Medieval Autographies: The "I" of the Text (Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies) [1 ed.] 0268017824, 9780268017828

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A. C. SPEARING

MEDIEVAL AUTOGRAPHIES The “I” of the Text

M e d i e va l Autographies

ME DIEVA L INSTITUTE UNIVERSIT Y O F NOTRE DA ME

The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2008 The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and publications resulting from it.

pr evi o us t i tl e s in t his s e r ie s : Paul Strohm Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (2005) Ulrich Horst, O.P. The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006) Rosamond McKitterick Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006) Jonathan Riley-Smith Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2009)

A. C. Spearing

M e d i e va l Au to g r a p h i e s The “I” of the Text

U n i v e r s i t y o f N o t r e D a m e P r e ss Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2012 by the University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Copyright © 2012 by the university of notre dame Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spearing, A. C.   Medieval autographies : the “I” of the text / A. C. Spearing. p. cm. —  (The Conway lectures in medieval studies) includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-0-268-01782-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isBn 0-268-01782-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isBn 978-0-268-15843-9 (web pdf) 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism.  2. First person narrative.  3. Autobiography in literature. I. Title.   PR275.F57S64    2012   820.9'35—dc23 2012030897

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents

Preface vii

ONE  The Textual

First Person  1

T W O  Autography: Prologues THREE  

and Dits 33

Chaucerian Prologues and the Wife of Bath  65 F OUR  

Why Autography?  99

F IVE  Hoccleve

and the Prologue  129

SI X  Hoccleve’s

Series 171

SEVEN  Bokenham’s Autographies 209

Afterword 257 Notes 269 Bibliography 307 Index 333

Preface

This book originated as the Robert M. Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies given at the University of Notre Dame in October 2007. I was honored to be invited to give these lectures, and I am most grateful to Tom Noble, then director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame, to his wife, and to his colleagues for their generous hospitality during my stay there. I am also grateful to those who heard the lectures for their searching questions and valuable suggestions, which have helped to make the book less inadequate than it would otherwise be. I owe special debts of thanks to Roberta Baranowski, associate director of the Medieval Institute, for much good-­natured practical help and many entertaining e-­mail messages, and to Barbara Hanrahan, then director of the University of Notre Dame Press, for her warm encouragement and shrewd guidance when I was struggling to plan the book. The tortuous process of converting and enlarging three lectures into a book that often bears little resemblance to its original form has been eased, and the book itself much improved, by the kind colleagues and friends who have read drafts and discussed problems with me. My obligations are too many to be recorded in detail, but I should like to thank Peter Baker, Cristina Cervone, Deborah McGrady, Gary Saul Morson, and especially Elizabeth Fowler. I am most grateful to Elizabeth Spearing, who stepped forward at a crucial moment, read the whole, and made invaluable suggestions for improvement. Some more specific debts are recorded in notes to the text. It goes without saying that the book’s faults are my responsibility alone. Some parts of the book’s argument and occasional ideas and sentences have previously appeared in the following: “The Poetic vii

viii Preface

Subject from Chaucer to Spenser” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 13–37; “Textual Performance: Chaucerian Prologues and the French Dit,” in Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages, ed. Marianne Børch (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), 21–45; and “Was Chaucer a Poet?” Poetica 73 (2010): 41–54. I am grateful respectively to Associated University Presses, to Professor Marianne Børch, and to Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya for permission to reuse this material here. Some material also derives from A. C. Spearing, “Dream Poems,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, 159–78 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); copyright © 2010 by the Pennsylvania State University Press; reprinted by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press. In quoting from medieval texts I have silently modified editorial spelling and punctuation where I thought that would aid understanding; this goes against the grain of medieval scholarship, and with good reason, but I persist in hoping that some nonspecialists might be willing to learn more about premodern literature. Further, in the hope that the book might find a few nonmedievalist readers who are interested in the theoretical issues I discuss—issues that I believe ought to be the concern of others besides medievalists—I have added modern translations (my own unless otherwise specified) of all medieval texts quoted in the original, except those, generally very brief, whose meaning seemed obvious.

Chapter 1

T h e T e x tual F i r st Pe r s o n

In this book I attempt to bring into focus a category of medieval English writing that has not previously been recognized as such. I call it “autography,” and, put simply, it consists of extended, nonlyrical, fictional writings in and of the first person. A more precise sense of what this involves and why it matters will, I hope, emerge from studies of specific texts in the following chapters, but it may be helpful to begin by indicating how my recognition of this category—perhaps better called a “supergenre” than simply a genre—relates to work I did in an earlier book entitled Textual Subjectivity. Its subtitle was The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics, and in it I investigated some of the linguistic and formal features by means of which subjectivity is built into texts in the two “supergenres” of narrative and lyric, and I tried to show how attention to these features might affect literary interpretation. Much of the argument of Textual Subjectivity was negative, illustrating how, as it seemed to me, failures of attention to the way language works in specific medieval texts had led to widespread misinterpretations. Dissatisfaction with accepted readings of major works such as Troilus and Criseyde, The Man of Law’s Tale, and Pearl, and a growing conviction that they were indeed bad readings—and often perhaps worse than bad, because they seemed contemptuous of the actual achievements of great poets—led me to 1

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question the assumptions on which I came to see they were based. Underlying my argument was a distinction between the representation of subjectivity and its encoding in the written form in which all the medieval literature we know has come down to us. To explain this as briefly as possible: An assumption of long standing is that writing is a representation of speech, with the consequence that, as one medievalist sweepingly puts it, “no tale can be interpreted except as the product of a human speaker.”1 This axiom goes back to Plato but has been increasingly taken for granted over the last century and more, and, because unquestioned, has often remained unmentioned. Thus the assumption has been that in principle every word of a written fictional narrative is to be interpreted as representing the utterance of a fictional speaker distinguishable from the author—and this is no less true of lyrics and indeed of imaginative writing of almost every kind. As a typical statement of this assumption puts it, “The writer creates a fiction when he attributes what he writes to another speaker; . . . he attributes the performance of his speech acts to a speaker he creates.”2 Reading aloud to listeners was a common practice in the Middle Ages, as in the famous scene in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in which Pandarus visits Criseyde in her palace, And fond two othere ladys sete and she, Withinne a paved parlour, and they thre Herden a mayden reden hem the geste Of the siege of Thebes, while hem leste. (II 81–84)3 —— [And found her and two other ladies seated in a paved parlor, and these three were listening to a maiden reading the story of the siege of Thebes to them for as long as they pleased.]

But what is being read aloud is a book, and it is important to grasp that in medieval linguistic theory it was not assumed that writing must be a representation of speech; on the contrary, as Martin Irvine and David Thomson put it,

The Textual First Person  3

In medieval grammatical theory, language is unthinkable outside writing, and even the theory of speech was modelled on the properties of writing. The model for articulate speech is writing, not spoken utterances. The vocal utterance considered the materia of the grammatical art was written, and, conversely, articulate speech was understood to bear the marks of writing. . . . Speech bears the imprint of writing; indeed, speech is considered meaningful only as it manifests the distinctive features of writing. . . . In grammatical discourse, the Platonic sense of the secondariness of writing has been erased; speech and writing become dual manifestations of a single activity—signifying or the production of meaning.4

It is understandable that writing should have been central to linguistic thought in a culture in which the universal medium of intellectual discourse was Latin, a language that, to be sure, was often spoken but was spoken exclusively by those who could read it in its written form. And long after the rise of the vernaculars as media for abstract thought and for literature (in English from the fourteenth century onward), the attitudes belonging to Latinitas continued to hold sway. A further assumption in modern interpretation of the literature of the past has been that an author’s purpose would be to produce a text coherent in perspective and ideology and that he or she could normally be expected to be perfectly in control of the text in fulfillment of this aim. In medieval literary studies, an article or chapter concerned with a single text typically argues that the text is more coherent than has previously been supposed—almost never that it is less coherent. Our standard academic tools for literary analysis are not well designed to make arguments against coherence, and the professional consensus is so strong that it would be hard for such arguments, if made, to achieve publication. Once you come to think about it, this seems strange. Reviewers of contemporary novels have no difficulty in noticing flaws in them, understood

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to be failures on the part of their authors. In any particular case the reviewer may be mistaken, but I suppose nobody would deny that even the most gifted and admired contemporary authors do sometimes fail; yet somehow it seems that almost every text surviving from the past, if analyzed with sufficient subtlety, can be shown to be a success in the sense of being more coherent than previously thought. The fictional speaker is a crucial part of the machinery of analysis used to transform past writings in this way. The author’s true meaning and his success in expressing it can be understood, it is supposed, by identifying the fictional person who is the text’s speaker and recognizing the gap between what he or she says and the coherent meaning really intended by the author. (If there were no such gap, it would of course be hard to see why the fictional person had been invented.) Modern interpretations of medieval texts along these lines have usually concluded that the speaker of the text is designed to be unreliable, or at least limited in knowledge and understanding by his or her location and personal characteristics (as of course people are in everyday life), and that the medieval author who controlled the whole work intended a meaning different from that expressed by the speaker. That intended meaning then almost invariably turns out to be one that appeals to the taste of the twentieth-­or twenty-­first-­century academic interpreter. Thus texts that apparently cele­brate a warrior ethic turn out to be really pacifistic, those that apparently express misogyny turn out to convey feminist values, those that apparently satirize “unnatural” sexual behavior turn out to sympathize with it, those that apparently admire powerful rulers turn out to condemn them as tyrants, and so on. Such transformations of meaning are our modern equivalents to those brought about by medieval commentators in their interpretations of classical texts. The kind of truth that medieval commentators believed themselves to reveal about the intentions of classical authors is neatly illustrated as follows by a modern scholar: “Homer had intended to dissuade people from unlawful union, which—as in the case of Paris and Helen—incurs the wrath of the gods; Ovid

The Textual First Person  5

had intended to reprehend inchastity [sic] and to commend legal and just love; Lucan had intended to discourage his readers from engaging in civil wars.”5 It goes without saying that we cannot help reading the cultural products of earlier ages through the preconceptions and desires of our own culture, and also that the preconception of the fictional speaker is by no means the only factor in the way this has been done to medieval literature over the last century; but that par­ticu­ lar preconception makes it especially easy to follow the natural inclination to see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the past. My cautionary argument in Textual Subjectivity was that, whatever might be the case with writings of the last hundred years and more (many of which do have unreliable “speakers”), medieval writings rarely represented the distinct subjectivity of a text’s fictional speaker, and their habit was to encode subjectivity in textual form by means such as deixis—subjectivity not usually that of a specific, self-­consistent person but broadly and variously diffused throughout the text. It is hard to determine any specific point at which it became normal or common for writings to have fictional speakers. One interesting recent theory is that the change occurred in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and was associated with the emergence of a public of critical size for whom silent reading was the norm and who therefore read not as speakers themselves but as hearers of a “fictive persona” addressing them “in the physical absence of the writer.”6 Whatever the cause, I believe the change to fictional speakers as the norm occurred long after the Middle Ages. It is true that in England, by the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales shows the beginning of a move toward representing the subjectivity of fictional speakers, but it is only a beginning, and the meaning of many of the Tales has been distorted by attempts to see them in more modern terms as consistent expressions of the personhood of their pilgrim-­tellers. The argument I have just been sketching also underlies the present book, but here, as I have said, I am concerned with a third supergenre besides narrative and lyric, one that began to emerge

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in French in the thirteenth century but in English not till the fourteenth. As the following chapter will show, it has been identified by French scholars as the dit, but in English it has not previously been recognized and has therefore not been given a name. The term “autography” is not one I invented, though I may be among the first to apply it to medieval literature;7 in due course I shall give a more detailed account of its meaning and previous uses. There is of course no single right way to divide writing into different categories, and I shall need to approach this concept of autography rather circuitously, pausing from time to time for definition and explanation. Ultimately I can do no more than to invite readers to share in the experiment of seeing texts of a certain kind, some well known and others less well known, as constituting a significant cluster or family, and thus of reading them in an unfamiliar literary context and interpreting them in a different way. I am not purporting to offer a comprehensive theory of subjectivity in discourse, nor am I even proposing a program for detailed interpretation. I am only offering an invitation to try out a different kind of reading, one less hobbled by presuppositions about matters such as narrators or speakers, the comprehensive planning of literary works, and their achievement of aesthetic and ideological unity. I have described autography as fictional, and to apply that term to a kind of medieval writing is already to beg some important questions. Medieval writers sometimes distinguish sharply between the categories of fiction and history, or of romance and chronicle, as the fourteenth-­century Scottish poet John Barbour does at the beginning of his Bruce, claiming the merit of truth and the pleasure that truth gives to readers above and beyond that of fictional narrative: Storys to rede ar delatibill Suppos that thai be nocht bot fabill; Than suld storys that suthfast wer, And thai war said on gud maner, Hawe doubill plesance in heryng. .......................

The Textual First Person  7

Tharfor I wald fayne set my will, Giff my wyt mycht suffice thartill, To put in wryt a suthfast story8 —— [Stories are pleasurable to read even if they are only fictional; so stories that were true, if they were well told, ought to give double pleasure to listeners. . . . Therefore I’d be glad to apply myself, if my ability should be adequate to the purpose, to put a true story in writing]

Here the contrast between “fabill” and “suthfast story,” corresponding respectively to the Latin terms fabula and historia, seems clear enough; yet it is also true, as Christopher Cannon puts it, that “the Middle Ages prized historia for its invention, classing it with poetry among the arts of grammar.”9 It is often hard for modern readers to grasp the principles governing medieval assignments of material to the two categories,10 and so I am going to use the term “fictional” here in a broad sense to refer to any writing that is not simply informative or didactic. My definition of “fiction” approximately corresponds to the definition of “literature” by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “understood in the crudest possible terms as textual matter conceived or read for purposes not primarily connected with information, or with religious precept or devotion.”11 Autography in this sense differs, as I shall explain, from what we now call autobiography, in not being based on a claim of any systematic relation to documentable truth; it is first-­person writing in which there is no implied assertion that the first person either does or does not correspond to a real-­life individual. In freestanding form autography includes dream poems and prologues, along with the group of poems known in French as dits (of which, I suggest, dream poems and prologues may be regarded as species). It can also take the dependent or supplementary form of first-­person narratorial commentary on heterodiegetic narratives—that is, narratives in whose events the teller of the story does not participate—but that will not be my main concern in the present book. (I use the

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term “heterodiegetic,” borrowed from Gérard Genette,12 rather than the more familiar “third-­person narrative,” because, as one theorist has put it, “Every narrator is a first person narrator.”13) This kind of medieval writing, in both its forms, is nearly always in verse, so in discussing it I shall generally refer to “poems” and “poets,” using those words descriptively rather than evaluatively. It is a striking fact that there is almost no writing of this kind in English until three centuries after the Norman Conquest: nearly all English fictional writing in those three centuries consists of heterodiegetic narratives and first-­person lyrics. Few probably would deny that this is so, yet the fact has evidently not been regarded as significant; certainly it has not been a topic of discussion. One narratologist, Monika Fludernik, has noted in passing that in fourteenth-­century English “first-­person narratives only occurred in dream poems,”14 but this perceptive observation does not seem to have been taken up by literary historians—and indeed recent histories of medieval English literature have been conspicuously uninterested in the formal characteristics of their subject matter, preferring to focus on its ideological content.15 Before the Norman Conquest a kind of autography did exist in English, in the so-­called elegies—poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer—but there is little continuity between these and later writings, and certainly no evidence that poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries read them or indeed would have had the linguistic capacity to do so. Pre-­Conquest autography is a separate field of study that I leave to those better qualified to discuss it; when I use the term “medieval” in this book, it will refer to the period between the Conquest and the Reformation. In that sense, then, there is almost no medieval English autography until the third quarter of the fourteenth century. At that point, rather suddenly, comes the emergence of a great variety of autographic writing in English: Chaucer’s dream poems, Piers Plowman, Pearl, prologues by Chaucer and his followers, along with extensive first-­person commentaries on heterodiegetic narratives, again by Chaucer and his followers. The chief origins of this new kind of writing lie in France, and in many cases

The Textual First Person  9

it seems to enter literature in English through the Anglo-­French literary culture that developed at the court of King Edward III. That much seems fairly certain, though I cannot give any watertight explanation as to why autography developed in French and gained popularity in English. But that tends to be the case with important cultural shifts: “explanations” of them are speculative and often tendentious, and probably the best we can do, at least initially, is to describe them. That is what I intend, though in chapter 4 I shall allow myself to speculate about the nature of the appeal that autography may have had for medieval writers and readers. Medieval autography is a kind of writing, and the word “writing” deserves emphasis, for, as we shall see, autography also has a strong tendency to be about writing. Much medieval literature was orally delivered—spoken, chanted, sung—and some may have been orally composed or at least composed in forms that bear strong traces of speech. One example of the latter is the occurrence in alliterative verse of alliterations that disregard word boundaries marked in writing but not in the spoken language, so that, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, “another” can alliterate with “newe” and “neghed.”16 Nevertheless, all the medieval literature we actually have comes to us in written form and, along with many traces of the features of speech or song, has some of the distinctive features that belong to writing. A telling example is The Book of Margery Kempe, which, according to the account it gives of its own composition, originated as a woman’s speech, but in the form in which it has survived bears marks of (male, clerical) textuality from beginning to end.17 One of the distinctive features of textuality is the way it uses the first person, if it uses it at all (The Book of Margery Kempe almost never does, except in quoted speech). The first-­person pronoun works differently in writing from the way it works in speech. In this it is like other deictics, those lexemes often called “shifters,” which have no fixed referential meaning but are used in the spoken language to indicate persons, objects, or events in their relation to the speaker— their spatiotemporal relation and thus by extension their epistemic

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and emotional relations. Where and when does a person, object, or event stand in relation to me as originator of the utterance in which it is referred to? What kind of knowledge do I have of it? How do I feel about it? The answers to those and many similar questions are indicated or implied by deictics in speech. Deixis is thus one of the most important means by which subjectivity is encoded in language. It includes many pairs of terms such as “I” and “you,” “here” and “there,” “this” and “that,” “now” and “then,” to refer to what is nearer to the speaker and what is further from her, or, in technical terms, what is proximal and what is distal. Let me quote a few sentences of what I said at this point when I delivered the lecture on which the present writing is based: So when I say “I,” as I’m doing at this very moment, now, you rightly assume that the pronoun refers to the person from whose mouth the spoken word emerges, a being to whom you’re probably willing to attribute consciousness. As Emile Benveniste famously put it, “Ego is he who says ‘ego.’ ”18 And similarly, when I say “you rightly assume,” you rightly assume that I’m addressing you, the people actually in my presence in this room.

I might have added that users of ASL can indicate “I” by simply pointing to themselves19—a striking confirmation of the way deixis works in interactive, communicative contexts—but when I write “I,” the word does not emerge from anyone’s mouth, and its deictic energy—the energy of pointing, looking, feeling, imagining—is freed for a wider variety of expressive purposes. People often think of writing as restricting the freedom that belongs to speech, but writing also liberates discourse by distancing it from the communicative, I/you context in which the spoken word originates. As Paul Ricoeur puts it, Writing is not simply a matter of the material fixation of discourse; for fixation is the condition of a much more fundamental

The Textual First Person  11

phenomenon, that of the autonomy of the text. A threefold autonomy: with respect to the intention of the author; with respect to the cultural situation and all the sociological conditions of the production of the text; and, finally, with respect to the original addressee. . . . The peculiarity of the written work . . . is . . . to transcend its own psycho-­sociological conditions of production and thereby to open itself to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated in socio-­cultural contexts which are always different. In short, the work decontextualizes itself . . . It follows that the mediation of the text cannot be treated as an extension of the dialogical situation.20

The same point is made by Suzanne Fleischman: “Only with the advent of the book—with writing, that is—can discourse become detached from a speaking subject and a context of origin.”21 Some medieval poets, perhaps more conscious than we have reason to be of the break between the spoken and the written, dramatized the detachment of the text from the speaking subject by devices such as the “Go, little book” topos, as Chaucer does near the end of Troilus and Criseyde. The text is sent out into space and time, a world and a future in which its meaning may no longer be governed by the occasion and purpose for which it was composed, and in which its originator will no longer be able to control how it is understood by tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, and other forms of interaction with listeners, only through the words he has written: Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! .............................. And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (Troilus V 1786–88, 1797–98)22 ——

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[Go, little book, go, my little tragedy, and may God yet grant your author, before he dies, the power to compose some comedy! . . . And wherever you may be read or else recited, I beseech God that you may be understood!]

As Fleischman notes, this idea of the detachment of “discourse from its context of origin,” made possible by writing, is seen by some as “violating one of the basic tenets of the ‘communication model’ of language (i.e., that every utterance presupposes a speaker and an addressee . . .)” and therefore “has been a topic of intense debate among discourse analysts.”23 Most scholars concerned with the interpretation of medieval literature in English have been uninterested in the debate and perhaps unaware of it—unconscious, so it would appear, even of the possibility of conceptualizing written texts as anything but representations of spoken utterances. Many therefore would argue, and more would assume, that the distinction I am drawing between the ways deixis operates in speech and in writing is of little importance, because writing can only be thought of as a representation of speech. In that case, a written “I” would always be the label of a represented speaker, a fictional being potentially in possession of all the characteristics, including consciousness or subjectivity, that we normally attribute to human persons. As I have stated, I believe this to be a mistaken assumption. Certainly writing can be designed as a representation of speech, but the supposed necessity of interpreting all writing in that way was, I believe, convincingly dismantled by Jacques Derrida in his essay “Linguistics and Grammatology” and then, more playfully, in his engagement with John R. Searle’s speech-­act theory in Limited Inc.24 Derrida’s argument in its full scope applies not just to writing in its conventional sense but to speech as well (archi-­ écriture, as he calls it), and Searle’s apparent failure to grasp this is one of the themes of Limited Inc. I do not dispute this larger and more difficult claim, but in a book about medieval literature, which is never directly available to us as speech, it would seem unnecessary for me to discuss it further, even if I possessed the philosophical

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competence to do so. My concern will only be with the more limited question of the functions of the first person in writing, and what I believe to be the case is this. The first-­person pronoun in written form in the narratorial discourse of a poem or novel may refer to a fictional individual, a speaker or narrator distinct from the author, an individual whose consciousness the writing purports to represent, as in a dramatic monologue such as Robert Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” or a novel such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It does not necessarily do so, however, and in the Middle Ages it rarely does so in any clear-­cut or systematic way. This practice corresponds to the theoretical understanding of personal pronouns in the work of late-­classical and medieval grammarians, explained as follows by Daniel Heller-­Roazen: Pronouns, for the grammarians . . . articulate not distinct subjectivities presupposed by language but, rather, purely discursive functions . . . which are determined by the grammatical structure of language alone. According to such a conception, to say “I” is in no way to express oneself as an existing and substantial individual: it is neither to “incarnate oneself in literature,” to invoke Zink’s phrase, nor to “elaborate a first-­ person (subject) position,” to return to Kay’s formulation of her subject.25

In practice, the textual first person differs from the third persons on whom a narrative or lyric confers a virtual existence. The third persons have to be represented in language and thus characterized, if only in some minimal way through the assignment of narrative or relational functions. In medieval texts the characterization is often very minimal: a third person need only be female or male, young or old, friend or enemy, ruler or subject, proz or sage, and so on. The first person, on the other hand, may be represented (as, for example, the “I” of a love lyric is likely to be characterized at least as male or female), but it need not be represented at all. In narrative especially it need be assigned no gender, no age, no social

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position, or it may be characterized to some extent in some passages (and perhaps differently characterized in different passages within a single text), while remaining elsewhere no more than an anonymous and unobtrusive channel of narration or discourse. I would argue that this difference in the world of writing should not surprise us, because it corresponds to a phenomenological difference: I experience that which I refer to as “I,” my self, quite differently from the way I experience the being of others. To myself, I am not a character in the way I may be to others who perceive me as a third person.26 Characterization of the first person in writing is an optional literary artifice, by no means a necessary reflection of human experience. Or, to put it differently, the first-­person singular pronoun need not be referential (referring consistently to an individual who uses the word “I”); it may only be deictic, its function being to convey proximality and experientiality without specific reference to a pragmatic center or origo.27 Consequently, although the textual “I,” consisting of ink on parchment or paper, not of flesh, blood, and consciousness, cannot be literally identical with the author, that does not mean that it must represent a self-­consistent imaginary person distinct from the author. Yet even medievalists are likely to have had their ideas about literature shaped by their reading of that dominant mode of modern prose fiction in which understanding of a story’s meaning depends on the interpretation and assessment of an unreliable fictional narrator. (And the very term “narrator,” unknown in the Middle Ages but indispensable to modern literary interpretation, substitutes a third-­person expression for the first-­person subject of narration, treating that subject as a character who just happens to be referred to as “I” rather than “he” or “she.”28) Many of the novels that are now most widely admired—The Remains of the Day is an excellent example—intrigue and flatter us with hermeneutic puzzles turning on the biases and shortcomings of an internal narrator, and we may find it hard to imagine an earlier situation in which that was not the norm, perhaps was not even imaginable. How can we imagine a cultural situation in which something so

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entirely familiar to us that it seems a constitutive feature of our conception of literature itself, could perhaps not be imagined? To do that is difficult, but if we are not to misunderstand a major area of medieval writing, I believe we need to try. I explored this question more fully in Textual Subjectivity, and I do not want to repeat what I wrote there. Here as there I cannot avoid negative examples, and in the hope of clarifying my argument as economically as I can, I offer one now, an instance of modern scholarly interpretation of a medieval literary text. I find it particularly instructive because it comes from a scholar whose professional field is not that of literary interpretation; he is an expert on medieval theology who has evidently accepted as obvious and unquestionable truth what must have appeared to be the unspoken consensus of literary scholars on this matter. Mark D. Jordan in his book The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology has a chapter on Alan of Lille’s twelfth-­century Latin dream allegory De planctu naturae. Jordan accepts without question the validity of the assumption, gathered from twentieth-­century literary interpretation, that every narrative must have a narrator distinguishable from the author. (The same assumption is treated as accepted truth by a more recent interpreter of the De planctu, Barbara Newman, who refers to “the narrator, a typically obtuse dreamer-­ poet.”29) Jordan refers to the “voice of the narrator—whom I will continue to distinguish from Alan,” and the word “narrator” occurs many times on almost every page of the chapter.30 He applies this narrator theory to what he sees as discrepancies in the surface narrative of the De planctu: in Jordan’s view, Alan’s synthesis of classical myth with Christian doctrine is incoherent, and therefore Alan must have intended his readers to recognize it as such. And so, “if there are holes in the narration of the integumentum [that is, the allegorical surface], as there plainly are, our first suspicions must fall on the narrator. Who is he?”31 Predictably, this approach, regarded as universally obvious and inevitable, not a matter of historical judgment or interpretative choice, leads to an interpretation of the poem as meaning something completely different from what

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it appears to say. “The conclusion is that Alan intends for these gaps in the cloth of his integumentum to show. He intends that they suggest the limits of Nature as a guide in morals”32—limits that are evidently not recognized by the narratorial “I.” The taking for granted of an author/narrator binary, along with the assumption that authors aim at discursive coherence and can be expected to have achieved it even if it does not appear on the surface of the text, almost inevitably leads, as here, to a hermeneutic of suspicion. The supposed narrators of medieval poems are seen as expressing biased or erroneous views, often thought of as designed to deceive naïve readers (usually of course imaginary ones), and only the suspicious reader will be able to recover the author’s true meaning—which then in practice generally turns out to be in accordance with that reader’s own wishes. My purpose is not to disparage Jordan’s passionately argued book or to dispute his interpretation of Alan of Lille’s poem. I simply question his acceptance of the assumption that only one interpretative approach is possible: “our first suspicion must fall on the narrator.” Behind the “I” of a medieval text there may be no narrator or speaker, no represented fictional person, and in the commonest kinds of Middle English poem, especially up to the middle of the fourteenth century, there is usually none. Before then it is in lyrics that “I” is most prominent. According to a traditional definition, lyrics “directly [express] the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments.” That definition, found in the original Oxford English Dictionary, comes from a time when a Romantic conception of poetry as the direct and spontaneous overflow of the poet’s feelings still prevailed. A more recent definition describes lyric as “organized around a first-­person voice”33—and that is more cautious but also more difficult to understand, especially if we remember that, in relation to writing, “voice” can only be a metaphor. But neither of those definitions will apply to most pre-­Chaucerian lyrics in Middle English. The first-­person pronoun may be prominent in them, but it rarely refers to a specific individual or creates the illusion of a distinctive voice; it is a near but empty space, proximal but not personalized, waiting to be inhabited and adopted by any reader.

The Textual First Person  17

A large proportion of the surviving pre-­Chaucerian lyrics are religious and, like most written prayers, are intended not to express the distinctive feelings of the individual writer but to be available for occupation by many different users. In some, the “I” is Christ or the Blessed Virgin, and the poem addresses itself to the feelings of any reader as “you.” In others, it is the “I” that offers a subject position for any reader’s occupation. For example, a poem about the Crucifixion begins as follows: I sike al when I singe, For sorwe that I se, Whan Ich with wepinge Biholde upon the tre. I se Jhesu mi swete His herte blode forlete For the love of me34 —— [Whenever I sing, I sigh for the sorrowful sight I see when I look with tears upon the cross. I see Jesus, my sweetheart, shedding his heart’s blood for love of me]

The “I” here is not, as it might be in a religious poem by Donne, that of a distinctive masculine individual of ingenious intellect and complex emotions; rather, it expresses the compassion of any medieval reader of either sex for Christ’s sufferings; and the “me” for whom Christ shed his blood is again any reader, any user of the poem as a devotional exercise. This poem is not about its “I”: it is in but not of the first person. To take another example, here are the opening lines of a lyric of the type known as the chanson d’aventure35 that begins as a first-­ person narrative: As I me rod this ender day By grene wode to seche play, Mid herte I thoughte al on a may, Swetest of alle thinge;

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Lithe, and Ich you telle may Al of that swete thinge.36 —— [As I rode out the other day by the greenwood in search of amusement, at heart I was thinking entirely about a maiden, the sweetest of all creatures. Listen, so that I can tell you all about that sweet creature.]

The opening is as formulaic as “once upon a time,” the maiden is the Blessed Virgin, the main theme of the poem is the entirely familiar topos of her Five Joys, and the “you” is a space to be filled by any devout reader willing to have his or her feelings touched and to join in a concluding prayer “to Oure Lady / And to the seintes that wone hire by [who dwell alongside her].”37 In such poems indeed, as Helen Phillips puts it, the “I” of the “dreamer, wanderer, and overhearer, passing through successive frames into scenes which gradually unfold their content to him or her” is also “the alter ego of the reader or audience, experiencing the process of gradually entering the realm of fiction.”38 The “thoughts and sentiments” are not peculiar to the anonymous poet; again, however prominent the “I,” that is not what the poem is about. To discuss nonlyrical medieval writing in the first person by defi­ nition means excluding lyrics, but it also means excluding the most familiar kinds of narrative, because the great majority of me­dieval narratives are heterodiegetic. The commonest types of medieval narrative in English are saints’ lives, along with their secular counterparts, the tales of knightly adventure loosely grouped under the heading of romance. Middle English romances usually contain traces of a narrating agent who appears as “I,” saying things like “I wyll you tell of a knyghte,” “The sothe as I telle yow,” “A lay of [Breteyn] long Y soght / And owt therof a tale have Y broght,” “Of mykyll [myrth] Y may you telle / And mornyng theramonge,”39 and so on. Any reader of the romances will be familiar with tags of that kind, in which the “I” is associated almost exclusively with acts of telling and asseveration. There may be a narratorial “I,” but

The Textual First Person  19

it is usually only very intermittent in its occurrences, and in any case the narratives are heterodiegetic in the sense that that “I” is not part of the story being told but belongs only to the rhetoric of telling. The narrator is not realized as an experiencing subject, and indeed the very term “narrator,” use of which has become virtually automatic in discussions of narrative, tends to blur the distinction between the living person who may have recited a romance to a medieval audience and the narratorial “I” that is part of the romance’s text. As in the scene from Troilus and Criseyde referred to above, many romances were probably read aloud to an audience of listeners;40 if so, the narratorial “I” would need to be a space suitable for occupation by any actual teller, and if it were individually characterized, it would be less suitable for that purpose. Genette uses the term “homodiegetic” to refer to texts with, as he puts it, “the narrator present as a character in the story he tells,”41 and in that sense Middle English romances, saints’ lives, histories, and nearly all other kinds of medieval narrative, however prominent the narrating agent may be (and usually it is not prominent at all), are not homodiegetic but heterodiegetic. Setting aside lyrics and romances, then, I turn to the beginnings of the new kind of writing that I call autography. One of its earliest occurrences in medieval English is the anonymous allegory in alliterative verse Wynnere and Wastoure. As Fludernik’s observation would lead us to expect, this is a dream poem, and it may be the earliest instance of that genre in post-­Conquest English. The next surviving example may be Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, probably of 1368–72 and described by Ardis Butterfield as “the first narrative poem in English to start with ‘I’ ”—though that “I” is adopted from a “Je” of Jean Froissart.42 Alternatively, though the dating of alliterative poems tends to be especially uncertain, the next example could be the A version of Langland’s Piers Plowman.43 The Book of the Duchess and Piers Plowman are also dream poems, and dream poems are inevitably written in the first person, because only the dreamer can give an authentic account of a dream.

