the sound of their cries. The modres wepe in here degré, And manye of hem aswoune falle, The yonge babes criden alle. This noyse aros, the lord it herde, And loked out, and how it ferde He sih …

(2.3236–41)

Invoking “divine pourveance” (2.3243), the emperor now delivers a speech. He will not go through with the ritual, for he has come to recognize that “the povere is bore as is the riche” (2.3246) and that all men, including kings, must abide both by the “lawe of kinde” and the “lawe” of God, who created “kinde” in the first place (2.3275–76). What is more, the cries of the women have “engendreth” such “pité” within his heart that he would rather die himself than now commit “so gret a moerdre” (2.3290–93). God, who “to pité” is “pitous” (2.3330), then heals Constantine of his leprosy, and the emperor converts to Christianity. The Tale of Constantine allows us to identify several features of the crying voice. It is spontaneous, or relatively so; it addresses a higher social position from a lower one; it is akin to counsel, but it also may correct the counsel provided by experts; and it accords, or seems to accord, with God’s

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wishes, and may even represent a divine command. The crying voice is thus a very powerful ethical tool in Gower’s poetry, one that allows Genius to resolve, in certain cases, moral conundrums and problems of narrative resolution with a single stroke of the pen. But as other stories from the Confessio demonstrate, the crying voice does not always receive the audience it merits. In the tales of Iphis and Araxarathen and Phyllis and Demophon, for instance, abject characters cry out in much the same way as the weeping mothers cried out Constantine. Iphis makes “dedli pleintes” (4.3555) and a “crie” (4.3563) to the gods for aid, while Phyllis “pleigneth” and “clepede” to Demophon (4.837–42), begging him to come back to her. Both receive no reply, and both hang themselves in despair. In the Tale of Lucrece, Tarquin ensures Lucrece’s silence by laying his sword beside her and commanding her to make no “noise or cry” while he rapes her (7.4979). This time, the crying voice fails to move Tarquin because power has ensured that it cannot speak in the first place. “Hire vois,” comments Gower, she “hath lost for pure drede, / that o word speke sche ne dar” (7.4976–77). Both obstacles to the crying voice – the threat of violence, in the case of Tarquin, and coldness of heart, in the case of Phyllis and Iphis – reappear in the terrifying story of Canacee, in which we are presented, not just with one failed instance of the crying voice, but with two. The first crying voice belongs to Canacee herself. Pleading upon her “bare knes” (3.223), she begs her father not to execute his own daughter: “Fader,” she says, “thenk I am / thi child, and of thi blod I cam” (3.225–26). But Eolus, who follows only the “conseil in his herte” (3.239), puts her to death anyway. The second voice belongs to Canacee’s infant, who “al blody crieth” (3.320) after his mother has been murdered. Unmoved, Eolus casts the child out to be devoured by beasts. And we might observe, here, that the power of both cries – but also, the fact that each one fell upon deaf ears – was noted by Gower’s later readers. Lydgate, as Maura Nolan points out, makes the infant’s lack of speech explicit in his own version of the story.85 “A mouth he hath,” Lydgate writes, “but woordis hath he noone,” for he “cannat compleyne, alas, for non outrage.”86 These problem stories would appear to complicate the power of the crying voice. In ethical terms, this voice remains the loudest voice imaginable. It instructs us to suspend or even supersede human law, and so it supplements the law, in the Derridean sense of the term, in those cases where a strict adherence to the law would produce an ethical result out of line with God’s wishes.87 But at the same time, the sound of this crying voice is very faint, or even silent, in many of the stories that Gower tells. Constantine hears it, but Tarquin does not. It

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is with these points in mind that I would like to turn, now, to the most sustained treatment of the crying voice in the Confessio amantis. This can be found in the story of Philomela, which builds upon an examination of law, power, and protest that Gower lays out across the fifth book of his poem as a whole, and which features, as Corinne Saunders notes, a “sustained emphasis” on the “voice[s]” of the women who are its protagonists.88 As is well known, Gower’s tale is drawn from Ovid, and it recounts the abduction, rape, and mutilation of a Greek princess named Philomela. The culprit is Tereus, a Thracian king who is married to Philomela’s sister, Procne, and who imprisons Philomela and cuts out her tongue once he learns that she intends to tell the world of his crime. Critics have often focused upon the pathos and sentiment that Gower seems to lend to this disturbing story. For C. S. Lewis, it is a “shocking tale” that nonetheless acquires a “bittersweet beauty” in Gower’s hands, while for Pearsall, it “mute[s] the horrors” of Ovid in order to produce “something like tenderness” in its depictions of the heroines.89 But I would suggest that the tale of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus can also be read as a political allegory – or, more precisely, as a thought experiment that asks, via allegory, whether a sovereign can fully deprive his subjects of a voice.90 While the fifth book of the Confessio amantis is notionally a study of avarice, it also considers the wide-ranging effects of all kinds of selfish desire, and in particular, the extent to which the selfish desires of kings can or cannot be curbed by law.91 Gower makes this much clear in his lengthy prologue to the book, which begins, like the general prologue of the Confessio, by comparing the norms of the golden age, when “al was set to the comune” (5.5), to the greed of the present day, which has led “alle love” to be “leide aside / and of comun his propre made” (5.14–15). In contrast to the general prologue, however, Gower here attributes the rise of greed in his own world to a specific target: the rich and the powerful, who take more for themselves than they need. Instead of working the earth alongside their fellows, these people turn ploughshares into swords (5.16–17), and use might, rather than right, to enrich themselves at the expense of the common good. The result is violence, poverty, and debauchery. “Hyhe walles” (5.20) spring up to divide the holdings of the rich from the poor, “werre” comes “on every side” (5.13), and at court – so Gower tells us – noblemen and noblewomen cast aside their marriage vows in favor of promiscuity and easy sexual gratification (5.i.6). Greed, sex, and violence are thus bound together from the very start of Book Five, and this makes good sense considering the context in which Gower wrote. Indeed, Richard II was a king whose greed and refusal to share power caused considerable controversy during the 1380s and 90s.

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He once declared to the lords appellant, for instance, that “he would not dismiss even the humblest member of his kitchen staff [minimum garcionem de coquina sua]” if they asked him to do so, and in the Cronica tripertita, Gower compares the effects of Richard’s avarice and putative megalomania to an act of sexual assault: “Richard despoiled and raped [vastat] the realm [regnum], vengeful, always vicious.”92 Several stories from the fifth book build upon this connection. The Tale of Virgil’s Mirror, for instance, introduces us to the emperor Crassus, who so desires gold that he foolishly disables the first line of defense for the city of Rome: a mirror that can spot anyone within “thritty mile” of the city gates, day or night (5.2036). With the mirror out of the way, Hannibal sacks the city, and so many noblemen die that three bushels can be filled with the gold rings stripped from their fingers (5.2203–8). Crassus is later forced to drink molten gold in punishment (5.2220–24). The Tale of the King and the Steward’s Wife, in turn, features a king who offers a cash reward to anyone who procures him with a “freissh, a yong, a lusti wiht” (5.2661) for sex. His enterprising Steward sends the King his own wife so that he can pocket the reward, despite her pleas that he not “selle” her “for gold” (5.2743). And in the well-known tales of Jason and Medea and Theseus and Ariadne, powerful men prove, yet again, that they’re happy to instrumentalize sexual relationships for personal gain. Having received, in exchange for a pledge of love (5.5338–39), the knowledge and tools he needs to defeat the Minotaur, Theseus abandons Ariadne and takes her sister, Phaedra, as his lover in her stead. Jason does much the same. In exchange for his “covenant / to love” (5.3449–50) and consent to a secret marriage, he receives from Medea both the knowledge and the tools required to obtain the golden fleece, to steal her family’s treasure, and to return his father, Eson, to the body of his youth. When she is no longer of use to him – when, as Gower flatly puts it, she “hath fulfild his wille” (5.4189) – he casts her aside for a younger and more socially acceptable wife.93 Once Gower’s reader has arrived at the Philomela story, then, she has been primed to expect a story that will superimpose the microcosm of erotic greed onto the macrocosm of economic and social greed. The reader may also anticipate a tale that will consider what effect, if any, the crying voice might have upon men who rule by might rather than right. In both respects, the Tale of Philomela does not disappoint, for from its very prologue, it announces that it will recount the story of a “tirant raviner” (5.5627) who cares little for the pleas of those around him, in matters of love and state alike. Procne and Philomela, of course, have no idea that this is the case at the start of the narrative, for as Kim Zarins notes, Gower gives us “no

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indication that the marriage” of Procne and Tereus “is unhappy” or “that Tereus is a brute.”94 Indeed, in Procne’s mind – and in contrast to what one finds in Ovid – Tereus is simply a “worthi king of hih lignage,” one whose deeds are “kid in every lond” (5.5566–68). Tereus, moreover, goes to some lengths to preserve this illusion.95 When Procne asks his permission to receive her sister at Thrace, he listens to her, politely agrees, and offers to “take” and “bringe” Philomela to Thrace himself (5.5588–89). “Sire,” Procne whispers with unknowing irony, “grant mercy” (5.5593). The reality, of course, is that Tereus is a criminal – or more precisely, a sovereign figure who believes he can commit no crime because the bonds of family, the laws of his kingdom, and the power of “conscience” (5.5916) have no purchase upon his actions. Like the personification of Ravine, whom Genius excoriates in the prologue to the tale, Tereus does what he does simply because he can: “Ravine makth non other skile, / bot takth be strengthe what he wile” (5.5521–22). It is indeed Tereus’s political and physical “strengthe” that Gower highlights in his depiction of the rape itself. Here, despite the fact that Philomela “crie[s] and preie[s]” for the “help” of her father and mother (5.5634–36), Tereus doesn’t listen, for she is “of to litel myht” (5.5637) to fight him off. Filled with rage once the crime is done, Philomela speaks out once again – but this time, she addresses Tereus himself. She condemns his “untrouthe” (5.5683) and his cruelty; she invokes the “beheste” (5.5678) of marriage that he has broken; and, most of all, she says that she will tell the world of his actions. That dai schal falle, I hope so, That I schal telle out al mi fille, And with mi speche I schal fulfille The wyde world in brede and lengthe. That thou hast do to me be strengthe, If I among the poeple duelle, Unto the poeple I schal it telle; And if I be withinne wall Of stones closed, thanne I schal Unto the stones clepe and crie, And tellen hem thi felonie; And if I to the wodes wende, Ther schal I tellen tale and ende, And crie it to the briddes oute, That thei schul hiere it al aboute. For I so loude it schal reherce, That my vois schal the hevene perce, That it schal soune in Goddes ere.

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Philomela’s determination to cry out against Tereus is powerful, and she appears convinced that, once the world hears what Tereus has done, it will rise up against him. But Tereus is unmoved. Without saying a word, he grabs her with his “unhappi handes stronge” (5.5685), forces open her mouth, and clips out her tongue. We might expect Philomela’s story to end here, not least because, in contrast to what one finds in Ovid, Gower stresses the extreme lengths to which Tereus goes to muffle Philomela’s voice. In Ovid, the king simply hides her in a tower in the woods. In Gower, by contrast, Tereus locks her up for the explicit purpose of ensuring her silence, commanding that “sche scholde abyde in prison stille / foreveremo” (5.5704–5; my emphasis).96 But as in Ovid, Gower’s Philomela does receive a second chance to speak out. Having procured “a cloth of selk al whyt” (5.5770), she weaves a depiction of the rape and sends it to Procne, who then discovers the truth. Though we may wonder how Philomela acquired silk, Gower is concerned more with the political valences of this act than with its realism, for where Ovid only notes vaguely that Philomela wove “purple marks [purpureas notas]” upon the cloth, Gower specifies that she employs “lettres and ymagerie” (5.5771), before setting her “signet,” or personal seal, upon the fabric to ensure its authenticity.97 Moreover, where Ovid stresses Procne’s emotional state, Gower chooses instead to emphasize the political character of Procne’s response to the letter: “of suche oultrages,” Procne says, “wepinge is noght the bote” (5.5792–93).98 An oultrage, in Middle English, was often understood as the specifically political crime of going beyond, or in excess, of the law.99 In Procne’s view, Tereus’s actions are the very definition of “oultrage,” and so, in another departure from Ovid, she gathers conspirators, swears them to secrecy (5.5799–801), and begins to plan a coup d’état.100 In Gower’s hands, then, Philomela’s woven cry for pity becomes an act of protest speech, and Procne’s plot for personal revenge is reimagined as the lead-up to a putsch. Where Ovid draws out the affective power of the story, Gower stresses its political implications instead. What is more, Gower continues to read Ovid politically in his conclusion to the tale, the grisly feast where Procne serves Tereus a stew made from the flesh of his own son, Itys. For one thing, Gower figures Procne’s stew not merely as a symbol of her personal revenge upon Tereus, but as a symbol of Tereus’s ethical violation of the body politic and the order of nature alike. As the tyrant consumes his subjects, Gower suggests, so too does the evil father consume his own son: “thus his oughne fleissh and blod / himself devoureth agein kinde, / as he that was tofore unkinde” (5.5904–6).101 For another,

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the feast itself is staged as an elaborate piece of political theater. Where Ovid emphasizes the fury and passion of the sisters – his Philomela throws Itys’s severed head “into his father’s face” – Gower’s Philomela calmly places the head upon the table and then stands beside her sister, who delivers a speech of Gower’s own invention.102 “O werste of alle wicke, Of conscience whom no pricke Mai stere, lo, what thou hast do! Lo, hier be nou we sostres tuo; O raviner, lo hier thi preie, With whom so falsliche on the weie Thou hast thi tirannye wroght. Lo, nou it is somdel aboght, And bet it schal, for of thi dede The world schal evere singe and rede In remembrance of thi defame. For thou to love hast do such schame, That it schal nevere be forgete.”

(5.5915–27)

Starting from his seat, Tereus overturns the table, grabs a sword, and swears that both sisters “scholde of his hondes dye” (5.5928–31). But the sisters – in Gower’s final change to Ovid – have something else in mind. Both “unto the goddes crie,” with “so loude a stevene, / that thei were herd unto the hevene” (5.5932–34). In response, the gods transform Philomela, Procne, and Tereus into birds.103 Why does Gower tell this terrible story? In one respect, it seems clear that the tale is meant as a warning to at least some of his readers. Given the political bent of Book Five as a whole, and his claim that “men sein in every region” that people like Tereus “nou regneth comunliche aboute” (5.6032–34), it is likely that the poet saw, in Tereus, certain elements of tyrannical rulers from his own time. Indeed, despite his obvious disapproval of popular rebellion, in this tale, as in the tales of Lucrece and Virginia, he quietly implies that it is acceptable for the nobility to depose a king, provided that the king has refused all counsel and resolved to rule as a despot.104 If we look beyond the political motives that may have led Gower to write the tale of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus, however, we may discover that the story also speaks to the ethical project of the Confessio, and to Gower’s aims as a literary writer, in two ways. First, the story suggests that literary matter may allow us to hear the voices of those we cannot hear in our day-to-day lives. Like the cloth that allows Philomela to speak with the voice of the shuttle, literature may

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serve  – so Gower’s tale suggests – as a prosthesis for those who cannot speak without it. Some people may be unable to speak because they cannot get the hearing they deserve from kings or judges. Some may be unwilling to speak because they fear retribution, or because they have been rendered silent through violence. But whatever the case may be, literature offers the reader an occasion to listen for such voices, and even an occasion to supply them if she feels they are absent from the text. What might Clytemnestra have said to Orestes before she was put to death? What would the mute daughter of Antiochus have said to her father, if she had had the chance? What would Canacee’s infant have told us, or the silent Itys who, in contrast to what one finds in Ovid, speaks not a word before he is murdered by Gower’s Procne?105 These voices may go without representation in the Confessio amantis, but their imaginative reconstruction is at the heart of what Gower’s poem asks us to do. This takes us to the second, broader implication of the Philomela story for Gower’s poetics, for if listening is central to how we “mai ben avised” (Prol.65) through the experience of reading Gower’s poem, then it is just as central to Gower’s own views on literary making. As I have argued in this chapter, Gower believes that the whole of the created universe is structured according to a single, God-given order. In his view, the task of the poet is to identify this order, not just in the world at large, but within the materials of his poetry, so that its patterns may be made legible to the reader. All Gower’s talk of “shaping” and “informing” his materials aside, what really animates his poetics is a close and even exegetical attention to matter – the physical matter of the created world, of course, but also the particular literary materials out of which he has made his poetry. And the same might be said with respect to his interest in the category of voice. For every instance in which Gower appropriates the voices of others, one can just as easily find an instance in which he has constructed his poetry around those voices, through the act of listening to the “many different mouths [diuersa … ora]” that, as he claims in the Vox, have provided him with the materials for his poems (2.Prol.79; p. 98).106 In contrast to what one often finds in the critical record, the Gower I am describing here is unexpectedly modest – so modest that we might wonder whether, after speaking in what J. Allan Mitchell rightly calls a “strident voice” in the prologue to the Confessio amantis, Gower simply chose to suppress that voice elsewhere.107 But Gower does speak for himself at least once more in the Confessio. This is at its very end, after the love allegory has collapsed and the poet has stepped forward to direct its closing measures. This Gower speaks neither in the guise of Arion, the mythic

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poet of commanding literary powers, nor in the guise of Genius, the erotic exegete and professional intellectual, but in his own person. As he tells us, he is merely an ordinary citizen, an “olde” man who is “feble and impotent” and knows “nought how the world ys went” (8.3126–28).108 With this lowly position established, Gower then cries out to God and king, praying that England will be preserved from evil. To thilke lord in special, As He which is of alle thinges The creatour, and of the kynges Hath the fortunes uppon honde, His grace and mercy for to fonde Uppon my bare knes y preie, That He this lond in siker weie Wol sette uppon good governance.

(8.2980–87; second recension)

Pleas for grace and mercy, reverence for the power of God, and a supplication made on the bare knees: Gower, it would seem, has adopted the same posture as the many characters in his poem who beg for succor. No doubt, this petitionary stance is conventional, as J. A. Burrow and Robert Meyer-Lee have observed, and it would only become more popular in court poetry during the century that would follow.109 But it seems to me that there is also something genuine about the poet’s representation of himself as a helpless petitioner. For Gower, after all, is no counselor with the royal ear, and he is certainly no prophet. He may play the bold archer, but insofar as he has any power to shape the king’s mind, he must exercise that power not by loosing arrows but through the more limited means that his poetry affords him – by speaking of “vices” and “vertus” (8.3098), or by noting the “covenant” that a king owes his people (8.3074), or by stressing the need to rule oneself before one attempts to rule others (8.3080–85). Such things are true enough, but they’re also beside the point, for as Gower himself admits, the only real bridle upon the king’s actions is the king’s will, for the king is owed the “leiance” (8.3058) of the realm even if he rules as a tyrant, and the king is likewise the only member of the realm who may wield the sovereign power over life, the mortal power “for to spille or for to save” (8.3063).110 Unless the king is willing to listen, even the best advice in the world will mean as little as the cries of a child. This, perhaps, is why Gower ends his plea for good governance, not by stressing rules of behavior and laws of ethics, but by appealing to his king’s conscience. He asks that Henry recognize with “humble chere” the “lawe of God” (8.3096–97) – and recognize, too, that this law is mostly

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unwritten. For in contrast to the law of man or the “lawe of kynde,” this law is found, not on the page, but “withinne a mannes herte,” where it stands “of charité confermed” (8.3163–64). It is this law, a law that prizes “love and alle pes” (8.3171), that he begs king and country to adopt. Gower knew, of course, that Henry Bolingbroke was a very busy man. But perhaps he hoped that, if he could simply gather enough voices together, and allow each one to make its own “gret compleignte” (8.3017), the aggregate of these voices might still bend the monarch’s ear. After all, cries and prayers sometimes receive a reply in the Confessio amantis. *** Gower did not get his wish. Though Henry had risen to power upon a wave of popular optimism, the first decade of his rule quickly made it clear that, even if he was willing to hear his people out, he would rarely respond to their requests in the way that they wished. Indeed, as Frank Grady drily puts it, “giving advice to Henry Bolingbroke was a pastime that could be very rewarding or very dangerous,” and the king’s lukewarm attitude toward those who presented him with counsel and plea, combined with a more general atmosphere of paranoia in the aftermath of the Lancastrian usurpation, made for an early fifteenth-century court where political speech often carried substantial risks.111 In the midst of the rebellions that accompanied his rise, Henry spent the first years of the fifteenth century executing many of his political enemies, and especially those who had spoken out against him, or the legitimacy of his rule, in terms that were too sharp.112 By 1406, these suppressions, along with the king’s lavish spending, led Parliament to address a petition of thirty-one articles to the monarch. Alongside other items that sought to restrict his expenditures, the petition stipulated that the king name counselors who were “agreeable [agreables] to his people” and who could not be dismissed until the next meeting of parliament; that he show all petitions and make known all requests to these counselors, “so that they might examine [pur faire examiner] the matters and remit them [pur remittere] to the common law”; and that he reserve at least two days per week – Wednesday and Thursday are preferred – to hear the petition of any subject who appeared in his presence.113 For his part, Gower seems to have held steady in his loyalty to the new regime, though he does appear to have felt that Henry could have done with a better group of advisors.114 Indeed, “In Praise of Peace” goes so far as to suggest that the king root out and expel any minions who might be promoting a continuation of the Hundred Years’ War (127–30), a conflict that Gower opposed.115 Here, in a mode of address that Candace

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Barrington has linked to the structure and diction of medieval legal pleas, Gower addresses the king directly.116 Listen, he begs, to “Goddis sonde,” which demands peace rather than war (84). Read “olde bokes,” where “wisemennes speche” counsels against violence, and where you can find countless “essamples” of the destruction “that the werre hath wroght” (93–96). Recall “the lawe of riht” (56) that must govern Christian actions and royal prerogatives alike. Consider, even, modeling yourself upon Constantine, whose willingness to take counsel demonstrates “what pité forth with mercy doth” (337). But such advice seems to have made little difference to Henry. The situation is described in acrid terms in Mum and the Sothsegger, which depicts the new king as a ruler who had risen to power amidst claims that he would listen to the commons, but who displayed little interest in hearing them out once he had secured the throne. whenne oure comely king came furst to londe, Tho was eche burne bolde to bable what hym aylid And to fable ferther of fautz and of wrongz, And romansid of the missereule that in the royaulme groved, And were behote high helpe, I herde hit myself Ycried at the crosse, and was the kingis wille Of custume and of coylaige the comunes shuld be easid. But how the covenant is ykepte I can not discryve, For with the kingis cunseil I come but silde.117

Like Gower, the Mum-poet lays the blame for this breach of “covenant” at the feet of the “kingis cunseil,” but this is ultimately a distinction without a difference. For as he goes on to say, if the “pouer” do “playne,” they will find themselves, at best, speaking “al in waste,” and at worst, “yputte into prisone,” or “ypyned to deeth,” or “yblent or yshent” in some way too awful to repeat.118 Was Gower attempting, in the Confessio amantis, to persuade his new king to listen to his subjects in a way that the old king had not? If he was, then his poem clearly did not succeed at the task – though we may wonder whether the poet really expected Henry to listen to him without a political incentive for doing so. It may well be the case, as Pearsall has argued, that monarchs often commissioned tracts of advice so that they could “represent themselves as receptive to sage counsel,” and the elaborate Trentham Manuscript, which Gower seems to have prepared for Henry, may have been composed with precisely this end in mind.119 Nevertheless, medieval kings were no more willing to do the right thing on principle than modern oligarchs are, and even if Henry did read the Confessio amantis, its words were unlikely to have had a great effect. As we have seen, Gower’s last

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major poem often concentrates its political force within its representations of the crying voice, but it also displays evidence of selective hearing on the part of its maker, and this selective hearing severely limits, in my view, the power of those representations.120 The voices of weeping mothers, helpless infants, and imprisoned royalty ring out loudly across the Confessio, but not once do we hear a word from the guilds, or the rural peasantry, or the London merchants – the very groups whose willingness to take direct political action had nearly toppled Richard from power, and whose continued discontent still posed a very real threat to Henry’s reign.121 It may well be that Gower refused to give voice to these classes because, like many men of his station, he felt that they had become quite powerful enough over the preceding years of the fourteenth century.122 But it is just as likely that his essentially aristocratic view of politics accounts for their silence: in his eyes, it is only the morally and intellectually excellent who are fit to speak, let alone shape the course of history.123 The Visio anglie, with its depiction of speechless peasant beasts run amok, reflects this position in the extreme.124 And lest we imagine that Gower had softened his stance on the rights of the peasantry by the time he wrote the Confessio, we should recall the fourth set of Latin verses from the prologue, where he insists, in an exact recapitulation of a passage found in both the Vox and the Mirour, upon the need for the commonfolk to be “subjugated by royal law [regali lege]” like a “meek lamb [mitis agna],” lest they become like a tiger and unleash a “wrath [ira]” that is “more violent” than the destruction wrought by “fire and flood [ignis, aqua]” (Prol.iv.1–6).125 As a work of political counsel, then, the Confessio was likely hamstrung by Gower’s blinkered and classist understanding of politics. But in literary terms, his last major poem was an obvious success. In one respect, this is because it employed a distinctive mode of first-person address, one that was “at once obsequious and critical,” as Meyer-Lee puts it, and that proved immensely popular with later courtly makers.126 Hoccleve used it, as did Lydgate and a score of lesser-known fifteenth-century poets.127 But in addition to its innovations in voicing and narrative technique, the Confessio also shaped later literary history by stressing the role that preexisting matter plays in the making of art. As we have seen in this chapter, Gower conceives of the long poem as a collection of narrative accounts through which different voices, both articulate and implied, may speak to the reader – and he limits the extent of his making so that those voices remain audible. No doubt, he subjects his matter to a good deal of reframing and commentary, and some of these voices are louder than others. But at least in conceit, Gower maintains that the task of the poet is not to

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reinvent his materials, but to draw out what is notable from within them – to act like the sculptor who finds “Hercules in the marble,” as C. S. Lewis once put it – and this theory of making would hold great sway with the poets who wrote in his wake. 128 We see it in Lydgate’s fear of “presumpcioun,” and in Hoccleve’s belief in the “vertu” of his matter.129 We see it in the fifteenth-century tendency to center literary production, not around the invention of new forms, but around the compilation, reorganization, and analysis of old materials. It is Gower’s work, more than the work of any other Ricardian poet, which accounts for the bookish and even scholarly character of so much fifteenth-century verse. Perhaps this is why Gower, in one of his most bookish moments, yokes his concern for voice together with his concern for the preservation of old matter. In the opening lines of the Confessio amantis, he suggests that, like those writers who came before him, it is his duty to “wryte of newe som matiere” that has been “essampled,” or modeled upon, their “olde wyse” (Prol.6–7). These writers are “dede and elleswhere” (Prol.9), just as Gower and his readers will one day be, but they live on in the books they have written. Partly, this is because their “lore” continues to be of value to the living, even if it must be mixed with “lust” to sustain the attention of a modern reader (Prol.19). But these writers also persist in a second way: their words still speak “to the worldes eere” (Prol.10). To make new books out of old matter, in Gower’s view, is not merely to attend to the ideas of those who came before us. It is also to listen for a voice that speaks to us from elsewhere, one whose traces remain in the books of the dead.

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chapter 3

Hoccleve and the Force of Literature

At some point during the early 1420s, Thomas Hoccleve wrote a poem that he hoped would save his life. The “Compleinte,” as he calls it, is a strange and self-conflicted text.1 It purports to be a tale of recovery, an account of the poet’s recuperation from a period when, under the effects of what he calls a “wilde infirmite,” he seems briefly to have lost his mind.2 But at every turn, the “Compleinte” also unsettles this story, for as we gradually learn, Hoccleve’s time of illness has left him with some lingering symptoms, and his friends and acquaintances worry that he hasn’t fully recovered. We hear in striking detail about the toll that the “infirmite” has taken and continues to take upon him – about gaps in his memory, sudden attacks of anxiety, a clumsy and hesitating gait, and eyes that that roll in his head, darting nervously from here to there, as though they “soughten euery halke,” or corner, in each room (1.133). And yet, despite the persistence of these unnerving symptoms, Hoccleve insists to the reader that his mind is no different than it was before he fell ill. “My wit and I,” he cheerfully proclaims, are “of suche acord / as we were or the alteracioun” (1.59). He is hale, hearty, and sane, even if it appears that he is not. Hoccleve’s observations about his health are misaligned, it would seem, with the claims he makes about his health. He shows us one thing but says another. And this self-contradiction is surely one reason that critics have sometimes been uncertain about the larger aims, and indeed the coherence, of both the “Compleinte” and the Series as a whole. One line of thinking holds that the lacunae and doublings of Hoccleve’s last set of poems reflect the scattered condition of their maker’s body and mind.3 According to this view, the best explanation for the disorderly appearance of the Series – for at first glance, it looks to be “no more than a manuscript miscellany” – is to be found in the poet’s physical and mental disorder.4 It is – so critics in this school would argue – “a Canterbury Tales for the schizophrenic subject,” or a work born from Hoccleve’s unsuccessful struggle to “reform” both his body and his book into a more normal and orthodox shape.5 83

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A second strand of criticism has instead approached the Series, not as a through-composed work, but as the record of an ongoing process of literary self-exploration. Some have cast it as a work of compilation or bricolage, and not a text that tries, and fails, to organize its matter according to some overarching plan.6 Others have likened it to a diary or journal, a kind of unvarnished autobiography that makes no attempt to coordinate its historical chronology of events (fabula) with the narrative order of its plot (syuzhet).7 And still others have held that, in the Series, Hoccleve is concerned less with the production of a coherent literary fiction than with the authentic expression of his fractured subjectivity.8 His “obsessive concern with representing his own inner life,” argues Lee Patterson, “is not a strategy directed to some larger literary goal but is the goal itself.”9 As one might expect, there is a measure of truth to these accounts. The Series does fixate upon themes of madness and illness; it certainly lays open the process of its own, uneven making; and it is without question an autobiographical text, or at the least, a text meant to simulate autobiography.10 But previous scholarship has often approached the Series by comparing it to what it is not, and as a result, critics have sometimes missed what is most striking about it. This is its preoccupation, not with form, pattern, and shape, but with matter – and especially, the matter of books and bodies.11 Indeed, to an extent that goes beyond what the motives of autobiography or compilation might explain, the Series takes pains to draw its reader’s attention, not toward the form of the poem, but toward the pre-existing materials out of which the poem has been made. What is more, these materials often appear, in the Series, to possess a will and agency of their own. Like the poet’s own body, as Julie Orlemanski has observed, they seem to act in a way that is “alien and inaccessible” to the poet.12 Hoccleve’s interest in the putative agency of matter was likely a personal one.13 This is a writer, after all, who documents in verse the experience of his flesh acting against his will. But this interest may also have been shaped by Hoccleve’s views on the craft and theory of making, and in particular, his views on the role that matter ought to play in the process of literary composition. Consider, for example, the debate that takes up much of the second poem of the Series, the so-called “Dialogue.” Here, the Friend and Hoccleve argue about the book that the poet plans to write for a prospective patron, Humphrey of Gloucester – a book that, as we later learn, will turn out to be the Series itself.14 At least by his own account, Hoccleve is poor, and he does not know whether Humphrey will reward his literary efforts. Hoping to get the book exactly right, he asks the Friend for help in

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determining the kind of literary “mateere” out of which he should “make” it (2.625–26), and the Friend replies with the following advice. “It is nat couenable To wryte to a prince so famous But it be good mateer and vertuous. “Thow woost wel, who shal an hous edifie Gooth nat therto withoute auisament If he be wys, for with his mental ye First is it seen, purposid, cast and ment, How it shal wroght been, elles al is shent. Certes, for the deffaute of good forsighte, Mistyden thynges that wel tyde mighte.”

(2.635–44)

“Good mateer and vertuous” takes a double meaning here, for according to the analogy proposed by the Friend, the “mateer” with which Hoccleve works should at once be ethically “good” and physically strong – a kind of literary stuff that will be “vertuous” enough to support the poetic architecture that Hoccleve plans to construct. In a twist on Geoffrey of Vinsauf, to whom the Friend here alludes, the poet’s selection of source materials is thus at least as important as his formal disposition of them, and the Friend’s words, “deffaute of good forsighte,” refer as much to using shoddy materials as to drawing up poor blueprints for the work one plans to carry out.15 As for those blueprints, they are here presented more as preliminary sketch than as an archetype to be realized, for according to the procedure recommended by the artes poetriae tracts and the courtly makers alike, the prudent writer begins by inventing and disposing his materials and only afterwards ornaments them in a suitable way – as Hoccleve puts it himself, by first “draw[ing] and “dilat[ing]” the “mateer” into a new shape (S 2.358–59), and then embellishing that matter with the “swetnesse / of rethorik” (RP 2084–85).16 Form, according to this view, is a preconceived plan that the careful writer must keep in mind. But it is only a contingent plan, for without “vertuous mateer,” it will only take the construction of a poem so far.17 I would suggest that this brief exchange offers us two insights into Hoccleve’s poetics. First, for Hoccleve, the quality of a poetic composition hinges upon the quality of the “mateer” used to build it, for even the most ingenious of forms will do little good if the materials of a poem are not “vertuous” enough for its realization. Second, the strength and force of this “mateer” do not seem to be merely figurative qualities in Hoccleve’s view. On the contrary, his body of work often suggests, as we will see, that written matter has a very real sort of substance and force, up to and including

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the power to effect physical change in the world.18 What is more, Hoccleve seeks to harness this force not merely so that he might petition the powerful, although he certainly does that, but for a larger aim.19 This is to substitute poetry for the poet – to refashion, as Ethan Knapp writes, the passive “solipsism of the complaint” into an active “petition” that will speak, on the poet’s behalf, to the “social world.”20 Such claims about language and force may seem extravagant to us, but they would not have seemed so to Hoccleve. By the time he wrote the Series, he had been working at the Privy Seal for more than thirty years, copying out documents that could indeed act and even speak on behalf of the individuals they named. On its own, as James Simpson observes, the language of most people, and the especially the language of the “powerless,” is “forgettable” to the powerful.21 When the speech of the powerless is warranted by the language of the law, the church, or the crown, however, even the most powerless of individuals have a temporary chance to be heard.22 If Hoccleve’s comments about his situation are true – he tells us that he composes the Series at time when he is decidedly down on his luck, so much so that no “wight” will “commvne” with him (1.269) – then he would likely have jumped at any chance to bend the ear of the “prees,” and so it should not surprise us if we detect, in the urgent pleadings of the Series, the traces of the hope that Hoccleve’s poem might intercede with the reading public on its maker’s behalf.23 For if Hoccleve could manage it, perhaps he could use this poem to solicit the aid of that public – not by speaking to them in his own person, which would of course be pointless, but by sending forth a literary doppelganger “to goo / amonge the peple” in his stead (2.23–24). Even if the Series attempts to substitute its will and body for the will and body of its maker, however, it is also a text that displays skepticism toward the very possibility of such a conflation. Can a writer, it seems to ask, really exchange her book for her body, her written will for the will of her heart? The Series leaves considerable room for doubt. Nevertheless, it persists in the attempt, even if it suspects, rather like Thomas before his looking glass, that the attempt may be quixotic in the first place. Hoccleve once wrote that “the arc of a mortal life is shaped [formatur] after a pattern just as wax is stamped by a seal [impressionem cera recipit ex sigillo].”24 Perhaps it is no coincidence that the poet’s own seal also speaks to the hope, however distant, that one might reshape the course of one’s life through writing. “Va ma voluntee,” it reads.25 ***

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Halfway through the Formulary, an enormous collection of bureaucratic templates that Hoccleve compiled at the end of his Privy Seal career, there is a Latin letter entitled “Protection bone.”26 As one might guess from the title, this document is a letter patent that guarantees its bearer royal protection, a scrit that was meant to be borne openly upon one’s person, with a royal seal stamped in red wax en placard or en pendant, and with the text of the letter visible to all.27 Hoccleve copied out many such letters, and in its form, this document is hardly remarkable.28 What is remarkable, however, is what the document says – the circumstances that it describes, the specific protections it affords, and, especially, the shorthand name of its bearer. Here is the text of the letter in full. The king to each and every one of his justices, landowners, administrators, sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, ministers, officials and to all our other faithful liegemen and subordinates, up to and including freemen [tam infra libertates quam extra]: to all present who receive this letter, greetings. So that our loyal clerk T. H., ecclesiastical canon of Cathedral L., and prebendary of the prebend of T. in the same place, might be able, in point of fact [realiter], to take up and possess the prebend which has been given to him by our agreement under our royal laws, as determined by the judgment handed down in our court and on our behalf, we, wishing that our same clerk might remain in peace in his possession of his prebend obtained in accordance with our ecclesiastical law, free from any impediment, and for the sake of the bodily safety [securitate corporis] of the same T. and against the malice and injury of anyone and everyone who might presume to molest or impede [impedire vel turbare] the same T. or his agents from taking possession of his prebend or its profits and emoluments, or those who, in an act of reckless audacity, seek to weaken the laws of our crown in this region, hereby provide the same T. with the aforesaid prebend, with its fruits, returns, and profits [fructusque redditus et proventus], with whatsoever agents, ministers, and servants of the aforesaid prebend exist in any place whatsoever, up to and including freemen, and with the royal defense of our honorable goodwill [regio munimine dignis favoribus], and we take and place him under our protection, defense, and special royal oversight [tuitionem nostram regiam specialem], and we enjoin and command you and any agent of yours who might be busily sought out that you protect, take in hand, and defend [manuteneatis protegatis et deffendatis] the same T. and his aforesaid prebend, its fruits, returns, and profits, including whatever agents, ministers, and servants of that prebend there might be, up to and including freemen, neither bearing against them nor allowing to be borne against them, so far as you are able, injury, molestation, condemnation, violence, hindrance, or any other sort of trouble. And if there is any forfeit or injury to these persons or to their property that we would not wish, you must make it so that it is set right for them [corrigi faciatis], with no debt of goodwill [sine dilectione debite]. In witness of which matter etc. Issued etc.29

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Why did Hoccleve – or as this letter calls him, “our loyal clerk T. H.” – include this document in the Formulary? And why did he substitute his own initials for the other, more anonymous shorthand names that he uses elsewhere in its pages, such as “A. de B.,” “C. de D.,” or “un tiel?”30 One explanation is that he was here engaging, as he seems to do elsewhere in the Formulary, in a bit of imaginative role-playing.31 Just like this letter, three of the eleven documents that identify Hoccleve by his name or initials designate him as the new recipient or current holder of a benefice, a clerical stipend that, like the “prebend” discussed in the letter above, we know the poet longed for.32 But if Hoccleve took pleasure in fancying himself the recipient of such an income, it was likely just as pleasurable for him to imagine that he was the bearer of a document like this one – a letter that could make things happen for him in the social world. In one respect, the force of such a document would obviously lie in its power to bestow rights and privileges upon its bearer. The writ above, for instance, asserts the right of “T. H.” to take possession of the “profits” and “emoluments” of the prebend he has been granted. But in another and more complex respect, this force would reside in the very words of such a document, for this letter does not speak merely in its own voice. On the contrary, it speaks in the voice of the king.33 It hails, or interpellates, anyone who might read or hear its words, “enjoin[ing] and command[ing],” not merely some of the king’s subjects, but any and all of them, up to and including “you and any agent of yours.” It protects the bearer of the letter, not merely from some kinds of harm, but from any “injury, molestation, condemnation, violence, hindrance, or any other sort of trouble.” And it does all of this, not by means of raised sword or high wall, but through a force that may appear to be lodged within its very terms. If this document does speak to a kind of wish fulfillment, then, it suggests a wish, not just for some advantageous social position or set of privileges, but for a kind of talismanic social power – a power bestowed upon an individual via the power encoded in the words of the pardon, writ, or grant made out in his name. To believe in the reality of such a power may seem naïve. After all, words do not make things happen on their own: their perlocutionary effect depends upon the positions of those who speak them, and the conditions under which they are spoken.34 But like the medieval peasants who carried charters about like they were rabbits’ feet – or like those scholars of medieval literature who hang diplomas upon their office walls – Hoccleve had good reason to believe that the force of certain words stemmed, not just from their mediation of social authority, but from the numinous power of the words themselves.35

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In social practice, the effect of a fetish is rarely diminished by the knowledge that it is a fetish. Let’s begin by considering the semantic context of the Friend’s term for linguistic force in the Series: the word “vertu.” This term possessed two common senses during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first of these, which denotes a standard of moral excellence, persists to this day. When one speaks, for example, of the “vertu” of an ethically admirable person, it is this sense of the term that is operative. But “vertu” also possessed a secondary sense during Hoccleve’s time, one that referred to the “force” or “power” of some person or object.36 Although this sense of the word has mostly fallen out of use, it was commonplace in both Latin and the vernacular, even if the kind of force it denoted could vary quite a bit. In academic texts, for example, the term virtus could designate types of force that differed widely in kind, such as the hermetic power of certain words to channel the “force of the soul” (as in the work of Roger Bacon) or the semantic “force” of a word’s immediate and literal sense (as in late-medieval logic and exegesis).37 In popular science, by contrast, “vertu” most often indicated either the magical power (according to a proverb cited by Gower among many others) that God had supposedly lent “to worde, to herbis, and to stonis,” or the animating force that the human body’s vital powers were understood to exercise.38 It is possible that Hoccleve had any or all of these senses in mind when he wrote of the “vertu” of written matter in the Series. But in addition to the views on language and power found in these sources, we might also attend to two other accounts of linguistic force that were well known during Hoccleve’s time and that shaped his work in obvious ways. These are, first, the force associated with certain kinds of religious language, and second, the force of legal language. While Hoccleve, like any urban lay Christian, would have been broadly familiar with the language of sacrament, prayer, and liturgy, the close study of his poetry has revealed more specific debts to religious discourse. In a landmark article, Eva Thornley long ago noted the roots of La male regle in a well-established tradition of Middle English penitential lyric, one that can be divided, in Thornley’s view, into two subcategories: lyrics that perform a function analogous to prayer, either by petitioning God for aid or by confessing the faults of the speaker, and lyrics that perform a function analogous to homily, by framing the speaker’s actions as an example for the reader either to emulate or to avoid.39 Hoccleve’s claim that he is ripe for his grave, his lament for his wild youth, and his meditations upon the seven deadly sins are all tropes, as Thornley demonstrates, that can be found in this tradition of lyric.40 More recently, Robyn Bartlett has argued

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that the Series plays upon discussions of the sacrament of confession found in Middle English devotional literature; Isabel Davis has noted homologies between representations of the body in Hoccleve and in devotional lyric; Eleanor Johnson has identified the Sarum Breviary as a source for his style; Spencer Strub has linked his use of certain affective gestures, such as “brasting oute,” to modes of feeling found in devotional writing; and Amy Appleford has shown that the Series often adapts the language and tropes of the missa pro defunctis to its own ends – for in both the “Compleinte” and the Mass for the Dead, as Appleford demonstrates, the act of recording one’s sufferings in a book is troped as a penitential practice.41 “Who mai graunte me,” asks the speaker of the Mass, “that my wordis be writun? Who mai graunte me that thei be writun in a bok, with an yrun poyntel, ether with a plate of leed, ether with a chisel be grauun in a flynt?”42 Vernacular religious writing did not, however, shape Hoccleve’s poetry merely on the level of theme and source. On the contrary, it also appears to have influenced the poet’s views on the force of language itself. Consider, for example, just how many penitential lyrics concern themselves with problems of language, as one short poem does when it offers up a complex meditation on the way that deeds can become words – the deeds of Christ, for example, which are said to make up the “chartre” he “wrot” only “for love,” or the deeds of the sinner, which at the last judgment will be sought out “in werk, in word, in thought” so that they might “spek” for him before the throne of God.43 Other devotional lyrics invoke the power of religious language in a still more direct way. Eamon Duffy has argued that “faith in the ‘vertu’ of the Holy Name was particularly strong in the late Middle Ages,” so much so that “its mere repetition seemed full of power and blessing,” and Duffy’s point is certainly borne out by the frequency with which these lyrics invoke the “vertu” of holy language.44 One poem, for instance, attempts to call Jesus forth – “I coungere thee,” begins every other line – so that he might aid the speaker in his illness by wielding “all the vertues of the Masse.”45 Another prays that “thorough the vertu of the Holy Gost, / the Father, and the Sonne,” the “goodes” of the speaker will be kept safe.46 And yet another refers, again and again, to the “vertu” of holy words and holy signs. I conjour hem in the name of the Fader, and Sone, and Holy Gost; In hem is vertu althermost! † In the beginning and in the ending, And in the vertu of all thing Is, and was, and ever schal be— In the vertu of the Holy Trinitee—

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By the vertu of every Masse, That ever was seyde, more and lasse— In the vertu of herbe, grass, ston, and tree— And in the vertu that ever may be.47

This poem seems to suggest that the simple recital of certain terms and phrases, such as the Holy Names, will be enough to make something happen for its speaker. Like the words of the psalms – which, according to Richard Rolle, were possessed of “muche vertu,” could chase away “fendis,” might excite “aungels til our help,” and would do “away synne” merely through their utterance – the very “name[s]” of the “Fader, Sone, and Holy Gost” are implied, in this lyric, to have a kind of intrinsic force.48 In one respect, then, Hoccleve may fixate upon “vertuous” language in the Series because he wants to associate his own words with the kind of force that penitential, devotional, and even sacramental language was believed to possess. Indeed, when he alludes to the power of the “chartre of mercy” that Christ wrote with his “blood” (RP 3339), or when claims that the very act of writing can serve a “clens[ing]” or penitential end (S 2.216), this is likely the kind of force he has in mind.49 But as I’ve noted above, there is also a second tradition of writing that shaped the poet’s views on the power of language. This is the language of the law, which Hoccleve would have encountered in the countless writs, pardons, safe-conducts, grants, and licenses that he copied, day in and day out, over the many years that he worked at the Privy Seal. In the legal documents of the Formulary, the phrases “par vertue de noz briefs” or “par vertue de noz lettres” can be found everywhere.50 Letters that invoke this “vertue” are usually very specific about what they command, and equally direct in stating that, upon receipt of the letter, it must immediately be done. One writ, for example, orders two men, W. B. and M. S., to cut down those trees in the royal forests that have been afflicted by the recent drought, “par noz lettres de commission a faire souz notre grand seal en due forme.”51 Another commands – once again, “par noz lettres patentes” – that justices in South Wales cease their harassment of a man who has already been released, by the king, of all prior debts.52 Another directs the Chancellor, “par notre brief,” to issue a bill of exchange to be used for a transfer of money between two associates.53 And still others warrant their imperatives in a similar form, though to different ends: the transfer of a corrody from one person to another, for example, or the order that an archdeacon be remanded from the ecclesiastical courts and tried before the king’s bench, or the hastening of the payment of an annuity to one “John Langrigge,” or the immediate grant of “xx livres de deniers” to

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one “John Snell,” the king’s almoner, for the rebuilding of a church that had recently burned to the ground.54 What is more, certain templates in the Formulary suggest that it was the norm for an official letter to demand immediate action upon its receipt. One of these templates reads as follows. That a certain person do nothing against the prohibition [contre la prohibition] made to him in a letter, on the pain of what is contained in the said letter [sur la peyne contenue en dit brief]: Dear and good friend, let it be known that by our letter, etc. You are for certain reasons prohibited, etc. Thus in a few words: we command and charge [vous mandons enchargeant] that you do nothing [riens nattemptez] against our aforesaid prohibition and order, on the pain of what is comprised in our aforementioned letter [sur la peyne comprise en notre brief susdit]. Issued etc.55

This document is extraordinarily vague, but that is precisely the point: its inclusion in the Formulary indicates that the Privy Seal clerks copied out so many writs like this one that it was useful to have a crib ready to hand. The circumstances described in these writs may have varied, and the places and names might have changed, but what remained constant was the presence of clear and unambiguous formulae of royal command – in French, “nous vous mandons,” and “vobis mandamus” in Latin. Evidence from the Formulary suggests, then, that Hoccleve was intimately familiar with the various kinds of force that legal language could exercise, and the various forms that such language could take. We can further corroborate this claim if we consider the influence of the law and its terms upon Hoccleve’s poetry. With respect to the genres in which he wrote, for instance, we might observe that both the “Compleinte” and the poet’s other complaint poems take obvious inspiration, not just from the tradition of begging texts that scholars have alternately termed the “poetry of address” or the “literature of complaint,” but also from the legal bill of complaint, or planctus, which was employed as one means for initiating litigation during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.56 Bills of complaint had become popular because they offered plaintiffs a way to appeal directly to the King’s Law, either before the King’s Bench at Westminster, before their local justice of the peace, or before an itinerant court – at different times, the Eyre, Trailbaston, or King’s Bench.57 This mode of direct address is reflected in the language of the complaints themselves, which often appeal to the king, or the king’s justice, in a strikingly immediate way. Petitioners appearing before the Eyre Court, for instance, often claim that they have come before the justices only because they have no other recourse – because, for instance, they have already tried the local courts but can “can get no reasonable answer” except “before our lord

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the King or before his Justices,” or because the local courts are corrupt and “dare not go against” the “wishes” of the person named in the suit.58 Likewise, surviving complaints often stress the helplessness and desperation of those who seek the king’s justice. After handing over his lands and goods to a man who had promised, falsely, to take care of him in his old age, a man named Robert begs the court for help. “For pity’s sake,” he pleads, “give remedy to a poor man.”59 A woman named Edith complains that her landlord threw her out of her house the day after her husband died. She “prayeth” the court “remedy of your charity for God’s sake, for she is poor, and by these things she hath been brought to beggary.”60 And at the close of her request that the court halt the release of two men who have beaten her husband nearly to death, a woman named Maud sounds particularly desperate. “Sir,” she pleads, “if you believe not this complaint of mine that I make unto you, for God’s sake send some of your jurors that they may see in what plight my husband lieth.”61 The rolls indicate that the court declined to pursue her request. Why might Hoccleve have taken a literary interest in legal complaint? One reason is that it offered him a lesson in how the powerless might petition the powerful for aid – and so, in Hoccleve’s particular case, a lesson in how “to sue unto” a patron, such as Lady Westmoreland or Henry V, in such a way that the patron’s “grace” might “nat be denyed” (RP 1843–45). But a second reason is that he may have found the planctus, like many other legal forms, to be an occasion for literary invention, with respect to matters of plot and theme alike. Consider, for example, the role that a very common late-medieval document, a pardon, plays in a short story from the Regiment of Princes. At the start of this story, the king grants a vagabond a letter of “pardoun” for murder (3124). But the man murders yet again and then boasts of his deed to his compatriots: “He nas nat so frendlees,” he tells everyone, that he wouldn’t get off again, even if “he had slayn othir two” (3128–29). Returning to the king, the man now begs “grace” for this second murder (3137), but the king refuses him and revokes the “chartre” he had given to the man before, leaving him “chartrelees” and subject to arrest, not just for the second murder, but for the first one as well (3142, 3159). This story dramatizes, among other things, the difference between a charter (which grants a right, typically to property, to a person and his heirs in perpetuity) and a pardon (which releases a person from prosecution for a prior criminal act, or which commutes or remits a sentence already handed down as punishment for that act).62 Indeed, even if one had already been pardoned for a crime, to be left “chartrelees” was to find oneself in grave danger, for

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a defendant would typically be expected to produce his charter of pardon at any future time were he to be summoned before the court.63 The story also plays upon contemporary misconceptions about the differences between medieval legal documents, for pardons and charters alike were colloquially called “chartres,” even though the two documents possessed a very different kind of legal force.64 Hoccleve’s murderer may have made the mistake of conflating the two. He seems to have believed that his “pardoun” was a “chartre” in a technical sense, a document that granted him the right to commit homicide as often as he liked. Legal language and religious discourse alike, then, clearly shaped Hoccleve’s poetry on the level of genre and theme. But did these discourses influence his views on the force, or “vertu,” that literary language might exercise in particular? With this question in mind, I would like to turn now to a well-known passage from the Regiment of Princes, one that anticipates the discussion of literary making that takes place between Hoccleve and the Friend in the Series. Early in the Regiment, Hoccleve bemoans his circumstances to an Old Man whom he has met while wandering the fields outside London. He is poor, he tells the Old Man, and he now “now stonde[s] in the plyt / of scarsetee” (1221–22), with no tool to earn his living except his pen. After some consideration, the Old Man recommends that Hoccleve write directly to a wealthy prospective patron – a man no less than Prince Henry himself – to ask for assistance. As he says, “Conpleyne unto his excellent noblesse, As I have herd thee unto me conpleyne, And but he qwenche thy greet hevynesse, My tonge take and slitte in peces tweyne! What, sone myn, for Goddes deere peyne, Endite in Frenssh or Latyn thy greef cleer, And for to wryte it wel do thy poweer.”

(1849–55)

The Old Man’s suggestion that Hoccleve “compleyne” to Henry is a nod to the bills of complaint that I’ve considered above. By writing a literary version of such a planctus, the Old Man suggests, Hoccleve may be able to get his “patente,” or license of payment, changed so that he is not paid out of “th’eschequer” but out of the “hanaper,” or Chancery (1877–80). This might allow him to be paid in a more regular way. But Hoccleve is skeptical. He cannot – so he says in an embrace of poetic fiction – write in either French or Latin, and in any case, a certain “ordenance,” or statute, has recently been changed, with the result that “no graunt chargeable” can be transferred from one office to another (1881–82).65 Undeterred, the Old Man changes tack. Instead of composing

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a planctus, he suggests, perhaps Hoccleve might write a poem that does what a planctus would do – a poem that will divert and entertain Prince Henry even while it politely solicits his help.66 Such a poem, the Old Man continues, might well secure Henry’s aid, but it will only work if it is made from the right materials: “mateere of sadnesse” that is “growndid” on the Prince’s “estates holsumnesse,” and that can be “humblely” presented to Henry without any risk of embarrassment or offense (1948–52). At this point, the debate over the proper kind of matter for Hoccleve’s book seems to stall, for like the Friend, the Old Man specifies neither where Hoccleve might find this “mateere of sadnesse” nor what the characteristics of such “mateere” might be. If we read on, however, we will find that, in the stanzas immediately following the Old Man’s advice, Hoccleve does seem to identify a source for this matter, albeit one that is not commonly associated with “sadnesse” or “groundedness.” Here is what he says. “O maistir deere and fadir reverent, My maistir Chaucer, flour of eloquence, Mirour of fructuous entendement, O universel fadir in science! Allas that thow thyn excellent prudence In thy bed mortel mightest nat byqwethe! What eiled deeth? Allas, why wolde he sle the? “O deeth, thow didest nat harm singuler In slaghtre of him, but al this land it smertith. But nathelees yit hastow no power His name slee; his hy vertu astertith Unslayn fro thee, which ay us lyfly hertith With bookes of his ornat endytyng That is to al this land enlumynyng. “Hastow nat eek my maistir Gower slayn, Whos vertu I am insufficient For to descryve? I woot wel in certayn, For to sleen al this world thow hast yment. But syn our lord Cryst was obedient To thee, in feith I can no ferther seye; His creatures musten thee obeye.”

(1961–81)

At first glance, this encomium to Chaucer and Gower is puzzling. Why has Hoccleve gone out of his way to praise these poets, and to do so in such apparently self-deprecating terms? It is possible that Hoccleve sees himself, as scholars have sometimes argued, as a kind of child walking in the overlarge footsteps of his forefathers.67 But I believe a likelier answer is that this passage is not really an encomium to Chaucer and Gower, but an

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encomium to the force of their books, for both writers are here figured neither as people nor even as poets, but rather as what Sebastian Langdell calls “a metonym for the possibility of English poesie.”68 Chaucer, for instance, is presented to us as what Hoccleve later calls the “firste fyndere of our fair langage” (4978), the wellspring of a kind of literary discourse that he hopes, through his purported association with Chaucer, to appropriate for his own purposes.69 And it is easy to see why Hoccleve would wish to appropriate such a discourse, for according to the passage, Chaucer’s words are “vertuous” in precisely the way he requires. They “astertith” off the page and “lyfly hertith” the reader, even while retaining their literary character. They are grounded upon several sources of well-established authority, including “fructuous entendement,” ethical “vertu,” proper “prudence,” and even “universel … science.” They possess unmediated power, not merely amongst the poet’s circle or before the bench of his local magistrate, but everywhere.70 Indeed, as Hoccleve stresses twice, these words bring light to “al this land.”71 Thanks to Chaucer and Gower, he implies, English literature now channels a force akin to that of the crown, the law, or even the church, one that exceeds the resources of mere aesthesis – a force that has jurisdiction in every place, and perhaps in every time.72 Neither Chaucer nor Gower, of course, ever claimed such power for the words they wrote. But this is precisely the point, for what Hoccleve has done, really, is to use these poets as a peg on which to hang his own literary hat. By endowing them with the kind of philosophical, textual, and religious authority typically reserved for kings, judges, and priests, and then claiming that the words of their books are grounded in that authority, Hoccleve can make a still more ambitious declaration – that literary discourse possesses, in itself, a “vertu” akin to the force of legal or religious language. With this in mind, I would like to turn now to the Series. For as we will see, it is in that poem that Hoccleve makes his most radical claim for the “vertu” of literary discourse, even if that “vertu” proves, in the result, to be more unwieldy than he expects. *** J. A. Burrow once remarked that the Series is “a profoundly bookish work,” and if anything, this is an understatement.73 Allusions to the books that comprise the matter of the Series – Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma, tales from the Gesta romanorum, and Henry Suso’s Horologium sapientiae – crowd the pages of Hoccleve’s collection, so much so that the reader could be forgiven for feeling, at times, that she has been presented with

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nothing so much as a versified book report.74 What is more, Hoccleve’s allusions to these books are not merely ornamental. On the contrary, they stress that the matter that is the basis for the poem has been sourced, not from some abstract well of textuality, but out of particular codices. In the “Compleinte,” for instance, Hoccleve characterizes the Synonyma, not merely as a text that he read in some form or another, but as a material book that he encountered one day. This othir day a lamentacioun Of a wooful man in a book I sy, To whom wordis of consolacioun Resoun gaf spekynge effectuelly, And wel esid myn herte was therby, For whanne I had a while in the book reed, With the speche of Resoun was I wel feed.

(1.309–15)

Literary matter, here, is held at once to be physically and temporally situated (“this othir day … in a book I sy”) and efficacious (it “es[es]” the poet’s “herte” and “feed[s]” him with “the speche of Resoun”). At least in conceit, this matter is to be found in a real book that prompted a real change in the poet’s life. Just a few lines later, however, the book is suddenly taken back by the person who had lent it to Hoccleve, and in response, he stops t­ranslating from it and notes its absence with some regret. “Lenger I thoughte reed haue in this book,” he complains, “but so it shope that I ne mighte naught” (1.372–73). Even if, as Burrow suggests, this is simply “a convenient fiction,” the point is that Hoccleve represents his source as a physical object, as something that can be taken away.75 At the very moment when the “speeche of Resoun” has begun to produce the illusion of diegesis, Hoccleve closes the book and takes it out of our hands. It is in this sense that the Series does indeed take place, as Simpson has argued, in the space of Hoccleve’s “real life,” for the poem does not merely simulate the process by which a book is made, but further suggests that books exist only in conversation with the various social and material forces that produce and receive them.76 The reader, in the persona of the Friend, repeatedly enters and exits the poem in order to provide Hoccleve with suggestions and literary critiques, and Hoccleve himself draws attention both to the space and to the seams of the Series, noting what he has copied, where he has left off, and his reasons for writing it in the first place. In the “Dialogue,” for example, a change in Lancastrian law leads him to revise an earlier claim about coin-clipping in the same way that a clerk might emend a case history. “Whanne I this wroot,” he explains, “many men dide amis,” for “no statute made was thanne as that

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nowe is” (2.134–36).77 In the prologues and epilogues, in turn, the Friend appears with new books under his arm, and Hoccleve agrees to append matter found in them onto the Series – to add a missing prose moralization to the “Tale of the Roman Empress,” for instance, or to tack onto the end of his collection an additional story, the “Tale of Jonathas,” that the Friend has asked him to translate anew (see 3.974–75 and 5.83–84). The permeable frame of the Series is thus not nearly so rigid as what one finds in, say, the Canterbury Tales or the Confessio amantis. It is less a container than an aggregation of the contingencies that have shaped Hoccleve’s life, and that he has had to negotiate in order to write his book.78 Why did Hoccleve take such pains, not only to avoid producing the illusion of diegesis, but to dispel this illusion whenever it arose on its own? Why did he go to the trouble, as several scholars have noted, to insist that his book was not merely the product of his imagination, but a real object produced by the social and historical forces that shaped his life during the late 1410s and early 1420s?79 One explanation, as I noted in my introduction, is that the Series is more a compilation or a diary than a through-composed work of fiction.80 But a more compelling possibility, in my view, is that its peculiar resistance to diegesis stems from Hoccleve’s attempt to position it as a text whose semantic force obtains, not merely in the realm of aesthesis, but in the realm of social reality. If it is to possess a semantic force analogous to that of religious or legal discourse, that is, the Series must insist that it is no mere representation. But – and here is where this account of the Series starts to break down – Hoccleve’s poem is also a highly experimental and highly literary text, one that tests this premise to destruction in two ways. First, throughout the poem, Hoccleve often fractures the significative force of his language. This results in a quality of semantic multiplicity and ambiguity that is at odds with the singular and unambiguous semantics demanded by the language of the church (e.g., the notional precision of the liturgy) or of the law (e.g., the unequivocal commands of a writ). Second, the Series persistently questions the extent to which Hoccleve can control the semantic and symbolic power of his source materials. This questioning strikes at the very heart of the poet’s stated purpose in writing the “Compleinte,” because, if he is telling us the truth about his situation, his ability to substitute his book for his body, and to command that book to speak in accordance with his will, is precisely the thing on which his continued survival depends. If the “Compleinte” cannot reliably personify Hoccleve’s wishes, then it will hardly convince the “prees” that he is no longer ill.