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They form an important branch of the supergenre of autography, but having discussed the dream poem as a genre or possible genre elsewhere, I do not intend to take it up again in this book.44 I make an exception of Wynnere and Wastoure because examining this one early example is a convenient way to begin to clarify the functions of the first person in autography. Its date has been hotly disputed, but internal evidence makes it likely that it was composed in 1352–53.45 Here the narratorial “I,” though still not the label of an imagined person, goes beyond the functions of telling and asseveration and becomes a means of evoking proximality and thus experientiality. By “experientiality” I mean the literary illusion of experience separable from any individual experiencing consciousness.46 As an illustration, it may be helpful to think of uses of the so-­called ethic dative in other Middle English poems, for instance in this passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, telling how Gawain readies himself for his final journey to the Green Chapel: He called to his chamberlayn, that cofly hym swared, And bede hym bryng hym his bruny and his blonk sadel. That other ferkez hym up and fechez hym his wedez And graythez me Sir Gawayn upon a grett wyse. (2011–14; my italics) —— [He summoned his chamberlain, who promptly answered him, and told him to bring him his mail coat and saddle his horse. The chamberlain bestirs himself and fetches him his clothes and dresses [me] Sir Gawain in magnificent style.]

The me, untranslatable into modern English, does not of course indicate that the poet is or was really present at the scene as a witness of the dressing of Sir Gawain, nor does it refer to any specific human being; it is a form of proximal deixis, intensifying the shift from the past tense (“called,” “swared,” “bede”) to the present (“ferkez,” “fechez,” “graythez”), drawing us in more closely and

The Textual First Person  21

empathetically to what is happening, as if we were experiencing the chamberlain’s care for ourselves. By analogy with what Roland Barthes calls the “reality effect” or effet de réel, experientiality might also be called the “experience effect.”47 Barthes’s effet de réel is something produced by language, through our acquiescence, as he puts it elsewhere, in “the postulate of realist style, according to which an accumulation of small and precise details confirms the truth of the thing represented.”48 Similarly, “experientiality” is an effect of literary language, and it is thus very different from “experience” (experientia and associated terms) as it appears in medieval scholastic thought, often by contrast with “revelation,” and in any case valued not for its own sake but as a possible pathway to what lies beyond it—God or truth.49 That there could be an effect of experience without an experiencing subject is perhaps a counterintuitive notion, so let me pause to elaborate. The question asked by Mark Jordan about the dream poem De planctu naturae, “Who is he?”—who is the speaker (or the narrator or the dreamer)?—is probably not one we would think of asking about a real dream. Of course I know in retrospect that a dream was my dream, but I suppose I am not alone in finding that while dreaming I float free of the constraints of identity as experienced when I am awake; it is not that I become a consistently different person from my waking self but that I become even less consciously a person of any kind than the uncharacterized “I” of my waking life. (This must, I think, be partly a matter of the dreamer’s total absorption, while dreaming, in the present experience of the dream, so that he is no longer in possession of the memories of past experiences that shore up and perhaps even constitute personal identity in waking life.) Medieval dream poems, though governed by literary conventions and by no means identical in every way to actual dreams, do share some of their characteristics, and this is one of them. Still, most of the cases of autography I want to discuss are not dream poems, and a more useful analogy, one more likely to help us to imagine experientiality as such—the effect of experience without an experiencing subject—can perhaps be provided

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by cinema. Watching a film is often like dreaming someone else’s dream, and what most parts of most films offer the viewer is not experiences attributable to specific persons within the cinematic fiction, nor is it the point of view of a specific narrator (except in the rare cases where a narrator is introduced into the film in the form of speech heard in voiceover); it is the illusion of experience itself, the effect of experience. Ann Banfield notes that a style that “seeks to capture, to arrest within the moment, the appearances of things independent of any observer and his or her desires, prejudices, intentions . . . can be taken as the counterpart of what Deleuze, speaking of film, calls ‘la conscience-­caméra’, the consciousness of the camera.” Banfield refers to such a style as “uniquely novelistic” and sees it as exemplified in Flaubert.50 What we find in much medieval first-­person poetry is something similar to this, though not identical: a style that captures the effect of experience, independent not so much of observation as of any represented, biographically identifiable observer. The way we watch and understand films may offer a better guide to reading some medieval poems than the principles of interpretation developed for reading more recent literature.51 To return now to Wynnere and Wastoure: It begins with a prologue lamenting the corruption of society—corruption that, as Vance Smith observes, includes the “degeneration of writing,” marked by the loss of “a condition in which the performance, the work, the maker, and the audience are joined together ‘in frenchipe.’ ”52 This is an early illustration of the tendency of autography to take writing itself as a theme. Extended prologues will be examined in later chapters, but here, before getting to the main body of Wynnere and Wastoure, I want to consider its brief prologue as an instance of writing about writing. The prologue is the most obscure part of the poem, with a number of its lines being differently interpreted by various recent editors.53 Some of the obscurity may be a result of scribal corruption in the single, rather late manuscript, corruption that may well be present throughout the poem,54 but in the prologue it is probably at least partly authorial

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and deliberate. The poet adopts the role of a prophet denouncing the present and divining a still worse future, and with the prophetic stance goes the double gesture of transmitting truths that one does not fully understand and of fearing to express oneself clearly. In the present age, he writes, guile has replaced straightforward dealing, and no “westren wy” (7: western person)55 dares to send his son to London for fear that he will be corrupted. In the specific case of vernacular poetic composition, he goes on, lords were once patrons of “makers . . . that matirs couthe fynde” (20)—that is, poets skilled in inventio, the finding or choice of material for poetry—but now mere beardless boys, who have never composed a line of their own, are praised for jokes and parrot-­like repetition more highly than those whose work they are repeating. Elizabeth Salter noted a parallel between these lines on the decline of the present from a past situation in which “respon­sible patrons were served by worthy poets” and a passage from the prologue to the Chandos Herald’s Life of the Black Prince: once “those who made fine poems were regarded as authors or in some sort recorders,” but now “such things are not valued any more, and people prefer chatterers, false liars, jongleurs or jesters.”56 The Chandos Herald’s work dates from 1385, and for Salter this was an argument in favor of a date later than the 1350s for Wynnere and Wastoure. In fact, though, the Wynnere and Wastoure poet is giving expression to a topos widespread in fourteenth-­century literature; a close parallel is found, for example, in a letter from Petrarch to Boccaccio of August 28, 1364: You know that ordinary, numerous lot of men, dealers in words, but not their own, who have multiplied among us to an intolerable degree. They are possessed of no great native wit but of splendid memories, much diligence, and more effrontery. They frequent the halls of kings and potentates. Naked of originality, they deck themselves out with other men’s poems. They pick up the best things written by one or another, especially those composed in Italian, and recite them with great expression,

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thus seeking the applause of the great, and money and fine clothes, and gifts. The material for their support they obtain at second hand, or sometimes from the writers themselves, either by begging or if necessary by paying cash when they find a greedy or poverty-­stricken author.57

The Wynnere and Wastoure prologue may well respond to a particular English situation, but it also expresses a broader sense, developing throughout Western Europe, of the possibility of originality and lasting worth in vernacular writing, along with awareness that writing in the vernacular, unlike Latin, was especially liable to be appropriated by unoriginal reciters. The prologue conveys a conception, surprisingly elevated for an English poem of this date, of the vernacular poet as something more than an entertainer. It repeatedly uses terms referring to poetic composition as creation and as work—“makers” (20) and “made” (28), “wroghte” (22 and 25), and finally “Werke wittnesse will bere who wirche kane beste” (30: the work will bear witness who is the best worker). This conception of the poet as creator includes the beginning of a notion of the alliterative poem as a stable text that is its author’s property rather than being a momentary crystallization out of the flow of a tradition belonging to no individual. At the Day of Judgment it will be seen who is il miglior fabbro58—the maker or the borrower? When Doomsday is in question, werke would normally mean “works,” the deeds by which we shall ultimately be judged, but here it must refer more specifically to literary works.59 Then the poet writes that he fell asleep and had a dream, and with that the prologue ends. The poet’s subsequent role as a visionary, seeing in his dream socioeconomic truth inflected by Christian morality and framed by apocalyptic transcendence, fits well with his role as a prophet in the prologue. But, as I have been arguing, the purpose of the centrality of the first person in medieval poetry is not usually to establish the perspective of an individual “speaker” but rather to capture the general effect of experientiality, and in Wynnere and Wastoure that feature is apparent even before the dream, as the poet writes,

The Textual First Person  25

Bot I schall tell yow a tale that me bytyde ones, Als I wente in the weste wandrynge myn one Bi a bonke of a bourne. . . . (31–33) —— [But I shall tell you a tale of what once befell me, as I walked in the west, wandering by myself by the bank of a stream . . . ]

The first person, prominent as it is in these lines, has no real individuality other than a location “in the weste” (which, it has been plausibly argued, may refer to Cheshire, in the northwest Midlands60). The poem’s “I” lies down to rest and is kept awake till near nightfall by the noise of the stream and of birdsong, Bot as I laye at the laste than lowked myn eghne And I was swythe in a sweven sweped belyve; Me thoghte I was in the werlde, I ne wiste in whate ende (45–47) —— [But as I lay, then at last my eyes closed, and at once I was quickly swept into a dream; it seemed to me that I was in the world, I didn’t know in what part]

The poet wants to convey from the beginning that what is to come is not a vision of the other world, as in many religious poems, but, for all its apocalypticism, a dream about the world in which his audience lives, an allegorical fiction that offers an analysis of economic drives, opposing yet dependent on each other, and the control exercised over them by royal authority.61 In his dream he witnesses a threatened battle between two armies representing the tendencies of winning and wasting, getting and spending goods and money. A king, unnamed but identifiable as Edward III, in whose reign the poem was written, commands that representatives of the two sides should state their cases before him. The resulting debate of the personifications Winner and Waster forms the poem’s main substance, and at the end the king consigns Winner to dwell at the papal court and Waster among the merchants of Cheapside.

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Winning and wasting are mutually dependent opposites, so it is appropriate that Winner is to lie in silk sheets among the unproductive luxury-­loving cardinals (in other words, wasters), while Waster is to make a profit by selling food and drink to the London merchants (that is, winners). Each is to become the patron and beneficiary of the activity to which he is apparently opposed, and indeed, throughout the debate, neither Winner nor Waster occupies a single fixed position: their assumptions and arguments are constantly shifting, rather like those of the Owl and the Nightingale in an earlier debate poem, or even perhaps like those of the opposing forces in a modern two-­party political system. The sole requirement is that each of them should occupy all the economic and dialectical ground not appropriated by the other. As John Scattergood observes, “The allegorical fiction of this poem is set in the form of a debate, but significantly it is an inconclusive or ‘horizontal’ debate: neither disputant concedes defeat, and the enigmatic, sidestepping judgment of the king is not of the sort to grant victory one way or the other.”62 The vernacular poet makes approximate use of the techniques of academic disputation, and the readers, in an age of increasing lay literacy, are left to arrive at their own judgments of the cases made. As Deborah McGrady notes, discussing French literature in relation to the “influx of debate poetry in which writers refrained from recording a judgment in their texts,” this is a period when, “increasingly called upon to expound on the text, to interpret its significance, and to take from it moral and ethical lessons, the laity was presented as only steps away from practising the meditative solitude associated with the learned.”63 That general development came earlier in French than in English (though The Owl and the Nightingale, perhaps intended for a clerical readership, is an exception64), but with Wynnere and Wastoure we are on its threshold. Wynnere and Wastoure is divided into “fitts,” the first of which ends, The kynge waytted one wyde and the wyne askes; Beryns broghte it anone in bolles of silvere.

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Me thoughte I sowpped so sadly it sowede bothe myn eghne! And he that wilnes of this werke to wete any forthire, Full freschely and faste, for here a fitt endes! (213–17) —— [The king looked about him and called for wine; men brought it at once in silver bowls. It seemed to me I drank so heavily that it grieved both my eyes. If anyone wishes to know any more of this work, let him fill up freshly and fast, for here a fitt ends!]

A scene of refreshment within the dream merges into a pause for refreshment for the “I” and the audience. The poem might really have been designed for reading aloud, with pauses for drink in which its real-­life performer hints that there will be no continuation unless his cup too is filled “freschely and faste”; alternatively, this could all be part of a literary fiction of minstrelsy and conviviality, in a poem intended for private reading in “meditative solitude.” In either case, there would be no point in trying to distinguish between a poet who is manipulating events behind the scenes and a fallible dreamer or narrator whose understanding of those events we need to doubt. The function both of the textual “I” and of the implied “you” he addresses is to evoke an experiential realm of bodies with thirsty mouths and bleary eyes, a world of space (through which the king looks about him) and of time (through which the public performance or private reading of the poem is extended). That is the world in which winning and wasting operate, a world comparable to that inhabited by the poem’s readers and/or listeners. At an earlier moment, describing the two armies and a knight sent by the king to command them not to fight—his coat of arms is probably meant to identify him as the Black Prince’s administrator, Sir John Wingfield65—the poet writes, Full wyde hafe I walked amonges thies wyes one, Bot sawe I never siche a syghte, segge, with myn eghne. (136–37) ——

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[I have wandered alone far and wide among men, but, man, I never saw such a sight with my eyes.]

Editors disagree as to whether, in this unpunctuated manuscript text, the “I” and the eyes are those of the dreamer or of the knight in his dream, but neither is given any distinctive voice, and the truth is that it does not matter. The “I” is not a participant in the poem’s events but an observer whose observations are rendered intermittently as experience. He is the means by which we are informed about an allegorical conflict between the winners and the wasters, and by which the substance of their dispute is made concrete for us. That does not mean that the observer is totally impersonal and uncritically objective. He makes judgments and guesses about what he sees: the king wears robes decorated with falcons and a belt embroidered with ducks and drakes, And ever I sayd to myselfe, “full selly me thynke Bot if this renke to the revere ryde umbestonde.” (99–100) —— [And I kept on saying to myself, “It seems extraordinary to me if this man doesn’t sometimes go hawking.”]

That helps to confirm that the king is Edward III, whose love of hawking was well known, and probably it is also meant to encourage us to look for meaning in the poem’s details rather than taking them simply as decorative pageantry. We are to be active interpreters rather than passive consumers. Thus we may be prepared to recognize touches of irony in the judgments of the poem’s “I,” as when he comments on the lawyers in Winner’s army, I holde hym bot a fole that fightis whils flyttynge may helpe, When he hase founden his frende that fayled hym never. (154–55) ——

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[I consider the man a mere fool who fights while (legal) dispute may help, when he has found his friend who has never failed him.]

Medieval lawyers were by no means always their clients’ trustworthy friends, and we are no doubt meant to smile at the assumption that they would be.66 The irony, though, is not an indication that the poet is creating a naïve narrator who really believes in the unfailing trustworthiness of lawyers; indeed, it does not matter who the “I” of the dream is, other than a series of textual projections of the poet. He may resemble a living person in being the origo or center of perception from which deictic proximality and distality are measured—“here es all the folke of Fraunce” (138: proximal), “And yondere a banere of blake” (143: distal)—but he has few, if any, biographical characteristics. Thomas H. Bestul notes that “the somber moralist of the prologue is not very much like the credulous dreamer seeking for ‘selcouthes’ in the second part of Wynnere and Wastoure,”67 and indeed the textual “I” is manifested not just as “somber moralist” and “credulous dreamer” but in a variety of other forms, many of which imply no characterizable self. The poem is of course a fiction, but that does not mean that its “I” is a fictional character, any more than the king in the dream is meant to be understood as someone other than Edward III. And as the poem proceeds, this “I” fades out. Line 215, quoted above (“Me thoughte I sowpped so sadly it sowede bothe myn eghne”), includes the last explicit appearance of a narratorial first person, and in the remaining 291 lines of the surviving text first-­person pronouns do not occur in the narration but only in speeches by Wynnere, Wastoure, and the king. Fitt II ends with repetition of lines 216–17 as 366–67, but now there is no equivalent to line 215: the witnessing “I” has disappeared. In the only manuscript, the end of the poem is missing. If we had it complete it is of course possible that the “I” of the prologue would return in an epilogue, but in the text as we do have it there is no such return of the “I.” What matters here is not the distinctive consciousness of

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an identifiable experiencing subject, but the claim to experientiality itself, the experience effect. Medieval Latin treatises on the art of poetry, such as the Englishman Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, while presenting amplification and abbreviation of the material as equally possible goals for the poet, usually devote most of their attention to amplification. The most conspicuous form of amplification in Wynnere and Wastoure occurs in the description of lavish feasting that contributes to Winner’s satire against Waster’s extravagance. These lines are an illustration: Roste with the riche sewes and the ryalle spyces, Kiddes cloven yn the rigge, quarterd swannes, Tartes of ten ynche, that tenys myn hert To see the borde overbrade with blasande disches Als it were a rayled rode with rynges and stones. (339–43) —— [Roast meat with rich stews and royal spices, kids split along the backbone, quartered swans, ten-­inch tarts, so that it pains my heart to see the table covered with shining dishes as if it were a cross adorned with rings and jewels.]

In that brief extract from a much longer passage, Winner introduces religious values, in the concrete form of the jeweled cross, as a means of objecting to the wastefulness of Waster’s expenditure on a mere feast, but his complete account of the feast, occupying thirty lines altogether, is no less wasteful of words than Waster is of “blasande disches.” This is not something that the dreamer-­ narrator gives any indication of noticing, so an interpretation in terms of the received poet/narrator binary might perhaps claim that he is ironically represented as imperceptive or obtuse, unable to recognize the implications of what he observes in his dream, or perhaps unaware of his own secret delight in the lavish expenditure that is being criticized. That would be a mistaken interpretation. The poem’s medium is alliterative verse, and the style of alliterative

The Textual First Person  31

verse is itself typically profuse and expansive: as the Beowulf poet put it many centuries earlier in describing an eloquent speaker, “wordhord unle¯ac” (he unlocked his treasury of words).68 There is an inevitable clash between that verbal generosity and the refusal to unlock his material treasury of which Waster accuses Winner, with the result that “Stuffed are sterlynges undere stelen bowndes” (272: silver coins are confined by bands of steel). Lavish expenditure of words and lavish expenditure of material resources are parallel and interchangeable phenomena: each can be used to express the other, because, as Ralph Hanna puts it, “sumptuous feasting and drinking, like the ornate verbal surface of courtly poetry, testify precisely to the aristocratic capacity to express power through wastage, conspicuous consumption.”69 Thus the thirty-­line description of Waster’s feast is a kind of literalization of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s repeated use of feasting as a metaphor for amplification, as when he writes of apostrophe as one means to that end, Delecteris ea, sine qua satis esset abundans Coena, sed egregiae sic crescunt fercula mensae. Pompa dapum veniens numerosior et mora mensae Tardior est signum sollemne. Diutius aures Pascimus ex variis et ditius, hic cibus auri Quando venit sapidus et odorifer et pretiosus. —— [Without it the feast would be ample enough, but with it the courses of an excellent cuisine are multiplied. The splendor of dishes arriving in rich profusion and the leisured delay at the table are festive signs. With a variety of courses we feed the ear for a longer time and more lavishly. Here is food indeed for the ear when it arrives delicious and fragrant and costly.]70

Greater poets than the composer of Wynnere and Wastoure can bend alliterative poetry to subtler purposes, but that is what it is like in itself. Its tendency toward amplification, along with its

32  M e d i e v a l A u t o g r a p h i e s

concrete and strongly subjectivized style, can produce a powerful sense of experientiality, but the experience is not necessarily or usually focused in any single narratorial consciousness. I offer Wynnere and Wastoure as a simple introductory illustration of the way medieval autography works in its earliest English stages; in what follows I explore the concept of autography more fully, by contrasting it with autobiography, and show how it emerges in more developed forms in prologues and dits.

Chapter 2

A ut o g r a p h y : P r o l o g ues and D i t s

The occurrences of a narratorial first person in Wynnere and Wastoure have behind them no fictional self of which an autobiography could be imagined. That brings us back to the terminological question, the question of autography, which I hope we may now be better prepared to take up after this examination of a particular case. In recent years, when asked to give a paper or a lecture on my current work, I have sometimes put the word “autography” in the title, only to find that “autobiography” has been substituted for it in announcements—sometimes repeatedly, in spite of my attempts to have it corrected. “Autobiography” is certainly the more familiar word, most people assume they know what it means, and probably think of it as referring to a natural and permanent genre. Over the last century and more, autobiography has proved to be extremely popular among readers, and anyone wishing or required to compose an autobiography would probably know enough models to have a clear sense of how to set about it. Yet the word “autobiography” has been traced no further back than the late eighteenth century,1 and the concept has proved surprisingly hard to define and to theorize. As Paul de Man puts it, The theory of autobiography is plagued by a recurrent series of questions and approaches that are not simply false, in the sense 33

34  M e d i e v a l A u t o g r a p h i e s

that they are far-­fetched or aberrant, but that are confining, in that they take for granted assumptions about autobiographical discourse that are in fact highly problematic. . . . Empirically as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition; each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm; the works themselves always seem to shade off into neighboring or even incompatible genres and, perhaps most revealing of all, generic discussions, which can have such powerful heuristic value in the case of tragedy or of the novel, remain distressingly sterile when autobiography is at stake.2

In modern literary discussion “autography” has sometimes been used to contrast with autobiography. One interesting instance is a 1988 article by H. Porter Abbott, with the title “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Cate­ go­ries.” For Abbott, autobiography is one “narrative subset” of the broader category of “self-­writing,” which he calls autography.3 He sees autobiography as performative, a sort of action, with the author, as he puts it, “present in the text, pushing and shoving the facts, coloring events, in short, doing something for himself.”4 The underlying assumption is that in autobiography a truth about the author exists outside the text, ready to be revealed by it, and that it is perhaps especially likely to be revealed in cases where the author is attempting to conceal it. Indeed, in one early use of the word “autobiography,” Friedrich Schlegel observes that one “great group among the autobiographers [Autobiographen] is formed by the autopseusts [self-­deceivers].”5 That is a valuable insight, and a few cases of medieval “self-­writing” do seem to reveal extratextual truths that the writer did not intend and seems to have been unaware of, though I know of none in English. (The Book of Margery Kempe would be an English instance if it were indeed “self-­writing.”) One medieval example is Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, which inadvertently exposes in Abelard motives very different from the “purity of my intentions and love of our Faith” by which he claimed, and perhaps believed himself,

Autography: Prologues and Dits 35

to be driven.6 The Historia reveals rather obviously how his ambitious egotism provoked the enmities by which he professes himself so baffled. It seems ironic that the promoter of an ethic of intention should apparently have had so little understanding of his own intentions, but there is no indication that the irony was intended. Many modern readings of the Historia see it as recording a growth in self-­knowledge; thus Eileen C. Sweeney has recently written that Abelard “presents himself as developing toward greater depth and interiority, coming to realize the gap between his reputation and the reality, which caused his fall.”7 That seems to me to be a distortion of the reality of the text, resulting from the imposition of more recent expectations. Another possible instance of the pattern suggested by Abbott is Guibert de Nogent’s Monodiae or Memoirs, which has been described as “the first ‘comprehensive’ autobiography in medieval Latin,”8 and which again tells us more than Guibert probably recognized or intended about his tormented inner life. In both cases, we may feel that we come to know the author in his very avoidance of the truth about himself. In the Middle Ages, however, there are few cases of autobiography in the modern sense stated in a well-­known definition by Philippe Lejeune: “a retrospective narrative . . . that a real person makes of his own existence when he puts the accent upon his individual life, especially upon the story of his personality.”9 As Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff puts it, “if pressed to name autobiographies written after St. Augustine’s Confessions and prior to the Renaissance, most scholars would point only to Guibert of Nogent’s Memoirs, Abelard’s Story of My Calamities and The Book of Margery Kempe. . . . Yet none of these writers claims to be writing an autobiography.”10 Such medieval examples as existed were evidently not much in demand among readers; it may be significant that not one medieval manuscript of Guibert’s Monodiae has survived. The Book of Margery Kempe, composed in the 1430s and surviving only in a single manuscript written some twenty years later, is often described as the first autobiography in English. It too contains many apparently inadvertent revelations about its

36  M e d i e v a l A u t o g r a p h i e s

central character (for example, that she is obsessed above all with the impression she makes on others), but it is very different from autobiography as now understood. It habitually refers to Margery Kempe in the third person and, if we take seriously what it says about itself, was not written by Margery, who was illiterate, but by more than one man, the last being probably her confessor, Robert Spryngolde.11 In some ways it has less in common with autobiography than with other vitae of holy women written by medieval clerics, such as those of Mary of Oignies by Jacques de Vitry, of Christina Mirabilis by Thomas de Cantimpré, and of Dorothea of Schönau by John Marienwerder.12 Not many medieval people wrote detailed accounts of their own lives, and those who did were most often driven by religious motives to focus on exemplariness rather than novelistic realism, and on what souls have in common rather than on the “personalities” that differentiate them. In the absence of direct evidence, I see no reason to doubt that individual subjectivity was experienced by medieval people more or less as it is experienced by us, but it was not very often the theme of writing. There is an important kind of medieval writing, though, which can be described as “autographic,” in that it is written in the first person and (to a greater or lesser extent) about the first person, but not as autobiographic because its purpose is not to narrate the life of an individual behind the text.13 This is autography in a sense used by some recent students of contemporary writing. One is Jeanne Perreault, in her 1995 book Writing Selves. She explains that “in autography, I find a writing whose effect is to bring into being a ‘self’ that the writer names ‘I,’ but whose parameters and boundaries resist the monadic.”14 It could be that this resistance to the monadic reflects a contemporary inner reality, as proposed, for example, in a fascinating passage by Philip Roth: All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about my self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do,

Autography: Prologues and Dits 37

and not only of my self—a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-­evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic attempts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.15

But what we encounter in this passage is of course not inner reality but writing. A similar but more exact use of the term “autography,” and one that focuses precisely on writing, is made by Lisa Samuels in a 1997 article about the contemporary poet Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian is the author of a prose text called My Life; Samuels nevertheless describes it not as autobiography but as autography. She does so because it is, as she puts it, “the story of a languaged self, a written ‘I,’ rather than the autobiography of an experiencing human.”16 My own use of “autography” comes closest to this definition. Medievalists may well be suspicious of a categorization that approaches medieval writing by way of a detour through postmodernism; but it can sometimes be helpful—helpful even to historical understanding—to see medieval literature in a discontinuous perspective. It can help us to notice things that we might otherwise miss in medieval texts and, perhaps more important, in the assumptions we bring to reading them. Modern autography is said to derive from what Perreault calls resistance to the monadic, resistance to individual selfhood as a self-­evident value, and at a late stage in the writing of this book I found a similar point made about contemporary “language poets” in a review of a book by one of them: They wanted to keep those innards of language exposed, rather than tuck them back inside a consistent speaker whom we get to know, and come to like or despise, as we read. Poetry shouldn’t reveal the soul of a unique individual: there’s no such thing as a unique individual. Poetry was there to countermand, rather

38  M e d i e v a l A u t o g r a p h i e s

than to express, identity, to reveal the hand-­me-­down nature of what we take to be deeply personal memories.17

We need to remember, though, that, far from deriving from resistance to an idée reçue of individualism, medieval autography is more likely to be (for us, though not for the medieval autographers themselves) a stage on the way toward such individualism. In this and other respects our culture seems to be moving through a phase somewhat analogous to that of the later Middle Ages, but moving in the opposite direction. An especially important kind of English autography in the Middle Ages is the prologue. Many Middle English prologues have been gathered together and annotated in an important collection, The Idea of the Vernacular.18 As its subtitle indicates, however— An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520— this collection’s focus is on content rather than on the prologue as a literary form. Among the commentaries included is the concise but valuable “Afterword on the Prologue” by Ruth Evans, who recognizes that Middle English prologues form a “genre (or even several genres)” and makes the Derridean point that they tend to undo conceptual hierarchies: “Written last but appearing first, and treated as integral to the works they are supposed to stand outside of, prefaces in fact continually overstep the line, disorganizing the categories of center and periphery, theoria and praxis.”19 Even this essay, though, is not concerned with what interests me here, the prologue as a form of extended writing in the first person, and the prologues collected or extracted in the anthology are all relatively brief. Another, more recent discussion, “Middle English Prologues” by Andrew Galloway, divides prologues into four types: first, “the ‘redactor’s prologue’, in which the writer’s role as collector, editor, or translator is the basis”; second, “the ‘testimonial prologue’, by which a direct experience, visionary or historical, is introduced and framed”; third, “the ‘commentary prologue’, where an initial or later explication is offered or initiated, or simply promised”; and fourth, “the ‘literary autobiographical prologue’ ” in which “the

Autography: Prologues and Dits 39

present work is introduced as another in a series of works by the present author.”20 Here again the concern is primarily with content, and length is immaterial, though the second and fourth types imply versions of autography. For extended prologues, we must turn first to Chaucer, clearly the champion medieval prologuizer. He wrote an enormous number of prologues, and considered as first-­person writings, they seem to fall into two groups. On the one hand are those in which the “I” is not formally differentiated from the writer: these include relatively short prologues such as the opening section of The Book of the Duchess, but the most substantial are the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and the prologue to The Legend of Good Women. The latter is also a dream poem, and the likelihood that the former was shaped on the model of the dream poem was noted long ago.21 The connection between Chaucerian prologues and dream poems is not an accident, for it was in composing dream poems that Chaucer learned the possibilities of autography. It is also perhaps not an accident that the prologue to the Legend is the only poem of Chaucer’s that we have in both an original and a revised form. The freedom from internal logic and from preexisting structures and patterns that, I shall argue, becomes possible with autography, and that Chaucer came to appreciate in writing dream poems and to develop further in writing prologues, included the freedom to reshape a composition at will or in response to external events. On the other hand there are the many passages within The Canterbury Tales, labeled as prologues in modern editions, in which the fictional frame identifies the various “I”s as those of the pilgrim tale-­tellers. It is worth noting that these passages are not always called prologues in the manuscript rubrics. As Laura Kendrick observes, “Certain sections that we call ‘prologues,’ in accordance with the way the text has been labeled and divided in printed editions, are really mixed forms; they may end with an introduction to a new tale in the voice of its teller (a prologue proper), but they often begin with the comments of the Host or other pilgrims on the preceding or forthcoming tale or teller.”22 The distinction

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between the two groups has some importance, because where the “I” is identified with the writer of the poem, there is no reason to think that Chaucer is impersonating someone else, a fictional being completely different from himself. Rather, he is putting on a textual performance comparable to the sort of social performances that we all engage in, consciously or unconsciously, in the various situations of our daily lives; only he is doing it in writing.23 Chaucer criticism over the last century has generally disregarded this distinction, treating the Chaucerian “I” as no less a fictional character than the various pilgrim “I”s. In my view this is a distortion of Chaucer’s achievement. I want to downplay the distinction for exactly the opposite reason, that I see the “I” of the pilgrim prologues as often autographic, with slight or even no special reference to a fictional person. All these prologues, I want to argue, are poems of a similar though somewhat loose kind, yet they have not usually been discussed as a group. An obvious reason for the lack of such discussion is that The Canterbury Tales is where most of Chaucer’s prologues are to be found, and the predominant interpretative tradition has insisted on reading the tales as expressions of the subjectivity of their individual tellers, and the prologues as introducing those subjectivities. That tradition goes back to George Lyman Kittredge over a century ago—that is, it goes back to the era of the poem as dramatic monologue and the novel or novella as Jamesian drama of consciousness, often revolving about the questionable reliability of its narrator.24 These are essentially two different versions of the same conception of writing as a representation of speech and thus of the consciousness of a specific speaker. The parallel between them is brought out in Jonathan Culler’s definition of the dramatic monologue as “the fictional representation of a speaker character, whose novelistic situation the reader is asked to reconstruct by asking, what would lead someone to speak thus and to feel thus?”25 It was in that cultural context that Kittredge began his series of brilliant and persuasive writings based on the argument, or rather the unargued assertion, that the tales are to be understood as dramatic speeches

Autography: Prologues and Dits 41

by the pilgrims, and that the prologues are part of those dramatic speeches. His first example, in an article published in 1893,26 was the Pardoner, the pilgrim whose prologue and tale do indeed seem most obviously to form a single unit and best lend themselves to such a reading. He subsequently went on to extend his “dramatic” interpretation to the whole collection, inviting readers to admire what he called “Chaucer’s exquisite delicacy of portraiture, and wonderful power of dramatically adapting his stories to their tellers.”27 The passage in which Kittredge gave his final statement of that theory is well known, and the approach it represents remains extraordinarily influential today, even (and perhaps especially) among those who do not know they are being influenced by it:28 “The Pilgrims do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa. Structurally regarded, the stories are merely long speeches expressing, directly or indirectly, the characters of the several persons.”29 Kittredge was applying to Chaucer ideas about literature that were modern in his time, but he also took for granted the deeper assumption that I have already explained I believe to be mistaken: that every text must have a speaker whose consciousness it expresses, and therefore every narrative must be the expression of a narratorial consciousness. The survival of that assumption can be seen a century later in the way that some of the most sophisticated modern criticism of The Canterbury Tales continues to substitute the imagined inner lives of the tellers for the texts of their stories. This is true even in cases where a prologue cannot plausibly be thought to be an expression of a pilgrim’s subjectivity, as with the Knight, whose “prologue” depicts him entirely as seen from the outside. Lee Patterson, in a study described by one reviewer as “probably the best book ever written on Chaucer,” wrote a penetrating chapter, “The Knight’s Tale and the Crisis of Chivalric Identity,” that seems to me to be weakened by a determination to read the tale as expressing the consciousness of an “experiencing subject.”30 That subject can only be the Knight himself, so the tale is interpreted as “the fictive

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expression of an aristocratic self-­understanding,” and as testifying to the Knight’s “repressed knowledge of military chivalry’s darker, more malevolent valence.”31 Since we know that a version of what became The Knight’s Tale was originally a separate poem,32 and there is almost nothing in the extant text that would have had to be added to turn it into a tale for the Knight, the self-­understanding and the repressed knowledge must surely be properties of the tale, or of the critic’s imagination, not of its fictive teller. In another important and intelligent book about Chaucer, H. Marshall Leicester goes even further along the same road in his determination to interpret The Knight’s Tale as the expression of a fictional mind that possesses a consciousness and also an unconscious. In this book, which is fully armored with a sophisticated Lacanian theory of the subject, Leicester nevertheless shows himself to be a true follower of Kittredge, repeatedly writing of how the tale reveals the Knight’s consciousness. He—the Knight, not Chaucer—“is attracted to the language, attitudes, and conventions of his sources even when he also finds them silly or disturbing”; he—the Knight—“would almost certainly agree with Northrop Frye that romance is a form of fantasy”; and the passages in his tale describing the temples of the gods can be taken as an expression of “the Knight’s bisexuality, the interplay of his masculine and feminine identifications across the text.”33 Those statements seem strange to me not so much because Leicester, no doubt playfully, imagines the Knight as having read Boccaccio’s Teseida and Chaucer’s other sources and then thinks of him as a literary theorist capable of agreeing with Northrop Frye, as because he insists on substituting a fictional character and his psyche for a written text. Patterson and Leicester, both of them in their different ways learned, penetrating, and sensitive readers of Chaucer, would be still more powerful critics, I believe, if they could bring themselves to recognize that The Knight’s Tale is not a dramatic monologue delivered on the psychoanalyst’s couch but a written narrative. I have allowed myself to be diverted from prologues to tales, but the diversion has not been a digression, because, according to

Autography: Prologues and Dits 43

the Kittredgean tradition, it is in the prologues, or at least in some of them, that the consciousnesses of which the tales are expressions are first set before us. It may be helpful if I attempt a practical demonstration of the distortions that can arise from applying this axiom to a Chaucerian prologue. My example is The Reeve’s Prologue. Here is the part of it that is represented as spoken by the Reeve and is thus a “prologue proper” in Kendrick’s sense, and that therefore offers the strongest temptation to being read as a dramatic monologue: “So theek,” quod he, “ful wel koude I thee quite With bleryng of a proud milleres ye, If that me liste speke of ribaudye. But ik am oold; me list not pley for age; Gras tyme is doon; my fodder is now forage; This white top writeth myne olde yeris; Myn herte is also mowled as myne heris, But if I fare as dooth an open-­ers— That ilke fruyt is ever lenger the wers, Til it be roten in mullok or in stree. We olde men, I drede, so fare we: Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype; We hoppen alwey whil that the world wol pype. For in oure wyl ther stiketh evere a nayl, To have an hoor heed and a grene tayl, As hath a leek; for thogh oure myght be goon, Oure wyl desireth folie evere in oon. For whan we may nat doon, than wol we speke; Yet in oure asshen olde is fyr yreke. Foure gleedes han we, which I shal devyse— Avauntyng, liyng, anger, coveitise; Thise foure sparkles longen unto eelde. Oure olde lemes mowe wel been unweelde, But wyl ne shal nat faillen, that is sooth. And yet ik have alwey a coltes tooth,

3865

3870

3875

3880

3885

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As many a yeer as it is passed henne Syn that my tappe of lif bigan to renne. 3890 For sikerly, whan I was bore, anon Deeth drogh the tappe of lyf and leet it gon, And ever sithe hath so the tappe yronne Til that almoost al empty is the tonne. The streem of lyf now droppeth on the chymbe. 3895 The sely tonge may wel rynge and chymbe Of wrecchednesse that passed is ful yoore; With olde folk, save dotage, is namoore!” —— [“As I hope to prosper,” he said, “I could easily repay you with (a tale of) the hoodwinking of a proud miller, if I wanted to talk about coarse things. But I’m old, too old to enjoy joking; my grazing days are over; now I just live on hay; this white head of mine indicates my old age; my heart is as moldy as my hair— unless I’m ripening like a medlar: that fruit gets continually worse, until it rots in the rubbish-­heap or in straw. That’s how it is with us old men, I fear: we can’t be ripe till we’re rotten; as long as the world goes on playing its music, we’ll go on dancing to it. For in our will there’s a persistent sharp longing, to have a white head but a green tail (i.e., youthful sexuality), the way a leek has; for though our capacity may be gone, we don’t stop having foolish desires. For we still want to talk about what we can’t do; there’s still fire raked up in our old ashes. We have four live coals, which I’ll list—boasting, lying, anger, covetousness: these are the four sparks that belong to age. Our old limbs may be feeble, but our desire won’t fade away, that’s the truth. And I still have a colt’s appetite, however many years may have passed since my life’s spigot began to run. For certainly, when I was born, Death pulled out the stopper of life and let it flow, and the spigot has been running like this ever since, so that the barrel is almost completely empty, and the stream of life is now splashing on the barrel’s rim. The foolish tongue may well ring and chime about wretchedness that was over long ago; there’s nothing more left for old people except this senile stuff!”]

Autography: Prologues and Dits 45

This is an extraordinarily rich and compressed piece of late Chaucerian poetry, and I emphasize the word “poetry,” rarer than might be expected in recent Chaucer criticism.34 Derek Pearsall has invited us to consider the question “What difference does it make to our reading of the Canterbury Tales that most of them are poems?”35 For many contemporary readers, whether critics or students, the answer is that it seems to make no difference at all; they read Chaucer as if reading a prose translation from a foreign language, attending only to what a translation can convey. (We may be at the beginning of a revival of concern for the largely untranslatable formal and aesthetic properties of literature,36 but if so, its influence has not yet spread very wide in Chaucer studies.) The lines quoted above are imitative of speech and of the specific position for the first person that speech implies, and they begin as vigorous colloquial drama, with the Reeve responding to what he takes to be the Miller’s attack on him in the preceding tale. Yet as the passage continues, it leaves that dramatic context behind to convey traditional written doctrine about old age,37 and it even hints at its own textuality in the use of “write” as a metaphor in line 3869: “This white top writeth myne olde yeris.” The passage begins in the first person (3864–71), then offers an unimpersonated generalization about medlars— That ilke fruyt is ever lenger the wers, Til it be roten in mullok or in stree (3872–73)

—as a transition to “we” old men. Lines 3874–87 contain only two occurrences of “I,” the first a transitional personalizing tag, “I drede” (3874), the second that of a clerkly transmitter of wisdom not his own—“I shal devyse” (3883). Next Chaucer reverts to the “I” of personal experience, perhaps even recalling the Reeve’s Norfolk origins when the pronoun appears in its East Anglian form: “And yet ik have alwey a coltes tooth” (3888). The effect of personal experience is sustained in the “now” of 3895 (a proximal deictic implying that the temporal position is that of the individual speaker), but this evocation of experience then gradually fades back

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into generalization about “olde folk” (3896). Within the fictional frame of the pilgrimage, the Host treats this whole passage as speech, as sermonizing inappropriate to a Reeve: What amounteth al this wit? What shul we speke alday of hooly writ? The devel made a reve for to preche (3901–03) —— [What does all this wisdom amount to? Why are we to talk about scripture the whole time? The devil turned a reeve into a preacher]

This is an ingenious device of Chaucer’s (and a reminder of those real features of The Canterbury Tales that have inspired “dramatic” interpretations from Kittredge on), but Chaucer can hardly have foreseen that future readers would take the fiction with naïve literalness, to such an extent as to obscure the nature of this passage as a Chaucerian poem about old age, composed in a highly distinctive style that has the sustained compression of writing rather than speech. The passage illustrates a paradox that seems characteristic of Chaucer’s prologues and of much other medieval autography: it mimics speech at least intermittently, but the mimicry can be fully appreciated only by a perceptive reader. The movement from the Reeve’s lament that he is old and impotent yet still troubled by “wyl,” appetite, to an embittered evocation of old age in general, in all its wretchedness and contemptibility, is hauntingly memorable. The most powerful image, of life as a full barrel of wine tapped by Death at the moment of birth and gradually emptying until only a trickle is left, might be seen by a Kittredgean reader as coming from the life experience of the fictional Reeve, because he was described in the General Prologue as a carpenter by trade, and carpenters made barrels. But the experience embedded in the image is surely that of Chaucer himself, feeling his age when he wrote it in the last decade of his life, and the son and grandson of wine merchants.38

Autography: Prologues and Dits 47

It is the wine merchant or his observant son, not the carpenter, who notes the gradually weakening stream as the barrel empties— an observation we might even imagine being recalled by the older Chaucer, as he regretfully remarked the weakening flow from the tun of wine that was certified as an annual gift to him by Richard II. (Mention of this survives in a record of 1398, but it was apparently the renewal of an earlier grant.39) “Dramatic” interpretations of the prologues and tales, like interpretations that read the narrating “I” of other homodiegetic poems as a narrator distinct from the poet, tend to discourage us from noticing the intermittent moments at which they express Chaucer’s own experience, as a poet and as a human being who was once alive like us. The Reeve’s Prologue conveys experientiality, but not the experience of any one individual, real or imaginary. A more general issue is involved here. Chaucer frequently allows himself to write poetically, often while developing familiar topoi, in ways that cannot easily be understood in terms of the motives of a speaker or even of a relation to larger literary structures. A good example is the gravely beautiful passage about the inexorable, impoverishing movement of time in the link preceding the prologe to The Man of Law’s Tale. It begins: Lordynges, the tyme wasteth nyght and day, And steleth from us, what pryvely slepynge, And what thurgh necligence in oure wakynge, As dooth the streem that turneth nevere agayn, Descendynge fro the montaigne into playn. Wel kan Senec and many a philosophre Biwaillen tyme moore than gold in cofre; For “Los of catel may recovered be, But los of tyme shendeth us,” quod he. (II 20–28) —— [Gentlemen, time lays us waste night and day, and—what with the secrecy of sleep and what with our lack of attention when awake—it steals from us like the stream that never turns

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back as it drops from the mountain into the plain. Seneca, like many other philosophers, does well to lament time more than hoarded gold, for, he says, “Lost goods may be recovered, but lost time ruins us.”]

The passage is formally assigned to the Host as speaker and is addressed to the pilgrims as “Lordynges” (a form of address that a medieval innkeeper might well use), yet I cannot see that it has any relation to Harry Bailly as a “character.” Are we to believe that he has read or would even claim to have read “Senec and many a philosophre”? And it has only the slightest relation to the tale that follows. We might conceivably recall it in connection with the sad comment on the marital happiness of Alla and Custance— But litel while it lasteth, I yow heete, Joye of this world, for tyme wol nat abyde; Fro day to nyght it changeth as the tyde (II 1132–34) —— [Worldly joy lasts only a little while, I assure you, for time will not stay still; it changes like the tide from day to night]

—but that is over a thousand lines later. To insist on making the lines fit either of these contexts, but especially the first, would be to diminish the passage as poetry, though admittedly that would not trouble critics who care little for poetry and are more interested in abstract pattern making. There is a similar passage on time in Guillaume de Lorris’s part of the Roman de la Rose, which in the Chaucerian translation begins by referring to The tyme that passeth nyght and day, And resteles travayleth ay, And steleth from us so prively That to us semeth sykerly That it in oon poynt dwelleth ever (Romaunt 369–73)

Autography: Prologues and Dits 49

—— [The time that passes nightly and daily, and is always restlessly laboring, and steals so secretly from us that to us for certain it seems to remain always at a single point]

The passage of nearly thirty lines is attached to the description of Old Age but is otherwise independent of pragmatic or thematic context. Chaucer, like other medieval poets, is much given to what may be called “free composition,” often stimulated by familiar topoi, and we need to allow ourselves freedom to respond to it—a freedom that is restricted by insistence on assigning an individual speaker to what is written. Perhaps I seem to be recommending an approach too similar to the bad old habit (it was also a medieval habit) of anthologizing “poetic beauties” or “purple passages,” but I believe modern criticism has generally moved so far in the opposite direction as to justify some reaction. To return to the Reeve: many readers, including some of the most distinguished Chaucer scholars, have followed the Kittredgean tradition—they have found in his prologue a distinct consciousness, mean and self-­loathing, and have then looked for (and inevitably found) that same consciousness in the Reeve’s tale.40 Alfred David suggests that the art of this tale is “more truly like the art of Conrad and James than anything Chaucer had written before because in it, for the first time, we are given a purely fictional persona whose biases are betrayed by his narrative.” V. A. Kolve sees The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale as constituting a single “performance” by the Reeve, “the act of a man revealing himself through the material and manner of his story telling,” so that in the tale we should look for “clear projections” of the Reeve’s own “embittered self-­regard.” Even Derek Pearsall, one of the critics most skeptical of dramatic interpretations, describes the prologue as “a remarkably disgusting piece of self-­ingratiating self-­abasement” and the tale as “a machine for the Reeve’s vindictive purposes.”41 It is a general rule that when readers look for something in a piece of writing, they will succeed in discovering it (that is why interpretative

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fashions can spread so rapidly), and so critics have readily detected bitterness, vindictiveness, and worse in this robustly comic tale. One describes The Reeve’s Tale as the product of its teller’s “sewer of a mind,” a second dismisses it as one of the “most limited and least valuable” of Chaucer’s tales, and a third categorizes it as “a study of meanness inspired by meanness” and an expression of “the Reeve’s bitter skepticism about the efficacy of love.”42 Even those who praise the tale tend to make it seem remarkably unattractive: it is hard, for example, to feel much eagerness to read a work praised by one of our finest Chaucer critics for its “rendering of a particularly bilious view of life.”43 A common device is to compare The Reeve’s Tale unfavorably to its predecessor and twin, The Miller’s Tale. One leading critic remarks that “the Reeve takes the laughter of the Miller’s Tale and turns it into spite,” a second that “gusto and geniality give way to a spirit of meanness and vindictiveness,” and a third that “the wholesome sexuality of the Miller’s Tale is replaced in the Reeve’s by theft, distrust, and plain malevolence.”44 At this point it becomes hard to avoid skepticism. “Geniality”? “Wholesome sexuality”? Those are very odd ways of characterizing a tale in which a harmless old man is cuckolded, a kiss inadvertently directed to the anus of the beloved leads to hysterical revulsion, and the lover’s behind is scalded with a red-­hot coulter (the sharp end of a plow), an incident depicted in such sadistic close-­up that we are told, “Of gooth the skyn an hande-­brede aboute” (3811: the skin disappears for a hand’s breadth around)—which would mean that about fifteen square inches of flesh is laid bare. To read The Reeve’s Tale as the expression of an individual consciousness conveyed by The Reeve’s Prologue is to distort it grossly and evidently to be led to distort The Miller’s Tale as well. These tales are set in England’s two ancient universities, The Miller’s Tale in Oxford and The Reeve’s Tale in Cambridge, and in the past, when I was a Cambridge don (after also being a Cambridge undergraduate and a Cambridge graduate student), I used to believe it could not be mere coincidence that Oxonians seemed rather prominent among the scholars who disparaged

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The Reeve’s Tale at the expense of The Miller’s—perhaps on the grounds, as one of them actually put it, that “Oxford . . . has always had the wittiest men, and the prettiest girls.”45 Having moved to the other side of the Atlantic, I can now take a more detached and objective view, and can see that the chief motive for this distortion is not the petty rivalry of the two English universities, but the unquestioned dogma that the textual first person must necessarily give voice to an individual human consciousness. Many other examples might be given of the distortions introduced into the tales by interpreting them as expressions of the consciousness of their tellers, usually supposed to be defined in their individual prologues and/or in the General Prologue. The distortions have been especially remarkable in the case of tales that fail to appeal to many modern readers, such as, for example, those of the Man of Law and the Physician, described in a characteristic modern account as “sentimental tales” that are “the work of moral hypocrites, concerned primarily to establish their own piety.”46 The Canterbury Tales of course provides a fictional framework that makes it possible to interpret the tales in relation to their tellers, but it certainly does not require us to believe, as Kittredge did, that the stories exist for the sake of the pilgrims. It is this that makes a different approach to Chaucer’s prologues seem desirable, one that disengages them from their individual contexts and considers them as a group belonging to a single autographic supergenre. In a medieval clerkly milieu, prologues or accessus could easily be seen as having a generic status. The Latin academic prologues written to introduce commentaries on classical auctores and on the human authors of the various books of the Bible have been studied by Alastair Minnis, and his recovery of the analytic content of scholastic discussions of literature provides important insights into medieval literary theory and practice, throwing light not only on Latin writings but on vernacular texts influenced by the academic tradition.47 Minnis distinguishes between an earlier twelfth-­ century type and a later thirteenth-­century “Aristotelian” type, so called because it is based on the Aristotelian concept of the four

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“causes” (material, formal, efficient, and final). These accessus are systematic in their structure and are devised to produce a systematic analysis of the auctores. But vernacular prologues do not generally have this systematic structure, though the Aristotelian causes are mentioned in Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee (VII 1393–1403) and, as we shall see, the fifteenth-­century poet Osbern Bokenham makes playful use of the structure in the preamble to his legend of Saint Margaret. What I am suggesting is something slightly different: that we attempt to consider as a group the autographic elements in Chaucer’s prologues, including the many Canterbury prologues that seem independent of scholastic thought. The pioneering study devoted specifically to Chaucer’s prologues is that of W. A. Davenport in his 1998 book Chaucer and His English Contemporaries. There Davenport asks the shrewd question “What kind of author is it for whom prologues become a favourite form?”48 He begins from the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition, with its distinction among various kinds of exordium, and he draws on Minnis’s work, agreeing that “one can hardly doubt Chaucer’s awareness of the nature of an academic prologue.” In discussing the Canterbury prologues, Davenport makes some telling points: that they are often composite structures, “in more than one part or style,” and that many of them “comment much more widely on literary matters than is necessary simply to introduce a pilgrim’s individual effort at story-­telling.”49 His survey is thought-­provoking, and from my point of view it has the advantage of clearing the ground for a somewhat different approach. Let us consider those major portions of Chaucer’s prologues that consist of autography—nonlyrical discourse in the first person. Some of the longer prologues consist entirely of such discourse: The Pardoner’s Prologue is one instance, all 134 lines of it; so, most spectacularly, is The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 828 lines all in the first person except for the Pardoner’s brief interruption; and the General Prologue comes under this heading too. Another long, first-­person prologal discourse is that of the Canon’s Yeoman, emerging slowly out of “wayside drama” and then continuing

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for 270 lines from the Canon’s hasty departure through what the manuscript rubrics call the first part of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. A shorter prologue made up entirely of first-­person discourse is that of the Merchant; memorable first-­person segments of prologues are the Franklin’s discourse on the Bretons and their lays, the Man of Law’s (in a link passage preceding that described as his prologe in the rubrics) on the stories that Chaucer has and has not told, the Monk’s exposition of tragedie, the Clerk’s critical account of Petrarch and his prologue to the story of Walter and Grisilde, and of course the Reeve on old age. This whole varied collection of nonlyrical first-­person discourses is quite unparalleled in any earlier Middle English writing. It is so familiar as part of the dramatic structure of The Canterbury Tales that we may no longer find it surprising, but it really is a new and striking phenomenon. It may be helpful to ask not just “What kind of author is it for whom prologues become a favourite form?” but “What kind of poem is it that so largely constitutes each of these prologues?” The attempt to answer that question leads me to writing in French and to the concept of the dit, to which I now turn. From the thirteenth century onward, French poems begin to have the word dit in their titles, and this is the poetry that is most likely to have been familiar to Chaucer, who surely read and admired far more thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century poetry in French than in English.50 Like most medieval generic terms, dit seems to be employed quite loosely, and it used to be taken to mean just “poem” rather than to indicate any particular kind of poem. Recently, though, French scholars have been examining the term’s use more closely, and they find a more specific meaning in it. The dit can be seen as a genre that emerges in French in contrast to the lyrical abstraction of the grand chant courtois. As defined by modern scholars, it is indeed a supergenre incorporating many kinds of writing, including dream poems and prologues. As Michel Zink puts it, very simply “the dit is a poem that, as its name indicates, is not destined to be sung.” He goes on, “Beyond this feature, which contrasts it with courtly lyricism, it does not appear a priori to be very clearly

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defined by any particular formal or thematic characteristic. The numerous pieces that, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, give themselves this name or have it attributed to them by manuscript rubrics are varied in nature, inspiration, and tone.”51 Generic terms have often had a narrower and more precise sense imposed on them by modern scholars than they possessed in medieval usage. Roman is one instance, for it is well known that in the Middle Ages almost any vernacular narrative could be called a roman, or in English a “romaunt” or “romaunce”; and we are coming to realize that “fabliau” is another, a striking example of a medieval genre invented as such by nineteenth-­and twentieth-­ century scholarship.52 Dit, too, had fuzzy medieval boundaries,53 but that has not prevented recent scholars from finding within it the seed of an important new development. Since the development seems to be a reality, and it needs to be given a name, let us stick to dit. Rutebeuf, the great satirical poet of the thirteenth century, is regarded as the most important originator of the dit in this sense, and the tradition is continued by the fourteenth-­century poets who were Chaucer’s favorites and at whose hands the dit developed about the middle of the century into a longer poetic form54— Froissart, Deschamps, Machaut. Zink writes of Rutebeuf, His poetry points up the fact that the dit, a genre formless in itself, was defined by a display of the self in the face of others and society. . . . He talked of himself and recounted his life, although it would obviously be futile to ask how much truth was contained in these false confessions. . . . His poetry often gave an impression of self-­display, of a dramatic monologue conceived entirely for the sake of the effect that it sought to produce on the audience. . . . It aimed solely at a concrete dramatization of the self.55

Zink might also have noted how often Rutebeuf’s dits, while imitating speech, call attention to their own formal nature as rime or as vers, and to their textuality as writings sent to possible patrons.

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This broad concept of the dit as a nonlyrical poetic discourse in the first person has been inflected in various ways by other scholars, ways that in fact separate it from the dramatic monologue. Some definitions are deliberately imprecise: Emmanuèle Baumgartner describes dits as “texts treating in the first person subjects of a general order,” and Anthime Fourrier writes, “Its speci­ ficity would lie precisely in not having any. . . . This global term represents . . . a grab-­bag [un fourre-­tout].”56 But the definition has also been refined, above all by Jacqueline Cerquiglini in a seminal article on Machaut’s major poem, the Voir Dit. She agrees that “The dit is a discourse that stages an ‘I,’ ” but she gives a different twist to its “not sung” nature, noting that, about the time of the emergence of the dit as a literary genre, there first appears in French the word ditié, “which comes from the Latin dictare, meaning in Old French: to write, to draw up, to teach.”57 On one level the dit, as I have been describing it, is a form of speech, but it is speech imitated in clerkly writing, or rather, the illusion of speech created in writing: “the dit text becomes the miming of a[n act] of speech”; it “mimes speech in a piece of writing.”58 And it is often about writing—a form of méta-­écriture, to use Cerquiglini’s term59—and tends to remind us of its writtenness, its textuality, as well as its spokenness. As another French scholar, Bernard Ribémont, puts it, summarizing Cerquiglini’s view, for her “the dit . . . is deeply anchored in the very act of writing.”60 In the dit we have the effect of spoken performance, of what Zink calls, in a delightful example of “franglais” that must be quoted in the original, “l’équivalent d’un one man show du music-­hall,”61 but we have it in a textual form that permits the performance to be a kind of compilation or montage. “For me,” Cerquiglini writes, “it is not the nature of the ‘ingredients’ that makes the dit, but the manner in which they are presented, their assembly [montage]. . . . Only this manner of presentation makes it possible to contrast this form with others, especially the romance . . . and makes it possible to gather together the texts that medieval authors called Dits.” Discontinuity is a crucial feature of the dit, the kind of discontinuity that belongs to

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written rather than spoken discourse. What is spoken and wishes to be remembered has to appeal to memory, but to quote Cerquiglini again, “the dit, by contrast with the conte, is not based on memorial patterns but on patterns of writing,” and she mentions alphabetical and numerical composition as instances.62 And once material is written, its spatial arrangement can become part of its meaning. Cerquiglini’s chief exhibit, Machaut’s Voir Dit, is a poem of extraordinary complexity, sophistication, and length. Were I capable of expounding it, it would demand a whole book, so instead, to give a sense of what is distinctive about this elusive literary type, I shall take a much simpler example, a poem from before the dit had become an extended literary form, the anonymous Dit des monstiers (the dit of the churches).63 It is in octosyllabic couplets, and its main content is a descriptive catalogue of all the churches in Paris at the time when it was written, about 1327. That is essentially textual material—you would need to have it in writing for it to be of any use to you—but it is presented not objectively or diagrammatically as a list but as if filtered through a first-­person perspective, that of its writer. He begins: Because I’ve made mention of churches where devotion is shown more than in other places, for there lies the body of God, I will tell you the places and the number of the churches that are in Paris and to which saints they are dedicated, if Satan does not keep me from enumerating them. A worthy man gave me lodging and begged me, for love of him, to put into rhyme and in a dit all the churches of Paris. Promptly, without protest, for love of him I set to work; I have put all of them into rhyme. I began with Notre-­Dame—may she save and protect our body and soul!—because it is the mother church of Paris. Next, in my manner, is the Church of St.-­Jean-­le-­Rond. (1–21)

And so he goes on through the list, always indicating the route that he is taking through the city to get from one church to another, until eventually he writes:

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I want to name for you before I close my mouth St.-­Jacques-­ de-­la-­Boucherie. [Here the ingenious rhyme, “avant ce que ma bouche lie / Saint Jaques-­de-­la-­Boucherie,” gives special emphasis to bouche, mouth.] I have named for you all the churches of Paris without misnaming any; I know no more, it seems to me, for I have put down whatever I know. I do not want to put into my tale ducal chapels or those of counts or of townspeople or of bishops or of abbots or of archbishops. (264–74)

There follow a few lines explaining why he has not listed these private kinds of consecrated buildings as churches, and then the poem ends with a prayer. So the effect is of speech, of an “I” speaking out of his mouth and his personal experience (yet speaking as a writer), and of a “you” being addressed. First-­person pronouns occur innumerable times in the course of the poem’s 306 lines, but this personal discourse is the frame for something impersonal and textual, a comprehensive list of eighty-­eight churches. And the “I” is a proximal deictic rather than the label of an individual; his identity is of no importance, except that he is the informative clerkly writer of this dit. This is not a dramatic monologue; it is what I call autography. The Dit des monstiers is not a major poem, nor do I imagine that Chaucer knew it or would have admired it if he had, but it has some fundamental things in common with much better French poems that he did know, such as Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse, which is among the sources of The Book of the Duchess. Machaut’s poem was written for Jean, duc de Berry, in 1360, when he was about to leave France for the English court to take the place of King Jean II, his father, as a hostage. It is thus a useful reminder of the French connection—the Anglo-­French culture manifested in the fact that England had two vernaculars, French as well as English, and nourished, paradoxically, by the antagonisms of the Hundred Years’ War.64 This poem, far more courtly and intellectually sophisticated than the Dit des monstiers, nevertheless begins

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in a surprisingly similar way, as the speech of a clerkly “I” that defines itself as writing. The opening lines of Machaut’s poem tell us that it arises from personal experience of love for a lady—the usual claim of the courtly love lyric from the troubadours on: In order to give delight and consolation to myself, and to bind my thoughts to the true love that holds me in those bonds where I shall never tire of being nor ever say “alas!,” I wish cheerfully to begin something in honor of my lovely lady, which will be gladly received, and delightfully composed out of the delightful experience [sentement] of that true heart which is devoted to her. (1–12)65

But the composition on which he is embarking is not song to be heard but writing to be read, as the following lines conspicuously emphasize, both directly and through insistent wordplay:66 Now I beg those who will read [liront] this that they should select [esliront] the good from the bad, if there is any good in it—that in reading [au lire] they should leave the bad and select [eslire] the good. For when a thing is well chosen [eslite] then people rightly enjoy it more, and ladies and he who reads it [le lit] must take more pleasure [delit] in it, and may he by whom it will be read [leüs] be numbered among the chosen few [esleüs]. But I don’t want to include anything ugly, for when there is rumbling thunder and menacing clouds the weather is dark and gloomy. But, compared with scandal, this is much sweeter than milk, by Saint Helen! For this reason I wish to renounce everything base and put it aside. And I will begin without delay when I have quickly [a delivre] named him for whom I am composing this book [livre], and myself as well, for there is no reason why I should omit this. (13–34)

Machaut goes on to identify both himself and Jean de Berry in an anagram that, as he explains—“Now I will tell you what to do” (45)