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The Series is thus a difficult text to approach, because it makes bold claims for the instrumental force of its language in some moments while seeming to undermine that force in others. But we might begin by observing that the “vertu” of Hoccleve’s book is best gauged through an examination of its last three items. This is because Hoccleve composes these texts with an explicitly pragmatic end in mind: to “clense” the reader’s body of guilt, in the case of “Learne to Die,” to “amendes make” to the women he has offended, in the case of the first fabula, and to “cause” young men to “forber” from “riot” and dissolution, in the case of the second one (2.216, 2.786, and 5.10). And while he is not explicit about the particular method he will use to ensure that, in practice, these items will act upon their reader with the right kind of moral and social force, in the case of all three, he often draws upon the prescriptive power of epideictic rhetoric. In Latin literary theory, epideixis typically concerns the representation of character. As Matthew of Vendôme has it, the inner traits of a person, such as his or her qualities of “reason, fidelity, endurance, honorability, injuriousness, pride” and other aspects “of the soul,” ought to be “expressed” by the poet for the specific purpose of “praise or blame [ad laudem vel ad vituperium].”81 English court poets certainly followed this advice, but they also seem to have expanded the range of topics that could be subjected to laudation or vituperation. Gower’s Confessio amantis, for instance, frames many of its stories around the sorts of actions, and the sorts of people, that ought to be praised or blamed – for individual people, as Gower often reminds us, function as a “mirour of ensamplerie” to others, one wherein the actions of “goode men ben to comende, / and alle these othre god amende.”82 Chaucer’s Man of Law, in turn, repeatedly interrupts his story to praise Constance and condemn her opponents. If she is a “mirour of alle curteisye,” with a heart that is the “chambre of hoolynesse,” then those who persecute her are said to be the “welle of vices,” or to contain such “malice” and “tirannye” that the narrator has no “Englissh digne” to describe it.83 Hoccleve, for his part, certainly employs epideictic rhetoric in this twofold way – as a means for drawing the reader’s attention to moral and immoral behavior, on the one hand, and as a means for delineating the good and bad aspects of the human character, on the other. Indeed, the last three poems of the Series feature many interpolations in which the poet instructs his reader to take note of the morality or immorality of a certain action; several descriptions of characters who are said to be virtuous or vicious; and a long conversation with a young man who claims that he is a personified “ensaumple” and “mirour” of sinful deeds (4.295).84

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But in these same poems, Hoccleve also takes epideictic representation as an occasion to reflect, in a metapoetic way, on the “vertu” of language itself. In both fabulae, for example, magical power is often likened to the legal or sacramental power that certain types of speech or writing may possess. For example, the curative water that Jonathas acquires is compared to a “chartre” with the force to “ensele” the good “helthe” of the person who consumes it (5.516), while the Empress’s own powers of healing are tied up with her ability to compel those around her into “open shrifte” (3.776). In “Learne to Die,” this thematic association of power and language is taken to a still greater extreme, for as Sapientia tells us in that poem, the character of the young man is himself a piece of “doctrine substancial” (4.23), a body of language that has been rendered apparently physical (and certainly “sensible”) so that, under the guise of “liknesse and figure,” it might act with a greater affective force upon the reader (4.82–85).85 The term that Hoccleve typically uses to describe this affective power is “stiryng.” If we listen to the young man’s words in the proper way, he tells us, they will “stire” our “persone” to action (4.81; cf. 4.519). But how exactly should they “stire” us? One answer comes toward the end of the young man’s speech to the disciple, where he tells us that his words will only have their proper effect if we feel them to be written upon our very flesh – only, that is, if they are “picchid and pight” (4.760) in the heart and “reuolue[d] ofte” in the “mynde” (4.592). As he explains, “Euery day haue of me deep remembrance. Into thyn herte let my wordes synke. The sorwe and angwissh and greuous penance Which thow haast seen in me, considere and thynke That of peril thow art ful ny the brynke. Remembre on my doom, for swich shal thyn be: Myn yistirday, and this day vnto thee.”

(4.603–9)

The “vertu” of literary matter in “Learne to Die” thus resides in its capacity to provoke an affective and indeed embodied response – in the ability of this “doctrine substancial,” that is, to make us feel the “matire” and “hete” of “helle fyr” upon our very skin (4.789). The last three items of the Series appear designed, then, to exercise a “vertu” that recalls the force of legal or sacramental language – a force that, in the hands of a writer like Chaucer or Gower, has the power to “enluymn[e]” and “lyfly hertith” its reader (RP 1972–74). Like the “stiryng” Young Man, these poems are supposed to move their audience to action – and in the process, win for Hoccleve some material or social

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reward. This is not an ill-conceived plan, for some books certainly do stir their readers into motion, and it may be true that, in the past, Hoccleve’s poetry had moved his patrons to open their purses, if not their hearts. But how, we might ask, can Hoccleve ensure that the “vertu” of his book will work upon his audience as he wishes? Can he be certain that, even if his book does speak on his behalf, it will speak with the particular force that he intends? The Friend has his doubts. As he tells Hoccleve in the “Dialogue,” there is no guarantee that the Series will have the effect he envisions, for the “prees” have long ceased to talk of his illness and they may be reminded of it when they read his new work. “If thou be wiis,” he warns him, “of that matter ho. / Reherse thou it not ne it awake” (2.26–27). When Hoccleve resists the Friend’s counsel – “a, nay,” he cries, “nay, nay” (2.35) – the Friend reminds the poet that his poetry has not always received a warm reception from the public. Consider the example of L’Epistre de Cupide. That poem, the Friend explains, has for years offended the women who have stumbled across it. Surprised and bewildered that these readers think ill of him – for it was written, he claims, out of a desire to praise women, not to insult them – Hoccleve asks the Friend what he’s done to cause such offense. “What world is this?” he exclaims. “How vndirstande am I?” (2.774). The Friend answers him elliptically at first, by referring to Augustine’s example of a natural sign.86 “Wher no fyr maad is, may no smoke aryse. But thow haast ofte, if thow thee wel auyse, Maad smoky brondes …”

(2.683–85)

When Hoccleve still doesn’t get it, the Friend points to the misogynistic comments found in the poem, explaining that, in the Epistre, Hoccleve has “of hem [women] so largeliche said / that they been swart wrooth and ful euele apaid” (2.755–56). Once again, the poet balks at the Friend’s critique, and denies the charge by invoking, like Chaucer, the compiler’s stock disavowal of responsibility.87 As he says, “Considereth, therof was I noon auctour. I nas in that cas but a reportour Of folkes tales. As they seide, I wroot. I nat affermed it on hem, God woot. “Whoso that shal reherce a mannes sawe, As that he seith moot he seyn and nat varie, For, and he do, he dooth ageyn the lawe Of trouthe. He may tho wordes nat contrarie.”

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(2.760–67)

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But the excuse rings flat. “Thomas,” says the Friend, “how so it be, do as I seide. / Syn it displesith hem, amendes make” (2.785–86). In one respect, this exchange clearly speaks to Hoccleve’s dubious gender politics. It testifies, that is, to the poet’s patronizing attitude toward his women readers.88 But it may also represent, in a comic and dramatic way, the limits of Hoccleve’s control over his literary materials. In L’Epistre de Cupide, Hoccleve’s matter – or wood, to use the Friend’s analogy – ­kindled of its own power into a set of “smoky brondes.” The fire that rose from these “brondes” then sparked the anger of women readers. It matters little whether Hoccleve “affermed” or agreed with what those materials said, because he still selected them as his source even though he knew, as he tells us at the start of that poem, that such “mateere” would likely offend those with “eres” that “greeueth” to “heere” it (EC 13–14). This is precisely why Hoccleve’s defense fails to persuade the Friend. Nobody really cares what Hoccleve intended, because the matter he translated ultimately possessed a semantic force of its own. Given this fact, Chaucer’s “turne over the leef, and chese another tale,” or Hoccleve’s “therof was I noon auctour,” are inadequate responses to the anger of the reading p ­ ublic, and the Friend knows it.89 “By wordes writen, Thomas,” he says, “yilde thee. / Euene as thow by scripture hem haast offendid, / right so, let it be by wrytynge amendid” (S 2.698–700). The poet may not have set the fire, but he is still liable for its consequences. Coming at the tail-end of this debate, the Friend’s final comment, “let it be by wrytynge amendid,” speaks to a paradox at the heart of Hoccleve’s literary project. On the one hand, the comment confirms that, in the Friend’s view, Hoccleve may well be able to use the Series to represent himself to the “peple” in a new light, for as David Watt observes, the Friend clearly believes the “Compleinte” will indeed act on Hoccleve’s “behalf,” and that it will indeed “amend” what other people think about him.90 But on the other, the Friend’s comment also raises an obvious question. In the past, he observes, Hoccleve has been known to stab himself with his own pen. How can he guarantee, in this instance, that the Series will “amend” the opinion of his audience in the way he intends? Hoccleve never answers this question, but if we return to the three items of the Series that I’ve considered above, we may find that the Friend has good reason to worry. Let’s consider again the two fabulae, both of which feature characters who are rendered helpless because texts, objects, and people betray them in some way or another. Both fabulae begin with bequests of power: the Empress is granted the authority to rule her homeland while her husband is away, and Jonathas is given the “vertu” vested

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in three magic objects – a ring, a brooch, and a rug – that will allow him to win riches and favor while he studies at university. In both stories, the rightful possessors of this power cannot keep hold of it for long. The Empress is stripped of her authority – and in one case, of her clothes – by agents who ignore her lawful commands; Jonathas is betrayed by Fellicula and betrays his father in turn, by neglecting to “parfourme” the old man’s “wil” (5.148–49); and throughout both stories, the instruments used to mediate power are unsettlingly indifferent to human intentions. The “vertues” of the “ryng,” “brooch,” and “clooth” (5.134–36) are turned against Jonathas, for instance, while a “pardoun” to which the Emperor allows himself to be “bownde” permits his brother to walk free, even after he has confessed to having abused and disinherited the Empress (3.818–19). The misdirection of power in these stories is relentless, so much so that they seem to suggest, at times, that any attempt to control one’s secular destiny is pointless without the express help of God. This is certainly the implication of “Learne to Die,” where it is made clear that spiritual “vertu” and worldly “vertu” could not be more different from each other. It is one thing, the text suggests, to speak words or perform actions that possess “vertu” in this world – to speak, as the Young Man does, a “conplaynte” in pursuit of the “grace” of a great lord (4.143–48). But it is quite another to expect this “conplaynte” to have any force in the world beyond, for if the great lord to which one complains is “deeth” himself (4.141), this sort of petition will do one little good. These are strange stories to tell if Hoccleve hopes to assert, via the Series, a claim for his own literary authority.91 Stranger still is the fact that Hoccleve clearly knows that his poem subverts its own premise, because he often addresses the self-contradictions of the Series in a self-conscious and even metapoetic way. Consider how uneasily the allegorical prose moralizations, which are appended to the end of the last three items of the Series, mesh with the stories they are supposed to explicate.92 How, we might ask, does it hone the “vertu” of Hoccleve’s book to claim, as he does in the moralization to the first fable, that “it is impossible to plese the world and God” (3.1061), or to assert, in the moralization to the second one, that we should “do therfore as dide Ionathas” (5.709)? These passages undermine the singular and epideictic power at which the Series elsewhere aims, because they flatly contradict other passages in the poem, and also fracture, via their use of allegory, the semantic force of the Series into multiple senses. To this day, they offer scholars a means to interpret Hoccleve’s collection in ways that have little to do with the poet’s stated agenda.93 The same might be said for Hoccleve’s decision to include the second fable in

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the Series, for if he was in earnest in claiming to have composed the first fable in order to win back the hearts of women readers, the misogyny of the second fable would seem to undo that plan. Hoccleve notes this himself in the prologue to the second fable, where he imagines what women will say when upon discovering the “Tale of Jonathas” placed opposite to the “Tale of the Roman Empress” in his book. “O, beholde and see The double man; o, yondir, lo, gooth he That hony first yaf and now yeueth galle. He fo in herte is vnto wommen alle.”

(5.39–42)

Although the Friend ultimately convinces him to include the story anyway – he suggests, rather implausibly, that only “wikkid wommen” (5.60) will be offended by this new item – the poet is surely right to worry that its addition will rekindle “neewe smoke” (5.57) from the “smoky brondes” (2.685) of L’Epistre de Cupide. So far, I’ve argued that the Series at once proposes and undoes an unusual literary project. On the one hand, it claims for its words a literary “vertu” akin to the force of legal or religious language, but on the other, it fractures and even dissipates this “vertu” through its embrace of the thematic ambiguity and figurative valences endemic to poetic language. This is not to say that the words of the Series lack force altogether. At least in this reader, the two fables certainly provoke a measure of outrage and compassion, and “Learne to Die” assuredly prompts “conpunct” (4.562) thoughts about death and what one leaves behind. But these are not the only responses that these texts call forth, because the very obliquity of literary language makes it impossible for literature to act with the reliably performative force of a prayer or a pardon. And Hoccleve knows this too. Despite his notional claim to a literary “vertu” that will “lyfly hertith” (RP 1972) his readers, he is perfectly aware that his book will not accomplish the same thing as a writ or a charm, because poetry depends, almost by definition, upon its capacity to exercise more than one kind of semantic force at once. Why else would he claim, in one instance, that his book is intended for his “lord of Gloucestre” (S 2.534), but elsewhere insist that he has written it only “vnto” the “mercy and grace” of God (1.413)? Why else would he say, in one breath, that he is once again in “acord” with his “wit” (1.59), but in another, that his “conceit” no longer “tastith / as it hath doon in yeeris precedent” (2.250–51)? I would like to return now to the “Compleinte.” At the start of this poem, Hoccleve tells us that he suffers while he walks the streets of London

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because of the idle talk of those around him. He hears the passersby whisper that his madness will “resorte” again (1.88), and he feels they can detect its traces in his face (1.120–23). Unnerved by these whispers, he returns home and stands before a mirror, so that he might inspect his features for any signs of disease. As he writes, My spirites labouriden euere ful bisily To peinte countenaunce, chere and look, For that men spake of me so wondringly, And for the verry shame and feer I qwook, Though myn herte hadde be dippid in the brook, It weet and moist was ynow of my swoot, Wiche was nowe frosty colde, nowe firy hoot. And in my chaumbre at home whanne that I was Mysilfe aloone I in this wise wrought. I streite vnto my mirrour and my glas, To loke howe that me of my chere thought, If any othir were it than it ought, For fain wolde I, if it not had bene right, Amendid it to my kunnynge and myght. Many a saute made I to this mirrour, Thinking, “If that I looke in this manere Amonge folke as I nowe do, noon errour Of suspecte look may in my face appere. This countinaunce, I am sure, and this chere, If I it forthe vse, is nothing repreuable To hem that han conceitis resonable.”

(1.148–68)

This is a scene of attempted self-fashioning, one in which Hoccleve’s wits work (or “labouriden”) upon his recalcitrant flesh (his “chere and look”) in the presumptive hope that, with enough practice, the poet will be able to construct an appearance that looks normal to those among the “prees” with “conceitis resonable.”94 And it is executed with characteristic wit and dark irony. Rather than “gaze earnestly into the mirror like a Keatsian gallant,” as Knapp puts it, Hoccleve instead makes a number of “hops” toward it.95 He jumps, that is, toward his looking glass over and over again, in the hope that, by contriving a small element of surprise, he may catch himself in the act of looking mad. But Hoccleve’s plan does not succeed. Partly, this is because the mind does not alone control one’s “manere” and “chere,” but it is also because Hoccleve cannot see his body in the way that others do. “Men in her owne cas,” he notes, “bene blinde alday,” and “in that same plite I stonde may”

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(1.170–72). Even if he looks ordinary enough to himself, in other words, he cannot know whether he sees himself truthfully.96 Yet if this attempt at selffashioning fails, its failure ultimately leads the poet to a different means for responding to the “prees.” This is the “vertu” of words. Hoccleve may have little control, as he himself admits, over what other men “ymagine” him to be (1.197). Nonetheless, the “preef” of a “man” is properly known by “hise dedis” and not by its “his lookes” (1.200–203). For “as it is writen in bookes, Bi taaste of fruit men may wel wite and knowe What that it is. Othir preef is ther noon. Euery man woote wel that, as that I trowe. Right so, thei that deemen my wit is goon, As yit this day ther deemeth many oon I am not wel, may, as I by hem goo, Taaste and assay if it be so or noo. Uppon a look is harde men hem to grounde What a man is. Therby the sothe is hid. Whethir hise wittis seek bene or sounde, By countynaunce is it not wist ne kid. Though a man harde haue oones been bitid, God shilde it shulde on him contynue alway. By commvnynge is the beste assay.

(1.203–17)

“Commvnynge” – the act of conversing face-to-face with another person – is how Hoccleve initially hopes to solve his problems with the “prees.”97 Instead of gawking at him from afar, he suggests, people in the street ought to approach him and strike up a conversation, so that they have an occasion to “grounde” their views about his sanity or insanity upon the “sothe” of his words. If he can merely encourage the “prees” to talk with him, he reasons, then he may be able to persuade them that he is not so mad after all. But this, of course, is precisely what Hoccleve cannot do, for the “prees” is unwilling to believe what he says when he speaks to them in his own person.98 “Sithen welny eny wight for to commvne / with me loth is,” he complains, “farwel prosperite” (1.269–70). Indeed, the “prees” flee from him in the street (1.78–79). They pretend not to see him, turning away so often that the world itself seems, as he memorably puts it, to show him “a straunge countinaunce” (1.70). And so Hoccleve turns, instead, to books – books for his own comfort, like the Synonyma, with its exhortations to “wrastle … agein heuynesse” (1.342), and books of his own making that will “commune,” or so he hopes, with others on his behalf.99 To some extent, this is a sound enough strategy, for it is likely that Hoccleve, like many a bookish type, was more persuasive on the page than he was when he spoke aloud. But this strategy is not without

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its risks. For one thing, as we have seen, Hoccleve knows that there is little guarantee that the “Compleinte” will have the precise effect that he intends, for literature does not possess a force that can be directed or channeled in the same way as legal or religious discourse. But even if the “Compleinte” does succeed in advocating for its maker, composing it will entail a good deal of new reading and writing on Hoccleve’s part – and this, at least in the eyes of the Friend, is a great hazard in itself. Indeed, the Friend fears that Hoccleve’s initial illness, his “full bukkissh” brain (1.123), was caused by the poet’s longtime reading habit. The consumption of literature, he tells Hoccleve, has done nothing but harm him in the past: “thy bisy studie aboute swich mateere, / hath causid thee to stirte into the plyt / that thow wer in” (2.302–4). He even implies that the poet’s compulsive desire to read is suicidal in character, a reckless impulse akin to that of the thief who persists in stealing after being warned that he will hang for it. “Right as a theef that hath eschapid ones The roop, no dreede hath eft his art to vse Til that the trees him weye vp, body and bones, So looth is him his sory craft refuse, Sa farest thow. Ioie hastow for to muse Vpon thy book, and therin stare and poure, Til that it thy wit consume and deuoure.”

(2.400–406)

In the Friend’s view, there is only one reasonable course of action. Hoccleve must put aside his books and papers and accept things as they are. But how could he accept things as they are? As D. Vance Smith remarks, Hoccleve feels his present life to be a kind of “living death.”100 In the “Compleinte,” he tells us that he stands “in greet turment and martire,” like one “sette on fire” (1.62–63). He feels like a “vessel” that has been “lost” at sea (1.82). He daily seeks “reste,” but finds himself only in new “trouble” (1.195–96). He even says that he is “ripe” for his “sepulcre” (1.266). These sentiments, no doubt, have been inflected by conventional expressions for suffering in the literature that Hoccleve knew – by Job’s desire to crawl into the grave, or by King David’s penitential desperation.101 But this does not mean that they are inauthentic, for literary conventions often mediate a lived reality that is deeply felt.102 We have every reason to take Hoccleve at his word when he talks like this, and if we do, we may arrive at one explanation for his resistance to the Friend’s advice. This is that the poet feels he will not survive if he cannot change his life.103 Perhaps this is why Hoccleve presses on with the Series, even despite the Friend’s concerns. His poem may have only a slim chance of changing

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the minds of the “prees,” but this is a chance that Hoccleve will have to take. And even if the “prees” remains unconvinced, perhaps the Series will still bring him some favor in the eyes of God, to whose “mercy and grace” (1.413) he belatedly, and rather half-heartedly, directs his book.104 But there may also be a second reason that Hoccleve chose to continue with his labors. By 1421, Thomas Hoccleve had lived for more than thirty years through books – through the verses he wrote, the letters he composed, and the poems he copied out as a commercial scribe. For him, literature was no hobby. On the contrary, it was the seal that stamped his wax, a force that had structured his life and that obviously satisfied a personal need.105 This could be many things, of course, but what Hoccleve says is that books brought him comfort – that they offered him a “consolacioun” that “esed” his “herte” (1.311–13).106 Though he does not tell us how books were able to do this – at least, not exactly – it seems to me that he found relief in them because they offered him a glimpse of the unforeseen. The force of literature may indeed be unruly or even chaotic in its operation. It may elicit an unpredictable response from its readers. But this is precisely why it is novel. Through books, the mind is taken to another place – and even if one cannot live there, the travel will still be “good,” as Hoccleve tells Prince Henry, “for to dryve foorth the nyght” (RP 2141). *** In five of the manuscripts that contain the Series as a whole, the text of one additional poem may be found just after the conclusion of Hoccleve’s collection: John Lydgate’s Danse Machabré.107 The Danse is a powerful text, one inspired, as Lydgate tells us, by a Totentanz that he once saw frescoed on a Paris churchyard wall. He writes his own version, he says, both because he wants the images of the Danse to serve as an exemplary “mirrour” for his English readers and because he hopes that the poem may stir them to change their lives.108 As he writes, By exaumple that thei in her ententis Amende her lif in every maner age. The wiche Daunce at Seint Innocentis Portreied is with al the surplusage To shewe this worlde is but a pilgrimage Yeven unto us our lyves to correcte.

(33–38)

It is no coincidence that this poem would follow the Series in so many of its extant witnesses. The demand to “amende,” a fascination with the ­leveling power of death, and a preoccupation with the unruliness of the

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flesh are held in common by both. In the case of each one, moreover, the force of the text depends upon the extent of the reader’s imaginative identification with what she reads.109 In the “Compleinte,” Hoccleve identifies with, and then rejects, the image that he sees in the mirror, while in “Learne to Die,” the apostle identifies, in the image of the Young Man, the deadly culmination of the vices that he hopes to expel from his own person. At the end of the Danse, Lydgate’s text performs a similar gesture. Urging his readers to confront their mortality face-to-face, Lydgate describes the postmortem decay of the human body in striking terms. “Ye folke that lokyn upon this portrature,” he proclaims, “seeth what ye bene and what is youre nature: / mete unto wormes, and not ellis in substaunce” (633–36). If it is tempting to read these poems in juxtaposition, however, we should also note their differences. As Sophie Oosterwijk has observed, the Danse was likely translated in 1426 for a powerful, courtly audience – perhaps at their explicit request.110 By 1430, the poem had become the centerpiece for a civic project when its words were adapted by John Carpenter and painted, along with images, onto panels that were hung on the walls of the cloister enclosing the cemetery known as the Pardon Churchyard, on the northwest side of St. Paul’s Cathedral.111 We do not know whether Lydgate received direct or indirect compensation for his labors, but given the value of his name as a literary brand, it seems likely.112 And even if he did not, Lydgate clearly hoped for a reward, for the lenvoy to the Danse cheekily addresses the “lordis and maistres” who read it and mentions, if only in passing, its author’s desire for their “mede,” “goodly support,” and “favour” (657–64). In this respect, the Danse Machabré is an obviously instrumental text. It appropriates the language of religious devotion and seeks, through its “translacioun” (28) of that language into a civic context, to procure recompence for its maker. One might assume the same thing about the Series, of course, but Hoccleve’s poem is in fact quite different from the Danse, if not with respect to its stated aims, then with respect to its method and procedure. As I’ve argued in this chapter, Hoccleve writes the Series so that it might speak, on his behalf, to a public that no longer believes what he says. The problem is that the Series cannot be relied upon to say what Hoccleve wants it to say. Its literary “vertu” is too unruly for that task. Even while the Series roundly affirms the force of literary discourse, then, it either cannot or will not direct that discourse toward a single instrumental end, and this naturally limits its social utility. According to Lydgate, anyone and everyone, at “every maner age,” will be able to “amende her

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lif” simply by looking at the “mirrour” of his poem (DM 31–34). Its efficacy is guaranteed – or so Lydgate says. When Hoccleve tries to “amend” his own life before a “mirrour” (S 1.157–61), by contrast, it does him no good, and what is more, he cannot help but disclose that fact to us. Left merely to “hope” that God will bring back the “oolde affeccioun” that others once showed to him (1.391–92), he concludes his own attempt to win back that affection with an expression of unvarnished contempt toward the “prees.” Why should I care, he asks aloud, about the “peples ymaginacioun / talkinge this and that of my siknesse” (1.380–81)? We may wonder if such comments amount to a form of self-sabotage. Indeed, Robert Meyer-Lee has argued that moments like these may indicate Hoccleve’s coded rejection of patronage systems and public approval alike.113 But perhaps Hoccleve also felt that the matter of his poem, like the matter of his body, would do what it wished even against his own wishes. Perhaps he felt that he was the wax it would stamp, and not the other way around.

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chapter 4

Lydgate and the Surplus of History

Near the end of his bloody and turbulent poem on Theban history – the socalled Siege of Thebes – John Lydgate pauses to address his reader.1 The Siege, which Lydgate finished by late 1422, recounts the familiar tale of Oedipus, Jocasta, and the unlucky city they call home, and so the poet knows he is walking well-trodden ground.2 After all, he admits, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the work of other, unnamed “auctours” (ST 4541) have told this story before, and in any event, one could hardly say that the matter of Thebes was unknown to medieval audiences.3 The problem, in Lydgate’s view, is that prior treatments of this matter have left out key details in their retellings of it. If Chaucer’s Tale “reherseth every del” (4531) of the story from the point of view of Theseus, the Athenian duke whose “gentyllesse” and “ful good entente” (4520, 4529) restore order to the city in the wake of its civil war, then it nonetheless remains silent on a number of points that may call this “gentyllesse” into question, such as the good duke’s decision to slaughter the Theban people, enslave Jocasta and her daughters, and raze the city until “nought was left but the soyle al bare” (4561). And if the texts of other, unnamed “auctours,” such as the Roman de Edippus and the Hystoire de Thebes, do include these grim details, then they pass over other parts of the story in turn, such as “what fil” to Jocasta and her daughters after the destruction of their home (4553), or the misery of the Argive women after Theseus departs (4600–1). Lydgate knows that, even when taken in the aggregate, these sources offer the reader only a piecemeal account of the Theban conflict. He tells us this outright. Nonetheless, he confesses to the reader that the treatment of history in his own poem will be little better, for as he admits, To tellyn al wer to gret a charge, And ek also, as ye shal understonde, At the gynnyng I took no mor on honde Be my promys, in conclusioun, But to reherce the destruccioun Of myghty Thebes shortly and no more. 111

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The past, for Lydgate, is like an iceberg with many peaks. It can surface only in part, through a patchwork of writings that never “tellyn” its “al.” Lydgate is right to claim that none of his sources recount the Theban story in full. Indeed, the Thebaid, Roman de Edippus, and Hystoire de Thebes all feature remarkable variation in what they chose to treat, and not to treat, from the matter of Thebes.4 He is also correct to note that the gaps and lacunae in these texts pose a serious historiographical problem, since they may bias the reader toward one side or the other in the Theban war, as Chaucer’s Tale may do by recounting those parts of history that stress Theseus’s “gentyllesse” instead of his savagery.5 But I do not think that a desire either to critique or to compete with these sources is the primary motive behind Lydgate’s claim that “to tellyn al” is “to gret a charge” for the poet of history.6 Rather, I would suggest that his fixation upon their incomplete character reflects a broader concern with those aspects of history that remain beyond the grasp of written forms – those parts of the matter of history that would complicate, for instance, a simpler story about Duke Theseus, one that understands his actions merely as the expression of noblesse oblige. Seen in this light, Lydgate’s open acknowledgement of the historical material that his poem leaves out is not a local fluke but the product of a broader tendency in his poetics, which tend at once to fixate upon the general discontinuity of history with literary form and to draw attention to the particular aspects of history that form may exclude – to those qualities and quantities of history that Lydgate elsewhere calls the “surplus.” This “surplus,” which the poet also terms the “remnant” or the “residu,” takes many shapes across his oeuvre.7 In its broadest sense, “surplus” simply means “the rest” or “the remainder.” This would seem to be its denotation when, in his lenvoy at the end of the Troy Book, Lydgate asks the reader to excuse “the surplus” of his many digressions and attend instead to the poet’s “trewe menyng” (77); or when, in the Siege of Thebes, King Lycurgus states that he cares little for the “surplus” of his kingdom and wealth (3357). But “surplus” also has a more specific and literary-critical sense in Lydgate’s writings, one that refers to whatever textual matter has been left out of a given poem. This is what the word denotes when, in the Fall of Princes, Lydgate tells his reader that he has deliberately cut the conclusion to the story of Pope Joan  – “I wil on hire spende no more labour, / but passe ouer al the surplusage” (9.1010–11) – or when, in the prologue to the third book of that same text, he reflects upon what he has written so far, and what remains for him to write. Just as pilgrims, he says, often take comfort in “reknyng the miles be computaciouns, / which thei haue passid”

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(3.111–12), so do poets “rekne” the “residue and the surplusage” of “ther labour komyng” (3.120–21), so that they know what lies ahead and what behind. A similar figure appears at the end of the Troy Book. Here, Lydgate instead casts himself as a plowman, “wery, feint, and waike” (5.2927) at the end of his labors. But almost now at the londes ende Of Troye boke, ficche I wil a stake, Saue I mote spende a fewe lines blake The laste chapitle shortly to translate Of al this werke, and ympen in the date Of thilke day deth sette on hym arest, Ful execute by hym he louede best.

(5.2930–36)

With the exception of the “surplus” (5.2914) of three final items that Lydgate plans to “ympen,” or graft, onto the last few leaves of his text, the bounds of the Troy Book are thus clearly defined by the “stake” that the poet has “ficched” at its edge, its territory marked off from the greater matter, or “londe,” in which it resides.8 Only some of this “londe” has been covered by the Troy Book, but this does not necessarily mean, as Lydgate suggests, that the matter included in his poem should be held distinct, either in quantity or in quality, from the surplus of matter that it excludes. This chapter considers the role that this “surplus” plays in Lydgate’s oeuvre of historical poetry, with a particular focus on the Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that the poet finished for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, by 1438 or 1439.9 It analyzes Lydgate’s use of the surplus in a twofold way. On the one hand, it argues that the surplus is a symptom of the poet’s negotiation with a vast body of historical materials that, as he knows well, exceed his capacities as a maker. In this most basic sense, “surplus” is simply the term that Lydgate employs whenever he wishes to cue his reader to the fact that there are parts of the historical record that remain both quantitatively and qualitatively beyond the purview of his book. But on the other, it suggests that this “surplus” also carries symbolic weight in Lydgate’s theory of making, because it indexes his belief that, in the act of composing any text, a maker will always leave something out. This could be a certain measure of textual matter, of course, but it could also be a certain quality of conceptual “excess,” or “ineffable” aspect, or even a “metapoetic” sort of “surplus.”10 Sometimes, this conceptual “surplus” has its roots in something concrete. In the Danse Machabré, for instance, Lydgate tell us that “al the surplusage” of his poem can be found painted upon the walls of the Cimitière des Innocents, in Paris.11 Here, “surplusage” immediately denotes the French

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text that serves as Lydgate’s source, but it also connotes, in a more figurative sense, the bones of the dead that were stuffed within the walls of the cemetery charnel houses – or even, perhaps, the experience of death that these bones in turn connote.12 More often than not, however, this conceptual surplus is rather more abstract. This is especially true when the poet invokes it in connection with history, for Lydgate seems to believe that history itself should be understood as a kind of surplus. It is, as he tells us, a vast “reuolucioun / of fatal thing,” one whose “causes,” “confusiouns,” and “harmys” cannot be half-told. For gladly ay the reuolucioun Of fatal thing, by disposicioun, Is so envious, and alwey meynt with wo, That in this world, wher-so that we go, We trewly may aduerten in oure thought, That for the valu of a thing of nought, Mortal causes and werris first by-gonne; Strif and debate, here vnder the sonne, Wer meved first of smal occasioun, That caused after gret confusioun; That no man can the harmys half endite.

(TB 2.119–29)

Given this view of history, it should not surprise us that Lydgate’s historical poems often stress the fact that they merely “half endite” the events they recount. For to attempt any more than this, Lydgate suggests, would be to paper over a surplus of history that even the most capacious forms of writing will invariably miss. Lydgate was hardly the first writer to note such a “surplus of history.” More than a thousand years before him, Livy had alluded to a similar idea in likening the topic of his own work to the vast scope and bottomless depths of the sea.13 Even if he was not the first to describe it, however, Lydgate’s peculiar sensitivity to this “surplus” still demands the attention of literary historians, both because it casts light upon practices of poetic making that were ubiquitous, not only in Lydgate’s work, but in Lancastrian culture more generally, and because it speaks to the historical role that Lydgate may have felt the Fall of Princes could play during his own time. With respect to its tactics of making, to start, the Fall takes inspiration from two bodies of discourse that are seemingly at odds with each other. These are the artes poetriae tradition of prescriptive literary theory, which prized stylized and artificial forms of expression, and monastic historiographic practice, which rejected style and artifice in its professed

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fidelity to what Lydgate terms the “substaunce” or “trouthe” of the historical record. I would suggest that the poet’s use of both traditions in the Fall is driven by the same impulse that motivates his attention to the surplus. He wants to stylize and formalize history even while noting that history exceeds the resources of style and form. This self-contradicting and doubled motive exemplifies the paradoxes of high Lancastrian making, which has often been characterized either as the plain-spoken verse of counsel or as the performance of “aureate” extravagance.14 It has also led some critics to claim that Lydgate takes a reductive view of history, for as Derek Pearsall once observed, the forms that he uses to write about the complexities of the past, like the ballade-form or the casusnarrative, are remarkably self-consistent and even “mechanical” in their operation.15 Rather than reducing history to form, however, I would observe that Lydgate in fact points up the discontinuity of form with history, so much so that it is very unlikely that he felt the two were commensurate. The rigid casus-narratives of the Fall, for example, hardly ask to be conflated with the historical matter they treat. On the contrary, these forms draw explicit attention to the matter they exclude, and they work less by representation than by analogy, which is why Lydgate often instructs his readers to find points of resemblance between the rigid arc of the casus-form and the more fluid trajectory of historical events to which it has been applied – to “countirpeise,” as he often says, the schematic form of the casus with the history it schematizes.16 Lydgate offers us a personification of this idea in the figure of Polyphemus, to whom he compares himself three times across his oeuvre.17 Just like the one-eyed god, Lydgate confesses that he too is nearsighted, for he also gropes after “mater” that is “vnkouth and ­wonderfull” (Edm 2129–30). I resemble vnto Polypheme, That hadde oon eye set in his forhed. Nat lik Argus, of liht I kan not deeme, Which causith me, allas, whan I take heed, That hand and penne quake for verray dreed.

(Edm 2136–40)

In contrast to the sophistication of Argus’s vision, Lydgate’s eyes ­cannot perceive depth. They see the world, as he often remarks, only in the myopic tones of “whit and blak” (e.g., Fall Prol.463–66). It is thus the reader’s job to provide the surplus of perspective, depth, and color – to identify what is missing from Lydgate’s text and supply it as best she can.

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In the Fall, then, Lydgate seems to demand a doubled hermeneutic attention from his reader. On the one hand, he directs our gaze toward a surplus of history that escapes the forms of his poetry, while on the other, he points up schematic resemblances between certain aspects of those forms and certain aspects of the history they treat. But why would Lydgate ask his reader to approach the Fall in this way? To answer this question, we need to consider the literary-historical significance of Lydgate’s poem, and in particular, its relation to its powerful addressee, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester.18 The fourth son of Henry IV, Humphrey split the de facto rule of English possessions during the minority of Henry VI with his older brother, John, duke of Bedford. John managed the war in France while Humphrey looked after the realm’s insular territories, ceding official control of them only when his brother was home in England.19 As one might imagine, this tenuous arrangement – along with Humphrey’s many clashes with his foremost political rival, Cardinal Henry Beaufort – made the 1420s and 1430s a time of considerable unease.20 And Lydgate, as I will suggest, took the Fall of Princes as an occasion to comment obliquely upon this tense state of affairs. Why might Lydgate have wanted to speak to Humphrey’s complex political position, and what might he have been trying to tell him? One possibility, as Paul Strohm has suggested, is that the Fall is a work of didactic counsel, one that sought to train Humphrey in the practical arts of governance. By reading Lydgate’s text, Strohm argues, Humphrey could familiarize himself with tactics of Senecan prudence and Machiavellian calculation alike, so as to “Fortune-proof himself” against future political disaster.21 A second possibility, one proposed by Derek Pearsall, is that the Fall is instead a text in the contemptus mundi tradition, “a vast and dark perspective of human history” that is “shot through with splendor and contempt.”22 In Pearsall’s view, Lydgate’s poem is concerned less with secular maneuvering and more with encouraging its patron to adopt the stance of the resigned contemplative. Both accounts certainly speak to aspects of the Fall. In some moments, Lydgate’s poem does urge its reader to hew to the path of prudence and moderation associated with “moral Senec” (3.4056).23 In others, it clearly presses her to detach herself from the historical world so that she might view it with what Lydgate calls “a maner contemplacioun” (1.106). But if Pearsall’s argument does not align with Lydgate’s practical-minded aims – the poet twice informs the “noble pryncis” who may be reading him, for example, that by reading of “othres fallyng,” they may “correcte” their own behavior and so avoid the same fate (2.153–54; cf. 1.5547) – then

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Strohm’s view does not fully account for the many stories in Lydgate’s collection that demonstrate what James Simpson has aptly termed “the treacherousness of history.”24 What tips for practical action could Humphrey have possibly gleaned, we might ask, from the story of Cadmus (see 1.2045–2149), who makes one savvy decision after another only to be betrayed, in Lydgate’s version of the story, by his own liegemen? How might Humphrey have learned to “Fortune-proof” himself by reading the story of Mithridates of Pontus (see 6.1359–757), who takes every conceivable measure to stay ahead of the winds of fate, but still finds himself overtaken by them in the end? It makes little sense, then, to construe the Fall as a work wholly committed either to contemptus mundi or to prudential instruction. What I will suggest instead is that the motives behind Lydgate’s most extensive historical poem are best understood through a study of the poet’s view of history itself. History, as I’ve noted above, is for Lydgate a “gret confusioun” (TB 2.128) of things that we can only ever grasp in part. In keeping with this fact, the wise historical actor, like Humphrey, ought never to forget that every step he takes is shadowed by a surplus of history, one that exceeds his knowledge, power, and control. He can no more be the author of his destiny than Lydgate can be the auctor of his poem.25 No doubt, a certain quietism may lie behind this position. Stable patrons make for wealthy poets, and it was certainly in Lydgate’s self-interest to convince the generous duke that peace, steadiness, and largesse would promise the longest and happiest of rules.26 But Lydgate may also have wished for Humphrey to recognize the limits of his secular power for a more principled reason. Domination and war were the common tongue of English and French policy during the 1430s, and so Humphrey may well have assumed that the cyclical bloodshed and cut-throat politics of the Fall were merely a representation of history itself. But there are, of course, many histories, and this is perhaps why Lydgate so often draws his patron’s attention to what is left out of these bloody tales. What, he seems to ask Humphrey, is the surplus of all this violence? And why does it always seem to matter less than the honor and glory of the great? *** As Lydgate tells us in the prologue to the Troy Book, there are two types of historical poets: those who lie, and those who tell the truth. In the first camp are those honest “auctours” who came “vs be-forn” (Prol.149).27 Statius, whose Thebaid tells the “trouthe” about the “rueyne and distruccioun” of “Thebes” (Prol.220–27), is one such “auctour,” as are Dares

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Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis, two supposed eyewitnesses to the war at Troy who “wrot moste trewly” (Prol.311) about what they saw – so much so that, despite local differences of language, there is only “consonaunce,” and no “variaunce,” in their respective accounts of the conflict (Prol.315–16).28 But, Lydgate continues, there is also a second camp of history writers, and these take far less care with the historical “trouthe” of the matter they handle. Rather than recounting the events of the past “feithfully” in “her writyng,” some poets, such as Homer, choose to “transform[e]” history “in her poysy” (Prol.260–62), diluting the purity of its facts with their “veyne fables” and “false transumpcioun” (Prol.263–64).29 Unable to resist the lure of a story better than the one history provides, these raconteurs “hyde trouthe falsely vnder cloude” (Prol.265). They alter the substance of what really happened in their pursuit of a more appealing representation. Most of this will sound familiar enough to readers of Lydgate: the praise of “trouthe” and “substaunce,” the desire for “consonaunce,” and even the invocation of Dares and Dictys. Indeed, all of these elements are commonplace in the poet’s work, and, as Robert Meyer-Lee observes, ­situate the Troy Book squarely within a tradition of monastic historiography that Lydgate would have known well.30 More unusual, however, is the poet’s odd lexis (“transumpcioun,” “cloude”), and its presumptive source, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova. Like Lydgate, Geoffrey also identifies transsumptio as the master-trope of all figures of thought, or ornata difficultas.31 He also disapproves, like Lydgate, of those writers who draw a “cloud” over their style through the overuse of convoluted tropes and figures, and likewise compares the sharp-eyed writer to Argus (and so, by extension, the nearsighted one to Polyphemus).32 While these allusions are unremarkable in themselves, their appearance in a discussion of history writing is striking, for Lydgate here appears to have used the standards of a poetic and rhetorical discourse to measure the relative truth or falsity of what he takes to be a historical discourse. Homer’s crime is not that he writes about history with poetic techniques, or “transumpcioun,” but that he employs these techniques to distort the truth of history, and so uses “transumpcioun” in a way that is “false.”33 It would seem, then, that in Lydgate’s view, all history writing makes use of the tools of rhetoric, but only some of it, such as the work of Dictys or Dares, employs these tools in the proper fashion, and so avoids any distortion or adulteration of ­historical “trouthe.” Lydgate reveals a few things about his views on making in this little discussion of history and poetry. The first is that, insofar as he takes inspiration from the techniques of monastic historiography, he also draws upon

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the work of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century artes poetriae t­ heorists, such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf. The second is that he appears to see little necessary conflict between these two traditions. The third is that he seems to conceive of poetic form as a kind of “cloude” or “schroude” (TB Prol.265–66) – as something that covers matter but does not necessarily bear a connection to its essence. I will argue that all three of these points cast light both on Lydgate’s poetics and on the poetics of his fifteenth-century contemporaries, because, when taken together, they speak to many of the apparent contradictions in Lancastrian making  – its combination of an “aureate” style with a resistance to verisimilitude, for example, or its doubled commitment to rococo forms and the value of “trouthe.” What is more, Lydgate’s debts to the monastic chroniclers and the artes poetriae theorists also help to explain his poetic tactics in the Fall of Princes. Indeed, as I will suggest below, Lydgate’s choice of the casus-form and his fixation upon its surplus are equally motivated, if in different ways, by his attempt to hold true to the tenets of both traditions. Before we turn to the Fall of Princes, however, a more general account of the relationship between rhetoric and history writing in fifteenth-century literary culture will first be necessary. To start, we might observe that Lydgate lived and wrote at Bury St. Edmunds, and so he would have been familiar with the predilections of the chronicle tradition that flourished at that monastery during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.34 The first of these was a belief in the continuity of successive but tangent historical accounts. According to this view, the truth of the historical record stretched backwards through time, in an unbroken chain from auctor to auctor and source to source, to the body of a person who had once witnessed a historical event with his own two eyes.35 Here, for example, is how Otto of Freising describes this idea. It is said to have been a custom of the ancients that those who had perceived with their senses [sensibus perceperant] the actual events as they took place should be the ones to write about them. Whence also it is customarily called “history” from “hysteron” [hystoria ab hysteron] which, in Greek, signifies “to see” [videre]. For everyone will be competent to speak more fully [plenius edicere] of the things which he has seen and heard [vidit et audivit].36

Although medieval writers hardly felt that all eyewitnesses were equal, the rhetoric of witnessing in historiographic theory shaped the procedure by which the Lancastrian poets credentialed their sources in practice. This procedure, which Mimi Ensley calls “accretive historiography,” typically involved the yoking of one’s text to a stemma of previous texts, so that one might claim that, thanks to the stemma, one’s own work was as unmediated

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an account of a historical event as possible.37 John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine, for example, purports to be a Middle English verse translation of a Middle English prose translation of a Latin translation of a Greek exemplar originally written by Saint Katherine’s confessor. A parson from St. Pancras, we are told, only recently found the book “fer up in Grece i-beryed in the grownde.”38 In similar fashion, Lydgate takes care to claim that his own source for the Troy Book, Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, is stemmatically linked to the two most authoritative eyewitness accounts of the events at Troy, those of Dares and Dictys, onto which Guido is said to have “ymped,” or grafted, his own text so closely that, despite their inevitable differences in language, “in effecte the substaunce” of the historical matter “is the same” (Prol.359–66).39 All of this suggests that Lancastrian poets and monastic historians alike were preoccupied with what Maura Nolan has termed “facticity,” or the accurate preservation and transmission of the “trouthe” of historical matter from its earliest witnesses to its latest instantiation.40 And this emphasis upon facticity went hand in hand with the second great predilection of monastic historiography. This was its desire to be “compendious,” or all-inclusive, in its treatment of a topic.41 Indeed, “compendious” is one of Lydgate’s favorite words, and the compendious aesthetic of his historical poetry echoes the tendency, from the twelfth century onwards, for monastic historians to see themselves more as compilers of historical documents (casus) than as students of the causes of history (causae).42 Gervase of Canterbury and Henry of Huntingdon, for instance, each characterize their labor as a form of compilation, and a range of other historians, both in England and on the European continent, apparently felt obliged to gather every scrap of relevant historical material into their eclectic and wide-ranging texts.43 By the end of the fourteenth century, this demand for historical totality seems to have weighed heavily on some writers. For example, a despairing Ranulph Higden, here translated into Middle English by John Trevisa, complains to his reader about the difficulties caused by a “matir” of history too vast for the powers of any one man. Like the “laborintus,” or maze, of “Dedalus,” he says, this matir … hath many halkes and hurnes, wonderful weies, wyndynges and wrynkelynges, that wil nought be vnwarled … my witt is ful luyte to unwralle the wrappyinges of so wonder werkes: the matire is large, writers therynne beth many, and greet for fulnesse therof.44

In this passage, Higden echoes William of Malmesbury, who at one point also describes the matter of history as a “tangled labyrinth [inextricabilem

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labyrinthum] of things and events,” and at another, pictures it as “a heap [strue] of things that have lain hidden [latebant] since antiquity.”45 For both men, writing about history in all its “large[ness]” and “fulnesse,” its vastitas and saturitas, is a nearly impossible task.46 In his reflections upon the labors of the medieval historian, Higden draws attention to a problem that history writers both past and present have often faced. How, given the enormous scope of history, can the diligent historian write about its totality in a way that is organized and comprehensible – and, if possible, in a style that is pleasurable to read? One response is to turn, as Higden ultimately does, to the tools of rhetoric. At the start of the Polychronicon, he praises the work of earlier historians, who he says were experts at “putting and medlynge to gidre profightes and swetnes,” or, in Latin, utile dulci commiscentes.47 This, of course, is a nod to Horace’s famous claim, in the Ars poetica, that the true poet mingles together the useful with the pleasant, or miscuit utile dulci.48 Like Lydgate’s allusion to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Higden’s use of Horatian rhetorical theory in a discussion of history writing is striking, but it is not unprecedented. From the twelfth century onwards, rhetoric and history writing had in fact grown more and more intertwined, so much so that, by Higden’s time, rhetorical figures and classical allusions were commonplace in the chronicles.49 This is easy enough to see in Thomas Walsingham’s wonderful Chronica maiora, where whirlpools that devour ships off the coast of King’s Lynn are likened to Charybdis, and where Richard Fitzalan, the late earl of Arundel, appears in a vision speaking lines from Ovid.50 Most spectacular of all is Walsingham’s depiction of the Battle of Agincourt, which takes place in a netherworld between the fifteenth-century Pas-de-Calais and the great battlefields of classical epic. Virgil furnishes golden trappings for the cavalry, Henry V alludes to Lucan, and English arrows fly straight out of Statius and into the French infantry lines.51 Walsingham’s prose is justly admired for its patina, but I would argue that Walsingham and his contemporaries took not only certain styles but also certain tactics for handling their materials from the rhetoricians. First among these was dispositio, which dictated the proper way to structure, or “dispose,” the matter of a text.52 Rita Copeland has observed that medieval rhetoric tends to shift the object of inventio away from “a field of conceptual coherences” and toward “a field of textual coherences,” with the result that the rhetorical handbooks focus much of their energy on dispositio, the “amplification and variation of materia that has previously been realized in some kind of linguistic form.”53 Put differently, these texts offer a wealth of advice on how to restructure textual matter that, just like the matter of

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history, already exists, and so can neither be wholly changed nor wholly discarded. Matthew of Vendôme, for instance, tells new writers that materia exsecuta, or textual matter that “has been treated previously” by another writer, must retain “the course [tenorem] of its poetic narration [poeticae narrationis].”54 In the broad strokes, in other words, the narrative structure of this matter must remain the same. But at the same time, Matthew also says that new writers are free to compress or expand certain aspects of that matter in their own poems. “Things understated should be filled in [suppleri],” he remarks, while “superfluous” aspects of the matter should be “completely discarded [aboleri].”55 The consonances between Matthew’s attitudes towards materia exsecuta and the stance that the chroniclers adopt towards the matter of history are more than coincidental, moreover, for if we turn again to Higden’s Polychronicon, we will find that, in his preface to that work, Higden deploys a wealth of similar metaphors to describe his process of composition. I schal entre in to the feeldes of oure forme fadres, and folwe the rype men, yif ich may any wyse leese and gadre me som eres that rype men schedeth and skapeth of here hondes; other, nameliche, yif I myghte gadre somwhat of the crommes that falleth of lordes bordes, that somtyme were fulfilled and left hir relif to hir children. And also yif I myght gadre eny scrappes of the releef of the twelf cupes, and somwhat putt to and eche writinge of auctours, as a dwerf sittynge on a geauntis nekke; wher thorugh yongelynges mowe be brought to lore and gretter men to vse and to besynesse i-spyed, that they mowe be enformed and i-taught by this schort tretys, that haueth nought i-seie the grete volyms and large, that beeth of stories i-write, nought sotilte of sentence, nother faire florischynge of wordes, but swetnesse of deuocion of the matire schal regne in this book.56

Matthew’s “course of narration” has become, in Higden’s agrarian analogy, the rows mown into the “feeldes” of old books by the “rype men” (­metentes, or “reaping men,” in the Latin).57 Just as Matthew advises, Higden will not break the grooves, or narrative tenor, of these rows by pushing his own treatment of the historical record in new directions. Instead, he will “eche,” or expand, the writings of past “auctours” by gathering up whichever “eres” of wheat the reapers have cut down but failed to pick up. This practice recalls the technique of amplificatio, which the handbooks often characterized as a process of “filling in the blanks” in one’s source, and which Lydgate elsewhere figures as the work of “glen[ing]” the “shokkys plentyvous of auctours” that have been left behind.58 And so it would seem that there is an unexpected compatibility, in the eyes of Higden and Lydgate alike, between the artes poetriae and historiographic traditions of

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writing. In both cases, “deuocion of the matire” goes hand in hand with a highly rhetorical mode of composition. What unites monastic historians and literary makers during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then, is a shared “deuocion” to the “matire” that they rework, one whose understanding of this “matire” is grounded in the precepts of medieval rhetoric.59 Alongside Lydgate, poets as varied as John Walton, John Capgrave, and Peter Idley all appear to conceive of their matter as materia exsecuta – as previously treated matter whose tenor, to use Matthew of Vendôme’s term, could not be changed.60 Like Higden, Chaucer claims that his making involves the gathering of stray “ere[s]” of “goodly word[s]” that have been left behind by writers who “han herebeforn / of makyng ropen,” while Osbern Bokenham and Gower also signal their debts to the rhetoricians and the historians alike – by suggesting, for instance, that making is nothing other than the redisposition of textual matter “in dew ordre clause be clause,” or by claiming that the work of the poet is to reorganize “matiere” found in old books into a new “forme.”61 For all of these writers, literary composition is a process that hinges upon dispositio, abbreviatio, amplificatio, and coloratio  – a process that, in Lydgate’s view, involves following the “tracys” of earlier authors while adding a bit here, subtracting a bit there, and sprucing things up with new terms and colors along the way (e.g., TB Prol.353–59). Indeed, even God is said to write in this fashion. He composes history, as Lydgate says, through his “disposicioun,” or dispositio, of “fatal thing[s]” (TB 2.120), and he pens the physical world, as Gower observes, by his “ordinance,” or ordinatio, of prime “matiere.”62 The account of literary making found in the work of these writers thus stresses the central role that pre-existing matter is understood to play in the process of literary composition. Invention begins not from a spontaneous moment of creativity, but from an act of reading – or still more precisely, the encounter of a maker with some older text. What is more, the opening lines of the Fall of Princes offer us a brief discussion of making that may serve to epitomize this position. Here, at the very start of his massive book, Lydgate reflects upon the labors of the poet, whom he compares to a potter.63 The poet, he says, does not invent his materials so much as “breke and renewe” them again, remolding them on the wheel into new “shappis” and “formys” (1.8–14). Thyng that was maad of auctours hem beforn, Thei [i.e., poets] may off newe fynde and fantasie, Out of old chaff trie out ful cleene corn,

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry Make it more fressh and lusti to the eie, Ther subtil witt and ther labour applie, With ther colours agreable off hewe, Make olde thynges for to seeme newe.

(1.22–28)

This passage could serve as a miniature ars poetica, not just for Lydgate’s poetics, but for Lancastrian making on the whole.64 As in Gower, whom Lydgate quietly echoes, the matter of poetry is here figured as textual, physical, and historical at once.65 It is alternately comprised of the events of the past, the books “of auctours” that came “beforn,” and the topics for composition that poets may “fynde” in those books. Like Hoccleve, who often claims to “ordre,” but not to create, his textual materials, Lydgate counsels the novice poet to rework pre-existing matter into a novel configuration, by turning the soft clay of history into a new shape, or by threshing the wheat harvested from old books into new corn.66 Finally, as in Bokenham, Lydgate conceives of form as something that changes the appearance, but not the essence, of the matter it informs. Just as it was a “schroude” or a “cloude” in the Troy Book prologue, in this instance form is a “colour” or “hewe.” Here again, Lydgate follows the rhetoricians, who often likened form to clothing in their own discussions of literary practice.67 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, for instance, claims that, by “vary[ing] its robes,” matter can be “concealed under multiple forms [multiplice forma]” throughout a text.68 For Geoffrey, as for Lydgate, the selfsame matter can thus be “varied and yet the same [varius et tamen idem]” at different points in a single work.69 It can, as Lydgate puts it, be continually made to “seeme newe.” Before we dismiss Lydgate on the grounds that he holds a reductive or even a “mechanical” view of form, then, we might recall that he is a product of the medieval literary-theoretical traditions in which he works. In the view of those traditions, it is one thing to change the appearance of one’s matter – its color, size, or even shape. Makers, as Lydgate remarks, have “licence” to do all of these things (Fall 1.19). But to change the tenor of one’s source is another thing entirely, for to do so is to commit an act, as Lydgate puts it, of “presumpcioun” (Fall 1.29). One’s matter may come to seem new, as Larry Scanlon observes, but this is “strictly a matter of appearance.”70 It is with this mind that I’d like to turn, now, to the Fall of Princes, which not only puts this theory of making into practice, but also adapts its tenets to the considerable historiographical demands of that compendious text. *** If Lydgate is a writer caught between history and poetry, then the Fall of Princes is a text strung across the space between the two. A monumental

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work translated from Laurent de Premierfait’s Bocace des nobles maleureux – itself a French adaptation of the De Casibus virorum illustrium of Giovanni Boccaccio  – Lydgate’s poem applies the same casus-form to hundreds of miniature biographies drawn from western European history, in what Nolan has called “the ceaseless reenactment of a single basic narrative: the fall of a great man.”71 Indeed, the narrative arc of the casus-form, which is apparently designed to mimic the turning of Fortune’s wheel, is nothing if not consistent. In each casus, a protagonist begins at the bottom of the wheel, then rotates upwards to the top of her or his worldly power, and then crashes down at the end of the story, in a dramatic collapse of station. Lydgate’s use of this simple form to write about the complex “windings” and “wrinklings” of historical matter, as Higden would say, is admittedly peculiar, and it also lends the Fall what Lydgate calls an “entirmedlyd,” or inter-meddled, quality, for as Lydgate himself concedes, his poem fits “straunge materys” that are “hystoryal” to a “processe,” or narrative form, that is “poetical” (9.3324–27).72 When, for instance, he compares the near-endless repetitions of the casus-sequence to the falling of raindrops upon stone (2.106–12) or the ebb and flow of the tide (1.6078–83), he would seem to revel in the sheer contrast of its regularity with the irregularities of the matter that it treats. “Doth oon clymbe up, another to discende” describes the casus in such reductive terms that it sounds like parody, and yet this is precisely how, according to Lydgate, we should “comprehende” the narrative action of his entire work “in a breeff somme” (9.3300–2). A good example of the “entirmedlyd” quality of the Fall can be found in Lydgate’s treatment of the Dido story, which is found in the second book of the poem. Here, we can discern the typical arc of the casus easily enough. We hear of Dido’s flight from Tyre (2.1921–46); of the portents of the ox head and the horse head (2.1961–85); of her foundation of Carthage (2.1986–2009); of her misfortune at being courted by Hiarbas (2.2014–23); of her rejection of his overtures on the grounds of her “auowed chastite” (2.2022); of Hiarbas’s threat to sack Carthage in the event of Dido’s refusal (2.2024–114); and, finally, of the suicide that is her last act of resistance to the courtship (2.2115–42). A clear trajectory of rise and fall thus serves as the narrative backbone of Lydgate’s account. It primes the reader to expect a tragic ending and prepares the way for the poet’s moralizing lenvoy. “Sore wepyng,” he remarks, “for wonder and for routhe, / in a woman to fynde so gret a trouthe” (2.2141–42). And yet, even before the narrative comes to its conclusion, Lydgate makes open acknowledgment of what it does not represent – for after all, we are talking about Dido here, and there are better-known versions of the queen’s biography that certainly do not paint her as an exemplar of chaste “trouthe.”73 As he admits to the reader,

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry Touchyng Dido lat ther be no striff: Thouh that she be accusid off Ouide, Afftir Bochas I wrot hir chaste liff, And the contrary I haue set a-side.

(2.2150–53)

Some writers, Lydgate explains, may choose to criticize Dido because of her extramarital liaisons with Aeneas, but he has “set a-side” these accounts, choosing instead to follow the version of her life in “Bochas,” or Boccaccio. The rigid consistency of the casus-form, the regular rise and fall of its arc, is thus patently at odds with the narrative complexities of the historical matter that it schematizes. Rather than synthesize the two or conceal the differences between them, however, Lydgate chooses instead to “meddle” them together loosely, in such a way that the reader may recognize at once the “contrary” accounts of Dido’s biography that do not fit the narrative parameters of the casus-form and the structural resemblances between that form and this particular account of Dido’s life.74 The queen of Carthage might be held up as an exemplar of faithful love in the lenvoy to Lydgate’s tale – “folwe Dido,” he tells his readers, “that was queen off Cartage” (2.2205) – but thanks to Lydgate’s disclosures, the reader knows there is more to her story than that. Why does Lydgate use the casus-form for every biography he recounts in the Fall of Princes, even when, as in the case of the Dido story, the rigidity of the form is at odds with the particulars of his matter? One answer, as I’ve suggested above, is that his views on form are shaped by the traditions of literary theory that he knew, and especially, by the precepts of the artes poetriae handbooks. In John of Garland, for example, absolute regularity and “congruence” of form, or what John terms the “consistent arrangement [congrua … disposicio] of parts,” is held up as the highest of poetic virtues.75 But while it is surely true that Lydgate’s casus-forms take some inspiration from the views of John and his fellow critics, I would suggest that the poet likely derives their specific mechanism from a more concrete source: the ballades, rondeaux, and virelais that were collectively known, in late-medieval literary culture, as the formes fixes.76 The formes fixes came to prominence during the first half of the fourteenth century, with the work of Guillaume de Machaut, but they quickly gained currency both in England and in English. Gower wrote two sequences of ballades in AngloFrench, and Chaucer claims to have penned many “balades, roundeles,” and “vyrelayes” in the prologue to his Legend of Good Women, a fact that Lydgate corroborates himself when he notes, in the prologue to the Fall, that Chaucer composed “compleyntis, baladis, roundelis,” and “virelaies” that were “ful delectable” (1.353–54).77 The key feature of the formes, as

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Elizaveta Strakhov and Ardis Butterfield have observed, is that they are at once “formally rigid” and organized around “structures of repetition.”78 They remain constant even while the writer swaps out different materials to fit within them, often fashioning, in the process, a recursive web of allusions both to his own corpus and to the writings of others. Of special importance is the role played by the refrain, which slows the forward motion of each stanza and which also, as Philip Knox has suggested, gives the formes fixes a circular shape and feel.79 The formes fixes and the casus-form certainly share a family resemblance. Both are repetitive, circular, and rigid. What is more, the formes fixes may have shaped the casus-form in an immediate way, because the short, moralizing lenvoys that cap off many of Lydgate’s casus-narratives are, as Jenni Nuttall has observed, “extended ballades.”80 Lydgate may have gotten the idea to use the ballade as a lenvoy-form from Gower, whose ballades are often close to Lydgate in both style and theme.81 It is also possible that he took direct inspiration from French literature. As David Lawton has observed, the Fall is sometimes “reminiscent” of the “poetic and prosodic forms” of the “French dictiers,” and Lydgate had translated one of Deschamps’ ballades earlier in his career.82 Whatever the case may be, Lydgate’s decision to use ballades in a work that is ­historical rather than amorous in topic is the poet’s own, and a daring one at that. Where they are present, each lenvoy consists of roughly three to five ballade stanzas and attempts to distill the narrative and moral logic of the more diffuse casus that has preceded it. Sometimes, this distillation concerns the themes and narrative structure of the preceding casus  – as is the case, for instance, in the lenvoy to the story of Oedipus, Jocasta, Polynices, and Eteocles. Here, Lydgate tells the reader that he should take note of “foure thinges” in the “tragedie” he has just read. In this tragedie foure thinges ye may see, The pride off Iabyn and fals presumpcioun, Off queen Iocasta the gret aduersite, Off kyng Edippus thynclynacioun To vices all, and the deuysioun Off the too brethre, pleynli vs tassure, Kyngdamys deuyded may no while endure.

(1.3816–22)

But at other times, the lenvoy serves less as an opportunity for divisio textus and more as an occasion for some moralizing address to the reader. This address often settles, as we might expect, in the refrain.83 Just so, the lenvoy to the story of King Arthur’s fall at the hands of Mordred features an

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ominous refrain with no small import for Lydgate’s patron: “Bewar afforn euere of vnkynde blood” (8.3136). In this way, Lydgate’s lenvoys draw into relief the rigid formal logic of the casus that they supplement. They make it obvious, in other words, that the casus are a highly schematic type of form. In doing so, however, the lenvoys also draw attention to the discontinuity between history and form that is everywhere latent in the Fall of Princes  – a discontinuity whose byproduct, as I noted in my introduction, is a certain “surplus” of history. Though he did new things with it, I should stress yet again that Lydgate was not the first writer to invoke this “surplus.” Livy alluded to it in his history of Rome, and Alain Renoir suggests that Virgil pioneered the idea.84 What is more, a wide set of English writers, ranging from Marie de France to Geoffrey Chaucer to John Skelton, all termed matter that they held to be extrinsic to poetic or narrative form the “resydewe,” “remenaunt,” or “surplus” of their verse.85 Lydgate is unique, however, in his fondness for the idea, which he invokes over and over again in his poetry. Sometimes, he uses the surplus to ensure that his reader knows that the Fall presents her with only a “parciall” account of history (1.455) – an account, in other words, whose representation in the historical record is either incomplete or biased. In the casus of Cleopatra II of Egypt, for example, the poet chooses to omit any mention of the queen’s brother, Euergetes II, whose murder of his own nephew and marriage to his own sister the poet finds repulsive. Even so, Lydgate also elects to tell the reader that he has left this material out. “Off Cleopatra,” he says, he will not record “the fynal greeuys,” lest “the mateer sholde difface his book” (5.2954–56). Similar omissions of matter that Lydgate deems offensive can be found in the stories of Rosamund (8.3277–78) and Pope Joan (9.1010–11), or in the story of Nero, which disgusts the poet. “That I myhte,” he writes, “I wolde race his name / out of this book” (7.782–83). While these omissions may differ in their particulars, in the case of each one Lydgate is assiduous in explaining what he has cut from his sources and why he has done so. At other moments, by contrast, Lydgate seems to invoke the surplus less for reasons of propriety or taste and more as a poetic convenience. As we saw in the story of Dido, the complexities of the matter of history do not lend themselves easily to the casus-form. In cases where the disjunction between the two is especially extreme, the surplus is a useful tool, one that allows Lydgate to keep his reader focused on the relevant portions of the casus at hand, without having to attend to historical matter that he deems superfluous – matter, for instance, that has already been treated elsewhere in his text (see, e.g., 5.1478–84), or matter that in his view would muddy

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the moral logic of the story. Just so, at the end of the casus of Hannibal, Lydgate instructs his readers to ignore the “surplus” of the general’s great military victories, “his deedis marciall,” and to focus instead on his final, “abhomynable” act of suicide (5.2152–58). Any historical details that might make it difficult for us to discern the rise and fall of the hero from Carthage are banished to a footnote of the narrative. Even more striking is Lydgate’s treatment of the story of Rehoboam, the ancient Hebrew king. Here, the poet deliberately excludes details from the history of Rehoboam’s reign – what he calls the “surplus off his gouernaunce” (2.722) – that would suggest that Rehoboam wasn’t such a bad king after all. With this “surplus” put aside, the arc of Lydgate’s narrative is left to turn neatly on the king’s ultimate moral failure, which is his refusal, in the poet’s view, to take “good counsail” from his advisors (2.776). In instances such as these, Lydgate’s surplus has a relatively concrete referent. It denotes a certain quantity of textual matter that can be found in the poet’s sources, but that he has decided not to include within the Fall. In other cases, however, the surplus may refer to something more abstract – to some unreliable quality of Lydgate’s matter, for instance, or even to the self-contradictions, silences, and ambiguities of the historical record itself. Lydgate invokes the surplus in this sense when he notes that Henry, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, may have died either during a long imprisonment, or from a fall from his horse, or by drowning in a river (9.1730–43); or that Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, may or may not have slept with the Cretan Bull (1.2696–717); or that Phaedra, Pasiphae’s daughter, may have died either by the rope or the knife (1.2871–84). In moments such as these, the surplus conjures up a chain of past events for which Lydgate’s sources offer no definitive account.86 A similar point could be made about the poet’s use of the surplus to denote matter that is missing from the historical record entirely. Sometimes, this matter is absent because of “oblyuyoun” (3.30), or what the poet terms the “glacyng brotilnesse” of human memory (3.24). But at other times, its absence is due to some historical cataclysm. The Flood, for example, is said to have wiped from the earth all scholarly “mater” and “olde writyng” (1.1023–26) documenting human history between the time of Adam and the time of Nimrod. Though he would like to tell us about this era, Lydgate admits that he lacks the records to do so. He must therefore omit the “surplusage off al that tyme” (1.1028). In large part, then, Lydgate is fond of the surplus because it is a useful device for resolving literary and historiographical problems. It aids him in maintaining standards of factual accuracy, narrative focus, source

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documentation, and “trouthe,” even while it also reminds his reader not to conflate a schematic representation of history with the totality of history itself. But as I noted in the introduction to this chapter, a political rationale may also lie behind certain invocations of the surplus in the Fall of Princes, because Lydgate may have intended his poem to speak to the political situation of its most powerful reader, Humphrey of Gloucester. Duke Humphrey was Lydgate’s patron during the 1430s, and not only commissioned the Fall but directly oversaw its production.87 This fact alone meant that Lydgate had been presented, through Humphrey’s apparent interest in his work, with an extraordinary chance to bend the ear of one of the most powerful men in England.88 What is more, the 1430s were a momentous time for Humphrey and his circle. At Westminster, Humphrey clashed with Henry Beaufort and the Privy Council in his continuing struggle for control of England, even as the war in France took a turn for the worse.89 Meanwhile, at Greenwich manor, the duke and his wife, Eleanor Cobham, busied themselves with the task of shaping culture. They served as patrons and benefactors to a wide range of intellectuals, English and foreign alike, and often hosted a coterie of poets, artists, scholars, musicians, and religious figures at their personal court, which they liked to call “La Plesaunce.”90 Lydgate may not have written his poem for Humphrey alone. Indeed, he tells us in the prologue that he put it together, not merely for his patron, but for many different readers, including “noble pryncis” (2.153), those “off estatis” who “compelle[d]” him to do so (1.46), and “the lowere peeple” (1.210). Nevertheless, it is very likely that, given his patron’s considerable political and cultural influence during this period, the chance to shape Humphrey’s views would have been foremost in the poet’s mind.91 Perhaps he felt he could catch Humphrey’s attention by molding the Fall so that it fit his patron’s intellectual and aesthetic tastes, as he appears to have done with the contemporaneous “Triumphal Entry of Henry VI into London.”92 Or perhaps he felt he could flatter Humphrey by positioning it as a text suitable for only the most discerning of readers. It cannot be for nothing that the poet notes the “ioie” the duke takes in conversing “with clerkis” (1.387), his exceptional wisdom in matters of “hih lettrure” (1.384), and the fact that, notwithstanding “his staat and dignite,” Humphrey has never lacked the considerable “corage” needed to “studie in bookis off antiquite” (1.394–96).93 In any event, internal evidence suggests that Lydgate did use his poem to comment on contemporary events of concern to Humphrey. Consider, for instance, the many allusions to the Hundred Years War that seem to

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surface, if only obliquely, at different moments in the Fall of Princes. In the story of Adam and Eve, for example, the couple’s decision to eat the apple is unexpectedly likened to the decision to go to war against another nation. “God bad us nat,” Lydgate writes, “our cuntrees for to lete / to vndirfonge thynges inpossible” (1.862–63). At the close of the story of the King Aribertus, who flees from battle and dies when his treasure-laden ship sinks, Lydgate again comments upon the futility of war. “Loo,” he writes, “heer the fyn of worldli wrechidnesse, / namli of them, to gete gret tresours / that gyne werre ageyn ther neihebours” (9.894–96). Elsewhere in the Fall, nods to other contemporary events also appear, or seem to appear, in still more oblique ways. At the close of the story of the Roman Emperor Valerian and Shapur of Persia, Lydgate urges his reader to show more mercy toward his prisoners than Shapur did. “Princis of merci,” he exclaims, “sholde tak heed herto, / aftir victorie in ther estat notable / to ther prisoneres for to be merciable” (8.481–83). In the story of Athaliah, in turn, he laments the catastrophe that often ensues when a usurping ruler kills off anyone who has royal blood in his veins. “O  noble Pryncis,” he cries, “thouh God hath maad you strong, / to rihtful heires be war ye do no wrong!” (2.1861–62). Are these murky allusions, one wonders, to Henry V’s summary execution of prisoners after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, or to the fate of Richard II after Henry IV came to power in 1399? Maybe, and maybe not. But either way, as Karen Winstead puts it, Lydgate is clearly “veering toward the unsayable” in such moments.94 Still more intriguing are the many instances where Lydgate draws the reader’s attention to stories of warring noble brothers. First among these are Polynices and Eteocles, the feuding siblings whose tale appears both in the Siege of Thebes and in the first book of the Fall, and whose difficulties in sharing power would likely have called to mind, as Simpson has argued, the division of English possessions between Humphrey and his brother John during the 1420s and 1430s.95 The refrain to Lydgate’s lenvoy makes the contemporary resonance of the tale impossible to miss. “Kyngdamys deuyded,” he muses, “may no while endure” (1.3822).96 What is more, the poet makes other, equally pointed comments about aristocratic fraternal conflict elsewhere in the Fall, comments that may speak to problems of birth order, or matters of primogeniture, or even the feudal distribution of rights and titles. In the story of Romulus and Remus, for instance, the two brothers argue about both the naming and the rule of Rome, a problem that is not easily solved because they are twins, and so neither holds the privilege of age. “Ther was no resoun who sholde go beforn,” Lydgate

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remarks, “because thei weren bothe attonys born” (2.4108–9). Artaxerxes II and Cyrus the Younger, each with a desire to rule Persia alone, engage in a series of bloody clashes that Artaxerxes nearly wins – at least until his own son, Darius, rises up against him in turn. “The gretter” the “noumbre” of royal children, Lydgate notes, “the wers thei muste speede” (3.5075). And, in perhaps the bluntest parallel of all, Robert Curthose, sometime Duke of Normandy, feuds with his brother Henry over “certeyn castellis that stood in Normandie” (9.1281). Henry finally invades the territory, captures his brother, and imprisons him for fourteen years until his death. John Lydgate, we have been told, was “poet-propagandist to the Lancastrian dynasty.”97 Why would he have included such stories in his poem? It is unlikely that Humphrey could have missed the resonance between his own situation and these tales of familial betrayal and factional dispute. Even after the death of Bedford in late 1435, and the end of Henry VI’s minority on November 1, 1437, they would have continued to speak to his deepest political concerns, especially given the continuation of the Hundred Years War and the intensification of the conflict between himself and Beaufort during this time.98 But this resonance, perhaps, was exactly what Lydgate wished Humphrey to feel. No doubt, he wanted his patron to see himself in the great leaders of the past – and perhaps to learn something useful, or even tactical, from their successes and failures. But at the same time, he may also have wanted Humphrey to recognize the limits of his control over the history that he sought to shape, and the surplus of that history that would always exceed his grasp. The Fall of Princes, after all, is replete with matter that speaks to the duke’s political ambitions, his aspirations in war, and his relations with his family. Even if Lydgate had no concrete agenda in writing his poem, it would certainly have given his patron many occasions “to ponder” for himself, as R. D. Perry puts it, “the ephemeral nature” of political and military victory.99 Throughout this chapter, I have argued that, in the Fall of Princes, literary form is circular, rigid, and fixed; that it works primarily by analogy rather than representation; that it advertises, rather than conceals, its differences from historical matter; and that it deliberately constructs its arc, its rise and fall, against a surplus of history that can only be gestured at. With these points in mind, I would like to turn now to the most extreme contrast between form and history that can be found in the Fall of Princes. This is the doubled account of an ideal, Golden World and its fallen counterpart, the city of Jerusalem, at the close of the seventh book of the poem. With their auspicious position in Lydgate’s book and their lofty subject matter  – the casus of this “goldene world” into a realm of

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Ovidian “led” (7.1316), the destruction of the Christian holy city, and the birth of Jesus Christ  – these linked episodes deserve critical consideration for several reasons. For one thing, both are heavily reworked by Lydgate, and are “full of colour” and craftsmanship, as their editor once observed.100 For another, they represent a late example of the poet’s tendency to contrast ideal, “goldene” forms with the ruins of historical matter in his work. Indeed, golden cities often stand opposite to fallen ones in Lydgate’s minor poems, and a score of Heavenly Jerusalems are juxtaposed with earthier cities in his devotional works.101 Most of all, however, these paired episodes demand our attention because they present us with the chance to examine, in miniature, the discontinuity of form and history that plays out across the Fall of Princes as a whole. By setting up a structural parallel between the fall of a “goldene” society and the fall of a historical one, that is, Lydgate invites his reader to “counterpeise” the two against each other – to identify their similarities and differences in matter and form alike. This is no small challenge, however, because these two stories differ from each other with respect both to their particulars and to the ideologies that motivate their poetics. One is zealously Christian and describes the swift destruction of a historical city, while the other is euhemeristic, and recounts the Ovidian decay of a golden and ideal age into the world of iron we inhabit today. To make the “counterpeising” of these episodes easier for his reader, Lydgate makes several changes to his source that are intended to bring the two into a clearer analogical relation. For example, where the decline of the Golden World is attributed to the loss of “attemperaunce” (7.1209–15), or moderate self-government, so too is Jerusalem said to fall from an earlier state of fair “distribucioun”  – in which Moses gives “to ech lyne” his just “porcioun” (7.1380–81)  – into a state of “dyuysioun” (7.1429), one caused by the “conspiracioun” of the Jews against Christ (7.1410).102 Lydgate also excises historical details that do not fit the arc of his paired casus-narratives, such as the diaspora of the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem, and he reorders Laurent so that the death of Christ occurs in the midst of its fall, therby implying that the two events are causally twinned.103 Lydgate adds, in turn, Christ’s “prophecy” about the destruction of Jerusalem, which is figured as payback for his “vnkynde” treatment (7.1412; cf. 7.1566–72), and other prophecies, by “Ananyas” (7.1622–49) and “Carnotence,” or John of Salisbury (7.1650–56), which also construe the fall of Jerusalem as an act of divine retribution – as an event, in other words, that parallels exactly the loss of the Golden World, which is likewise attributed to the wrath of the gods (see 7.1209–15).104

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At first glance, then, it would seem that Lydgate goes to some lengths to conflate the form of the casus (here figured by the rise and fall of the Golden World) with the complex, historical fall of an actual city (here, the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman forces in 70 CE). Indeed, Lydgate stresses that the historical Jerusalem and the mythic Golden World are both governed, at least at first, by rational order and common profit; that both begin their decline because of human greed and “furious cruelte” (7.1233); and that both ultimately fall into misery and destruction. But while it may be tempting to conflate the Golden World with its earthly counterpart, to do so runs at cross purposes to what Lydgate so often tells his reader in the Fall – that one should never take the casus-form as a substitute for history. It should not surprise us, then, that even while he brings many elements of these two stories into analogical “consonaunce,” Lydgate also leaves other aspects of the two in obvious dissonance. There is, for example, a jarring discontinuity between the chiming diction of the Golden World refrains, with their repetition of “attemperaunce” and “gouernaunce,” and the terrible events that fall upon Jerusalem. After the Romans lay siege, a famine sweeps through the city, and people begin to fall dead in the streets (7.1496– 1502). A starving woman eats her own child (7.1484–88). Slaughter follows when Jerusalem is sacked, with more than a million people ultimately killed (7.1517–20), and once the dust has settled, the remaining inhabitants are sold into slavery at a penny apiece, one-thirtieth the amount – so we are told – that Judas received for Christ (7.1524–30). While much of this m ­ atter can be found in Laurent’s text and in his own source, Josephus’s De bello Judaico, it is Lydgate’s choice to juxtapose it so pointedly with what he himself calls a perfect and “golden” world  – a realm where allegorical personifications such as “Fortitudo” and “Rihtwisnesse” (7.1174, 81) rule benevolently, where the rich are always “redi to do almessedeede” (7.1190), and where strangers seeking shelter swiftly receive “herborwe” (7.1191).105 Even beyond the local discontinuities between these episodes, moreover, Lydgate also points up their broader, structural discontinuity by employing a different stanza-form for each one. As I’ve noted above, nearly every story in the Fall is composed in seven-line rime royal stanzas with a moralizing lenvoy, in the form of a ballade, appended to its end.106 The poetry of the Golden World section, by contrast, is wholly written in ballade stanzas, and so it is a kind of lenvoy writ large. One might conclude that, just as the lenvoys are said to “remedie” (2.150) the casus they follow, so too does the Golden World episode seek to “remedie” the destruction of Jerusalem, by translating its historical particulars into the realm of the absolute. But this is hard to fathom. Even if one ignores Lydgate’s own suggestions that

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the fall of Jerusalem was an event of great complexity, it is very unlikely that he felt a historical disaster of such a magnitude could be expressed in the form of nursery rhymes.107 It is likelier, in my view, that he cast the Golden World episode in this form because he wished for the contrast between form and history to be as stark as possible – because he hoped to point, as clearly as he could, to the ever-widening crevasse between the forms we use to write about history and the totality of history itself. What is lost within this crevasse? This is impossible to know, and that is part of Lydgate’s point. But the Fall never stops asking its reader to contemplate what escapes the bounds of form, no doubt because an attention to form alone will blind that reader to the surplus of what does not receive ethical, political, or aesthetic consideration. In a given instance, this surplus could be anything at all – other texts, or other events, or even other people. But it is telling, I think, that Lydgate often dwells upon the surplus of violence and destruction that follows in the wake of noble deeds and great actions. In the eighth book of the Fall, for instance, he depicts the battle between Arthur and Mordred in heroic terms, but also notes that he cannot tell us the “surplusage” of those who were “in that bataile ded” (8.3032–33). There are too many names to remember. In the sixth book of the poem, in turn, Caesar triumphs over Pompey on the battlefield, to the great “encres of glorie” (6.2485). The true extent of the bloodshed is revealed only later, after a vulture drops “gobetis of flessh” upon Caesar’s face (6.2479). Here as elsewhere in the Fall, the casus-form does little to make sense of these terrible histories. It cannot represent the bodies on the ground, and it cannot recall the names of the dead. But it can admit its limits. Perhaps this is why these two episodes, which so stress the bounds of Lydgate’s chosen narrative mode, conclude with yet another invocation of the surplus. As he writes, … this vengaunce most terrible Doon upon Iewes for ther transgressioun, For ther demerites the punshyng most horrible, Of Iherusalem fynal subuersioun, Of the temple, tabernacle & toun, In Iosephus, who list seen al the deede— De bello Iudaico, the surplus he may reede.

(7.1657–63)

It seems to me that, in this passage, the poet’s instructions to his reader – “seek out the rest in Josephus, if you like” – are tinged with a certain irony. After all, Lydgate knows that his reader will not find the whole story of Jerusalem’s fall in Josephus, any more than he might find the “hool” tale of Polynices and Eteocles in the Siege of Thebes (1.3725), or the full account

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of Troy’s history in the “Troie Book” (1.6037). Even with world enough and time, no reader could ever grasp the historical record in all of its fullness and detail. What Lydgate is really saying, then, is that the reader ought to reflect upon the surplus of history that will always remain beyond his comprehension. This is especially true if that reader happens to be Humphrey of Gloucester. For it is precisely when people like Humphrey conflate form with history  – secular power with immortality, or honor with the dead on a battlefield – that a catastrophe more terrible than the fall of a king will occur. *** Shortly after Hector’s death in the Troy Book, Priam orders the construction of a tomb to house the body of his son. In the heart of the temple to Apollo, “the craftiest maisteres of the toun” (3.5601) labor to do the king’s wishes. Four golden pillars, each topped by an angel, rise from the corners of the tomb and hold aloft an arched, golden roof (3.5621–37). On the top of this roof stands a gilded statue of Hector, a fearsome look on his face and a sword, raised toward the Greeks, in his hand (3.5647–52), while just below, propped up in imitation of the statue, stands the corpse of Hector en plein air (3.5653–62). A crown conceals pipes that have been drilled into Hector’s skull, and through these pipes flows an artificial “licour,” one designed both to prevent the corruption of his flesh and to give his decaying corpse a hue of continued life (3.5663–95). At the foot of the apparatus, Trojan priests sit day and night – praying perpetually, as Lydgate tells us, for the salvation of Hector’s soul (3.5741–56). A memorial to the death of Troy’s military hopes, the tomb figures the difference between form and history in macabre fashion.108 Like the “aureat licour” that flows into Lydgate’s poetry, the “licour” pumped through Hector’s veins seeks immortality for his body. It hopes to preserve by taxidermic craft what should naturally fall into decay.109 But such a desire for immortality indexes more than the wish of a grieving father to memorialize his son, for the tomb also stands in aesthetic defiance of the motion of history itself. What if a work of art, it asks, could serve as a monument more lasting than one of bronze? What if the rush of history could be slowed, or even distilled into a more durable form – perhaps the very form that Bochas proposes for the Fall itself in the sixth book of the poem, where he proclaims that the title of his grand work will be displayed atop his tombstone, in “lettres large” graven “in ston” (6.225–31)? But Troy shortly burns to the ground, and Priam is shortly dead, and all this despite the fact that the tomb, like Troy itself, was built to “perpetuelly contune” (TB 2.567).

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In this chapter, I have argued that Lydgate’s historical poems grapple with a surplus of history: a quantity of historical matter, and a quality of history itself, that resists telling in narrative form. In the Fall of Princes, this surplus troubles the bounds of the casus-narratives that Lydgate uses to rework the historical record, disrupting them by digression, intertextuality, and the invocation of events, times, and places beyond the book in the reader’s hands. Rather than indicating the failure of Lydgate’s representational tactics, however, these moments of disruption are part of the poem’s design. This is because, in Lydgate’s view, history defies anything but a partial telling, and so the job of the history writer is not to claim that he represents it in its totality, but to gesture toward what he knows he can only “half endite” (TB 2.129). Hardly an “index,” as Robert Ayers once put it, “to God’s otherwise mysterious will in the world,” Lydgate’s historical poetry never attempts to grasp the iceberg beneath the surface of the ocean, or to name the men whose “hepe” of bodies lie outside the walls of Thebes (ST 4497).110 Instead, it draws our attention toward those aspects of history that can never be expressed – toward what William of Malmesbury calls the “pile of things lying hidden since the time of antiquity,” or what Walter Benjamin would term, much later, the “single catastrophe” that hurls “wreckage upon wreckage” before the historian’s feet.111 Why Lydgate might choose to write in this way should, I hope, be clear enough by now. But in addition to the literary-theoretical and political reasons that I’ve noted above, I would like to note in closing one final reason – an aesthetic reason – that he may have done so. When Lydgate’s reader takes note of the elaborate care taken to preserve Hector’s body “hool” from “corrupcioun” in the Troy Book (3.5673), all while knowing that this body and Troy will shortly burn together, a certain effect is produced. This is most often called irony, or more precisely, an aesthetic mode wherein two registers of meaning complicate and destabilize each other, to playful or pointed effect. Though it may seem odd to call Lydgate an ironic writer, irony is in fact precisely the result of the doubled mode of reading – the doubled hermeneutic attention, as I termed it in my introduction – that so much of his historical poetry demands.112 To some extent, this irony is surely a symptom of Lydgate’s monastic sensibilities. It is a logical extension, we might say, of the penitential impulse to state that all is vanity, and that all living creatures, no matter how great, are ultimately “mete unto wormes.”113 But given Lydgate’s longstanding connections with the great and the powerful, one must wonder if the aesthetics of irony were closely associated with politics in the poet’s mind. Consider, for instance, the case of Duke Humphrey. Throughout his career, the sole governance of England

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was kept, like the fruit that pained Tantalus, just out of Humphrey’s grasp. After years of reaching for it, the duke seemed on the cusp of seizing it in early 1440, when he finally managed to push his longtime enemy, Cardinal Beaufort, into early retirement.114 As the Fall reminds us, however, every victory must be “counterpeised” with a defeat, and this is a lesson that Humphrey ultimately learned the hard way.115 For it is precisely when men like Humphrey imagine themselves to be fully in control, the sovereign authors of their destinies, that the motion of history “vnwarli chaungith” and, as Lydgate so often puts it, “seith to hem chekmat” (1.182).

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chapter 5

Copy and Copia in Skelton

Around the time of his ordination in June 1498, the early Tudor poet, priest, and one-time royal tutor John Skelton received a gift from a friend, “an honorable Jentyllwoman.”1 The gift, he tells us, was a human skull, or “deedmans hed,” and it appears to have brought forth unusual literary energies in the poet. This skull is “holow-eyed,” Skelton writes, With synnews wyderyd, With bonys shyderyd, With hys worme-etyn maw And hys gastly jaw Gaspyng asyde, Nakyd of hyde, Neyther flesh nor fell.

(3.3.11–18)

The vivid imagery of this poem lends it an intrinsic aesthetic interest, but it deserves our attention for a literary-historical reason as well: it is the first poem in which Skelton used the irregular mixture of rhyme, varied meter, alliteration, and repetition that is today called “Skeltonics.”2 An “apparently formless prosody of unpredictably long rhyme-leashes in lines varying between two and five beats,” as A. R. Heiserman describes it, the Skeltonic works by means of accumulation and repetition.3 It circles around its object, offering the reader an image here, a sensation there, until the object begins to emerge from this collage of scattered observations. Literary form gradually evokes physical matter, or even seems to become matter, as “verba” coalesce, before our very eyes, “into res.”4 Why would Skelton choose to write in Skeltonics, and where did he get the idea to do so? This is no easy question. Scholars have often debated the origins of this peculiar verse-form, and over the past seventy years, a range of sources have been proposed for its genesis – most plausibly, Latin rhymed prose, the Old and Middle English alliterative line, and verse associated with the so-called “signs of death” tradition.5 What all of these putative sources have in common, however, is 139

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a debt to three literary-theoretical techniques that were ubiquitous in premodern evocative writing, and that likely inspired, as we will see shortly, Skelton’s own practices of making as well. The first of these is the theory of imitation, or imitatio, which sometimes entailed the mimicry of another writer’s style, and sometimes concerned the verisimilar representation of physical matter. Both aspects of imitatio inform the Death Head poem, which mimics the sound and style of devotional literature even while it describes the deteriorating appearance of a physical corpse lain in the ground, with its “worme-etyn maw” and withered “synnews.” The second is the technique of enargeia, which sought to lend “substance” to an object “with appropriate words,” so that, as Desiderius Erasmus puts it, the object would appear as a picture set before the reader’s eyes.6 Like many a text that makes the presence of its object felt, Skelton’s poem produces enargeia as much through its use of affectively charged language (“shyderyd,” “gastly,” “gapyng”) as by its stubborn insistence that the skull is here, sitting on the desk before us. The power of a death head, it suggests, may be found not merely in its grim connotations – in its symbolism – but in the power we feel to be imbued within the bone itself. In addition to energeia and imitatio, however, this macabre lyric also makes use of a third technique, one that was often discussed in medieval and Renaissance theory and that is, in my view, most important for understanding its literary tactics. This is the practice of copia, which serves at once as the conceptual backbone of Skeltonics and as the central focus of this chapter. Copia, as Erasmus tells us, is the expression of linguistic plenty, a style that “surges along like a golden river [aurei fluminis], with thoughts and words pouring out [exuberans] in rich abundance [diuite … copia].”7 In both Humanist and medieval accounts, the copious style is understood to work, like the poem about the “deedmans hed,” through variation and repetition. It returns to a phrase, an idea, or a theme over and over again, but employs slightly different words each time, in the hope that, when taken together, these variations will produce the effect of what Gavin Douglas calls a “copioss fouth or plenitude” of diction, one that was also compared to the cornucopia of dishes laid out upon a banquet table.8 During the early sixteenth century, copia was most often used as a device of stylistic variety. It was a means for keeping one’s language fresh and clever. But copia could also be a powerful engine of representation, and so it should not surprise us that Skelton would use it in a poem about a skull. Indeed, in late-medieval devotional writing, poems about death often feature

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the copious style, a fact that is easy enough to see if we consider one of the best-known Middle English poems in the “signs of death” tradition, which lists the physical changes that operate upon the body as the end grows near. Whanne mine eyhnen misten, And mine eren sissen, And my nose koldeth, And my tunge foldeth, And my rude slaketh, And mine lippes blaken, And my mouth grenneth, And my spotel renneth, And min her riseth, And min herte griseth, And mine honden bivien, And mine fet stivien— All too late, all too late, Whan the bere is ate gate.9

The list-like format, short lines, and irregular but recurrent end rhymes of this poem all recall the sound and rhythm of Skeltonics, so much so that, were one to introduce greater metrical variation, it would be hard to distinguish it, at least in purely formal terms, from “Uppon a Deedmans Hed.” There are, however, two important differences between Skelton’s lyric and the poem above. First, in the Middle English lyric, the signs of death are found not in the bodies of others, but in the writer’s own body: the ears, nose, tongue, lips, hair, heart, hands, and feet belong to him alone. In Skelton, by contrast, the skull on the desk before him is said to belong, not merely to his own body, but to the body of every living human. “It is generall,” he muses, “to be mortall” (3.3.7–8), and this more “generall” figuration of the skull is reflected in the shifting ambit of the possessive pronouns of his poem, which gradually attribute the skull to an ever-expading copia of persons: it is first said to be “youre[s],” and then “my[ne],” and then the skull of “man” in general, and then, finally, the possession of all of “us” (3.3.1–24). Second, and still more important, where the Middle English lyric sees death as an end to all lively motion – a static “thanne,” as the poet later writes, when his “hous” will lie upon his “nose” – Skelton instead characterizes it as a state of ongoing change, one that begins long before life ceases and continues even after the body is in the ground.10 “Oure days be datyd,” he writes,

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry To be chekmatyd, With drawttys of deth, Stoppyng oure breth; Oure eyen synkyng, Oure bodys stynkyng, Oure gummys grynnyng, Oure soulys brynnyng!

(3.3.29–36)

There certainly will be, as Skelton writes, a point in time when our breath stops. But long before that moment, we will have already drawn “drawttys of deth,” and even after our last gasp, our bodies will continue to stink, our eyes will continue to decay, our gums will start to recede, and our souls will begin to burn. The skull may appear to sit dead upon the poet’s desk, but as Skelton’s lyric teaches us, even death entails perpetual motion. The multifaceted character of the death head is not, I think, a product of literary fancy or happenstance, for even while “Uppon a Deedmans Hed” clearly aims to bring a particular object into the present view, it also draws attention to how that object has changed, and will continue to change, over time. It uses copia, in other words, not just as a tool of style, but as a tool of representation, one that can reveal the copious energies latent in the matter of the skull itself. This, as I will argue below, is in fact the central aim of Skelton’s poetics, which often use copia to evoke life, motion, and change – in a word, the effect of enargeia. And while Skelton was hardly the first or only maker to pursue this kind of energetic representation, I would observe that he pushes its conventions in new directions and employs them to unexpected ends, in three respects.11 First, the way that Skelton practices copia marks him apart from his contemporaries. In premodern literary culture, copia was viewed primarily, though not exclusively, as a subspecies of elocutio rather than inventio.12 In other words, it was usually held to be a technique more concerned with style and ornamentation than with representation. For this same reason, the copious style was sometimes regarded with suspicion by grammarians and logicians, who believed that the relation between words and things, rather than the relation of words to other words, ought to take priority in matters of discourse.13 In the eyes of these thinkers, as Mary Thomas Crane has observed, copious language was at best superfluous, and at worst a kind of empty figuration that “obscure[d] the matter of the text,” a criticism to which Erasmus also gave voice in warning the novice student of copia not to “pile up a meaningless heap of words and expressions [vocum et sententiarum turba] without any discrimination,” lest he “obscure the subject [rem]” under discussion.14 Skelton, as we might guess, understands copia in

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a different way. Rather than using it as a means for stylistic ornamentation alone, he also treats the copious style as a subtype of mimesis per se – as a way of depicting the multiplicity and liveliness that he seems to have perceived in the world around him. Indeed, it would have come as no surprise to Skelton that, as Terence Cave has pointed out, the very words “copia” and “copy” were semantically linked in early sixteenth-century Latin.15 For as his poetry demonstrates again and again, a sufficiently intense desire to copy an object will “naturally” result in what Michel Jeanneret has termed a “flowering” of copia, an overgrowth of descriptive language that seeks, by its accumulation, to bring that object’s every aspect into view.16 Second, Skelton’s views of imitation were just as idiosyncratic as his view of copia, for he seems to have believed that imitation – at least as it was practiced by his contemporaries – was at once too inexact in its semantics and too unwilling to represent its object in a multifaceted light. To those readers familiar with Skelton’s iconoclastic tendencies, these objections will come as no surprise. During this period, literary theorists often held that the imitation of style and reality alike ought to work according to the principles of decorum – the rule, as Skelton’s Parott sardonically puts it, that one must always “speke aptlye” (18.45).17 Indeed, with respect to the imitation of style, the Ciceronians and their followers insisted upon the exact replication of one and only one idiom, while with respect to mimetic imitation, early modern literary theorists often held, with Julius Caesar Scaliger, that because the principle of decorum was rooted in nature itself, any proper imitation of nature would by definition be decorous.18 It is against this twofold demand for imitative decorum that Skelton rebels, both because, as we will see below, he believes the imitation of style alone to be inane, and because he sees decorum as a bridle upon the poet’s ability to mimic life in all its multiplicity and contradiction. In this respect, his poems offer us an implicit critique of early sixteenth-century practices of imitation. They reveal what Cave terms “the duplicity of mimesis.”19 Skelton’s doubled critique of mimesis takes us to the third and final aspect of his poetics that demand our attention, which is their political aim. This, I will suggest, is to voice dissent – disagreement and dispute, not merely with respect to the state of things in the socio-political world but with respect to how that world is represented to us. As we might imagine, this dissent often takes an aggressive or even vicious form. Skelton may not have been a “violent, intemperate man” who sought to “scourge, cleanse, and refashion his England,” as William Nelson once wrote, but he was certainly “one of the most obstreperous English poets,” as Richard Halpern says, a writer whose “literary gifts were inseparable from a bottomless and

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apparently free-floating aggression.”20 Some of this aggression may be related to Skelton’s pugnacious and apparently litigious character, as Sebastian Sobecki has recently suggested, and it certainly takes inspiration from the traditions of satire in which he worked, including the Provençal sirventes, British flyting contests, anti-clerical invective, and, especially, the Juvenalian mode.21 One of his favorite phrases, after all, was “difficile est saturam non scribere.”22 But in my view, a second and more pointed motive for this aggression may be found in Skelton’s apparently compulsive drive to lay bare the ideologies that lie beneath normative practices of representation, no matter whether these are literary or political in kind. What, he so often asks, counts as a “realistic” portrayal of Tudor life, and why? What makes a representation of the social world “objective” or “subjective,” “true” or “false,” and who defines these standards of representation? It is no accident that Henry VIII insisted on being painted, not just in the same style, but in the same posture in every three-quarters portrait commissioned during his reign.23 A passing glance at the portraits found in government offices today reveals a similar impulse toward homogeneity: the powerful rarely wish to see themselves from a perspective other than the one they prefer, and they are usually the first to insist that their perspective alone represents the truth. With respect both to their politics and their poetics, then, Skelton’s poems are iconoclastic in character. They aggressively challenge the shibboleths of literature and culture alike. This means that Skelton is often an exciting read, but it also accounts for the difficulty that scholars have had in assessing his work on the whole. Many have understood his iconoclastic impulses in periodizing terms, and so have cast him as the first poet of the English Renaissance – as an early exemplar of “the spirit of the new age” or a “national awakening,” one in which we find “a new sense or self-consciousness of the writer as originator.”24 There is, to be sure, some evidence to support this claim, for Skelton does seem, in his concern for liveliness, realism, and what Shakespeare would later call the “bodying forth” of representations, to anticipate the claims of subsequent poets to a more totalizing and autonomous mode of authorship.25 But a closer examination of his work suggests that Skelton’s views may be more complex than they appear. With respect to the question of autonomy, for instance, we should note that Skelton is relentlessly solicitous of patronage, and unscrupulous in his solicitation of it. Every one of his claims for poetic independence must be balanced against the fact that he begged favor from all and sundry, including, at times, such sworn political enemies as Thomas Wolsey.26 With respect to the question of authorship, in turn, his work typically displays an incorrigible hostility toward any

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representation that claims to be totalizing or objective, no matter whether it is put forward by an author figure or a figure of political authority. Good art – so Skelton often seems to claim – should never conflate its imitations with the matter it imitates. This is a position that does not fundamentally differ, in my view, from that of the Middle English makers who were his predecessors, and in whose simulated company he figures himself in the Garland of Laurel (see 21.386–441).27 Skelton’s poetics, then, might best be said to reflect the uneasy moment in literary history during which he wrote, one that looked forwards, toward newer ideologies of literary composition, while also glancing backwards, toward older commitments to matter and making. He was acquainted with Erasmus, but followed Geoffrey of Vinsauf.28 He resented the New Learning, but lambasted the bad Latin spoken by his fellow priests.29 He claimed to practice “laureate creacyon” (24.373), but also figured his work as a reduplicative rather than an originating act – as the act of remaking of pre-existing matter rather than the creation of something wholly new.30 He is best understood, in other words, as a transitional figure who, as Vincent Gillespie quips, “takes pleasure in the syllogism and the cento alike.”31 Indeed, Skelton himself tells us to read him in this way at the very end of the Garland of Laurel. “If you wish to think well,” he says, then you must train your mind to be like Janus, “looking backwards and forwards at once [retro speculetur et ante]” (21.1519–20).32 To adopt a “double chere” (21.1515), he suggests, is not to embrace deception or falsity. Instead, it is to orient one’s mind toward the truthful duplicity of all things: histories, representations, cultures, literary periods, and physical bodies alike. *** In the Merie Tales of Skelton, a collection of anecdotes about the poet that were printed by Thomas Colwell in 1567, one finds a story that casts some light on Skelton’s attitudes toward imitation, making, and matter. The Bishop of Norwich has summoned the poet to see him. Skelton’s parishioners at Diss have complained that he lives with a woman whom he calls his wife, and the Bishop is not happy to hear of it. “I would,” he says to the poet, “that you shoulde not lyue suche a sclaunderouse lyfe, that all your parisshe woulde not wonder and complaine on you as they dooe.”33 The next Sunday, Skelton climbs into the pulpit and says to his parishioners, “vos estis vos estis”: you are what you are, perhaps a sarcastic allusion to Matthew 5:13, vos estis sal terrae, “you are the salt of the earth.”34 Then he insults the congregation, exclaiming, “you bee a sorte of knaues, yea,

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and a man might saye, worse then knaues.”35 He tells them he knows they have complained to the Bishop about his wife, and to make his defense, he summons her and commands her to hand him their child, a baby boy. Holding up the child, he exclaims to the congregation, How saye you neibours all, is not this child as fayre as is the beste of all yours? It hathe nose, eyes, handes and feete as well as any of your[s]. It is not lyke a Pygge, nor a calfe, nor like no foule, nor no monstruous Beast. If I had … broughte forthe thys chylde without armes or legges, or that it wer deformed being a monstruous thyng, I woulde neuer haue blamed you to haue complayned to the bishop of me. But to complain without a cause? I say as I said before in my Antethem: vos estis. You be, and haue be, and wyll and shall be knaues to complayne of me wythout a cause resonable. For you be presumptuous, and dooe exalte yourselues, and therefore you shall be made low.36

The most obvious characteristic of this story is its aggression, which would seem to fit with what is known of Skelton’s personality. Indeed, H. L. R. Edwards thinks the anecdote is “probably not far from the truth,” and Stanley Fish believes that the Merie Tales as a whole “surely have some foundation in fact.”37 But even if it is merely an amusing fabrication, I would suggest that the story speaks to several of the poet’s key proclivities, including his preoccupation with true and false appearances, his love of caricature and exaggeration, his fascination with human bodies, and his belief in the truth-telling power of satire. When, for example, Skelton caricatures the members of his congregation by depicting them, not as good-hearted Christians, but as scoundrels – “you be, haue be, and wyll and shall be knaues” – he effectively remakes them into what he sees when he looks at them, with little regard for what they see when they look at themselves. When he holds up his son before the congregation, he does the reverse, by proving that the infant they see as a caricature, a “monstruous thyng,” is in fact an ordinary human child. Although these gestures have different ends, both stem from Skelton’s belief in his right to reveal the truth behind appearances – “to say what needed saying, by whatever means,” as David Carlson puts it.38 This is a privilege that Skelton asserts loudly and often, and it recalls the precedent of the classical satirists who, as Isidore of Seville puts it, claimed “to depict the vices … naked [nudi pinguntur]” in their verse, so that “every one of their faults could be laid bare [denudetur]” to the reader’s eye.39 Like these satirists – so he tells us in the series of flyting poems that he exchanged with Christopher Garnesche sometime during the 1510s – Skelton writes satire not just for the pleasure of it, but because

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it provides him with a chance to show us how things really are.40 As he says to Garnesche, Thou demyst my raylyng ovyrthwarthe; I rayle to the soche as thow art. If thow war aquentyd with alle The famous poettes saturicall, As Persius and Juvynall, Horace and noble Marciall, If they wer lyveyng thys day, Of the wote I what they wolde say; They wolde the wryght, all with one stevyn, The follest sloven ondyr heven, Prowde, peviche, lyddyr and lewde, Malapert, medyllar, nothyng well thewde, Besy, braynles, to bralle and brage, Wytles, wayward, Syr Wrag-wrag, Dysdaynous, dowble, ful of dyseyte, Liing, spying by suttelte and slyght, Fleriing, flatyryng, fals and fykkelle, Scornefull and mokkyng over to mykkylle.

(13.5.136–53)

Good satire, Skelton here implies, remakes real objects in words “soche” that they appear, not as they seem to be, but as they actually “are,” in all of their multiplicity and contradiction. Garnesche might imagine himself to be a singular and self-consistent person, but when stripped bare, his many inconsistencies are revealed. All the classical satirists, Skelton writes, would immediately proclaim, “with one stevyn,” that Garnesche is a “besy” man, but also a “sloven” one; a “prowde” gentleman, but also “lewde” and “nothyng well thewde”; a “medyllar” and “deseyte[ful]” operator, but also one who is too “braynles” and “wytles” to manipulate others with success. What the story from the Merie Tales and the portrait of Garnesche have in common, then, is that each one purports to use satire, not merely as a form of invective, but as a mode of truthful representation. In this respect, both texts are also in conversation, if only implicitly, with the mode of premodern literary representation most concerned with the truthful replication of its object. This, as I noted in the introduction to this chapter, is the theory of literary imitation, or imitatio. Literary imitation was a topic of considerable interest to writers at work during the early sixteenth century, in two respects. First, it was a newly fashionable practice. While medieval literary theorists had occasionally considered its rules and procedure – Robert of Basevorn, for instance, claimed that “art imitates nature [ars imitatur naturam] as much as it can,” and Matthew of Linköping and

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Alan of Lille each wrote of the vivid realism, or representatio, of which imitative art was capable – imitation became, during Skelton’s moment, a near-obligatory topic of discussion, as much among poets as among critics.41 Indeed, while the debate over the proper use and ends of imitatio initially began as a kind of parlor dispute between Italian intellectuals during the fifteenth century – most famously, between Paolo Cortesi and Angelo Poliziano – by the turn of the sixteenth century, discussions of imitation in Northern European literary circles, and their respective vernaculars, had become commonplace.42 Second, the term imitatio was often used to describe the imitation of nature and the imitation of another writer’s style alike, and the muddy distinction between these two kinds of imitation – if one was marked at all – often led to their cross-pollination.43 Marco Girolamo Vida, for example, stressed that poetry should “emulate the thing itself,” because it “functions only by imitating nature [naturam nisi ut assimulet],” but he also linked this mimetic sort of imitation with rhetorical imitatio by suggesting that mimesis is best learned from other poets, who “can show you what is fitting and what is not [quid deceat, quid non].”44 Cortesi claimed that, just as nature gave to all humans, despite their individual differences, “a single shape and form [una … figura et forma],” so too must all human “art” proceed as the proper “imitation of nature [naturae … imitationem],” by making the universal forms that lay behind nature’s particulars legible to the reader.45 And Cristoforo Landino, in his commentary on Horace’s Ars poetica, argued that, even while “poetic art ought to imitate nature [poetica naturam imitari debeat], nature would also have it that a poet’s speech should correspond to the emotions it depicts [orationem correspondere affectibus].”46 In Landino’s view, that is, nature is the ground of rhetoric, and so any rhetorically apt poetry will also be mimetic by definition. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the conflation of rhetorical with mimetic imitation was so common that a writer like Ben Jonson could define the technique in three ways: as a practice about which both “poetry and picture … are busy,” as the ability “to convert the substance or riches of another poet” to one’s “own use,” and as the act of choosing the style of “one excellent man” to follow in one’s own writing, so closely that “the copy may be mistaken for the principal.”47 Imitation, for Jonson, is at once textual, visual, and physical – at once the mimicry of life, the aping of another writer’s style, and the copying of another writer’s ­materials  – and, like many of his contemporaries, he shows little concern for ­distinguishing between its three valences.48

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What did Skelton think about this mania for imitation? One answer can be found in his eclectic poem from the end of the 1510s, Speke, Parott. Like the equally zany House of Fame, “this poem is about many things,” but one of them is clearly the practice of literary imitation during the early sixteenth century.49 We know this because the poem was Skelton’s polemical intervention into the so-called “Grammarians’ War” of 1519 and 1520, a dispute which took place between two notable Tudor pedagogues, William Horman and Robert Whittington, and which centered upon the best way to teach Latin to grammar-school pupils.50 Horman was a Humanist who believed in teaching by imitatio – in short, by having his students copy out, and then imitate, sentences drawn from the classical authors. Whittington, by contrast, was a conservative who believed that grammar ought to be learned by rules and precepts, and not through the mimicry of style. Skelton took the side of Whittington, and this helps to explain why, in Speke, Parott, he so often rails against the neglect of ­traditional training in elementary education and the rise of what he clearly believes to be a new charlatanism. As he writes, Albertus De modo significandi And Donatus be dryven out of scole; Prisians hed broken now, handy-dandy, And Inter didascolos is rekened for a fole; Alexander, a gander of Menanders pole, With “Da causales,” is cast out of the gate, And “Da racionales” dare not shew his pate. Plautus in his comedies a chyld shall now reherse, And medyll with Quintylyan in his Declamacyons, That Pety Caton can scantly construe a verse, With “Aveto” in Greco, and such solempne salutacyons, Can skantly the tensis of his conjugacyons; Settyng theyr myndys so moche of eloquens, That of theyr scole maters lost is the hole sentens. (18.169–82)

In his pedagogical views, Skelton here proves to be a solid conservative, or perhaps even a reactionary, for the first book to which he alludes, the Liber de modis significandi, was a product of speculative grammar, a late-medieval school of thought that held that all the languages were based upon an identical and universal set of “modes,” or modi.51 According to the speculative grammarians, the structure of language was aligned with the ontological structure of the world.52 Insofar as they differed from each other, different tongues did so only with respect to their accidental qualities, for the “modes of signifying” in each one, as Irène Rosier-Catach puts it, were

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understood to have their “real foundation” in a corresponding and universal set of “modes of being.”53 By the time Skelton wrote, this position was hardly the intellectual norm. It was old-fashioned and ignored developments in historical philology and linguistics that had taken root in Italy a century before. Nonetheless, it is likely Skelton felt some genuine affinity for this school of thought, for he claims elsewhere, in the prologue to his translation of Diodorus Siculus’s Biblioteca historica, that good writing should make its “wordes equyualent vnto the dedes” that they denote.54 To write with precision, in other words, one must match words to things so perfectly that each word refers exactly to a real object or set of objects. This would indeed seem to recall the modist view that the words of every language ultimately denote the same modes of being.55 Even if we put aside its allusion to the modists and the role it played in the Grammarians’ War, however, Skelton’s poem still casts light on his views of imitation through its satirical portrayal of its central character. This, of course, is Parott, a squawking minion who will say anything to anyone for “an almon or a date” (18.7). As we learn over the course of the poem, Parott is a parody of the Humanist courtier, one of the new men in the circle of Henry and Wolsey who follows “Dame Phylology” and has learned “all langage and hyt to speke aptlye” (18.43–45).56 He can parrot back phrases in French, Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and countless other tongues, but in none of them does he speak sense, because, of course, he is a parrot.57 As Parott tells us, Dowche Frenshe of Paris Parot can lerne, Pronownsyng my purpose after my properte, With “Perlez byen, Parott, ow perles ryen.” With Dowche, with Spaynyshe, my tonge can agree; In Englysshe to God Parott can supple: “Cryste save Kyng Herry the viiith, owur royall kyng, The red rose in honour to flowrysshe and sprynge!”

(18.29–35)

Parott’s mimicry of other languages and dialects (“Dowche Frenshe”) and his eager appropriation of the speech of others (“my tonge can agree”) casts him as a comic figure of imitatio, one modeled, as Skelton’s allusions indicate, on Psittacus, the parrot of classical legend whom Ovid describes as a “winged imitator [imitatrix ales]” with a “voice adept in mimicry of sounds [mutandis … sonis].”58 Like Psittacus, and like the many Humanists who elevate “Dame Phylology” above all concerns for sense, Parott speaks words without matter. Even if he would prefer to speak in a more substantive mode – Skelton clearly wants him to have at least the “lyberte” (18.210)

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to do so – the constraints of the court ensure that his discourse remains the language of princepleasers and sycophants.59 If this poem is any guide, it would appear that Skelton took a dim view of how imitation was practiced, both in the classroom and at court, during the early sixteenth century. But what may surprise us is that, when we take a closer look at Speke, Parott, we will find that it is not, in fact, hostile toward imitation per se. Consider for example, the “myrrour of glasse” into which Parott repeatedly “tote[s],” or peers (18.10). If this mirror is, as Fish suggests, “the parrot-satirist’s mirror of reality,” then it is also a mirror that represents the substance of that reality, and not its mere appearance.60 Here is how Parott describes the mirror. The myrrour that I tote in, quasi diaphonum, Vel quasi speculum, in enigmate, Elencticum, or ells enthimematicum, For logicions to loke on, somwhat sophistice. Retoricyons and oratours in freshe humanyte, Support Parrot, I pray you, with your suffrage ornate, Of confuse tantum avoydynge the chekmate. But of that supposicyon that callyd is arte, Confuse distrybutyve, as Parrot hath devysed, Let every man after his merit take his parte; For in this processe, Parrot nothing hath surmysed, No matter pretendyd, nor nothyng enterprysed, But that metaphora, alegoria withall, Shall be his protectyon, his pavys and his wall. 

(18.190–203)

In using the word “supposicyon” – and in contrasting it with what he terms “metaphora” and “alegoria” – Parott here alludes to supposition theory, that subdivision of medieval terminist logic that considers predication, or the question of whether or not a given word actually stands for the thing it denotes in a logical proposition.61 Supposition differs from signification, as Peter of Spain observes, because signification is merely “the conventional representation [secundum placitum representatio] of a thing by an utterance.”62 In supposition, by contrast, a sign actually predicates (or “supposits for”) the thing it represents. As Peter explains, Supposition and signification are different … because signification happens by imposing an utterance [per impositionem vocis] upon a thing in order to signify it, while supposition is taking in place of something the very term [acceptio ipsius termini … pro aliquo] that already signifies a thing: when someone says ‘a man runs,’ for example, that term ‘man’ supposits for S[oc]rates or for Plato, and so on for others. This is why signification comes before supposition.63

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To signify, a word need only call what it denotes to mind. But to work by supposition, a word must absolutely stand for the thing it denotes within the context of a logical proposition. “Words” mean many things, but “terms” substitute for just one. Moreover, the particular variety of supposition to which Parott here alludes – “confuse distrybutyve,” or “confused-and-distributed” supposition – refers to a kind of supposition in which a term predicates any and all things of a certain type.64 It is, in other words, a very concrete mode of speaking, because it ties a single term, not to an abstract and universal res, but to every single res of a certain kind that actually exists. As we know from other discussions of language and philosophy in Skelton’s works, this type of supposition comes highly recommended by the poet. In the Bowge of Court, for instance, the figure of Dissimulation has written upon his sleeve the phrase, “a false abstracte cometh from a fals concrete” (5.439). Words are true, in other words, only when they are predicate to an individual thing. In Collyn Clout, Skelton mocks a priest who “can nothynge smatter / of logyke nor scole matter” and who “knoweth not his elenkes, / nor his predicamentes,” so much so that everything he says floats unmoored from material reality (19.813–19). He doesn’t know, Skelton quips, “how farre Temple Barre is / from the seven sterrys!” (19.826–27). And in the Replycacyon, finally, Skelton attacks heresy by claiming that it uses “supposycions” that are “confuse tantum” (24.111–12) – logical propositions that are based, not upon real things, but upon castles in the sky. Ye argued argumentes, As it were upon the elenkes, De rebus apparentibus Et non existentibus.

(24.125–28)

In each of these cases, language that does not supposit for a concrete particular – that “pretend[s],” as Parott says, to “no matter” (18.201) – is denigrated as the language of empty imitation, the representation merely of “res apparentes” and not of “res existentes.” By contrast, true discourse and true poetry – so Skelton implies – must be comprised of more than the “mere form of words,” as Jane Griffiths puts it.65 We might consider Parott’s mirror, then, to be Skelton’s response to the debates about imitation raging during his moment. It is not enough, he suggests, for poetry merely to mimic the appearance of a thing. Instead, poetry must somehow supposit for the thing it imitates – or at least, it must try to do so, for it is “supposicyon,” and not mere imitation, “that callyd is arte.” Fair enough, one might say, but this is easier said than done. After all, the tools a poet uses to simulate reality (such as the tricks of imitation) have

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little in common with the tools a logician uses to make propositions about reality (such as the rules of a predicative statement). Skelton would likely have thought it true to say, for example, that “all humans are mammals; all mammals are composed of flesh, bone, and blood; therefore, all humans are composed of flesh, bone, and blood.” But what does this syllogism really convey about the experience of embodied human life? Even if terminist logic supplied, in this respect, the conceptual framework for Skelton’s views on imitation, it provided him with little that would have been useful for the making of literary representations. Happily enough, however, a different tradition of premodern thought stood at the ready. This tradition was more concerned with the production of enargeia than with the precise relation between res and verba, and it was associated in Skelton’s works, not with Parott, but with King David, the speaker of the psalms. David plays a prominent role in Skelton’s last surviving poem, which also stands as his “most passionate and emphatic defence of his poetic calling,” as Gillespie suggests.66 This is the Replycacyon, which he wrote in 1527 to rebuke Thomas Arthur and Thomas Bilney, two dissenting academics at Cambridge who had been accused of harboring sympathies for Lutheran thought. After he finishes his attack on the scholars, Skelton informs us at the end of his poem that certain readers have complained that he writes, as a poet, of such things that ought to be left to “theology” and “philosophy” (24.306–13). To respond to such complaints, Skelton “call[s] to this rekenyng” (24.316) the figure of David, whom he hails, following Jerome, as the “chefe poete” of “poetes” (24.330). David is a figure of considerable authority, of course. Not every writer is possessed of the power necessary to “harp[e] out of hell / olde patriarkes and prophetes in heven with him to dwell” (24.341–42). But Skelton summons David, we learn, not merely to associate his writings with the authority of this ancient poet, but to imply that his verse draws upon the same source of power as David’s songs once did. This, Skelton explains, is nothing less than the “spyrituall instygacion / and divyne ­inspyracion” of the “hete of the Holy Gost” (24.380–83). For as he writes, … there is a spyrituall, And a mysteriall, And a mysticall Effecte energiall, As Grekes do it call, Of suche an industry And suche a pregnacy, Of hevenly inspyracion In laureate creacyon, Of poetes commendacion, That of divyne myseracion

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry God maketh his habytacion In poetes whiche excelles, And sojourns with them and dwelles.

(24.365–78)

What is this “effecte energiall”? In one sense, it surely refers to divine energeia, or “energy,” because it is conflated with the “hete of the Holy Gost” (24.383), or the divine force that is supposed to drive inspired activity. But in another, broader sense, this “effecte energiall” likely also denotes enargeia, the ability to body forth the physical matter of things in words – or at least, the ability to produce the illusion that one’s writing is not merely a form of imitation, but a materializing creative act in itself.67 The “effecte energiall” is the power that allows David to engage in “laureate creacyon” rather than mere “fayn[ing]” (24.353). It is what allows him to mirror the truth of the physical world so exactly that his words seem indistinguishable from what they represent. The key point, however, is not merely that David is a master of evocative writing. Rather, the point is that his poetry is at once evocative (because, as in enargeia, its representations appear to be life itself) and truthful (because, as in supposition theory, those representations may be logically taken for what they represent). This complex idea – that true imitation requires both supposition and enargeia – is central to Skelton’s theory of making, and as we will see, his most extensive experiment with this energetic mode of imitation can be found in Phyllyp Sparowe, which goes to extraordinary and even comic lengths in its attempt to copy a living thing into words. Skelton’s poem clearly made something of a splash. It circulated widely enough to occasion an attack from Alexander Barclay, and it went through numerous printings later in the sixteenth century.68 At the same time, however, it received a cool reception from some of its readers, who seem to have disliked both what Skelton represented in the poem and how he did so.69 This will come as small surprise to those familiar with the poem, for with its acid tone, grotesque imagery, and apparently chaotic structure, Phyllyp Sparowe often seems to take pleasure in performing a kind of premodern ostranenie – to revel in making its representations at once vivid and strange to the reader.70 In one respect, this is surely because Skelton is a born troll, a provocateur who delights in shocking his audience. But in another, more serious respect, I will argue below that Phyllyp Sparowe is also a kind of literary-critical manifesto, one that levies all its maker’s energies to prove to the reader, at every opportunity, that the only authentic representation is a copious one. ***

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Phyllyp Sparowe was written sometime between 1502 and 1509.71 In terms of structure, it can be divided into roughly two parts, with a coda that Skelton appended to the poem after its first circulation. The first part recounts the lamentations of Jane Scrope, a daydreaming nun from Norfolk who is its initial speaker and, later on, its primary addressee.72 Jane’s beloved pet sparrow, Phyllyp, has recently been eaten by the nunnery cat, Gyb. While she listens to another nun sing Vespers, she grieves for Phyllyp, tells us the story of his life, and stages, in her mind, the Missa pro defunctis, or Mass for the Dead, to commend his soul to heaven.73 In the second part of Phyllyp Sparowe, Skelton takes over Jane’s poem. Speaking in propria persona, he presents us with a “commendacyon” (7.849), not of Phyllyp, but of Jane herself. He praises her character, remarks upon her beauty, and offers up his poem as a token of his affections. The coda consists of a defense of the poem that Skelton added in response to the criticisms of certain “janglynge jayes” (7.1269); it directly addresses these detractors, who seem to have included Jane Scrope herself. Skelton’s poem is eclectic both in matter and in style. John Scattergood notes that it draws upon many sources, including Catullus, Ovid, Persius, Statius, Martial, Caxton, the liturgy, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf.74 Here as elsewhere in Skelton, Langland is a likely influence, too.75 The genre of the poem is still more eclectic. Critics have proposed Goliardic satire, Burgundian poetry, and the titulus, or monastic roll on which funeral commemorations were inscribed, as possible models for its form.76 This playful blend of influences makes for what is no doubt a strange text, one that puts bold claims to literary innovation side by side with a bathetic lament for a dead pet bird. It is self-serious in one moment, trivial in the next, so much so that we may wonder just how seriously we should take the poem in the first place. C. S. Lewis, for one, declared it “our first great poem of childhood,” and remarked that it was “the lightest – the most like a bubble – of all the poems” he knew.77 But Phyllyp Sparowe is hardly a “bubble” or a work of “light” verse. For one thing, insofar as the poem does treat Jane as a daydreaming child, it does so in decidedly patronizing and even caustic fashion. For another, it is an obviously metacritical poem, one that repeatedly alludes to the poetic concerns at the heart of Skelton’s literary project – even if it never quite says, in earnest, what it thinks about them. We might begin by observing that Phyllyp Sparowe is a poem preoccupied with bodies, especially bodies that are desired, but are lost or remain beyond one’s grasp. In the first part of the poem, Jane speaks as a woman who misses the physical presence of her masculine pet, a bird who is also

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figured, with a nod to classical tradition, as her lover.78 In the midst of her grief, she recalls how his little body would hop about when he was alive. Somtyme he wolde gaspe Whan he sawe a waspe; A fly, or a gnat, He wolde flye at that; And prytely he wolde pant Whan he saw an ant; Lord, how he wolde pry After the butterfly! Lorde, how he wolde hop After the gressop! And whan I sayd, “Phyp, Phyp,” Than he wolde lepe and skyp, And take me by the lyp.(7.128–40)

At other times, Phyllyp does more than kiss Jane. Sometimes, he “syt[s]” on her “lap,” while at other moments, he lies and rests “betwene [her] brestes softe” (7.121–25). She recalls how he would press up against her “nakyd skyn” while moving inside her dress, and she remembers fondly how he would “crepe in” to her gown and rest upon her body, “flyckerynge with his wynges” (7.167, 346–48). Jane’s putative fantasies about Phyllyp’s body serve, of course, as a pretext for Skelton’s fantasies about Jane’s body. Indeed, as Celia Daileader has noted, the poet transfers his desires to Phyllyp so that he might live them out through his avian surrogate, in a poetic gesture inspired, as Susan Schibanoff observes, by the fact that sparrows were conventional symbols of lechery and the phallus.79 Through its use of enargeia and mimesis, in other words, the poem aims to create an erotic illusion that will titillate Skelton (in point of fact) and charm Jane (at least in conceit). Jane is said to take pleasure in the vivid memory of Phyllyp’s body, while Skelton takes obvious pleasure, via Phyllyp, in the illusion of Jane’s body. But Jane – who seems to desire, like Skelton, a mode of representation comprised of more than words alone – soon expresses her dissatisfaction with these purely literary fantasies. As she tells us, the representation of her hopping and chirping beloved only serves to remind her that Phyllyp is now lost – “alas,” she cries, “I wolde ryde and go / a thousand myle of grounde, / if any such might be found!” (7.186–88) – and so she begins to daydream about recreating his presence in a more physical way. She first considers the exemplum of Attalus II (7.189–93), a second century king of Pergamon who reportedly gave a hundred talents for a picture by Astrides

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of Thebes, a painter whose work was renowned for its depth of physical expression. Then she imagines how much it would cost to retain the services of Cadmus (7.194–200), who once scoured the globe for his sister Canacee, so that he might search for Phyllyp and return him to Jane.80 Finally, she recalls the rejuvenating powers of “Medeas arte” (7.202) and laments her ignorance of such sorcery. “I wolde I had a parte / of her crafty magyke!” she cries. “My sparowe than shuld be quycke / with a charme or twayne, / and playe with me agayne” (7.203–7).81 Ultimately, Jane settles on a strategy more within her power: she decides to needle Phyllyp’s likeness onto her sampler in the hope that his cross-stitched image might serve as a more embodied and lively reminder of her lost pet. But this method works all too well. As she approaches the end of her stitchwork, Jane takes a closer look at the image upon her sampler, and suddenly, it springs to life. But whan I was sowing his beke, Me thought my sparow did spek, And opened his prety byll, Saynge, “Mayd, ye are in wyll Agayne me for to kyll! Ye prycke me in the head!” With that my nedle waxed red, Me thought, of Phyllyps blode.