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to “discover our full names” (49)—requires counting the number of lines backward. This is of course detectable only in the written text: listeners do not count lines, and certainly cannot go back, and so would be unable to recognize it. However colloquial in manner, a poem like this has its essential existence as writing, and anagrams like this are “rich evidence of the textuality of late medieval culture.”67 Machaut creates the impression of casual chat, slow to get to the point, by a clerc who describes himself as such in the poem: he even calls attention to his cowardice as the quality appropriate to his clerkly profession, as courage is appropriate to a knight.68 (In due course we shall find Hoccleve writing similarly about himself as a clerc.) Correspondingly, a clerc’s appropriate medium of expression is not speech or song but writing, and the whole poem centers on the interaction of the spoken and the written. Machaut describes how he overhears someone first “complaining and groaning” (73–74), then speaking “in a loud voice” (199), and saying that he will compose “a sad complaint” (214) to express his “feelings [sentement]” (220) to his lady. Machaut exactly specifies his own position as voyeur and eavesdropper, and prepares to write down the speaker’s words, which form a lyrical lament addressed to his lady about their forthcoming separation. As Daniel Poirion observes, a distinct type of dit consists of those “addressed to great men, allegedly unhappy in love, but in fact victims of ill fortune in politics and warfare.”69 That is certainly so in this case, for Machaut’s dit commemorates a moment of humiliation for the French monarchy, after the defeat of Poitiers at which the king himself became an English captive, and his sons were then obliged to take their father’s place while he attempted to raise a gigantic ransom for their release.70 Machaut copies down in writing every word of the spoken lament, using, he explains, “my writing-­desk, which is inlaid with ivory, and all my writing implements” (229–31)—concrete emblems of clerkly textuality and at the same time, given the ivory inlay, indications of courtly elegance. The lament occupies no fewer than eight hundred lines of verse, in the idealizing and generalizing style of a grand chant

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courtois. It is full of classical allusions, personified abstractions, and claims of absolute uniqueness for the lady as the speaker’s “earthly god” and for his adoration of her; and it includes a version of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, but one that, unlike Chaucer’s version in The Book of the Duchess, does not omit the final metamorphosis. The speaker of the lyric imagines Morpheus “transporting himself” (715) before the lady in the speaker’s own form to convey his grief to her, “for no messenger, ink, or parchment” (748) will serve the purpose. The need for secrecy, giving a special intensity to love, is part of the ideology of courtliness, and reappears later. But this way of putting it makes the imagined dream a metaphorical substitute for writing, in conveying the feelings of one who is absent. Morpheus, he hopes, will “imitate me correctly” (788) in the form of a dream—just as Machaut is “imitating” speech in writing.71 The speaker ends (1019–34) by boasting of his virtuosity as a poetic craftsman, a virtuosity inspired by the lady. Machaut tells us that he waited to see if there was any more, “But no, so I left off writing” (1038). He reads through what he has written, and finds, to his astonishment, that it contains a hundred dissimilar rhymes (1052)—something he was unable to notice as a listener, and that would surely not have been noticed by an actual listener to Machaut’s poem. But of course the virtuosity attributed to the lord is actually Machaut’s own: the complaint copied down from the lord’s speech is one that Machaut composed himself in writing. It has passed from writing, through a written imitation of speech, back to writing. Next he briefly meets a young man who names the speaker of the complaint “by his true name” (1074)—but the name is not mentioned because, as readers, we already know it from the earlier anagram. Finally he sees the speaker himself and discovers that he is exceptionally handsome, if a little pale from sleeplessness and love-­anguish; he witnesses a demonstration of lordly generosity and states that the lord “seemed a king’s son” (1158), which indeed Jean de Berry was. There is no need to continue to summarize this dit, but other, nonnarrative sections include some moralizing

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on how great men should behave (1161ff), after which Machaut remarks, “Now I wish to leave this subject and return to my original theme” (1201–2), and a detailed description of the mythological scenes depicted on the fonteinne amoureuse (1313ff). The lord adds his own account of the fountain’s history and powers, and he and Machaut explain to each other why they have no need to drink from it: they are already full to the brim with love. (It is perhaps rather characteristic of fourteenth-­century French courtly poetry that the fountain’s power should be described but never used; it is enough that it should be set out in writing.) Now the lord asks Machaut to write for him “a lay or complaint about my love and my sorrow”— at which Machaut reaches into his wallet and produces the lament that he has copied down, saying, “Receive, my lord, your request: here it is, all ready” (1519–20).72 The lord is utterly astonished to find his own secret thoughts set out in writing—so greatly astonished that he falls asleep in the poet’s lap (1543–45). Machaut too sleeps, and they both dream the same dream, which is recounted in detail.73 It is the culmination of what Ardis Butterfield calls “this careful, clever double subjectivity” in which “Machaut and the duc both split and redouble their roles.”74 The dream includes a retelling by Venus of the judgment of Paris, about which Machaut remarks that he deserves no praise for the story because “I have written this word for word as I have seen it in writing” (1993–94). What more striking demonstration could there be of Machaut’s intimacy, amounting almost to identification, with the duc de Berry, and of his ability as a clerc to share in the noble experience of love (though only in a dit)? Yet the poem incorporates, in the form of a discontinuous compilation or montage, large bodies of material, lyrical and didactic, which do not serve the purpose of characterizing Machaut as its “I”; and it plays with the interaction of speech and writing, and with its own status as speech created in writing. There is an essential linguistic playfulness in Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse that is surprisingly similar to what is found in writings by Jacques Derrida, to whose theoretical argument I

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referred in the preceding chapter. The similarity is particularly marked in Derrida’s “Limited Inc a b c . . . ,” the second and main section of the montage volume Limited Inc. This too is a text that creates in writing the fluid and provisional effect of speech. There are parallels between Machaut’s repeated reflexive remarks, such as “Yet I am straying too far from my initial topic and what I proposed to speak of, and so I wish to take my subject matter up again and concentrate on continuing with it” (189–92) and “Now I wish to leave this subject and return to my original theme” (1201–02), and Derrida’s “What might that involve? Where will it lead us? Let us be patient a little while longer” and “Will my snail’s pace ever be forgiven?”75 The playfulness of both texts is something that Derrida would claim to be indistinguishable and inseparable from seriousness. In the following passage from “Limited Inc a b c . . . ,” Sec is an acronym for “Signature Event Context,” the first section of Limited Inc, but also means “terse” or “curt,” while Sarl is an acronym for Société à responsabilité limitée, substituted by Derrida for what he calls “the presumed and collective author” of Searle’s “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” but also puns on “Searle.” Derrida points out that “Sec . . . proposes, even if Sarl fails to make the slightest allusion to it, an explicit deconstructive critique of the oppositions ‘serious/non-­serious,’ ‘literal/non-­literal’ and of the entire system of related oppositions.” And he goes on to state categorically: “no criterion that is simply inherent in the manifest utterance is capable of distinguishing an utterance when it is serious from the same utterance when it is not. Solely intention can decide this and it is not identical with ‘realization.’ Nothing can distinguish a serious or sincere promise from the same ‘promise’ that is nonserious or insincere except for the intention which informs and animates it.” And that “intention” is never directly accessible to us. Does Derrida really mean it, when he keeps on writing “Let us be serious,” or indeed “But am I serious here?”? Who knows? Even Derrida himself cannot fully know, given that his view is that “no intention can ever be fully conscious, or actually

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present to itself”—a principle we could helpfully take into account when reading the courtly poetry of the late medieval Anglo-­French tradition.76 To take another question: Who is the true author of the lyrical complaint incorporated in Machaut’s dit? Whose signature should it bear? That of Jean de Berry, named only in an anagram created by Machaut as part of his written text, an anagram that also includes Machaut’s name? Or that of Machaut, who claims no more than to have written down what he overheard being spoken by Jean de Berry? Sylvia Huot has noted that, because dits are always “constructed on first-­person discourse,” they “are frequently transmitted along with other works by the same author, and can be associated with the rise of the single-­author codex.”77 Yet concepts of authorship, sincerity, authenticity, intentional meaning (what Derrida calls vouloir-­dire), seem to dissolve as soon as we start thinking about them in connection with a poem like this. Even within the bounds of a text such as the Fonteinne amoureuse, the “I,” which readers might wish to stabilize by connecting it either to a fictional persona (an imaginary figure characterized as cowardly, garrulous, sycophantic, and so on) or simply to “the real Machaut,” has an irreducible instability revealed, for example, in the passage describing the nobleman when he first sees him: Then I turned a little, applying my mind and my eyes to examining his manner, his person, his rank, and his expression. But never in all the days of my life had I seen a more pleasant manner in man or woman, and his body was very well shaped, for he was big, tall, and upright, well built in every way, noble, elegant, handsome, young, and attractive. I well believe that his heart was wounded and pierced by the arrows of love, and that he was familiar with all the qualities required by a lover’s life. His face was very gracious, pleasant, cheerful, direct, and gentle, but it was a little pale because he had stayed awake and suffered all night long. And yet he would have had color enough if he had not been tired from staying awake. On his

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head he had a chaplet, and on his finger a ring which he looked at carefully. But the chaplet truly suited him remarkably well. I don’t know where it came from. (1097–1124)

The “I” through whose eyes the nobleman is seen cannot be the label of a single, self-­identical consciousness, because, like the “I” of Chaucer’s General Prologue, it is the means of conveying both what could be seen at a particular moment from a particular point of view within the fiction and what could not be seen but is evidently known in some other way from outside the fiction—for example, that the nobleman was not normally pale. (That he was not normally pale does not have the status of a real-­world fact that needs to be known to some person in order to be reported; whether or not true of the real-­world Jean de Berry, it belongs here to the order of discourse, on which the question of knowledge does not arise.) This dit is a perfect example of what I call autography, and perhaps it is even an early stage, a very early stage, on the way to something more like autobiography. We need, though, to remember that in the late Middle Ages autobiography as we understand it was not visible as a goal to be achieved, and smooth teleological development can only be a retrospective illusion. Derrida’s text, on the other hand, is moving away from, consciously deconstructing, the assumptions that belong to autobiography, and especially the assumption that “someone who says I and who speaks of himself would best satisfy the idealizing hypothesis of ‘saying what he means.’ ”78 We can better grasp what is going on in a fourteenth-­ century dit if we observe its parallels with a twentieth-­century deconstructive text, but if we are not to distort both, we need to keep in mind their different relations to the stream of history, which can be discerned only in retrospect. Both Machaut’s Fonteinne amour­ euse and Derrida’s “Limited Inc a b c . . .” can be understood as autography. But while the latter is reacting against an all-­too-­solid set of assumptions about the relation of language to individual consciousness, the former, along with the other late medieval examples I discuss, is feeling its way toward what only we are in a position to identify as a possible goal.

Chapter 3

C h auce r ian P r o l o g ues and t h e W ife o f B at h

If, after examining two fourteenth-­century dits, the anonymous Dit des monstiers and Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse, we now turn back to Chaucer’s prologues, we shall find that many of them, whether in whole or in part, are surprisingly similar in nature. The material of some of the prologues, for example, resembles the Dit des monstiers in consisting of a catalogue or compilation framed in a first-­person discourse. An obvious instance is a section of the passage introducing The Man of Law’s Tale that catalogues the Ovidian stories that Chaucer has told. It begins with The Book of the Duchess— In youthe he made of Ceys and Alcione, And sitthen hath he spoken of everichone Thise noble wyves and thise loveris eke. (II 57–59) —— [In his youth he wrote about Ceyx and Alcyone, and since then he has told about every one of these noble wives and these lovers too.]

—and is followed by brief mentions of the stories he has not told, “unkynde [unnatural] abhomynacions” (II 88), touching on incest. (These, as it happened, John Gower had told in his Confessio 65

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Amantis—a sly joke that comes from Chaucer, not from the Man of Law.) This parallels the way that the Dit des monstiers mentions the buildings that do not count as churches along with those that do. But isn’t something similar true of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—a descriptive catalogue of “Wel nyne and twenty” (I 24) pilgrims, which is framed in a first-­person account of how an unnamed “I” met them, and is set in an experiential framework associated with a specific time and place? That “I” is not a character as the various third persons described in the General Prologue are. And the “I” is not the origin but the product of a “one man show,” incorporating in the mode of experientiality much material that could not have been part of the experience of an actual observer at that time and place (just as is true of the description of the young lord in Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse). I am thinking of all the insights into the pilgrims’ daily lives, their thoughts, and even their secrets (such as the Reeve’s way of keeping on good terms with his lord even while making a profit from him), as opposed to the visible and audible details of what they wore and what they said. Nor can the “I” of the General Prologue be thought of as its “speaker.” The prologue begins with a formal and ostentatiously textual springtime exordium, an opening sentence so complex that the main verb does not appear until the twelfth line; after that it often imitates speech, but it does so by conspicuously textual means. It includes, for example, instances of what Ann Banfield calls “unspeakable sentences,”1 statements in forms characteristic only of writing. One example is a brief passage in the middle of the portrait of the Friar. His leniency in imposing penance is being explained: For unto a povre ordre for to yive Is signe that a man is wel yshryve; For if he yaf, he dorste make avaunt, He wiste that a man was repentaunt. (I 225–28) ——

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[For to give to a poor religious order is a sign that someone has made a good confession; for, he dared boast, if someone gave, he knew that he was repentant.]

Most readers, I think, understand these lines as reflecting the Friar’s own self-­satisfied views and probably as echoing his very words. The first of the two couplets, with its main verb in the generalizing present indicative, could well be read as reproducing those views in the form of direct speech; in modern punctuation those two lines could well be put in quotation marks. The second couplet, though, expresses the Friar’s views less directly, through “verbs of inner action”2 in the third person and the past tense—“he dorste,” “He wiste”—as if an objective report were being made of his sub­jec­ tivity. This is an effect typical of fictional writing and not at all of everyday speech, since in everyday reality we do not have objective access to the subjectivity of others. Whether or not Banfield is right in claiming that differences between the spoken and the written can be defined in purely linguistic terms (and the claim is certainly open to dispute), linguistic forms such as this are unquestionably peculiar to written narrative: no one would ever have said, “For if he yaf, he dorste make avaunt, / He wiste that a man was repentaunt.” There are other passages, too, in the General Prologue that must be among the earliest instances in English of this textual phenomenon, variously named as style indirect libre, erlebte Rede, narrated monologue, and “empathetic narrative,”3 and often supposed to be characteristic of the novel and to have emerged much later than the fourteenth century. And then there are passages that play subtly with the textualization of speech, as when, at the end of the catalogue, Chaucer asks us to forgive him for speaking plainly in repeating what the pilgrims said, but also for failing to “set folk in hir degree / Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde” (I 744–45: arrange people, here in this account, according to their social rank, as they ought to be placed). The proximal Heere in which they are or are not set as they should stonde has to refer to a

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written page, not to spoken words: this is not just, as it is sometimes called, “discourse deixis,” but more specifically textual deixis. There is a famous instance of the same effect in The Miller’s Prologue, when Chaucer repeats an apology for saying the offensive words spoken by the Miller in his tale: And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, Turne over the leef and chese another tale. (I 3176–77) —— [And therefore, anyone who doesn’t wish to hear it, turn over the page and choose another tale.]

There could hardly be a more explicit indication of Chaucer’s awareness, and his willingness to make his readers aware, that the effect of hearing colloquial speech is an illusion being created on the pages of a book. So I must disagree with John Burrow when he states that The Canterbury Tales “goes out of its way to discourage any consideration of the tales as writings—either by the pilgrim narrator or even, one might say, by Chaucer himself.”4 I would argue, on the contrary, that there is much in the tales and especially in the prologues that can only be considered as writing. The Canterbury Tales creates a fictional effect of orality and community, but it does not conceal the fact that the means by which the effect is produced is textual and solitary.5 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, to which I now turn, can also be seen as an example of the same kind of writing as the anonymous Dit des monstiers—a catalogue or compilation (of five husbands and of the outlines of clerkly doctrines about women and marriage), framed in a first-­person textual discourse that very markedly “stages an ‘I’ ” but does so in ways that only writing makes possible. I feel some hesitance in making this suggestion, because The Wife’s Prologue has usually been considered in quite different terms—those of individual character and of the ideology of gender; and I admit at once that, if it can be considered as a dit, it is an incomparably richer and more interesting example than the Dit

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des monstiers. Its material is not arranged in a simple “a, b, c, d” or “1, 2, 3, 4” form, and its “I,” unlike the first persons of the two French dits discussed above and of the General Prologue, is formally attached to a fictional being distinct from the poet, and one presented with memorable vividness. The Wife of Bath is probably the Chaucerian figure readers have most liked to think of as having a real existence outside the text—an existence, somewhat like that of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, as a conspicuous body.6 She evidently meant a great deal to Chaucer himself. It appears that he felt driven to develop her prologue further than he had originally intended: scholars have conjecturally traced a series of layers in its construction,7 though of course he may have had other motives for this besides an interest in her as a character. She appears in more different places in The Canterbury Tales than any other pilgrim: not just in the General Prologue portrait, the epilogue to The Man of Law’s Tale, her own prologue (which is itself the longest of all the Canterbury prologues), and her tale, but also in references in two other tales. In the epilogue to The Clerk’s Tale of the patient Grisilde a passage of six six-­line stanzas, scribally headed “Lenvoy de Chaucer,” is introduced by a statement that in the real world there are few Grisildes, For which heere, for the Wyves love of Bathe— Whos lyf and al hire secte God mayntene In heigh maistrie, and elles were it scathe— I wol with lusty herte, fressh and grene, Seyn yow a song to glade yow, I wene (IV 1170–74) —— [And so here, for the love of the Wife of Bath—and may God keep her and all her sex in high dominance (and otherwise it would be a pity)—with hearty vigor, fresh and green, I’ll recite a song that I think will give you pleasure]

(I note in passing that heere again seems to be textual deixis rather than a reference to the progress of the fictional pilgrimage, and this

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whole epilogue strikingly illustrates the instability of the textual “I.” If the somber narratorial first person of The Clerk’s Tale can generally be identified with the Clerk, it is hard to see how the “lusty herte” of the concluding “song” can also be his; psychologizing efforts to reconcile them have tended to distract attention from the narrative and poetic effects that are likely to have been Chaucer’s main concern.) Still more strikingly, in The Merchant’s Tale, which immediately follows The Clerk’s Tale in the Ellesmere and other manuscripts, the character Justinus, belonging to the interior fiction of the tale, breaks the logic of fictional levels by referring to the Wife, who belongs to the exterior fiction of the pilgrimage framework: But lat us waden out of this mateere. The Wyf of Bathe, if ye han understonde, Of mariage, which we have on honde, Declared hath ful wel in litel space. (IV 1684–87) —— [But let’s move away from this matter. The Wife of Bath, if you’ve understood her, has given an excellent exposition in little space of our present topic of marriage.]

The last line could have been taken by medieval readers to mean that she had expounded the topic of marriage in a short space of time or, as I would prefer to think, in a small space on the page. In either case “litel” must be as ironic as it is when Chaucer refers to the Melibee as “a litel thyng in prose” (VII 937). Still, the passage illustrates how Chaucer himself was prepared to pretend to think of the Wife as having an existence behind and outside the text in which she appears. That metafictional pretense was later extended even beyond The Canterbury Tales when Chaucer mentioned her in similar phraseology in his short poem addressed to “Master Bukton,” urging him, “The Wyf of Bathe I pray yow that ye rede / Of this matere that we have on honde” (29–30: I beg you to read the Wife of Bath on our present topic of marriage). But it is worth noting that, in his playful

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warning to Bukton not to fall into the trap of marriage, Chaucer urges him to read the Wife of Bath: if she had a lasting existence, it evidently could not be separated from textuality.8 As Arthur Lindley puts it, “she confirms what men say about women because she is what men say about women. Since she is herself a text, there is no experience in her history with which she could refute authority that is not itself derived from authority.”9 The larger issues raised by this statement will be touched on in what follows. The Wife of Bath outlived Chaucer and made appearances in several poems by his followers in the century and more after his death, generally in association with textuality. The earliest is by Thomas Hoccleve. In the Dialogue, the second part of his long prosimetric compilation known as the Series (discussed in chapter 6), Hoccleve asks a friend to suggest a suitable choice of topic for a poem to be dedicated to the Duke of Gloucester. The friend reminds him that in the past he has written things that women have found offensive, and suggests that he should try to compensate for that in this new composition, adding: The Wyf of Bathe take I for auctrice That wommen han no joie ne deyntee That men sholde upon hem putte any vice; I woot wel so, or lyk to that, seith shee. By wordes writen, Thomas, yilde thee. Evene as thow by scripture hem haast offendid, Right so let it be by wrytynge amendid. (694–700)10 —— [I take the Wife of Bath as (female) authority for stating that women have no joy or pleasure in being accused of any fault by men: I know well that she says that, or something like it. Surrender in written words, Thomas. Just as you have offended women by writing, in exactly the same way let it be made good by writing.]

Like Chaucer addressing Bukton, Hoccleve thinks of the Wife as a text: the friend takes her as auctrice (an English word newly

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coined as a feminine form of auctor, derived from the rare Latin auctrix11), and he associates her not with speech or voice but with “wordes writen,” “scripture,” “wrytynge.” He recalls that the Wife states that women do not like being accused of vices by men, and so indeed she does in her prologue: “I hate hym that my vices telleth me, / And so doo mo, God woot, of us than I” (III 662–63: I hate any man who tells me of my vices, and, God knows, so do more women than I). But the present tense of “seith” in line 697 of the Dialogue—not “said” but “says”—indicates that Hoccleve is thinking not of a speech-­act in the past but of a text, standing outside time and therefore to be summarized in the present. This is in 1421, and a few years later we find another of Chaucer’s disciples, the prolific John Lydgate, referring once more to the Wife of Bath as an authority on women and marriage. About 1427, Lydgate as semiofficial Lancastrian laureate was commissioned to compose the speeches for a little play performed during the Christmas and New Year festivities at Hertford Castle before King Henry VI and his mother.12 The play, known as The Mumming at Hertford, is probably simple enough to amuse a boy of six, which Henry would then have been, though that would presumably not have been its main purpose. It consists of an exchange of antagonistic speeches between two parties of courtiers, respectively disguised as rural husbands and wives. As the manuscript rubric puts it, the mumming represents “rude upplandisshe people complaynyng on hir wyves, with the boystous aunswere of hir wyves” (rough country people complaining about their wives, with their wives’ sturdy answer).13 The husbands’ case appears to be put for them by a presenter, while the wives speak for themselves, and it is they who refer to the Wife of Bath: And for oure partye the worthy Wyff of Bathe Cane shewe statutes moo than six or seven, Howe wyves make hir housbondes wynne heven, Maugré the feonde and al his vyolence (168–71) ——

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[And for our side the admirable Wife of Bath can point out more than six or seven decrees showing how wives make their husbands get to heaven, in spite of the devil and all his violence]

Wives benefit their husbands in this way by eliciting the virtue of patience from them, as the Wife of Bath implies in telling one of her husbands that, since men are more rational than women, he must be the one to put up with things: And sith a man is moore resonable Than womman is, ye moste ben suffrable. (II 441–42)

There are several other allusions to Chaucer in this part of the Mumming, including one to the Clerk’s Grisilde, and one scholar has recently suggested that “Lydgate’s most influential source for the Wife of Bath is not the Wife of Bath’s Prologue” itself but the references to her in the Envoy to The Clerk’s Tale and in The Merchant’s Tale and the poem addressed to Bukton.14 It is as though for Lydgate Chaucer had already created in retrospect a Wife who was less the origin of a text than a figure referred to in other texts. Though the reference to statutes once more indicates textuality, Lydgate, unlike Hoccleve, may seem to think of the Wife as a person. But it is no less likely that he is representing the wives as naïvely doing so, for, as Maura Nolan suggests, their language has to reflect their point of view, because “it is precisely their right to speak—to chide—that they are defending.”15 A third reference to the Wife of Bath comes much later, probably in the early years of the sixteenth century, in John Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe. The first part of this poem is a lament by a young woman, Jane Scrope, for the death of her pet sparrow at the claws of a cat. Her lack of classical learning, she admits, hinders her in composing an epitaph for Phyllyp, but she proudly declares that she can “rede and spell” (612)16 and lists her extensive English reading. It includes “the Tales of Caunterbury / Some sad storyes, some mery” (614–15), and among them that of

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the Wyfe of Bath, That worketh moch scath Whan her tale is tolde Among huswyves bolde, How she controlde Her husbandes as she wolde, And them to despyse In the homylyest wyse, Brynge other wyves in thought Their husbandes to set at nought. (618–27) —— [. . . the Wife of Bath, who does much damage when her story of how she controlled her husbands as she liked is repeated among bold housewives, and she gives other wives the idea of defying their husbands, and of showing their husbands contempt in the most unvarnished way.]

In these lines “her tale” means not the tale told by the Wife of Bath but the one she tells about herself in her prologue, evidently understood a century later by “huswyves bolde” and by Jane not as fiction but as autobiography. It must still be thought of as surviving in textual form, as something Jane has read. The Wife of Bath’s afterlife, then, is associated quite firmly with writing. It is her prologue that chiefly explains the strength of her afterlife, which of course has extended not just to the early sixteenth century but down to the present. In the prologue the Wife is presented through powerful and engaging “reality effects,” but if we are prepared to try the experiment of regarding the prologue as a dit, we shall recognize that these are largely, though not entirely, confined to its rhetorical dimension. Chaucer’s mimicry of vigorous, argumentative speech is marvelously skillful, with repeated rhetorical questions, exclamations, asseverations, many oaths— “Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve” (III 5), “God woot” (41, 663, 703), “a Goddes half” (50), “As help me God” (201, 596, 605), “As helpe me verray God omnipotent” (423), “by God and by Seint Joce” (483)—and always a compellingly rapid energy of forward

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movement. The rhetoric is strongly egocentric, with an almost obsessive focus on how the general precepts and commandments of religion and its scholastic interpreters apply to “me”: St Paul was a virgin and wished that all should be virgins, but Al nys but conseil to virginitee. And for to been a wyf he yaf me leve Of indulgence; so nys it no repreve To wedde me, if that my make dye (III 82–85)17 —— [It’s all just advice to remain a virgin. And as a concession he gave me leave to be a wife; and so it’s no shame to marry me, if my spouse should die]

Similarly, the “you” addressed by “my” speech is repeatedly invoked, but as is appropriate for a written text unable to control its own readership, that “you” has no fixed identity, appearing sometimes as “lordynges” (4), sometimes as the imagined addressees of the rhetorical questions, sometimes as “ye wise wyves” (225), sometimes as the singular “thou” of the unspecified old husband to whom abusive accusations are attributed: Thou seist also that it displeseth me But if that thou wolt preyse my beautee, And but thou poure alwey upon my face, And clepe me “faire dame” in every place. And but thou make a feeste on thilke day That I was born, and make me fressh and gay, And but thou do to my norice honour, And to my chamberere withinne my bour, And to my fadres folk and his allyes— Thus seistow, olde barel-­ful of lyes! (III 293–302) —— [You say too that it displeases me if you won’t praise my beauty, and if you won’t keep on gazing at my face and calling me “fair lady” everywhere, and if you won’t hold a celebration on my

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birthday, and dress me freshly and gaily, and if you won’t show respect to my nurse and to my chambermaid in my bedchamber, and to my father’s household and his kinsfolk—that’s what you say, you old barrelful of lies!18]

There are certainly aspects of the Wife’s prologue that imply the consciousness of a “speaker” behind the rhetoric, and perhaps the most important of these is that of temporality. In the first-­ person account of five marriages, the first three husbands are not much differentiated, while the two later ones are more strongly individualized, and this overall structure evokes a memorial dimension in which distant life experiences are more blurred than more recent ones. The temporal perspective comes into sharper focus when the Wife looks back with pleasure to her youth and lapses for a moment into regret at the effect of time on the body: But—Lord Crist!—whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, allas, that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. (III 469–75) —— [But—Lord Christ!—when I remember my youth and my gaiety, I’m tickled to the bottom of my heart. To this very day it does my heart good that I’ve had my pleasure in my time. But, alas, age, that will poison everything, has stolen away my beauty and my vigor.]

Here we get a glimpse of interiority that cannot be reduced to outward expression, and another such moment of regret, also marked by “allas,” this time doubled, comes when, meditating on the external cosmic forces that have shaped her disposition, she sees them as operating throughout her life on a bodily self thus made unable to avoid what religion categorizes as sin:

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For certes, I am al Venerien In feelynge, and myn herte is Marcien. Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse, And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardynesse; Myn ascendent was Taur, and Mars therinne. Allas, allas! That evere love was synne! I folwed ay myn inclinacioun By vertu of my constellacioun; That made me I koude noght withdrawe My chambre of Venus from a good felawe. (III 609–18) —— [For indeed my senses are dominated by Venus, and my courage is dominated by Mars. Venus gave me my appetite, my lustfulness, and Mars gave me my sturdy boldness; Taurus, with Mars within it, was in the ascendant when I was born. Alas, alas, that ever love was sin! I always followed the bent that was given me by my horoscope; and that made me unable to hold back my “chamber of Venus” from a man who attracted me.]

Contrasting the Wife with the personified Old Woman in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, a figure agreed to be one of Chaucer’s chief models for her, Lesley Lawton rightly remarks, “It is impossible to imagine La Vieille having the kind of moral consciousness which would permit her to lament: ‘Allas! allas! that evere Love was sinne!’ ”19 There is almost as strong a contrast with other Chaucer prologues, such as that of the Reeve discussed in chapter 2. In The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, then, more than in most of his other first-­person writings, Chaucer’s poetry does intermittently call up a distinct and memorable consciousness—one that exists, as we all do, in the dimension of time. It is that consciousness that has come more and more to dominate the imaginations of critics. And yet, as has often been noted (though to little lasting effect), Chaucer’s presentation of the Wife of Bath is marked by inconsistencies that must qualify any sense of the systematic characterization of a “speaker” whose every word is an expression of her inner

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life. He provides her, it is true, with a local habitation and a name. She appears in the General Prologue as a “good wif . . . of biside Bathe” (I 445), and in her own lengthy prologue she names herself as “dame Alys” (III 320) or “Alisoun” (III 804). From these two sources readers have found it possible, with some pleasurable effort of unscrambling and adjusting, to construct a detailed biography of a strongly imagined, frequently married woman, though opinions differ as to the relevance of some details and the coherence of the whole. For example, the General Prologue represents her as a prosperous clothier from “the Avon valley . . . an area of vigorous cloth production,”20 more successful even than those “of Ypres and of Gaunt” (I 448) in the Low Countries, the established center of the European cloth industry; it also describes her as an enthusiastic international traveler on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. Yet in her own prologue she seems to be dependent for her wealth on her husbands’ money, not her own enterprise, while her travels into foreign countries, indeed the whole international dimension of the earlier portrait, appear to have been forgotten.21 Within The Wife of Bath’s Prologue the illusion of female speech, of a woman speaking out in defense of women and of marriage, is accepted as reality by many readers; yet even on the level of speech inconsistencies abound. The most important have to do with literacy and Latinity. The Wife is represented as probably illiterate and certainly not Latinate, yet when the Pardoner interrupts her and she quotes the proverbial statement that “Whoso that nyl be war by othere men, / By hym shul othere men corrected be” (If anyone will not take heed of the example of others, others shall learn from his example), she adds an attribution to a learned classical source: “The same wordes writeth Ptholomee; / Rede in his Almageste, and take it there” (III 180–83; those very words are written by Ptolemy; read his Almagest, and find it there). A little later, she attributes another proverb to the same written source: Of alle men yblessed moot he be, The wise astrologien, Daun Ptholome,

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That seith this proverbe in his Almageste: “Of alle men his wysdom is the hyeste That rekketh nevere who hath the world in honde.” (III 323–27) —— [May all men bless the wise astronomer, Master Ptolemy, who states this proverb in his Almagest: “The wisest of all men is the one who never cares who has the world in his control.”]

Jill Mann has rightly stressed the union, within medieval culture, of “the clerkly and the experiential”:22 Latin school texts, learned by heart, often had familiar proverbs derived from everyday experience as a major part of their substance. But that makes it all the more striking that Chaucer should have the Wife give this very specific attribution because, when he wrote, Ptolemy’s Almagest was available only in Arabic, Latin, and Spanish, not in English—so how could she know what was written in it? A second inconsistency, of a different kind, occurs in her account of a walk in the fields with the clerk Jankyn one Lent while her husband was away in London. She alleged, so she tells us, that Jankyn had cast a spell on her, adding confidentially, “My dame taughte me that soutiltee” (III 576: my mother taught me that bit of cunning), and she further claimed to have dreamed that Jankyn tried to kill her while she was in bed, once more adding for our benefit, And al was fals; I dremed of it right naught, But as I folwed ay my dames loore, As wel of this as of othere thynges moore. (III 582–84) —— [And it was all false; I didn’t dream of it at all—I was just following my mother’s teaching, in that as well as in many other things.]

One of many characteristic readings of the prologue as a woman’s speech on behalf of her sex states that in these confidential parentheses the “feminine voice of the text” appeals to “an apparently

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absent feminine discourse community”—absent, that is, from the fictional pilgrimage.23 Yet the “loore” itself, and the very idea of dangerous female cunning passed from mother to daughter, actually comes from the long tradition of clerkly misogyny as it surfaced in lengthy writings such as the Lamentations of Matheolus (or the French adaptation of this Latin work by Jehan le Fèvre) and the Miroir de mariage by Eustace Deschamps. This is an illustration of the most fundamental and systemic inconsistency within The Wife of Bath’s Prologue: she offers herself from the very beginning as a spokeswoman for experience—both female experience and marital experience—as against the authority of the misogynous and misogamous books written by celibate male clerics, yet it is now well established that an enormous proportion of what she says derives from those very books.24 The authors of the books are repeatedly mentioned in the text, and early manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales incorporate “various formatting devices intended to call attention to sources and textual divisions.”25 The manuscripts also include Latin glosses indicating the specific written sources of some of the prologue’s material; these, as Helen Cooper suggests, “may go back to Chaucer himself, whether as source notes for his own or the reader’s information, as his own working notes, or as guides to interpretation.”26 In the Ellesmere manuscript the Latin glosses are “most dense around those tales that explicitly summon up Latin books,”27 and it is a striking paradox that the Wife’s prologue and tale should be among these heavily glossed areas, plainly intended for readers, not listeners. And if the Wife may not be able to read at all, and certainly cannot read Latin, how could an interpretation of her prologue as spoken autobiography account for her knowledge of its sources? To ask such a question may well seem desperately and humorlessly literal-­minded, but critics have been much concerned to answer it, and by considering a few of their answers I hope we may get a clearer sense of what kind of writing The Wife’s Prologue is and what it is not. A possible explanation from within the fiction is provided when we learn that the Wife’s fifth husband, Jankyn, was

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a “joly clerk” (III 628) who had studied at Oxford and who habitually told her about “olde Romayn geestes” (III 642: old Roman stories) and read aloud to her from a “book of wikked wyves” (III 685). That book is a compilation of the actual sources of the text in which the Wife and Jankyn are both characters, and it has become a commonplace in modern discussion of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue to see this witty Chaucerian mise en abyme as a crucial basis for interpretation. Examples are too many to list, but I can illustrate the approach from a single recent instance, one that I find particularly telling because it occurs in the course of an exceptionally learned and informative study of the prologue’s intellectual content and context. Alastair Minnis writes: The Wife of Bath has received her intellectual (as well as some of her amatory) schooling not in some Lollard classroom or conventicle but from her last husband, named Jankin, an Oxford-­trained “clerk” . . . who read aloud to her (translating into English in the process, of course) from his anthology of antifeminist texts. It could be said, then, that she has learned at home, from her husband—how acquiescent and submissive can one get? But what Alisoun has learned hardly promotes compliance with the social norms and niceties, for it allows her access to information and methods of analysis which were the privileged currency of the “scoles of clergye.” . . . Thus Chaucer accounts for the Wife of Bath’s learning and scholastic skill. Not all of her information could have come from Jankyn’s book, of course; the poet is not that precise or pedantic. The important thing to recognize is that Chaucer made a major gesture toward verisimilitude.28

Minnis’s chief point is that this was not just a matter of “literary decorum” but is evidence against claims by certain modern scholars that the Wife and her secte might be associated with Lollardy and its alleged encouragement of independent female reading and

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teaching.29 On the contrary, Minnis points out, she has learned at home from her husband, as Catholic orthodoxy required, and he adds: According to Chaucer’s fiction, she has acquired most of her learning from her husband Jankyn, who at “scole” in Oxford (III(D) 527–28) was trained in reading, writing, and arguing. Jankyn’s method of instruction, if such it may be called, consisted of reading aloud to her from his antifeminist an­thology. Alisoun proves an apt pupil, getting far more out of this unpromising material than her husband could have imagined possible.30

But imagining what her husband could or could not have imagined possible belongs not to Chaucer’s fiction but to that of a modern reader; it is as much a matter of fantasy, and as much a distraction from the actual nature of the text, as the question “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” is a distraction from Shakespeare’s play.31 It goes without saying that Minnis does not intend the specu­la­tion seriously, but even such passing jokes serve to sustain a way of reading the prologue that is no longer productive. We do not need an explanation, serious or not, of how a knowledge of learned doctrine could be attributed to the “I” of the prologue, because that “I” is not in any consistent way a “speaker” revealing the truth about her life. Yet even scholars such as Catherine Cox, who explicitly claims to be resisting the “sense among readers that [the Wife] is somehow an autonomous, self-­determined voice,” often find themselves treating her as if she were such a voice.32 Cox, for example, states that the origin of the word “glose” as tongue “is not lost on the Wife” and that the word’s uses in her prologue hint at “erotic ac­tivity, of the connotations of which the Wife is no doubt aware,” so that “erotic textuality is an active oral process for the Wife, delighting both speaker and audience through the instrumentality of the mouth and tongue.”33 Chaucer’s gestures toward verisimilitude

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do not amount to a commitment to novelistic realism, and, more important for my purpose, the “I” of medieval autography is not a complex character about whose awareness of etymology and its erotic implications speculation could be profitable.34 My argument probably seems designed to take the fun out of reading The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. My point, though, is that a certain kind of fun—unending speculation provoked by textual discrepancies, often accompanied by an archness too tiresomely mechanical to be really funny—has become a means of obscuring what kind of text this prologue is. Here, as in The Canterbury Tales in general, Chaucer was feeling his way in the direction of a kind of impersonatory realism that did not yet exist in any systematic form, but in much modern criticism his tentative and often joking gestures toward a consistent representation of the “I” as a character have been taken as the crucial basis for interpretation. Another way of putting this is to say that The Wife of Bath’s Prologue has been read as a dramatic monologue, having as its purpose to evoke consistently and believably the consciousness of an individual character in a specific situation. An example I think especially worth consideration, because it throws into relief the underlying assumption that the dramatic monologue itself must be a universal, transhistorical genre, is an article by W. David Shaw. Shaw’s topic is the dramatic monologue as such, and his defining instances are all from the nineteenth century, with Browning, naturally enough, as the crucial case, but he takes for granted that works from much earlier periods, including poems by Rochester, Donne, and Chaucer, are also dramatic monologues that can be understood in exactly the same way as Browning’s. This case is never argued; it is simply taken to be obvious. What matters in all instances is said to be some contradiction within the consciousness of the poem’s “speaker,” so that his or her meaning must be understood to be “different from the poem’s meaning.” Among Shaw’s “speakers” are the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, and of the Wife he writes, “In principle, she is not a zealous partisan but a fair-­minded and judicious double ironist,

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who believes that something cogent can always be said on both sides of an issue.”35 To me at least, this assessment, based on an anachronistic misidentification of the prologue’s genre, seems to demonstrate how misleading it is to assume that the purpose of the Wife’s prologue is to enable us to make a subtle analysis of her consciousness, revealing the “fair-­minded and judicious double ironist” beneath the “zealous partisan.” A dramatic monologue by Browning is indeed intended to be a revelation of its speaker’s consciousness, often involving self-­deception or bad faith; Chaucer’s prologues are first-­person discourses of a different kind, and we need a different term for them. “Autography” is the term I have proposed, and I have suggested that it can be understood along the lines developed by French theorists of the dit. At this point it will be helpful to return to the question of definition. The dit is hard to define as a genre, and much of the effort to define it has been a matter of stating what it is not: it is not sung, it is not exactly narrative, it is not organically unified, and so on. Perhaps the most important positive feature identified by French scholars is that the dit is a first-­person discourse in which writing creates the effect of speech while always keeping us aware of its writtenness: it is a textual performance that has the discontinuous nature of a compilation or montage or bricolage. It may stage an “I,” but it does not stage a unitary consciousness, because it tends to include much that is quoted and much that in other ways is not represented as having been processed by the “I.” It can perhaps be thought of as a kind of writing that acknowledges rather than conceals the citationality that is a necessary feature of language itself. But what can be said about the “I” that is staged by a dit? Sarah Kay gives a helpful summary of the relevant views of the two leading scholars by whose work I was guided in chapter 2, Michel Zink and Jacqueline Cerquiglini. She explains that “whereas Zink sees the first-­person teller of the dit as a kind of stand-­up comic, Cerquiglini sees him as a professional writer.” She goes on to quote a statement by Cerquiglini: “The I that appears in the dit is not the undifferentiated, universal I of the courtly lyric. . . . It refers to a social type,”

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and Kay adds, “the type, precisely, of a compiler or composer of manuals, a clerk.”36 A stand-­up comic and a clerkly compiler: those two figures are fused in the “I” of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and their opposing implications are reconciled, on a relatively superficial level of verisimilitude, in Jankyn’s reading-­aloud of his book of wicked wives. The prologue has often been thought of as a place where, for once, a medieval woman speaks for herself and for her fellow women. That involves treating the Wife as if she were a real woman with real agency and thus “forgetting” that the Prologue was written by Chaucer—a form of credulity that can coexist with the most sophisticated theoretical apparatus.37 A less fanciful view would recall that the prologue was composed and written by a man, and further that this was the normal way in which femaleness was publicly staged in medieval England—as a performance by a man, in a culture in which it was not acceptable for women to appear as public performers.38 Performance—textual performance—may be a more useful concept than representation in thinking about this and other Canterbury Tales prologues. There is a fundamental difference between heterodiegetic narrative and autography. A character such as Criseyde is represented in the third person, in a way made clear by the narratorial commentary on her, even though that commentary may leave gaps to be filled and ambiguities to be resolved by readers. The Wife in her prologue, on the other hand, is performed in the first person. Mary Carruthers has noted that “the Wife’s Prologue and Tale are often described as ‘performance’, a word which properly defines the rhetorical nature of her tale-­telling.”39 That is true, but in continuity with Kittredge’s “dramatic” interpretation of the Tales, the performer is almost invariably seen (as by Carruthers) as the Wife herself—a woman who, as Carolyn Dinshaw claims, “makes her autonomous desire the very motive and theme of her performance.”40 But she is not an autonomous being, and it would be closer to the truth to think of her not as performing but as being performed—by Chaucer. The Prologue’s passing reference to

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“pleyes of myracles” (III 558) can serve as an accidental reminder that, in activities belonging to the public realm of drama, women’s parts in the Middle Ages were played by men.41 It seems probable that in this vernacular drama, as in modern English Christmas pantomimes, when comic female parts were performed—Noah’s wife or Pilate’s wife—femaleness was recoded as a form of display, and even its biological manifestations, such as broad hips and prominent breasts and buttocks, were presented as in effect costumes or stage properties, incapable of a merely natural existence and functioning as objects designed to attract public attention. That would also have been the case with the wives, presumably played by men, who refer to the Wife of Bath in Lydgate’s Mumming at Hertford, and I suspect that it might even have applied to the Blessed Virgin in the N-­Town play of Joseph’s Doubt, in which (if performance actually occurred) Joseph’s repeated “Thy wombe to hyghe doth stonde!” (your belly has risen too high) and “Thy wombe is gret, it gynneth to ryse” (your belly is big, it’s beginning to swell) and “With childe thu gynnyst ryth gret to gon” (you’re beginning to get really big with the child you’re bearing) must surely have pointed to a false belly worn by the male actor.42 The audiences of the medieval drama no doubt included women, but most medieval women are likely to have internalized the notion that the public existence of their own bodies was in the mode of performance or masquerade.43 I find it easy to imagine the figure of the Wife described in the General Prologue, with red face, gaps in the teeth, broad hips, red stockings, and gigantic hat, in these theatrical terms, as an English pantomime dame. The English pantomime is a survival of popular entertainment, comparable in some ways to the music hall to which Zink refers, though considerably older: it derived from the Italian commedia dell’arte and began to develop its present form in the seventeenth century. In almost every English town where live theatre exists, a dramatized version of some traditional tale such as Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk or Puss in Boots is still staged in the Christmas season every year. The pantomime is highly formalized

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in style, designed to appeal to both children and adults (sometimes with different versions slanted for children in the afternoon and for adults in the evening), and a leading figure in the cast of characters is always a comically grotesque old woman, known as the dame, played by a male actor in drag. (I remember going to the Cambridge Arts Theatre forty years ago to see performances of Jack’s mother or one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters by the admired veteran comedian Cyril Fletcher. More recently the distinguished classical actor Sir Ian McKellan has starred as Widow Twankey in Aladdin.) Similarly, what underlies all the local detail of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is not a woman; it is Chaucer in drag. A similar point has been persuasively made by John Ganim: It is difficult to interpret the Wife as totally satiric, a bundle of antifeminist clichés, or as totally celebratory, as an exuberant portrait of female protest. This ambiguity is precisely the ambiguity of popular theatrics such as the charivari, or the monstrous women of carnival celebrations. . . . As outrageous as the suggestion may be, the Wife of Bath is analogous to the festive performance of a man pretending to be a woman, a transvestite travesty, who is, nevertheless, allowed to express certain truths disallowed to normative characters. . . . That the Wife of Bath is an example of transvestite poetics is of course much less shocking than it might seem. Indeed, in its original presentation when Chaucer read it aloud, its very ventriloquism acquired a comic, festive quality.44

If we imagine the prologue being delivered by Chaucer himself to a Ricardian audience, he was surely not trying to make them believe that he was the Wife of Bath. The aim would not have been total and continuous impersonation, but a performance having the discontinuities of a “one-­man show,” and the “I” of this textual show would have been both Zink’s “stand-­up comic” and Cerquiglini’s “professional writer.” This is not to deny that, as I have argued, elements in the Prologue can evoke interiority and can be moving

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as well as comic; and Chaucer’s performance, embodied in the text, can, of course, raise questions about gender and power, sex and sin. Different readers might respond to it in different ways. Something similar was true of Cyril Fletcher’s performances, which had their own kind of subtlety. Ganim’s view of the Wife of Bath, penetrating though it is, leaves out an important dimension that I have stressed above—the textual mode in which she exists, with its bearing on the relation between textuality and gender. If The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is a male performance of femaleness, it is also a textual performance of speech. And there is an obvious connection between these two ways of seeing it, because in medieval culture, writing (and especially Latin writing) was associated with men, speech (especially vernacular gossip and nagging) with women. Boys were taught misogyny along with their Latin,45 a language spoken by no one who could not write it, and there was a long-­standing clerkly tradition of conceiving the relation between women and books as inherently antagonistic. One highly imaginative example is a work by the fourteenth-­ century English bishop, diplomat, and bibliophile Richard de Bury, the Philobiblon (meaning “book lover”). At one point Richard imagines the books in a household complaining how their owners (inevitably clerics) neglect them. In the following translation of Richard’s bookish Latin, the books mutter to each other, grumbling about how they are not sufficiently valued—and undervalued especially by women, or rather by that favorite misogynistic fantasy, “Woman”: “Our place [they say] is usurped by pet dogs, or by hunting hawks, or by that two-­legged animal with whom clerics were long since forbidden to live together, and whom we have always taught our pupils to shun even more than a snake or a cockatrice.” (The “two-­legged animal,” bestia bipedalis, is of course Woman; scribes sometimes inserted scilicet mulier at this point, for the benefit of slow-­witted male readers.) For that reason she has always been jealous of any devotion to us: she cannot be placated. Eventually, when she spies us

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languishing undefended (except by some dead spider’s web) in a corner, she begins to scowl, abusing us and scorning us in malignant language. She points out that we are the only items in the household that are unnecessary; she complains that we serve no domestic purpose whatever; and she advises that we should quickly be exchanged for expensive hats, fine silk fabrics and deep-­dyed scarlets [coccum bis tinctum], frocks and fancy furs, wool and linen. And with good reason, if she could see what lies within our hearts, if she had attended our private deliberations, if she had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or if she had only listened with comprehending ears to the twenty-­fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus.46

In context this passage is part of a complaint by the books against clerics: it is they who are to blame for allowing book-­hating females into their dwellings (presumably for sexual purposes)—which of course is just what Jankyn has done. Richard de Bury was producing a witty elaboration of a theme from “Theophrastus,” as cited by Jerome in his Adversus Jovinianum: “it is impossible for anyone to attend to his books and his wife at the same time. Married women want many things, costly dresses, gold, jewels, expensive items, maidservants, all kinds of furniture, litters and gilded coaches. Then come prattling complaints all the night. . . .”47 “Theophrastus or Valerius, or . . . the twenty-­fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus”: these Latin texts, which scarcely any woman could read, are among the misogynistic materials that make up the substance of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, a work that expresses both the enmity of books toward Woman and the reciprocal hatred of Woman for books. Richard’s “two-­legged animal” appears in the Prologue as Alisoun, with her expensive hat and stockings of “fyn scarlet reed” (I 456) and her inability to read the books out of which she is constructed. As in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and in its sources, the opposing sides constantly quote each other’s propaganda while inverting its purpose.48 Assertion floats free of intention (as in a different way it does in The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale), and that is something more strongly characteristic of writing than of speech.

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The Wife of Bath’s Prologue has been so variously and elaborately interpreted in terms of modern thought about gender that there can be no need here for any further discussion of its content. In case it needs to be made explicit, I state here my conviction that modern Western thought about gender is more enlightened than medieval clerical thought;49 but interpretation of the Prologue simply in terms of its gender content, without regard to the kind of text it is and the way it plays with its own textuality, has a strong tendency to become a kind of hermeneutic wish fulfillment. There is of course no reason why modern readers should not reimagine the Prologue, if not as feminist, at least as anti-­antifeminist50—and there are elements in it that lend themselves to such a reimagining, if only because Chaucer was not fully in control of its meaning, knew that he could not be, and perhaps did not even wish to be. That attitude toward writing seems at least to be the implication of the stanza near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, in which he sends his “little book” out into the world with the hope that it may not be corrupted by scribes and that it may be understood—“That thow be understonde, God I biseche!” (V 1798)—but without any instruction as to how it should be understood. In a number of his poems, from the House of Fame onward, Chaucer seizes the opportunity to demystify textuality. One way he does this in his performance as the Wife of Bath is by uncovering the pathetic male figures who shelter behind the formidable books that they compile to conceal their own impotence: The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho, Than sit he doun, and writ in his dotage That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage! (III 707–10) —— [When the learned man is old, and can no more perform the works of Venus than his old shoe can, then he sits down, and in his dotage writes that women can’t keep their marriage vows!]

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Even that passage is about textuality, and I believe the clerical assumption, set out by Richard de Bury, that there is a natural antagonism between women and books needs to be one basis for understanding The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.51 Misogyny and misogamy are transmitted by books, which there is no evidence the Wife can read and which she certainly cannot write, so the only remedy is to destroy books themselves, books so intolerably repetitive in their dissemination of clerical prejudice that they can appropriately be all “bounden in o [one] volume” (III 681).52 And so, as she explains, she first tears a leaf out of Jankyn’s book, “For which he smoot me so that I was deef” (III 668: for which he hit me and made me deaf). (Her deafness, first mentioned in the General Prologue, has been interpreted by one school of critics as an indication of foolish or obstinate inability to grasp clerical doctrine—but then it is a cleric who has deafened her, and one might equally well say that at least it means she does not need to put her fingers in her ears and chant, “La la la la, I’m not listening!”) Then she goes further: And whan I saugh he wolde nevere fyne To reden on this cursed book al nyght, Al sodeynly thre leves have I plyght Out of his book, right as he radde, and eke I with my fest so took hym on the cheke That in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun. (III 788–94) —— [And when I saw that he’d never cease reading this cursed book all night, all of a sudden I plucked three pages out of his book, just as he was reading, and also I hit him on the cheek with my fist so hard that he fell down backward into our fire.]

Jankyn in turn punches her head, she falls to the floor as if dead, And whan he saugh how stille that I lay, He was agast and wolde han fled his way. (III 797–98)

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—— [And when he saw how still I lay, he was frightened and felt like running away.]

(To make another small attempt to remove the fun, this is a minor example of Chaucer’s lack of concern for epistemic consistency: how can the Wife, lying unconscious, be in a position to know that Jankyn was afraid and wanted to run away? Even in a passage as dramatic as this, such questions have no answers because it never occurs to the medieval poet that they might be asked. The autographic “I” is not tied down to the point of view of a character in the énoncé, but retains the omniscience normal in medieval narration.) The Wife regains consciousness and pathetically exclaims, “Er I be deed, yet wol I kisse thee” (III 802: I want at least to kiss you before I die), but when Jankyn kneels to kiss her and beg forgiveness, she hits his cheek. At last they “fille acorded” (III 812), the terms of their accord being that she should have control of “hous and lond” (III 814) and that he should burn his book of wicked wives. The destruction of the book itself is the only possible basis for avoidance of marital “debaat” (III 822). Like the rebels of 1381, determined to destroy written documents and hostile toward the clerks who produce them, the Wife represents “a group outside literate culture and thus disadvantaged at countering literate culture’s authority.”53 And like the rebels as represented in the texts that are our main source of information about them, she is herself the construct of that literate authority. Only a little later, with Christine de Pizan, did the possibility emerge of a book directed against the misogyny transmitted by books—an idea more likely to be generated by a woman writer than by a man. The Prologue, in my view, is not such a book, and the Wife’s famous “By God, if wommen hadde writen stories . . .” (III 693: By God, if the histories had been written by women . . .) is the expression of a wish assumed to be unfulfillable, a fact underlined by our awareness that she is a character in a book written by a man. The “speech” incorporated in the Prologue is always subtended by textuality and thus by masculinity. It is not by accident that, as

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Davenport reminds us, the Friar in his prologue criticizes the Wife “for being too bookish.”54 The Prologue is constantly engaged in processes of transmutation, rapidly converting writing into speech and speech back into writing. In the famous opening lines, the Wife declares, Experience, though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynough for me To speke of wo that is in mariage (III 1–3) —— [Even if there were no [written] authority in this world, experience is quite enough basis for me to speak about the misery there is in marriage]

She proceeds to convert back into speech the text of the scriptural exempla with which she begins: she “was toold, certeyn, nat longe agoon is” (III 9: was certainly told, and not long ago) that Christ attended only one wedding, and, she goes on, Herkne eek, lo, which a sharp word for the nones, Biside a welle, Jhesus, God and man, Spak in repreeve of the Samaritan (III 14–16) —— [Listen, too, to what a harsh word Jesus, God and man, spoke to the purpose beside a well in reproof of the Samaritan woman]

The textual form of the dit creates in the Wife’s prologue a powerful illusion of speech. I have mentioned above some of the rhetorical devices that contribute to that illusion, but among the most effective are the very discontinuities that belong to writing—the apparently random progress through the catalogue of five husbands and through the counts of the clerkly case against women and marriage, and especially perhaps moments of forgetfulness such as the Wife’s: But now, sire, lat me se what I shal seyn. A ha! By God, I have my tale ageyn. (III 585–86)

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—— [But now, sir, let me think what I was about to say. Oh yes, I remember what I was telling you.]

Her forgetfulness no doubt functions on one level as a symptom of female irrationality, of the feebleness of intellect and dominance of emotion over reason that clerkly misogyny attributed to Woman. And yet it is precisely because the dit, as Cerquiglini notes, is not based on memorial patterns that it can represent the act of forgetting: paradoxically, only writing can effectively represent the failures of memory that occur in the absence of writing. This is an extreme example of the paradox on which the whole Prologue is based: it takes a written text to imitate colloquial speech, because orally composed and transmitted compositions rely on formulaic and other patterns that are not characteristic of colloquial discourse. Paul Zumthor remarks that “orality and writing are opposed as the continuous to the discontinuous”;55 it is well known that the language of oral poetry is extremely formal and formulaic, and in most ways not at all like that of daily speech. Lee Patterson writes perceptively about the Wife’s prologue, “Try as she (and Chaucer) might, she remains confined within the prison house of masculine language; she brilliantly rearranges and deforms her authorities to enable them to disclose new areas of experience, but she remains dependent on them for her voice. Her performance is a kind of transvestism, and she speaks ‘habillé [sic] en homme.’ ”56 To this we need to add that the prison house that confines her (but at the same time makes her existence possible) is not just that of masculine language but that of writing, and that if she is habillée en homme, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is a textual performance in which Chaucer is habillé en femme. A collection of essays on the medieval dit is entitled Écrire pour dire,57 and that title—“To write in order to say”—aptly summarizes the paradox of this genre. The dialogue between writing and speech is an especially significant feature of the Wife’s prologue, but it also characterizes Chaucerian prologues in general. The

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Franklin’s Prologue is the only one of the Canterbury prologues that specifically defines itself as a dit in the basic terms proposed by Zink, as a poem that “is not destined to be sung.” It does so by distinguishing what it proposes to do from what the Bretons did in antiquity: they composed lays about various adventures, “Whiche layes with hir instrumentz they songe” (V 712), but it proposes to “say” such a lay,58 and in fact it distinguishes among three forms of expression: song, speech, and the formal Ciceronian rhetoric that the Franklin claims not to be able to manage. Cerquiglini, as we have seen, insists that the dit is above all a méta-­écriture,59 an instance of writing about writing. Examples in The Canterbury Tales would include the prologues of the Franklin, the Man of Law, the Monk, and the Clerk. Another would be The Pardoner’s Prologue, with its disturbing examination of the gap between the moral state of the preacher and the moral effect of his preaching, making it, as Ganim puts it, “at least partly an essay on the efficacy of fiction and the peculiarities of intention.”60 Another would be The Prioress’s Prologue, with its conception of religious song as the product of heavenly inspiration operating on an immature and unworthy vessel. Yet another would be The Parson’s Prologue, with its questioning of the validity of fiction and of metrical ornament. We might even include The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue under this heading, if we were to understand it not just as a dit de l’alchimie but as a figurative account by Chaucer of the imaginative alchemy by which base materials—“Poudres diverse, asshes, donge, pisse, and cley” (VIII 807)—can be transmuted into poetic fiction. It is not just an example of bricolage; it is about bricolage, the transformation of miscellaneous materials into artistic form. And here, as in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the supposed speaker’s lack of education— Thogh I by ordre hem nat reherce kan, By cause that I am a lewed man, Yet wol I telle hem as they come to mynde Thogh I ne kan nat sette hem in hir kynde (VIII 786–89) ——

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[Though I can’t repeat them in the right order, because I’m an ignorant man, still I’ll list them as they come to mind, even if I can’t set them out according to their natures]

—and the forgetfulness of an untrained mind— Yet forgat I to maken rehersaille Of watres corosif, and of lymaille, And of bodies mollificacioun (VIII 852–54) —— [And I forgot to mention acidic waters, and metal filings, and the softening of bodies]

—are no more than excuses for Chaucer’s own freedom of composition. My argument is not that the Canterbury prologues have nothing to do with the pilgrims and the stories they tell, or that critics since Kittredge have been completely wrong to read some of them as the dramatic self-­expressions of imagined individuals. Certain prologues are individuated to some extent, but the prevalent conception of them all as fully consistent expressions of complex individual selves is greatly exaggerated, and useful discussion of them along those lines has now, in my view, been exhausted even in the case of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue—discussion that is dependent on the assumption that the written text is the record of a lived subjectivity open to infinitely minute analysis. In the games played by Chaucer critics, that assumption has led to fruitless speculation about the Wife’s psyche: her masochism, her bisexuality, her oral eroticism, her concealment of her true experience from herself, not to mention her extraordinary ability not just to remember every word of Jankyn’s book of wicked wives but even to recognize its phrasing proleptically in the speech of husbands who preceded Jankyn. The late medieval supergenre that incorporates the dit was certainly known to Chaucer in many textual realizations, though there is no reason to think he would have formulated it

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in theoretical terms as autography, or would have needed to do so. We need to do so now only because we have lost the inward and instinctive grasp of it that was available to him and his contemporaries in a particular historical phase of Anglo-­French culture. At the very least, to think along these lines will not just discourage idle speculation but will enable us to notice many autographic features of Chaucer’s prologues that would otherwise be obscured— above all to notice that these writings are textual performances, not the spoken words issuing from living, conscious bodies that they sometimes imitate.

Chapter 4

W h y A ut o g r a p h y ?

What can it have been in autography that appealed to French poets and their readers from the thirteenth century on and to those writing and reading in English from the mid-­fourteenth century on? Answers to such a question can only be speculative, but I think it is worth speculating, and in doing so I shall try to put the medieval situation in a broader context of the ways we think about literary texts. That means that this chapter will proceed in a more rambling way than other parts of the book. This may make it seem all too like an inferior modern version of medieval autographies, but if so, I hope it may be of use in provoking thought about how to understand them. One likely source of the appeal of autography was what now seems the obvious one, that it was a step on the way toward autobiography. We need to remember that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries autobiography in the sense in which we now understand it did not yet exist, so that medieval autographers cannot have been knowingly striving toward it, nor yet avoiding it; but they did live in a culture that was growing more interested in individual lives and especially in individual interiorities. The latter interest may be most obvious in religious texts, usually in prose, such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations; Julian indicates more than once that what God reveals to her is intended for all Christians, 99

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but it is revealed through her own unique and distinctive interiority, shaped, we have to suppose, by some program of religious exercises before her revelations were received. As to secular writing that is of the first person as well as in the first person, I suggest that two groups of people were most likely to be impelled to devise and elabo­rate its conventions and conditions. The first consists of those forced by external circumstances into self-­absorption and a sense of being separated from others. These would notably include literate prisoners, such as King James I of Scotland and Charles, Duke of Orleans, both foreigners of very high rank captured by the English in the first half of the fifteenth century and retained in captivity for extended periods—James for eighteen years and Charles for twenty-­five. As captives both became remarkably accomplished poets in the Chaucerian mode, at once courtly and clerkly, and both wrote in ways that seem to have incorporated fragments of individual experience into a general autographic experientiality. James’s one known composition is the Kingis Quair, a highly original variant on the Chaucerian dream poem.1 It appears to have had a public purpose in marking his marriage to the English princess Joan Beaufort, cousin of Henry VI, which was a crucial factor in the political negotiations leading to James’s release from captivity, but it also looks inward to examine how hope, resilience, and, above all, the grasping of opportunity could shape an individual destiny.2 Unlike James, who was captured as a boy, Charles was already a poet of achievement when he was taken prisoner at Agincourt; he had written much in his native French, and as a captive he composed the first extended lyric sequence in English, partly translated and adapted from his own French poems. There is no evidence that his “prison book,” taken as a whole, had a political purpose, but there too the abstract “I” of the courtly tradition is inflected with touches of personal experience—the constraints of imprisonment and of being under hostile surveillance, the death of his wife while they were separated, and a pervading sense of absence from his familiar surroundings and in some sense from himself.3 Joanna

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Summers writes perceptively that a “stable reading of the English Book as autobiographical somewhat flattens the text, for it ignores the playful way such readings are invited and then sabotaged”;4 yet that may be a modern response, in the sense that a stable autobiographical reading would probably not have been a possibility for fifteenth-­century readers and therefore could not be sabotaged. The second group most likely to move toward autobiography were those suffering from some kind of psychological disturbance that would heighten their awareness of being different from others.5 They would remain, as medieval people generally seem to have been, strongly dependent for their self-­definition on others’ responses to them, but the nature of those responses, often critical and disparaging, would lead them to feel their apartness. One in this group is Margery Kempe—not strictly a writer, I believe, but at least a crucial participant in the writing of The Book of Margery Kempe. She was a woman of what now seems obsessive religiosity, the expressions of which were regarded by many of her contemporaries as symptoms of physical or mental illness—perhaps “the fallyng evyl” (epilepsy) or “a cardiakyl er sum other sekenesse” (a heart condition or some other sickness).6 Another is Thomas Hoccleve, whose work will be discussed in the next two chapters. A central element in his autographic writing was the melancholy or “wildnesse,” of which he wrote that it swelled up within him so overwhelmingly that “needes oute I muste therwithal. / I thought I nolde keepe it cloos no more” (Complaint 31–32: I just had to burst out with it. I thought I didn’t wish to keep it hidden any longer). This psychological disturbance left some apparent traces in the record of Hoccleve’s official life as a clerk in the Privy Seal Office. In cases such as these, subjectivity could be experienced and construed as a quasi-­objective reality, and it was likely to be perceived in terms of fragmentation rather than wholeness. So the focus on subjectivity in writing is motivated by real-­life circumstances, but if it is to be written, it must be constructed out of textual materials—those of existing literary traditions and those of language itself—that were not devised to express the specific motivating circumstances.