(7.219–26)

If literary imitation is too anemic for Jane’s tastes, then enargeia in thread proves too uncanny. The image of Phyllyp is so lively – so apparently real – that it provokes the opposite of the “pleasure and comforte” that Jane had hoped to gain “by representacyon” (7.214–17). Terrified, she throws away her sampler “for drede” (7.236). Why do both of Jane’s attempts to recreate Phyllyp – first in words, and then in image – fail to bring her the solace she desires? Though the methods differ, the problem is the same. Neither one is able to bring her Phyllyp back, for her Phyllyp was, as she tells us, the most perfect, singular, and unique bird that ever existed, an archetypical sparrow better than every other sparrow since the time of Noah’s Ark. As she explains, my sparowe dyd pas All sparowes of the wode That were syns Noes flode; Was never none so good. Kynge Phylyp of Macedony Had no such Phylyp as I, No, no, syr, hardely!

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(7.266–72)

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Here, Jane suggests that Phyllyp cannot be doubled because he is too unique: any copy of his body would be a mere variation upon what made the original Phyllyp so special. What is more, that variation would diminish – if only implicitly – the perfection of that original, in the same sense that all sparrows descended from the original two on Noah’s Ark are implicitly held, in the terms of Christian postlapsarian thought, to be degraded versions of their ideal parents. Perhaps this is why, at this very moment in the poem, Jane appears to change her tactics. Rather than attempting to console herself with further representations of Phyllyp, she refocuses her efforts upon his proper commemoration – first, by staging an avian mass for his soul, and second, by composing a fitting epitaph for his grave. In contrast to her earlier experiments with imitation and enargeia, both rituals of commemoration center upon Phyllyp’s absence rather than his presence. In the mass, for example, Phyllyp is interred while a vast number of birds “chatter” the liturgy in his memory (7.397). We hear of the crane, the swan, the goose, the duck, the drake, the peacock, the heron, the cormorant, and so on, each with its own role to play in the ceremony (see 7.432–65). Notably absent from this copia of fowls, however, is any second sparrow. Insofar as the mass represents Phyllyp, then, it does so only by the via negativa – through a parodic quem queritis and through the exclusion of any other birds of Phyllyp’s kind.82 With the mass concluded, Jane moves on to composing her “epytaphe … for Phyllyppes grave” (7.605–6). She begins her search for an apt inscription with a literary-historical survey of the many styles that might prove suitable. Her depth of knowledge is impressive. She would seem to have read all the Canterbury Tales (7.612–27); countless Matter of Britain romances (7.628–658); several Matter of Troy epics (7.659– 723); the Odyssey (7.724–33); various texts of Roman and Greek history (7.734–48); long swathes of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate (7.784–812); and classical poetry, including Ovid, Virgil, Plutarch, Sappho, and Pindar (7.755–68). But here again, what stands out is the fact that none of these styles will do – presumably because none of them, in Jane’s view, are adequate to Phyllyp’s distinctive appearance and unique personality. Although, as Jane tells us, she has “enrold / a thousand” books, both “new and old,” in her memory (7.749–50), a copia of books that could “fyll bougets and males” (7.752), nowhere in this assortment can she find an English style that is fitting for her bird. And so, in an unexpected turn, she resorts to Latin.

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Copy and Copia in Skelton Flos volucrum formose, vale! Philippe, sub isto Marmore iam recubas, Qui mihi carus eras. Semper erunt nitido Radiantia sydera celo; Impressusque meo Pectore semper eris. 

159

(7.826–33)

[Best of birds, beautiful one, farewell. Phyllyp, beneath that marble now you rest, who were dear to me. Always there will be shining stars in the clear sky; and you will always be stamped in my heart. (Scattergood tr.; p. 375)]

The inscription is certainly in a grand style. It tells us that the image of Phyllyp will always be stamped within Jane’s heart. Nevertheless, it does not provide Jane with what, at the start of the poem, she says she truly desires. This is “to call Phylyp agayne” (7.26) – or at least, to produce a living copy of Phyllyp, one convincing enough to take his place. Why do Jane’s attempts at energetic imitation fail? One reason, as I’ve suggested, is that they aim at the quixotic goal of reproducing, and not merely doubling, her beloved pet. Jane wants a representation of Phyllyp that is identical to Phyllyp himself, but she also believes there can be no second Phyllyp. Under such conditions, no representation could ever prove satisfactory, because any copy will necessarily double its original. At the center of the avian mass, however, there is a figure who may be able to offer Jane a solution of sorts. This is the phoenix, who plays the role of the ordained minister, blessing Phyllyp’s tomb and commending his soul to heaven. This phoenix, we are told, is a bird possessed of remarkable powers. Plinni sheweth all In his Story Naturall, What he doth fynde Of this phenyx kynde; Of whose incyneracyon There ryseth a new creacyon Of the same facyon Without alteracyon …

(7.536–43)

According to Skelton, the phoenix can reduplicate its own body after each mortal “incyneracyon,” rising from the ashes as a bird that is at once a copy and an original, at once old and new, without any “alteracyon” of itself. These magical powers are surely what authorize the phoenix to serve as the officiant of Phyllyp’s service – to sing the commendation of the mass

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“as patryarke or pope / in a blacke cope” and to wave the censer above Phyllyp’s coffin (7.528–35). The sacramental authority bestowed upon the clergy is ultimately derived, after all, from the holy powers of Christ, that greater Phoenix who, as countless medieval bestiaries remind us, also rose from his grave.83 The phoenix plays a small but important role in Phyllyp Sparowe, and so we should pause for a moment to consider its significance to Skelton and, especially, the literary techniques that he associates with its powers. As it happens, Skelton likens both himself and the “laureate” work of his making to this rare bird at several moments across his oeuvre. Near the end of Ware the Hawke, for instance, he calls himself a phoenix in a cryptogram (see 6.239–45), while in the Garland of Laurell, the bird sits atop a laurel tree, “bet[ing] up a fyre” and singeing its leaves with “sparkis full kene” (21.669).84 When one considers the durable association of phoenixes with laureation – Francesco Petrarca, for example, pictures “a wondrous phoenix [strania fenice],” with its wings “clothed with purple and its head with gold,” mourning at the foot of “an uprooted laurel tree [alloro]” – it seems likely that Skelton perceived, like many of his contemporaries, an analogy between certain kinds of literary activity and the creative powers of the phoenix.85 How exactly might Skelton have understood these powers? In one respect, he may have felt that they had to do with the “effecte energiall” that I noted in my discussion of the Replycacyon. Just as the words of David duplicate form and flesh, so too does the phoenix recreate itself, both in form and matter, every time it dies. But in another respect, I believe that the phoenix, with its cyclical recreation of its own body, figures a more specific literary technique in Skelton’s view. This is the reduplicative power of copia, and the verse-form that Skelton associates with it: Skeltonics. As I observed at the start of this chapter, the origins of the Skeltonic style remain something of a mystery, but we do know a few things about this unique type of verse. First, Skelton explicitly links it with copia. It is – so Collyn Clout suggests in his account of Skelton’s “rayne-beaten” and “mothe-eaten” diction (19.55-56) – a technique for writing “copyously” (19.1085). Second, while it is possible that Skelton’s understanding of the copious style was Erasmian, it is just as likely that it was shaped by treatments of the concept found in the artes praedicandi tradition, which often provide examples of abundant writing that display a striking resemblance to Skeltonics.86 In John of Garland, for instance, the so-called “Isidorean Style” dictates that the writer first divide his matter into clausulae, or little clauses, and then cap off each clausula with a

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leonine rhyme.87 The resulting effect, as we can see from the Latin clauses in the example below, is a cascade of irregular rhyme groupings that produce a sense of forward motion. Let the human race be struck dumb at the shame, let every man shiver at the general blame, let slaves be shocked, free men appalled, when stuttering children are called to professorships, irresponsible schoolboys turned into masters, when the cause of scholarship is the plaything of the mob. They read lectures before they can sound out syllables, they fly before they can hop along the ground, before they know how to connect nouns with verbs they brag they compose marvels of verse. Pre pudore genus humanum obstupeat, de communi dampno quilibet abhorreat, admirentur serui, stupescant liberi, dum uocantur ad cathedram elingues pueri, conformantur magistris leues discipuli, dum causa studii fauor est populi. Prius legunt quam sillabicent; prius uolant quam humi curcitent; antequam sciant partes connectere, versus iactant miros componere.88

Here, both the rhyme scheme and the metrical variation of the Latin strongly recall Skeltonics. If one were to break John’s clausulae into lines of verse of uneven lengths, the resemblance would be more obvious still. Given his clerical training, Skelton may well have been familiar with John’s treatise, but even if he was not, he would likely have encountered the “Isidorean Style” elsewhere, for it was a staple of discussion in other manuals on the art of preaching, even if it went by different names. Ranulph Higden, Robert of Basevorn, and Thomas Waleys all call it coloration or color rhythmicus, and note that it is typically used in divisio, the division and elaboration of the various points that can be derived from a sermon’s thema, or “theme.”89 This last point – that color rhythmicus is properly a subtype of divisio – is also key for our understanding of Skeltonics, because it is in fact by division that Skeltonics typically do their work. Consider, for example, the opening of Elinour Rummyng, a poem that lambasts a brewer of the same name from Surrey.90 Skelton begins his poem with a mock-blazon of Elinour. He starts with her head and then moves, slowly, down to her shoes, dividing and describing her as he goes. Her lothely lere Is nothynge clere, But ugly of chere, Droupy and drowsy, Scurvy and lowsy; Her face all bowsy, Comely crynklyd,

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry Woundersly wrynklyd, Lyke a rost pygges eare, Brystled with here. Her lewde lyppes twayne, They slaver, men sayne, Lyke a ropy rayne, A gummy glayre. She is ugly fayre: Her nose somdele hoked And camously croked, Never stoppynge But ever droppynge; Her skynne lose and slacke, Greuyned lyke a sacke; With a croked backe.

(17.12–33)

Elinour’s face, he says, is “wrynklyd” like “a rost pygges eare.” Her lips slobber “lyke a ropy rayne.” Her nose is “never stoppynge, / but ever droppynge.” And the list goes on and on. The blazon recalls “Flemish genre painting” for John Scattergood, while for Elizabeth Fowler, it is reminiscent of the work of Hieronymous Bosch.91 But it feels as much like cubism to me, in that it splits its object into its several aspects before elaborating upon each one, and so produces, in the process, variation and a sense of motion through the repetition of irregular patterns of rhyme and meter.92 What is more, this method of producing liveliness through division recurs throughout the rest of Skelton’s poem, for the most striking images of Elinour Rummyng are in fact those that depict the motion of life. When Elinour walks, for example, “she dryveth downe the dewe / with a payre of heles / as brode as two wheles,” and “hobles as she gose” (17.82–85). Her customers come with “naked pappes, / that flyppes and flappes” (17.135–36), and one falls asleep while drinking and “pyst where she stood” (17.373). In the background, the “hennes ron in the mashfat,” dropping their excrement into the “ale tunnes” (17.190–94), and at one point, a boar raises his tail up and rubs his “rumpe” against “the hye benche” (17.177– 79). The distinction between human and animal, so important for western thought since Aristotle, is suspended for those who drink with Elinour. Skelton’s poem reminds us that, at least in certain cases, our urges and our motions have more in common with the impulsive behavior of hens and boars than we might like to think. The motion, dynamism, and copia of Skeltonics thus serve as the engine that produces, in Skelton’s poetry, the “effecte energiall” at which Skelton seems to aim. By describing Elinour in the way that he does, he summons before the reader’s eyes a person who is grotesque in her physicality and

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instability, but who also feels alive, like a trembling and moving being possessed of flesh, bone, and breath. Indeed, the success of Skelton’s recursive style and hyperactive rhymes in these passages may suggest that he is right to use copia as a means for imitating life, because life is indeed characterized by constant motion, energy, and change. Like the phoenix, it is always renewing itself, dividing itself, doubling itself – and so, far from producing what Mishtooni Bose calls “mimetic degradation,” the Skeltonic style is better understood as a mode of representation defined by its extreme commitment to verisimilitude.93 With this in mind, I’d like to return now to Phyllyp Sparowe. At precisely the moment when Jane finishes her epitaph for Phyllyp, Skelton steps forward to reveal that he has been the voice behind the poem all along.94 As he writes, Per me laurigerum Britonum Skeltonida vatem Hec cecinisse licet Ficta sub imagine texta. Cuius eris volucris, Prestanti corpore virgo: Candida Nais erat, Formosior ista Joanna est: Docta Corinna fuit, Sed magis ista sapit.

(7.834–43)

[Through me, Skelton the laureate poet of Britain, these compositions could be sung under a feigned likeness. She whose bird you were is a maiden with an outstanding body: the naiad was fair, but Jane is more beautifully formed; Corinna was learned, but that one knows more.] (Scattergood tr., p. 375; translation modified)

Here, Skelton takes the reins of Phyllyp Sparowe and turns its attention away from the body of Phyllyp and toward the object in which he is truly interested: the “outstanding body,” or corpus praestans, of Jane herself.95 If in the first half of the poem, Jane had tried first to resurrect and then to commemorate her beloved pet, then in the second half, Skelton will do the same for Jane, but with a difference. Where Jane dwelt upon her failure to recreate her lost bird in a singular way – to bring back, as she would say, the body of her one and only Phyllyp – Skelton will instead attempt to copy Jane’s body by using copia – by representing it multiply, and not just as a singular thing. No commendation for the dead soul of a bird, this will be a celebration of the living flesh of a nun.96 Skelton’s bawdy celebration takes the form of a “commendacyon” (7.849) of Jane’s beauty, a playful allusion to the ordo commendationis

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animae, which is the penultimate section of the Mass for the Dead.97 It begins with a blazon that shares, albeit in an inverted way, key features with the mock blazon found in Elinour Rummyng. First, both blazons follow a model of the form found in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova.98 Each begins with a description of its subject’s head and proceeds to her feet, with a conventional – if unexpected, in Skelton’s case – jump from the waist to the thighs for the sake of modesty. Second, Skelton’s blazon of Jane works, like his blazon of Elinour, through a process of division. He splits Jane’s body into its constituent parts as he moves downward, pausing to elaborate upon the qualities of each one. Just so, Jane’s skin is said to be whiter than an “orient perle,” her veins as blue as “Indy saphyre,” and her lips as red as a “lusty ruby” or a “rose budd[e]” (7.1031–36). Her hair is golden and pressed, he tells us, like the beams of Phoebus (7.1170–74), while her fingers are as soft as silk and whiter than fresh milk (7.1116–20). With this copious assembly of images in place, Skelton proceeds to embrace the copy he has bodied forth. He traces the “sugred mouth” that, he says, “it were an hevenly blysse” to “kysse” (7.1039–40). He imagines putting his fingers upon “the garterynge” of Jane’s “hose,” and he stares, or “tote[s],” at “her prety fote” (7.1176, 1146–47). The language of the passage clearly mirrors Skelton’s sexual excitement. As he thinks of Jane’s hands, he “strayn[es]” his own “hand” (7.1122), and his “unable” pen shakes, producing an “unstable” script, when he tries to “prayse her at the full” (7.1219–22). The innuendo peaks, as we might expect, during the hiatus. Her kyrtell so goodly lased, And under that is brased Such pleasures that I may Neyther wryte nor say; Yet though I wryte not with ynke, No man can let me thynke, For thought hath lyberte, Thought is franke and fre; To thynke a mery thought It cost me lytell nor nought. Wolde God myne homely style Were pullysshed with the fyle Of Ciceros eloquence, To prase her excellence!

(7.1194–1207)

With these euphemistic allusions to “pullyssh[ing]” his “style” and holding back his “ynke,” Skelton exhausts the blazon. In a concluding gesture, he names Jane, thus firmly identifying his textual copy of her body with

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the physical body itself. “Goodly maystres Jane,” he writes, “sobre, demure Dyane; / Jane this maystres hyght” (7.1223–25).99 Is the blazon successful? Skelton was certainly pleased with it. He tells us that others “cannot amend” it, “though they wold spend / all the wyttes they have” (7.1271–73), and it’s possible that he spoke in earnest, for if one considers the blazon with respect Skelton’s notional poetic values, one might well conclude that it meets his exacting standards for energetic imitation, at least in two respects. First, the blazon does not merely seek to describe Jane’s body, but to stand as a kind of predicate for it. Indeed, like the individuating characteristics that he includes in the blazon – the “warte upon her cheke” and the scar that, “from afar,” seems “lyke to the radyant star” (7.1043–47) – Skelton’s naming of Jane is important because it links his representation – at least in conceit – to a real person. It openly declares that it depicts Jane Scrope, the daughter of Richard Scrope and a nun who lives in a Benedictine house at Carrow, in Norfolk.100 Second, the blazon does not represent Jane merely as she appears at a certain moment in time or as she appears to the mind’s eye, but as she lives and breathes – or at least, as she lives and breathes in Skelton’s conceited imagination. This is why Skelton’s first move in the Commendation, after his invocation to the muse, is to allude, with a figure that anticipates Erasmus’s characterization of copia as a golden river, to the “golden flod” of “Thagus” that his “pen hath enbybed” (7.872–75). Indeed, just as Skelton uses copia elsewhere as a means for representing the vivacity, multiplicity, and change latent within an object, so too does he use it here as a means for representing Jane. Her “browes” are “bent” in such a way, for instance, that they remind the poet of countless other women: “she may well represent / fayre Lucres, as I wene, / or els fayre Polexene, / or els Caliope, / or els Penolope” (7.1016–21). In her movements and appearance, Jane recalls an entire garden of flowers, and a whole set of goddesses. She is a violet, a daisy, and a columbine (7.1050–58); she is Athena, she is Diana, and she is Venus (7.1223–30). What is more, these copious comparisons are not mere nods to convention, for as Skelton stresses in a recurrent five-line envoi, Jane is a “goodly floure” that “floryssheth new and new.” For this most goodly floure, This blossome of fresshe coulour, So Jupiter me socour, She floryssheth new and new In bewte and vertew.

(7.893–97 and passim)

It would appear that Skelton employed copia precisely because he wished to depict the movement and change that characterized, in his view, “all the goodly sort” of Jane’s “fetures clere” (7.999–1000).

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Unlike Jane’s imitations of Phyllyp, which took as their object a dead body, Skelton’s imitation of Jane seems centrally concerned with life – with the “movement, feeling, voice [vox], and speech [sermo]” of a living person that, as Erasmus says, any good literary imitation ought to produce.101 If Skelton believed his blazon to be a triumph, however, many of his readers took a different view. Some seem to have felt that the poem was too silly and fantastical – too unconcerned with reality – to be taken seriously. Alexander Barclay, for instance, seems to have spoken for many of Skelton’s contemporaries when he claimed that Phyllyp Sparowe was an example of empty “wantones,” a poem for those fools who take pleasure in “wordes vayne” uttered “without reason.”102 Other readers, by contrast, appear to have felt just the opposite – that it was so topical, and so specific in its representation of a living person, that it was a scandal. Jane herself seems to have felt this way about the poem, for it appears that she did not take Skelton’s objectifying “commendacyon” as a compliment.103 Skelton was never one to turn the other cheek, however, and so he decided to append an “addicyon” to his poem (see 7.1268–1382) that would respond to his critics in two ways. The first, predictably enough, is to make fun of those who do not like what they see in Phyllyp Sparowe but can do no better themselves. People like this, Skelton suggests, are merely consumed by Envy – who is, we should note, a figure not merely for the jealousy that one may feel toward the success of another person, but for one’s inability to appreciate any representation that does not align with one’s own tastes. Envy, he tells us, is an ugly fellow with a foul-looking face. Whan other ar glad, Than is he sad, Frantyke and mad; His tong never styll For to say yll, Wrythyng and wringyng, Bytyng and styngyng; And thus this elf Consumeth himself, Himself doth slo, With payne and wo.

(7.938–48)

When Skelton proclaims that his critics “discommende / that they cannot amend” (7.1270–71), he associates them with precisely the kind of

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reading, and writing, that Envy is here said to practice. People such as these, he suggests, seek from books merely the confirmation of their own views, and dismiss any work of art that does not reflect the world in a manner that aligns with their preconceptions. What is more, in their rejection of Skeltonic copia, they pervert their own copious energies, turning them inward until they “consumeth” themselves, like Envy, with a “tong never styll.” Instead of creating life with their pens, they attack the lively representations of others, “wrythyng and wringyng” and “bytyng and styngyng” until all is rendered – no doubt to Envy’s satisfaction – immobile and dead. If Skelton’s first response to his critics is to dismiss their complaints as the product of philistinism, then his second response takes these complaints somewhat more seriously, if only to use them as an occasion for a bit of literary-critical humor. Feigning shock at the poor reception of his poem – “alas,” he cries, “that goodly mayd, / why shuld she be afrayde?” (7.1282–83) – the poet then summons Phyllyp back from the underworld so that he might answer his maker’s detractors. The gesture is comic, of course, but it also serves as a half-serious demonstration of Skelton’s poetic powers, and in particular, of his ability to produce a living copy by pouring language forth, like Hercules, from the horn of cornucopia (7.1316–21).104 This is why Phyllyp is not called but rather “conjure[d]” forth – in a satirical echo of a formulation often found in Middle English charms – by the poet no fewer than three times (7.1290, 1342, 1362).105 To underline the point, Skelton then bodies forth a number of other strange creatures across the “addicyon.” There are “Centaures, / or Onocentaures, / or Hipocentaures” (7.1294–96). There is “Gerion, / with thre bodyes in one” (7.1307–8). There are the “flames” that come forth from the mouth of “Chemer[a],” a creature that is part goat, part lion, and part dragon (7.1330). Such bodies seem to represent a serio-comic threat toward Skelton’s critics. On a good day, our poet might choose to depict beautiful nuns or charming sparrows. But just imagine – so these images warn – the monsters he could create if his readers were to put him in a foul mood. Skelton’s reassertion of his poetic talents culminates in the final part of the “addicyon,” where, in the midst of his third summoning of Phyllyp Sparowe, he introduces the reader to yet another conjurer laureate. This is the Witch of Endor, or “Phitonesse” (7.1345), whose power to summon spirits from beyond the grave recalls at once Jane’s fantasies about “Medeas arte” (7.202) and Skelton’s own claims to phoenix-like literary abilities.

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry I conjure, Phylyp, and call In the name of Kyng Saul; Primo Regum expresse, He bad the Phitonesse To wytchcraft her to dresse, And by her abusyons, And dampnable illusyons Of marveylus conclusyons, And by her supersticyons, And wonderfull condityons, She raysed up in that stede Samuell that was dede …

(7.1342–53)

Like the phoenix, the Witch “rayses up” the dead and returns them to life. Or at least, this is what we are often told about the Witch’s powers – for as it happens, Skelton has his doubts. As he explains, … whether it were so, He were idem in numero, The selfe same Samuell, How be it to Saull dyd he tell The Philistinis shuld hym ascry, And the next day he shuld dye, I wyll my selfe dyscharge To lettred men at large.

(7.1354–61)

In using the phrase idem in numero, Skelton alludes to a longstanding debate in Scholastic philosophy and theology, one that concerned the proper way to define self-identity in predicative terms.106 To assert that something was idem in numero was to claim that, after a certain passage of time or change in circumstance, that thing had remained wholly identical to itself. Just so, John Buridan observes that “in the strictest sense, sameness in number [idem in numero] is a state of being [esse] totally the same [totaliter], in the sense that ‘this’ is ‘that’ [hoc est illud] and that there is nothing from the whole [de integritate] of ‘this’ that is not part of the whole of ‘that,’ and vice versa [e converso].”107 As we might expect, moreover, the phrase often occurs in controversies about the resurrection of the body, especially on the question of whether a newly resurrected person would be truly identical to the person they had once been.108 Though thinkers differed on the details, they generally agreed on “an eschatology in which body and soul truly became the person.”109 Does Skelton himself believe that the “Samuell” who speaks through the Witch is the “self same” person as the son of Hannah and Elkanah, seer of the Jewish people? Though he claims to leave the matter “to lettred

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men at large” (7.1361), I think the poem makes Skelton’s position clear enough. For even if the Witch did conjure up the spirit of Samuel, this “Samuel” could hardly have been identical to the Samuel who had once quarreled with Saul and anointed David at Bethlehem. He would be half a prophet at best, a soul without the body to match. And we might observe the same, moreover, about the object of Skelton’s own conjurations in this last section of his poem. Skelton’s “Phyllyp” is clearly not the same as Jane’s Phyllyp, because his Phyllyp is only a textual copy. To be truly idem in numero, this literary Phyllyp would have to be a creature identical to Jane’s pet, both in matter and form, in spirit (idem) and in body (in numero) alike. The satirical force of Skelton’s “addicyon” may thus be said to hinge upon his serio-comic response to the two groups of readers who have objected to his poem on different grounds. To Jane Scrope, and others who have felt the poem is scandalous, he insists that poetry traffics only in matters of representation, and not in matters of being. All bluster about “laureate creacyon” (24.373) aside, a poem can only copy the real world, and so the belief that a poetic double is anything other than a mere double is the stuff of legends and daydreams. Skelton’s “Jane” cannot be identical to the real Jane, any more than his “Phyllyp” may be conflated with her Phyllyp. There is thus little reason – at least in the poet’s self-interested view – for Jane to take offense at the fictional representation of herself that she finds in his pages. To Alexander Barclay – and those who feel, like Barclay, that Phyllyp Sparowe is an empty and “wanton” poem – Skelton observes that, when properly done, poetry can evoke life in all its motion and energy. To call this energy “wantones” is to reject the magic of literary illusion, or even worse, to consign oneself to a sterile mode of reading and writing. Like the Witch of Endor, Skelton may be nothing more than a prestidigitator. But his craft, like hers, may allow us to experience the living world with a vivid and renewed attention. Neither Alexander Barclay nor Jane Scrope were the first to protest the qualities they found objectionable – rightly or wrongly – in Skelton’s poem. Indeed, both of their criticisms have often been raised at different moments in the long history of literary reception, not least in response to the traditions of classical satire that Skelton so admired.110 The first conflates literature with its representations, while the second holds that its representations are devoid of any real substance. But both stem from a common impulse, one that pushes for the rejection of any representation that does not align with the prevailing norms of a given culture or the proclivities of an individual reader’s taste – and so appears, paradoxically, either too real or not real enough. Whether one understands it as snobbery,

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prudishness, or philistinism, this impulse has long been a target of satire, and in the “addicyon,” it is certainly one of Skelton’s targets as well. But I think the poet’s response to readers like Jane and Alexander also speaks to the broader concerns of his literary project, and especially, to his views on prevailing practices of literary imitation during the early sixteenth century. When Skelton remarks that Elinour Rummyng is “legged lyke a crane” and “foted lyke a plane” (17.49–50), or when he threatens to “varnyshe” the “face” of “gawdy, gresy Garnesche” (13.3.120–21), we may justifiably feel that his representations are offensive, or at least overdrawn. But these representations also aim, as I’ve argued throughout this chapter, to depict the energy and motion of life – to cut through the lie of mimesis so that a more expressive mode of representation is made possible. No doubt, Skelton cannot fully achieve “that supposicyon that callyd is arte” (18.197). But he can offer his reader an image of life that is more dynamic than what can be found in the imitations of his contemporaries – an image with all the “physical appeal,” as W. H. Auden once put it, of a living thing trembling in space.111 *** At one point in the Lingua, Erasmus discusses the relationship between copies and multiples. Writing about the problem of gossip, he laments that “there is no man alive so still of tongue or cautious of mind” that he will not divulge his deepest intimacies to a friend. The problem, he explains, is that this friend will have another friend whom he trusts in turn with his secrets, and this other friend will have yet another friend, … and so as soon as we depart from the singular [ab vnione], the affair is quickly broadcast to the biggest crowd. For whatever is one is single and undivided [simplex … singulare] and does not exceed its limits – hence its name, “monad.” But even a pair, or “dyad,” is the beginning of an unlimited series of distinctions [infinitae differentiae]. Shortly, when you have doubled one with another [conduplicaueris], the consequence is an unlimited ­quantity [infinita numerositas].112

Duplication, here, is just multiplication in disguise, for to double something is in fact to inaugurate “an unlimited series of distinctions.” It is also, Erasmus quietly suggests, an act of copia, a fact to which he alludes by employing a medieval synonym for copious expression, conduplicatio, to define the act of “doubl[ing] one with another.”113 This kind of copia, however, is no tool of eloquence or key to varied expression. Instead, it is a kind of monstrous overgrowth, one comparable, as Erasmus elsewhere

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observes, to the metastasis of cancer, or to a nightmare wherein a “barbarous thing [barbare]” is spoken, not merely once, but “over and over again and worse every time [iterum atque iterum indoctius].”114 Erasmus obviously takes a negative view of this sort of copia, and in doing so, he aligns himself with the literary norms of his time. To write aptly during the early sixteenth century, after all, was to match verba to res in a decorous way, and so the wild sort of copia described by the Lingua was, by the literary rules of this era, excessive and rude. As I’ve noted above, however, what is remarkable about Skelton is precisely his resistance to this decorous and singular mode of writing – though it did him no favors with sixteenth-century readers, particularly after his death.115 William Bullein, for example, saw in Skelton’s works, not a golden river of copia, but a hellish flood of words sent toward its targets by way of “the infernall riuers Styx, Flegiton, and Acheron.”116 George Puttenham and Gabriel Harvey concurred. Skeltonics, in their view, were at once “too speedy” and “over-busy,” too filled with “Libles, Calumnies, Slaunders, Lies for the whetstone,” to befit the work of a true poet.117 Most damning of all, perhaps, is an unexpected allusion to Skeltonics in the work of Edmund Spenser, who appears to slip into an imitation of their rhyme and rhythm when he peers within the mouth of the Blatant Beast. And therein were a thousand tongs empight, Of sundry kindes, and sundry quality; Some were of dogs, that barked day and night, And some of cats, that wrawling still did cry, And some of Beares, that groynd continually, And some of Tygres, that did seeme to gren, And snar at all, that euer passed by: But most of them were tongues of mortall men, Which spake reprochfully, not caring where nor when.118

Spenser’s alliterative copia, his use of onomatopoetic verbs (“wrawling,” “groynd,” “snar”), and his sudden adoption of half-line periods all recall the energy of Skeltonics. The speech of the Beast, that figure of slander and lies who continually breaks decorum, “rend[ing] without regard of person or of time,” was to Spenser’s ears indistinguishable from the poetry of his early Tudor predecessor.119 To Skelton, however, such speech clearly sounded a different note. This is because, as I have argued in this chapter, Skelton writes in a mode of energetic imitation that draws upon the theoretical resources of imitation, enargeia, and copia in order to represent the world as it lives and breathes.

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This living world – and in particular, its living bodies – constitutes the typical matter used in Skelton’s poetry, while his copious mode of writing, Skeltonics, comprises his typical style of making. Through his representation of the copia that he perceives to be latent within living things, moreover, Skelton compels us to see the world multiply, and this is likely why many readers have found his poetry to be vulgar. Hippolyte Adolphe Taine once wrote, for example, that insofar as Skelton’s verse has some liveliness to it, this is only a liveliness akin to that of the “ignoble vermin” that swarm within “a great decomposing body,” and the spirit of Taine’s comment reappears in the words of later critics, who have also felt that Skelton’s poetry is characterized by a “wild” and “vulgar” diction, by a “gay destructiveness” that “delights in the violation of boundaries,” or even by a defiance of “all the rules of art.”120 For these readers, Skelton offends not merely in what he says, but in how he says it. Instead of clean lines, he gives us energetic disorder and chaotic motion. Instead of neat bodies, we see fleshly excess and fleshly defect. And in every case, Skelton insists – no doubt to the consternation of Taine and those who share his view – that his poetry represents the truth of things, “soche” as they really “are.” With this in mind, I’d like to conclude by returning to the question of Skelton’s political views, and especially, the politics of the style of making he employs. As I noted in my introduction, there is little question that Henry and Wolsey, like Puttenham and Taine after them, demanded a certain type of poetry from the writers in their ambit. To represent the world properly was not merely to represent it as the powerful saw it, but to claim that the powerful saw it truthfully and correctly. To depict the world in a different light carried, by contrast, a genuine risk of imprisonment or exile, as the example of Polydore Vergil teaches us.121 For this reason, when Skelton says that Wolsey “dothe revyle and brall / lyke Mahounde in a play” (20.596–97), or that he is “suche a potestate, / that he wolde breke the braynes / of Lucyfer in his chaynes, / and rule them echone / in Lucyfers trone” (20.989–93), he is voicing a risky sort of dissent, one that is especially dangerous because it attacks not only what Wolsey does, but how he sees himself. Where Wolsey chose, in his best-known portrait, to have himself painted as a pillar of state, clasping a letter and fixed in profile, Skelton draws him as an unstable and insatiable buffoon. “He rayles and he ratis, / he calleth them doddy patis; / he grynnes and he gapis, / as it were Jack Napis!” (20.651–54).122 To his fawning biographer, George Cavendish, Wolsey is a man so wise, and so capable of “pithy” and “witty persuasions in the council chamber,” that his fellows always elect him, of their own free will, to speak to the king with “his filed tongue and ornate

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eloquence.”123 To Skelton, Wolsey is a megalomaniac who “hathe all the sayenge / without any renayenge” in the Star Chamber, with the result that “all maters there he marres, / clappyng his rod on the borde” (20.189–93). The dissenting politics of the Wolsey poems may seem a far cry from the absurdist comedy of Phyllyp Sparowe, but they are not so different as we might think. For what the energetic imitations of that poem demonstrate is that every act of representation is predicated upon an ideological stance. Phyllyp Sparowe is objectionable to Jane Scrope not merely because it is rude and disrespectful – though it obviously is – but because its representations do not align either with Jane’s authentic self-image or the image of herself that she wished others to see. The same could be said, moreover, about the many other Skeltonic poems that do not represent their subjects in their preferred light. There is hardly a guarantee, of course, that these poems were motivated by Skelton’s political principles – and not, for instance, by his self-interested pursuit of patronage, or by his tendency toward self-gratifying fantasy.124 But I do believe that the style of these satires may yet imply a political stance in itself. This is that art and life, making and matter, are always different things, and that those figures who seek to conflate the two, like Wolsey, are dangerous people. If Jacques Rancière is correct to argue that political dissent often takes the form of a tactical rupture in the distribution of the sensible, then perhaps Skelton’s poetry might be said to effect, at least at certain times, a similar kind of rupture.125 Janus-like, it shows us not only how the world appears to be, but how it was, how it is, and how it might be – both for better and for worse.

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chapter 6

Wyatt’s Grace

At the start of one of his best-known rondos, Thomas Wyatt poses a qu­estion with the tenor of a demand. “What vaileth trouth?” he asks, or, by it, to take payn? To stryve, by stedfastnes, for to attayne, To be iuste, and true: and fle from dowblenes: Sythens all alike, where rueleth craftines Rewarded is boeth fals, and plain. Sonest he spedeth, that moost can fain; True meanyng hert is had in disdayn. Against deceipte and dowblenes What vaileth trouth? Decyved is he by crafty trayn That meaneth no gile and doeth remayn Within the trapp, withoute redresse. But, for to love, lo, suche a maisteres, Whose crueltie nothing can refrayn, What vaileth trouth?1

Like so many of Wyatt’s poems, “What vaileth trouth” speaks to its reader in two voices at once. One of these addresses us directly, as if the speaker “really wants to know,” as Thomas Hannen once put it, “the worth of honesty in an environment dominated by treachery.”2 Indeed, no matter our view of its implications, the question posed by this lyric demands an answer because it has been asked in earnest. What’s the point of taking “payn” to be good – so Wyatt wonders aloud – only to be treated with open “disdayn?” Why bother with a “true meanyng hert” when both “fals” and “plain” receive the same credit? What are we to make of our strange world, where there is no “redresse” after one has been wronged? Most of all, why do we continue to pose such questions when we already know, as the speaker clearly does, that human affairs are ruled by “craftines,” and not by “trouth?” 174

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This is Wyatt’s first voice. It is pressing, plainspoken, and direct. But there is also a second voice at work in “What vaileth trouth,” one that we can better hear if we focus on the diction of the poem, which often sounds weary and clichéd. This is because it is clichéd – so clichéd, in fact, that to my ear, only the first three lines of the second stanza do not feature at least one obvious commonplace. Consider a similar poem, Chaucer’s “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” which rehearses so many of the same tropes that it could nearly be mistaken for an imitation of the lyric above.3 Here, “trouthe” has also been “put doun” in favor of sycophancy and “fable” (15), open communication has likewise been replaced by “fals and deceivable” words (3), and “stedfastnesse,” once the pillar of the world, has again been cast aside for “wilfulnesse” and greed (6–7). Such Chaucerian truisms, along with other Middle English chestnuts about flattery, “doubleness,” and falseness, make up the greater part of Wyatt’s matter in “What vaileth trouthe,” and they undercut its urgency with their staleness. The poem is certainly powerful in its evocation of bitterness, cynicism, resentment, and even rage – but does it say anything that we didn’t know already? It is telling that Wyatt reused its opening line in yet another lyric, one where he also muses upon the value of “trothe or stedfastness” in a world without just “repreffe” (216.19–20). How might we reconcile Wyatt’s first voice with his second one? Critics have long pondered this themselves, for with respect both to this poem and to the rest of his oeuvre, many have found it difficult to admire his verse in the knowledge that so much of its matter was gotten secondhand.4 Douglas Peterson, for example, once argued that Wyatt’s “clichés, categories of apostrophes and antitheses, and hyperboles of self-pity” are basically indistinct from what he called “their hackneyed prototypes.”5 H. A. Mason was blunter still. “Can we doubt,” he asked, “that if we had all the songs sung at court between Chaucer and Wyatt we should be able to shew that every word and phrase used by Wyatt was a commonplace and had been used by many of his predecessors?”6 But others have found it just as difficult to ignore the pressing tone that Wyatt’s poetry so credibly projects. Located in what scholars have alternately termed a “weight of feeling,” the “performance of individual conviction,” a “sense of urgency and self-criticism,” or Wyatt’s “need to give vent,” if only in an “indirect” way, to “his perception of his situation,” this powerful tone would seem to account for the poet’s aesthetic and affective appeal – for even if his lyrics are made up of clichés, they do not sound clichéd in the reading.7 This, we might say, is the mystery of Wyatt. Again and again, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed, he presents us with the same “familiar

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tropes and stale paradoxes,” the same conventional poses and the same tired proverbs, only to “convince us,” yet again, “of the reality of his pain and disillusionment.”8 In my own attempt to address this mystery, I will argue that we must read Wyatt obliquely if we are to understand him properly. This is because his poems do not communicate a semantic message so much as a me­aningful disposition, a certain habitus of feeling and thought that is not conveyed directly, by the matter of the poem, but indirectly, by its manner.9 This manner is certainly related to what I’ve identified, following a long critical tradition, as the double-voiced quality of Wyatt’s style, but as with any style, it emerges not out of thin air, but in relation to the materials it inflects.10 To illustrate this point, let’s return for a moment to “What vaileth trouth.” We might note that this lyric opens not with one question, but with two: (1) “What vaileth trouth?” and (2) “Or by it to take payn?” The second question is far more important. Why, in a milieu where “truth appears to be of no importance at all,” do we continue to suffer for truth?11 And why do we still possess “true meanyng” hearts – or at least, believe that we still possess them? That Wyatt’s poem focuses upon this question, and not upon a lack of “trouth” per se, marks an important difference from his models. Late in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, for example, Troilus’s realization that God will not “fortheren trouthe” launches him into a self-destructive spiral, one that ultimately proves impossible for him to escape.12 In the world of Wyatt’s poem, by contrast, only a fool would believe such a thing in the first place, for even if God and “trouth” really do exist, no strained appeal to either one will change the fact that, in this world, it is “craftines,” and not “trouth,” who “rueleth” over “all alike” (2.4). The practical thing to do in such a crafty world – as Wyatt remarks in yet another rondo – would be to put aside fantasies of “trouthe” altogether, and resolve instead to “worke” ourselves by “craft and art” (20.10).13 And yet this is also no easy task, for even if we change our tactics and succeed in catching those who “meaneth no gile” within our own “crafty trayn[s]” (2.10–11), an earnest desire to be “iuste” and “true” (2.3) may persist in our hearts – or at least, the shadow of such a desire, one still strong enough to tempt us to voice an authentically felt outrage toward others who set the same crafty “trapp[s]” (2.12) as we do. This is the paradox on which Wyatt’s poem turns. Why do we “take payn” for “trouth” (2.1), he asks, when we are truthless ourselves? What this short reading reveals is that Wyatt’s rondo is not really about “trouthe,” or “dowblenes,” or “craftines.” These commonplace ideas, and their ubiquity within the social world of the poem, are presented as a given

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from its first line. Instead, it is a poem about the inscrutability of human desires and motives. It “makes no statement,” as Donald Friedman puts it, but rather “enacts a passage of the mind,” one wherein we are gr­adually led to ask ourselves how we feel, and what we think, about a series of difficult things – our complicity in practices of “craft” and “do­wblenes,” for instance, or our insupportable belief in our own honesty, or even our continuing desire for certain people, like Wyatt’s “maisteres” (2.13), whom we know will betray us.14 What is more, “What vaileth trouth” is hardly unique in this respect. Many of Wyatt’s poems employ similar techniques of implication and suggestion, guiding us slowly toward a message that is to be found, not in the semantic meaning denoted by their matter (e.g., Hoccleve’s “trouthe is absent, but falsheed is not fer”), but in the manner of feeling and thought that this matter may connote (e.g., the uneasy realization that one can love “trouth” and use “craft” at the same time).15 Such lyrics work, as we will see, via a triangulated mode of indirect communication, one wherein the poet encodes, and the reader decodes, an unwritten message that is suggested but not immediately indicated by what the poem says. There is little guarantee, of course, that both reader and poet will feel and think the same thing in response to a single text, especially when it takes the form of gnomic verse. Nonetheless, Wyatt does seem to hold out hope that, in certain cases, both parties may experience such a consonance of thought and feeling thanks to a power that he terms “grace.” In the idiom of courtly poetry, grace most often refers to a space of erotic intimacy that at least two people share. One can be “in” the grace of another, as Wyatt often says (see 97.11, 156.1), so much so that both individuals may feel a sense of wordless connection – even when they are “elonged” from each other, as he puts it, by “sees and hilles” (78.15). But in Wyatt, “grace” also intimates any moment in which the reader and the poet share an affective and sometimes intellectual response to a textual object, and by extension, any moment in which they believe themselves, via the act of reading a common text, to understand each other’s thoughts and feelings perfectly. This is the sense of “grace” in Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms, where David’s poetry conveys to us an apparently supralinguistic message, one that is “not exprest by word” but implied through gesture and affect (108.517–24). The mutual acknowledgement of such a grace is the confirming sign, in Wyatt’s view, that a true act of communication has taken place between two people. But this “grace” may also be revealed, upon closer inspection, to be nothing more than an illusion – the mere fantasy that the “warm and breathing” face on the other side of the page, as Virginia Woolf once put it, feels the same as you do.16

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By attending to tropes of “grace” and indirect communication across Wyatt’s oeuvre, this chapter will make three larger claims about the poet and his cultural significance. The first of these concerns the sources of his literary techniques. Wyatt spent a good deal of his professional life as an ambassador in the service of Henry VIII. He traveled in Italy, France, and Spain; negotiated on the king’s behalf with Charles V and Francis I; and performed, to varying degrees of success, acts of espionage for his country.17 Despite his obvious commitment to his diplomatic career, however, Wyatt also appears to have mixed business with pleasure on these missions. As Jason Powell has shown, he took the Egerton manuscript with him to Spain and employed one of his secretaries, John Brereton, as a copyist while he was in embassy.18 Powell’s findings are invaluable for our grasp of the textual history of Wyatt’s verse, but they also indicate that the poet was often occupied with matters of literature and matters of state at the same time. The cross-pollination of these pursuits may cast light upon the indirection and obliquity of his lyrics, for many of these poems, as we will see, display an obvious debt to the tricks of language that he learned as a courtier at home and as an ambassador abroad. Direct communication, after all, was a risky affair in Wyatt’s line of work. It laid open one’s mind to one’s enemies, and in certain cases, it could provoke the anger of one’s allies as well. Wyatt received a reprimand from Thomas Cromwell, for instance, when in April 1538, he carelessly neglected to seal a diplomatic report that he sent home to England.19 To some extent, then, we may find an explanation for the peculiarities of Wyatt’s style by considering the circumstances of his life. The obliquity of his poetry sometimes recalls the indirections of a political negotiation, while his emphasis upon manner instead of matter may remind us of Baldassare Castiglione’s claim that sprezzatura produces a “grace” that exceeds the concrete, or even the physical.20 But at the same time – and this is my second claim – Wyatt’s poems cannot be fully understood as an extension of his biography. No doubt, the temptation to understand them in this way is quite strong, for Wyatt lived a remarkable and “crowded life,” as A. C. Spearing puts it, and this is surely why scholars have often sought to interpret his poetry by looking to the twists and turns of the poet’s personal fortunes.21 In accounts such as these, the aesthetic qualities of Wyatt’s oeuvre are said to stem – to choose only a few examples – from his Humanist beliefs, his Protestantism, his ambassadorial profession, his fondness for Italian culture, his class sensibilities, or the Stoic mindset to which his letters and poems notionally attest.22 Such scholarship has taught us much about Wyatt’s character, but it has sometimes forgotten that he

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was as interested in writing for an audience as he was in writing about himself. Indeed, textual evidence bears out this claim, for Wyatt often appears to have used his manuscripts as sites of communication and exchange.23 As Chris Stamatakis has observed, signatures, marginal notes, and comments found beneath and adjacent to poems in the Egerton, Blage, and Devonshire books often “name a particular individual,” and so “intimate an ongoing social conversation.”24 Given Wyatt’s own claim, moreover, that some of his readers “wrote” replies to the poems found in his “boke” (173.5) – in the Devonshire miscellany at least, examples include “fforget thys,” “yt ys worthy,” and “lerne but to syng yt” – it is likely that he intended his manuscripts to circulate among a coterie reading public for the express purpose of what scholars have variously termed “co­mmunal composition,” “dialogic exchange,” and the strengthening of a “co­mmunicative relationship” between himself and his readers.25 Wyatt wrote poetry, in other words, not merely because he wished to express himself, but because he wanted others to read his poems. Only an aspirant to a specifically English sort of laureation would have adopted an ivy leaf as the insignia for his personal seal, as Wyatt did from the mid-1530s onwards.26 The public-facing aspect of Wyatt’s verse takes me to the third and final claim of this chapter, which concerns the literary-historical significance of his style of making. As Jonathan Crewe once observed, Wyatt has often been seen as an early proponent of literary autonomy and personal self-determination alike – as “an autonomous, masterful presence” who is “invulnerably withdrawn from his own representations.”27 According to this view – so we might say, following Terry Eagleton – his lyrics would seek to emancipate the literary from “the various social functions” it had “traditionally served.”28 While certain poems in Wyatt’s corpus do appear to bear out this reading, I want to consider his seeming commitment to aesthetic autonomy with some caution, for his work also shares key characteristics with the decidedly less autonomous verse of the makers who preceded him. Like the makers, Wyatt continues to use pre-existing matter as the basis for his poems, and, as we will see, his poems cannot do their work without this matter. What is more, his lyrics cannot be meaningfully divided from the social, political, and even – as Bradin Cormack has observed – legal contexts in which they were written.29 There is no “piller pearisht” (236.1) without Thomas Cromwell, and there is no “hynde” to “hounte” without Anne Boleyn (7.1). Theodor Adorno once argued that the work of art possesses a “double character as both autonomous and fait social,” because it is at once a product of culture and an object that seeks to transcend the conditions of its production.30 Perhaps we could say the same thing about Wyatt’s art.

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On the one hand, his lyrics seem to downplay the role that pre-existing matter plays in the literary game – and this may confirm the view that, over the course of the sixteenth century, English court poetry sought to disentangle itself from the social, cultural, and material forces that had produced it and that conditioned its reception. But on the other, Wyatt is also a poet deeply concerned with the role that these forces play in the construction of what Paul Alpers termed the “domain of lyric.”31 For as Wyatt knew well, there can be no autonomy without a culture to enable the fiction. *** In 1534, the English Parliament ratified a law making it illegal to say certain things about King Henry VIII.32 Among the “shamefull sclaunders” now treasonous to pronounce was any “wyshe will or desyre by wordes or writinge” that harm might come to the monarch, or any claim made “by expresse writinge or wordes” that Henry was not the legitimate head of the English church.33 Though the law was remarkable in its wide definition of conspiracy and sedition, it was not without precedent, for the Treasons Act, as it would come to be called, was only one part of a larger effort to bolster the king’s authority during the early 1530s. Indeed, like other laws passed during this period – such as the Act of Submission of the Clergy (1533), the Act of Supremacy (1534), and the Jurisdiction in Liberties Act (1535) – the Treasons Act extended both the reach and the depth of Henry’s power. It not only allowed him to prosecute his enemies under a wider range of existing statutes (heresy was now sedition, for instance, and vice versa) but also granted him the right to arrest those enemies in jurisdictions that had before remained beyond his dominion (sanctuary protections, for example, were now suspended for those who had been accused of treason).34 Where the Clergy Act, the Act of Supremacy, and the Liberties Act were primarily concerned with the expansion of the king’s power over both church and state, however, the Treasons Act was unique in its assertion of Henry’s right “to maintain” a “monopolistic hold” upon the language, and even the private beliefs, of his subjects, as G. R. Elton has noted.35 Like the frontispiece to the Great Bible of 1539, which imagines Henry at the center of English discourse, distributing the word of God while his people cry in unison, “vivat rex,” the Treasons Act projects a fantasy in which the king is the alpha and omega, the origin and sole guarantor, of all legitimate speech.36 It is unlikely that Henry actually believed in this fantasy, but he clearly found it a useful pretext, for the Treasons Act was widely

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and freely enforced.37 Thomas More, for instance, was tried and executed in 1536 on the grounds, not merely that he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, but that he had set his mind against it. As the Crown’s lawyer had it, More’s “very silence” was “a sure token and demonstration” that his thoughts were “maligning and repyning against the statute.”38 From a strictly legal point of view, then, More could in fact be said to have entertained the kind of malicious “wyshe will or desyre” toward the king that the law had recently made it treasonous to harbor.39 What was the effect, we might ask, of the 1534 Treasons Act on Thomas Wyatt? In one respect, the answer to this question is obvious: Wyatt was arrested in 1538 on the grounds that he had spoken disrespectfully about the king at a dinner party, and some of his closest associates, including Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, would likewise fall victim to Henry’s newly capacious definition of treachery.40 But we may find a subtler answer to this question, perhaps, if we consider the Act as a symptom of the discursive climate in which Wyatt lived and worked. This was a climate of surveillance and suspicion, one in which plain speech carried such a great risk that courtiers often spoke in blank phrases, empty generalities, and banal commonplaces, if they did not opt, like Mum, to say nothing at all. In such a context, the matter of language was obviously compromised by its proximity to power, and so Wyatt would have known that every word he uttered at Hampton Court would convey a doubled sense – a semantic denotation, of course, but also a social connotation, one shaped both by the general conventions of courtly discourse and by the specific currency of that word within the particular symbolic economy of the Henrician court.41 It is one thing to speak of the “brackish ioyes” of “courtes estates” (240.2–4) in the privacy of one’s chambers, and quite another to voice that phrase at the dinner table. As I will suggest below, Wyatt responds to the discursive pressures of this environment in two ways. First, he models the communicative force of his poems upon the evasion and indirection of courtly discourse, and especially, the discourse of diplomacy, in which the matter of what is said rarely aligns with what is meant. Second, he locates the meaning of his verse, not in its compromised and conventional matter, but in its style and manner. Before I turn to the poetry, however, I would first like to consider the influence of the court upon Wyatt in a more general way. To start, we might note that information was always at a premium among Henry’s courtiers during the 1530s, especially when it concerned one’s enemies – or as Wyatt wryly calls them, one’s “good frendes.”42 To obtain knowledge of an opponent’s motives and goings-on was key, but

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just as important was the act of keeping oneself “vnknowen in courte,” or at least, not too “moche knowen of other” (240.4–9). To some extent, this demand could be satisfied either by lying or by saying nothing at all, practices that came highly recommended by the satirical literature of the period. In Le Philosophe de court, for instance, Philibert de Vienne, here translated by George North, quips that it is always good “to giue counsell to others, yet not alwayes with the truth, but according to the appetite and pleasure of those they speake and giue aduice vnto.”43 Similar jokes – or perhaps, half-jokes – can be found in Wyatt’s satires, where the poet advises Sir Francis Bryan to “fle” from “trueth” and to “vse vertu as it goeth now a dayes,” by making his “langage swete” in “word alone” (107.34–38). Such satire aside, however, many texts from the 1530s and 1540s do offer up some earnest instruction in how to traffic in information at court. Thomas Elyot’s Pasquill the Playne, for example, gives the courtier extensive guidance on what Frank Whigham aptly calls “audience management.”44 If the courtier suspects his monarch to be in danger – so we are told – then he should speak out, but cautiously, by showing the monarch all the “signes and liklihodes” that have given rise to his “coniecture” of the plot.45 Should the danger prove to be real, the courtier will win praise for his “dilygence and study.”46 If it proves false, however, this open display of the courtier’s process of reasoning, along with his demonstrations of “care and loue” toward his master, will win him a similar commendation.47 Of still greater influence was Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, which provided ambitious young men with a model for keeping one’s business to oneself and for feeling out what the business of others might be. With respect to gathering intelligence on one’s foes, Castiglione counsels that, by carefully observing the “beehaviours, maners and gestures” of his enemies (their “Operations,” as he puts it), the courtier will make “menne knowne” with greater success than if he merely took heed of what they said.48 With respect to keeping his own affairs covert, in turn, Castiglione recommends that the courtier communicate, particularly in amorous matters, with “signes and tokens more then in woordes.”49 This is because indirect communication carries fewer risks and lends itself more easily to dissembling. In certain cases, a lady must “make wise not to understand” her lover for the sake of discretion, or even to “draw his woordes to another sense,” but this is precisely why it is prudent to employ a mode of indirect “communication” in the first place, one that may appear ambiguous, but that “be such that she can not feigne not to understande it.”50 Obliquity, observation, and tactful speech: these were thus the most common tactics that Wyatt and his fellow courtiers would have used to

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surveil, mislead, signal, and entrap one another. But in addition to what Daniel Javitch calls the standard “indirection, subterfuge, and deception” of the courtier, Wyatt also knew, and drew upon, the resources of a more specialized discourse for his courtly maneuvers. This was the language of diplomacy, which he had learned to employ while working abroad.51 Though the idiom of negotiation had of course always been oblique, the early sixteenth century seems to have witnessed what Isabella Lazzarini terms an “increasing diffidence towards the power of language in telling, explaining, and modifying reality” in diplomatic negotiations, and a growing awareness that the language used in these negotiations could, at any moment, “both contain and be void of real meaning.”52 Indeed, sixteenthcentury political philosophy often urged “courtiers to communicate their aims obliquely and indirectly,” as Jessica Wolfe observes, and to recall, at all times, that they were speaking not merely “as of themselves,” but as the representative of their prince.53 All of this meant that, in their attempts to feel out the agendas of their interlocutors, ambassadors paid close attention, not merely to what was said, but to the affect, character, manner, and ultimate source of that speech. Étienne Dolet, for example, suggests that the prudent ambassador must always counterbalance the apparent meaning of his interlocutors’ words with his careful observation of their natura, their capacity for ingenium, and the cultural and political contexts in which those words are spoken, and we can see Dolet’s advice played out to the letter in the two sets of instructions that Wyatt was given before he departed for his embassies in Spain and France.54 Henry VIII commanded Wyatt to report “the woordes” of Francis I in the dispatches he sent home, of course, but he also told him to record the “maner of speche, and countenaunces of the said emperour, to th’intent they may make the more perfyt significacion thereof to the kinges maieste as shall appertain” (CW 1:155). Cromwell ordered Wyatt to do much the same in his audiences with Charles V. By noting Charles’ countenance, fashion, and tone, Cromwell suggested, Wyatt might be able to “fishe out the botom of his stomake,” or “desciphre the botom of his harte,” so that “the certaintie of thinges to ensue may be coniected and knowen” beyond the bare letter of what the emperor had said.55 Wyatt appears to have followed these instructions very carefully. In one letter to Henry, for example, he describes how the demeanor of Charles V changed after he learned that the poet had chosen not inform him about a plot to capture, on Henry’s orders and with the consent of Francis I, the English expatriate and accused traitor Robert Branceter, who had found favor with Charles and had been in hiding in the Low Countries.56

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Where before, Wyatt writes, Charles had appeared “farr more colder, more tr­actable, and conformable to reson,” now he “notyd” the Emperor’s “lowder voyce, his ernester looke, and specially his imperius fashon in his wordes” (CW  1:198). Many of the poet’s other letters to Henry contain similar descriptions, but when Wyatt found himself unable to speculate on the meaning of a certain behavior he observed in his interlocutor – a sharp glance, or a pause that lasted a bit too long – he would refer to the “particulars,” or specific details, that he felt were obscured by that interlocutor’s vague manner and vaguer speech. Again and again, we hear of “particularites” of information that Wyatt cannot quite learn (1:138); of si­tuations now known in greater detail, or “more particvlerly,” than they were before (1:146); of “pa­rticular incidentes” that Wyatt’s memory can “skant … containe” (1:206); of “pa­rticulars” that the Emperor decides are best left unsaid in open conversation (1:227); of a “particuler” bit of “newes” whose specifics remain a mystery (1:234); and even of a “particularite” of law that Charles says ought to guide Henry’s actions in his newly unhappy m­arriage to Anne of Cleves, but that Wyatt cannot get the emperor to define outright (1:255). In each case, the letters prize these “particulars” because, as Wyatt suggests, they are where the truth of a statement really lies. They are the specific facts, the exact details, that cut through the vague “generalites” (1:254) of di­plomatic evasion and empty formality. Later in his career, while he sat in the Tower awaiting trial, Wyatt would return to this idea.57 The “truthe” of a sentence or phrase, he would write, is often to be found merely “in some lyttell thynge” – in the “alteringe” of “but one smale sylbable,” for instance, or in a slightly different “settinge of the wordes” – that distinguishes two seemingly identical statements (1:308). The matter of a text may appear to tell you what it says outright, but in order to know what the text truly means – so Wyatt would argue – one must take into account the “little things” that inflect its semantics. In one respect, then, the oblique and evasive character of Wyatt’s writing may be understood as his response to the discourse of court and embassy. Like the “language of counterpoint” and “art of indirection” that characterized diplomatic negotiations and debates in the Star Chamber alike, Wyatt’s songs and sonnets typically stake their communicative powers upon suggestion and implication, and not upon the denotative force of their matter.58 But I would argue that Wyatt also responded to the discursive culture of the court in a second way, by employing a very small, or even constricted, idiom in his poetry. As I noted in my introduction, it is commonplace in the critical record to observe that Wyatt constructs his lyrics out of a strikingly limited reservoir of conventional words and

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themes.59 Again and again, we hear of his weary travail, of the cruelty of his lady, of the blindness of his error, of his misspent time.60 Again and again, we encounter the same key terms – “hap,” “trouthe,” “doubleness,” “craft,” and “quiet,” to name only the most common ones – with a frequency that testifies to their ubiquity in the verse of Wyatt’s contemporaries. Surrey, for instance, also speaks of his “wofull smart,” of his “weried ghost,” of the “spoyle” of the “harte,” of “creping fier” and of “cold lymmes,” and a host of poems from Tottel’s Miscellany contain phrases and even full lines that are nearly identical to Wyatt’s own.61 To some extent, Wyatt’s small vocabulary may reflect his belief, and the belief of his contemporaries, that early modern English was a parsimonious language. Roger Ascham, for example, lamented that, in contrast to Latin and Greek, “the Englysh tonge” stated “euery thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.”62 But there is also little question, I think, that Wyatt’s adoption of a restricted idiom for his poetry was a poetic tactic, and not merely the result of linguistic necessity or literary incompetence. Had he wished to write in the style of Skelton, there is no purely linguistic reason that Wyatt could not have done so.63 What might account, then, for the small vocabulary employed by courtly writers during Wyatt’s time, and more to the point, the narrow idiom of his own courtly poems? One answer may be found in the literary fashions of Italy during the 1520s and 1530s, which Wyatt knew well, and in which style, rather than matter, was the prevailing concern.64 Early claims for style as the true measure of literary accomplishment can be found in, say, the work of Guillaume de Machaut or Francesco Petrarca, but this view is made explicit for the first time in the writings of Pietro Bembo, who judged not only that matter and style could be categorically distinguished from each other, but also that the literary worth of a piece of writing had everything to do with its “maniera,” and nothing to do with its “materia.”65 One poet, argued Bembo, may take up the highest possible subject matter [d’altissimo suggetto] for composition, and nevertheless, write in such a way that his composition is said to be offensive and maudlin [rea e sazievole]; and another, while presenting a low subject matter [materia umilissima], may compose his poem in such a way [di maniera] that it is reputed very pleasing and good [buonissimo e vaghissimo] … As I have already said, one subject will not be more or less pleasing than another, for a subject does not please or displease of necessity [di necessità]; of the many examples I have already provided, it is necessary to praise and appreciate each one on its own terms [per sé] with respect to its component parts [componente].66

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Bembo’s views on “materia” and “maniera” were influential, but they were not uncontroversial.67 In the Ciceronianus, Erasmus mocked Humanist writers whom he believed to have prioritized, like Bembo, the “manner” and style of their texts over and above concerns for matter and sense. Because the Ciceronians employed only those words and styles found in Cicero, Erasmus argued, their language was fundamentally indecorous and incapable, in many cases, of describing reality adequately. “Since the entire scene of human activity [tota rerum humanarum scena] has been transformed,” he re­ asoned, “the only speaker who can respond to it appropriately [apte dicere] is one who is very different from Cicero.”68 For Erasmus, then, Ciceronianism had given rise to an artificial and stale sort of writing, one that was too constricted in its semantics to speak meaningfully about the present world. One ground for the narrowness of Wyatt’s diction, then, may well be found in his own elevation, like Bembo, of “maniera” above “ma­teria” – in his focus, that is, not on the matter of what was said, but on the style and manner in which it was spoken. Wyatt certainly read Bembo, and, given what Patricia Thomson calls Bembo’s “literary dictatorship” over Italian letters during the 1520s, he was likely aware of the debates in which Bembo and Erasmus had participated.69 But there is also a second and more immediate reason that Wyatt may have chosen to constrict the language of his own verse, for during the 1530s, it would have been impossible for him to mouth the idioms of English court poetry without hearing, at the back of his ear, the sound of another and more powerful voice – the voice of the king. Henry VIII, after all, fancied himself a courtly lover. His letters to Anne Boleyn lament that he has been struck with the dart of love, or “attaynte du dart d’amours.”70 They speak of his desire for “bonne grace” and appeal to Anne’s “grande pitié.”71 They claim to disclose tremendous depths of feeling in Henry’s “herte roote,” or “racine en ceure.”72 They even allude – albeit not very convincingly – to the “hartes ease” and the “quiettnes” of “mynd” that the King of England and orchestrator of the Protestant Reformation claims to desire above all worldly power.73 All of these “phrases, idioms, allusions, and wordplays,” as Seth Lerer has noted, put Henry’s letters “in a literary trajectory traceable from the late medieval lyrics copied into manuscript anthologies to the Petrarchan sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt.”74 But the common discursive ground shared by the matter of Wyatt’s poems and the matter of the king’s discourse is still easier to see if we examine the commonplaces found within Henry’s poetry. Consider, for example, one of the king’s demi-sonnets.