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I shall return in the following chapters to the pleasure to be gained from shared interiority and also to the adaptation of Chaucerian materials in fifteenth-­ century autography, but for the moment my speculation turns to a more general and specifically literary phenomenon. Medieval poetry has a strong tendency to confine itself to fixed patterns. Most medieval lyrics take up a limited number of themes and follow fixed stanzaic forms rather than forms invented to express specific, individual sequences of thought and feeling. In this, they are at the opposite extreme to the lyrics of, say, Thomas Hardy, in many of which idiosyncratic stanzaic and metrical shapes are devised to express unique situations and states of mind. With narratives the case is still more striking: unlike novels, almost all medieval narratives are retellings of already existing stories, the outlines and outcomes of which are not open to change. Peter Brooks suggests that this may be a general truth about narratives: “Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered: a sjužet repeating the fabula, as the detective retraces the tracks of the criminal. This claim to an act of repetition—‘I sing of,’ ‘I tell of’—appears to be initiatory of narrative.”7 Whether or not this is generally true, it was certainly assumed to be true in the Middle Ages, and a small but telling example of this medieval assumption appears in the versified table of contents provided by John Shirley for a manuscript miscellany copied by himself in the fifteenth century. He urges readers of the collection, Thankethe th’auctoures that theos storyes Renoveld have to youre memoryes And the wryter for his distresse.8 —— [Thank the authors who have recalled these (hi)stories to your minds and the writer for his pains.]

The “authors” have not invented stories but only “renewed” the readers’ recollections of stories that already exist. The same

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assumption is implied by medieval Latin artes poeticae, such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, which are entirely concerned with techniques for presenting a given story, not with constructing the story itself. We tend to take freedom of composition for granted as a natural or constitutional right for the narrative artist of our time, the novelist, but it was not a right that medieval narrative poets felt themselves to possess. Don DeLillo or Philip Roth, Ian McEwan or Martin Amis, having begun a story, can make it follow whatever shape he chooses (though it will still be in some way story-­shaped); that was simply not the case for a medieval poet retelling the story of Dido and Aeneas or of Tristan and Iseult. There may be variations in detail, as for example there are different ways of telling how Tristan and Iseult come to die, but the story of their love must always end with their deaths. (Malory’s version of the Tristan story is an exception, but the reason for that is that he never reached the story’s end, perhaps because the volume containing the final part of his French source was not available to him at the time of writing. Referring back to the story later in his Arthurian compilation, he indicated his acceptance that it did end with the lovers’ deaths.9) As Alberto Varvaro has written, “All those who listen to a passage of one of the romans de Tristan already know, albeit to varying degrees, the entire story; they all know that the lovers will die tragi­cally. This also happens in epic poetry: from the outset, the audience knows that Roland will die in Roncesvalles, that Charlemagne will avenge him, and that Guillaume d’Orange will never betray an ungrateful Louis.”10 Narrative forms and outcomes that change only in detail, not in fundamentals, offer a sense of security, of the kind that children gain from the retelling of familiar stories. I suspect it is precisely that aspect of medieval culture, its apparent provision of certainty and safety in literature as well as in doctrine, that may have helped to attract many of the literary scholars who have become medievalists. This is not to suggest, of course, that my fellow medievalists and I are like children, but, whatever the reason, these qualities

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are what many of us tend to look for in the literature in which we specialize, and tend to suppose that medieval poets must always have desired. For at least the last century Dante has been widely speaking world as the ideal medieval regarded in the English-­ poet against whom we measure all others, and his Commedia has been regarded as the ideal medieval poem—a work so perfect and complete in form and doctrine that it is hard to conceive of any temporal process by which it might have come into being, or any single moment at which Dante might have changed his mind or even hesitated before committing himself to one choice rather than another. In reality of course the Commedia was composed over a considerable period of time—some fifteen years, according to modern scholars—and though the earliest surviving manuscripts date from after Dante’s death, there must presumably have been drafts, sketches, changes of mind, on the way to the text we have. But the perfection of the completed work makes these difficult to imagine, and the outcome seems to offer itself as analogous to the perfect building as conceived by Leon Battista Alberti, such that “nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse,” the rare achievement that is “entirely complete and perfect in itself.”11 The consequence is that it is all too easy to identify Dante with the God of his imagined universe, and to assume that the choices made in designing the poem, for instance as to who would be in which circle of Hell, must have been not his but God’s. Teodolinda Barolini notes how successful Dante is in blurring “our sense of the distinction between the fabricated text and the allegedly nonfabricated reality of which it tells,” so that “we have rarely stopped to consider how they invest the subjective author of the Inferno with the objective authority of the divine ‘author’—i.e., maker—of hell.”12 Barolini argues persuasively that the academic Dante industry has too readily entered into complicity with Dante in creating this confusion. Still, there are strong indications in medieval theorizing of literature that this perfection of structure was indeed an intended goal. The common notion is that the medieval ars poetica is chiefly

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concerned with details, whether of structure—ways of beginning and ending a poem, for example—or of style. There is some truth in this, but in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s widely circulated Poetria nova, at least part of which we know Chaucer had read,13 before the extensive naming, categorization, and illustration of figures of thought and words comes a repeated contrast between the parts and the whole, the latter being referred to in phrases such as “omne / Materiae spatium” (55–56: the whole extent of the material), “tota . . . series” (67: the work as a whole), and “totalis facies” (69: the whole face).14 Most striking is a passage comparing the poet to an architect or builder who needs to have a complete image of a house’s structure in his mind before beginning work on the actual house: Si quis habet fundare domum, non currit ad actum Impetuosa manus: intrinseca linea cordis Praemetitur opus, seriemque sub ordine certo Interior praescribit homo, totamque figurat Ante manus cordis quam corporis; et status eius Est prius archetypus quam sensilis. Ipsa poesis Spectet in hoc speculo quae lex sit danda poetis. Non manus ad calamum praeceps, non lingua sit ardens Ad verbum: neutram manibus committe regendam Fortunae; sed mens discreta praeambula facti, Ut melius fortunet opus, suspendat earum Officium, tractetque diu de themate secum. Circinus interior mentis praecircinet omne Materiae spatium . . . (43–56) —— [If a man has a house to build, his impetuous hand does not rush into action. The measuring line of his mind first lays out the work, and he mentally outlines the successive steps in a definite order. The mind’s hand shapes the entire house before the body’s hand builds it. Its mode of being is archetypal before it is actual. Poetic art may see in this analogy the law to be given to poets: let the poet’s hand not be swift to take up

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the pen, nor his tongue be impatient to speak; trust neither hand nor tongue to the guidance of fortune. To ensure greater success for the work, let the discriminating mind, as a prelude to action, defer the operation of hand and tongue, and ponder long on the subject matter. Let the mind’s interior compass first circle the whole extent of the material . . .]15

In insisting on the need for the poem to be complete in the mind before it exists on the page, to be “prius archetypus quam sensilis,” Geoffrey does indeed seem to be comparing the poet to the architect of the world, the God of Genesis, often depicted in medieval art with a great compass defining the whole extent of the cosmos.16 Geoffrey’s ideal poet might be an anticipation of Dante, and he is certainly a figure of whom teachers of literature are likely to approve; after all, whatever our own methods of composition, we are surely in the habit of telling our students that they must always work out in advance a detailed plan for what they write, rather than plunging ahead and trusting to Fortune. And this is not a habit peculiar to academics or to medievalists: poets, too, have sometimes emphasized the necessity for a poem to exist in the mind before it is committed to paper. Louis Zukofsky, for example, adapting a famous passage from Marx’s Capital, offers a different version of the architectural analogy when he writes, What distinguishes any worker from the best of the bees Is that the worker builds a cell in his head before he constructs it in wax.17

But it is worth considering whether this is actually how most creative artists work. To return to builders or architects: it appears that most architectural projects in the Middle Ages, and even in Al­berti’s fifteenth-­century Italy, were not in fact developed in the way Geoffrey of Vinsauf recommends, with a clear distinction between the mental design and its material execution. Marvin Trachtenberg

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writes as follows about the traditional practice that survived into Alberti’s time: The initial design phase of a project generally was limited to those aspects of form critical to convince the clients to build or necessary to the initial phases of fabrication. A comprehensive design did not exist at the beginning of construction any more than did the building itself, meaning that the intentions of the designer were not yet “complete” even to himself. What came into being in the fullness of time was not only the evolving physical structure but quite literally its comprehensive design, as an integral part of the slow process of facture, through and together with, in the realization of the building itself. At no point in the process was formal change, large or small, ruled out.18

For a modern analogy it is worth considering the creation of films. Some film directors certainly plan everything in advance. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously did so, and he claimed to find the actual making of a film uninteresting by contrast with the planning. But for others, and those some of the most distinguished, the making of a film is not the execution of a perfected plan but rather a process of exploration and discovery. As one of the greatest French directors, Bertrand Tavernier, puts it: “When I begin a film, I don’t have all the answers. I discover things along the way. . . . I make films to learn and not to teach.”19 A more extreme case is that of Maurice Pialat. Besides directing his extraordinary film À nos amours, he also acted in it, and, after the character he played was supposed to be dead, he decided to diverge from the script by bringing him back to life. While a scene was being shot, he reappeared in character without warning the other actors that he was going to do so and thus, quite unpredictably, brought about a moment of astonishing emotional power and depth. Probably no medieval poet improvised in quite such a startling way, but for all the prestige of the doctrinal and the systematic in the Middle Ages, even then

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some of the greatest poets may have been more like Tavernier than like Hitchcock, learning by writing as much as they taught. That is especially likely to have been the case with large-­scale projects, such as Piers Plowman or Troilus and Criseyde, in which composition must have extended over a substantial period of time, leaving room for changes of mind and new understandings brought about by developments in the writers’ lives, including changes occurring in the course of, and in response to, the process of composition itself. Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova was familiar to Chaucer and also, as we shall see, to Chaucer’s followers Thomas Hoccleve and Osbern Bokenham. Chaucer recalls the passage about advance planning very exactly in explaining how Pandarus pauses to lay plans for Troilus’s love affair with Criseyde: For everi wight that hath an hous to founde Ne renneth naught the werk for to bygynne With rakel hond, but he wol bide a stounde, And sende his hertes line out fro withinne Aldirfirst his purpos for to wynne. Al this Pandare in his herte thoughte, And caste his werk ful wisely or he wroughte. (Troilus I 1065–71) —— [For every person who has to build a house doesn’t rush to begin the work hastily, but he’ll wait for a time, and first of all, so as to attain his purpose, he’ll send out the cord of his heart from within. Pandarus pondered all this in his heart, and plotted his work very wisely before he began it.]

His “hertes line” (Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s linea cordis) is the mental tape or plumb line with which the architect calculates the measurements of the virtual structure; yet for all Pandarus’s wisdom, it turns out that his advance planning cannot take account of every contingency. In the earthly world Fortune is always at her work,

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time brings unforeseeable changes, human beings do not possess divine omniscience and cannot grasp the controlling divine purpose, and when the Trojan parliament decides to exchange Criseyde with the Greeks for the captured Antenor, Pandarus’s “purpos” is lost, and, with the lovers separated, his werk is ruined. There was only one Dante, and no extended writing in Middle English is comparable to the Commedia in perfection of form. Perhaps Pearl, with its intricate mathematical architecture and its discriminating choice of every word, comes closest, but it is of course very much shorter, and its ending is troublingly compressed and enigmatic by contrast with the superbly conclusive affirmation of the Commedia. Chaucer greatly admired Dante and borrowed many passages from his work, but he is not much like him as a poet. Chaucer more closely resembles Boccaccio, but even from him he differs in similar ways. As John Ganim puts it, discussing The Canterbury Tales, “Compared to Boccaccio’s Decameron, . . . with its tightly organized thematic structure and narrative frame, Chaucer seems much more willing to improvise, to allow inconsistency and to permit the work itself or its readers to generate principles of coherence and symmetry.”20 Was the breathless arrival of the Canon and his Yeoman in Fragment VIII, followed by The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, a tale so different from all the others, part of Chaucer’s blueprint when he started work on The Canterbury Tales? As the Canon and his Yeoman are desperately trying to catch up with the pilgrims, so it emerges that they are desperately trying to catch up with the goal of their science of alchemy, but “We mowen nat . . . / It overtake, it slit awey so faste” (VIII 681–82: we may not overtake it, it slips away so quickly). Thus in life, as in narrative form, “evere we lakken oure conclusioun” (VIII 672). There is no way of proving that this turn was not planned from the very beginning, but to me it looks like a happy afterthought, a grace beyond the reach of foresight, that might well have arisen from Chaucer’s growing sense of the elusiveness of conclusion in his own poetic projects. And the apparent coexistence within the Tales as we have them of competing plans for the whole collection (one tale per

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pilgrim versus two per pilgrim, a one-­way journey versus a two-­ way journey) is surely a trace of the gradual, improvisatory process of composition rather than an indication of some extraordinarily subtle master plan or idea. What we find in the Tales as they have come down to us is not a self-­effacing, smoothly transparent window giving on to a perfectly preconceived “world” but something more like an impasto that retains marks of the brush, the palette knife, and even the painter’s fingers. Even in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s most monumental single achievement, a poem in which he was retelling a single existing story only loosely attached to the larger history of Troy and was following a specific version of it by Boccaccio, it does not appear that he had planned the entire work in advance and then executed his mental archetype in every detail. If he had, how could it be that in the proem to Book IV he begs the Furies and Mars, This ilke ferthe book me helpeth fyne, So that the losse of lyf and love yfeere Of Troilus be fully shewed heere (IV 26–28) —— [Help me to finish this same fourth book, so that Troilus’s loss of his life and his love together may be completely set forth here]

yet then finds that it takes him a fifth book to fulfill the promise?21 Scholars have attempted to explain away the contradiction, but the sense of the words is plain, and it is hard to imagine why Chaucer should have appealed not just to the Furies “That endeles compleignen evere in pyne” (IV 23), but also to the god of war for help in completing Book IV, if he had not intended that book, specified by number, to include Troilus’s death in battle. There is no telling at what point in the composition of Book IV he came to realize that his earlier plan could not be fulfilled: it might have been when he decided to add Troilus’s Boethian soliloquy on predestination and free will, or perhaps that only confirmed and exploited a decision he had already reached. But I suppose that Chaucer cannot have

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regretted the discrepancy too much, or he would have revised the poem to remove it. We should remember, no doubt, that he was not a professional poet and that the other demands of his busy life as a royal servant, even after he had relinquished his major offices, may have interfered with his wish to perfect his poems;22 but Troilus and Criseyde is in part about the effects of time in changing human lives and defeating human plans and expectations, and it is not inappropriate that the structure of the poem itself should also be subject to unplanned change in the process of composition. As the work proceeds, we become increasingly aware of the gaps between human intentions and their outcomes, and I think it possible that one reason why Chaucer did not revise the proem to Book IV is that he was willing to leave in the text a trace of the gap between intention and outcome in his own case too. In the proem he wrote “in good entente” that this would be the last book; he doubtless really meant it to be, just as Criseyde really meant to be true to Troilus, but then things turned out otherwise. Intentions may be real and sincere, neither foolish nor hypocritical, even if they are not fulfilled in reality: that is true for the characters, and it was true for the poet too. And if Chaucer’s main aim as a poet had been to achieve a preconceived compositional perfection like that apparently displayed in Dante’s Commedia, it seems unlikely that he would have moved on from the Troilus to produce two final major works that are essentially compilations, the unfinished Legend of Good Women and the still more miscellaneous and also unfinished Canterbury Tales. To support these suppositions about the creative process I turn to the work of the Slavic scholar and literary theorist Gary Saul Morson. In his important book Narrative and Freedom, Morson offers the following generalization about what actually happens in sustained literary creation (and in my experience it is what happens in the course of producing any sustained composition): For creativity to be real, it must be a genuine process of unpredetermined becoming: it cannot be the mere unfolding of an already completely determined sequence of steps to a

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ready-­made conclusion. . . . So conceived, the creative process typically traces not a straight line to a goal but a series of false leads, missed opportunities, new possibilities, improvisations, visions, and revisions. It is constituted by an intention that evolves over time. To be sure, authors typically remove the traces of this process and present their work as if it were the product of a clear plan, known from the outset. By convention, works are usually offered as the expression of an intention that is essentially instantaneous even if it took time to execute and takes time to appreciate. After the work is complete, the authors “remove the scaffolding,” as Bakhtin liked to say. But the process of creation is in fact anything but regular.23

Chaucer chose not to remove all the scaffolding even from the most classically shaped of his major works, Troilus and Criseyde; he did not suppress all evidence of the false leads and improvisations that were part of the process by which he created it. I do not believe that he was the only medieval poet who chose to let his work escape from the dominance of the preconceived structure into the flexi­ bility and unpredictability of life as human beings actually experience it, or who allowed the traces of an intention evolving over time to remain in the finished product. Influenced by Elizabeth Salter, who wrote with such sympathetic penetration about the evidence remaining in Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer’s “conflicting purposes, unresolved difficulties,”24 I have become skeptical of the increasingly subtle lengths to which scholars are driven in their attempts to read major medieval poems as the perfect fulfillments of perfectly conceived plans—a task requiring them, like the astronomers mocked by Milton’s Raphael, to “contrive / To save appearances . . . With centric and eccentric . . . , Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”25 As academic critics, that is what we characteristically do: we contrive to save appearances, and we gain authority by discovering subtleties of structure. It is not only medievalists of whom this is true, but let me give a recent example from one of our most influential Chaucer critics, Lee Patterson.

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Arguing that the final speaker in The Man of Law’s Epilogue (II 1178ff), differently identified in different manuscripts, must have been intended by Chaucer to be the Wife of Bath, Patterson writes, “When Alisoun of Bath interrupts the Parson, a strict parallelism is set up with the interruption of Fragment I, where the Miller interrupts the Monk in order to tell his tale of Alisoun; and this parallelism is also enforced by the important if still unexplored analogies between the tales of the Reeve and the Cook and those of the Friar and the Summoner.”26 I am not convinced that Chaucer aimed at such “strict” and intricate patterning or would have thought his work improved by it. Academic interpretation rarely aims to convey the pleasure of the unpredictable, which may be most intense on our first encounter with a text; on the contrary, it strives to create an effect of inevitability. The stronger the impression that the critic has expounded the one right and true order of the text, the greater his authority. And that academic desire for order can be at odds with an ability to take pleasure in the poet’s freedom of invention and improvisation. Morson is chiefly concerned with nineteenth-­and twentieth-­ century Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bakhtin, but in several articles, and especially in Narrative and Freedom, he puts forward a persuasive, more general argument about narrative and about the way that even novelists, apparently at liberty to shape their work as they wish, are constrained by the demands of narrative form itself. Thus what Morson calls “foreshadowing,” by which preceding events within a fiction occur “as a consequence of events to come,” is a common effect in narrative. The prequel, a supplement designed to explain unexplained events in a known story, providing causes for what follows in the order of narrative but itself caused by what comes earlier in the order of composition, is not uncommon in the Middle Ages. One example is the thirteenth-­ century French Suite du Merlin, devised to elucidate puzzles in the already widely read Grail story27 and used by Malory as the source for his tale of Balyn and Balan. And more generally some degree of foreshadowing is almost inevitable in the medieval situation in

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which every telling is a retelling. Moreover, Morson adds, “even when foreshadowing is not explicitly used, it is implicitly present by virtue of a narrative’s reliance on structure and closure. In a well-­constructed story, everything points (or will turn out to point) to the ending and to the pattern that will eventually be revealed.”28 A similar argument was made earlier in the twentieth century by Jean-­Paul Sartre. In his early novel La Nausée there comes a point at which the “I” of the narrative, Antoine Roquentin, denies the possibility of “true stories”: You appear to begin at the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a solicitor’s clerk at Marommes.” And in fact you have begun at the end. It is there, invisible and present, and it is the end which gives these few words the pomp and value of a beginning. “I was out walking, I had left the village without noticing, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the fellow was absorbed, morose, miles away from an adventure, in exactly the sort of mood in which you let events go by without seeing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the fellow is already the hero of the story. His morose mood, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. And the story goes on in reverse: the moments have stopped piling up on one another in a happy-­go-­lucky manner, they are caught by the end of the story which attracts them, and each of them in turn attracts the preceding moment.29

Intelligent medieval poets, pondering their craft, must surely have been aware of this kind of constraint, the kind imposed not just by specific sources but by narrative itself. How could a storyteller escape from the dominance of the well-­shaped story with its purposiveness and its preordained ending? As Pandarus puts it, echoing the proverbial finis coronat opus, “th’ende is every tales strengthe” (Troilus II 260), and it exerts that strength to affect all that precedes it. And thus, in Morson’s words, “narratives, insofar as they rely on

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structure, are predisposed to convey a sense of fatalism, determinism, or otherwise closed time.”30 In Book IV of Troilus and Criseyde the hero ends a long and elaborately argued soliloquy on predestination and free will by coming down on the side of predestination, with the statement that future events are preordained and “mowe nat ben eschued on no syde” (IV 1078: may not be avoided in any way). The soliloquy is pervasively Boethian in content, but its conclusion differs from the defense of human free will arrived at in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, prosa 3. One reason why Troilus is presented as a fatalist is no doubt that Chaucer attributed to him a philosophical position believed by medieval scholars to have been characteristic of pagans,31 but another reason, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that Troilus senses or half-­senses that his life is part of a history that has already been written or, if not already written, has a shape preordained by the requirements of narrative itself.32 As he puts it later, looking back over his life and reproaching Cupid for what he sees as the god’s sustained antagonism toward him, Whan I the proces have in my memorie How thow me hast wereyed on every syde, Men myght a book make of it, lik a storie. (V 583–85) —— [When I call to mind the process by which you have attacked me from every direction, (it strikes me that) people could make a book out of it, like a story/history.]

I suggest that Chaucer may have found this situation as oppressive as Troilus does, and that in much of his writing he seeks to achieve the freedom of what Morson calls “life as it is experienced,” which “does not have closure or an Aristotelian ending, a point at which continuation is unthinkable and at which all loose ends are tied up.”33 In the case of Troilus, it is striking that even his eventual death is not a point at which all loose ends are tied up. Chaucer follows the ascent of Troilus’s soul through the heavenly spheres but does

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not tell us where he finally came to rest, only that “forth he wente, shortly for to telle, / Ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle” (V 1826–27)—wherever he was allotted to dwell by Mercury, the messenger of the gods and guide of souls. The pagan Troilus knows nothing of whatever lies beyond the planetary gods in whom he believes and the material spheres in which they revolve. Morson notes that “an end requires an external standpoint,”34 and many readers may feel that in Troilus and Criseyde that standpoint is provided when Troilus reaches “the holughnesse [concavity] of the eighthe spere” (V 1809), hears the planets as they revolve making “armonye / With sownes ful of hevenyssh melodie” (V 1812–13), and then looks down at “this litel spot of erthe” (V 1815) and laughs at the grief of those mourning his own death. But his standpoint is not truly external to himself: he is the perceiving spirit as well as the perceived body, and what he will ultimately perceive, beyond the eighth sphere, is left undefined. Continuation is not unthinkable, but it would take place not in the poem but in the minds of late medieval readers, for whom the problem of what happened to the souls of righteous pagans, and whether they might achieve salvation, was intensely interesting and highly controversial. (The controversy was directly relevant to Christians, for it bore on questions raised by the thinkers known as moderni about the extent to which Christians might initiate their salvation by their own deeds.) What Derrida calls “the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire” for a “transcendental signified”35 is deflected so far as the story of Troilus is concerned, though Chaucer adds, from outside the world of that story, some concluding stanzas addressed to the triune God of Christianity. Clearly the larger argument between two conceptions of artistic structure, the fully planned and the partly improvised, is one that does not relate only to medieval writing. As is implied by my brief references to Tavernier and Zukofsky, and more substantially by the use I have been able to make of Morson’s work on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it can be found in many periods and cultures, with the balance tilting now to one side and now to the other. I hope readers will bear with me if, before returning to medieval autography,

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I consider another postmedieval place where the argument is conducted with great subtlety, as an opposition between “composition” and “life,” with the balance tilting toward composition. This is in Henry James’s meditations on prose fiction, and especially on his own achievements as a novelist. In thinking through the issues with which this book is concerned, I have been surprised how often I found myself recalling James’s retrospective prefaces to his own novels, and particularly that to The Tragic Muse. To take up the question in James’s terms may be unexpectedly helpful as a stimulus to thought about the medieval situation. “Composition” is a key term in the preface to The Tragic Muse, and by it James evidently means something like the preconceived unitary form that was asserted by Geoffrey of Vinsauf to be a necessity in the ars poetica and that has been assumed by much academic criticism to be the goal of medieval poets. James’s parallel is not with the architect but with the painter. Discussing the danger he had seen when writing his novel of juxtaposing separate interests so that the “seam” between them would be revealed as “mechanical and superficial,” he recalls that he “had on occasion seen two pictures in one; were there not for instance certain sublime Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place? Yes, that might be, but there had surely been nevertheless a mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all mysteriously to its own.” This mysterious “fusion,” later referred to as “complete pictorial fusion” derived from the novelist’s “delight in a deep-­breathing economy and an organic form,” is a subtler and more elusive concept than that of the mental blueprint, but it is similarly opposed to the possibility of including “the accidental and the arbitrary” in the novel.36 James continues, in a passage containing one of the most frequently quoted phrases from his prefaces: A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is moreover not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working

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as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as “The Newcomes” has life, as “Les Trois Mousquetaires,” as Tolstoi’s “Peace and War,” have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we will remember, that such things are “superior to art”; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us.37

The passage of a century has made it seem strangely incongruous to put Tolstoy on the same level as Dumas and Thackeray (not to mention referring to his great novel as Peace and War). Modern readers are more likely to agree with E. M. Forster that “no English novelist is as great as Tolstoy,”38 and it appears that it is precisely James’s wish to exclude the accidental and the arbitrary that underlies what now seems a serious misjudgment on his part. But an “absolutely premeditated art,” guided by the artist’s perfect knowledge of what he is doing, remains the assumption and expectation of modern academic critics of medieval literature. (And it is sadly true that academics are now almost the only critics that medieval literature has.) Continuing his analogy of literary to pictorial art, James observes later that “the sense of a system saves the painter from the baseness of the arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason”39; and as if the arbitrary were truly base, we academics make it our business to show that nothing in a text really is arbitrary, no touch without its definable reason. There can be little doubt, I suppose, that for James The Canterbury Tales would also have seemed a “large loose baggy monster,” and Troilus and Criseyde hardly less monstrous, with its visible seams where bits of Boethian philosophy have been patched into the fabric of a Boccaccian narrative, and its unconcealed traces of abandoned designs. Though our value judgments may differ from his, we are often still influenced

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by a version of James’s principles, straining to find “organic form” in texts that may be better seen as compilations,40 and in doing so we unconsciously attempt to move them further away from “life as it is experienced.” Premeditation, system, unity are generally assumed by critics to be defining features of the art of medieval poetry and are indeed required by the teaching of Geoffrey of Vinsauf; yet many medieval vernacular poets in fact compose more freely, allowing themselves to improvise and digress and apparently not worrying too much about unity. The case against James’s principles was made long ago by Forster in his critique of James’s favorite among his own works, The Ambassadors. There, Forster wrote, Everything is planned, everything fits. . . . The final effect is pre-­arranged, dawns gradually on the reader, and is completely successful when it comes. . . . James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the narrow path of aesthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him. . . . It is this question of the rigid pattern. . . . Can it be combined with the immense richness of material which life provides? This then is the disadvantage of a rigid pattern. . . . It shuts the doors on life.41

James was, I believe, largely right about the nature of his own creative achievements, and one need not accept Forster’s relatively low opinion of them, his sense of the limited nature of James’s “complete success,” to recognize that the critical principle of the prearranged effect, as required by Geoffrey of Vinsauf and his modern disciples, is likely to lead to a devaluation or disregard of a different kind of art—an art that embraces what Forster loosely calls “life” and Morson more exactly life “as it is experienced.” My purpose in recalling the disagreement between James and Forster has been to throw into relief the assumptions underlying

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current practice. Within the subculture of contemporary Anglophone studies in medieval literature, and especially perhaps in Chaucer studies, the balance seems to me to have tilted too far away from a willingness to recognize and welcome the improvised and the arbitrary as means of capturing the effect of experience and thus of giving a certain kind of pleasure and a certain kind of truth. And this may be true of academic literary studies in general, in part perhaps for a reason suggested earlier—that discovering planned intricacies of structure provides an endless supply of material for books and articles, whereas questioning whether such intricacies exist and whether they were indeed planned looks like a dead end so far as the professional demand for publication is concerned. I would add one point to the cluster of arguments put forward by Morson—namely, that life “as it is experienced,” if understood literally, must mean life in the first person, for the only experience that we can enjoy or suffer as such is our own. And that brings me back at last to the Middle Ages and to autography. What appealed to Chaucer about autography, as he would have encountered it in the dit and as he practiced it himself in homodiegetic forms such as prologues and dream poems (and also in improvisatory first-­ person commentaries on unchangeable narratives), may not only have been its correspondence to life as experienced, in the way that especially interests Morson—the incorporation into fictional narrative of the uneven and unforeseeable flow of real-­life events. It may also have been the unique opportunity it offered for compositional freedom. That may not be a desire that medievalists usually imagine being felt by medieval poets or their publics; as I have been suggesting, we tend to attribute to them the desire for a preconceived order that is part of our makeup as scholars. And I would not wish to deny that many medieval writers do share this desire for order and embody it in their compositions, so that as readers we should be willing at least to consider the possibility, as Christopher Cannon has recently put it, “that every aspect of every ‘line’ must relate to every other such aspect, and that, whatever the obfuscating

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complexities, all such details can be brought together as the parts of a shape that discloses an originating, if complex, thought. . . . [We should be] particularly willing to look at any apparent oddity and credit its importance in a larger meaning and structure.”42 I agree, but surely we should also be willing to consider that some texts may not be entirely governed by an originating thought, however complex, that they may have taken shape through discoveries made in the course of composition, and that the poets and their readers may sometimes have welcomed this freedom from the bonds of a larger meaning and structure. If we try to consider Chaucer without the preconceptions that belong to our profession as scholars, he looks like a poet who was much given to composing freely without having a determinate pattern or archetypus in mind or, what amounts to the same thing, to diverging in the course of composition from patterns he may originally have intended to follow. Troilus and Criseyde looks to me like an example of such divergence. It presents itself in its opening line as being, like the Filostrato, its main source, the story of “the double sorwe of Troilus” (I 1)—“the book of Troilus,” as Chaucer himself called it when cataloguing his own works in the Retractions at the end of The Canterbury Tales (X 1085). Yet in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women he refers to it differently, as “the bok / How that Crisseyde Troylus forsok” (G 264–65)—a clause in which Criseyde is the subject and Troilus the object, as though the poem’s chief concern were with her motives and actions rather than his. Later in the same prologue the poem is referred to simply as “Crisseyde” (G 344). Admittedly those descriptions reflect the God of Love’s self-­interested view, but it does seem as though, in the course of composition (and especially the composition of Book II) and in a way that Chaucer evidently had not planned in advance, the poem became equally the story of Criseyde, and only near the end did Chaucer make it revert to its original pattern. Traces of that original pattern can be detected throughout: for example, in the way that the proximal-­demonstrative, anaphoric, familiarizing “this” is applied to Troilus far more often than to Criseyde; but

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from Book II to some point in Book V they are in tension with an alternative Criseydan perspective. To make a more obvious point, a great many of Chaucer’s poems are or appear to be unfinished: The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women themselves, the House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, the story of Hypermnestra within the Legend, and the tales of the Cook, the Squire, and the Monk within the Canterbury collection. Of the apparently unfinished Canterbury Tales, only Chaucer’s own Tale of Sir Thopas appears to have been consciously designed to be a fragment.43 C. S. Lewis, devoted to a vision of the medieval world-­picture as complete, harmonious, and unified—the vision so winningly described in his late book The Discarded Image, published only after his death—wrote long ago that when medieval art lacked completeness or unity, it was not because of a “‘Gothic’ love of wildness” but “because it attempted vast designs with inadequate resources.”44 As a pupil of C. S. Lewis as well as of Elizabeth Salter, I would not accuse Chaucer of a “Gothic” love of wildness, but I do think that for such a magnificently gifted poet to leave so many poems unfinished, and to leave in others traces of plans not followed through, was a sign not of inadequate resources but of an impatience with preconceived designs and a delight in the riskiness of free composition. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is an extreme example of this freedom; it may even be, as Susanne Weil has suggested, a conscious performance of composition by free association, influenced by Aristotelian psychology and seen as characteristic of female thought.45 Whether or not Weil is right in proposing that Chaucer was influenced in the Prologue by an Aristotelian conception of how the mind works, she recognizes in it what much recent discussion has obscured, a delight in escaping from the systematic bounds of clerical thought. Morson in Narrative and Freedom is especially interested in the way Tolstoy and Dostoevsky consciously sought to escape from the “shadows of time” by composing works that incorporated actual, incomplete events as they occurred during the course of writing. To turn for a moment to Chaucer’s other favorite form of autography

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beside prologues, the dream poem, it may be that he adopted there a similar means of escape from the requirement to follow a preconceived design.46 Such an avoidance of the preconceived is certainly what the outward appearance of the dream poems indicates. In the earliest of them, The Book of the Duchess, when Chaucer in his dream follows a puppy into a forest, Doun by a floury grene wente Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete, With floures fele, faire under fete, And litel used . . . (398–401) —— [Down by a green flowery path, very thick with grass, very soft and sweet, with many beautiful flowers underfoot, and little used . . .]

he does not know, and neither do we, where he is going to be led. The path is indeed “litel used” in one sense, though not in another: the poem is made out of fragments of fashionable French poetry (mainly dits), some of which Chaucer’s audience might well have recognized, but it is a unique bricolage, as dreams really are, not a retelling of a single source-­story. And similarly in the House of Fame, once Chaucer has retold the familiar story of Dido and Aeneas in the fixed form47 in which it is “writen on a table [tablet] of bras” (142) in the temple where his dream begins, he wanders outside to find himself in a terrifyingly boundless and unfamiliar desert. From there he is snatched up into space by an eagle, and once again he knows no more than we do what is going to happen next. The uncertainty is pleasurable, and it may be that it is more than a matter of appearance. Larry Benson has suggested that the House of Fame was begun at a moment when negotiations were in progress for a marriage between Richard II and Caterina Visconti, and that its lack of an ending reflects the unforeseeable failure of the negotiations, with the news, arriving in December 1379, “that there was no news.”48 Even if Chaucer did not put himself at the

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mercy of ongoing events in that way, it could well be that he began the House of Fame, as if it were really a dream, without knowing how it would end. I suspect that we tend to underestimate the degree of Chaucer’s interest not just in the dream poem as a literary form but in the experience of dreaming and especially in the unpredictability of dreams as we experience them. Helen Phillips is one of the few recent critics to have retained a living sense of the freedom of invention in the dream poems and the equal freedom of response that it grants to, or imposes on, their readers. She writes: “Each of Chaucer’s dream poems takes elements from the tradition of dits and dream poetry and puts them in new juxtapositions that invite the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning. The House of Fame uses the journey to another world, a dream, goddesses, debate, and a temple, but it is for Chaucer’s readers to make sense of how its successive experiences and levels may relate to each other.”49 But when those readers of the House of Fame are (like me) academics, they are strongly impelled by the professional subculture to which they belong to publish articles and books arguing for a particular way of making sense of it; and then the freedom valued by unprofessional readers disappears. In retrospect, of course, we can find patterns of all kinds in the dream poems (as in actual dreams), and finding them brings real rewards, but the more we do so, the more likely we are to forget the delightful unpredictability of their forward movement as we are engaged in the process of reading them.50 Another of Chaucer’s dream poems, The Parliament of Fowls, is not unfinished, but it ends inconclusively. Chaucer presents himself initially as searching through an old book “a certeyn thing to lerne” (20), and at the end of the poem he turns to “othere bokes . . . , / To reede upon” (695–96), and the “thing” is still unfound and undefined, “certeyn” but uncertain. The dream’s main episode concerns a competition among three male eagles for the hand or wing of a female bird, and when the dream is abruptly ended by the “shoutyng” (693) of all the birds, the winner is still unsettled. Benson has proposed a similar explanation for this

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inconclusiveness: that it reflects the unfinished state in May 1380 of negotiations for the hand of Anne of Bohemia, with Richard II, represented by the “royal tersel [eagle]” (415) favored by Nature, being one of the suitors.51 If Benson is right, then Chaucer, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as described by Morson, was gaining freedom by the risky means of incorporating ongoing and unfinished events into his poems. Some of Chaucer’s followers adopted just such a strategy of risk, allowing their poems to develop in response to current events, the outcomes of which could not be certainly predicted. We shall see Hoccleve doing this, and an even more striking example is John Skelton, who can be shown to have added a series of further sections to his Speke Parott as more news arrived about a conference at Calais.52 But to return to the case of Chaucer: Could such deliberate acceptance of risk be reconciled with what is widely held to be his commitment to Boethian principles? In the passage quoted above from the Poetria nova, Geoffrey of Vinsauf urges the poet to “trust neither [hand nor tongue] to the guidance of Fortune” [neutram manibus committe regendam / Fortunae (51–52)]. So wouldn’t Boethius’s disparaging treatment of “the felefolde colours and desceytes of thilke merveylous monster Fortune” (Boece II, prosa 1, 15–16: the manifold tricks and deceits of that astonishing monster Fortune) have led Chaucer to follow the other Geoffrey’s advice in his practice as a poet and to avoid the dangerous uncertainties of what I am calling “free composition”? Even apart from the difficulty of distinguishing between Fortune on the one hand and providence or inspiration on the other, it is worth noting that some of the French dits that were among the sources for Chaucerian autography echo Boethius on Fortune without adopting Philosophy’s contempt for all earthly values. As Phillips has written in an article that is a rare attempt to think seriously about the dits and what Chaucer made of them, “Borrowing lines and echoes from Boethius . . . does not guarantee that Machaut will endorse a Boethian worldview.”53 She is referring to Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, a dit that is among the sources of

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The Book of the Duchess, and she goes on to quote Kevin Brownlee’s remark that a central characteristic of the Remede is “the transformation and fragmentation of literary models, in particular the De consolatione Philosophiae,” and to observe that this is “much closer to what we find in Chaucer than the model of direct and respectful imitation” that was more common in the Middle Ages, and that is often assumed by literary scholars to be the norm.54 The point I am making, with the help of Phillips and Brownlee, is not just about Boethius or Fortune. It is to suggest that the pos­si­bility of free composition involving uncertainty, unpredictability, and what Phillips calls “ambiguous, even dialectic intertextuality,”55 as opposed to “direct and respectful imitation” and the repetition of preestablished lyric or narrative patterns, may well have been a major attraction of autography for Chaucer. That attraction was available, as I have been suggesting, in various forms—independently in the dream poem but also in the form of prologues to and commentaries on heterodiegetic texts—and it appeared in an especially prestigious and fashionable French form in the dit. If the dit, as Zink wrote in a passage quoted in chapter 2, “does not appear a priori to be very clearly defined by any particular formal or thematic characteristic,” that is precisely the mark of the freedom it grants to both poet and audience: it is a kind of writing that escapes from the predictability imposed by the requirements of preexisting forms and themes. That, I believe, was a major reason why it appealed to Chaucer and to some of his followers (and presumably also to their readers). It is a genre that isn’t a genre, a genre “qui n’en est pas un.” I borrow that phrase, with its double meaning—a genre that isn’t one, and a genre that isn’t simply one genre—from the title of a book by Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un. She writes there about female pleasure as “a sort of expanding universe to which no limits could be fixed and which would not be incoherence nonetheless.”56 That would be a good description of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (and also perhaps of the conception of what women want conveyed there and in The Wife of Bath’s Tale). Without wishing to propose any necessary connection

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between autography and the feminine, I can see it too as a description of medieval autography in general, in the form of dits and prologues. As we shall see, Chaucer’s autographies, especially in the unbounded and yet not incoherent shape of prologues—writings whose structure and ending were not determined by a source that had to be followed, or by any extraneous logic—greatly appealed to some of his followers in the fifteenth century and became loose models for their own autographic writings. In the following chapters I examine in detail such writings by two fifteenth-­century poets, Thomas Hoccleve and Osbern Bokenham.

Chapter 5

H o ccleve and t h e P r o l o g ue

Of Chaucer’s many fifteenth-­ century followers, the one who learned most from his predecessor’s autographic writings was Thomas Hoccleve. Hoccleve (circa 1367–1426), probably born in the same year as Chaucer’s son Thomas1 and sharing his baptismal name, founded the tradition of praise of Chaucer that hails him as “father”—the father of a new kind of poetry in English, elevated in style and substance, and seen as being of national significance, an achievement that his “sons” strive in vain to match. In this chapter I discuss the part of Hoccleve’s writing with which modern scholars have found it most difficult to come to terms, reconsidering the nature of its indebtedness to Chaucer and attempting to show that its various features can best be understood if it is read as autography. The work of Hoccleve’s that was most widely read in the century of its composition is The Regement of Princes, probably dating from 1411; it survives in over forty manuscripts. In it he more than once laments the death of his father Chaucer: My deere maistir, God his soule qwyte, And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght, But I was dul and lerned lyte or naght.

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Allas, my worthy maistir honurable, This landes verray tresor and richesse, Deeth by thy deeth hath harm irreparable Unto us doon. . . . (2077–83)2 —— [My dear master—may God reward his soul!—and father, Chaucer, would gladly have taught me, but I was dull and learned little or nothing. Alas, my worthy honorable master, the true treasure and wealth of this land!—by your death, Death has done us irreparable harm . . .] The firste fyndere of our fair langage . . . Allas, my fadir fro the world is go, My worthy maistir Chaucer. . . . (4978–83) —— [The first discoverer/inventor3 of our beautiful language . . . Alas, my father has departed from this world, my worthy master Chaucer. . . .]

In the Regement Hoccleve recounts a lengthy conversation that he has with an anonymous Old Man (whom he also addresses as “fadir”). The Old Man asks him, “What shal I calle thee, what is thy name?” (1863), and as soon as Hoccleve reveals his name he comments, Sone, I have herd or this men speke of thee; Thow were aqweyntid with Chaucer, pardee. (1866–67) —— [Son, I have heard people speak about you before this; by God, you were acquainted with Chaucer.]

Acquaintance with Chaucer, then, is represented as being Hoc­ cleve’s claim to recognition and almost his identity. From about 1387 Hoccleve had been a civil servant, a clerk in the Privy Seal Office; as such, it is likely enough that he really was

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personally acquainted with Chaucer, who also held public offices, though at a somewhat higher level;4 and it could well be that he did indeed receive some kind of coaching as a writer from Chaucer. Most of Hoccleve’s poetry is in the rhyme royal stanza that Chaucer introduced into English, and adaptation from Chaucer (as we shall see) is an important and pervasive element in his work. Hoccleve shows a better grasp of Chaucer’s continentally derived metrics than other fifteenth-­century English poets, though his verse is more precisely syllabic than his master’s. In this he must have been influenced not only by Chaucer but also by his own reading in French poetry. (His Formulary, a collection of model official documents and letters composed near the end of his life, shows that he wrote Anglo-­French fluently, and his earliest recorded poem of substance, the Letter of Cupid, is a witty adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours.5) Though some of Hoccleve’s poems appeared in print over two centuries ago,6 it is only in the last thirty years or so that his work has aroused enthusiastic critical interest. The first editor of his collected works in printed form, the terrifyingly energetic Victorian Frederick Furnivall, regarded him contemptuously as “a weak, sensitive, look-­on-­the-­worst side kind of man,” and wished that he had been “a better poet and a manlier fellow.”7 (For Furnivall, “sensitive” and “manly” seem to have been antonyms.) But more recently there has been a burst of scholarly activity: important new editions,8 several books,9 and many chapters and articles, work often of great intelligence and originality. This has transformed our understanding of Hoccleve and has lifted him to a prominence that he has not enjoyed since the fifteenth century. When this revival of interest in Hoccleve first began in the 1980s, those who wrote about him, led by J. A. Burrow, were especially interested in the self-­revelatory, apparently autobiographical elements in his poetry. More recent study has tended to move in a different direction. Often influenced by New Historicism or by cultural materialism, it has been concerned with the political significance of Hoccleve’s poetry in its own time and especially its place in the crisis of legitimacy that followed

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the deposition of Richard II—the troubled era of the Lancastrian usurpation and the attempts to suppress Lollardy.10 In the case of the Regement, this general political context, now better understood than it had previously been, is established from the poem’s beginning, when Hoccleve explains his own present anxiety by relating it to Richard’s recent fall: Me fil to mynde how that nat longe agoo Fortunes strook doun thrast estat rial Into mescheef. . . . (22–24) —— [It came to my mind how, not long ago, the stroke of Fortune thrust [one of] royal rank down into distress. . . .]

And it has rightly been noted that Hoccleve’s later work, the compilation known as the Series (to which I shall turn in chapter 6), though beginning in a private and self-­absorbed way, ultimately directs itself to a figure of great political importance, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and offers him counsel in the form of moral tales and a religious treatise. But a shortcoming of recent historicist studies, illuminating though they may be, is that they often disregard the distinctively poetic ambition embodied in Hoccleve’s manuscripts. As Sarah Tolmie observes, his “specific status as a writer of poetry has remained secondary in much recent criticism: the poet has become a prisoner of context, administrative, political, or cultural.”11 Hoccleve was a scribe as well as a poet, and it has been persuasively argued by John Bowers that the two holograph manuscripts now in the Huntington Library, HM 744 and HM 111, “originally constituted a single complete codex representing the earliest extant ‘collected poems’ made by a known English author.” If so, this original codex expanded “the concept of vernacular authorship,”12 forming a humbler equivalent to the manuscript collections of their own vernacular works put together by continental poets such as Petrarch, Machaut, and Christine de Pizan. It may be true of Hoccleve that “most of his works are occasional pieces,

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and of himself he certainly never speaks without occasion,”13 but if Bowers is right, texts that may originally have served occasional purposes were subsequently brought together by Hoccleve himself to form a poetic oeuvre not bound to those purposes and “very consciously organized by the poet as works of self-­promotion.”14 By compiling a “collected works” he doubtless hoped to gain patronage from prominent political figures, but if so, it must surely have been as a poet whose works would outlive their historical occasions.15 And we should not discount the possibility that, like Chaucer dispatching Troilus and Criseyde into a world of future readers whose interpretations he could not control, Hoccleve may have had posterity as well as patronage in mind. Moreover, the explanatory power of political interpretation is in practice limited, because there is no general agreement about Hoccleve’s position in the public affairs of his time, even in The Regement of Princes, the most obviously political of his works. Derek Pearsall, in a path-­breaking historicist study of the Regement, sees him as offering a sycophantic echo to Lancastrian orthodoxy;16 James Simpson regards him rather as a discreet critic of the Lancastrian regime;17 and a case somewhere between these, that Hoccleve may have intended to support the regime but that the Regement unconsciously conveys something different, is argued by Paul Strohm.18 Indeterminacy of tone, deriving from the unfixed position of the textual “I,” is a normal feature of autographic writing, and critical attempts to resolve such uncertainties, often based on defining the “I” as a fictional narrator clearly distinguishable from the author, tend to become excessively subtle contrivances of “centric and eccentric . . . , Cycle and epicycle.” To take one example, Karen Winstead claims that in his treatment of women in the Series, “Hoccleve the author is adhering to his designs of mocking troublesome women” in an unequivocally antifeminist poem, while “Thomas the narrator” is a “bumbler” comparable to the “buffoon” Cupid of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours.19 I think it truer to the way autography works to accept and enjoy its irresolvable ambivalence, as Catherine Batt does in considering a

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comparable passage in the Regement (5139–45), a stanza praising woman’s derivation from Adam’s crooked rib on the grounds that the best parts of creation are not straight but round. Batt’s comment takes the form of unanswered questions: “Do [these lines] constitute a witty and playful reversal of a common set of assumptions, a reversal which none the less carries a serious feminist message (albeit one limited to the terms set up by women’s detractors)? Or do they, rather, border on the offensive?”20 It seems to me helpful to consider not what Hoccleve’s real opinions were but what kind of writing he was engaged in and what kind of appeal to his first readers he may have intended. Hoccleve was familiar with the passage from Geoffrey of Vin­ sauf’s Poetria nova discussed in chapter 4, and he must have been influenced by Chaucer when in his Dialogue he repeated the analogy between building a house and composing a poem.21 In this second part of the Series, an anonymous Friend cautions Hoccleve: Thow woost wel, who shal an hous edifie Gooth nat therto withoute avisament 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. (Dialogue 638–42)22 —— [You know well that anyone who is going to build a house, if he is wise, does not set about it without deliberation, for how it is to be constructed is seen in advance by the eye of his mind, proposed, forecast, and planned—otherwise the whole thing is ruined.]

So, the Friend says, Hoccleve must not take up his pen “Or thow avysed be wel and wel knowe / What thow shalt wryte” (648–49: before you have well considered and well know what you are going to write). Within the fiction of the Dialogue Hoccleve agrees with the Friend and asks him for guidance as to what he should write in order to please the Duke of Gloucester and gain his patronage.

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Yet the Series does not read as a work that was carefully planned before being written; it appears to be an inorganic compilation, full of abrupt and pleasurably surprising changes of direction. And I am tempted to believe that the Friend’s somewhat exaggerated insistence on the need for advance planning (the work must be envisaged, proposed, forecast, and planned, and its author must consider well and know well what he is going to do) may imply Hoccleve’s sense that he badly needs this advice but at the same time finds it hard to follow.23 I shall return to the Series in chapter 6; here I want to consider the part of Hoccleve’s work that has most puzzled readers who seek signs of the execution of a plan laid out in advance, the prologue to The Regement of Princes. As its title indicates, the Regement is a Fürstenspiegel, a book of advice for rulers. It is compiled and translated from Latin sources (principally the Secreta secretorum supposedly addressed by Aristotle to Alexander, the De regimine principum of Egidius Romanus, and the De ludo scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis), and the advice it offers is illustrated with exemplary narratives. It was directed to Prince Hal a few years before his accession to the throne as Henry V, at a time when his father was unwell and the prince, presiding over the council in his place, had taken control of national policy. The poem refers only in passing to Henry IV and clearly anticipates the prince’s forthcoming assumption of the throne. The royal finances were in a state of crisis, and one step taken to meet this was to halt payment of annuities from the Exchequer. These included the lifetime annuity, increased in 1409 from ten pounds to twenty marks (£13 6s. 8d.), that had been granted to Hoccleve as the only regular payment for his service in the Privy Seal Office. The book of advice consists of 469 rhyme royal stanzas, making up 3,283 lines. It is followed by an envoy of three 8-­line stanzas and is preceded by an extraordinarily long prologue of 308 rhyme royal stanzas (2,156 lines)—two-­fifths of the entire composition. The prologue in fact falls into two unequal parts: its last twenty stanzas are separate from what comes before them, and constitute a formal address to the prince, introducing the book of advice and humbly

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recommending it to his attention. In many of the manuscripts this section is headed “prologus” or “prohemium”; in one, pre­sumably written after the prince’s accession to the throne, the rubric is “Verba compilatoris ad regem” (the compiler’s words to the king).24 In what follows, to avoid confusion, I shall borrow Chaucer’s Friar’s term for the Wife of Bath’s introductory discourse and refer to the opening 2,016 lines of the Regement as the “preamble,” leaving the term “prologue” for the following 140 lines. What then can be the purpose of the two-­thousand-­line preamble, and to what extent can this section be regarded as “purposid, cast and ment”? The preamble is less formal and more freely composed than the prologue; it follows no obvious preconceived pattern, such as that of the Latin academic prologues mentioned in chapter 2.25 It begins with Hoccleve telling how “Thoght” (anxiety) kept him awake one night and provoked him to meditate on the mutability of the world under the sway of Fortune. The symptoms of Thoght, as he knows “by experience” (106), include “troubly dremes drempt al in wakynge” (109: troubled dreams dreamt while fully awake). We could well be at the beginning of a dit amoureux or dream poem such as The Book of the Duchess, yet as it happens no dream is recounted, and the contradictory symptoms usually attributed to love-­sickness—“frosty swoot and fyry hoot fervence” (108: frosty sweat and fiery hot fervor) and later Thoght that “brenneth and freesyngly keelith” (1806: burns and freezingly chills)— will turn out to have more material and down-­to-­earth causes. The morning after his sleepless night, Hoccleve takes a walk in the fields outside London and meets the unnamed Old Man. What follows consists largely of rambling dialogue between the two, in which the Old Man tries to cure Hoccleve of his anxiety, and they discuss a miscellany of topics such as extravagant dress, the danger of heresy, the pains of writing, marriage, and above all Hoccleve’s financial worries, resulting from the delay in paying his annuity. Hoccleve is eventually persuaded to write a poem as an appeal to Prince Hal to provide “salve unto [his] indigence” (1834: remedy for his destitution), and what he writes is a Fürstenspiegel, the Regement proper.

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If the preamble were a separate poem and were in French, we would surely have no hesitation in describing it as a dit. In context it does have a goal—the writing of the Regement proper—but it takes an extraordinarily long time to get there. As Chaucer’s Friar remarks after the Wife of Bath has delivered her preliminary discourse, less than half as long as Hoccleve’s, “This is a long preamble of a tale!” (Canterbury Tales III 831). Scholars have had difficulty in explaining the preamble’s length. In the only book-­length study of the Regement, Nicholas Perkins notes that it creates “a much more personal and unstable literary environment” than that of the “authoritative tradition” of mirrors for princes,26 but says little of reasons why it might have been so fully developed. Pearsall does not take up the preamble till near the end of his important historicizing article, and then argues that it is “not merely the opportunity for autobiographical self-­indulgence on Hoccleve’s part but an essential part of the strategy of the poem for representing the prince as a wise ruler, receptive to the counsel of brave, simple souls such as Hoccleve,” and that “the function of Hoccleve’s self-­reference is above all to establish him as a truth teller.”27 That may well be so, but if this is the preamble’s main function, it seems to make an excessive and unnecessary demand on the reader’s patience, and it might be added that the Hoccleve of the preamble, if a simple soul, is not a very brave one. Indeed he frequently acknowledges his lack of courage: as he comments when writing about wives’ duty to obey their husbands, “I adrad am that I thus fer seye” (5103: I am frightened that I say so much). Another modern scholar, David Greetham, describes the Regement as “a strangely schizophrenic work” and notes that, as the varying rubrics indicate, medieval scribes could not agree as to how much of the poem should count as the actual Regement of Princes. Greetham claims to solve the problem of its apparent disunity by finding “a deft cross-­referencing of a number of points in the personal (‘Prologue’) and didactic (Regement) sections.”28 Cross-­referencing has been eagerly seized as a lifebelt by other scholars: one, James Simpson, claims to find such “density of cross-­reference between

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Regement and Prologue” that in “each section of the Regement” proper, “the apparently univocal address to the king [sic] produces a shadow commentary, related to the position of the subject” as conveyed by the preamble.29 I can only record that my experience as a reader does not bear out such an extreme claim. There are connections between the preamble and the Regement, of course. One of the most general and obvious is that the preamble “broadens the poem by placing the princely mirror in the context of Hoccleve’s learning from an old beggar the need for proper governance and the price of transgression.”30 Just as Hoccleve offers counsel to the prince in the Regement, so the Old Man offers counsel to an often resistant Hoccleve in the preamble, and the topic of counsel is underlined by Hoccleve’s claim to have received “consail and reed” (1960) from Chaucer while he was alive. Thus the preamble might be seen as illustrating the value of a readiness to seek and accept advice, with the telling mise en abyme effect that the advice Hoccleve accepts is to offer advice to the prince, who ought also to accept it. A more specific connection is that Hoccleve’s anxiety as the preamble begins is caused in part by the unstable political situation that followed the Lancastrian usurpation—the situation that the prince will need all the advice he can get to handle. Moreover, the prince figures in the preamble not just as the future recipient of counsel but in other topical roles— as responsible by his policy of retrenchment for Hoccleve’s poverty and, in a section on heresy, as having generously striven to convert the heretic John Badby to orthodoxy so as to enable him to avoid execution. But I cannot find cross-­referencing affecting “each section” of the Regement. Whatever political themes may be woven into the preamble, its sheer length and the fact that it comes first, so that any such cross-­referencing with what follows cannot possibly be grasped until after it is over, must surely imply that it was intended to be enjoyed for its own sake. Hoccleve must have expected the future king to enjoy the extended preamble or he would not have included it, and it must presumably have been enjoyed rather than just tolerated by some of those other readers who caused the poem to survive in over forty manuscripts. Who

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would read through a two-­thousand-­line preamble solely in order to discover how it anticipated the themes developed in the following didactic section?31 If the preamble was intended to be enjoyed for its own sake, then appreciation of its rambling progress must surely have been an essential element in that enjoyment. Its lack of order is something of which Hoccleve was well aware, as appears from his apology to the prince as it nears its end: Also byseeche I that the altitude Of your estat, though that this pamfilet Noon ordre holde ne in him include, Nat greved be, for I can do no bet. (2059–62) —— [Also I beseech Your Highness not to be offended though this little book neither follows any order nor develops any of its own, for I can do no better.]

The apology for the lack of both external and internal order is no doubt to be understood as a humility topos, but it calls attention to the preamble’s real disorderliness; and that is a characteristic that is repeatedly noted as it moves, seemingly at random, from topic to topic. After describing his initial state of nighttime anxiety, Hoccleve adds, “Passe over; whan this stormy nyght was goon” (113), and moves on to his encounter with the Old Man. The same transitional phrase, marking an abrupt change of topic, occurs later in the preamble, when it is used by the Old Man to bridge (but also call attention to) the gap between his obsessively long diatribe against the use of aphrodisiacs and his return to Hoccleve’s motives for marriage: Passe over this. Thow seidest th’enchesoun Why that thou took upon thee mariage . . . (1618–19) —— [Pass over this. You said the reason why you undertook to get married . . .]

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And a little later the Old Man similarly marks his transition from arguing that couples should be able to “see the flessh” (1676) before they get married to urging Hoccleve to avoid adultery: In this mateere depper cowde I go, But passe I wole and slippe away therfro. (1679–80) —— [I could go into this matter in greater depth, but I’ll pass on and slip away from it.]

Perhaps some psychological motive for the change of subject is implied, embarrassment or timidity—a motive that must be Hoccleve’s own, since it is he who has made the Old Man take up this ticklish topic—but in any case the transition is made explicit. Other changes of subject are marked in other ways. After a passage regretting his failure to recognize Fortune’s fickleness, leading into some misogynistic remarks about her typically feminine preference for virile young men, the Old Man adds, Al this that I have of Fortune seid Is but a jape, as who seith, or a knak. Now I a whyle bourded have and pleid, Resorte I wole to that I first spak. (1394–97) —— [All this that I’ve said about Fortune is just a joke, as you might say, or a trick. Now that I’ve jested and played for a while, I’ll return to what I was saying first.]

At the end of a digression on extravagant dress, he remarks, “Lo, sone myn, that tale is at an ende” (554), and after Hoccleve has given a fascinatingly detailed account of how things worked in the Privy Seal Office, with the clerks precariously dependent on gratuities that were an expectation but not a right, the Old Man impatiently asks, “Hastow seid, sone? Wilt thow aght seye more?” (1551: Have you finished, son? Do you want to say anything more?). Similarly,

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after the Old Man has told a series of exemplary stories of how God punishes adultery, even if it is committed unwittingly, and even if it is not actually committed but only desired, he adds, Of swiche stories cowde I telle an heep, But I suppose thise shul suffyse, And forthy, sone, wole I make a leep From hem, and go wole I to the empryse That I first took. . . . (1765–69) —— [I could tell a heap of such stories, but I suppose these will be sufficient, and therefore, son, I will make a leap from them, and will turn to my original undertaking. . . .]

The preamble is full of such leaps, and by now, in our fascination with the tightrope performance of digression, we may almost have forgotten the Old Man’s original “empryse,” which was to comfort Hoccleve in his anxiety, “thogh I longe have abiden” (1775: though I have waited a long time). The preamble is a consciously and teasingly digressive performance, concealing its purpose, slow to get to the point, and repeatedly calling attention to its own meandering progress. I see no reason to suppose that these various apologies and explanations conceal some planned intricacy of structure; rather, it is easy to believe that they reflect the actual process of composition and encourage us to notice it. It is important to distinguish between the fiction and the composition: we do not of course have to believe that Hoccleve really met an old man when suffering from depression and is now giving an exact documentary account of their conversation, only that he chose to allow himself a self-­indulgent randomness in putting the work together, and expected that this would appeal to his readers. In the absence of evidence about what took place before Hoccleve began to write, there is no reason to imagine anything preceding and controlling the compositional process, whether a real-­life experience that it records or a fully formed blueprint or archetypus in

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the poet’s mind. No doubt much thought accompanied the process of composition, but the preamble gives every impression of being a poem that shaped itself in the very course of being composed. It really is about the various personal, moral, political, and economic topics it takes up, but at the same time it is also partly about its own creation and especially about the reflection of compositional time in textual time and in the time occupied by the reading of the text. Like Chaucer’s prologue to The Legend of Good Women, Hoccleve’s preamble serves as a justification for the existence of the text that follows: it is meant to win the prince’s favor. That must have been intended all along, but the winding path by which the justification is reached was surely not planned in detail: most of it is not in any way necessary, and Hoccleve must have supposed that the prince would welcome the preamble for its own sake. Hal’s serious and rigidly orthodox piety and his formidable efficiency as a ruler and commander suggest a tightly buttoned personality and a preference for strategic preparation, but perhaps even he took aesthetic pleasure in the spontaneity of Hoccleve’s preamble, the sense it gives of liberation from the requirement to follow either a source or a fixed plan. We may guess what the end will be—Hoccleve will be persuaded to write something to be presented to the prince in the hope that his poverty will then be remedied—but we have no idea how he will get to that point or how long his “one man show”—in this case a kind of striptease performance—will delay the moment at which he appears in daring nakedness as an adviser on the art of rule. Topicality, such as that of the reference to Badby’s conviction of heresy “Nat fern ago” (286), contributes not just to a political message belonging to the moment but to an evocation of what Morson calls “life as it is experienced,” measured from an ever-­shifting present. By a kind of montage or bricolage, Hoccleve takes the moments supplied by history and places them in a unique, unpredictable, and unrepeatable design. Such cross-­referencing as there is between the preamble and the Regement proper seems to work backward rather than forward: the didactic regiminal section is interspersed with recollections of

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the preamble. One point where this is particularly marked occurs toward the end of the Regement. The most elaborately narrated of the exemplary stories is that of John of Canace, designed to teach the wisdom of avoiding “fool largesse” (4180: prodigality). John, a rich and generous man, comes to see that his daughters and their husbands are treating him well only in the expectation of inheriting his wealth. By means of a chest that they believe to be full of the gold he plans to bequeath them, he tricks them into supporting him lavishly in their own household; but when they unlock it after his death, it turns out to contain only a mace inscribed, Who berith charge of othir men and is Of hem despysid, slayn be he with this. (4353–54) —— [If someone bears the financial burden of others and is despised by them, let him be killed by this.]

The lesson has a double application: John has avoided the mace’s deadly blow, but his daughters and sons-­in-­law have received it as their inheritance. At this point Hoccleve draws the moral: Amonges folies alle is noon, I leeve, Moore than man his good ful largely Despende in hope men wole him releeve Whan his good is despendid uttirly; The indigent men setten nothyng by. (4355–59) —— [Among all follies I believe there is none greater than for a man to spend his wealth very generously in the hope that people will assist him when his wealth is completely spent; people have no respect for someone who is destitute.]