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If love now reynyd as it hath bene And war rewardit as it hath sene, Nobyll men then wold suer enserch All ways wherby thay myght it rech; Butt envy reynyth with such dysdayne, And causith lovers owtwardly to refrayne, Which puttes them to more and more Inwardly most grevous and sore: The faut in whome I cannot sett; But let them tell which love doth gett. To lovers I put now suer this cace – Which of ther loves doth get them grace? And unto them which doth it know Better than do I, I thynk it so.75

This poem is awful, but that is mostly a function of its poor style. Indeed, its matter is nearly identical to much of what one finds in Wyatt – the “reign” of love and envy, for instance, or the bawdy pun on “grace,” or even the contrast of what is “inward” with what is “outward.” As he listened to these echoes of his own phrases, Wyatt may well have felt that the very matter of courtly verse had been co-opted by the royal voice. What is more, he would have known that this voice was hardly impartial in pronouncing upon good poems and bad ones. We cannot know, of course, whether Eustace Chapuys was telling the truth when he claimed that Henry had executed Anne and George Boleyn because they “made fun of” his “ballades,” but given Henry’s choleric temperament, anything seems possible.76 The king’s use of the courtly idiom does not mean, of course, that Wyatt felt he could not write courtly poetry in his own way and to his own ends. His body of work obviously testifies to the contrary. But it does explain why Wyatt may have felt his words were not fully his own. As I’ve argued so far, the straitened conditions of courtly and diplomatic discourse alike would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for Wyatt to feel he could ever speak “as of himself.”77 Rather than draw upon a new idiom for the matter of his poems, however, Wyatt seems to have resolved to locate whatever meaning he felt to be his own in a space beyond the matter of language – in something akin to Bembo’s “maniera,” p­erhaps, or in the sprezzatura of a courtier’s gesture. No wonder, then, that Wyatt also seems to have fantasized, at times, about a mode of speech that could bypass language altogether. Consider the following poem, which daydreams about a profound but wordless connection between two lovers.

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Matter and Making in Early English Poetry A face that shuld content me wonders well Shuld not be faire but cumley to behold, Wyth gladsum loke all gref for to expell; With sober chere so wold I that yt shuld Speke withowt wordes, such wordes as non can tell; The tresse also shuld be of cryspyd goold; With wytt, and these myght chance I myght be tyed, And knytt agayne the knott that shuld not slyde.

(118.1–8)

Here, as John Kerrigan notes, the lady’s face is certainly a symbol of impassivity, or even opacity.78 But it is also – and this is the key point – a face that communicates without speaking (“speke withowt wordes”) things that cannot be spoken (“wordes as non can tell”). How, this poem asks, can one talk of one’s love for another person when one is prohibited from doing so, as Wyatt and Elizabeth Darrell were forbidden to do after the poet was released from prison in 1541?79 How can one express one’s thoughts and feelings merely with the glance of a “chere,” or the shine of a blonde “tresse?” These are difficult questions, but, as we will see shortly, Wyatt does seem to believe that it is sometimes possible to “speke withowt wordes,” even if there is no guarantee that one’s speech will be properly understood. *** At the apex of Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms, King David achieves a mode of expression that seems to rise above the constraints of human language. Addressing the Lord directly, David offers him a “sacryfice” that consists, not of the matter of his song, but rather of the “spryte contrite” and “low hert” of which that song is merely the “glose” or “owtward dede” (108.498–501). As Wyatt comments, Off diepe secretes that David here did sing, Off mercy, off fayth, off frailte, off grace, Off goddes goodnes and off Justyfying, The grettnes dyd so astonne hymselff a space, As who myght say who hath exprest this thing? I synner, I, what have I sayd alas? That goddes goodnes wold within my song entrete, Let me agayne considre and repete. And so he doth, but not exprest by word: But in his hert he tornith and paysith Ech word that erst his lypps might forth aford. He poyntes, he pawsith, he wonders, he praysyth The marcy that hydes off justice the swourd, The justice that so his promesse complysyth, For his wordes sake to worthilesse desert, That gratis his graces to men doth depert.

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What are the “diepe secretes” that David sings to the Lord? This is a di­fficult question to answer, for as the passage suggests, such secrets resist linguistic explication in two ways. In one respect, they cannot be put into words because Wyatt’s particular mouth is inadequate to the task. He is, as he tells us, far too fallen to give proper voice to David’s song, let alone to the mystery of God’s mercy, justice, and grace. “I synner, I,” he cries, “what have I sayd alas?” But in another, more fundamental respect, these “secretes” cannot be uttered because their meaning exceeds the resources of language itself. They consist of the mysterious “grace” that God has given to David – the grace of “Inward Syon” and “hertes Hierusalem” (108.504–5), as Wyatt earlier defines it – and so any words, whether sp­oken or wr­itten, would indeed be the mere “glose,” the mere “sygne and fruyt alone” (108.655), of their greater and ineffable message. Like the music of the heart that David performs “withowt heryng or Jugement off the sownd” (108.404), the meaning of these secrets escapes the matter of human language. One can certainly gesture toward it, by “poynt[ing],” “paws[ing],” “wonder[ing],” and “prays[ing]” (108.520), but this is all that one can do. Like many of his comments on language and expression in the Penitential Psalms, the passage above is largely Wyatt’s invention.80 Why did he choose to interpose it? A common view is that the poet saw, in David’s speech, “the possibility of an unmediated language of truth,” one that could bypass the limitations of an ordinary tongue.81 This prospect would surely have appealed to Wyatt; it would have appealed to any poet at work at Hampton Court. The problem with this account, however, is that David does not, in fact, possess the power of such an “unmediated language.” Where God communicates his “diepe secretes” to David wordlessly, the mortal David must express those “secretes,” so far as he can, by using the terms and phrases of human speech. He can gesture toward a meaning that is not “exprest by word,” or that lies in excess of words, but he needs words to do even this. What the passage from the Penitential Psalms really suggests, then, is not that Wyatt believed a human poet could communicate after the manner of God, but that a sufficiently talented poet, like David, could model his own style of communication upon the supralinguistic power of divine revelation. Beyond its kinship with revelation, song, and prayer, the passage above offers us few clues as to how exactly this mode of communication might work. But it does name, I think, the power that would make it possible. This is the condition of “grace” that God bestows upon David, and that David hopes to convey to us through his song. In its religious sense, “grace” is a state of spiritual attunement that allows a Christian to feel close to God, one

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that is lent “gratis” – so Wyatt says – to true believers without their knowing it. By “grace,” the Lord reveals his “diepe secretes” to David, and through “grace,” the Lord knows of David’s “inward contemplation” and “hertes inward restraintes,” even though the prophet has not told him of these things and cannot fully “expresse” them through his “syghes” and “plaintes” and “teres” (108.358–61). In Wyatt’s shorter poetry, however, “grace” may also denote a more secular kind of wordless connection, one that allows two human people to know each other’s meaning in ways that go beyond what is openly said. As we will see below, the concept of “grace” played a messy and syncretic role in the intellectual cultures of Wyatt’s time, and so it serves as useful touchpoint for a study of his general debts to the many discourses in which it featured – religious, literary, and social discourses alike. But a study of Wyatt’s “grace” also casts light upon his particular views of literature and making, for in his poems, “grace” is often figured as the thing the poet most desires – and even, at times, as the effect of true poetry. It is an illusion of intimacy produced by verse that is so expressive, and yet so oblique, that it seems to say more than any poem could. Wyatt was obviously not the only intellectual to take an interest in “grace” during the first half of the sixteenth century, for as I’ve noted just now, the concept was everywhere in the culture of his time. It is often found, for instance, in the patois of courtly love, or fin’ amor, where it denotes either “the ennobling condescension of the ideal courtly lady or the sexual satisfaction” that her lover might receive.82 In its most familiar theological sense, by contrast, “grace” refers to the imperceptible force that drives world history and individual actions alike, a force that performs God’s inscrutable will and also serves, as Brian Cummings observes, “as the definitive expression of what is beyond experience, and even beyond language.”83 Wyatt used the term in both of these senses, and in the case of the second, there is considerable evidence that he did indeed conceive of the theology of grace in this way.84 In the first letter to his son, for instance, he compares the “fauour and grase” of God to an invisible hand that steers the ship of one’s mortal life (CW 1:63), while in the second letter, he warns the younger Wyatt that, “if God and His grase be not the fundation” of a person’s actions, then he can neither “auoyd euil nor iuge wel” (1:68). Beyond his use of “grace” to denote an amorous favor or the course of providence, however, Wyatt also employs the word in a more literary sense, one that is likely indebted to its treatment in two further contexts that he would have known. The first of these was, again, courtly in its origin, but it was concerned with the graceful performance of the self rather than with the grace that

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one might seek from a potential lover. In Il Cortegiano, Castiglione defines this sort of “grace” as an ineffable quality of excellence that ought to “accompany” all the “doinges, gestures, demeaners” and “mocions” of the courtier, in the same way that a good “sauce” might transform a dish whose “other properties and good condicions” would be, without its accompaniment, of “litle woorth.”85 In the ensuing discussion, we are told that, to produce such grace, the courtier must use sprezzatura, or the act of doing something well without apparent effort.86 For as Castiglione explains, there is but one rule for the courtier, and that is to eschew as much as a man may, and as a sharp and daungerous rock, Affectation or curiosity and (to speak a new word) to use in every thyng a certain Reckelesness, to cover art withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and sayeth to do it wythout pain, and (as it were) not myndyng it. And of thys do I beleve grace is muche deryved, for in rare matters and wel brought to passe every man knoweth the hardnes of them, so that a redines therin maketh great wonder.87

“Grace,” for Castiglione, is thus a socio-aesthetic effect. It is the illusion of effortless prowess and “recklesness” – the term Thomas Hoby, Castiglione’s translator, selects as his English equivalent for sprezzatura – that conceals the hours of study and effort it has taken for the courtier to master a di­fficult skill. Castiglione’s book exercised a remarkable influence on the thinking of Tudor courtiers. It was, as Joan Simon memorably put it, “almost a second bible for English gentlemen.”88 And so it should not surprise us that, from at least the 1530s onwards, we find Castiglione’s account of “graceful” aesthetics echoed in the literary criticism composed by these gentlemen, who typically define “grace” as some quality of beauty or excellence that may be superadded to the matter of a text – the “liuely spirite,” as Thomas Elyot says, that elevates ordinary language to the status of art.89 Sometimes, these critics use the term to refer to a pleasing quality of meter. George Googe, for example, praises Thomas Phaer’s translation of the Aeneid by stating that it lends “greater grace” to Virgil “in foreign foot” than the Roman poet had himself achieved in Latin.90 George Puttenham, in turn, uses the word to describe what makes some types of rhythm charming, and others inelegant.91 But at other times, and indeed more often, “grace” is identified as a way of inflecting one’s literary materials with some quality of distinction. This “grace” could be found in a certain tenor of speech, as it is for Thomas Wilson, who writes that “the tongue geueth a certayne grace to euerye matter, and beautifieth the cause in like maner, as a sweete soundynge Lute.”92 Or it could consist in the elegant shaping of matter through

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figures of speech, or what Henry Peacham calls “artificiall forme.”93 It could be a property of metaphor, as it is when George Gascoigne argues that “figures or tropes” lend “good grace to a verse.”94 Or it could even be the driving force behind metaphor per se, as Puttenham suggests in claiming that “figure itself is a certain lively or good grace set upon words, speeches, and sentences.”95 Most of all, however, “grace” seems to have been understood as a property of harmony and balance, one related both to style and to decorum. “In all things,” as Puttenham again writes, “to use decency is it only that giveth everything his good grace.”96 “Grace” could be understood, then, in a religious, a social, and even a literary sense in Wyatt’s moment, and like any keyword, it seems to have served as a point where the different ideas and beliefs associated with its various senses could intersect. Indeed, Wyatt himself uses it in all the senses I’ve traced above, and this often makes it difficult to pin down what he means by it in a given instance.97 With respect to its li­terary sense in particular, however, I would suggest that “grace” does possess four ty­pical features, or aspects, that tend to recur in Tudor discussions of the term. First, “grace” is held to be a mercurial and uncertain thing. It is ob­viously produced by art, but it is not the same as the art that has produced it, and so it may appear present in one instant but absent in the next. Second, its ap­preciation hinges upon taste. The song of a “soundynge Lute,” to use Wilson’s example, may ring full of grace to one listener, but sound strident and ugly to another. Third, “grace” is immaterial. It cannot be reduced either to matter or technique, which is why it “is not to be learned,” as Castiglione insists.98 Instead, it is what Puttenham calls a “manner,” an aesthetic quality that lends a work of art a sense of meaning or beauty that cannot equally be found in the materials from which it has been made.99 Fourth, and finally, “grace” is so­mething that accompanies matter, or that is superadded to m­atter. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Castiglione compares it to a sauce.100 It lends so­mething more to a thing that would be less without it – a quality of an­imation, or an aspect of beauty, or a pleasing tone. But this is not to say that grace has no need of the matter it accompanies, for like the “hote affect” that inflames Wyatt’s David and allows him to express what cannot be said in words (108.309–18), grace also requires “subjecte matter” for its “op­eracion” (108.130). There is no sauce without a “pyk” in which to “walwe[n]” it, as Chaucer might observe.101 And so we might say, in a brief sum, that poetic grace works by a kind of literary consubstantiation, one that requires two things for its su­ccessful effect: the matter of the poem and the manner that signals its presence.

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This last point is of special importance for Wyatt’s own evocation of literary “grace,” for although he employs different methods to signal it, his lyrics always draw attention to it indirectly, or even by the via negativa.102 One of his favored methods for doing so is to use matter that is so graceless that it compels us to attend to qualities of manner and suggestion instead – to look for grace, not in what the poem says, but in what it does not. Proverbs and commonplaces, which he cites everywhere, are one of the poet’s favorite tools for this job.103 Sometimes, Wyatt uses proverbs in an obviously flat-footed way. He might conclude a sonnet about the despair he feels at his lover’s probable breach of faith with a bland truism: “he that beleveth bering in hand / plowith in water and soweth in the sand” (14.13–14).104 Or he might finish a poem about romantic abjection and humiliation in this way: “goode is the liff, ending faithfully” (4.14).105 In each case, the commonplace says little about what the speaker really has on his mind, and this may lead us to speculate about what is not being said, and why. Equally flat-footed is Wyatt’s overuse of proverbs to comic effect. At times, he piles them up with such Polonius-like enthusiasm that they swiftly become useless for parsing the meaning of his situation – or indeed, any situation at all. This technique can certainly be seen in Wyatt’s longer verse. In his sardonic third satire to Sir Francis Bryan, for instance, the poet drily lists one empty commonplace after another, all while assuring his reader that “these proverbes yet do last” (107.4). But Wyatt’s overuse of the proverbial idiom is equally on display in his lyrics. The first half of “Go, burning sighes,” for example, is a dutiful recitation of the best-known Tudor clichés about erotic feeling. As Wyatt writes, Goo burnyng sighes Vnto the frosen hert! Goo breke the Ise which pites paynfull dert Myght never perse, and if mortall prayer In hevyn may be herd, at lest I desire That deth or mercy be end of my smart. Take with the payne wherof I have my part, And eke the flame from which I cannot stert And leve me then in rest, I you require: Goo burning sighes!

(20.1–9)

At the start of the poem’s second stanza, however, Wyatt abruptly gives up the act. Having found no welcome audience for his burning sighs, he now tells us that he will work instead “by craft and art,” for he cannot “assaill her / with pitefull plaint and scalding fyer” (20.10–13). The comedy of this lyric thus resides precisely in the failure of the poet’s commonplaces to get him

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anywhere. No one, and especially not his lover, will believe that this tired matter – frozen hearts, prayers to heaven, painful darts, and so on – has anything to do with what is really going on. As Jeff Dolven puts it, Wyatt has here rehearsed the “characteristic devices” of courtly love “to the point of incoherence.”106 Proverbs and commonplaces thus allow Wyatt to speak to the reader with what Elizabeth Heale has called “a forked tongue.”107 In the lyrics, clichés are typically made to sound so hackneyed that an effect of irony is produced, one that may lead the reader to seek Wyatt’s meaning elsewhere, in the manner rather than the matter of his poem. The same could be said of Wyatt’s second tactic of literary indirection, which is his recurrent use of the conditional mode. Conditionals likely appealed to Wyatt because he could use them to inject uncertainty into his lines – or, to put it in more exact terms, because they offered him the means to qualify and ironize language that means one thing according to a certain set of conditions, but quite another when those conditions are changed. Much of the time, Wyatt uses conditionals simply to signal his uncertainty or doubt about some situation. Like the diplomatic letters, which often focus anxiously upon some unknown set of “particulars,” poems like this usually speak to Wyatt’s spiraling worries about the opaque motives of others, or the shifting conditions of an affair, or the unforeseen outcome of some dark chain of events. “I wolde yt ware not as I think,” he writes, “I wolde I thought yt ware not” (233.7–8). But at other times, Wyatt uses the conditional mode, not just to evoke his own feelings of uncertainty, but to foster them in his reader. This is especially true in those poems where he questions, in an apparently guileless tone, the foolish assumptions that all of us make. “Ys yt possyble,” for example, runs through a series of events that might appear impossible under ordinary conditions before concluding, abruptly, that what seems impossible is always possible. All ys possyble, Who so lyst beleve; Trust therfore fyrst, and after preve; As men wedd ladyes by lycence and leve, All ys possyble.

(184.26–30)

Because we may compel themselves to “beleve” anything with sufficient effort, anything is possible, for us and our enemies alike. As with his fondness for clichés and commonplaces, Wyatt’s affinity for the conditional mode has frequently been noted.108 What has less often been remarked, however, is that he employs a third tactic for producing similar destabilizing effects in his lyrics. This is the cultivation of an atmosphere,

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setting, or mood that he calls “strangeness.”109 Strangeness, which is the thematic opposite of grace, usually takes the form of an ex­perience of alienation and surreality in Wyatt, one akin to what one might feel in the midst of a hallucination, a vivid memory, a waking dream, or a moment of déjà vu. It is a state, in other words, where what is felt or pe­rceived seems intensely real, but does not align with reality. In “Unstable dreme,” for instance, we find Wyatt wishing that a happy dream might either persist (“be stedfast”) or reflect how things really are (“be true”). Vnstable dreme according to the place Be stedfast ons: or els at leist be true: By tasted swetenes make me not to rew The sudden losse of thy fals fayned grace.

(79.1–4)

The “swetenes” of this dream, Wyatt tells us, is so intense that he can taste it – but he also knows that the dream is starkly divided from re­ality. At other moments, however, the boundary between dreams and the real is muddier than this. In one sonnet, the cold speech of Wyatt’s lover sounds, to him, like the words one would hear “in dreme vnperfaict and lame” (25.8), while in another, better-known poem, he reverses this idea, by imagining how his songs must sound to a lover who has experienced their affair quite differently than he has. As he writes, Blame not my lute, for he must sownd Of thes or that as liketh me; For lake of wytt the lutte is bownd To gyve suche tunes as plesithe me; Tho my songes be sume what strange And spekes such words as toche they change, Blame not my lutte.

(205.1–7)

The “strange[ness]” that Wyatt’s lover perceives in his “songes” is here characterized as an aesthetic effect that she finds surreal. But, as the poet explains, these songs sound “strange” to her only because of her di­ssociation from the reality of their affair, which has been soured – at least for Wyatt – by her “faute so grett” and “case so strange” (205.24). Rather than editing out the “dr­eaminess” from his “Petrarchan borrowings,” as one critic has it, Wyatt might thus be said to remove the cues that would allow his reader to determine whether or not she is in a dream in the first place.110 “Strangeness,” it turns out, actually enhances the “dreaminess” of the scenario as a whole. Wyatt takes a similar approach, moreover, to the representation of memory in his lyrics, which often point up uncanny contrasts between the past and the present. Consider,

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for example, his compressed account of a love affair from start to finish, “Fforget not yet.” From the very first words of this lyric, “fforget not” (203.1), Wyatt positions it, not merely as a challenge to the present state of things, but as a meditation upon how odd the present state feels in relation to what has come before. Think of the “tryde entent” (203.1) we bore to each other, he says, or of the “gret travayle so gladly spent” (203.3), or of the powerful emotions we once felt together. Think of “the gret assays, / the cruell wrong, the skornfull ways, / the paynfull pacyence” (203.9–11). Can it be, he asks, that all these things are absent now? Wyatt refuses to believe it, and so, in a set of remarkable lines from the middle of the song, he deliberately blurs the past with the present. As he writes, Fforget not yet, forget not thys, How long ago hathe bene and ys The mynd that neuer ment amys, Fforget not yet.

(203.13–16)

The syntax is itself fork-tongued in this instance, but no matter whether we read the lines as advocating the constancy of Wyatt’s mind over time (the “mynd” that “hathe bene and ys”), or as instructing his lover not to forget their long history together (all their shared experiences of what “hathe bene and ys”), the point is that the poet’s sense of time is out of step with that of his lover. To Wyatt, nothing has changed between them. Things are as they were – at least, with respect to his own feelings and his own “mynd.” To Wyatt’s lover, however, things are wholly different from before. The past is the past, and it no longer intrudes upon the present. Her differing perception of their relation, in other words, is the source of the strangeness that Wyatt in turn perceives, and in its attempt to redress this strangeness, the poem takes a striking turn at its very end. Fforget not then thyn owne aprovyd The whyche so long hathe the so louyd, Whose stedfast faythe yet neuer movyd, Fforget not thys.

(203.17–20)

What does Wyatt mean by “thys?” In an immediate sense, “thys” is obviously the poem we hold in our hands, and which declares itself a supplement to the faulty memory of Wyatt’s lover. If you cannot recall our time together, it says, then read what is written, and remember it anew. But “thys” may also refer to the shared space of intimacy between Wyatt and his addressee, to the “grace” they once shared together and may one day share again. It may be impossible, of course, to reenter this state of grace.

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But Wyatt does seem to hope that, if his lover reads his poem, she may be willing to put aside the “straungeness” that has arisen between the two of them – not because of what the poem says, but because of the longstanding intimacy toward which it gestures. So far, I’ve argued that, in response to the constraints upon language and communication at the Tudor court of the 1530s and 1540s, Wyatt attempts, in his lyrics, to write in an oblique and indirect way, one that encourages us to read, not for the matter, but for the manner of his poems; that this manner is made legible by presenting the reader with matter that is patently unreliable (such as dreams and memories), obviously nonspecific (such as proverbs and commonplaces), or framed in uncertain and conditional terms; and that, when the reader properly apprehends the manner of a poem, she enters temporarily into a relation of poetic “grace,” one wherein she may understand, at least in conceit, its unspoken meaning. With these points in mind, I would now like to turn to Wyatt’s most famous poem, “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke,” for it is in this lyric that we can best grasp, not merely how he sought to communicate with his readers, but what he may have wished to say. Here is the Egerton text of the poem. They fle from me that sometyme did me seke With naked fote stalking in my chambre. I have sene theim gentill tame and meke That nowe are wyld and do not remembre That sometyme they put theimself in daunger To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge Besely seking with a continuell chaunge. Thancked be fortune, it hath ben othrewise Twenty tymes better; but ons in speciall In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her armes long and small; Therewithall swetely did me kysse, And softely said “dere hert, how like you this?” It was no dreme: I lay brode waking. But all is torned thorough my gentilnes Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking; And I have leve to goo of her goodeness, And she also to vse new fangilnes. But syns that I so kyndely ame serued, I would fain knowe what she hath deserued.

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(37.1–21)

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From its very start, the poem latches onto the difficulty that Wyatt often has in reconciling his thoughts and feelings with his situation – a situation that is, to his eye, patently surreal and “straunge.” As he does elsewhere, he begins by thematizing this strangeness as an uncanny experience of time, one that is here comprised of three overlaid states. These are the state of the present (the “nowe”), a state of general reminiscence (the “sometyme” or “othrewise”), and a more specific memory of a particular moment from the past (“ons in speciall”), whose difference from the present Wyatt still feels with a special pleasure and intensity.111 “It was no dreme,” he writes, “I lay brode waking.” This focus upon time and memory is important, because it may lead the reader to assume from the outset that, like so many of Wyatt’s best-known lyrics, the charged images of “They fle from me” are drawn directly from the poet’s experience of life. Like his visions of bell-tower grates and white deer, the elements of “They Fle From Me” seem so real that we may feel compelled to imagine ourselves in Wyatt’s place – to watch, for ourselves, the naked feet stalking the floorboards, or to feel the crumbs of broken bread amidst the sheets, or even to listen for the whispered pillow talk with our ears, as though they were mere s­urrogates for the poet’s own. But to read “They Flee from Me” for its matter – for the personal history that seemingly lies behind the situation it depicts – actually leads us into still more strangeness, because, on closer inspection, the realism of this lyric proves less authentic, or at least less tr­ustworthy, than we might initially assume. In one respect, this is because the matter of “They Fle From Me” is, like so many of Wyatt’s other poems, largely comprised of clichés, commonplaces, and echoes, even and indeed especially when this matter seems intensely autobiographical. The opening image of birds, women, and bread is taken, for example, from an anti-feminist me­dieval carol: “Sum be wise, and sum be fonde; / sum be tame, I understond; / sum will take bred at a mannes hond; / yet all be not so.”112 The gossamer nightgown and dreamy atmosphere have their analogues in Ovid, and p­erhaps in Catullus.113 The idea of a surreal “newfangleness” may be derived from the Squire’s Tale, and other phrases likely their origin in Chaucer’s work as well.114 His Palamon, for example, also “stalketh” with “dredful foot,” his Arcite also identifies “dere herte” as a boring cliché, and the pairing of “bisyly” and “seke” is ubiquitous elsewhere in Chaucer’s verse.115 If we continue to listen closely, moreover, we will hear still other echoes of earlier texts in Wyatt’s poem. “They fle from me,” for instance, refigures a line by Charles d’Orleans.116 “Long and small” is a Middle English commonplace employed by Gower among others.117 Wyatt’s climactic “it was no dreme”

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may be derived from an early m­odern proverb that held, “it is a true dream that is seen wa­king.”118 Even the lady’s question has an analogue, if not an exact source, in a Scots poem from the Bannatyne manuscript. “Than in my armes I did hir brace,” it reads, and “with gudly wordis scho said to me, / O ser, how lyk ye this solace?”119 All of this would seem to confirm, at least at first glance, Mason’s rude assessment of Wyatt’s oeuvre.120 If we had every song and carol written between the reigns of Edward III and Elizabeth I, then perhaps we could indeed trace every phrase that Wyatt employed to some pre-existing text. But as I’ve argued throughout this chapter, to read Wyatt for his matter is to misread him, for he communicates his message indirectly and obliquely, via the manner that his poems seem to evoke. We are meant, in other words, to read between the lines of this lyric, because so much of what it says is obviously unoriginal in itself. If we approach “They fle from me” in this way, I suggest, we will discover an anxious poem that is not really about birds and gowns and vivid erotic memories, but about something far more uncertain. Consider, for example, Wyatt’s maddeningly oblique use of pronouns and puns throughout “They fle from me.” Over the course of the first three stanzas, a concrete referent seems to manifest before our very eyes: “they” and “them” in the first stanza become “it” in the second, and “she” in the third. The relation between these different pronouns, however, is not at all clear, for as scholars have observed, different parts of imagery of the first stanza can be plausibly construed to refer to deer, birds, or human beings, but one cannot say that this imagery, when taken on the whole, denotes any one of these referents at all times.121 One might say the same about the vague object of Wyatt’s feminine pronoun in the second stanza, which is doubtless why critics have sometimes felt at liberty to argue that “she” here refers to Lady Fortune rather than to a human mistress – though it must be said that this seems very unlikely.122 What is more, the unstable semantics of the poem are further destabilized by its use of what Chaucer had once called “amphibologies.”123 Does “kyndely” mean “gently,” “considerately,” or “according to nature?” Is Wyatt’s “gentilnes” the same as that exhibited by the “gentill” creatures of the first stanza? Does the “daunger” of these creatures correspond to the hauteur that one courtly lover might show another? Are the naked feet of this poem human or animal, the limbs of wild “dere” or of the poet’s “dere hert?”124 In all of these cases, Wyatt removes, as Cathy Shrank has observed, the “external reference points” for what he writes, with the result that his matter seems to float unmoored, drifting between different frames of reference from line to line.125

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Despite its apparently autobiographical character, then, the procedure of “They fle from me” does not really differ from Wyatt’s tactics in his other, more anonymous lyrics. The matter it represents as real, authentic, and rooted in an almost primal human experience is shown, gradually, to be nearly as mediated as the fantasies and delusions it is assumed to oppose. Seen in this way, the poem does not really offer us a collection of memorable images or phrases so much as a characterization of the poet’s shifting and probing perception in relation to its materials. What is important, in other words, is not what Wyatt writes about, but how he feels about what he writes. But how does he feel about it? What, in the last, is Wyatt trying to say with this weird and haunting poem? One answer may be found in the volta: “but all is torned thorough my gentilnes / into a straunge fasshion of forsaking.” Here, the key terms are “straunge” and “fasshion,” both of which qualify the lady’s act of “forsaking” and signal the poet’s deep uncertainty about the meaning of this act. In one respect, of course, this uncertainty is rooted in Wyatt’s apparent confusion about her decision to leave, which seems “straunge” to him but which – as he seems himself to admit – may not be so strange if one considers the affair from her perspective. After all, it may be that the poet’s “gentilnes” was not of the kind that small birds and tame deer employ, but the courtlier “gentilnes” of a lothario.126 When we turn to the other key term of the line, however, a different possibility emerges. This is that Wyatt may not have been left at all, for what he says is not that his lover is gone, but that she has treated him to a “fasshion” of leaving – and so we cannot assume, as Alastair Fowler points out, “that the poem implies a dramatic situation in which a relationship has ended.”127 Certainly, the poet knows he has “leve to goo,” and that his lady has leave to “vse new fangilnes.” But is it possible, we might ask, that these are all part of another, newer game of love that Wyatt is meant to play? With this in mind, I’d now like to turn to the question that Wyatt poses in last lines of this lyric: “But syns that I so kyndely ame serued, / I would fain knowe what she hath deserued.” Even if it is less direct in the Egerton manuscript than what one finds in Devonshire or in Tottel, this is not a “merely rhetorical” question, as scholars have sometimes claimed.128 On the contrary, it seems to me that, as in “What vaileth trouth,” Wyatt here genuinely wants to know what we perceive in his lover’s actions – and, perhaps, what she perceives in them too.129 In part, this is surely because he would like the reader to validate his own side of the story – to exclaim aloud that his lover has indeed behaved “unkyndely” in their relations. But it may also be the case that Wyatt is here seeking an answer to a still

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greater question posed implicitly by the central image of his poem. How, he seems to ask, should he feel as he watches his lover depart like the birds that migrate with the shifting of the seasons, “besely seking with a continuell chaunge?” Should he feel bitter and indignant about how he has been treated? Should he regret his past behavior? Should he rejoice in his newfound freedom? Should he find beauty, or even solace, in watching his lover circle on to another bed? Wyatt doesn’t know, but more important than an answer is the possibility that his readers might feel as he does when they look at migrating birds or remember old lovers. Greg Walker has suggested that Wyatt’s lyrics attempt to make legible a “felt condition,” not to convey some “universal truth,” and his point surely holds true with respect to the closing lines of this poem.130 Insofar as it has a message, the message of “They fle from me” would seem to reside in the poet’s hope that our perceptions will align with his perceptions, our feelings with his feelings – and that, upon reading it, these perceptions and feelings will seem, if not less “straunge,” then less discomfiting than they once did. For as Wyatt’s lyrics so often suggest, it is the feeling of mutual understanding that signals the presence of grace. *** Shortly after Wyatt’s death in 1542, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, published a short elegy in his honor.131 As he does in poems such as the “The Soote Seson,” Surrey here approaches the problem of representing sorrow by starting, not with the abstractions of feeling, but with the more concrete things to which feeling may attach itself. We hear first of Wyatt’s head, “where wysdom mysteries dyd frame” (5); next, of his face, “sterne and mylde” (9); then, of his hand, his tongue, his eye, his heart, and his “valiaunt corps, where force and beautye met” (29). As it moves across Wyatt’s body in the manner of a blazon, the poem begins to feel rather overcareful, or even pedantic, in its regular enumeration of its subject’s physical features – at least until the very end of the poem, where Surrey abruptly shifts its focus. But to the heavens that symple soule is fleed, Which lefte with such as covet Christe to knowe Witnes of faith that never shalbe deade; Sent for our welth, but not received so. Thus for our gylt this jewell have we lost; The earth his bones, the hevens possesse his goost.

(33–38)

It would appear that Surrey has appropriated one of Wyatt’s favorite tricks. Over the course of this elegy, we are presented with one aspect of Wyatt’s physical person after another, with the apparent aim of bringing him

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into view via the aggregation of these parts, only to discover, in its final lines, that we have been treated to an extended occupatio. This is because, ac­cording to Surrey, Wyatt’s character does not reside in any aspect of his matter, but rather in an ineffable quality of charisma, his “goost.” And the same goes, moreover, for the power of Wyatt’s poetry, which is said to consist, not of words and lines, but of “mysteries” that are “frame[d]” by “wysdom.” It is easy enough, Surrey suggests, to consider the “bones,” the material stuff, of a person or a text. But to grasp the authentic meaning of either one, we must look to a “goost” so removed from the physical substratum that its proper home is in “the hevens.” Surrey’s belief that the meaning of a poem would reside primarily in its manner, or “goost,” may seem intuitive to the modern reader. In the criticism of our own moment, it is often taken to be axiomatic that the very essence of a lyric resides in its style, manner, and spirit.132 But Surrey did not stumble upon this view by chance. Social pressures, such as those found at the Tudor court, and literary conventions, such as the elevation of “grace” and “manner” in the poetic theory of Surrey’s time, played an obvious role in its genesis. What is more, Surrey would not have written in this way had Wyatt not done so himself. Indeed, over the decades following his death, a number of mid-Tudor poets baldly appropriated – or at least, echoed in a flat-footed way – Wyatt’s characteristic techniques of indirection and suggestion in their own lyrics. Again and again, we catch them describing the “strangeness” of their experiences, or fantasizing about speech that speaks in silence, or wondering at the “grimmer grace” conveyed, not by the words, but by the face of one’s lover.133 Sometimes, these borrowings are so obvious that they fall just short of plagiarism. Consider, for instance, a short poem by Sir Edward Dyer. I woulde it were not as it is, Or that I cared not yea or no; I woulde I thoughte it nott amiss, Or that amiss myghte blameless goo; I woulde it were, yet woulde I not; I myghte be gladd, yet coulde I not.134

In this lyric, the pile-up of conditionals so strongly recalls the opening of Wyatt’s “Deme as ye list” (cf. 233.1–8) that one wonders if Dyer wished his readers to recognize what he was doing. In any event, it seems clear enough that, by the time Dyer put pen to paper, certain elements of Wyatt’s poetics  had become synonymous with Tudor poetry itself. This is no small accomplishment on Wyatt’s part, not least because Tudor poetry, we may recall, has long been seen as the vanguard of a new and genuinely modern

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literary aesthetic, one that prizes style instead of matter, fiction instead of fact, the unfettered expression of subjectivity, and, most of all, an au­tonomous “realm of imaginative pleasure quite apart from the world.”135 Before we pop the cork, however, we might ask whether Wyatt hi­mself would have celebrated these new aesthetic values, for his poetry often di­ splays considerable skepticism toward purely imaginative realms of pl­easure. Consider one of his darkest poems, a late lyric that he wrote to Sir Francis Bryan in 1541, during his second imprisonment in the Tower of London. Syghes ar my foode, drynke are my teares; Clynkinge of fetters suche musycke wolde crave; Stynke and close ayer away my lyf wears; Innocencie is all the hope I have. Rayne, wynde, or wether I iudge by myne eares. Mallice assaulted that rightiousnes should have. Sure I am, Brian, this wounde shall heale agayne, But yet, alas, the scarre shall styll remayne.

(244.1–8)

What James Simpson has called Wyatt’s “retreat” to “the small rooms, or stanze, of poetry” is here a good deal more literal than Simpson himself suggests, for the “massy walls” of this lyric, as John Kerrigan observes, are made of more concrete stuff than “tight form and syntax” alone.136 Indeed, the poem is intensely claustrophobic. I believe I feel, in its end-stopped lines, some version of how Wyatt may have felt while he breathed the “close” prison air, listened to the weather outside his cell, and noted the sound that his chains made with each movement. But at the same time – so the poem quips to Bryan – we should not worry too much about poor Wyatt. After all, he is a man with a powerful imagination, and so with just a little effort, he can easily transport himself from his prison cell to a grand feast, one where he is surrounded by merriment and good company. In this festive and imaginative space, his “syghes” are no longer sighs, but delicious “foode,” and his “teares” are no longer tears, but fine “drynke.” Even his “fetters” here become a source of pleasure and fun, for they make a “clynkinge” sort of “musycke” so delightful that all the present guests “crave” to hear it. The only catch is that this banquet takes place in Wyatt’s head.

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Epilogue

Sometime during the early 1580s, Philip Sidney began the first English sonnet sequence with a poem about literary invention. The poet Astrophil, we learn, has fallen in love with a young woman named Stella, and, in the hope that Stella might show him grace, he decides to compose a sonnet about his feelings. But the writing of this sonnet proves no easy task. The common tropes of love do not do justice to his emotions, and the study of other love poetry leads him nowhere. At his wits’ end, Astrophil bites his pen in frustration – but at that very moment, a new idea comes to him and he finally sits down to write. Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That the deare She might take some pleasure of my paine: Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine: Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay, Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Studie’s blowes, And others’ feete still seem’d but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes, Biting my trewand pen, beating my selfe for spite, “Foole,” said my Muse to me, “looke in thy heart and write.”1

Sidney’s poem is ingenious in its transposition of literary-theoretical terms into wordplay. Poetic feigning is refigured as Astrophil’s “faine” desire to disclose his feelings; the metrical “feete” of earlier poets become physical “strangers” that block his path; the “leaves” of these poets are evidence of a “fruitfull” poetic growth that will not take root in the “sunne-burn’d” soil of his own “braine”; and “Invention” is troped both as “Nature’s child” and as its own force of literary gestation, one that has conceived a poetic “child” waiting to be born through Astrophil’s speech. But formal 204

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virtuosity is not Sidney’s sole object in this poem, for as the final lines make clear, it is in fact a compressed ars poetica, one that proposes a new theory of making altogether. Where the novice poet – so the sonnet implies – composes his verse by copying what he finds amongst the “leaves” of other writers, the master writes of himself and from himself alone. His “heart” contains all the matter he needs. It is thus only when the aspiring poet puts aside extraneous matter and instead “bringeth” forth “his own stuff,” as Sidney elsewhere claims, that the novice can become the master, and poetic invention can truly begin.2 Because the lyric takes invention as its theme, and because it divides the history of its own invention into two discrete stages of development, critics have sometimes argued that it inaugurates, not only a new way of writing, but a new period of literary history altogether – a “golden age” of poetry, as C. S. Lewis once put it, that stands opposed to the “drab age” that came before it.3 This view has had a considerable influence upon scholarship both then and now, for if an earlier generation of critics flatly declared that Sidney here puts “convention aside” and “speak[s] out for himself,” more recent ones have continued to adopt the same position, if in a quieter way.4 No doubt, such claims are partly warranted by Sidney’s own pronouncements. Astrophil and Stella is without question a text that insists upon its own novelty, and its opening sonnet certainly proclaims that it will cast aside an older way of writing in favor of a newer one. Before we take Sidney at his word, however, we might first ask whether this new theory of making truly aligns with what we know about his habits of composition. First, we should note that Astrophil and Stella is a work of imitation, one that is patently modeled upon the tropes and conventions of Petrarchan verse.5 To claim that the sequence is born from a disregard of “others’ leaves” is thus to misrepresent both its matter and its genesis, for imitation, as Sidney knew well, proceeds by reworking the conventions of preexisting texts, not by ignoring them.6 Second, when the sequence does not imitate Petrarch, it draws upon life. As scholars have long observed, the central characters in the poem, “Astrophil” and “Stella,” represent Sidney himself and Penelope Devereux, a young woman at Queen Elizabeth’s court who would later serve as lady-in-waiting to Anne of Denmark.7 Indeed, the allegory of Astrophil and Stella is so transparent that it would have been difficult for those in the poet’s circle not to recognize it as a kind of historical fiction, or even as a roman à clef.8 Third, and most of all, the tropes and diction of Sidney’s verse display a deep debt to the literary traditions in which he wrote. Let’s consider again the opening sonnet.

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With their appeals to “pitie” and “grace,” its first four lines may seem a genuine cry of the heart, but they are also a textbook example of rhetorical climax, or gradatio.9 The casting-aside of other books may appear a romantic gesture, but this is an allusion to Joachim du Bellay, who likewise claims to put away “others’ leaves” before he picks up his pen.10 And while Sidney’s comments about taking “pleasure” from “paine” may authentically speak to his experience of deep romantic feeling, or even to what Catherine Bates terms his “masochism,” they are also a typical characterization of Aristotelian catharsis.11 This was a topic, it goes without saying, that was much in vogue in the sixteenth-century literary theory that Sidney so assiduously read. It is clear enough, then, that the theory of invention proposed by this sonnet is not new in any obvious sense, for it is not predicated upon a profound shift in literary technique. Indeed, as he nearly admits himself in the Defence of Poetry, Sidney writes in much the same way as the makers studied in the preceding pages of this book.12 But if this is the case, then how might we explain the divergence of Sidney’s claims for novelty from his traditional practice? One answer, perhaps, can be found in the self-contradictions of Elizabethan literary culture itself. Consider the very first chapter of George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, which attempts at once to define the labor of the poet and to designate the poet’s position within the field of culture. A poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conforms with the Greek word, for of poein, to make, they call a maker poeta. Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God, who without any travail to his divine imagination made all the world of nought, nor also by any pattern or mold as the Platonics with their Ideas do fantastically suppose. Even so the very poet makes and contrives out of his own brain both the verse and matter of his poem, and not by any foreign copy or example, as doth the translator, who therefore may well be said a versifier, but not a poet. The premises considered, it giveth to the name and profession no small dignity and preeminence above all other artificers, scientific or mechanical. And nevertheless without any repugnancy at all, a poet may in some sort be said a follower or imitator, because he can express the true and lively of every thing is set before him, and which he taketh in hand to describe; and so in that respect is both a maker and a counterfeiter, and poesy an art not only of making, but also of imitation.13

In this passage, Puttenham struggles to reconcile two models of ­literary labor. The first casts the poet as a kind of pseudo-deity, one with the power to create new matter out “of nought” and not “by any foreign copy or example.” Poets, according to this view, are fully autonomous artists. Like “creating gods,” as Puttenham writes, they “make all these things of

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themselves” (1.1; p. 94). The second model of poetic labor, by contrast, holds that the poet “express[es] the true and lively of everything” that is “set before him.” According to this model, the poet does not create verse out of nothing, but rather acts as an “imitator” or a “counterfeiter,” one who draws either upon his “experience and observation of the world” or upon written “­precedent” and “pattern” for his matter (1.1; p. 94). Does Puttenham fail to see that the first model is at odds with the second? This is unlikely, and so we might consider another explanation, one encoded in his attempt to differentiate poetic labor from the work of “other artificers.”14 Carpenters and masons and even gardeners, as Puttenham admits elsewhere in his treatise, perform a kind of labor that cannot be wholly distinguished from the work of the poet (3.25; pp. 385–86). But unlike these craftsmen, the poet must “disguise and cloak” the “subtleties of his art” so that it does not appear “to proceed from him by any study or trade,” but seems purely to be the result of his “natural” ability (3.25; p. 382). Even if literary autonomy is a mere illusion, in other words, it is an illusion that Puttenham insists the poet must claim for his work. But why? One answer to this question might be found in his probable inspiration for this vision of literary autonomy. This is Queen Elizabeth herself, whom Puttenham calls “the most excellent poet” (1.1; p. 95) and whom he characterizes – not entirely without justification – as a figure vested with the power to create works that proceed solely from herself and that answer solely to her wishes. But you, Madam, my most Honored and Gracious: if I should seem to offer you this my advice for a discipline and not a delight, I might well be reputed of all others the most arrogant and injurious, yourself being already, of any that I know in our time, the most excellent poet. Forsooth, by your princely purse, favors, and countenance, making in manner what ye list, the poor man rich, the lewd well learned, the coward courageous, and vile both noble and valiant. Then for imitation no less, your person as a most cunning counterfeiter lively representing Venus in countenance, in life Diana, Pallas for government, and Juno in all honor and regal magnificence. (1.1; pp. 94–95)

No doubt, Puttenham’s brown-nosing is conventional. But it is also very clever, for in modeling the autonomy of poetic making upon the autonomy of royal power, he is able to position – if only in conceit – the field of literary production beyond the jurisdiction of those who are not poets or critics themselves.15 Common craftsmen, he suggests, merely rework the materials they find available. Only poets and princes may create works that are fully autonomous in form – if not always in matter.

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Puttenham did not attempt this move alone. Sidney also declared the poet “the monarch” of “all sciences,” and Spenser appears to have claimed his own “domain of lyric” in staking out what Paul Alpers once termed “a qualified but nonetheless genuine independence” for his work.16 Puttenham was also not the first to attempt it. Indeed, this book has often considered the writings of earlier poets and critics who pondered questions of literary autonomy, many of whom suggested, like Puttenham, that the matter of poetry was partly “invented” in the poet’s “mind.”17 But what marks Puttenham and his contemporaries apart is their willingness to claim literary autonomy in an unqualified way, and this is an important development. Aesthetic categories, as Sianne Ngai reminds us, index “specific ways of relating to other subjects and the larger social arrangements these ways of relating presuppose.”18 When these writers insist that the poet is an autonomous figure, and that his labor differs absolutely in kind from other modes of work, they thus project a new position for poet and poetry within the field of culture, for even if, as we have seen, their claims are founded upon half-truths, such claims are motivated by very real shifts in the socio-political conditions under which these writers labored. Indeed, as Annabel Patterson once observed, Sidney himself learned the hard way, in the wake of his disastrous attempt to offer advice on the French Match, that poets had little business speaking openly about history or politics during the latter half of the sixteenth century.19 If he were determined to do so, the prudent poet would do better to write about such things in an aestheticized form – by locating them within the confines of the Green World, perhaps, or by disguising them “under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep.”20 It is in this sense – as I argued in the introduction to this book – that the modern notion of authorship is born from the mystification of making. On the whole, sixteenth-century writers follow the same procedures as their medieval counterparts when they sit down to compose a poem. They continue to imitate the styles and tropes of others; to tie their work to contemporary socio-historical contexts; and to construct their texts out of the plots, characters, and themes found in other books. They continue, as Gower or Lydgate would say, to make old texts seem new. But where earlier court poets point up their reliance upon their materials, Sidney and his contemporaries conceal this fact instead, disguising the “subtleties of their art” so that they may declare that “verse” and “matter” are born, like some textual Athena, “out of” the poet’s very “brain.”21 Such claims are obviously extravagant. It may be tempting to dismiss them as nothing more than literary mythmaking, even if they have been integral to

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the rise of modern aesthetic theory and the birth of the literary author.22 The point of studying this development, however, is not to indict its prerogatives, but “to inquire into the objective conditions” that made them possible.23 During their lifetimes, Spenser and Sidney certainly remained “makers,” in the medieval sense of that term. They also came to be seen, and to see themselves, as “authors.” It is the complex force that these aesthetic categories exercised across the early history of literary production, and their uneasy relation to each other, that this book has sought to describe.

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Notes

Introduction 1 A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 94–95. Minnis builds upon a foundational article by M.-D. Chenu, “Auctor, actor, autor,” Archivium Latinitatis Medii Aevi 3 (1927), 81–86. 2 Bonaventure, “Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences,” Question 4, respondeo, in A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott with David Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The CommentaryTradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 229. 3 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 10. 4 Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017), pp. xiv–xv. 5 See Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially chapter four. 6 Eustache Deschamps famously called Chaucer a “grant translateur”; for the text of Deschamps’ ballade to Chaucer and discussion, see Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 143–51, who suggests that “translateur” may possess a double edge (see pp. 150–51). For the terms that early English poets used to refer to themselves, see especially Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, “Authorizing Text and Writer,” in Wogan-Browne, Watson, Taylor, and Evans (eds.), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 4–5, and Katharine Jager, “The Practice of Makynge: Masculine Poetic Identity in Late Medieval English Poetry” (City University of New York, 2007), especially pp. 22–23 and p. 22n61. 7 For the resonance of English making with French literary practice, see Glending Olson, “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” Comparative Literature, 31.3 (1979), 272–90. For the faiseurs, see Yolanda Plumley, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapters six and seven. 8 For a similar line of argument, see Noëlle Phillips, “Vernacular Makynge, Jack Upland, and the Aesthetics of Antifraternalism,” in Katharine Jager 210

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(ed.), Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages: Politics, Performativity, and Reception from Literature to Music (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 233–70 (esp. 242–43). For a different account of making, one that primarily understands it as the performance of masculine social identity but whose description of makynge as a literary practice also shares elements with my own, see again Jager, “The Practice of Makynge,” especially pp. 14–28 (and compare pp. 28–41 and 53–62). 9 Mary Carruthers, “The Concept of Ductus, or Journeying through a Work of Art,” in Carruthers (ed.), Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 190–213; Kara Gaston, Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 1–4. 10 In using the term “literary production” here and elsewhere, I allude to Pierre Macherey, who held that criticism must attend not merely to the products of literature but to “the laws of its production,” the labor and materials which are the “actual conditions of its possibility.” See Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 10. 11 For the use of “matter” in the second sense given, see especially C. S. Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” Essays and Studies, 17 (1932), 56–75 (59–61). 12 For this definition, see Aristotle, Physica, ed. Fernand Bossier and Jozef Brams, in Gerard Verbeke (gen. ed.), Aristoteles Latinus, vol. 7.1.2 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1.9 (192a29–34; p. 40). 13 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and M. C. E. Shaner, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), F.1582; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki, second edition (London: Routledge, 2013), 3.6.36–37. 14 Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” Exemplaria, 22.2 (2010), 99–118 (112); compare Daniel Wakelin, Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 4–6. For Aristotle on the materiality of words, see again the Physica, ed. Bossier and Brams, 2.3 (195a16–19; p. 59). 15 For an overview, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 28–29. For a more recent account of the influence of Aristotelian thought on medieval poetics, see Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), especially pp. 1–90. 16 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, tr. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: PIMS, 1967), chapter four (p. 79); cf. Edmond Faral (ed.), Les arts poétiques du xii et du xiii siècle (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1962), p. 251 (ll. 1761–63). 17 Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores, p. 74, in R. B. C. Huygens (ed.), Accessus ad auctores, Bernard D’Utrecht, Conrad D’Hirsau (Leiden: Brill, 1970), pp. 71–131. For the use of materia to refer to the topic of a text or the persons represented by the text, see the anonymous Accessus ad auctores, in Huygens (ed.), Accessus ad auctores, pp. 19–54. The accessus to Homer, for

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instance, claims that the poet’s “matter [materia]” is either “Troy or Greece” or “the persons [personae] from whose illicit union [illicito coniugio] the war first broke out [ortum est bellum]” (p. 26), while the accessus to Ovid’s Tristia suggests that its “matter [materia] is the description of the dangers [periculorum descriptio]” that Ovid faced in exile (p. 35). 18 For the house analogy, see, e.g., Thomas Hoccleve, Series, 2.635–44, in Roger Ellis (ed.), ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems (University of Exeter Press, 2001). For the pottery analogy, see, e.g., John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS e.s. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27), Prol. 8–28. For the coin analogy, see, e.g., Dicus’s verses in Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 65 (ll. 9–14). For the field analogy, see, e.g., William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, rev. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 19.262–73. For the framing analogy, see, e.g., E. K.’s comments in the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 25. For the wheat-and-chaff analogy, see, e.g., Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, ed. Vincent J. DiMarco and Larry D. Benson, in Benson (gen. ed.), Riverside Chaucer, ll. 22–25. 19 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Larry D. Benson, with materials provided by Robert A. Pratt, in Benson (gen. ed.), Riverside Chaucer, 3.835–36. 20 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. John Jowett, in Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2016), 2.2.189–92. 21 Geoffrey Chaucer, Boece, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, in Benson (gen. ed.), Riverside Chaucer, 1.m1.2 (p. 397, col. 1); compare Boethius, De Consolatio Philosophiae, tr. S. J. Tester, in Boethius, Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, LCL 74 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 1.m1.2 (p. 130). Chaucer follows Jean de Meun, who likewise renders maistos modos in essentializing terms, as “dolereuse matiere.” See Jean de Meun, tr., Li Livres de Confort de Philosophie, 1.m1.2–3 (p. 171), in V. L. Dedeck-Héry (ed.), “Boethius’ De Consolatione by Jean de Meun,” Mediaeval Studies, 14 (1952), 165–275. 22 For discussion, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 118–45, and Andrew Kraebel, Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 24–27. 23 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum, tr. John Trevisa, in Charles Frederick Briggs, David C. Fowler, and Paul G. Remley (eds.), The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De regimine principum of Aegidius Romanus (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 6. 24 For “perilous matter,” see Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 9.348. For “virtuous matter,” see Hoccleve, Series, 2.637. For “historical matter,” see Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 1.1458–60. For “holy matter,” see Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 206 (Oxford University

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Press, 1938), ll. 6249–55. For “hard matter,” see again Chaucer, The House of Fame, ed. John M. Fyler, in Benson (gen. ed.), Riverside Chaucer, l. 861. 25 Margaret W. Ferguson, “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds.), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 291. 26 See Aristotle, Physica, 2.2 (194b9; p. 55). As Aristotle writes, “matter [materia] is present within everything that exists, for to each form there corresponds a particular kind of matter [eorum que sunt ad aliquid materia est; in alia enim specie alia materia iam est].” The philosopher’s point is that, in any given hylomorphic compound, one component is understood to be the matter and another to be the form, though what is designated as the “form” of one compound may be designated as the “matter” of another. 27 Ibid., 1.7 (190b4–16; pp. 32–33). 28 Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus, p. 78. 29 Compare Patricia Claire Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 28–36. 30 Peter Lombard, Sententiae in iv libris distinctae, ed. Ignatius Brady, rev. third edition, 2 vols. (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–81), 2.1.2. 31 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 53; compare pp. 52–54. 32 See especially Lisa H. Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 11–14; Sonja Drimmer, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 1–14; Wendy Beth Hyman, Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 32–36; V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 78–81; Stephen Partridge, “‘The Makere of this Boke’: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler,” in Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (eds.), Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 106–53; Wendy Scase, “Latin Composition Lessons, Piers Plowman, and the Piers Plowman Tradition” in Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (eds.), An Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (Columbus: The Ohio State  University Press, 2013), pp. 34–53; A. V. C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker: Langland’s Poetic Art (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 1–20; and Wakelin, Immaterial Texts, pp. 9–13. 33 See respectively Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney, in Benson (gen. ed.), Riverside Chaucer, 5.1786–90; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, Prol. 12–15; Hoccleve, Series, 2.624–26; and George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1.31 (pp. 148–49). 34 The reader may wish to compare what follows with three accounts that have shaped its claims: James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford

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University Press, 2002), pp. 62–67; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 7–9 and 38–40; and Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 10–15. 35 I use “imagination” in the post-Enlightenment sense of the term; for an overview of the different way that medieval intellectuals conceived of the imaginative faculty, see especially Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 1–4. 36 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 86–87. This resistance to overt fictionality, however, does not preclude the use of fictions altogether; so long as they are well documented, a writer such as Hoccleve, for instance, is more than happy to recount implausible and marvelous events in his poetry. For discussion, see Chapter 3, and compare Michelle Karnes, “The Possibilities of Medieval Fiction,” New Literary History, 51.1 (2020), 209–28. 37 For making and rhetoric, compare Jager, “Practice of Makynge,” pp. 21–22. For a succinct account of this three-part process in one of the handbooks, see Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, tr. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981), 3.51–52 (p. 92); cf. Faral (ed.), Arts poétiques, pp. 179–80. On the debts of the handbooks to the tradition of Roman oratory, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 158–78. 38 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 166. Compare, e.g., Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, 4.3 (p. 93), and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, tr. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), 2.C.132 (p. 85). 39 See, e.g., Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, tr. Nims, chapter three (pp. 24–42). 40 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, 3.2 (p. 79; translation modified); cf. Faral (ed.), Arts poétiques, pp. 167–68. 41 For the foundational study of this influence, see John Matthews Manly, “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 12 (1926), 95–113, and compare Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” 61–62. 42 Wynnere and Wastour, Prol.20–28, in Warren Ginsberg (ed.), Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parlement of the Thre Ages (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1992). For discussion, see J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 23–24. 43 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, Prol.12–28. 44 Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds.), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 112. 45 Ben Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (gen. eds.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7:556. 46 See especially Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, pp. 23–28; Olson, “Making and Poetry,” p. 275; and Anne Middleton, “Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the Good of Literature,”

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in Edward W. Said (ed.), Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 15–56 (30–33). For discussion of this critical trend, compare Jager, “Practice of Makynge,” pp. 23–25. Scholars of early modern poetry have often asserted this hierarchy as well; see, e.g., Richard Helgerson, “The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career,” PMLA, 93.5 (1978), 893–911 (899–900). 47 For early-modern accounts of “making” and “versifying,” see, e.g., Thomas Elyot, The boke named the gouernour, STC 7635 (London, 1531), 1.13 (fols. 49r–v); Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 81; and Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 1.1 (pp. 93–95). 48 For the interchangeability of these terms in the manuscript record, see especially Partridge, “The Makere of this Boke.” For the shifting set of iconographic conventions that illuminators used to depict Middle English poets, see Drimmer, Art of Allusion, pp. 53–69. 49 Eustache Deschamps, L’Art de dictier, ed. and tr. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), line 1 (p. 54). 50 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1786–90; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 4.94–102 and 6.3151–71. 51 Chaucer, House of Fame, ll. 311–14. 52 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, new edition (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. xxiii. 53 Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 99. 54 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 1.1 (p. 93); Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Terri Bourus, in Taylor, Jowett, Bourus, and Egan (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare, 5.1.14–17. 55 Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 18–29. 56 Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 79. 57 Ibid., p. 78. 58 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 259–60 (compare 76–77). 59 Compare Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 4; Patterson’s argument – that early modern “censorship” largely produced the notion that literature is “a kind of discourse with rules of its own” – anticipates my own in several respects. 60 For Tudor press oversight and censorship programmes, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially pp. 3–76. 61 For Walsingham’s spy network, see Stephen Alford, “Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham,” in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds.), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 46–62. 62 For copyright and the proprietary claims of early modern writers, see Margreta de Grazia, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” in Jean I. Marsden

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(ed.), The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstruction of the Works and the Myth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 57–71. 63 For Nashe, Harvey, and the early modern reading public, see Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 162–203. 64 Compare Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, pp. 37–40. 65 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 53–56. 66 Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, p. 7; for further discussion, see especially pp. 24–27. 67 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 7. 68 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 298.

1  Words and Deeds in Chaucer 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Larry D. Benson, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 1.734. Subsequent citations of Chaucer’s works will refer to selections from The Riverside Chaucer, and will be given p­arenthetically, according to the following system: CT = Canterbury Tales, ed. Hanna and Benson; TC = Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney; LGW = Legend of Good Women, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and M. C. E. Shaner; B = Boece, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler; HF = House of Fame, ed. John M. Fyler; and “Lak” = “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” ed. R. T. Lenaghan. 2 For medieval theories of stylistic decorum and invention, see, e.g., Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and tr. Harry Caplan, LCL 403 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 4.8.11–12.18 (pp. 253–75). For word-for-word translation, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 9–62. 3 For discussion, see Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 122–24; compare P. B. Taylor, “Chaucer’s Cosyn to the Dede,” Speculum, 57.2 (1982), 315–27 (318–24). 4 For Chaucer and the sworn oath, see especially Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 96–102, and Tison Pugh, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2014), pp. 65–97. 5 See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 198–203, and compare Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 6–8. 6 See especially Joseph Dane, Res-Verba: A Study in Medieval French Drama (Leiden: Brill, 1985), pp. 1–5; compare Mary Carruthers, The Book of

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Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, second edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 28–31. 7 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. Joseph Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), 1.2; my translation. 8 Priscian, for instance, states that, when presented in the indicative mode, words “signify the substance or essence of a thing exactly as it is [substantiam sive essentiam rei significat].” See Prisciani Grammatici Caesariensis institutionum grammaticarum libri xviii, ed. Martin Hertz, 2 vols. (Leipzig: G. Teubner, 1855–59), 8.12 (1:422). For further discussion, see especially Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study of the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, revised edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 55–109. 9 See especially John Baker, “Deeds Speak Louder than Words: Covenants and the Law of Proof, 1290–1321,” in Susanne Jenks, Jonathan Rose, and Christopher Whittick (eds.), Laws, Lawyers, and Texts: Studies in Medieval Legal History in Honour of Paul Brand (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 177–99; compare Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially pp. 121–64. 10 Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr. Betty Radice, CWE, 27, pp. 77–153 (p. 107). 11 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 3. 12 I count twenty-six uses of the commonplace and its variants. See CT 1.730–42, 1.1773–75, 2.890–91, 4.26–28, 4.164–67, 4.363, 4.859–61, 5.984–85, 6.107–8, 6.525–27, 6.739–41, 7.137–40, 7.1742–43, 7.2505–6, 8.636–38, 8.1274–75, 9.207–10, 9.240–41; TC 3.471–72, 3.1053–54, 5.470–75; Boece 3.p12 (ll. 205–7; p. 439); LGW F.1706–7, F.1738–39, F.2540–42; and “Lak,” lines 1–7. 13 See especially Anne Middleton, “Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,” in Edward W. Said (ed.), Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 15–56, and Lee Patterson “‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” SAC, 11 (1989), 117–75. For a slightly different account, compare Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 182–86 and 211–33. 14 For these constraints, see Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience,” Literature and History, 5 (1977), 26–41 (esp. 30–34), and for the personal risk of a continued association with the court, see again Paul Strohm, “Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s,” in Lee Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83–112 (especially 90–97). For contrasting accounts of Chaucer’s negotiation of his complex social and literary position during this period, see David R. Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), especially pp.  5–26; Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 172–96 and 267–94; and Robert

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J. Meyer-Lee, Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 28–39 and pp. 163–67. 15 Critics have suggested this identification on the basis both of the God of Love’s penetrating gaze and on the costume and iconography of the God and Alceste. See especially David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 338–39 and 353–56; Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91–92; and Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 87–94. 16 Compare Robert Worth Frank, Jr., Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 27–34, and Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, pp. 130–48. For the central role of Alceste, see especially Joyce Coleman, “‘A Bok for King Richardes Sake’: Royal Patronage, the Confessio, and the Legend of Good Women,” in R. F. Yeager (ed.), On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 104–23, and Holly A. Crocker, The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 252–55. 17 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 370; compare Patterson, “What Man Artow?,” pp. 120–23. But for a more skeptical view of how constraining Chaucer may have found the God’s commands, see Crocker, Matter of Virtue, pp. 256–57. 18 For examples of this position, see, e.g., Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 197; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 322; and Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), p. 233. 19 On Chaucer’s putative commitment to aesthetic autonomy, see, e.g., Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 74–75; Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 295; Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 64; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 173; Peggy Knapp, Chaucerian Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 43–46; and Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), pp. 151–52. For the position that the Tales instead critique notions of both personal and aesthetic autonomy, see especially Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 20 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 164. 21 For these and other examples, see Bartlett Jere Whiting, with Helen Wescott Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), entry W642 (pp. 669–70).

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22 For the renewed scrutiny that questions of language and reference received in fourteenth-century intellectual culture, see especially John M. Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 51–59, and David Coley, The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Narrative, 1377–1422 (Syracuse University Press, 2012), pp. 5–10. 23 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, 5 vols. (Paris, 1919–24), ll. 15189–92 (4:94). Compare Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, The Romance of the Rose, tr. Charles Dahlberg, third edition (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 258. 24 Jean de Meun, tr., Li Livres de Confort de Philosophie, 3.p12 (p. 232), in V. L. Dedeck-Héry (ed.), “Boethius’ De Consolatione by Jean de Meun,” Mediaeval Studies, 14 (1952), 165–275. 25 Gower, Confessio amantis, Prol.113–14, 130. 26 Dante, Vita nuova, tr. Mark Musa (Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 13 (p. 23). 27 Boccaccio, Decameron, tr. Guido Waldman (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 682; compare Boccaccio, Decameron, in Vittore Branca (ed.), Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 4 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1976), p. 960. 28 In the account most often found in later thought, Aristotle held that the meanings of words were determined “according to convention,” or secundum placitum; see Aristotle, De Interpretatione vel Periermenias, tr. Boethius, ed. Laurence Minio-Paluello, in Gerard Verbeke (gen. ed.), Aristoteles Latinus, vol. 2.1–2 (Brussels and Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965), chap. 2 (16a19–29; p. 6). There remained, however, a great deal of debate about the issue; for discussion, see especially Fyler, Language and the Declining World, pp. 17–34. 29 For these citations, see, respectively, Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la rose, ll. 7091–94 (3:29) and 15189–92 (4:94). For discussion, see Minnis, Magister Amoris, pp. 140–46, and Fyler, Language and the Declining World, pp. 90–100. 30 For the semantic triangle, see Aristotle, De Interpretatione, chap. 1 (16a1–8; p. 5). For discussion, see especially Paul Vincent Spade, “The Semantics of Terms,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, assoc. ed. Eleonore Stump (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 188–96 (189). 31 For these disputes, which invariably found themselves tied up with debates about the intelligibility of universals, see especially Gyula Klima, “Nominalist Semantics,” in Robert Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 159–72, and compare Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 35–40 and 56–61. 32 Gower, Confessio amantis, Prol.113–14. 33 Dante’s precise meaning has occasioned debate; compare especially Fyler, Language and the Declining World, pp. 101–27, and Aldo Scaglione, “Dante and the Ars Grammatica,” in G. L. Bursill-Hall, Sten Ebbesen, and Konrad Koerner (eds.), De Ortu Grammaticae: Studies in Medieval Grammar and

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Linguistic Theory in Memory of Jan Pinborg (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990), pp. 305–19. 34 This view of satirical poetry was commonplace. For discussion, see, e.g., Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 135–49. For Boccaccio’s endorsement of this position, see Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, tr. Charles G. Osgood (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 14.15 (pp. 74–75). 35 For a recent discussion, see R. D. Perry, “Chaucer’s ‘Summoner’s Tale’ and the Logic of Literature,” Poetics Today, 41.1 (2020), 37–57. 36 Green, A Crisis of Truth, pp. 154–64. 37 Compare Strohm, Social Chaucer, pp. 96–102, for further discussion. 38 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, third edition (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), p. 54. For further discussion, see pp. 54–58 and compare Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Early English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 24–27, and Green, A Crisis of Truth, pp. 41–77. 39 Quoted in Baker, “Deeds Speak Louder than Words,” p. 184 and 184n34. 40 See Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 132–55. For a very close study of Chaucer’s literal rendition both of Petrarch and the Livre Griseldis, and a catalog of moments where he does depart from these sources, see J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (Hamden: Archon Books, 1972), pp. 215–28 and 229–48, respectively. Compare Meyer-Lee, Literary Value and Social Identity, pp. 45–51. 41 Petrarch had figured his own work in similar terms; as he wrote to Boccaccio, “You be the judge [tu iudica] of whether I have deformed or perhaps ornamented [your story] by changing its clothes [mutata veste].” For this comment, see Thomas J. Farrell and Amy W. Goodman, “The Clerk’s Tale,” in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (eds.), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–5), 1:111. See too Kara Gaston, Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 93–103, for discussion of Petrarch’s views on change in the Historia. 42 For Chaucer’s possible critique of his Petrarchan source, see especially Leah Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration Through Translation in the Clerk’s Tale,” Chaucer Review, 47.2 (2013), 274–99 (especially 287–99). 43 For discussion of the lenvoy, see especially Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 286–93, and Gaston, Reading Chaucer in Time, pp. 112–15. 44 John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 54. 45 Compare Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 45–51. 46 A typical formulation is provided by Peter of Spain, who writes that “supposition [suppositio] and signification [significatio] are different … because

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signification happens by imposing an utterance upon a thing in order to signify it [per impositionem vocis ad rem], while supposition is taking [acceptio] in place of something [pro aliquo] the very term that already signifies a thing [ipsius termini iam significantis rem].” See Summaries of Logic, ed. and tr. Brian P. Copenhaver, with Calvin Normore and Terence Parsons (Oxford University Press, 2014), 6.3 (pp. 240–41). For discussion, see E. Jennifer Ashworth, “Terminist Logic,” in Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 146–58 (esp. 152–58). For a compelling study of the relation of terminist logic to medieval poetics, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2020), especially pp. 17–28 and 65–84. 47 The reading that follows is indebted to Eugene Vance, who long ago observed that the Troilus uses the word “thing” in a remarkably open-ended way; see Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 293. 48 See MED, “thyng,” n., sense 13a; for a Chaucerian example, see CT 3.121, where the Wife of Bath discusses “oure bothe thynges smale.” 49 For the former position, see, e.g., Barbara Nolan, “‘A Poet Ther Was’: Chaucer’s Voices in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA, 101.2 (1986), 154–69 (162). For the latter, see, e.g., Taylor, “Chaucer’s Cosyn to the Dede,” pp. 324–25. 50 Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, p. 136. 51 See, e.g., Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 65; Simpson, “Chaucer as a European Writer,” in Seth Lerer (ed.), The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 55–86 (80–81); and Turner, Chaucer, p. 313. For a critique of this position, see especially Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs, pp. 57–58. 52 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 26; compare her remarks on pp. 32–33. Critics have likened the rules governing the tale-telling contest both to the social codes of late-medieval guilds and to the procedure followed in late-medieval parliaments; see respectively Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 97–103, and Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 169–78. For critiques of this vision of the contest, see especially Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, pp. 2–5 and 131–35, and Kellie Robertson, “Authorial Work,” in Paul Strohm (ed.), Middle English: Twenty-First Century Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 441–58 (451–52). 53 CT 4.54 and 5.38. For the Clerk’s fidelity to his source, see the discussion above. For the Squire’s use – or perhaps misuse – of medieval rhetorical techniques, see especially Robert S. Haller, “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Uses of Rhetoric,” Modern Philology, 62.4 (1965), 285–95. 54 For the Knight’s “cheyne,” see Theseus’s first-mover speech (CT 1.2987–3034); for discussion, see Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, pp. 175–90, and David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 187–95.

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55 Compare V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 297–358. 56 For discussion of the Merchant’s assumption that marriage and authorship ought alike to follow the logic of the marketplace, see Christian Sheridan, “May in the Marketplace: Commodification and Textuality in the Merchant’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 102.1, (2005), 27–44, and compare Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination, pp. 152–53. Moreover, the Merchant’s very “fantasye” of marriage is itself shaped, as Harry Cushman has shown, by the technology of commerce; see H. M. Cushman, “Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Sense of Having,” forthcoming in Exemplaria, 34.3 (2023). 57 “Fre” carried a specific legal sense: to make “fre aquitaunce” is to release someone unconditionally from a bond, while to “make” oneself “fre of” something is to help oneself to another’s property; see MED, “fre,” adj., senses 4c and 4d respectively. For differing accounts of the Franklin’s views on the “promises” of gentils and literature alike, see especially Alan T. Gaylord, “The Promises in The Franklin’s Tale,” ELH, 31.4 (1964), 331–65; Meyer-Lee, Literary Value and Social Identity, pp. 173–235; and Nicholas Perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England (Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 157–68. 58 See Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, pp. 40–50, and compare Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, pp. 173–85 and 193–97. 59 Meyer-Lee’s term for these acts of literary value-ascription is “axiology”; for discussion, see Literary Value and Social Identity, pp. 12–21. Compare Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 1–16. 60 Compare especially Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, pp. 168–76. 61 See especially Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 237–39, and Lee Patterson, “‘No Man his Reson Herde’: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales,” in Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social Change, pp. 113–55 (123–25 and 130–32). 62 A notable exception is Elizabeth Scala; compare the reading that follows with her Desire in the Canterbury Tales (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015), pp. 10–11 and 73–79. 63 Compare Turner, Chaucer, pp. 246–48, who observes that gold nobles were indeed a “newe” type of coin during Chaucer’s lifetime. 64 One might add that Alisoun’s apparently calculated misprision of “curteisie” seems designed to contrast with Absolon’s frankly naive misunderstanding of the term elsewhere in the Tale (see, e.g., 1.3348–51). But see Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 43–46, for an account that instead reads the encounter between Alisoun and Nicholas as “the beginning of a rape” (45). 65 The sense of “hende” has been discussed by E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), pp. 17–19. For these and other

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puns in the tale, see Jennifer Bryan, “‘A berd! A berd!’: Chaucer’s Miller and the Poetics of the Pun,” SAC, 38 (2016), 1–37. 66 See again Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, pp. 28–29; compare Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 244–45, and Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, pp. 96–112. 67 For the foundational reading of the Wife of Bath’s appropriation of exegetical terminology, see D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 317–31. For a critique of Robertson’s views, see Theresa Tinkle, “Contested Authority: Jerome and the Wife of Bath on 1 Timothy 2,” Chaucer Review, 44.3 (2010), 268–93. For the conflicts of “jurisdiccioun” between the Friar and Summoner, see especially Arnold Williams, “The ‘Limitour’ of Chaucer’s Time and his ‘Limitacioun,’” Studies in Philology, 57.3 (1960), 463–78. 68 Mann, Chaucer and Estates Satire, p. 197; compare Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, pp. 37–40, and Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, pp. 43–44. 69 Compare Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” PMLA, 94.2 (1979), 209–22. 70 Scholarship on the relation of tale to teller in the Canterbury Tales is too large to survey in full; for two recent accounts, see David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval England: Public Interiorities (Oxford University Press, 2017), especially pp. 151–80, and Meyer-Lee, Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales, especially pp. 10–12 and 15–20. 71 For discussion of the Pardoner’s religious credentials—or lack thereof—see especially Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 99–118. Compare Fowler, Literary Character, pp. 48–66, for the Pardoner in the context of canon law, and Robyn Malo (now Bartlett), Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 125–40, for the Pardoner’s relics in the context of late-medieval relic custodianship. 72 See, e.g., George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), pp. 20–22. 73 Alan Fletcher has observed that the form of the Pardoner’s sermon recalls a grabbag of popular, and often maligned, preaching tricks; see Fletcher, “The Preaching of the Pardoner,” SAC, 11 (1989), 15–35 (33–34). For a similar line of argument, and further extracts from medieval sermons that bear out this point, see Lee Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies,” Speculum, 76.3 (2001), 638–80 (pp. 666–69), and Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 49–52. 74 See especially Frederick Tupper, “The Pardoner’s Tavern,” JEGP, 13.4 (1914), 553–65, and compare G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, second edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 425–41. 75 See especially Anne McTaggart, Shame and Guilt in Chaucer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 99–113; Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 345–57; and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing

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the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 40–42 and 53–57. 76 Three Middle English Sermons from the Worcester Chapter Manuscript F. 10, ed. D. M. Grimsdale, Leeds School of English Language Texts and Monographs, no. 5 (Leeds: Titus Wilson of Kendal, 1939), pp. 30, 35, and 31, respectively. 77 For the significance of the Flemish setting, see David Wallace, “In Flaundres,” SAC, 19 (1997), 63–91 (especially pp. 79–82). 78 See Smith, Arts of Dying, pp. 99–100 (quotation at 99). For an example of the spear motif, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden Supra MS 53, fol. 118r. 79 As Smith notes, the boy conflates this Death with “the Death,” the Plague; see again Arts of Dying, p. 100. 80 See especially Rita Copeland, “The Pardoner’s Body and the Disciplining of Rhetoric,” in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (eds.), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 138–59 (148–49), and compare Malo, Relics and Writing, 128–31, and Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination, pp. 89–102. 81 McTaggart, Shame and Guilt in Chaucer, p. 112. 82 Three Middle English Sermons, p. 38–39. 83 Ibid., pp. 34, 38. 84 The Pardoner twice mocks the stupidity of “lewed peple” (6.392 and 6.437), displays contempt for the salvation of his audience’s souls (6.405–6), and brags that he swindles the poorest of the poor, taking “moneie, wolle, chese, and whete” even from those whose children might “sterve for famyne” (6.448–51). For discussion, see Leicester, Disenchanted Self, p. 38. For the claim that his entire Tale is a mockery of pilgrim “felaweshipe” in itself, compare Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, pp. 155–66. 85 The foundational reading of the Pardoner’s sexuality is Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 156–84. For a range of views on its significance, compare Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch,” pp. 656–71; Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, pp. 140–59; Fowler, Literary Character, pp. 66–75; Pugh, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms, pp. 90–94; and Samantha Katz Seal, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in the Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 137–43. 86 Alan T. Gaylord, “Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor,” PMLA, 82.2 (1967), 226–35 (226). Gaylord’s theory has been widely adopted; for a survey of its influence, see Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 180–81. 87 Christopher Cannon, “The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales,” in Cannon and Maura Nolan (eds.), Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 25–40 (28). 88 For a discussion of just how much the clergeon may have understood, see Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008),

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pp. 1–39 (and especially pp. 37–39); see too Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 259–92. 89 See Karla Taylor, “Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse from the Shipman’s Tale to Melibee,” Chaucer Review, 39.3 (2005), 298–322 (301–310; quotation at 310). 90 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 361. What is more, “cosynage” itself is a word whose meaning can be exchanged across languages; for discussion, see Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 227–29, and Jonathan Hsy, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 44–45. 91 For the sources of the Thopas, see Joanne A. Charbonneau, “Sir Thopas,” in Correale and Hamel (eds.), Sources and Analogues, 2:649–57. For discussion of its play upon romance conventions, see especially Alan T. Gaylord, “Chaucer’s Dainty ‘Dogerel’: The ‘Elvyssh’ Prosody of Sir Thopas,” SAC, 1 (1979), 83–104, and Patterson, “What Man Artow?” For the tail-rhyme and its literary connotations, see Jessica Brantley, “Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas,” Chaucer Review, 47.4 (2013), 416–38. 92 Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 129. 93 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, p. 194. 94 Patterson, “What Man Artow,” p. 153; compare Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, pp. 365–69, and Brantley, “Forms of Sir Thopas,” p. 437. But for a different view, see Amanda Walling, “‘In hir tellyng difference’: Gender, Authority, and Interpretation in the Tale of Melibee,” Chaucer Review, 40.2 (2005), 163–81 (176–78). 95 David, The Strumpet Muse, pp. 219–20. 96 For proverbs in the Melibee, see Christopher Cannon, From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 211–20. For its debts to counsel literature, see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 89–107. For the style of the Melibee, see especially Margaret Schlauch, “Chaucer’s Prose Rhythms,” PMLA, 65.4 (1950), 568–89; J. D. Burnley, “Curial Prose in England,” Speculum, 61.3 (1986), 593–614 (especially 608–10); and Taylor, “Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse,” pp. 310–17. 97 For the Monk’s conception of “tragedie” and its relation to traditions of tragic and historical writing, see especially R. W. Babcock, “The Mediæval Setting of Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale,” PMLA, 46.1 (1931), 205–13; Renate Haas, “Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’: An Ingenious Criticism of Early Humanist Conceptions of Tragedy,” Humanistica Lovaniensia, 36 (1987), 44–70; Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 65–79; and Kara Gaston, Reading Chaucer in Time, pp. 144–74.

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98 This trope is common in monastic historiography; for discussion, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Carnegie Publishing, 2004), pp. 79–97. 99 See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 308–11, and compare Seal, Father Chaucer, pp. 214–21. 100 J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 21. 101 On the Monk’s tendency toward “quantification,” see L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 139–41. 102 For the annales form, see especially Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, 7.1 (1980), 5–27 (10–15). For the sermo humilis, see especially Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1953), pp.  487–94; for its influence upon medieval historiography, see especially John O. Ward, “Some Principles of Historiography in the Twelfth Century,” in Ernst Breisach (ed.), Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), pp. 103–65. 103 Gaston, Reading Chaucer in Time, p. 161. 104 Robert Root, The Poetry of Chaucer: A Guide to Its Study and Appreciation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), pp. 33 and 207 respectively. For discussion of this critical tendency, see Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, pp. 144–46. 105 For the sources of the Monk’s Tale in general, see Thomas H. Bestul, “The Monk’s Tale,” in Correale and Hamel (eds.), Sources and Analogues, 1:409–14; for the sources of these two stories, see the Roman de la rose, ed. Langlois, ll. 6184–488 (2:286–292 and 3:1–6) and ll. 6489–630 (3:7–12), respectively. 106 The reading that follows builds upon Helen Cooper’s observation that the Monk amplifies the pathos of the Ugolino story beyond what he finds in Dante; see Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Hugolino in the House of Rumour,” New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 39–66 (es­pecially pp. 50–52). 107 As Gaston notes, the extant historical record offers few details about Ugolino’s last days; see Gaston, Reading Chaucer in Time, p. 166, and compare pp. 165–70 for further discussion. 108 For discussion, see especially Theodore Spencer, “The Story of Ugolino in Dante and Chaucer,” Speculum, 9.3 (1934), 295–301, and Piero Boitani, “The Monk’s Tale: Dante and Boccaccio,” Medium Ævum, 45.1 (1976), 50–69. 109 See respectively Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 164; Rita Copeland, “Chaucer and Rhetoric,” in Lerer (ed.), The Yale Companion to Chaucer, pp. 122–43 (139); and Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, p. 8. 110 See Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 243. For a critique of this position, see Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 157–238. 111 See Donald Fry, “The Ending of the Monk’s Tale,” JEGP, 71.3 (1972), 355–68 (364–66).

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112 Richard W. Fehrenbacher, “‘A Yeerd Enclosed al Aboute’: Literature and History in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaucer Review, 29.2 (1994), 134–48 (139). 113 Compare Seal, Father Chaucer, pp. 135–36. 114 On the matter that the Nun’s Priest uses as the backbone of this debate, see especially Robert A. Pratt, “Some Latin Sources of the Nonnes Preest on Dreams,” Speculum, 52.3 (1977), 538–70 (esp. 541–47). 115 Compare Pauline Aiken, “Vincent of Beauvais and Dame Pertelote’s Knowledge of Medicine,” Speculum, 10.3 (1935), 281–87. 116 For Chauntecleer’s mermaid song, see 7.3269–72; for the allusion to the Speculum stultorum, see 7.3312–19; for discussion, see Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 250–61. Chaucer’s immediate source appears to be the Roman de Renart (and perhaps Marie de France’s “Del cok e del gupil,” though Mann is skeptical). For both texts, see Edward Wheatley, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in Correale and Hamel (eds.), Sources and Analogues, 1:454–74. 117 See Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, pp. 252–53. 118 Compare Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 282–83. 119 See Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, p. 55; compare Ian Bishop, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Liberal Arts,” RES, vol. 30, no. 119 (1979), 257–67, and Cannon, From Literacy to Literature, pp. 41–44. 120 For the sense in which I use “fable” here, see especially Larry Scanlon, “The Authority of Fable: Allegory and Irony in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Exemplaria, 1.1 (1989), 43–68. 121 Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 164. Compare Fehrenbacher, “Literature and History,” pp. 140–41, who claims that the “literary world” of the Tale is divided from the “realm of the historical.” 122 Priscian, Praeexercitamina, 1.1 (p. 430), in Heinrich Keil (ed.), Grammatici latini, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1859), pp. 430–40. Compare especially R. T. Lenaghan, “The Nun’s Priest’s Fable,” PMLA, 78.4 (1963), 300–7, and Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 2000), pp. 34–41. 123 Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, p. 252; compare Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 238–39. 124 See Lalia Phipps Boone, “Chauntecleer and Partlet Identified,” Modern Language Notes, 64.2 (1949), 78–81. Boone determines that the two were Golden Spangled Hamburgs. 125 Charles Muscatine, “The Canterbury Tales: Style of the Man and Style of the Work,” in D. S. Brewer (ed.), Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (University of Alabama Press, 1966), pp. 88–113 (109). 126 The lament is at 7.3347–52; for discussion, see especially Karl Young, “Chaucer and Geoffrey of Vinsauf,” Modern Philology 41.3 (1944), 172–82. For the possibility that Chaucer may intend the reader to conflate Richard I with Richard II, see Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 113.

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127 On the Rising and Middle English literature, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); for discussion of the murder of Flemish aliens in 1381, see Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 193–96. 128 Most chronicles contemporary with the revolt refer to Jack as an individual and as one of the rebel leaders; see, e.g., Jean Froissart, Chroniques de Jean Froissart, ed. Gaston Raynaud, Léon Mirot, and Albert Mirot, 15 vols. (Paris: Société de L’Histoire de France, 1869–1975), 10:117, who designates one “Jake Strau” as a “cappitainne” of the peasants, and Thomas Walsingham, The St. Albans Chronicle, ed. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, and tr. Watkiss, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003–11), 1:480–81 and 1:480n541, who identifies one “Iohannes Wraw” as their “duce.” Other chronicles suggest that the name was a pseudonym; see, e.g., Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and tr. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 218–19, which suggests that Wat Tyler at one point “changed his name to Jack Straw [nomine mutato uocatus est Iakke Strawe].” A third possibility is that “Jakke Straw” refers to a number of different individuals, or that it was used as a shorthand for anyone who participated in the rebellion; for this possibility, see Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, pp. 175–76; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 222–23; and Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, p. 260. 129 Chaucer lived above Aldgate from May 1374 to October 1386; see Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds., with assistance from John M. Manly, Edith Rickert, Lillian J. Redstone et al, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 144–47. For discussion, see Hsy, Trading Tongues, pp. 31–35. 130 As Astell suggests, this aside “strongly indicates that the real matter of Chaucer’s tale is historical and political”; see Astell, Political Allegory, p. 109. What follows owes much to Astell’s precedent. See too John M. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 17–30, for the claim that Chaucer took from the chronicle form more generally a certain quality of voice. 131 Compare Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 205–13, and see too Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 152–53, and Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality, pp. 108–20. 132 Walsingham, St. Albans Chronicle, 1:426–27. 133 Froissart, Chroniques, 10:106. 134 The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333–1381, ed. Vivian Hunter Galbraith (Manchester University Press, 1970), p. 146. 135 John Gower, Visio anglie, in David R. Carlson (ed.) and A. G. Rigg (tr.), John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events (Toronto: PIMS, 2011),11.815–16 (pp. 84–85). 136 Ibid., 11.797–98 (pp. 82–83). 137 The allusion in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale has been recognized at least since the eighteenth century. The allusions in the Knight’s Tale and the Troilus were first noted (to the best of my knowledge) by Walter W. Skeat, “Life of Chaucer,”

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138

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152 153

154

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in Skeat (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), pp. ix–lxi (lvi), and by Carleton Brown, “Another Contemporary Allusion in Chaucer’s Troilus,” Modern Language Notes, 26.7 (1911), 208–11 (209–10). The allusion in the Monk’s Tale was first suggested (to my knowledge) by Scott Norsworthy, “Hard Lords and Bad Food-Service in the Monk’s Tale,” JEGP, 100.3 (2001), 313–32 (315–16); I find the identification persuasive. A fourth allusion (at HF 935–49) has also been suggested by J. Stephen Russell; see “Is London Burning? A Chaucerian Allusion to the Rising of 1381,” Chaucer Review, 30.1 (1995), 107–9. See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 207–18, for this influential argument. For Gower’s transformation of the peasants into beasts, see Visio 2.169–82 (pp. 40–41). For his framing of the Rising as a terrible dream, see 21.2139–46 (pp. 172–73). Froissart, Chroniques, 10:98. The Westminster Chronicle, ed. and tr. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 2–3; translation modified. Anonimalle Chronicle, p. 149; Adam Usk, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and tr. Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 4–5. See, e.g., Knighton, Chronicle, pp. 232–33; translation modified. Walsingham, St. Albans Chronicle, 1:562–63. Gower, Visio anglie, 21.2141–42 (pp. 172–73). Knighton, Chronicle, pp. 216–17. See London Metropolitan Archives, “Letter Book H,” COL/AD/01/008, fol. 133v: “Inter admiranda nec non inaudita prodigia quae conti[n]gant vmquam in ciuitate londoni quod accidit in eadem ciuitate in festo corporis christi quod erat xiij die Junij Anno regis Ricardi secundi quarto … [et] tribulacio talis maior et horribilior quam credi potest ab hominibus qui non viderunt illam vsque ad horam vesperarum diei subsequentis quae fuit dies sabbatum xv dies Junij.” Walsingham, St. Albans Chronicle, 1:422–25. Ibid., 1:486–87. Ibid., 1:414–15; translation modified. Ibid., 1:504–5. For this position, see, e.g., Fehrenbacher, “Literature and History,” p. 135. For views closer to my own, see, e.g., Cannon, “The Language Group,” p. 40, and Strohm, “Usk and Chaucer,” pp. 109–112. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, pp. 163–64. Derek Pearsall, “Introduction,” in Pearsall (ed.), A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume Two, Part Nine: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), p. 12. For a similar view, compare David, Strumpet Muse, p. 229. Walter of England, The Fables of ‘Walter of England’, ed. Aaron E. Wright (Toronto: PIMS, 1997), ll. 5–6 (p. 19): “If you like the fruit [fructus] more than the flower [flore], pick the fruit [fructum lege]; if the flower more than

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the fruit, / then pick the flower; if you like both [duo], then pick them both.” For discussion, see Stephen Manning, “The Nun’s Priest’s Morality and the Medieval Attitude Towards Fables,” JEGP, 59.3 (1960), 403–16 (414). For the positions of Robertson and Donaldson, see respectively Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, pp. 250–52, and Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, p. 150. 155 Julie Orlemanski makes a similar point; see her Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. 94. 156 Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 242; for Chaucer’s own warning not to “maken ernest of game,” see CT 1.3186. 157 For discussion, see especially Britton J. Harwood, “Language and the Real: Chaucer’s Manciple,” Chaucer Review, 6.4 (1972), 268–79, and Marianne Børch, “Chaucer’s Poetics and the Manciple’s Tale,” SAC, 25 (2003), 287–97. 158 See again Harwood, “Language and the Real,” p. 268. But for different views of the Manciple’s understanding of language and semantics, compare Seal, Father Chaucer, pp. 30–37, and Coley, Wheel of Language, pp. 45–55. 159 See Jamie C. Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 209–10. 160 Aranye Fradenburg has argued that the Tale is deeply concerned with the politics of discourse at court; see her “The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales,” ELH, 52.1 (1985), 85–118 (106–9). Compare too Michaela Grudin, “Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale and the Poetics of Guile,” Chaucer Review, 25.4 (1991), 329–42 (337–38). 161 Compare Perkins, Gift of Narrative, pp. 171–72. 162 Fradenburg, “The Manciple’s Servant Tongue,” p. 89; compare Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 252–53; Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, pp. 20–22; and Harwood, “Language and the Real,” pp. 271–72. But for the claim that it is instead the way the Crow speaks, and not what he says, that is the true problem, see Craig Bertolet, “The Anxiety of Exclusion: Speech, Power, and Chaucer’s Manciple,” SAC, 33 (2011), 183–218 (201–2); Peter C. Herman, “Treason in the Manciple’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 25.4 (1991), 318–28 (323–24); and Fumo, Legacy of Apollo, pp. 221–25. 163 Apollo is very likely a shadowy figure of Richard II; for discussion, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 256–59, and compare Coley, Wheel of Language, pp. 64–67. 164 Trigg, Congenial Souls, pp. 64–65; for further discussion, compare generally pp. 50–73. 165 Gower, Confessio amantis, Prol.1–11; for further discussion, see the subsequent chapters in this book. 166 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 230.

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2  Gower and the Crying Voice 1 The verses are found in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iv, fol. 9r; see John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, with In Praise of Peace, ed. R. F. Yeager and Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2005), p. 10. The translation provided is my own. Subsequent references to Gower’s works will be given parenthetically, according to the following system: CA = Confessio amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck and tr. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2004–2013); VC = Vox clamantis, in G. C. Macaulay (ed.), The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), and The Voice of One Crying, in Eric W. Stockton (tr.), The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962); MO = Mirour de l’omme, in G. C. Macaulay (ed.), The Complete Works of John Gower: The French Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), and Gower, Mirour de l’omme, tr. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992); and PP = “In Praise of Peace,” in Yeager and Livingston (eds.), Minor Latin Works. 2 For the beaver hat, see Herbert Norris, Medieval Costume and Fashion (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999), pp. 225 and 268 (figs. 317 and 391). For Gower’s robes and sleeves, see pp. 256–58 (figs. 363 and 367). 3 For surviving copies of the illumination, see Yeager and Livingston (eds.), Minor Latin Poems, pp. 8–11 (see p. 11 for a reproduction of the image in the Cotton Tiberius manuscript). For Gower’s control over his manuscripts and the possibility that he was involved in the production of this image, see respectively Wendy Scase, “John Gower’s Scribes and Literatim Copying,” in Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager (eds.), John Gower in Manuscripts and Printed Books (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 13–31, and R. F. Yeager, “Gower in Winter: Last Poems,” in R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiyais (eds.), The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 87–103 (89). 4 For Gower’s self-representation as an archer, see especially Maria Wickert, Studies in John Gower, tr. Robert J. Meindl, second edition (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016), pp. 67–73, and Sebastian Sobecki, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 51–53 and 61–63. 5 Derek Pearsall, “The Gower Tradition,” in A. J. Minnis (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 179–97 (185–89). 6 George Coffman, “John Gower in His Most Significant Role,” rpt. in Peter Nicholson (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 40–48 (41); Ethan Knapp, “John Gower: Balzac of the Fourteenth Century,” in Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (eds.), John

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Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 215–27 (216); David Carlson, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 218; David Aers, “Representations of the ‘Third Estate’: Social Conflict and its Milieu around 1381,” Southern Review, 16.3 (1983), 335–49 (345). 7 For discussion, see especially Maura Nolan, “Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower’s Mirour de l’omme,” in Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (eds.), Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 214–43 (esp. 219–20 and 240–43). 8 For preachers who figured themselves as archers, see again Wickert, John Gower, 70–73. 9 See generally Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 168–90. For Gower and clerical auctoritas, see Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 249–51; for Gower and visionary authority, see Andrew Galloway, “Reassessing Gower’s Dream-Visions,” in Elizabeth Dutton with John Hines and R. F. Yeager (eds.), John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 288–303; for Gower and the Latin rubrics, see especially Ardis Butterfield, “Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex,” The Yearbook of English Studies, volume 33, Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies (2003), 80–96. 10 On “information” in Gower, see especially James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–10. 11 “Pité” is one of Gower’s key terms (see, e.g., CA 7.3103–41). For two views on “pité” in Gower, see especially Matthew Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 261–67, and Andrew Galloway, “The Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio amantis,” in Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (eds.), The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 67–104. 12 See, e.g., Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. xi–xiii and 156–60; Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 221–23; and David Aers, “Reflections on Gower as ‘Sapiens in Ethics and Politics,” in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Re-Visioning Gower (Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1998) pp. 185–201. 13 A notable exception is the work of Eve Salisbury. See her two excellent essays, “Violence and the Sacrificial Poet: Gower, the Vox, and the Critics,” in R. F. Yeager (ed.), On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium (Kalamazoo: Medieval

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Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 124–43, and “Remembering Origins: Gower’s Monstrous Body Poetic,” in Yeager (ed.), Re-Visioning Gower, pp. 159–84. Much of what I discuss below has been inspired by the pioneering work of other scholars as well. See especially Candace Barrington, “John Gower’s Legal Advocacy and ‘In Praise of Peace’,” in Elizabeth Dutton (ed.), John Gower, Trilingual Poet, pp. 112–25; Stephanie Batkie, “The Sound of My Voice: Aurality and Credible Faith in the Vox Clamantis,” in Russell Peck and R. F. Yeager (eds.), John Gower: Others and the Self (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 32–49; Isabel Davis, “Calling: Langland, Gower, and Chaucer on Saint Paul,” SAC, 34 (2012), 53–97 (especially pp. 62–63 and 77–81); Siân Echard, “With Carmen’s Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology, 95.1 (1998), 1–40; Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late-Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 126–32; Irvin, Poetic Voices of Gower, pp. 27–43; Pamela L. Longo, “Gower’s Public Outcry,” Philological Quarterly, 92.3 (2013), 357–87; and Misty Schieberle, “‘Thing Which a Man Mai Noght Areche’: Women and Counsel in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review, 42.1 (2007), 91–109. 14 The sermon is undated but may have been delivered sometime in the late 1370s or early 1380s; see the headnote to “Sermon 80,” in Mary Aquinas Devlin (ed.), The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389) (London: Royal Historical Society, 1954), 2:361. 15 Brinton, “Sermon 80,” in Devlin (ed.), Sermons of Brinton, vol. 2, pp. 362–63. All translations are my own. 16 Ibid., p. 363. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., pp. 363–64. 19 Galloway, “Reassessing Gower’s Dream-Visions,” p. 299. Pamela Longo, Siegfried Wenzel, and Michael Bennett have also noted parallels between Gower and Brinton; see Longo, “Gower’s Public Outcry,” p. 372; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 276–77; and Bennett, “Gower, Richard II and Henry IV,” in Stephen Rigby (ed.), with assistance from Siân Echard, Historians on John Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 425–88 (427). 20 This sermon can be found in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.2.30, fols. 170v–72r; for further discussion of manuscripts owned by the priory, see note 54 below. For the text of the sermon and a translation, see Thomas N. Hall, “Latin Sermons and Lay Preaching: Four Latin Sermons from Post-Reform Canterbury,” in Hugh Magennis and Jonathan Wilcox (eds.), The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on His Seventieth Birthday (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), pp. 132–70. 21 Thomas Walsingham, The St. Albans Chronicle, ed. and tr. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003–11), 1:848–49; translation modified. The situation was so tense that,

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in Nigel Saul’s view, Richard may in fact have been deposed, if only for a few days; see Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 188–90, and compare Bennett, “Gower, Richard II and Henry IV,” pp. 438–39. 22 Richard the Redeless, in James M. Dean (ed.), Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2000), 1.56–61. For discussion, see Saul, Richard II, pp. 112–34, and Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 230–37. 23 For discussion, see Galloway, “The Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity,” pp. 75–90, and compare Bennett, “Gower, Richard II, and Henry IV,” pp. 440–47. 24 See, e.g., R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 237–60. 25 For Gower as an auctor, see note 9 above; compare too Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 202–20; Yeager, Gower’s Poetic, pp. 93–106; and Derek Pearsall, “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis,” in A. J. Minnis (ed.), Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 13–25. For a rejection of this view, see especially Watt, Amoral Gower, pp. 153–56. 26 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 211. 27 Salisbury, “Violence and the Sacrificial Poet,” p. 128. 28 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 1. 29 There is some dispute about the date on which Gower moved into his priory house. Martha Carlin has argued for a date of January 1387 at the earliest, while John Fisher (and others) have argued that he lived in the priory starting in 1377. See Martha Carlin, “Gower’s Southwark,” in Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, R. F. Yeager, and Brian Gastle (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Gower (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 132–49 (140–41); Martha Carlin, “Gower’s Life,” in Rigby (ed.), Historians on Gower, pp. 23–120 (51–52); and John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York University Press, 1963), pp. 58–61. 30 For this theory, see Fisher, John Gower, p. 58, and for a more skeptical view, compare Carlin, “Gower’s Southwark,” pp. 141–42, and Carlin, “Gower’s Life,” pp. 56–61. In any event, there is firm evidence that Gower did give money to the priory; for discussion, see Martin Heale, “Monastic Life,” in Rigby (ed.), Historians on Gower, pp. 271–89 (271–72). 31 For the history and location of the priory, see John Hines, Nathalie Cohen, and Simon Roffey, “Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of his Life and Death,” in Siân Echard (ed.), A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 23–41 (28–36).

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32 Fisher, John Gower, p. 60; compare Carlin, “Gower’s Southwark,” pp. 132–35. 33 For Gower’s probable career as a lawyer and its implications for his poetry, see especially Hines, Cohen, and Roffey, “Iohannes Gower,” pp. 24–25; Sebastian Sobecki, “A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 92.3 (2017), 630–60 (631–40); and Brian W. Gastle, “The Constraints of Justice and Gower’s ‘Lawyerly Habit of Mind’,” in Susannah Mary Chewning (ed.), Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 203–16. 34 On the possible connection between Gower’s move to the priory and the shift in his literary production, see especially R. F. Yeager, “Gower’s French Audience: The Mirour de L’Omme,” Chaucer Review, 41.2 (2006), 111–37. But compare Heale, “Monastic Life,” pp. 273–75, for a more skeptical view. 35 For Chaucer’s retirement to Westminster Abbey, see Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 486–504. For Hoccleve’s opportunity to retire, thanks to a corrody granted him on 4 July 1424, to Southwick Priory, see J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), pp. 29–31. 36 As Martha Carlin notes, his new house featured, among other things, “an oratory with its own altar, where Gower could have said his prayers in elite privacy.” See Carlin, “Gower’s Southwark,” p. 143. 37 Seb Falk, “Natural Sciences,” in Rigby (ed.), Historians on John Gower, pp. 491–525 (494). Gower’s preoccupation with ideas of divine, natural, and positive law is very well established. See especially Russell Peck, “The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings,” in Echard (ed.), Companion, pp. 215–38 (216–17); Simpson, Sciences and the Self, pp. 167–97; Conrad van Dijk, John Gower and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), especially pp. 15–32; and Irvin, Poetic Voices of Gower, pp. 17–27. 38 For this tradition, see John V. Fleming, “The Friars and Medieval English Literature,” in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 349–75 (355–59). For Gower’s debt to it, see especially Gerald Kinneavy, “Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Penitentials,” Chaucer Review, 19.2 (1984), 144–61. 39 Michael of Northgate, Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Pamela Gradon, EETS o.s. 23, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 5. 40 For an overview of Gower’s engagement with Biblical and para-Biblical material, see especially R. F. Yeager, “Gower’s Religions,” in Sáez-Hidalgo, Yeager, and Gastle (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Gower, pp. 56–74. 41 For Gower’s other discussions of the microcosm, see VC 7.637–60 (p. 268) and CA Prol.945–66. Gower’s use of this idea has occasioned much discussion. For an important early account, see George G. Fox, The Mediaeval Sciences in the Works of John Gower (Princeton University Press, 1931), pp.  18–51; for important later accounts, see especially Coffman, “Gower in his Most Significant Role,” pp. 41–42, and Elizabeth Porter, “Gower’s

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Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” in Minnis (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis, pp. 135–62. 42 Aristotle alludes to the idea in the Physics; see Physica, ed. Fernand Bossier and Jozef Brams, in Gerard Verbeke (gen. ed.), Aristoteles Latinus, vol. 7.1.2 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 8.2 (252b7–28; pp. 284–85). As for the homily, this is almost certainly Gregory the Great, Homilia in evangelia, no. 29, in PL 76, cols. 1213–19 (allusion at 1214), though it is possible Gower was using a glossed copy of the Moralia; compare Gregory, Moralia in Job, in PL 75, col. 740. For discussion, see Falk, “Natural Sciences,” pp. 494–97. 43 For the claim that Gower adapted the idea from Bacon, see Porter, “Gower’s Ethical Microcosm,” p. 136; compare Bacon, Secreta secretorum, in Robert Steele (ed.), Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 3.13 (p. 143). For Gower and Neo-Platonic philosophy, see especially Simpson, Sciences and the Self, pp. 217–29 (and 218n25). 44 Fox noted the first discrepancy long ago; see Mediaeval Sciences in Gower, pp. 20–23. James M. Dean suggests that Gower may have taken the second idea from Innocent III’s De miseria humanae conditionis; see Dean, The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1997), pp. 259–61. 45 For the contents of the St. Mary Overie library, see Jean-Pascal Pouzet, “Southwark Gower: Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts – Some Prolegomena,” in Dutton (ed.), John Gower, Trilingual Poet, pp. 11–25 (appendix one). For discussion of whether Gower relied on the library, see Pouzet, “Southwark Gower,” pp. 11–12, and Falk, “Natural Sciences,” pp. 509–10. 46 There is no evidence that a copy of the Elucidarium (or the Summa praedicantium) was extant in the priory library, but our records of the library holdings are incomplete; see Matthew T. McCabe, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), p. 50. What is more, several manuscripts that bear the ex libris of the priory contain material similar to what one would find in Honorius or John; for discussion see note 54 below. 47 Honorius of Autun, Elucidarium, 1.11, in PL 172, col. 1116. 48 John of Bromyard, Summa praedicantium, 2 vols. (Venice, 1586), “Mors,” art. 14 (2:69v). This entry is cross-referenced with the entry on “Mundus,” which also features a definition of man as a microcosm; compare “Mundus,” art. 1 (2:90r). 49 See especially Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 1–4; Porter, “Gower’s Ethical Microcosm”; and James Simpson, Sciences and the Self, pp. 10–14 and 217–29. 50 For discussion, see D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 114–22, and Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 193–201. For convenientiae in Gower, see especially Irvin, Poetic Voices of Gower, pp. 237–38.

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51 Allen, Ethical Poetic, pp. 101–2. 52 Pouzet’s reconstructed list of manuscripts that were available at the priory include a complete glossed Bible with interpretationes, compilations of sermons, Richard Fishacre’s commentary on the Sentences, and several florilegia – all of which contained figurae and distinctiones in some form or another. For example, London, British Library, MS Royal 10 B.vii features distinctiones sketched in the margins and interspersed among the main text (see, e.g., fol. 52v), while London, British Library, MS Royal 7 A.ix also contains many distinctiones (see fols. 36v, 37r, 42r–43v, 80r–82v and 108v–114v) along with a copy of Grosseteste’s Templum domini that features many instances of the form (see fols. 91v–102v). For a full list of manuscripts in the priory library, see Pouzet, “Southwark Gower,” appendix one (item no. 8). For the wider range of manuscripts that Gower may have consulted, see Yeager, Gower’s Poetic, pp. 53–55. 53 On the distinctio and the figura, see especially R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, “Biblical Distinctions in the Thirteenth Century,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 41 (1974), 27–37; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, third edition (University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 246–48; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 12–14, 137–38, 293–94; and Judson Boyce Allen, The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971), 54–116. 54 G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, second edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p. 152; see too Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Ralph Manheim (tr.), Scenes From the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11–76 (61–62). 55 Few critics have discussed Gower’s use of the distinctio in detail; a notable exception is Kurt Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 14–15 (and compare 67–69, 155, 170–71, and 231–32). 56 Distinctiones monasticae, “De herba,” in J. B. Pitra (ed.), Spicilegium solesmense complectens sanctorum patrum scriptorumque ecclesiasticorum, 4 vols. (Paris, 1852–58), 3:469–70. 57 For distinctions in Gower that echo scholastic distinctions in concrete terms, see, e.g., the entries in the Distinctiones monasticae in Pitra (ed.), Spicilegium, on oil (oleum, 2:382), on salt (sal, 2:342–44), on the owl (bubo, 2:474 and 2:507–8), on the bee (apis, 2:513–14), and on leprosy (lepra, 3:263–65), and compare Gower’s distinctions on the same: on oil (VC 3.1169–72; p. 142), on salt (MO 20605–28 [p. 275] and VC 3.1997–2002 [p. 161]), on the owl (VC 3.1691–1700; p. 154), on the bee (MO 19345–483 [pp. 263–65] and VC 4.877–86 [p. 186]), and on leprosy (MO 3769–80; p. 56). 58 On Gower and the exemplum, see especially R. F. Yeager, “John Gower and the Exemplum Form: Tale Models in the Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia, 8 (1982), 307–35; Charles Runacres, “Art and Ethics in the ‘Exempla’ of ‘Confessio Amantis’,” in Minnis (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis, pp. 106– 34; Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 245–97; and J. Allan

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Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 36–60. 59 William of Auvergne, Liber de arte praedicandi, in A. De Poorter (ed.), “Un Manuel de Prédication Médiévale: Le MS. 97 de Bruges,” Revue NeoScolastique de Philosophie, vol. 25, no. 97 (1923), 192–209 (200). 60 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum, tr. John Trevisa, in Charles Frederick Briggs, David C. Fowler, and Paul G. Remley (eds.), The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De regimine principum of Aegidius Romanus (New York: Garland, 1997), 1.1 (p. 6). For discussion of this passage, see Runacres, “Art and Ethics,” pp. 115–16. 61 Genius follows a similar procedure with respect to many other exempla in the Confessio; for discussion and more examples, see Yeager, “Gower and the Exemplum,” pp. 315–30. 62 For discussion, see especially Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 107–26. 63 Compare, e.g., MO 10673–80 (p. 146) and CA Prol.352–55. 64 See Distinctiones monasticae, “De lilio,” in Pitra (ed.), Spicilegium, 3:475–76, and compare two distinctiones printed in Allen, Friar as Critic, 107 and 107n130 and 115n149 (the first, by Nicholas of Biart or Nicholas Gorham, is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 71, fols. 169v–70r; the second, which is anonymous, is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wood empt. 16, fol. 100v). 65 Helen Cooper, “Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling,” in Peck and Yeager (eds.), John Gower: Others and the Self, pp. 91–107 (95). 66 Simpson, Sciences and the Self, p. 194. Critics have long found this tale puzzling; see, e.g., Derek Pearsall, “Gower’s Narrative Art,” rpt. in Nicholson (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis, pp. 62–80 (77), and Runacres, “Art and Ethics,” p. 124. But Elliot Kendall and Conrad van Dijk have each argued that Orestes’s acts are licit when they are considered in a tighter relation to medieval views on law and dominion; see van Dijk, Gower and the Limits of the Law, pp. 154–78, and Elliot Kendall, Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), pp. 233–41. 67 Or at least, Gower seems to be – this is the best explanation I can propose for his decision, immediately following the story, to launch into a digression upon the evils of murder, warfare, and the crusades; see CA 3.2251–638. 68 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 205. 69 Ibid., p. 206. 70 Minnis has argued that Gower’s “wisdom” corresponds to the concept of sapientia, and that it may be inspired by Robert Holcot’s influential commentary on the book of Wisdom; see Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 177–82. 71 Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, ed. Bernard Klumper, 4 vols. (Rome: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1924–1948), book 1, quaestio 1, cap. 4, art. 1 (p. 8, col. 2). 72 For Alexander and Gower, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 206–7, and Simpson, Sciences and the Self, pp. 169–71. For

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discussion of the modus orativus in thirteenth-century theology, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 119–26, and Andrew Kraebel, Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 24–30. 73 Kraebel, Biblical Commentary, p. 31, and see pp. 30–49 for further discussion. Compare David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval England: Public Interiorities (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 61–66 and 90–100. 74 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 1.111–12. 75 Thomas Hoccleve, Series, 1.35, in Roger Ellis (ed.), ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems (University of Exeter Press, 2001). For more extended uses of the crying voice in Hoccleve, see, e.g., his Marian poems (items nos. 1, 7, and 10) in Frederick J. Furnivall (ed.), Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, EETS e.s. 41 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and co., 1892); for discussion, see especially Jennifer Bryan, “Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint,” PMLA, 117.5 (2002), 1172–87 (1175–79). 76 For political uses of the crying voice in medieval literature, see especially Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 137–69. 77 William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.79, 2.1, and 20.386. 78 See, e.g., Mum and the Sothsegger, in Dean (ed.), Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger, ll. 1115–28. 79 See The Song of the Husbandman and The Simonie, both in James M. Dean (ed.), Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1996), ll. 1–12 and ll. 19–24, respectively. 80 Piers the Plowman’s Crede, in James M. Dean (ed.), Six Ecclesiastical Satires (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1991), line 441. 81 For an overview of these different types of voice, see generally Matthew W. Irvin, “Voices and Narrators,” in Sáez-Hidalgo, Yeager, and Gastle (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Gower, pp. 237–252, and compare Wickert, Studies in Gower, pp. 53–67; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 209–11; Ferster, Fictions of Advice, pp. 129–32; McCabe, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue, pp. 114–22; and Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower, passim. 82 On Gower and the “common voice,” see especially Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum, 53.1 (1978), 94–114. 83 On Gower and vox populi, see David Aers, “Vox Populi and the Literature of 1381,” in Wallace (ed.), Cambridge History, pp. 432–53 (esp. 439–44); compare Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, pp. 56–61. 84 See PP 337–57; I return to this poem at the close of this chapter. 85 Maura Nolan, “Lydgate’s Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, Canacee,” SAC, 27 (2005), 59–92 (73–75). 86 John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS e.s., 121–24 (Oxford University Press, 1924–27), 1.6931–32.

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87 For the supplement, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 141–64 (esp. 144–45). 88 Corinne Saunders, “Gower and Romance,” in Sáez-Hidalgo, Yeager, and Gastle (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Gower, pp. 281–95 (289). 89 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 210; Pearsall, “Gower’s Narrative Art,” pp. 68–69. 90 There is some precedent for an allegorical reading of this tale; see especially Kathryn McKinley, “Lessons for a King from Gower’s Confessio Amantis 5,” in Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (eds.), Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007), pp. 107–28, and María Bullón-Fernández, “Translating Women, Translating Texts: Gower’s ‘Tale of Tereus’ and the Castilian and Portuguese Translations of the Confessio Amantis,” in Malte Urban (ed.), John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 109–32. I should also stress that, though I read the tale allegorically, I do not wish to downplay the sexual violence at the heart of this tale; for caution against doing so, see Diane Watt, “Gender and Sexuality in Confessio Amantis,” in Echard (ed.), Companion, pp. 197–213 (211). 91 For discussion of the unusual size and scope of the fifth book, see especially Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, pp. 102–5. As Olsson notes, avarice is a kind of master-sin for Gower, one that can encompass almost any kind of inordinate desire; see Olsson, John Gower, p. 148. 92 See respectively Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and tr. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 354–55 (translation modified), and John Gower, Cronica tripertita, in David Carlson (ed.) and A. G. Rigg (tr.), John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events (Toronto: PIMS, 2011), 3.472. Richard was often accused of property theft in similar terms; for discussion, see María Bullón-Fernández, Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 132–33. For further discussion of these motifs in Gower, see Kendall, Lordship and Literature, pp.  140–43; Watt, Amoral Gower, pp. 90–91; and Bullón-Fernández, “Translating Women, Translating Texts,” pp. 126–27. 93 Peck also notes Jason’s transactional attitude; see Kingship and Common Profit, pp. 110–12. 94 Kim Zarins, “Violence Without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and John Gower’s Crafting of Ovidian Narrative,” in Peck and Yeager (eds.), John Gower: Others and the Self, pp. 141–55 (151). But see Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rape, Rivalry, and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1991), pp. 130–52 (136–37), for a more skeptical view of Tereus and Procne’s marriage. 95 Ovid, by contrast, invites the furies to the wedding of Procne and Tereus and, for good measure, notes that a screech-owl sits on the roof of their bedroom:

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“under this omen” [hac ave] do the pair consummate their m­arriage. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, LCL 42–43, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977–84), 6.428–34 (6.433). For a succinct overview of the differences between Gower and Ovid, see Bruce Harbert, “The Myth of Tereus in Ovid and Gower,” Medium Ævum, 41.3 (1972), 208–14. Gower would likely have encountered this story in a heavily glossed copy of the Metamorphoses; for discussion, see McCabe, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue, pp. 49–60. 96 Compare Gastle, “Constraints of Justice,” p. 214. 97 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.577. 98 Cf. Ibid., 6.581–86. For discussion of Gower’s variation upon Ovid, which is echoed by the Ovide moralisé, see McKinley, “Lessons for a King from Gower’s Confessio Amantis 5,” pp. 111–12. 99 See MED, “oultrage,” n., sense 2a. 100 Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.587–600; Ovid makes no mention of a conspiracy, though he does note that Procne “is accompanied by a group of her companions [turba comitante suarum]” when she arrives to free Philomela. Kendall, Lordship and Literature, p. 196, concurs that Gower figures Procne’s revenge as a political act. 101 Tereus, of course, is also consuming his own heir, and so the passage has an additional political valence; for discussion, see Watt, Amoral Gower, pp. 92–93, and Dinshaw, “Rape, Rivalry, and Manhood,” pp. 138–39. 102 For Philomela’s flinging of the head, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.658–59, and for the absence of the sisters’ speech, cf. 6.652–60. 103 Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.661–66; Ovid makes no mention of a cry to the Gods, though he does note that Tereus “overturns the table with a great cry [ingenti mensas clamore repellit]” (6.661); that he “weeps [flet]” (6.665); and that he “calls himself [seque vocat] his son’s most wretched tomb” (6.665). 104 In the Tale of Lucrece, the Tarquins are exiled for their “tirannie / of lecherie and covoitise” (7.5118–19), while in the Tale of Virginia, the “wrongfull king” is “deposed” by “comun conseil” (7.5294–95). Past critics have also noted Gower’s tacit approval of the coups in these stories – though not, curiously, in the Tale of Philomela. See van Dijk, Gower and the Limits of the Law, pp. 135–37; Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 293–96; and Kendall, Lordship and Literature, pp. 228–30. For a more skeptical view, see Watt, Amoral Gower, pp. 119–25. 105 Compare CA 5.5885–97 with Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.640. In Ovid’s version, Itys cries out to his mother and tries to embrace her: “‘mater! mater!’ clamantem et colla petentem.” Gower, by contrast, states that Procne kills her son “withouten noise or cry” (5.5896). 106 Compare again Salisbury, “Violence and the Sacrificial Poet,” pp. 127–28, and Salisbury, “Remembering Origins,” pp. 164–65. For Gower’s broader appropriation of voice, see especially Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, pp. 90–128. 107 J. Allan Mitchell, “John Gower and John Lydgate: Forms and Norms of Rhetorical Culture,” in Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350–c. 1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 571–84 (571).

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108 For the role that age plays in these passages, see J. A. Burrow, “The Portrayal of Amans in ‘Confessio Amantis’,” in Minnis (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis, pp. 5–24 (11–20). 109 See especially J. A. Burrow, “The Poet as Petitioner,” SAC, 3 (1981), 61–75, and Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 49–123. 110 These lines have occasioned considerable debate about Gower’s views on kingship; for an overview, see van Dijk, Gower and the Limits of the Law, pp. 89–90 and notes. 111 Frank Grady, “The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity,” Speculum, 70.3 (1995), 552–75 (552); compare Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), for the atmosphere of paranoia that followed the coup. 112 For details, see especially Carlson, John Gower, pp. 135–51. 113 Articles nos. 1, 3, and 8 in Richard Blyke and John Strachey (eds.), Rotuli parliamentorum, 8 vols. (London, 1780–1832), 3:585 (col. 2), 3:586 (col. 1), and 3:587 (col. 1). For Henry’s relations with parliament, see Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, pp. 212–17. 114 Gower’s shifting affinities have long been the subject of debate; for a recent survey of views, see Nigel Saul, “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?” in Dutton (ed.), John Gower, Trilingual Poet, pp. 85–97. On Gower’s recurrent skepticism towards royal advisors, see Ferster, Fictions of Advice, pp. 118–26. For the claim that Gower had an ambivalent or even critical view of Henry, see Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 219–31. 115 Gower’s pacifism is widely accepted, if not entirely beyond dispute. The most sustained examination of his views on war and peace remains R. F. Yeager, “Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Gower and Chaucer,” SAC, 9 (1981), 97–121. For more recent accounts, see, e.g., R. D. Perry, “Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries: Chaucer’s Family and Gower’s Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century,” Speculum 93.3 (2018), 669–98 (688–94), and Sobecki, Last Words, pp. 38–43. For a contrasting view, see, e.g., Carlson, John Gower, pp. 111 and 204–9. 116 See Barrington, “John Gower’s Legal Advocacy,” pp. 117–21. 117 Mum and the Sothsegger, ll. 143–51. 118 Ibid., ll. 1577–79 and 168–70. 119 Derek Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,” Speculum, 69.2 (1994), 386–410 (386); cf. Grady, “Lancastrian Gower,” pp. 553–54. For the Trentham manuscript and Henry IV, see Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, pp. 209–20. 120 Compare Middleton, “Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II.” 121 As Kendall puts it, Gower’s willingness to marginalize “the political agency of the commons or non‐elite groups dovetails with the large portions of the Confessio that do not represent the commons at all.” See Lordship and Literature, p. 62.

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122 See Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, pp. 64–69 and 76–84. 123 For discussion, see especially Ian Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt,” Representations, 131.1 (2015), 22–51. 124 As Steven Justice memorably puts it, “the rebels cannot speak, but only moo.” See Justice Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 213; compare Knapp, “John Gower,” pp. 222–23, and Salisbury, “Violence and the Sacrificial Poet,” pp. 128–35. 125 Compare VC 5.989–92 (p. 218) and MO 26497–508 (pp. 347-48). For discussion of these echoes, see Longo, “Gower’s Public Outcry,” pp. 368–69, and compare Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt,” pp. 33–35. 126 Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, p. 36. 127 For Gower’s influence in this respect, see especially Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 36–38; compare Perry, “Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries,” pp. 688–94, for a slightly different account. 128 Lewis, The Allegory of Love, p. 209. 129 See Chapters 3 and 4 of this book.

3  Hoccleve and the Force of Literature 1 For the date of the Series (begun in November 1420, completed after February 1421), see Sebastian Sobecki, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 74–87. 2 Thomas Hoccleve, Series, in Roger Ellis (ed.), “My Compleinte” and Other Poems (University of Exeter Press, 2001), 1.40. Subsequent references to Hoccleve’s works will be given parenthetically, according to the following system: S = Series, in Ellis (ed.), “My Compleinte”; RP = The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1999); EC = L’Epistre de Cupide, in Ellis (ed.), “My Compleinte”; and MR = Male regle, in Ellis (ed.), “My Compleinte.” I will refer to the various sections of the Series numerically: the Complaint = S 1, the Dialogue = S 2, and so on. 3 For the Series and mental or physical illness, see especially Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 208–31; Matthew Boyd Goldie, “Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in London, 1416–1421: Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend,” Exemplaria, 11.1 (1999), 23–52; Helen Hickey, “Legal Personhood and the Inquisitions of Insanity in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series,” in Andreea D. Boboc (ed.), Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 192–217 (especially 194–201); and Julie Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 217–48. 4 Christina von Nolcken, “‘O, why ne had y lerned for to die?’ Lerne for to Dye and the Author’s Death in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series,” Essays in Medieval Studies, 10 (1993): 27–51 (27).

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5 Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 14, and David Watt, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s Series (Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 8–15. Compare D. C. Greetham, “Self-Referential Artifacts: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device,” Modern Philology, 86.3 (1989), 242–51 (245), who terms the Regiment of Princes “a strangely schizophrenic work.” 6 See especially Sarah Tolmie, “The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve,” SAC, 29 (2007), 341–73; James Simpson, “Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series,” in Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (eds.), Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry (Exeter: Short Run Press, 1991), pp. 15–29; and J. A. Burrow, “Hoccleve’s Series: Experience and Books,” in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 259–73. 7 For “fabula” and “syuzhet,” see Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), p. 170. Scholarship on Hoccleve and autobiography is vast; for a recent survey, see Laurie Atkinson, “‘Why that yee meeued been/can I nat knowe’: Autobiography, Convention, and Discerning Doublenesse in Thomas Hoccleve’s The Series,” Neophilologus, 101.3 (2017), 479–94 (479–88). 8 See, e.g., Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 6, and Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 142. 9 Lee Patterson, “‘What is Me?’ Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve,” SAC, 23 (2001), 437–70 (440). 10 Compare A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 144–45. 11 I pursue this line of thought in an earlier article; see Taylor Cowdery, “Hoccleve’s Poetics of Matter,” SAC, 38 (2016), 133–64. 12 Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects, p. 218; compare pp. 240–41. 13 Compare Cowdery, “Hoccleve’s Poetics of Matter,” pp. 136–40. 14 The Series seems to have been planned as a gift for Humphrey, but the final envoi shifts its dedication to Humphrey’s aunt, Joan Beaufort, the Countess of Westmoreland (cf. 2.528–34 with 5.733–42). For discussion, see especially Watt, Hoccleve’s Series, pp. 55–59, and Stephen Langdell, “‘What World is This? How Vndirstande am I?’ A Reappraisal of Poetic Authority in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series,” Medium Ævum, 78.2 (2009), 281–99 (294). 15 Compare Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, tr. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: PIMS, 1967), chapter one (pp. 16–17). For discussion, see especially Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth Century English Poetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), pp. 119–20, and Watt, Hoccleve’s Series, pp. 1–13. 16 There has been little sustained work on the relation of Hoccleve to the artes poetriae; for two preliminary attempts, see Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve,

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pp. 58–63, and Samuel F. McMillan, “Talk of the Tavern and Boatmen’s Songs: Authorship in Thomas Hoccleve’s Male regle,” SAC, 40 (2018), 435–46 (443–45). 17 Compare Daniel Wakelin, Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 69–72, whose reading of this passage shares some points with my own. 18 For the “vertu” of physical matter in the Series, see S 5.136, 5.204–12, 5.281, 5.377, and 5.414. For the “vertu” of books and words, see RP 1971–74 and RP 2129–31. 19 On Hoccleve’s solicitations of his patrons, see especially Robert J. MeyerLee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 88–123. 20 Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, p. 36. 21 James Simpson, “Nobody’s Man: Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” in Julia Boffey and Pamela King (eds.), London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages (London: University of London Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995), pp. 149–80 (156). 22 Compare Larry Scanlon, “The King’s Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” in Lee Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1990), pp. 216–47 (223–25). 23 On Hoccleve’s finances during the period when he wrote this poem, see especially J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), pp. 16–31. Sebastian Sobecki has recently discovered that Hoccleve was named as a substantial beneficiary in a will dated 6 November 1420, and so may not have been quite so hard up as he suggests; see Sobecki, Last Words, pp. 67–73. 24 Elna-Jean Young Bentley (ed.), The Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve (Emory, 1965), item 870 (p. 1025). 25 In English, “Go, my will.” For its discovery, see Linne Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” SAC, 29 (2007), 293–340 (315–18); for the correct reading of its words, see Richard Firth Green and Ethan Knapp, “Thomas Hoccleve’s Seal,” Medium Ævum, 77.2 (2008), 319–21. 26 The Formulary is now London, British Library, MS Additional 24062. For the date of the Formulary (likely between 1422 and 1424), see Sebastian Sobecki, “The Handwriting of the Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal Clerks,” RES, vol. 72, no. 304 (2020), 1–27 (14). 27 For the form of the letter patent, see T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber, and the Small Seals, 6 vols. (Manchester University Press, 1920–33), 5:122–33. For Hoccleve’s career at the Privy Seal and the office itself, see especially A. L. Brown, “The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (eds.), The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major (Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 260–81; Ethan Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 20–29; and Sebastian Sobecki, “Communities

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of Practice: Thomas Hoccleve, London Clerks, and Literary Production,” Journal of the Early Book Society, 24 (2021), 51–106. 28 The vast majority of Privy Seal documents were safe-conducts and protection letters; see A. L. Brown, “The Authorization of Letters Under the Great Seal,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 37 (1964), 125–56 (128–29). For the quantity of documents that a government clerk would have regularly copied out – roughly one thousand per annum – see Sobecki, “Communities of Practice,” pp. 64–66. 29 Hoccleve, Formulary, item 567 (pp. 548–49). 30 For discussion of these placeholder names, see Matthew Clifton Brown, “‘Lo, Heer the Fourme’: Hoccleve’s Series, Formulary, and Bureaucratic Textuality,” Exemplaria, 23.1 (2011), 27–49 (31–33). 31 Other late-medieval formularies display a similar playfulness at times; for discussion, see especially Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 32–33, and Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Early English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 53–61. 32 Hoccleve talks of his desire for a benefice at RP 1451–53; items nos. 139, 567, and 659 in the Formulary designate “T. H.” as the recipient of one. For translations of the “T. H.” documents and discussion, see Taylor Cowdery, “Hoccleve’s Formulary and the Matter of Everyday Life,” in Jenni Nuttall and David Watt (eds.), Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 2022), pp. 167–96, and compare Sebastian Sobecki, “‘Gens sans argent’: A New Holograph Manuscript by Thomas Hoccleve,” forthcoming in The Library, 24 (2023). For the difficulty that Hoccleve and many other clerks in his class faced in obtaining benefices during this period, see especially Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), pp. 1–32 and 86–96. 33 For the phenomenon of legal personification that I describe here, see Steiner, Documentary Culture, p. 21–28, and compare Frederick Pollock and F.  W.  Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, second edition, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1909), 1:469–95. 34 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 35 For peasant uses of charters, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, third edition (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), pp. 51–53. 36 “Vertu” is derived etymologically from the Latin virtus; in addition to its ethical sense, see MED, “vertu,” n., sense 1 (“physical strength, power; force, energy”), sense 3a (“bodily strength or vigor; vitality”; and sense 5a (“a physical faculty or power which causes functioning of the body”). Compare Holly A. Crocker, The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 2–6; Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects, pp. 150–53; and David Coley, The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377–1422 (Syracuse University Press, 2012), pp. 157–61.

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37 For the power of words to channel the virtus animae, see, e.g., Roger Bacon, Opus tertium, in J. S. Brewer (ed.), Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), chapter 26 (p. 96). Bacon holds that the species of words are the mechanism of this force; for discussion of species, see Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 92–99. For the virtus sermonis, or “force of a word,” see William J. Courtenay, “Force of Words and Figures of Speech: The Crisis over Virtus Sermonis in the Fourteenth Century,” Franciscan Studies, 44.1 (1984), 107–28. 38 Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium medicinae, ed. Faye M. Getz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 286; compare Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russell Peck, tr. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2004–13), 7.1545–49 (see too 6.448–49 and 4.437–38). For discussion, compare Louise M. Bishop, Words, Stones, and Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England (Syracuse University Press, 2007), pp. 77–101. 39 Eva Thornley, “The Middle English Penitential Lyric and Hoccleve’s Autobiographical Poetry,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 68.3 (1967), 295–321 (296–97). 40 Ibid., pp. 303–21. 41 Robyn Malo (now Bartlett), “Penitential Discourse in Hoccleve’s Series,” SAC, 34 (2012), 277–305 (especially 283–95); Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 138–67; Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 223–25; Spencer Strub, “Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting,” in Nuttall and Watt (eds.), Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches, pp. 124–41; and Amy Appleford, “The Sea Ground and the London Street: The Ascetic Self in Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve,” Chaucer Review, 51.1 (2016), 49–67 (53–54). For a recent overview discussion of Hoccleve’s use of the tropes and motifs of devotional literature, see too Kerby-Fulton, Clerical Proletariat, pp. 124–25. 42 “The Office for the Dead,” in Henry Littlehales (ed.), The Prymer, or, Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, EETS o.s. 105 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & co., 1895), pp. 52–78 (69). For discussion see again Appleford, “Sea Ground and London Street,” pp. 50–55. 43 Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (eds.), Middle English Lyrics (New York: Norton, 1974), no. 184 (pp. 172–74). 44 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c.1580, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 285; compare too pp. 266–98. 45 Luria and Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics, no. 115 (pp. 112–13). 46 Ibid., no. 127 (pp. 120–21). 47 Ibid., no. 126 (p. 120). 48 Richard Rolle, The Psalter, or, Psalms of David and Certain Canticles, With a Translation and Exposition in English by Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. H. R. Bramley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), pp. 1, 3.

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49 The so-called “charter of Christ” was a well-known trope; for Hoccleve’s use of it, see Davis, Writing Masculinity, pp. 148–53. 50 See, e.g., Hoccleve, Formulary, items nos. 164 (p. 156), 166 (pp. 157–58), 183 (p. 173), 218 (p. 213), 232 (p. 228), 244 (p. 241), and passim. 51 Ibid., item no. 157 (p. 152) 52 Ibid., item no. 380 (p. 375). 53 Ibid., item no. 27 (p. 23). 54 Ibid., items nos. 72 (pp. 67–68), 137 (p. 133–34), 251 (pp. 247–48), and 654 (pp. 672–73). 55 Ibid., item no. 700 (p. 723). 56 For the first phrase, see, J. A. Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 68 (1982), 389–412 (403); for the second, see Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1. For this tradition of legal complaint, see especially Alan Harding, “Plaints and Bills in the History of English Law, mainly in the period 1250–1350,” in Dafydd Jenkins (ed.), Legal History Studies, 1972 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), pp. 65–86; for written bills, see pp. 74–77 and 80–82. For Hoccleve and this tradition of legal complaint, see especially Watt, Hoccleve’s Series, pp. 33–64, and A. Arwen Taylor, “Speech Acts and Conversation in the Series,” in Nuttall and Watt (eds.), Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches, pp. 47–64. 57 See Harding, “Plaints and Bills,” pp. 67–68 and 70–71; compare Scase, Literature and Complaint, pp. 8–10, and Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 165–205. 58 William Craddock Bolland (ed.), Select Bills in Eyre, A.D. 1292–1333, Publications of the Selden Society, no. 30 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1914), items nos. 39 (p. 24) and 78 (p. 52). 59 Ibid., item no. 63 (p. 41). 60 Ibid., item no. 68 (p. 44). 61 Ibid., item no. 45 (p. 29). 62 For medieval charters, see especially Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, 2:80–94; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 46–64 and 87–89; and J. M. Kaye, Medieval English Conveyances (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1–27. For royal pardon in medieval England, see Naomi D. Hurnard, The King’s Pardon for Homicide before A. D. 1307 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 31–67. 63 See Hurnard, The King’s Pardon for Homicide, p. 66. 64 See, e.g., Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, 5:126 and 5:410–11. 65 For discussion of this “ordenance,” see K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 78–101. 66 Robert Meyer-Lee pursues a similar line of argument in his reading of this episode; see Meyer-Lee, “Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,” Exemplaria, 13.1 (2001), 173–214 (196–201).

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67 In particular, the relationship of Hoccleve to Chaucer, and his figuration of Chaucer as a father-figure, has been much discussed. For Chaucer’s paternal figuration in general, see especially David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH, 54.4 (1987), 761–99; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3–21; and Samantha Katz Seal, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in the Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 1–24, 86–91, and 209–13. For Hoccleve and Chaucer in particular, see Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 107–27. 68 Sebastian Langdell, Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer (Liverpool University Press, 2018), p. 69; compare D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 219–20. 69 The Old Man notes their acquaintance at RP 1866–69; for documentary evidence confirming it, see Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” pp. 311–12. 70 For further discussion of “vertu” in this passage, see Langdell, Thomas Hoccleve, pp. 165–70. 71 The Clerk claims that Petrarch “enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie.” See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Larry D. Benson, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 4.33. For discussion of the trope of illumination plays in this passage, see especially Ruen-chuan Ma, “Curatorial Hoccleve: Spiritual and Codicological Illumination in the Regiment of Princes,” in Nuttall and Watt (eds.), Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches, pp. 215–29 (217–19). 72 For Hoccleve’s sensitivity to the affective force of literary language, see again Strub, “Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting,” and compare Holly A. Crocker, “Engendering Affect in Hoccleve’s Series,” in Holly A. Crocker and Glenn D. Burger (eds.), Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 70–89. 73 Burrow, “Experience and Books,” p. 260. 74 For Isidore’s Synonyma as the partial source of the Complaint, see A. G. Rigg, “Hoccleve’s Complaint and Isidore of Seville,” Speculum, 45.4 (1970), 564–74; compare J. A. Burrow, “Hoccleve’s Complaint and Isidore of Seville Again,” Speculum, 73.2 (1998), 424–28. For Hoccleve’s use of Suso, see especially Benjamin Kurtz, “The Relation of Occleve’s Learn to Die to its Source,” PMLA, 40.2 (1925), 252–75. For Hoccleve and the Gesta – and the likelihood that the particular copy he used for the Series was London, British Library, MS Harley 219 – see Misty Schieberle, “A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: the Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library, MS Harley 219,” RES, vol. 70, no. 297 (2019), 799–822 (817–18). 75 Burrow, “Hoccleve and Isidore,” p. 428; compare Wakelin, Immaterial Texts, pp. 201–2. 76 Simpson, “Madness and Texts,” p. 15. 77 For discussion, see especially Meyer-Lee, “Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,” pp. 203–209.

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78 Compare Watt, Hoccleve’s Series, pp. 1–3. 79 See especially Burrow, “Experience and Books,” pp. 260–66; Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 160–74; Simpson, “Madness and Texts,” pp. 17–20; and Tolmie, “The Professional,” pp. 354–55. 80 See notes 5, 6, and 7 above. 81 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, tr. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981), 1.74 (p. 43); cf. Edmond Faral (ed.), Les arts poétiques du xii et du xiii siècle (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1962), p. 135. For a similar claim, compare the Rhetorica ad Herennium, tr. Harry Caplan, LCL 403 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 3.6.10 (pp. 172–73). 82 Gower, Confessio amantis, Prol.491–98; for further discussion, see Chapter 2. 83 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 2.166–67 (on Constance), 2.323 (on the Sultan’s mother), and 2.778–79 (on Donegild). 84 This is especially true in the two fabulae of the Series. See Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory, pp. 216–19. 85 For discussion of the affective power of the Young Man, see especially Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 76–79, and Steven Rozenski, Jr., “‘Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour’: Hoccleve’s Amplification of the Imagery and Intimacy of Henry Suso’s Ars Moriendi,” Parergon, 25.2 (2008), 1–16 (especially pp. 14–15). For the signs of death that the image makes manifest, see Smith, Arts of Dying, pp. 220–21. 86 Compare Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. Joseph Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), 2.1. 87 For this trope in Chaucer, see Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 190–210. 88 Hoccleve’s apparently prejudiced view of women has been the subject of debate. For discussion, see especially Karen Winstead, “‘I am al othir to yow than yee weene’: Hoccleve, Women, and the Series,” Philological Quarterly, 72.2 (1993), 143–55 (especially pp. 144–45); Catherine Batt, “Hoccleve And … Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in The Regiment of Princes,” in Batt (ed.), Essays on Hoccleve, pp. 55–84; Davis, Writing Masculinity, pp. 153–62; Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects, pp.  245–48; and Crocker, “Engendering Affect,” pp. 82–85. 89 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 1.3177. 90 Watt, Hoccleve’s Series, p. 33–34. 91 I am not the first to note that Hoccleve’s selection of matter often seems at odds with his stated literary (and financial) goals; for discussion, see especially Patterson, “What is Me?,” pp. 447–50 and 463–64, and Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 94–97 and 120–23. 92 See especially Johnson, Practicing Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 219–20, for discussion. For an excellent account of the uneasy way that gloss and text align in Hoccleve more generally, see Jane Griffiths, “‘In Bookes Thus

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Writen I Fynde’: Hoccleve’s Self-Glossing in the Regiment of Princes and the Series,” Medium Ævum, 86.1 (2017), 91–107. 93 Vincent Gillespie, for example, leans heavily on the moralizations to claim that the Series is an allegorical response to the Council of Konstanz; see Gillespie, “Chichele’s Church: Vernacular Theology in England After Thomas Arundel,” in Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (eds.), After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 3–42 (39–42), and compare Watt, Hoccleve’s Series, pp. 8–10. Whether or not we find such a reading convincing, the fact remains that it is made possible, in large part, by the fact that Hoccleve opens the door to allegory by including the moralizations in the first place. 94 Gayk notes the same; see Image, Text, and Religious Reform, p. 65. 95 Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, p. 171. 96 Compare Goldie, “Psychosomatic Illness,” p. 48; Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, p. 117; and Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 183. 97 “Communynge” has been widely glossed by critics. I believe that it is best understood as the act of talking with someone in person, face-to-face. But for a range of different accounts that instead relate it to social circulation, to sympathetic dialogue, to identity construction, and to legal personhood, see respectively Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, p. 117; Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, p. 180; Malo, “Penitential Discourse,” p. 291; and Hickey, “Legal Personhood,” pp. 197–201. Because Hoccleve speaks of “commvn[ing] of thingis mene” (S 1.218), it is unlikely, as Langdell observes, that he means the term to carry a sacramental sense, although “communynge” could mean to receive or administer the Eucharist. See MED, “communynge,” n., sense 7, and compare Langdell, Hoccleve, p. 162. 98 Compare Coley, Wheel of Language, pp. 136–38. 99 See again Coley, Wheel of Language, pp. 146–47. 100 Smith, Arts of Dying, p. 224. 101 On Job and Hoccleve, see Appleford, “Sea Ground and London Street,” pp. 62–67. 102 See Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” p. 396. 103 But see Appleford, who has argued that the Series is a text designed as a last will and testament for a writer who has already begun to prepare for death; see her Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 132–36. 104 Orlemanski is also skeptical towards the bona fides of the prayer; compare Symptomatic Subjects, p. 226. 105 As R. D. Perry suggests, Hoccleve seems to believe that “his life is reading and writing.” See Perry, “Hoccleve and the Logic of Incompleteness,” in Jenni Nuttall and David Watt (eds.), Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches, pp. 65–84 (83). 106 For Hoccleve’s views on consolation and their relation, if any, to a Boethian model, see especially Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 99–105; Johnson,

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107 108

109 110

111 112 113

Notes to pages 108–11 Practicing Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 203–13; Patterson, “What is me?,” pp.  440–42; and Danielle Bradley, “‘By communynge is the beste assay’: Gossip and the Speech of Reason in Hoccleve’s Series,” Mediaevalia, 40 (2019), 187–217 (201–2). For the Danse and the Series, see especially David Lorenzo Boyd, “Reading through the Regiment of Princes: Hoccleve’s Series and Lydgate’s Dance of Death in Yale Beinecke MS 493,” Fifteenth Century Studies, 20 (1993), 15–34. John Lydgate, The Dance of Death: A Version (Selden), in John Lydgate’s Dance of Death and Related Works, ed. Megan L. Cook and Elizaveta Strakhov (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2019), l. 31. Subsequent references to the Dance (hereafter abbreviated DM) will be given parenthetically. Compare Boyd, “Reading through the Regiment,” p. 24, who also notes that the theme of “amendment” is common to both texts. Sophie Oosterwijk, “Death, Memory, and Commemoration: John Lydgate and ‘Macabrees Daunce’ at Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,” in Caroline M. Barron and Clive Burgess (eds.), Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), pp. 185–201 (189–94). See Appleford, Learning to Die in London, pp. 83–87, for this adaptation (called the “Daunce of Poulys”) and its installation at St. Paul’s in London. On Lydgate’s “brand value,” see Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, p. 52; compare pp. 50–52 for the poet’s circle of patrons. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 116–23.

4  Lydgate and the Surplus of History 1 See John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2001), ll. 4336–37, and following. For disagreement about the title of the Siege, which James Simpson prefers (with reasonable justification) to call “The Destruction of Thebes,” see Simpson, “‘Dyesmol daies and fatal houres’: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (eds.), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 15–33. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent references to Lydgate’s works will be given parenthetically, using the following system: ST = Siege of Thebes, ed. Edwards; TB = Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126, 4 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & co., 1906–35); Fall = Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–24, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1924–27); Edm = John Lygdate’s Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and Anthony Bale, Middle English Texts, 41 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009); and MP = Minor Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 and o.s. 192, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1911–34). 2 For the generally accepted date of the Siege, see Johnstone Parr, “Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate’s Poems,” PMLA, 67.2 (1952), 251–58. For the argument for a later date, see Simpson, “Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes,” pp. 15–16.

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3 See Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes (London: Routledge, 2004), and Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 126–36. 4 For comparative discussion of Lydgate’s sources for the Siege, see Battles, Medieval Tradition of Thebes, pp. 149–52, and compare Edwards (ed.), The Siege of Thebes, pp. 2–5. 5 Chaucer does indeed omit stanzas from the Teseida that paint Theseus in a negative light; compare William E. Coleman, “The Knight’s Tale,” in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (eds.), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002–5), 2:141–42. 6 For this position – and especially, the claim that Lydgate sees himself in competition with Chaucer – see, e.g., Scott-Morgan Straker, “Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes,” RES, vol. 52, no. 205 (2001), 1–21 (5–8). For a critique of this view, see Gania Barlow, “Remodeling Authorship in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes,” Viator, 49.1 (2018), 257–80 (258–61). 7 See, e.g., ST 1046 and Fall 1.1486. The use of “surplus” in this sense also seems peculiar to Lydgate; compare MED, “surplus,” n., senses 1a–b. 8 These items are the conclusion to the story of Odysseus (5.2937–3325), Lydgate’s reflections upon his book and the state of England at the time of its completion (5.3326–612), and a lenvoy to Henry V (pp. 876–79). For discussion, compare Nicholas Perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England (Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 223–26. On “ymping” in Lydgate, compare TB Prol.163–70 and 5.2932–36, and see R. D. Perry, “Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries: Chaucer’s Family and Gower’s Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century,” Speculum, 93.3 (2018), 669–98 (669–71). 9 Work began on the Fall by 1431/32. For the terminus a quo and ad quem of the Fall and its relation to Humphrey, see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, “Poet and Patron in the Fall of Princes: Lydgate and Humphrey of Gloucester,” Anglia, 38 (1914): 121–36, and Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 223–54. 10 For Lydgate and aesthetic “excess,” see Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 20–29 and 98–99; Maura Nolan, “Lydgate’s Worst Poem,” in Lisa Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (eds.), Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 71–87 (82); and Andrea Denny-Brown, “Lydgate’s Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and Chychevache,” in Cooper and Denny-Brown (eds.), Lydgate Matters, pp. 35–56 (51). For Lydgate and the “ineffable,” see Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 151–58 and 174–75. For Lydgate and “metapoetic surplus,” see James Simpson, “‘For al my body … weieth nat an unce’: Empty Poets and Rhetorical Weight in Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird,” in Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (eds.), John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 129–46 (138–39).

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11 “Dance of Death: A Version (Selden),” in Megan L. Cook and Elizaveta Strakhov (eds.), John Lydgate’s Dance of Death and Related Works (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2019), line 36. 12 For this particular Dance of Death and its physical layout, see Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101–13. For the cultural and poetic significance of the Dance to Lydgate, compare Amy Appleford, “The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38.2 (2008), 285–314; Claire M. Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theatre (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 75–77; and Chaganti, Strange Footing, pp. 145–46. 13 See Livy, History of Rome: Books 31–34, tr. Evan T. Sage, LCL 295 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), book 31, chapter 1 (p. 3). 14 For a discussion of both views, see especially David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH, 54.4 (1987), 761–99. 15 See Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 132–36. For the view that Lydgate’s understanding of history is reductive, see, e.g., Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, tr. Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen and Company, 1961), pp. 220–21; Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 129; and Robert W. Ayers, “Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes,” PMLA, 73.5 (1958), 463–74. 16 E.g., FP 3.1034; the term roughly translates to “counter-weigh.” Though Chaucer and Gower had used the term very occasionally, “counterpeisen” is a word quite unique to Lydgate’s corpus; see MED, “countrepeisen,” n., sense 1a, and quotations. My sense of the term is related to what Maura Nolan has noted as Lydgate’s interest in an aesthetic of “chanteplure,” or “a poetic mode that combines joy and woe”; see Nolan, “‘Now Wo, Now Gladnesse’: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes,” ELH, 71.3 (2004), 531–58 (548–49). 17 In addition to the example given below, compare Edm 3593–606 and Fall 3.20–21. 18 For the role of Humphrey in the production of the Fall of Princes, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 33–39; Hammond, “Poet and Patron in the Fall of Princes,” and Eleanor Prescott Hammond, “Lydgate and Coluccio Salutati,” Modern Philology, 25.1 (1927), 49–57. 19 See G. L. Harriss, “Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390–1447),” DNB 28:787–93 (788–91). 20 See Nolan, John Lydgate, pp. 18–19, for the various hassles and troubles that Humphrey made for the council and parliament during the 1420s. 21 Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 2; for Strohm’s account of the Fall, see especially pp. 87–104. 22 Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 250.

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23 Andrew Galloway has proposed that that Lydgate knew Seneca’s De providentia; see his “John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism,” JEGP, 107.4 (2008), 445–71 (468–71). I would propose that he may also have known De clementia, for Lydgate attributes to Seneca the maxim that “the throne of princis be clemence is maad stable” (3.4057). The word “clemence” is quite rare in Middle English; the MED records one use of the word as a variant reading in a copy of Chaucer, Knight’s Tale, but beyond that, the next earliest use of the term is in Lydgate; see MED, “clemence,” n., sense 1a. It may be the case, then, that given his access to both the impressive library at Bury St. Edmunds and Humphrey’s Greenwich Manor, Lydgate had read “On Mercy,” and was referring to it by its Latin name. 24 Simpson, “Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes,” p. 16. 25 For a similar characterization of Lydgate’s poetics, compare D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 193–94. For the likening of royal power to creativity and craftsmanship in Fürstenspiegel, see Lisa H. Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 146–50. 26 Lydgate does seem to expect some material reward for his labors; see, e.g., Fall 3.71–84 (where he fantasizes about his “lordis fredam and bounteuous largesse”) and 9.3345–51 (where he trusts that Humphrey’s “liberal largesse” will “relevyn” him of his “cotidien” needs). For discussion, see Hammond, “Poet and Patron in the Fall of Princes,” pp. 121–22, and Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 227–30. 27 This is likely an echo of Gower; compare John Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck and tr. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2004–2013), Prol.1–3. For the “auctours” and sources behind Lydgate’s Troy Book, see especially Schirmer, John Lydgate, pp. 42–50. 28 For the significance of Dictys and Dares, whose history writing Lydgate also discusses at TB 5.3326–59, see especially Paul Strohm, “Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narratives” Speculum, 46.2 (1971), 348–59 (349–50). 29 In addition to Homer, Lydgate also notes Ovid (Prol.299) and Virgil (Prol.304) as perpetrators of this poetic crime. 30 For Lydgate’s debt to monastic historiography and “trouthe,” see Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 68–70. For Lydgate and “substaunce,” see Alan Ambrisco and Paul Strohm, “Succession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to the Troy Book,” Chaucer Review, 30.1 (1995), 40–57 (42–47). For the threefold sense of “truth” in monastic historiography, which Lydgate here adapts, compare Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Carnegie Publishing, 2004), pp. 2–14. 31 See Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, tr. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: PIMS, 1967), chapter 4, ll. 952–54 (p. 50); cf. Edmond Faral (ed.), Les arts poétiques du xiie et du xiiie siècle (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1962), ll. 952–54

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(pp. 226–27). We might note, however, that transsumptio referred more exactly to metalepsis in classical rhetoric; see William Purcell, “Transsumptio: A Rhetorical Doctrine of the Thirteenth Century,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 5.4 (1987), 369–410. 32 Ibid., chapter 4, ll. 1065–67 (p. 54) and ll. 748–51 (pp. 42–43) respectively; cf. Faral (ed.), Arts poétiques, ll. 1065–67 (p. 230) and ll. 748–51 (p. 220). 33 But see Mary C. Flannery, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 120–21, who suggests instead that Lydgate critiques Homer on the basis of his bad intent and not because of his improper technique. 34 For this tradition, see especially Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1996), 1:356–79, 1:380–403, 2:43–57, 2:118–56, and 2:342–424; compare Andrew Galloway, “Writing History in England,” in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 255–83. 35 See Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500 (Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 183–87; compare Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 99–104. 36 Otto of Freising and Rahewin, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, tr. C. C. Mierow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 2.41 (p. 159); cf. Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, ed. Georg Waitz and Bernhard von Simson, third edition, Scriptores rerum Germanicum in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae historicis recusi, no. 46 (Hanover and Leipzig: Impensis bibliopolii Hahniani, 1912), p. 150. For discussion, see Kempshall, Rhetoric and History, pp. 183–84 and 184n232. 37 Mimi Ensley, “Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost: Building Medieval History in Seventeenth-Century England,” RES, vol. 71, no. 299 (2019), 251–71 (257–61). 38 John Capgrave, The Life of Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1999), Prol.51 (p. 16) 39 On “ymping,” see note 8 above. 40 Nolan, John Lydgate, p. 215. Compare Smith, Arts of Dying, pp. 194–95, who stresses the importance of the “archive” to Lydgate’s self-conception as a poet. 41 For the “compendious” literary aesthetic, see Emily Steiner, John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 29–65. 42 See, e.g., Ralph de Diceto, Abbreviationes chronicorum, in William Stubbs (ed.), The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London, 2 vols. (London, 1876), 1:3 (“tam causis quam casibus”). For discussion, see Kempshall, Rhetoric and History, pp. 82–89 and 441–46. 43 See Bernard Guenée, “L’historien et la compilation au XIIIe siècle,” Journal des savants, 1.1 (1985), 119–35; compare Galloway, “Writing History,” p. 257. 44 Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi cestrensis, tr. John Trevisa, ed. Churchill Babington, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1865), §7 (p. 9). For further discussion, see Taylor Cowdery, “Lydgate and the Surplus of History,” ELH, 85.3 (2018), 567–98 (574–75); compare Steiner, John Trevisa, pp. 37–38.

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45 See William of Malmesbury, De Gestis regum anglorum libri quinque atque historiae novellae, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887–89), 2:566 and 1:104 respectively. Lee Patterson suggests that Higden may also be playing upon Paulus Orosius, Pavli Orosii Historiarum adversvm paganos libri septem, ed. Karl Zangemeister, CSEL 5 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889), 3.2.9 (p. 144), where Oriosus remarks that he has “woven together an inextricable wickerwork of jumbled history [contexui indigestae historiae inextricabilem cratem].” Compare Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 99–100 and 100n48. 46 Higden, Polychronicon, tr. Trevisa, §7 (pp. 8–9). 47 Ibid., §1 (pp. 2–3). 48 Compare Horace, Ars poetica, tr. H. R. Fairclough, LCL 194 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), ll. 343–44 (pp. 478–79). A second allusion to Horace comes later, at Polychronicon, tr. Trevisa, §9 (pp. 12–13): “I fare as the whetston that maketh yren sharpe and kene.” Compare Horace, Ars poetica, ll. 304–5 (pp. 474–75). 49 See especially Kempshall, Rhetoric and History, pp. 362–66, and compare Gransden, Historical Writing, 2:45–49, 2:148, 2:164, 2:346–47, 2:374–76, and 2:394–96. 50 See Thomas Walsingham, The St. Albans Chronicle, ed. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, and tr. Leslie Watkiss, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 2:494–95 (Charybdis) and 2:94–95 (Ovid), and notes. 51 Ibid., 2:674–81 (and notes). 52 Compare Kempshall, Rhetoric and History, pp. 299–302. 53 Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutic, and Translation: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 156, 166. 54 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, tr. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981), 4.3 (p. 93), translation modified; cf. Faral (ed.), Arts poétiques, p. 180. 55 Ibid., 4.2 (p. 93); cf. Faral (ed.), Arts poétiques, p. 180. 56 Higden, Polychronicon, tr. Trevisa, §9 (pp. 12–15). 57 Higden is likely following an exegetical tradition that read Ruth 2:1–17, where Ruth gathers fallen grain from the men who have been harvesting in rows before her in the fields, as a figure for intellectual labor. See G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to the Sermon Manuscripts of the Period, c. 1350–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1926), pp. 76–77 and 77n1. 58 “An Exposition of the Pater Noster,” MP 1.14.305–6 (1:70). For amplificatio as “filling in the blanks,” see, e.g., John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria, ed. and tr. Traugott Lawler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), chapter 4 (pp. 72–75), and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, tr. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), 2.C.134 (p. 85). 59 As Rita Copeland has noted, Lydgate clearly inherits his view of rhetoric from the artes poetriae; see Copeland, “Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of

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Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly, 53.1 (1992), 57–82 (72–73). 60 John Walton suggests that the poet must “saue the sentence” of his preexisting source matter (a phrase echoed by Lydgate at Fall Prol.448). See Walton, De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Mark Science, EETS o.s. 170 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), Prol.4.8 (p. 2). John Capgrave suggests that writers must “folow” the “steppes” of their sources. See Capgrave, Life of Saint Katherine, Prol.215. And Peter Idley, finally, says that he will preserve the essence, or “kepe” the “sentence” of his source matter “vndre suche forme as I can.” See Idley, Instructions to his Son, ed. Charlotte D’Evelyn (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1935), 2.27–40 (p. 109). 61 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and M. C. E. Shaner, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), G.61–65; Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 206 (Oxford University Press, 1938), line 18; Gower, Confessio amantis, e.g., 1.1973–76, 2.2496–500, 6.2437–40, and 7.521–36. For discussion of Lydgate’s use of the term “tracys,” see Ensley, “Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost,” p. 258, and Robert R. Edwards, “Lydgate and the Trace of Gower,” South Atlantic Review, 79.3–4 (2014), 156–70 (156–57). 62 Gower, Confessio, 7.210–16; Gower specifies that this prime “matiere” initially lacks “eny forme” because it is hyle, or “ylem in special.” 63 For the craft analogies in this passage and elsewhere in the Fall, see Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft, pp. 164–74. 64 This passage has often occasioned comment; for an excellent recent account, see Elizaveta Strakhov, Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years’ War (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022), pp. 206–11. For two contrasting readings, see respectively Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 42–43, and Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 327–32. 65 Compare Gower, Confessio, Prol.1–11, and see note 27 above. For Gower’s influence on Lydgate, see especially Maura Nolan, “Lydgate’s Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee,” SAC, 27 (2005), 59–92; Edwards, “Lydgate and the Trace of Gower”; and Perry, “Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries.” 66 See, e.g., Thomas Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1999), ll. 2052–65. Strakhov notes that the metaphor of breaking and renewing is an echo of Jeremiah 18:3–4 and that it is indeed meant to recall a potter’s wheel; see Continental England, p. 208. 67 See, e.g., Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, 2.11 (p. 64), and John of Garland, Parisiana poetria, chapter 4 (pp. 64–65). For discussion, see Jill Ross, Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 23–24 and 34–45. 68 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, ll. 222–25 (p. 24); cf. Faral (ed.), Arts poétiques, p. 204.

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69 Ibid., line 225 (p. 24); Ibid., p. 204. 70 Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 331. 71 Nolan, “Lydgate’s Literary History,” p. 59. For Lydgate’s French source, see Laurent de Premierfait (tr.), Bocace des nobles maleureux (Paris, 1538); for his use of Laurent, see especially Nigel Mortimer, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pp. 25–50, and Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 230–41. 72 For similar characterizations of Lydgate’s mixed or “heterogeneous” aesthetic, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 55, and Nolan, “Now Wo, Now Gladnesse,” pp. 531–36. 73 There were three versions of Dido’s story common in the western Middle Ages; see Marilyn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 45–73. Lydgate’s Dido is the “historical” one, a Dido found most often in the work of Boccaccio and his imitators. 74 But for the claim that Lydgate instead synthesizes his sources, see Nolan, John Lydgate, pp. 35, 58, and 72, and Mortimer, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pp. 49–50. 75 John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria, chap. 5 (pp. 84–85). 76 For an overview of the formes fixes, see Daniel Poirion, Le poète et le prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 361–426, and Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 273–90. For the history and development of the formes into the fifteenth century and their influence upon Lydgate, see especially Strakhov, Continental England, pp. 24–35 and 189–214, respectively. 77 Gower’s ballades can be found in his Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz and Cinkante balades. For Chaucer’s allusion to the formes fixes, see Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, G.411. For the role that the formes fixes play in the work of Chaucer and Gower, see Strakhov, Continental England, and compare Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 234–65. 78 Strakhov, Continental England, p. 1; Butterfield, Poetry and Music, p. 288. 79 See Philip Knox, “Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal,” New Medieval Literatures, 16 (2016), 213–49, and compare again Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 273–90. 80 Jenni Nuttall, “Lydgate and the Lenvoy,” Exemplaria, 30.1 (2018), 35–48 (42); compare Strakhov, Continental England, pp. 212–14. 81 Compare, e.g., Gower, Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz, in R. F. Yeager (ed. and tr.), The French Balades (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2011), nos. 6–15. 82 David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 142. For Lydgate and Deschamps, see Jake Walsh Morrissey, “‘To al Indifferent’: The Virtues of Lydgate’s ‘Dietary,’” Medium

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Ævum, 84.2 (2015), 258–78 (260); the translation survives as “A Doctrine of Pestilence” (see 275n26). 83 As Nuttall puts it, a typical lenvoy “centripetally gathers the narrative around its refrained point”; see “Lydgate and the Lenvoy,” p. 42. 84 For Livy and the surplus, see note 13 above. For Virgil and the surplus, which Renoir sees as a variation upon the topos of “pauca e multis,” see Alain Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 59 and pp. 116–17 (for examples). Compare Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 160 and 160n52, who suggests that Virgil, Georgics 2.42–44, is a good Classical reference point for this idea. 85 “Surplus” appears in Marie de France, “Prologue” to the Lais, in The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and tr. Claire M. Waters (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2018), line 16; John Skelton uses “resydewe” in The Bowge of Court, in John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood, revised edition (Liverpool University Press, 2015), line 539. “Remenaunt” appears in Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, F.623, and “remnaunht” in Bokenham, Legendys, line 5733. 86 Compare Fall 1.2388–94, 1.4913–28, and 1.5272–92 for more examples of this use of the surplus. 87 For discussion, see Hammond, “Poet and Patron in the Fall of Princes”; compare Alessandra Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 282–312, and Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 223–27. We might wonder just how closely Humphrey actually watched over Lydgate’s work, but a recent study on another text completed on his orders, On Husbondrie, suggests that his style of supervision may have been quite hands-on; see Lisa H. Cooper, “Agronomy and Affect in Duke Humfrey’s On Husbrondie,” Speculum, 95.1 (2020), 36–88 (39–40). 88 But for caution against overstating this point, see Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 34–37. 89 See Harriss, “Humphrey, duke of Gloucester,” 28:792–93. 90 For Humphrey’s circle, see Petrina, Cultural Politics, pp. 346–55. For Eleanor Cobham’s role in the circle, see G. L. Harriss, “Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester,” DNB 18:27–28. 91 For the audiences for which Lydgate may have intended the Fall, see especially Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 36–38. 92 For this claim, see Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows, pp. 133–35. For Lydgate’s familiarity with such an enterprise at earlier moments in his career, see especially Lee Patterson, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” in Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (eds.), New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 69–107. 93 Compare Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 31–34, who suggests that Lydgate here paints Humphrey as man cultured in the studia humanitatis.

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94 Karen A. Winstead, “John Lydgate’s ‘Mumming at Windsor’: Clothilda, Women’s Steadfastness, and Lancastrian Rule,” Chaucer Review, 49.2 (2014), 228–43 (235). Winstead is concerned with the political implications of Lydgate’s “Mumming at Eltham,” but in my view, her comment speaks to these cases as well. For the power that Agincourt and Richard’s deposition held in the fifteenth-century imagination, see respectively Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, pp. 308–16, and Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 101–27. 95 See Simpson, “Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes,” pp. 15–16. One difficulty of Simpson’s argument is that it requires the Siege of Thebes to have been completed at a later date than most scholars believe (late in 1422 at the earliest). No such difficulty arises, however, if we adapt Simpson’s claims to the story of these brothers in the Fall of Princes, which Lydgate began to write in the 1430s, while England was obviously still in the midst of their shared rule. 96 Maura Nolan has suggested that another work by Lydgate, the Serpent of Division, also speaks to the tense circumstances into which Humphrey and John were plunged after the death of Henry V; see Nolan, John Lydgate, pp. 52–64. 97 Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 169. 98 Beaufort advocated peace with France, while Humphrey wanted to press on with the war. The conflict came to a head in the summer of 1439, when Humphrey vigorously opposed Beaufort’s ongoing negotiations for peace at the Second Conference of Gravelines. For discussion, see Harriss, “Humphrey, duke of Gloucester,” 28:790. 99 Perry, “Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries,” p. 696. Compare Petrina, Cultural Politics, p. 286, who suggests that Lydgate overtly advocates for peace with France in the Fall. 100 See Bergen (ed.), Fall of Princes, 4:289, for this comment. For further discussion of Lydgate’s composition of the Golden World passages, see Richard A. Dwyer, “Arthur’s Stellification in the Fall of Princes,” Philological Quarterly, 57.2 (1978), 155–71 (165–66). 101 For Lydgate’s golden cities, see Fall 3.3137–71 (the Golden World) and TB 2.479–1066 (the construction of Troynovant). For Lydgate’s earthly cities, see, e.g., Fall 2.4460–592 (Rome) and 8.2437–57 (various fallen cities). For Lydgate’s Heavenly Jerusalem, see, e.g., “That Nowe is Haye,” MP 2.69.1–129 (2:809–13) and “Balade of Oure Ladye,” MP 1.66.1–232 (1:315–23). 102 The dangers of political division are, of course, also Lydgate’s topic in his Serpent of Division. See again Nolan, John Lydgate, 55–58. 103 Compare Laurent, Des nobles maleureux, 7.7–9 (fols. 164r–168v). 104 Mortimer notes that Lydgate adds the portents to this episode; see Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, p. 289. For the reference to John of Salisbury, compare Fall 7.1650–56 with Polycraticus 2.5, in Migne (ed.), PL, 199, cols. 385–822 (col. 423B). Salisbury claims to be quoting Josephus. The reference is not in Laurent; compare Des nobles maleureux, 7.8 (fols. 168r–v).

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105 See, e.g., Des nobles maleureux, 7.9, for the idea that Jews were sold at a penny apiece in recompense for Judas’s betrayal of Christ (fol. 168r, col. 2), and for the woman “qui par contraincte de fain publicque mangeoit son propre enfant” (fol. 168r, col. 2). Compare Flavius Josephus, Flavii Josephi De Bello Judaico libri septim, ed. Edward Cardwell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1837), 5.1 (1:270–74), 5.12 (1:312–15), 6.8 (1:351–53), and 7.1 (1:357–59). 106 Very occasionally, Lydgate adopts the eight-line octave, but only for his lenvoys and some of the longer moralizing passages in the poem; see, e.g., the lenvoys to the stories of Arsinoe and Ceraunus of Macedonia and Antiochus III at 4.3445–492 and 5.1590–1621, and the concluding chapter on Fortune at 9.3239–3302. For a full list of Lydgate’s passages in octaves, see Mortimer, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 280–95. 107 These factors include internal dissension at Jerusalem, disparities in military strength, and a geography that made it easy to encircle the city with a siege. As Lydgate notes, before the disaster at Jerusalem, “Werre withoute and werre was withynne; / Thus of vengaunce myscheef dide gynne” (7.1466–67). He also notes that vastly superior numbers and the fact that the only source of water lies beyond the walls of Jerusalem allow Vespasian to besiege the city so successfully (7.1477–83). 108 For discussion of Hector’s tomb, see especially Paul Strohm, “Sovereignty and Sewage,” in Cooper and Denny-Brown (eds.), Lydgate Matters, pp. 57–70 (63–66); Robert J. Meyer-Lee, “The Memorial Form of John Lydgate’s Troy Book,” Exemplaria 29.4 (2017), 280–95 (288–91); Smith, Arts of Dying, pp. 204–7; and Perkins, Gift of Narrative, pp. 193–203. 109 For discussion of “aureat licour” and Lydgate, see especially Robert MeyerLee, “The Emergence of the Literary in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady,” JEGP, 109.3 (2010), 322–48 (328–30); compare Amanda Walling, “Feminizing Aureation in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and Life of Saint Margaret,” Neophilologus, 101.2 (2017), 321–36 (323–30 and 334–35). 110 Ayers, “Lydgate’s Siege,” p. 471. 111 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 257. For William’s comments, see note 45 above. 112 Though many critics have noted the ironic aspects of Lydgate’s discourse, few have claimed that he is an ironic writer. See, e.g., Robert R. Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Confusion of Prudence,” in Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (eds.), The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 52–69 (53); Paul Strohm, “Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Lancastrian Court,” in Wallace (ed.), Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, pp. 640–61 (656); and Rosamund Allen, “The Siege of Thebes: Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale,” in Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (eds.), Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry (London: King’s College London, Centre for Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 122–42 (130–32). 113 Lydgate, “Dance of Death,” ed. Cook and Strakhov, line 636.

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114 For discussion, see Harriss, “Humphrey, duke of Gloucester,” 28:790–91. 115 Ibid., 28:791. Shortly after he succeeded in pushing Beaufort out, the Duke fell victim to a plot by the Cardinal’s allies, who had discovered that his second wife, Eleanor Cobham, had consulted astrologers to determine whether Henry VI would soon die. Eleanor was arrested and tried on charges of “treasonable necromancy” in 1441; the trial proved the end of Humphrey’s political career, and when the opportunity arose to arrest Humphrey in February 1447, his enemies took it. The Duke died shortly after his arrest, on 23 February 1447.

5  Copy and Copia in Skelton 1 John Skelton, The Complete English Poems of John Skelton, ed. John Scattergood, revised edition (Liverpool University Press, 2015), item 3.3 (pp. 32–33). Subsequent references to Skelton’s poetry will be given parenthetically, with reference both to lines in which the quotation appears and to the number (and subsection, if applicable) of the poem in John Scattergood (ed.), Complete English Poems of Skelton. For the date of “Uppon a Deedmans Hed,” see R. S. Kinsman, “‘Uppon a Deedmans Hed’: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic,” Studies in Philology, 50.2 (1953), 101–9 (106). 2 As Kinsman first observed; see “New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic,” and compare Maurice Pollet, John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England, tr. John Warrington (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1971), pp. 29–30. 3 A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 6. 4 Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 21. 5 See, respectively, William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 90–101; Ian Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate (Melbourne University Press, 1943), pp. 194–95; and Kinsman, “New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic.” For a recent discussion of these and other possibilities, see John Scattergood, John Skelton: The Career of an Early Tudor Poet (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 136–38. 6 Desiderius Erasmus, De copia, tr. Craig Thompson, CWE, 24, pp. 280–659 (577); cf. Betty I. Knott (ed.), De copia verborum ac rerum, OODE, I-6, p. 202. 7 Ibid., p. 295; compare Knott (ed.), De copia, p. 26. 8 Gavin Douglas, Eneydos, ed. David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols., Scottish Text Society, third series 27–30 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1957–64), “General Prologue,” line 58 (p. 4). For links between copia and the convivium, or banquet, see Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1991). 9 No. 234, ll. 1–14, in Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (eds.), Middle English Lyrics (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 224. Compare Rossell Hope Robbins, “Signs of Death in Middle English,” Mediaeval Studies, 32 (1970), 282–98, for the signs of death tradition.

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10 Ibid., line 21. 11 Chaucer certainly employs it at times. For enargeia in his works and elsewhere in late-medieval literary culture, see especially V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 59–84. 12 For the association of copia with elocutio in medieval thought, see especially Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 40–41 and 92–93. Erasmus did not adhere to this view himself, though he was often read in this way; studies by T. W. Baldwin suggest that only the first seventy or so pages of De copia, the ones concerned with elocutio and style, were widely read and taught during the sixteenth century. See Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:25 and 2:32–33. 13 For anxieties about the stability of the relation between res and verba during the early sixteenth century, see especially Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 14–15; Cave, Cornucopian Text, pp. 3–77, and Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 8–82. 14 Crane, Framing Authority, p. 39; Erasmus, De copia, tr. Thompson, p. 295; compare Knott (ed.), De copia, p. 26. 15 Cave, Cornucopian Text, p. 4. 16 Jeanneret, Feast of Words, p. 183. 17 Classic discussions of decorum can be found in Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance and Twentieth-Century Critics (University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 192–247; and Annabel M. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 3–43. See too Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), pp. 187–97. 18 Scaliger suggests, for instance, that the proper imitation of Virgil and the proper imitation of nature will produce the same result: “all those things which you might imitate [imiteris],” he tells the poet, “you can also find [habes] in a second nature [alteram naturam], which is Virgil.” See Julius Caesar Scaliger, Ivlii Caesaris Scaligeri, viri clarissimi, poetices libri septem (Lyons, 1561), 3.4 (p. 86; col. 1). 19 Cave, The Cornucopian Text, p. 132; compare Jeanneret, A Feast of Words, pp. 268–69. 20 Nelson, John Skelton, pp. 67, 235; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 103. 21 Compare Sebastian Sobecki, “New Life Records for John Skelton as Rector of Diss, Norfolk (1514 and 1516),” HLQ, 83.2 (2020), 395–400. For Skelton and the sirventes, see Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, pp. 244–90. For Skelton and flytyng, see John Scattergood, “‘Portraying a Life’: Skelton’s Flytings

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and Some Related Poems,” in David Carlson (ed.), John Skelton and Early Modern Culture: Papers Honoring Robert S. Kinsman (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 189–214. For Skelton and anticlerical satire, see especially Mishtooni Bose, “Writing, Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse,” in Greg Walker and Elaine Treharne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 276–93 (esp. 291–93). For Skelton and Juvenal, see especially Scattergood, John Skelton, pp. 58–60 and 327–32, and Vincent Gillespie, “Justification by Faith: Skelton’s Replycacyon,” in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (eds.), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 273–311 (277–87). 22 In English, “It’s hard not to write satire.” The phrase is from the third of Juvenal’s satires; Skelton uses it both in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (see 20.1216–17) and in his Speculum principis for the young Henry VIII, for which see David Carlson (ed.), “The Latin Writings of John Skelton,” Studies in Philology, 88.4 (1991), 1–125 (p. 36, line 95). 23 See Tatania String, Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 56–68 (esp. 61). 24 For these comments, see respectively Stanley Fish, John Skelton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 27 (and cf. pp. 26–35); Pollet, John Skelton, p. xi; and Jane Griffiths John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 54. For discussion and a critique of this view, see especially Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 136–38. 25 This expression belongs to Shakespeare’s Theseus; see William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Terri Bourus, in Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2016), 5.1.14–17. 26 Opinions have varied on Skelton’s patronage connections, but there is no question that, by the early 1520s, when he addressed “his master the cardinal” in the Garland of Laurel (21.1587–88), Skelton was at the very least solicitous of Wolsey’s support. For further discussion, see especially Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 188–217, and compare Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 210–19. 27 For Skelton’s relation to these makers, see especially Vincent Gillespie, “Justification by Good Works: Skelton’s The Garland of Laurel,” Reading Medieval Studies, 7 (1981), 19–31 (24–25); Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 189–90; and Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 202–8. 28 For Skelton’s acquaintance with Erasmus, whom he seems to have met in 1499 through Thomas More, see Edwards, Skelton, pp. 66–70, and Pollet, Skelton, pp. 38–40. For his use of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, see note 98 below.

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Notes to pages 145–48

29 For Skelton’s hostility towards new forms of pedagogy, see Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, 86–96. For Skelton’s mockery of bad clerical Latin, see, for example, the many jokes found in Ware the Hawke (e.g., 6.246–336). 30 I discuss Skelton’s claims to “laureate creacyon” below. For discussion of his views on laureation, see especially Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 205–10; Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 25–37; Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, pp. 193–208; and Dan Breen, “Laureation and Identity: Rewriting Literary History in John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40.2 (2010), 347–71. 31 Gillespie, “Justification by Faith,” p. 282. Compare Kathleen Tonry, “John Skelton and the New Fifteenth Century,” Literature Compass, 5.4 (2008), 721–39, and Mary C. Flannery, “The English Laureate in Time: John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel,” in Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock (eds.), Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 107–21. 32 My translation. For a similar claim, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 34–35. For further discussion of Skelton’s allusion to Janus, see Breen, “Laureation and Identity,” pp. 359–63; Flannery, “John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel,” pp. 117–18; and Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 177. 33 Merie tales newly imprinted [and] made by Master Skelton Poet Laureat, STC 22618 (London, 1567), unsigned, fol. 8r (sig. A.viiir). 34 Ibid., fol. 8v (sig. A.viiiv). Thanks to Nicholas Watson for identifying this probable allusion. 35 Ibid., fol. 8v (sig. A.viiiv). 36 Ibid., fols. 9r–v (sigs. B.ir–v). 37 Edwards, Skelton, 99; Fish, Skelton’s Poetry, 82. But for the claim that the story is a fabrication, see A. W. Barnes, “Constructing the Sexual Subject of John Skelton,” ELH, 71.1 (2004), 29–51 (31–33). 38 David Carlson, “John Skelton,” in Rita Copeland (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English, Vol 1: 800–1558 (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 541–60 (544). 39 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 8.7.7; compare Scattergood, John Skelton, pp. 33–39. 40 For the flytyngs of Garnesche and Skelton, see David Carlson, “Skelton, Garnesche, and Henry VIII: Revels and Erudition at Court,” RES, vol. 66, no. 274 (2015), 240–57. 41 Robert of Basevorn, Forma Praedicandi, chapter 47, (p. 309), in Th.-M. Charland (ed.), Artes Praedicandi: Contribution à l’histoire de la rhétorique au moyen age (Paris: J. Vrin, 1936), pp. 233–323. Compare Matthew of Linköping, Testa nucis and Poetria, ed. and tr. Birger Bergh (Arlöv: Berlings, 1996), pp.  46–47, and Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, in Winthrop Wetherbee (ed. and tr.), Literary Works, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 22 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.33 (pp. 52–53).

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42 For Italian theories of imitatio, see Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). For the dissemination of these theories to Northern Europe, see Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford University Press, 2011), especially pp. 76–163. For their reception by vernacular poets, see especially Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 28–53, and A. J. Smith, “Theory and Practice in Renaissance Poetry: Two Kinds of Imitation,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 47.1 (1964), 212–43. 43 See especially Jeanneret, A Feast of Words, pp. 263–75. 44 Marco Girolamo Vida, De arte poetica, ed. and tr. Ralph G. Williams (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 2.455–56 (pp. 72–73) and 2.541 (pp. 78–79; translation modified). 45 Paolo Cortesi, “Paolo Cortesi to Angelo Poliziano,” in JoAnn DellaNeva (ed.) and Brian Duvick (tr.), Ciceronian Controversies, I Tatti Renaissance Library 26 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 10–11. 46 Cristoforo Landino, In Quinti Horatii Flacci artem poetica ad pisones interpretationes, ed. Gabriele Bugada (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 2012), §108.1 (p. 113). 47 Ben Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (gen. eds.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7:550 and 7:582–5. 48 Jonson’s syncretism was typical in early modern accounts of imitation; for discussion, see G. W. Pigman, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly, 33.1 (1980), 1–32. 49 Christopher Cannon, From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 112. 50 See David Carlson, “The ‘Grammarians’ War’ 1519–21, Humanist Careerism in Early Tudor England, and Printing,” Medievalia et Humanistica, 18 (1992), 157–81. For further discussion of Skelton’s role in the war – in short, he supported Whittington – see Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 79–96; Walker, Skelton and Politics, pp. 63–66; and Scattergood, John Skelton, pp.  260–74. For Humanism in Tudor literary culture more generally, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford University Press, 2007). 51 See Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Quaestiones Alberti de modis significandi, ed. and tr. L. G. Kelly (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1977); for its account of the modi, see Q6.resp2 (p. 27). 52 See especially Irène Rosier-Catach, “Grammar,” in Robert Pasnau and Christina Van Dyke, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 196–216. 53 Ibid., p. 208. 54 John Skelton, tr., The Bibliotheca Historica of Didorus Siculus, Translated by John Skelton, ed. F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards, EETS o.s., no. 233

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Notes to pages 150–55

(Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 8. Compare Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, tr. Poggio Bracciolini (Paris, 1508), fol. 3v (sig. a.iiiv): “pares verbis res gestas representans.” For further discussion of Skelton’s translation, see Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 149–50, and Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 38–55. 55 As Griffiths notes, Skelton suggests as much by mistranslating Diodorus; he renders “pares” not as “fitting to” but as “equivalent.” See Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, p. 46. 56 Compare John Chalker, “The Literary Seriousness of John Skelton’s ‘Speke, Parrot,’” Neophilologus, 44.1 (1960), 39–47 (43–44 and 46). 57 As Fish puts it, Parott is “incessantly but uncomprehendingly vocal.” See Fish, John Skelton, p. 135. 58 Ovid, Amores 2.6, in Heroides and Amores, ed. and tr. Grant Showerman, second edition, LCL 41 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), ll. 1 and 18 (pp. 398–99); translation modified. 59 Parott’s speech is obviously constrained by his social context, and Skelton shows him considerable sympathy: he calls Parott his “owne dere harte” and “dere darling” (18.208) and notes that the ladies of the court shush him whenever he begins to squawk too plainly (18.55–56). For discussion, see especially Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 92–96. 60 Fish, Skelton’s Poetry, p. 140. 61 See E. Jennifer Ashworth, “Terminist Logic,” in Pasnau and Van Dyke (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 146–58. 62 Peter of Spain, Summaries of Logic, ed. and tr. Brian P. Copenhaver, with Calvin Normore and Terence Parsons (Oxford University Press, 2014), 6.2 (pp. 240–41). 63 Ibid., 6.3 (pp. 240–43). 64 Ibid., 6.9 (pp. 248–51); compare Ashworth, “Terminist Logic,” pp. 156–57, for discussion. 65 Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, p. 63. 66 Gillespie, “Justification by Faith,” p. 276. For discussion of the tradition of David-personae that Skelton here picks up, see David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 92–100. 67 The conflation of energeia with enargeia was common in sixteenth-century thought; for discussion, see François Rigolot, “The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion,” in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 161–67 (162). 68 See A. S. G. Edwards, “Skelton’s English Poems in Manuscript and Print,” in Carlson (ed.), John Skelton and Early Modern Culture, pp. 85–98. 69 See the Garland, 21.1254–60; compare Scattergood, John Skelton, pp. 170–77. 70 For ostranenie, see Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), pp. 5–12. 71 Scattergood, John Skelton, p. 161.

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72 For Jane’s biography, see Emily Stockard, “Who Was Jane Scrope?” in Jim Pearce, Ward J. Risvold, and Nathan Dixon (eds.), Renaissance Papers 2014 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), pp. 1–15. 73 I follow F. W. Brownlow’s account of the poem’s situation; see Brownlow, “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy,” English Literary Renaissance, 9.1 (1979), 5–20. 74 For a concise overview of the sources of Phyllyp Sparowe, see Scattergood, John Skelton, pp. 158–60; for the poem’s debt to Persius in particular, see Nathaniel Owen Wallace, “The Responsibilities of Madness: John Skelton, ‘Speke, Parott,’ and Homeopathic Satire,” Studies in Philology, 82.1 (1985), 60–80 (68–70). 75 Deanne Williams has noted, for instance, that the Oriel manuscript of the B-Text of Piers Plowman contains the line, “many a preest heer schulden go synge seruyseles with sire philip the sparwe”; for discussion, see Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare, p. 150, for discussion. 76 For Skelton and Goliardic satire, see Gordon, Skelton, pp. 119–34. For Skelton and Burgundian poetry, see Kipling Gordon, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977), pp. 23–30. For Skelton and the titulus, see R. S. Kinsman, “Phyllyp Sparowe: Titulus,” Studies in Philology, 47.3 (1950), 473–84. 77 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 138. 78 The association was made famous by Catullus; for his influence upon Skelton, see Linda Grant, Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of SixteenthCentury English Love Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 34–36. 79 See Celia R. Daileader, “When a Sparrow Falls: Women Readers, Male Critics, and John Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe,” Philological Quarterly, 75.4 (1996), 391–409 (391–92); Susan Schibanoff, “Taking Jane’s Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers,” PMLA, 101.5 (1986), 832–47 (836–37). 80 For these allusions, see Pliny the Elder, Natural History, tr. H. Rackham, vol. 2, LCL 352 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 7.38 (p. 591), and Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, LCL 42–43, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977–84), 3.1–137. 81 For Medea’s rejuvenation of Jason’s father, see, e.g., Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.159–293. 82 While presumptive relatives of Phyllyp attend the service, including the “red sparow” (7.403) and the “popyngay” (7.421), the exact species of Jane’s beloved is nowhere to be found. 83 See, e.g., the entry on the Phoenix in Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature of Lore, tr. Michael J. Curley (University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 13–14. 84 Scattergood translates the cryptogram in English Poems of Skelton, pp. 363–64. 85 Francesco Petrarca, Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and tr. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), no. 323, lines 49–60 (pp. 504–5).

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Notes to pages 160–66

86 Halpern has held that the poem owes more to “medieval traditions of am­plification” than “Erasmian copia”; see Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, p. 114. 87 John of Garland, Parisiana poetria, ed. and tr. Traugott Lawler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), chap. 5 (p. 107). 88 John of Garland, Parisiana poetria, chap. 5 (pp. 106–9); my emphases. 89 See Ranulph Higden, Ars componendi sermones, tr. Margaret Jennings and Sally A. Wilson (Paris: Peeters, 2003), p. 69; Thomas Waleys, De modo componendi sermones, in Charland (ed.), Artes praedicandi, pp. 328–403 (372–75), and Robert of Basevorn, Forma Praedicandi, chap. 50 (p. 320). 90 “Alianora Romyng” apparently lived in Leatherhead; see Scattergood, John Skelton, p. 219. For discussion both of Alianora and of Skelton’s Elinour in the context of historical alewives, compare Fowler, Literary Character, pp. 148–58. 91 Scattergood, John Skelton, p. 226; Fowler, Literary Character, p. 138. Pollet also thinks of Netherlandish painting, while Brownlow thinks (rather oddly) of Jan Van Eyck; see Pollet, John Skelton, p. 197, and Brownlow, “‘Phyllyp Sparowe’ and the Liturgy,” p. 19. 92 Richard Hughes, who provided an introduction to Skelton’s works for an early twentieth-century edition, observed the same; see his comments as quoted in Scattergood, John Skelton, p. 226. 93 Mishtooni Bose, “Useless Mouths: Reformist Poetics in Audelay and Skelton,” in Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (eds.), Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 159–79 (165). 94 Compare Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity, pp. 36–37. 95 Compare A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 279. 96 Compare Scattergood, John Skelton, p. 171, for a similar view. 97 I again follow Brownlow, “‘Phyllyp Sparowe’ and the Liturgy,” pp. 8–11; compare I. A. Gordon, “Skelton’s ‘Philip Sparrow’ and the Roman ServiceBook,” The Modern Language Review, 29.4 (1934), 389–96 (395–96). 98 For the passage from Geoffrey of Vinsauf to which both blazons allude, see the Poetria nova, tr. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: PIMS, 1967), ll. 562–99 (pp. 36–37); cf. Edmond Faral (ed.), Les arts poétiques du xiie et du xiiie siècle (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1962), ll. 562-99 (pp. 214–15). For discussion, see especially Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 114–15 and 172–74; Edwards, Skelton, pp. 24–28; and Schibanoff, “Taking Jane’s Cue,” pp. 839–42. 99 Skelton names Jane twice more in the poem; see 7.1245–59 and 7.1282–89. 100 See Stockard, “Who was Jane Scrope?”, p. 1. 101 Erasmus, The Ciceronian, tr. Betty I. Knott, CWE, 28, pp. 323–448 (p. 375); cf. Pierre Mesnard (ed.), Dialogus Ciceronianus, OODE, I-2, pp. 583–710 (p.  630). For a medieval version of the same idea, compare Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, tr. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981), 2.43 (p. 78). 102 Alexander Barclay, Shyp of folys of the worlde, STC 3545 (London, 1509), unfoliated (sig. Y.iiir). For discussion of the attacks that Hawes, Skelton, and

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Barclay launched at each other throughout their careers, including this one, see Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 81–82. 103 For an account (though one is hardly needed) of why Jane was likely offended by Skelton’s blazon, see Scattergood, John Skelton, pp. 175–77, and for further discussion, compare Schibanoff, “Taking Jane’s Cue,” pp. 842–44. 104 For the horn of cornucopia and Hercules, see, e.g., Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.80–88 (pp. 8–9). 105 See, e.g., “Medicina pro morba caduco et le Fevr,” in Theodore Silverstein (ed.), Medieval English Lyrics (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), p. 124: “What manere of Ivell thou be / In Goddis name I coungere the. / I coungere the with the holy crosse / That Iesus was done on with fors. / I coniure the with nayles thre / That Iesus was nayled upon the tree” (ll. 1–6). 106 See Tyler Huismann, “John Buridan’s Metaphysics of Persistence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 54.3 (2016), 373–94 (compare 386–91 for discussion of predication). 107 John Buridan, Quaestiones super octos libros physicorum Aristotelis (secundum ultimam lecturam) libri i–ii, ed. Michiel Streijger and Paul J. J. M. Bakker (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1.10 (p. 109). For discussion, compare Huismann, “Buridan’s Metaphysics of Persistence,” p. 376. 108 See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 229–78. 109 Ibid., p. 247. 110 For discussion, see especially Ralph M. Rosen, Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 3–42. 111 W. H. Auden, “John Skelton,” item no. 52 in A. S. G. Edwards (ed.), Skelton: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 184. 112 See Erasmus, Lingua, tr. Elaine Fantham, CWE, 29, pp. 262–412 (p. 298), translation modified; cf. J. H. Waszink (ed.), Lingua, OODE, IV–1A, p. 66. 113 Compare, e.g., John of Garland, Parisiana poetria, chapter 6 (pp. 122–23), who defines conduplicatio as “the repetition [iteratio] of the same word for amplification [causa ampliationis], or to express wonder [admirationis].” 114 For copia as a tumor, see Erasmus, Lingua, p. 263; cf. Waszink (ed.), Lingua, p. 26. See too Cave, Cornucopian Text, p. 165. For copia as the proliferation of barbarisms, see Erasmus, Colloquies, tr. Craig R. Thompson, CWE, 29, p. 165; cf. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, and R. Hoven (eds.), Colloquia, OODE, I-3, p. 62. 115 For discussion, see Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity, pp. 43–45. 116 William Bullein, “A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence,” item no. 9 in Edwards (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 56. 117 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2.10 (pp. 172–73); Gabriel Harvey, “Four Letters and Certaine Sonnets,” item no. 14b in Edwards (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 63.

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Notes to pages 171–75

118 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki, second edition (London: Routledge, 2013), 6.12.27. 119 Ibid., 6.12.40. 120 Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, History of English Literature, tr. H. Van Laun, vol. 1 (New York: Holt and Williams, 1871), p. 139; Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, p. 6; Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, p. 112; and Lewis, English Literature, p. 139. 121 Polydore Vergil was imprisoned during 1515. For the precedent of imprisoning those who wrote against the “principal ministers” in the reign of Henry VIII, see Walker, Skelton and Politics, p. 68. 122 The original of Wolsey’s most widely copied portrait is lost but is assumed to have been painted around 1520. The best-known copy now hangs as NPG 32 in the National Portrait Gallery, London. 123 George Cavendish, “The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey,” in Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (eds.), Two Early Tudor Lives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 12. 124 See especially Walker, Skelton and Politics, pp. 87–89, and compare Bose, “Useless Mouths,” pp. 178–79. 125 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and tr. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 38–39.

6  Wyatt’s Grace 1 “What Vaileth Trouthe?”, ll. 1–15, item no. 2 in Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (eds.), Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool University Press, 1969). Subsequent references to Wyatt’s poetry and prose will be given parenthetically, according to the following system: CP = Collected Poems, ed. Muir and Thomson; CW = The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, ed. Jason Powell, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 Thomas A. Hannen, “The Humanism of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: from Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas O. Sloane and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 37–57 (43). 3 See “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” ed. R. T. Lenaghan, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 654. Subsequent references to this poem will be given parenthetically. 4 For discussion, see Jeff Dolven, “Reading Wyatt for the Style,” Modern Philology, 105.1 (2007), 65–86 (65–67). 5 Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 92. 6 H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period: An Essay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 171. 7 For these comments, see respectively Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 261; Kenneth J. E. Graham, “The Performance of Conviction: Wyatt’s

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Notes to pages 176–78

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Antirhetorical Plainness,” Style, 23.3 (1989), 374–94 (385); Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 427; and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 135. 8 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 137. 9 I draw here upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, for which see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 72–95. Compare Jeff Dolven, “Reading Wyatt for the Style,” pp. 80–82. 10 Thomas Greene, for example, has argued that Wyatt’s peculiar style of irony “introduces two or more voices into a single word”; see Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 259. 11 Jason Gleckman, “Thomas Wyatt’s Epistolary Satires: Parody and the Limitations of Rhetorical Humanism,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 43.1 (2001), 29–45 (34). 12 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney, in Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 5.1707. 13 For the meaning of “craft” in Wyatt, see Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 23–47. 14 Donald M. Friedman, “The Mind in the Poem: Wyatt’s ‘They Fle from Me’,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 7.1 (1967), 1–13 (12); Friedman is describing “They Fle from Me,” but his comment speaks to this poem as well. Compare Meredith Anne Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 37. 15 Thomas Hoccleve, Series, in Roger Ellis (ed.), “My Compleinte” and Other Poems (University of Exeter Press, 2001), 2.119. 16 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1938), p. 3. 17 For Wyatt’s professional life abroad, see Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), pp. 312–450. 18 See Jason Powell, “Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry in Embassy: Egerton 2711 and the Production of Literary Manuscripts Abroad,” HLQ, 67.2 (June 2004): 261–82. 19 For the rebuke, see Roger Bigelow Merriman (ed.), Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), item no. 250 (2:132–33). 20 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Thomas Hoby (London: David Nutt, 1900), 59. 21 A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 278. 22 For strong readings of Wyatt as, alternately, an ambassador, a Protestant, a gentleman amateur, a Stoic, an imitator of Italian models, or a Humanist, see, respectively, Jason Powell, “‘For Caesar’s I am’: Henrician Diplomacy and Representations of King and Country in Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry,” The

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Notes to pages 179–80

Sixteenth Century Journal, 36.2 (2005), 415–31; Greenblatt, Renaissance Se­lfFashioning, 115–27; Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 225–30; Donald M. Friedman, “The ‘Thing’ in Wyatt’s Mind,” Essays in Criticism, 16.4 (1966), 375–81; Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Wyatt’s Transformation of Petrarch,” Comparative Literature, 40.2 (1988), 122–33; and Hannen, “The Humanism of Sir Thomas Wyatt.” 23 Compare Andrea Brady, Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 37–38. 24 Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning the Word’ (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 152. 25 For these comments, see respectively Deborah C. Solomon, “Representations of Lyric Intimacy in Manuscript and Print Versions of Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’,” Modern Philology, 111.4 (2014), 668–82 (670); Jason Powell, “Marginalia, Authorship, and Editing in the Manuscripts of Thomas Wyatt’s Verse,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 15 (2009), 1–40 (11); and Florence Hazrat, “Fashioning Faith to Forms (Im)mutable: The Rondeau and Trust in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” The Cambridge Quarterly, 47.3 (2018), 222–42 (232). For the notes in the Devonshire manuscript, see again Powell, “Marginalia, Authorship, and Editing in Wyatt’s Verse,” pp.  2–15 and 23–25, and compare Helen Baron, “Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s Hand in the Devonshire Manuscript,” RES, vol. 45, no. 179 (1994), 318–35 (324–35). 26 For Wyatt’s seal, see Powell, “Wyatt’s Ivy Seal,” Notes and Queries, 54.3 (2007), 242–44; see p. 244 for the association of ivy with laureation (one drawn by John Leland among others) in England during the 1530s and ’40s. 27 Crewe, Trials of Authorship, p. 27. 28 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 9; Eagleton is speaking here of aesthetics generally, not literature alone. For a different view, see Maura Nolan, “Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34.3 (2004), 549–75 (570–71). 29 See Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 12–21. 30 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), p. 5; compare Nolan, “Making the Aesthetic Turn,” pp. 558–60. 31 Paul Alpers, “Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” Representations 12 (1985): 83–100 (94). 32 For discussion, see G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 263–92. For discussion of its effects upon Wyatt’s life, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 325–27. 33 Statutes of the Realm, ed. John Raithby, vol. 3 (London, 1817), p. 508. 34 See Elton, Policy and Police, pp. 286–91.

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35 Ibid., p. 277. 36 For a reproduction of this image and further discussion, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 495–98. 37 See Elton, Policy and Police, pp. 293–326. 38 Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS o.s. 186 (Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 185. 39 For discussion, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 68–69, and compare Cormack, A Power to Do Justice, pp. 88–102. 40 For discussion, see Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 382–84 and 536–46. Wyatt claims he was accused of having said specifically that “the kinge shulde be caste owte of a cartes arse and that by Goddis bloude yf he were so, he were well served” (CW 1:300). 41 Compare Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 130; Greene, Light in Troy, pp. 254–56; Stamatakis, Turning the Word, pp. 162–63; and Solomon, “Representations of Lyric Intimacy,” p. 679. 42 See CW 1:138; compare Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, p. 317. 43 Philibert de Vienne, The philosopher of the court, tr. George North, STC 19832 (London, 1575), p. 59. 44 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 54; see too pp. 50–60. 45 Thomas Elyot, Pasquyll the Playne, STC 7673 (London, 1540), sig. C.ir. 46 Ibid., sig. C.iv. 47 Ibid. 48 Castiglione, The Courtier, p. 137. 49 Ibid., p. 277. 50 Ibid., p. 268. 51 Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 46. 52 Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 216 and 237, respectively; see too pp. 207–12. 53 Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 91; compare Powell, “For Caesar’s I am,” p. 426, and Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 313–14. 54 See Étienne Dolet, De Officio legati (Lyons, 1541), book one (p. 18): “Naturam, ingeniumque eorum, apud quos agit, sedulo perspiciat.” 55 See Merriman (ed.), Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2:92, 2:105, and 2:116. For discussion of the instructions Wyatt received from Cromwell, see Jon Robinson, “My King, My Country, Alone for Whom I Live: The Pragmatic Imperatives of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Verse,” Literature Compass, 3.6 (2006), 1278–96 (1290–91), Stamatakis, Turning the Word, pp. 119–23, and Powell, “For Caesar’s I am,” pp. 420–23. 56 For the plot to capture Branceter, see especially Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 501–9.

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Notes to pages 184–86

57 Compare Brady, Poetry and Bondage, pp. 44–45. 58 For these quotations see respectively William T. Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), p. 95, and Christopher Z. Hobson, “Country Mouse and Towny Mouse: Truth in Wyatt,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 39.3 (1997), 230–58 (233). 59 For an overview, see, e.g., Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 154–57, and Stamatakis, Turning the Word, pp. 158–61. 60 See, e.g., CP 7.3 and 8.47 (vain or weary travail), 5.6 and 6.2 (cruelty and disdain or doubleness), 9.3 and 26.11 (hating oneself), 9.9 and 12.1 (amorous faith), and 13.13 and 16.7 (misspent time). 61 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, The Complete Poems, ed. William McGaw (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 1.4 (cf. Wyatt, CP 5.1); 8.28 (cf. CP 10.12); 39.34 (cf. CP 66.16–17); and 14.6 (cf. CP 108.8 and 108.42). For the echoes in Tottel, see Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and others, ed. Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (London: Penguin, 2012), no. 200.1–8 (cf. Wyatt, CP 140.1–8); no. 202.13–14 (cf. CP 2.1); no. 214.4–7 (cf. CP 178.5–8); no. 220.8 (cf. CP 37.2); no. 247.19–20 (cf. CP 13.14); and no. 255.8 (cf. CP 45.6). 62 Roger Ascham, Toxophilus the schole of shooting contayned in tvvo bookes, STC 837 (London, 1545), “To all gentle men and yomen of England,” sig. av. In the prologue to the Quyete of Mynde, Wyatt seems to concur with this view (see CW 1:17). 63 For the social forces that may have shaped this choice, see again Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 225–30. 64 Wyatt’s acquaintance with Italian literature has received much comment; for discussion, see especially Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 179–200, and Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 45–80. 65 Petrarch, for example, claims to read some writers “for their style [in verborum], and others “for their content [in rerum],” while Machaut suggests that the “maniere” of a poem can bring pleasure, even if its “matiere” is unpleasant. See Petrarch, Le Familiari, ed. Umberto Bosco, 4 vols. (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1933–42), 22.10 (4:128), and Guillaume de Machaut, “Prologue,” in R. B. Palmer (ed. and tr.), The Fountain of Love and Two Other Love Vision Poems (London: Routledge, 1993), §5 (ll. 157–62). 66 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, in Carlo Dionisotti (ed.), Prose e rime di Pietro Bembo (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1966), 2.20 (p. 176–77); compare his remarks on the style of Boccaccio at 2.19 (p. 175). 67 See Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 262–74. 68 Erasmus, The Ciceronian, tr. Betty I. Knott, CWE, 28, pp. 323–448 (p. 383); cf. Pierre Mesnard (ed.), Dialogus Ciceronianus, OODE, I-2, pp. 659–710 (p. 636).

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Notes to pages 186–91

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69 Thomson, Wyatt and his Background, p. 166; see too pp. 191–93. Compare Rudolf Gottfried, “Sir Thomas Wyatt and Pietro Bembo,” Notes and Queries, 199.1 (1954), 278–80. 70 Theo Stemmler (ed.), Die Liebesbriefe Heinrichs VIII an Anna Boleyn (Zürich: Belser Verlag, 1988), no. 3 (p. 92). 71 Ibid., no. 5 (p. 100). 72 Ibid., no. 6 (p. 104). 73 Ibid., no. 8 (p. 112). 74 Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 89; see too pp. 95–103, and compare Linda Grant, Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of SixteenthCentury Love Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 81–86. 75 For the text of Henry’s poem, see John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 403. 76 See Pascual de Gayangos, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Spain, vol. 5, part two (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1888), item no. 55 (dated 19 May, Eustace Chapuys to Charles V), p. 128. The ambassador’s exact words were as follows: “cestoit certaines balades que le dict roy a composé, des quelles la putain et son frere, comme de chose inepte [et] gouffe se gaudissoient, que leur fut objecte pour grand et grief cryme.” For discussion, see Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, 34–35, 34n55, and 287–88. 77 For the importance of this idea for the language of diplomacy, see note 53 above. 78 John Kerrigan, “Wyatt’s Selfish Style,” Essays and Studies, 34 (1981), 1–18 (7). 79 See Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 547–49. 80 Compare Pietro Aretino, I Sette Salmi de la Penitentia di David (Venice, 1539), fol. 30v; for Wyatt’s manipulation of this source, Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad, pp. 168–90. 81 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998), p. 171. 82 Donald M. Friedman, “Wyatt and the Ambiguities of Fancy,” JEGP, 67.1 (1968), 32–48 (38). 83 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 48. Aretino also uses grazia in this sense; for discussion, see again Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad, pp. 170–74 and 188–89. 84 For two recent discussions of Wyatt’s religious views, see Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, pp. 360–63, and compare Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad, pp. 158–60. 85 Castiglione, The Courtier, tr. Hoby, p. 56. 86 For discussion, see especially Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, pp. 93–95, and Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, pp. 31–33. 87 Castilgione, The Courtier, tr. Hoby, p. 59. 88 Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 340. 89 Thomas Elyot, The boke named the gouernour, STC 7635 (London, 1531), 1.8 (fol. 25v).

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278

Notes to pages 191–95

90 Barnabe Googe, “An Epitaph of Master Thomas Phaer,” ll. 13–16 (p. 82), in Judith M. Kennedy (ed.), Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (University of Toronto Press, 1989). 91 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2.3 (p. 159). 92 Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique for the vse of all suche as are studious of eloquence, STC 25799 (London, 1553), book three, “Of Pronunciation” (fol. 118v). 93 Henry Peacham, The garden of eloquence, STC 19498 (London, 1593), p. 40. 94 Gascoigne, “Certayne Notes of Instruction,” in G. W. Pigman (ed.), A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford University Press, 2001), section 8 (p. 458). 95 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 3.10 (p. 243). For figures that both amplify grace and contribute to its lack, compare 3.19 with 3.22. 96 Ibid., 3.23 (p. 347). 97 For the “grace” of Wyatt’s lady, see, e.g., CP 97.11–14. For God’s “grace,” see, e.g., CP 108.750–58. For the “grace” of good counsel, see, e.g., CP 107.7–10. For the “grace” of nature, see, e.g., CP 68.1–4. For the “grace” of “diuersyte” of “tong,” see Wyatt’s “Prologue” to the Quyete of Mynde (CW 1:17). 98 Castiglione, The Courtier, p. 57. 99 See, e.g., Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 3.1 (p. 222), 3.10 (p. 243), and 3.23 (p. 349). 100 See note 85 above. 101 Geoffrey Chaucer, “To Rosemounde,” ed. R. T. Lenaghan, in Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, lines 17–18. 102 Compare Nancy S. Leonard, “The Speaker in Wyatt’s Lyric Poetry,” HLQ, 41.1 (1977), 1–18 (8). 103 For Wyatt’s proverbs, see especially Elizabeth Heale, “‘An owl in a sack troubles no man’: proverbs, plainness, and Wyatt,” Renaissance Studies, 11.4 (1997), 420–33, and Diane Ross, “Sir Thomas Wyatt: Proverbs and the Poetics of Scorn,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 18.2 (1987), 201–12. 104 For these proverbs, see Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), S87 (p. 584) and S184 (p. 590); cf. Muir and Thomson, eds., Collected Poems, p. 280, for discussion. 105 Compare Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs, G330: “Longer lives a good fellow than a dear year” (p. 269). 106 Dolven, “Reading Wyatt for the Style,” p. 84. 107 Heale, “Proverbs, Plainness, and Wyatt,” p. 431. 108 For Wyatt’s commonplaces, see the discussion and notes above. For Wyatt’s preference for the subjunctive and the conditional modes, see especially Stamatakis, Turning the Word, pp. 202–5; Skura, Tudor Autobiography, pp. 43–44; and Cathy Shrank, “‘But I, that knew what harbred in that hed’: Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Posthumous ‘Interpreters’,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 154 (2008), 375–401 (394–96). 109 Wyatt does not define “strangeness” outright, but it is a term common in the idiom of the court, one that typically refers to a cold, distant, and impersonal

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Notes to pages 195–99

110 111

112

113 114 115

116

117

118 119

120 121 122 123

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affect; compare, for instance, Henry VIII’s first letter of instructions to Wyatt (CW 1:88). For further discussion of the term, see Grant, Latin Erotic Elegy and Sixteenth-Century Poetry, pp. 80–81. Gordon Braden, “Wyatt and Petrarch: Italian Fashion at the Court of Henry VIII,” Annali d’Italianistica, 22 (2004), 237–65 (257). For an account of the temporal dynamics of this poem, see especially David Matthew Rosen, “Time, Identity, and Context in Wyatt’s Verse,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 21.1 (1981), 5–20 (12–14), and Albert Gerard, “Wyatt’s ‘They Fle From Me’,” Essays in Criticism, 11.3 (1961), 359–65 (360–62). No. 74 in Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (eds.), Middle English Lyrics (New York: Norton, 1974), lines 10–13 (pp. 72–73). Here, the refrain – “Women, women, love of women / Maketh bare purses with sum men” – makes the misogyny of the poem clear enough. For discussion, see R. L. Greene, “Wyatt’s ‘They Fle From Me’ and the Busily Seeking Critics,” Bucknell Review, 12.3 (1964), 17–30 (22), and Dennis Kay, “Wyatt and Chaucer: ‘They Fle From Me’ Revisited,” HLQ, 47.3 (1984), 211–25 (214). See Grant, Latin Erotic Elegy and Sixteenth-Century Poetry, pp. 79–83. For discussion of the poem’s Chaucerian echoes generally and the allusion to the Squire’s Tale in particular, see again Kay, “Wyatt and Chaucer.” For Palamon’s “dredful foot,” see Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Larry D. Benson, with Robert A. Pratt, in Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 1.1479. For Arcite’s disdain for his “dere hert,” see Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, ed. Vincent J. DiMarco, in Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, lines 199–200. For the compound idiom of the adverb “bisily” with the verb “seke,” see, e.g., Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.452. See Ballade no. 38 in Mary-Jo Arn (ed.), Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans English Book of Love (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994): “They flee fro me. They dar not onys abide!” (line 1347; p. 185). For discussion, see especially Leonard E. Nathan, “Tradition and Newfangleness in Wyatt’s ‘They Fle From Me’,” ELH, 32.1 (1965), 1–16 (3–4). See e.g., John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck and tr. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2004–13), 4.1177 (“hir fingres longe and smale”), and no. 46 in Hoffman and Luria (eds.), Middle English Lyrics, line 5 (p. 48): “Her feingeres bith long and small.” Compare Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs, D586 (p. 172). “Lait lait on sleip as I wes laid,” lines 25–27, in W. Tod Ritchie (ed.), The Bannatyne Manuscript, vol. 3, Scottish Text Society, new series 26 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1934), pp. 308–9. For this identification, see Braden, “Wyatt and Petrarch,” pp. 259–60. See note 6 and the discussion above. For discussion, see especially Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 44–108. See, e.g., Greene, “Wyatt’s ‘They Fle from Me’ and the Critics,” pp. 28–30. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 4.1406.

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280

Notes to pages 199–203

124 See Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt, pp. 94–108, for puns upon “dere” and “herte” in this poem. 125 Shrank, “Wyatt’s Interpreters,” p. 394; compare Leonard, “The Speaker in Wyatt’s Lyric Poetry,” p. 2. 126 As Greenblatt quips, “Dear heart, what did you expect?” See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 151. 127 Alastair Fowler, Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems (Edinburgh University Press, 1975), p. 13. Braden likewise observes that, if the relationship is over, its end is “an agreement to which the speaker acceded without really assenting or even understanding”; see Braden, “Wyatt and Petrarch,” p. 262. 128 For this claim, see, e.g., Leigh Winser, “The Question of Love Tradition in Wyatt’s ‘They Flee From Me’,” Essays in Literature, 2.1 (1975), 3–9 (6–7). In the Devonshire manuscript, the final line reads, “what think you bye this yt she hat deserued,” while Tottel has the following: “How like you this, what hath she now deserved?” For a transcription and discussion of the Devonshire text, see Jason Powell, “Editing Wyatts: Reassessing the Textual State of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry,” Poetica, 71 (2009), 93–104 (98–100); for transcriptions of both Devonshire and Tottel and a discussion of their relation to the Egerton text, see Solomon, “Representations of Lyric Intimacy,” p. 670 and passim. 129 For the possibility that Wyatt is posing this question to his lover, see Barbara Estrin, “Becoming The Other/The Other Becoming in Wyatt’s Poetry,” ELH, 51.3 (1984), 431–45 (438–40). 130 Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, p. 428. 131 “Wyat resteth here, that quicke coulde never rest,” no. 32 in McGaw (ed.), The Complete Poems, pp. 42–43. Subsequent references to Surrey’s poem will be given parenthetically in the text. 132 See, e.g., Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 1–7, and compare 92–105. 133 For “strangeness,” see George Gascoigne, “Gascoignes passion,” in Pigman (ed.) A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, lines 7–10 (p. 268); for speech that speaks silently, see Thomas Vaux, “Of a contented mynde,” in The Paradyse of daynty deuises, STC 7516 (London, 1576), ll. 10–12 (p. 80); and for “grimmer grace,” see George Turberville, “A Vow to serue faithfully,” in Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, STC 24326 (London, 1567), lines 15–18 (p. 75v). 134 Edward Dyer, “I would it were not as it is,” in Ralph M. Sargent (ed.), The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), lines 1–6 (p. 180). 135 Gordon Teskey, “Literature,” in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 380. 136 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 154; Kerrigan, “Wyatt’s Selfish Style,” p. 8. For the carceral context of the lyric, see Brady, Poetry and Bondage, pp. 43–44.

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Notes to pages 204–207

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Epilogue 1 Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in William A. Ringler (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 165. 2 Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds.), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 99. 3 For the “drab” and “golden” ages of poetry, see C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 64–65. 4 Theodore Spencer, “The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney,” ELH, 12.4 (1945), 251–78 (268). For a recent version of the same idea, see, e.g., Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 34–35. 5 The debt was obvious to Sidney’s contemporaries. John Harington, for example, claims to follow Walter Ralegh in calling Sidney “our English Petrarke” shortly after he had died; see John Harington (tr.), Orlando furioso in English heroical verse, STC 746 (London, 1591), p. 126. 6 Compare Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 28–53. 7 For the biographical context and Sidney’s coterie audience, see especially Arthur A. Marotti, “Love is not Love: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH, 49.2 (1982), 396–428 (400–6). 8 The twenty-fourth sonnet of the sequence, for example, puns upon the name of Sir Robert Rich, Sidney’s romantic rival. See Ringler (ed.), Poems of Philip Sidney, pp. 176–77, and compare A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 81–86. 9 See Alex Davis, “Revolution by Degrees: Sidney and Gradatio,” Modern Philology, 108.4 (2011), 488–506. 10 See Ringler, ed., Poems of Philip Sidney, p. 459, and compare Joachim du Bellay, The Regrets, ed. and tr. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), no. 4 (pp. 54–55). 11 Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 28–29. 12 See Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 112, for his elliptical comments on the need for poets to practice “art, imitation, and exercise,” and compare pp. 111–17. 13 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1.1 (pp. 93–94). Subsequent references to Puttenham will be given parenthetically. 14 Compare Sidney, Defence of Poetry, pp. 82–91, who likewise takes pains to distinguish poets from historians and philosophers. 15 Naturally, this field would lie beyond the reach of economic and political power only in conceit. Compare Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 61–67.

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Notes to pages 208–209

16 Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 91; Paul Alpers, “Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” Representations, 12 (1985), 83–100 (95). 17 Giovanni Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, tr. Charles G. Osgood (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 14.7 (p. 39). 18 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 11. 19 See Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 24–43. 20 Ibid., p. 29; compare Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 95. 21 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 3.25 (p. 382) and 1.1 (pp. 93). 22 For the relation of these attitudes to the rise of aesthetic theory, see, e.g., Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, especially pp. 112–14. For their relation to rise of the author, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), especially pp. 55–100. 23 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 5.

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Index

Accessus ad auctores, 4, See also Conrad of Hirsau Adorno, Theodor, 179 Alan of Lille, 148 Alexander of Hales, 67–68, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Allen, Judson Boyce, 61 Alpers, Paul, 180 Anonimalle Chronicle, 45–46 Appleford, Amy, 90 Arendt, Hannah, 28 Aristotle, 4, 6, 60, 162, See also Scholasticism and the four causes, 4 and hylomorphism, 3–4, 6–7 artes poetriae, 8–9, 85, 99, 114–15, 118–19, 121–24, 126, See also rhetoric, history of Ascham, Roger, 185 Astell, Ann, 45 Auden, W. H., 170 Augustine of Hippo, 16, 61 authorship, theories of. See also making, theories of contrasted with making, 3, 9–10 Elizabethan, 12–13, 207 and invention, 204–206 and the reception of court poetry, 13 Scholastic, 1–2 Ayenbite of Inwit, 59, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Ayers, Robert, 137

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 20–21, 125 De casibus virorum illustrium, 38, 124–25, See also Laurent de Premierfait, Lydgate, John Decameron, 20–21 Boethius, 5, 25 De consolatione Philosophiae, 5, 20, 25 Bokenham, Osbern, 123, 124 Legendys of Hooly Wummen, 123 Boleyn, Anne, 179, 181, 186, 187 Boleyn, George, 187 Bonaventure, 1, See also Scholasticism Bose, Mishtooni, 163 Bourdieu, Pierre, 12 Branceter, Robert, 183 Brinton, Thomas, 54–55, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Bryan, Francis, 182, 193, 203 Bullein, William, 171 Buridan, John, 168 Burrow, J. A., 37, 78, 97 Butterfield, Ardis, 127 Cannon, Christopher, 34 Capgrave, John, 120, 123 Life of Saint Katherine, 120 Carlin, Martha, 58 Carlson, David, 146 Carruthers, Mary, 3 Castiglione, Baldassare, 178, 182, 191 The Courtier, 178, 182, 191–92 and sprezzatura, 190–92 Catullus, 198 Cave, Terence, 143 Cavendish, George, 172 Charles, duc d’Orléans, 198 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 178, 183–84 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2, 4–6, 10, 13, 15–51, 58, 68, 95–96, 99, 101–102, 111, 123, 126, 128, 175, 192, 198 and aesthetic autonomy, 19, 27–29, 40

Bacon, Roger, 60, 89 Bahr, Arthur, 36 Barclay, Alexander, 154, 166, 169–70 Barrington, Candace, 80 Bartlett, Robyn, 89 Bates, Catherine, 206 Bembo, Pietro, 185, 187 Prose della volgar lingua, 185–86, See also rhetoric, history of Benjamin, Walter, 8, 137 Beowulf, 20

318

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Index Anelida and Arcite, 198 and authorship, 2, 50 Boece, 5, 25, See also Boethius Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 22 Canterbury Tales, 18–19, 27–48, 98 Clerk’s Tale, 22–24, 28, 96 Franklin’s Tale, 28 General Prologue, 15–16, 26–29 House of Fame, 10, 24, 149 Knight’s Tale, 28, 111, 112, 198 “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” 22–23, 175 legal bonds and oaths, 22–24, 28–29, See also law in England, history of Legend of Good Women, 4, 17–18, 123, 126 and making, 15–18, 26–28 Man of Law’s Tale, 28, 99 Manciple’s Tale, 48–50 and matter, 15–18, 26–28 and medieval sermons, 31–34 Merchant’s Tale, 28 Miller’s Tale, 28–30 Monk’s Tale, 37–40 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 40–48 Pardoner’s Tale, 31–34 Physician’s Tale, 22 Prioress’s Tale, 34–35 Reeve’s Tale, 30 and the Ricardian court, 17–18, 49–50 “To Rosemounde,” 192 and the Rising of 1381, 44–47 Shipman’s Tale, 35 Squire’s Tale, 198 Summoner’s Tale, 5 Tale of Melibee, 36 Tale of Sir Thopas, 35–36 Troilus and Criseyde, 10, 24–26, 68, 176, 199 Cicero, 186 Clanchy, Michael, 23 Conrad of Hirsau, 4, 7, See also Accessus ad auctores Cooper, Helen, 66, 194 Copeland, Rita, 8–9, 57, 67, 121 Cormack, Bradin, 179 Cortesi, Paulo, 148, See also rhetoric, history of Crane, Mary Thomas, 142 Crewe, Jonathan, 179 Cromwell, Thomas, 178, 179, 181, 183 diplomatic instructions to Thomas Wyatt, 183 Cummings, Brian, 190 Daileader, Celia, 156 Dante, 2, 20–21 Vita nova, 20, 21 David (Old Testament Figure), 68, 107, 153–54, 160, 188–90, 192 David, Alfred, 36

319

Davis, Isabel, 90 Derrida, Jacques, 71 Deschamps, Eustache, 2, 10, 127 L’Art de dictier, 10, See also making, theories of devotional literature, 89–91, 140–42 and the Holy Name, 58, 90–91 and the missa pro defunctis, 90, 155, 163–64 and penitential lyric, 89–90 and the signs of death, 140–42 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 24 Diodorus Siculus, 150, See also Skelton, John, history writing, theories of Distinctiones monasticae, 62, 65–66, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Dolet, Étienne, 183 Dolven, Jeff, 194 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 48 Douglas, Gavin, 140 Duffy, Eamon, 90 Dyer, Edward, 202 Edwards, H. L. R., 146 Edwards, Robert, 2 Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, 130 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 12, 205, 207 effects on literary culture, 11–13, 207–208, See also authorship, theories of Elton, G. R., 180 Elyot, Thomas, 182, 191, See also rhetoric, history of Ensley, Mimi, 119 Erasmus, Desiderius, 17, 140, 142, 165, 166, 170–71, 185–86, See also rhetoric, history of The Ciceronian, 166, 186 Colloquies, 170–71 De copia, 140, 142 Lingua, 170–71 exegesis and exegetical tools and the artes praedicandi, 160–61 and the distinctio, 62–63, 65–66 and the exemplum, 63–64 and the figura, 61–62, 65–66 and manuals of penance, 59 and the microcosm, 60–61 and the modus orativus, 67–68 Ferguson, Margaret, 6 Fish, Stanley, 146, 150, 151 Fisher, John, 58 Fowler, Alastair, 200 Fowler, Elizabeth, 162 Francis I, King of France, 178, 183 Friedman, Donald, 177 Froissart, Jean, 45–46 Fyler, John, 24

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320

Index

Galloway, Andrew, 55 Garnesche, Christopher, 146–47, See also Skelton, John Gascoigne, George, 192 Gaston, Kara, 3, 38 Gaylord, Alan T., 34 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 4, 44, 85, 118, 124, 164, See also artes poetriae Gervase of Canterbury, 120 Gesta romanorum, 96, See also Hoccleve, Thomas Giles of Rome, 5, 63 Gillespie, Vincent, 145, 153 Googe, George, 191 Gower, John, 13, 20–21, 45, 51–82, 89, 95–96, 99, 123–24, 126–27, 198, 208 “Ad mundum mitto,” 52 and authorship, 53, 56–57 Confessio Amantis, 20–21, 53, 55–56, 63–64, 67–82, 89, 98, 99, 123 Cronica tripertita, 56, 72–73 and exegesis, 59–68, See also exegesis and exegetical tools and making, 76–77, 81–82 and manuals of penance, 59 and matter, 56–57, 76–77 and medieval preaching, 53 and the microcosm, 59–61 Mirour de l’omme, 58, 59–63, 65 political views, 56, 81 “Prayer for England,” 77–79 and the Rising of 1381, 45–47 and St. Mary Overie priory, 55, 57–61 “Tale of Canacee,” 71 “Tale of Constantine and Sylvester,” 70 “Tale of Demetrius and Perseus,” 64 “Tale of Dives and Lazarus,” 64 “Tale of Florent,” 69–70 “Tale of Iphis and Araxarathen,” 71 “Tale of Jason and Medea,” 73 “Tale of Julius and the Poor Knight,” 64 “Tale of Lucrece,” 71, 76 “Tale of Mundus and Paulina,” 69 “Tale of Nebuchadnezzar,” 70 “Tale of Orestes,” 66–67 “Tale of Philomela,” 71–77 “Tale of Phyllis and Demophon,” 71 In Praise of Peace, 79–80 “Tale of Spertachus and Thameris,” 64 “Tale of the Courtiers and the Fool,” 69–70 “Tale of the King and the Steward’s Wife,” 73 “Tale of Theseus and Ariadne,” 73 “Tale of Virgil’s Mirror,” 73 “Tale of Virginia,” 76

Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz, 127 views on Henry IV, 80–81 Visio Anglie, 45–47, 81 Vox Clamantis, 53, 57, 62–65, 77 Grady, Frank, 79 Green, Richard Firth, 22 Greenblatt, Stephen, 175 Greene, Roland, 11 Gregory the Great, 60 Griffiths, Jane, 152 Guido delle Colonne, 120, See also Lydgate, John Guillaume de Machaut, 126, 185 Halpern, Richard, 143 Hannen, Thomas, 174 Harvey, Gabriel, 171 Heiserman, A. R., 139 Henry Beaufort, Cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England, 116, 130, 132, 138 Henry I, King of England, 132 Henry IV, King of England, 79, 131 relations with parliament, 79–80 Henry of Huntingdon, 120 Henry V, King of England, 95, 108, 131 Henry VIII, King of England, 144, 178, 180–81, 183–84, 186–87 diplomatic instructions to Thomas Wyatt, 183 as a poet and courtly lover, 186–87 Higden, Ranulph, 120, 125, 161 Ars componendi sermones, 160–61, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Polychronicon, 120–22, See also history writing, theories of history writing, theories of and Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis, 117–18, 120 and monastic historiography, 37–38, 114–15 and rhetoric, 118–22, See also Lydgate, John and the Rising of 1381, 44–47 Hoccleve, Thomas, 11, 13–14, 51, 58, 68, 81–110, 124 and devotional literature, 89–91, See also devotional literature Dialogue, 84–85, 91, 97–98, 101–102, 104, 107, 177 Formulary, 86–88, 91–92 and illness, 83–84, 104–108 La male regle, 89 Learn to Die, 98–101, 103–104 and legal complaint, 85–86, 91–94, See also law in England, history of L’Epistre de Cupide, 101–102 and making, 83–86

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Index and matter, 84–85, 95–96 My Complaint, 68–69, 83, 90, 97–98, 102, 104–108, 110 Regiment of Princes, 85, 91, 93–96, 100, 104, 108 and the Privy Seal, 86–87, See also law in England, history of relation to Chaucer and Gower, 95–96 Series, 83–86, 94, 96–110 Tale of Jonathas, 98–104 Tale of the Roman Empress, 98–104 Homer, 117–18 Honorius of Autun, 60, See also Gower, John Horace, 121, 148 Ars poetica, 121 Horman, William, 149, See also Skelton, John Howard, Henry, the Earl of Surrey, 185, 201 “Wyat resteth here, that quicke coulde never rest,” 201–202 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, 84, 113, 116–17, 130, 132, 136–38, See also Lydgate, John Hystoire de Thebes, 111–12 Idley, Peter, 123 Isidore of Seville, 96, 146 Etymologies, 146 Liber synonymorum, 96–97, 106, See also Hoccleve, Thomas Jameson, Fredric, 14 Javitch, Daniel, 183 Jean de Meun, 16, 20–21 Li Livres de confort de Philosophie, 20, See also Boethius Roman de la rose, 20–21, 38 Jeanneret, Michel, 143 Joachim du Bellay, 206 Job (Old Testament Figure), 107 John of Bromyard, 60–61, See also exegesis and exegetical tools John of Garland, 126, 160–61, See also artes poetriae John of Salisbury, 133 John, duke of Bedford, 116, 131, 132 Johnson, Eleanor, 35, 90 Jonson, Ben, 9, 148 Discoveries, 9, 148, See also making, theories of Josephus, Titus Flavius, 134, 135 De bello Judaico, 132–36 Justice, Steven, 14, 45 Juvenal, 144 Kerrigan, John, 188, 203 Knapp, Ethan, 86, 105 Knighton, Henry, 46

321

Knox, Philip, 127 Kraebel, Andrew, 68 Landino, Cristoforo, 148, See also rhetoric, history of Langdell, Sebastian, 96 Langland, William, 155 Piers Plowman, 69 Laurent de Premierfait, 125, 134 Bocace des nobles maleureux, 124–25, 132–36, See also Lydgate, John, Boccaccio, Giovanni law in England, history of bonds, oaths, and contracts, 22–24, See also Chaucer, Geoffrey and Chancery, 94 and coin-clipping, 97–98 and legal complaint, 92–93, See also Hoccleve, Thomas and legal documents, 86–88, 91–94 and the Treasons Act of 1534, 180–81 Lawton, David, 127 Lazzarini, Isabella, 183 Lerer, Seth, 186 Lewis, C. S., 51, 72, 155, 205 Liber de modis significandi, 149, See also Scholasticism Livy, 114, 128 Ab urbe condita, 114, See also history writing, theories of London Letter Book H, 46 Lydgate, John, 9, 10, 13–14, 20, 51, 71, 81, 82, 108–10, 111–38, 208 and the artes poetriae, 114–15, 118–19, 122–24, See also rhetoric, history of, artes poetriae Danse machabré, 108–10, 113–14 Fall of Princes, 9, 10, 71, 112–17, 123–36 and the formes fixes, 126–27, See also making, theories of and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, 115–17, 130–32, See also Humphrey, duke of Gloucester Life of St. Edmund, 115 and making, 114–15, 122–24 and matter, 115, 122–24 Siege of Thebes, 111–12, 135, 137 “Tale of Adam and Eve,” 131 “Tale of Athaliah,” 131 “Tale of Cadmus,” 117 “Tale of Caesar and Pompey,” 135 “Tale of Cleopatra II, Queen of Egypt,” 128 “Tale of Cyrus the Younger,” 132 “Tale of Dido,” 125–26 “Tale of Emperor Valerian of Rome,” 131

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322

Index

Lydgate, John (cont.) “Tale of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor,” 129 “Tale of Hannibal,” 129 “Tale of King Aribertus,” 131 “Tale of King Arthur,” 127–28, 135 “Tale of Mithridates of Pontus,” 117 “Tale of Nero,” 128 “Tale of Oedipus,” 127 “Tale of Pasiphae,” 129 “Tale of Phaedra,” 129 “Tale of Polynices and Eteocles,” 131 “Tale of Pope Joan,” 112 “Tale of Rehoboam, King of Israel,” 129 “Tale of Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy,” 132 “Tale of Romulus and Remus,” 131–32 “Tale of Rosamund,” 128 “Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem,” 132–36 “Tale of the Golden World,” 132–36 “Triumphal Entry of Henry VI into London,” 130 Troy Book, 20, 112–14, 117–19, 123–24, 136–37 views on history, 113–14, 132, 137–38, See also history writing, theories of making, theories of. See also authorship, theories of and authorship, 2–3, 9–10, 204–209 definitions and accounts, 2–3, 7–8 and the forma tractandi, 5–6 and French poetry, 3, 7 premodern discussions of, 7–10 and rhetoric, 3, 8–9 Mann, Jill, 30, 42 Marie de France, 128 Mason, H. A., 175, 199 matter, theories of definitions and accounts, 2–4, 206–207, See also Aristotle in premodern literary culture, 3–7 role in premodern rhetoric, 8–9 Matthew of Linköping, 147 Matthew of Vendôme, 9, 99, 122–23, See also artes poetriae McTaggart, Anne, 32 Merie Tales of Skelton, 145–47 Meyer-Lee, Robert J., 13, 29, 78, 81, 110, 118 Minnis, Alastair, 2, 16, 53 Mitchell, J. Allan, 77 More, Thomas, 181 Mum and the Sothsegger, 69, 80 Muscatine, Charles, 17, 40, 48 Nelson, William, 143 Ngai, Sianne, 208

Nolan, Maura, 71, 120, 125 Nuttall, Jenni, 127 Oosterwijk, Sophie, 109 Orlemanski, Julie, 84 Otto of Freising, 119 Ovid, 72, 74, 121, 150, 198 Metamorphoses, 75–76, 150, 156–57 Owst, G. R., 61 Patterson, Annabel, 208 Patterson, Lee, 35, 36, 84 Peacham, Henry, 191–92 Pearsall, Derek, 48, 52, 72, 80, 115, 116 Peraldus, William, 59, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Perry, R. D., 132 Peter Lombard, 7, See also Scholasticism Peter of Spain, 25, 151–52, See also Scholasticism Peterson, Douglas, 175 Petrarch, Francesco, 8, 24, 160, 185, 205 Historia Griseldis, 23–24, See also Chaucer, Geoffrey Philibert de Vienne, 182 Piers the Plowman’s Creed, 69 Plato, 16, 20 Poliziano, Angelo, 148, See also rhetoric, history of Polydore Vergil, 172 Powell, Jason, 178 Priscian, 43 Puttenham, George, 11, 171, 191–92, 206–208 Art of English Poesy, 11, 171, 191–92, 206–207, See also making, theories of Rancière, Jacques, 173 Renoir, Alain, 128 rhetoric, history of. See also artes poetriae and Ciceronianism, 143, 186 and copia, 140–43 and decorum, 15–16, 150–51 and enargeia, 140, 142, 154 and epideixis, 99–100 and historiography, 118–22 and imitatio, 140, 143, 147–48, 185–86 and making, 8–9 Richard I, King of England, 44 Richard II, King of England, 17, 56, 72, 81, 131 Richard the Redeless, 20, 56 Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, 132 Robert of Basevorn, 147, 161, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Robertson, D. W., 43, 48 Robertson, Kellie, 4

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Index Rolle, Richard, 91 English Psalter, 91, See also devotional literature Roman de Edippus, 111–12 Root, Robert, 38 Rosier-Catach, Irène, 149 Salisbury, Eve, 57 Samuel (Old Testament Figure), 168–69 Saunders, Corinne, 72 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 143 Scanlon, Larry, 124 Scattergood, John, 155, 162 Schibanoff, Susan, 156 Scholasticism. See also Aristotle and nominalism, 21 and speculative grammar, 149–50 and supposition theory, 25, 149–52, 168, See also Peter of Spain and the virtus sermonis, 89 res and verba, 16 Scrope, Jane, 155, 165, 169–70, 173, See also Skelton, John Shakespeare, William, 5, 6, 11, 144 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 11 Hamlet, 5, 6 Shrank, Cathy, 199 Sidney, Philip, 9, 11, 204–206, 208–209 Astrophil and Stella, 204–206 Defence of Poetry, 9, 11–12, 206, 208, See also making, theories of and Penelope Devereux, 205 Simon, Joan, 191 Simpson, James, 66, 86, 97, 117, 131, 203 Skelton, John, 13, 14, 128, 139–73 “Against Garnesche,” 146–47, 170 and authorship, 144–45 Bowge of Court, 152 Colyn Clout, 152, 160 and dissent, 143–45, 171–73 Elinour Rummyng, 161–62, 170 Garland of Laurel, 145, 160 and the “Grammarians’ War,” 149–50 and making, 144–45 and matter, 142–43, 171–72 Phyllyp Sparowe, 154–70 and possible sources of Skeltonics, 139, 160–63 A Replycacyon, 145, 152–54, 160, 169 and satire, 146–47, 169–70 and the Signs of Death, 140–42, See also devotional literature “Uppon a Deedmans Hed,” 139–42 and the Witch of Endor, 167–69 influence on later poets, 171

323

Speke, Parott, 143, 148–52, 170 Translation of Diodorus Siculus, Biblioteca historica, 150, See also Diodorus Siculus views on imitatio, 148–52, See also rhetoric, history of Ware the Hawke, 160 Why Come Ye Nat To Courte?, 172–73 Smith, D. Vance, 32, 107 Sobecki, Sebastian, 144 Somme le roi, 59, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Spearing, A. C., 178 Spenser, Edmund, 4, 171, 208, 209 Faerie Queene, 4, 171 Stamatakis, Chris, 179 Statius, 117 Thebaid, 112, 117 Strakhov, Elizaveta, 127 Strode, Ralph, 22, See also Chaucer, Geoffrey Strohm, Paul, 43, 116, 117 Strub, Spencer, 90 Suso, Henry, 96, See also Hoccleve, Thomas Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 172 The Simonie, 69 The Song of the Husbandman, 69 The Worcester Sermons, 31, 33, See also Chaucer, Geoffrey Thomas Waleys, 161, See also exegesis and exegetical tools Thomson, Patricia, 186 Thornley, Eva, 89 Tottel’s Miscellany, 185 Travis, Peter, 47 Trevisa, John, 120, See also Giles of Rome, Higden, Ranulph Trigg, Stephanie, 50 Turner, Marion, 27 Usk, Adam, 46 Vida, Marco Girolamo, 148, See also rhetoric, history of Virgil, 128, 191 Walker, Greg, 201 Wallace, David, 18 Walsingham, Thomas, 45–47, 56, 72–73, 121, See also history writing, theories of Walter of England, 48 Walton, John, 123 Watt, David, 102 Westminster Chronicle, 46 Whigham, Frank, 182 Whittington, Robert, 149, See also Skelton, John

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324

Index

William of Auvergne, 63 William of Malmesbury, 120, 137, See also history writing, theories of Williams, Raymond, 10 Wilson, Thomas, 191, See also rhetoric, history of Winstead, Karen, 131 Wolfe, Jessica, 183 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England, 144, 172–73 Woolf, Virginia, 177 Wyatt, Thomas, 13–14, 174–203 and aesthetic autonomy, 179–80, 202–203 “A face that shuld content me wonders well,” 187–88 “Bicause I have the still kept fro lyes and blame,” 195 “Blame not my lute, for he must sownd,” 195 career as an ambassador, 178, 182–84 Defence, 184 “Deme as ye list vpon goode cause,” 194 diplomatic writings, 183–84 “Fforget not yet the tryde entent,” 195–97 “Goo burnyng sighes vnto the frosen hert,” 176, 193–94 and the habitus, 176 influence on later poets, 201–203 letters to his son, 190

“The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar,” 193 and making, 176–77, 199–200 and matter, 174–76, 197–99 “My galley charged with forgetfulness,” 8 “My hert I gave the not to do it payn,” 193 Penitential Psalms, 177, 188–90, 192 “The piller pearisht is whearto I Lent,” 179 “Stond who so list vpon the Slipper toppe,” 181–82 “Syghes are my foode, drynke are my teares,” 203 and the theology of grace, 189–90 “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke,” 197–201 Third Satire (“A spending hand”), 182, 193 and the Treasons Act of 1534, 181 use of clichés and commonplaces, 174–76, 184–88, 192–94, 198–200 “Vnstable dreme according to the place,” 195 “What Vaileth Trouthe?,” 174–76 “Who so list to hounte I know where is an hynde,” 179 “Ys yt possible,” 194 Wynnere and Wastour, 9, See also making, theories of Zarins, Kim, 73

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cambridge studies in medieval literature 1 ROBIN KIRKPATRICK Dante’s Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry 2 JEREMY TAMBLING Dante and Difference: Writing in the “Commedia” 3 SIMON GAUNT Troubadours and Irony 4 WENDY SCASE “Piers Plowman” and the New Anticlericalism 5 JOSEPH J. DUGGAN The “Cantar de mio Cid”: Poetic Creation in its Economic and Social Contexts 6 RODERICK BEATON The Medieval Greek Romance 7 KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON Reformist Apocalypticism and “Piers Plowman” 8 ALISON MORGAN Dante and the Medieval Other World 9 ECKEHARD SIMON (ed.) The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama 10 MARY CARRUTHERS The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture 11 RITA COPELAND Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts 12 DONALD MADDOX The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions 13 NICHOLAS WATSON Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority 14 STEVEN F. KRUGER Dreaming in the Middle Ages 15 BARBARA NOLAN Chaucer and the Tradition of the “Roman Antique” 16 SYLVIA HUOT The “Romance of the Rose” and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission 17 CAROL M. MEALE (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 18 HENRY ANSGAR KELLY Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages 19 MARTIN IRVINE The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 20  LARRY SCANLON Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition 21 ERIK KOOPER (ed.) Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context

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22 STEVEN BOTTERILL Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the “Commedia” 23 PETER BILLER AND ANNE HUDSON (eds) Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530 24 CHRISTOPHER BASWELL Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer 25 JAMES SIMPSON Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s ‘Anticlaudianus’ and John Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’ 26 JOYCE COLEMAN Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France 27 SUZANNE REYNOLDS Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text 28 CHARLOTTE BREWER Editing ‘Piers Plowman’: The Evolution of the Text 29 WALTER HAUG Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: The German Tradition, 800–1300, in its European Context 30 SARAH SPENCE Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century 31 EDWIN D. CRAUN Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker 32 PATRICIA E. GRIEVE “Floire and Blancheflor” and the European Romance 33 HUW PRYCE (ed.) Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies 34 MARY CARRUTHERS The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 35 BEATE SCHMOLKE-HASSELMANN The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart 36 SIÂN ECHARD Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition 37 FIONA SOMERSET Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England 38 FLORENCE PERCIVAL Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women 39 CHRISTOPHER CANNON The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words 40 ROSALIND BROWN-GRANT Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender 41 RICHARD NEWHAUSER The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature 42 MARGARET CLUNIES ROSS (ed.) Old Icelandic Literature and Society

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43 DONALD MADDOX Fictions of Identity in Medieval France 44 RITA COPELAND Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning 45 KANTIK GHOSH The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts 46 MARY C. ERLER Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England 47 D. H. GREEN The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220 48 J. A. BURROW Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative 49 ARDIS BUTTERFIELD Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut 50 EMILY STEINER Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature 51 WILLIAM E. BURGWINKLE Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 52 NICK HAVELY Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the “Commedia” 53 SIEGFRIED WENZEL Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif 54 ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR AND DEANNE WILLIAMS (eds.) Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures 55 MARK MILLER Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the “Canterbury Tales” 56 SIMON A. GILSON Dante and Renaissance Florence 57 RALPH HANNA London Literature, 1300–1380 58 MAURA NOLAN John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture 59 NICOLETTE ZEEMAN ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Medieval Discourse of Desire 60 ANTHONY BALE The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 61 ROBERT J. MEYER-LEE Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt 62 ISABEL DAVIS Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages 63 JOHN M. FYLER Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun 64 MATTHEW GIANCARLO Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England

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65 D. H. GREEN Women Readers in the Middle Ages 66 MARY DOVE The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions 67 JENNI NUTTALL The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England 68 LAURA ASHE Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 69 J. A. BURROW The Poetry of Praise 70 MARY CARRUTHERS The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Second Edition) 71 ANDREW COLE Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer 72 SUZANNE M. YEAGER Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative 73 NICOLE R. RICE Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature 74 D. H. GREEN Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance 75 PETER GODMAN Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages: Abelard, Heloise, and the Archpoet 76 EDWIN D. CRAUN Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing 77 DAVID MATTHEWS Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship, and Literature in England, 1250–1350 78 MARY CARRUTHERS (ed.) Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages 79 KATHARINE BREEN Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 80 ANTONY J. HASLER Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority 81 SHANNON GAYK Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England 82 LISA H. COOPER Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England 83 ALISON CORNISH Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature 84 JANE GILBERT Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature 85 JESSICA ROSENFELD Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle 86 MICHAEL VAN DUSSEN From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages

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87 MARTIN EISNER Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular 88 EMILY V. THORNBURY Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England 89 LAWRENCE WARNER The Myth of “Piers Plowman”: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive 90 LEE MANION Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature 91 DANIEL WAKELIN Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510 92 JON WHITMAN (ed.) Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period 93 VIRGINIE GREENE Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy 94 MICHAEL JOHNSTON AND MICHAEL VAN DUSSEN (eds.) The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches 95 TIM WILLIAM MACHAN (ed.) Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500 96 ERIC WEISKOTT English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History 97 SARAH ELLIOTT NOVACICH Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance 98 GEOFFREY RUSSOM The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry: From the Earliest Alliterative Poems to Iambic Pentameter 99 IAN CORNELIUS Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter 100 SARA HARRIS The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain 101 ERIC KWAKKEL AND RODNEY THOMSON (eds.) The European Book in the Twelfth Century 102 IRINA DUMITRESCU The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature 103 JONAS WELLENDORF Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds 104 THOMAS A. PRENDERGAST AND JESSICA ROSENFELD (eds.) Chaucer and the Subversion of Form 105 KATIE L.WALTER Middle English Mouths: Late Medieval Medical, Religious and Literary Traditions

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