If it discouraged the prince from treating him generously, this moral might seem to be to Hoccleve’s own disadvantage; but with ingenious opportunism he then reenters the poem, under his own

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name and in the mode of confessional, first-­person experientiality that characterizes the preamble: “I, Hoccleve, in swich cas am gilty; this me toucheth” (4360: I, Hoccleve, am guilty in such a matter; this concerns me). The name draws attention to itself by its extrametricality. He explains that, though poor, he has been guilty of prodigality in opening his purse too freely and that his “welthe” (4372: both wealth and well-­being) will be destroyed unless he receives assistance— And whens it come shal, can I nat gesse, My Lord, but it proceede of your hynesse. (4374–75) —— [And where it is to come from I cannot guess, my lord, unless it derives from Your Highness.]

Hoccleve continues in this personal vein for four more stanzas, proclaiming his repentance of his “dotage excessyf” (4378: excessive folly), reminding the prince that the annuity granted to him for his long service at the Privy Seal is “al behynde” (4385: completely in arrears), and pointing out how fervently he loves the prince and desires his honor, prosperity, and “soules helthe” (4396: the salvation of his soul). The last of these stanzas, in a way characteristic of autography, reminds us by the use of textual deixis of the writtenness of a text that at this very point is mimicking a spoken address to the prince: “In al my book” (4397) you will find not a word of criticism of your deeds, but I am writing what in “my symple conceit” (4401: my simple opinion) I judge will remind you of things to enhance your honor, and “al that my penne seith/ Procedith of good herte” (4402–3). “Al that my penne seith” is a neat combination of writing and speech, one of many reminders that the “I” and the “you” of autography, apparently belonging to speech, are in fact produced by writing. I shall return to this point later. It is tempting to describe Hoccleve’s preamble as stream-­of-­ consciousness writing, but then the question arises, whose consciousness is it the stream of? In my first chapter I tried to show

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that the medieval textual “I” does not necessarily refer to any unitary person, any “existing and substantial individual” (to borrow Heller-­Roazen’s phrase), whether real or fictional. It is autographic rather than autobiographic and need not be understood as giving voice to any specific consciousness. I believe that to be obviously true of the “I” of Wynnere and Wastoure, and I hope to have convinced the reader that it is true of The Reeve’s Prologue. But one thing that has emerged from Burrow’s illuminating work on Hoccleve is that unusually close connections exist between the textual first person of his poetry and his documented flesh-­ and-­blood life as a Privy Seal clerk—connections far closer than those between the poetic first person and the historical life of his father and master, Chaucer. Burrow argues forcibly that the presence of literary conventions and influences within a text does not mean that it must be fictional, because in real life people inevi­ tably perceive and analyze their own experience in terms of existing models and conventions.32 That is surely true, but I hope that the concept of autography, as opposed to autobiography, may make it unnecessary in general to decide whether a first-­person poem is or is not a document of an individual life: it is enough for the poem to produce effects of proximality and experientiality even for readers who have no means of access to the poet’s real life. I do not dispute Burrow’s argument, and if we consider the first-­ person elements in The Regement of Princes along with those in Hoccleve’s other autographic writings, such as the Series and the Male Regle, we find that they have much in common—notably the weaknesses of character that Furnivall regarded with such contempt: self-­indulgence, timidity, anxiety, obsessiveness, abjectness. In Hoccleve’s work, then, autography begins to merge into what we would call autobiography: his textual “I,” much more than the various first persons of Chaucer’s poems, corresponds stably to a single imaginable person, and that person, as Burrow argues, corresponds to the Hoccleve of the documentary record. Paradoxically, though, the stable correspondence is to a person who is unstable, and that in more than one sense.

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One kind of instability is implied in the weaknesses just mentioned; they appear to have culminated in the mental breakdown that is described in the Series and has left traces in the archives. Perhaps associated with that is Hoccleve’s tendency to describe his inner experience in terms of a drama of personified agents of which “I” is only one.33 An early stanza in the Regement describes his anxiety and sleeplessness as follows (I have supplied capital letters to call attention to the personifications): This ilke nyght I walwid to and fro Seekynge [R]este, but certeynly shee Appeerid nat, for [T]hoght, my cruel fo, Chaced had hir and [S]leep away fro me, And for I sholde nat allone be, Ageyn my lust [W]ach proferred his servyse, And I admitted him in hevy wyse. (71–77) —— [This same night I tossed to and fro seeking Rest, but she certainly didn’t appear, because Anxiety, my cruel enemy, had chased her and Sleep away from me, and so that I should not be alone, Wakefulness proffered his service against my desire, and I gloomily admitted him.]

In this vivid evocation of insomnia, “I” literally is not alone, not a single self encompassing all its faculties and experiences, but is only one agent among others, restlessly pushed to and fro, deprived by Anxiety of the longed-­for company of Rest and Sleep, and obliged instead to accept Wakefulness as his servant and bed companion.34 A second kind of instability especially prominent in the preamble to the Regement lies in the fact that the first person is not unitary but is split into two. From line 120 onward the preamble consists of dialogue between Hoccleve and the Old Man. We might expect the Old Man to be a source of mature wisdom by which the younger Hoccleve would benefit, to be in effect a Philosophia to his Boethius.35 And indeed the De consolatione is among

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Hoccleve’s sources in the Regement. A passage before the Old Man’s appearance—  . . . in bookes thus writen I fynde, “The werste kynde of wrecchidnesse is A man to han be weleful or this.” (54–56) —— [I find this written in books: “The worst kind of misery is for a man to have been prosperous previously.”]

—has a marginal gloss that quotes in Latin the relevant passage from Boethius.36 The wise advice that Hoccleve should gain relief from his anxiety by appealing in writing to Duke Humphrey does come from the Old Man, but in general the Old Man is very unlike Boethius’s Philosophia. As many scholars agree, he seems to be another version of Hoccleve himself, an alter ego in whom Hoccleve sees as present what he most fears for the future, an old age of poverty and insecurity.37 From the beginning, their consciousnesses can scarcely be distinguished, and this, I think, is why, as Burrow notes, the Old Man “is no more than a pale shadow by comparison with the old man in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale”38—he is indeed a shadow of the “pale and wan” Hoccleve. His first appearance comes after Hoccleve has been walking in the fields for an hour or so: A poore old hoore man cam walkynge by me And seide, “Good day, sire, and God yow blesse!” But I no word, for my seekly distresse Forbad myn eres usen hir office, For which this old man heeld me lewde and nyce, Til he took heede to my drery cheere, And to my deedly colour pale and wan. Than thoghte he thus: “This man that I see heere Al wrong is wrestid, by aght I see can.” He stirte unto me and seide, “Sleepstow, man?

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Awake!” and gan me shake wondir faste. And with a sigh I answerde atte laste: “A, who is there?” “I,” quod this olde greye, “Am heere,” and he me tolde the manere How he spak to me, as yee herde me seye. (122–36) —— [A poor old gray-­haired man came walking alongside me, and said, “Good day, sir, and God bless you!” But I spoke not a word, for my sickly distress prevented my ears from doing their duty, so that this old man considered me ignorant and foolish, until he took account of my sad expression and my deathly pale and wan coloring. Then he thought as follows: “This man I see here is twisted all wrong, for all that I can see.” He moved toward me and said, “Are you asleep, man? Wake up!” and began to shake me very hard, and with a sigh I answered at last, “Ah, who’s there?” “I,” said this old graybeard, “am here,” and he told me the way he had spoken to me, as you heard me say.]

The narrated Hoccleve is a ridiculous figure, made deaf by introspection and subjected to a violent shaking by a feeble old man; but the narrating Hoccleve is no less so, in revealing what a ridiculous figure he is; and the two can never be clearly distinguished, flickering in and out of identicality. The last two lines of this passage purport to explain how Hoccleve can know what the Old Man had said to him even though his misery had made him deaf, and also what the Old Man’s initial opinion of him was, how that opinion changed when he noticed Hoccleve’s pallor, what he then thought, and the vigorous action he took to produce a response. Hoccleve allegedly knows all this because the Old Man went on to tell him. But this explanation is retrospective and seemingly makeshift: as the events are narrated, there seems to be no barrier between Hoccleve’s consciousness and the Old Man’s; they might as well be different versions of the same person.

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That effect persists in various ways throughout their dialogue. Thus the Old Man shares Hoccleve’s acute self-­consciousness, in the form of obsessive imaginings of the way that others see him (something that in Hoccleve’s case will be shown most strikingly in the Series at the point where he takes up a mirror to see how he appears to others, so as to adjust his features appropriately): I woot wel, sone, of me thus wilt thow thynke: This olde dotid grisel halt him wys; He weeneth maken in myn heed to synke His lewde clap, of which sette I no prys. He is a noble prechour at devys; Greet noyse hath thurgh his chynned lippes drye This day out past, the devel in his ye. (400–406) —— [I know well, son, that this is what you’ll think about me: “This feeble-­minded old graybeard considers himself wise; he imagines he’s making his ignorant chatter sink into my brain, when I think it worthless. He’s a noble preacher indeed; great noise has passed through his dry, cracked lips today, the devil take him!”]

The Old Man imagines how Hoccleve imagines him, and vice versa: each is strongly characterized by a sense that he has no character except as defined by others. When the Old Man asks, “What shal I calle thee, what is thy name?” (1863), the answer is “Hoccleve, fadir myn, men clepen me” (1864), and the poet then arranges for his name to be repeated: “‘Hoccleve, sone?’ ‘Ywis, fadir, that same’ ” (1865). That is a firmer self-­identification than can be found anywhere in Chaucer, but it is worth noting that what he is asked is “What shall I call you?” and that his answer is that people call (clepen) him Hoccleve—as though he were aware of dependence on others’ words for his very identity. When Hoccleve apologizes to the Old Man for his initial rudeness, he explains that he did not attend to his greeting because “heer and there I myselven soghte”

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(763: I was seeking myself here and there). This is a telling formulation: the self is not a present ready-­made reality but is something to be searched for “here and there,” and that is also a description of what the preamble is doing, not expressing but seeking a self for its writer. Another similarity between Hoccleve and the Old Man is that the latter shares the extreme fear of heresy that Hoccleve reveals throughout his work. After telling of the heretic Badby’s execution, the Old Man wishes that all such enemies of Christ should meet a similar end, nervously adds, “For I am seur that ther been many mo” (329), and anxiously enquires whether Hoccleve is one of those who question the church’s teachings. In his poverty, as I have argued, the Old Man is not an external source of transcendent wisdom but a projection of Hoccleve himself—perhaps a superstitious way of averting what frightens him by fantasizing it as vividly as he can. Similarly, in his sense of heresy as an ever-­present threat, the Old Man expresses Hoccleve’s fear that it is not just an external danger to be denounced and extirpated but something that may be lurking within himself—as Ethan Knapp puts it, “an admission of the dangers of his own thought.”39 In the circumstances of the early fifteenth-­century Lollard scare, how could any English layman be sure that his belief about the Eucharist was perfectly in accordance with what the church defined as truth? Far better to avoid arguing, or thinking for oneself, about theological questions! Hence Hoccleve’s response to the Old Man’s query: Of our feith wole I nat despute at al, But at o word, I in the sacrament Of the auter fully byleeve and shal, With Goddes help, whil lyf is to me lent, And in despit of the feendes talent, In alle othir articles of the feith Byleeve as fer as that Holy Writ seith. (379–85) —— [I will not dispute at all about our faith, but, in a word, I fully believe in the sacrament of the altar, and, with God’s help, shall

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do so as long as I live, and I also believe, in defiance of what the Devil desires, in all other articles of the faith to the full extent of what Holy Writ declares.]

The excessive vehemence of this profession implies Hoccleve’s constant need for God’s help in avoiding an ever-­present diabolic temptation to diverge from perfect orthodoxy, and indeed the stanza’s very wording seems to leave an inadvertent aperture for questioning in its distinction between what the church requires and what the Bible says. Beyond this splitting of the first person into two figures, a more important source of instability is that the Hocclevian first person is a textual “I” constructed out of fragments of other texts. This is inevitably true of language in general: to express the self I experience as unique I can use only the language already used by others for their own purposes. But it is especially true of Hoccleve, because the other texts are recognizably Chaucerian. Bowers states that Hoccleve “shows very little direct knowledge of Chaucer’s poetry. . . . Hoccleve seems to have known the man, his literary reputation, and even some ringing phrases, but not much of the works themselves.”40 This differs in a small but telling way from Burrow’s similar observation that “direct echoes of Chaucer occur less frequently than one might expect in Hoccleve’s verse,”41 and the difference suggests that Bowers may have been misled by the distinctive nature of Hoccleve’s use of Chaucer. The poetry of his contemporary John Lydgate is full of Chaucerian ventriloquism, direct borrowings from Chaucer and imitations, often heightened, of the more Latinate features of his style. Hoccleve too occasionally imitates Chaucer’s high style (what Lydgate called the gold dewdrops of his eloquence42), as for example in the eulogy of Health, with which he begins his earlier poem Male Regle: O precious tresor inconparable! O grounde and roote of prosperitee! O excellent richesse, commendable Aboven alle that in eerthe be!

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Who may susteene thyn adversitee? What wight may him avante of worldly welthe, But if he fully stande in grace of thee, Eerthely god, piler of lyf, thow Helthe?43 —— [O incomparably precious treasure! O basis and source of prosperity! O supreme riches, to be commended above all others on this earth! Who can stand up to opposition from you? What creature can boast of well-­being in this world unless he stands entirely in your grace, you earthly god, you pillar of life, you Health?]

That is a concentrated imitation of Chaucer’s proem to Book III of Troilus and Criseyde, with one circumlocutory apostrophatio piled on another, and the deity addressed not named till the last possible moment; but Chaucer was addressing a real planetary goddess, Venus, while “Health” is a fiction devised as part of a self-­mocking joke, and the passage can only be intended as a deliberately exaggerated instance of stylistic elevation. In general Hoccleve followed his father and master more subtly and allusively; he learned from Chaucer to do things that Chaucer had not done. In the case of the preamble to the Regement, it looks as though an important stimulus came from the part of Chaucer’s work that was nearest to being a dramatic monologue, The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. One small sign of this is found in a single line quoted above. The Old Man imagines Hoccleve’s sarcastic response to his incessant lecturing: “He is a noble prechour at devys!” (404). If the line seems half-­familiar, it is because it recalls the backhanded compliment with which the Pardoner interrupts the Wife of Bath as she embarks on her excessively long preamble: “Ye been a noble prechour in this cas” (III 165).44 That Hoccleve had the Pardoner’s line in mind seems likely, because he not only repeats the phrase “a noble prechour,” used ironically, but places it in exactly the same metrical and syntactical slot.45 This is relatively trivial, but a more substantive parallel exists between the

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anonymous poverty-­stricken Old Man of Hoccleve’s preamble and the equally anonymous “oold man and a povre” (VI 713) encountered by the three revelers of The Pardoner’s Tale. The Pardoner’s Old Man, unable to die, is a warning of what will happen to the revelers if they succeed in their quest to kill Death—an unending process of bodily dissolution: Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn! Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste? (VI 732–33) —— [See how I’m disappearing, flesh and blood and skin! Alas, when will my bones be at rest?]

The Pardoner’s Prologue and especially the Tale are crammed with references to separate bodily parts, including the parts of Christ’s body by which people swear—“By Goddes precious herte” (VI 651), “By the blood of Crist” (652), “By Goddes armes” (654), and so on. The whole Pardoner sequence in the Canterbury Tales is littered with mutilated and dismembered bodies, and the bodily parts often seem to have the kind of autonomous power and energy fantasized more recently in horror movies such as Night of the Living Dead. The separated parts of bodies take on a horrible life of their own in the Pardoner’s preaching, where throat, mouth, and belly seem to possess separate energies: “Allas, the shorte throte, the tendre mouth” (VI 517) and “O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod [bag]!” (VI 534). To satisfy the disgusting appetite that the Pardoner denounces, located in specific bodily parts (mouth, throat, gullet), the bodies of animals are dismembered and the marrow knocked from the “harde bones” so that it can “go thurgh the golet softe and swoote” (VI 541–43). The false relics that the Pardoner carries about prominently include bones, and the dice that the revelers in the tale use for gambling are “the bicched bones two” (VI 656: the pair of cursed bones). The tale ends with the threat of another dismemberment, when the Host offers to separate the Pardoner from his testicles. In the preamble to the Regement Hoccleve’s lengthy

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account of the painful labor involved in his work as a scribe similarly focuses on the separate parts that are afflicted: mind, eye, and hand in one formulation (997); stomach, back, and eye in another (1019–22); and “every veyne and place of his body” (1026) in a third. As Isabel Davis puts it, in his “singling out of his various body parts . . . he effects his own dismemberment.”46 Hoccleve’s Old Man is a warning of what the future may hold for Hoccleve himself if he does not find a remedy for his poverty, a projection of his fear of a destitute old age; but what he says about his earlier life makes him a kind of combination of the Pardoner’s Old Man with the three revelers who meet him. Hoccleve’s Old Man explains how, like those revelers, Whan I was yong, I was ful rechelees Prowd, nyce, and riotous for the maistrie, And among othir, consciencelees. By that sette I nat the worth of a flie; And of hem hauntid I the conpaignie That wente on pilgrimage to taverne. (610–15) —— [When I was young, I was completely reckless, proud, foolish, and extremely riotous, and, among other things, lacking in conscience. To that I didn’t grant the value of a fly; and I frequented the company of those who went on pilgrimage to the tavern.]

In that diabolic shrine—the “develes temple,” as the Pardoner calls it (VI 470)—he played dice all night long and, like Chaucer’s “riotoures,” recrucified Christ with his blasphemous oaths by the parts of Christ’s body: There the former of every creature Dismembred I with oothes grete, and rente Lym fro lym or that I thennes wente. (628–30) ——

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[There I dismembered the Creator of every creature with great oaths, and tore him limb from limb before I left.]47

Hoccleve’s Old Man goes on to associate these tavern oaths with “the desir fervent of covetyse” (632), again following the pattern of the Pardoner with his assertion that “I preche nothyng but for coveitise” (VI 433: I don’t preach out of anything but covetousness). It is hard to be certain how fully Hoccleve was aware of his multiple debts to Chaucer’s Pardoner, but the links are so many that the influence is undeniable, whether conscious or unconscious. The fragmented and redoubled subject of the preamble to the Regement is shaped out of multiple Chaucerian recollections. A crucial difference from The Pardoner’s Tale, though, is that there is nothing radically evil about the two versions of Hoccleve in the preamble. What makes Hoccleve and his alter ego so engaging in their abjection is their admission of fears and weaknesses. The Pardoner’s self-­exposure, like that of his revelers, is terrifyingly arrogant, while what Hoccleve exposes is his own vulnerability: he admits us to intimacy with what is least admirable about him. Like the first persons of the earlier Male Regle and the later Series, the versions of the Hocclevian subject in the Regement lack the courage to commit themselves fully to dangerous passions: the sins of the tavern end with “I thennes wente.” (As journalists investigating sexual sleaze used to put it, “I made an excuse and left.”) The Old Man explains that he was violent in words but physically cowardly: “Whan strokes cam, a place I gan dissevere” (640: when it came to blows, I made myself scarce). Similarly in the Male Regle Hoccleve had self-­mockingly confessed that he was protected from the consequences of his drunken aggressiveness by his “manly cowardyse” (174). What Furnivall wished Hoccleve had been, “manly,” is just what he is not.48 The Old Man recalls how when he had money to spend people “seide I was a manly man” (720), and that too is another version of what Hoccleve confesses about himself in the Male Regle: when he paid Thames boatmen overgenerously,

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Othir than maistir callid was I nevere Among this meynee, in myn audience. Methoghte I was ymaad a man for evere. (201–3) —— [I was never called anything but “master” among this company, in my hearing. It seemed to me I was made a man for ever.]

To be “a manly man,” like Chaucer’s Monk as described in the General Prologue,49 is a matter of reputation, something conferred by others and therefore capable of being temporarily purchased by lavish tips, but the reality behind this includes an awareness that “master” was only what he was called when within earshot. He cannot know what the boatmen called him behind his back. Hoccleve was writing as the first professed disciple of Chaucer. (Clanvowe had earlier borrowed from Chaucer in his Book of Cupid, but without naming him and without presenting himself as Chaucer’s son or apprentice.50) Precisely because of this Hoccleve was confronted with the problem of an autographic “I” that was not his own. It may have been this, along with his sense of alienation, of being different from others (as I suggested in chapter 4), that provoked him to imagine his own “I” as more like a third person, exposing truths about himself that he would rather conceal and that render him abject. That is something that Chaucer never does. When writing autographically Chaucer often engages in self-­ mockery, staging first-­person performances of innocence, naïveté, ignorance, gaucherie, but he never does so to a really damaging extent, never to the extent of betraying his own hidden motives. In an odd way, he always retains a certain degree of self-­possession, even when being whisked through the heavens in the claws of an eagle. The one exception might seem to be his performance as teller of Sir Thopas in the Canterbury Tales. There he allows his tale to be brutally cut short by the Host as “drasty rymyng” that is “nat worth a toord” (VII 930), but he can safely do that because his ideal reader will understand that what Harry Bailly takes to be

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a contemptibly bad tail-­rhyme romance is in fact Chaucer’s brilliantly witty parody of bad tail-­rhyme romances.51 It is always third persons whom Chaucer allows to expose themselves in embarrassing ways. In the General Prologue he does this by devising a free indirect style, supplying the statements or rhetorical questions with which a pilgrim might have justified his own way of life, but without specifying any source or endorsement for them. He does it with the Monk: What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood, Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure, Or swynken with his handes, and laboure As Austin bit? How shal the world be served? (I 184–87) —— [Why should he study and drive himself crazy, always poring over a book in the cloister, or labor with his hands, and work away as Saint Augustine commands? How is the world to be served?]

Where are those aggressive questions coming from? Presumably from the Monk himself, as a revelation of the values he brings to his monastic profession, but Chaucer never says so. The same technique of inadvertent self-­exposure is applied to the Guildsmen. Each was a suitable candidate to be an alderman, For catel hadde they ynogh and rente, And eek hir wyves wolde it wel assente; And elles certeyn were they to blame. It is ful fair to ben ycleped “madame,” And goon to vigilies al bifore, And have a mantel roialliche ybore. (I 373–78) —— [For they had enough property and income, and their wives would readily agree to it too; and otherwise they’d certainly be to blame. It’s very pleasing to be called “madam,” and to head

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the procession at vigils, and to have your mantle carried as if you were a queen.]

Who is offering this rationalization of the Guildsmen’s ambition? Again Chaucer does not say but leaves it to us to work out that it is how they and their wives justify it.52 Hoccleve adopts this Chaucerian device of assertions or questions coming from an unspecified source, but he employs it to expose not others but himself.53 Thus in the Male Regle he uses a sourceless assertion of principle to explain why he bought the drinks for good-­time girls in the tavern: To suffre hem paie had been no courtesie; That charge I took, to wynne love and thank. (151–52) —— [It wouldn’t have been courteous to let them pay; I accepted that task, so as to gain love and gratitude.]

And he uses a rhetorical question, again coming from no specific source, to explain why he paid tradesmen whatever exorbitant prices they asked: Wher was a gretter maistir eek than Y, Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre yate, Among the taverneres namely And cookes, whan I cam eerly or late? (177–80) —— [Also, where was to be found a more important man than I, or one better known at Westminster gate, especially among the innkeepers and cooks, at whatever time of day I arrived?]

Hoccleve, I suggest, learned from Chaucer to apply this approach to himself as first person, thus beginning what can be seen from our own historical position as a move from autography to autobiography. He reveals his inmost fears of heresy, of age, even of poverty—

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I am so drad of moneyes scantnesse That myn herte is al nakid of lightnesse (Regement 1243–44) —— [I am so frightened of shortage of money that my heart is completely deprived of happiness]

—in such a way as to enable readers to feel comfortably superior to him even as they pity him. That is both part of the pleasure offered by the preamble and an important element in its contribution to the effectiveness of the Regement as a petitionary poem. As Burrow has pointed out, much of Hoccleve’s work in the Privy Seal Office would have involved the preparation of petitions, requests addressed to superiors for some favor, and several of Hoccleve’s poems take the form of such requests.54 The Male Regle is one, a petition addressed to Thomas Nevill, Lord Fournival, for payment of a delayed installment of his annuity. A display of humility was expected, and Hoccleve turns self-­exposure to his purpose, explaining that he desperately needs the money owing to him because he has ruined his health by various forms of self-­indulgence. The preamble to the Regement is an elaboration of the same petitionary strategy: the regiminal text to which it leads is a gift to the prince, for which Hoccleve deserves some reward, and the preamble reveals just how badly he needs to have his annuity paid. The rhetorical strategy is clearly explained by the Old Man: Thou seest al day the begger is releeved That sit and beggeth blynd, crookid, and lame, And why? For he ne letteth for no shame His harmes and his povert to bywreye To folk as they goon by him in the weye. For and he keepe him cloos and holde his pees, And nat out shewe how seek he inward is, He may al day so sitten helpelees; And, sone myn, althogh he fare amis

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That hydeth so, God woot, the wyt is his; But this begger his hurtes wole nat stele: He wole telle al and more—he can naght hele. (248–59) —— [Every day you see that the beggar who sits and begs, blind, crippled, and lame, receives assistance. And why? Because he doesn’t let shame prevent him from revealing his injuries and his poverty to people as they walk by him in the street. For if he should keep himself hidden and remain silent, and not display outwardly how inwardly sick he is, he can sit like that all day without receiving help; and, my son, if things go badly for someone who hides away like that, God knows he’s the one to blame. But the beggar I’m talking about refuses to conceal his sufferings; he’ll tell all and more—he can hide nothing.]

In just the same way Hoccleve (which in this case means the double Hocclevian subject, “Hoccleve” and the Old Man) reveals the needi­ ness that shames him. But what is described here is also something more than rhetorical strategy: the beggar tells all and more, and “he can naght hele.” He cannot hide anything; there is something compulsive about this self-­exposure, something not entirely calculated, a mystery that fascinates and provokes further analysis. The same is true of Chaucer’s Pardoner, whose more aggressive shamelessness in revealing his motives goes beyond any calculation of what would serve his material purposes. The very inability to hold anything back, an inability enacted in the length and random progress of the preamble itself, may have had a special appeal to readers in Hoccleve’s own time, intensifying their pleasure in his work—a pleasure comparable, perhaps, to that offered by the elements of uncontrolled excess in The Book of Margery Kempe. In one of the few accounts of Hoccleve’s poetry concerned with the kind of pleasure his work might have given to his readers, Jennifer Bryan has written that fifteenth-­century London elites had a growing sense of the inner life as a valuable commodity. . . . Hoccleve assiduously

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cultivates the invasive gaze of his patrons for good reason, in a culture where selfhood in both devotional and social contexts has become a currency of enjoyment. . . . Hoccleve commodifies his interiority, spectacularizing singularity, excess, and failure in the service of an audience that desires the pleasure of intimacy, here produced as a satisfyingly literary effect.55

That puts it well and, I think, offers another perspective on the debt of the Regement preamble to Chaucer’s Pardoner. In The Pardoner’s Prologue especially, interiority is commodified—turned into cash value—and singularity and excess are spectacularized. In the preamble, Hoccleve goes a step further and takes a more real risk, by giving the first person his own name. The Hocclevian subject in the Regement is above all clerkly. In chapter 3 I quoted Sarah Kay’s summary of the views of French scholars about the “I” of the dit: Zink sees him as “a kind of stand­up comic,” Cerquiglini sees him as “a professional writer,” and Kay herself adds that the “I” is a “social type,” that of “a compiler or composer of manuals, a clerk.”56 This is true in a quite literal way of Hoccleve, who was in real life a professional writer and who in his autographic, dit-­like writings repeatedly gives comic twists to his own clerkliness. When Hoccleve first meets the Old Man, the latter at once asks him, “Art thow aght lettred?” (150: are you at all literate/educated?), and Hoccleve modestly answers, “Yee, . . . sumdel” (150: yes, a bit). The Old Man is pleased to know this, because Lettred folk han gretter discrecion And bet conceyve konne a mannes sawe, And rather wole applie to reson, And from folie sonner hem withdrawe, Than he that neithir reson can ne lawe, Ne lerned hath no manner letterure. (155–60) —— [Educated/literate people have greater discernment and can better grasp what someone is saying, and will more readily conform to reason, and will sooner draw back from folly, than a

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person who knows neither reason nor law and has not received any kind of learning.]

Literacy lies at the heart of this conception of learning: to be a clerk is to inhabit the world of textuality, to have the ability to learn from texts and also to produce them. But to be a clerk, in the eyes of those whose patronage Hoccleve sought,57 is also to be abstracted from the world of action, to be unmanly and even a coward. That, as we saw, was how Machaut performed himself by contrast with Jean de Berry in the Fonteinne amoureuse, as cowardly by clerkly profession, because a bold clerk is as much an oxymoron as a timid knight, and it is how the Old Man performs himself in the Regement by contrast with the knightly readership epitomized by Prince Hal. Having told the story of the great warrior Scipio Africanus and how he rejected wealth and gained only honor by his conquests, he expresses the wish that modern knights were similarly concerned only for “noble fame” (1179) and not for material goods, but then adds: But I was nevere so aventurous Renoun to wynne by swerdes conquest, For I was bred in a peisible nest. Upon my bak cam nevere haburgeon, Ne my knyf drow I nevere in violence. I may nat countrefete Scipion In armes . . . (1181–87) —— [But I was never so daring as to gain renown by martial conquest, for I was reared in a peace-­loving nest. A mail coat never came upon my back, nor did I ever draw my knife in violence. I cannot imitate Scipio in arms . . .]

This corresponds to Hoccleve’s own self-­enactment: to be acceptable to a knightly audience, the clerkly writer has to present himself as

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lacking the knightly virtues. (And it more distantly parallels the way Chaucer performs himself in Troilus and Criseyde and other courtly poems: it is those of higher birth who know “the craft of fyn lovynge”58 by experience; he can know it only as a clerk, from reading books. Clerkliness is a deprivation as well as a qualification, and in Hoccleve’s time we have not yet reached the reconciliation of knightly and clerkly values proposed in Stephen Hawes’s early Tudor Pastime of Pleasure, in which the hero is trained in the liberal arts on his way to the Tower of Chivalry.) Literacy gives access to understanding, to “discrecion” and “reson,” and is thus a step up from laboring; yet writing is itself a form of labor. Hoccleve explains that he is unable to earn a living as a farmer because “My bak unbuxum hath swich thyng forsworn” (985: my unbending back has renounced such tasks); yet his back is not unbending out of pride but because it has been physically damaged by his clerkly life as a writer. There follow six stanzas vividly detailing the pains of writing. “It is wel gretter labour than it seemeth” (993: it is much greater labor than it seems): it requires the precise coordination of “Mynde, ye, and hand” (997: mind, eye, and hand) and demands total concentration, with no distractions. Laborers can talk and sing to pass the time while they work, but we writers can only “stowpe and stare upon the sheepes skyn” (1014). And anyone who has worked at writing for twenty-­three years, as Hoccleve had in the Privy Seal Office, knows to his cost how damaging it is to the stomach and eyes as well as the back, indeed to “every veyne and place of his body” (1026: every vein and part of his body). It would be implausible to claim that these stanzas are part of a carefully planned structure for the prologue, “seen, purposid, cast and ment” in advance: no doubt they underline Hoccleve’s neediness for the benefit of the prince and other possible patrons, but some of their appeal for all readers must be that they are apparently an expression of personal experience provoked by what Hoccleve feels at the very moment of writing. We are allowed into the workshop, the scriptorium as sweatshop, to glimpse the painful process that lies behind the product and that, for these few stanzas, is the product.

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One other function of this passage about the pains of writing is to remind us of the material textuality of what we are reading, produced with “penne and ynke and parchemeyn” (2013: pen and ink and parchment). This is méta-­écriture, writing about writing, in the most literal sense. We have seen how for Cerquiglini “the dit . . . is deeply anchored in the very act of writing,”59 and the clerkliness of the “I” and the textuality of the preamble itself are conveyed not just locally in the stanzas about writing as labor but recurrently throughout. This can be simply a matter of a form of deixis that points to the book itself, as in the passage near the end in which Hoccleve incorporates a portrait of Chaucer, explains that “I have heere his liknesse / Do make” (4995–96: I have had his likeness made here), and adds that those who cannot remember what Chaucer looked like “By this peynture may ageyn him fynde” (4998: can discover him again by this painting). (And as the text points to the portrait, so in the manuscripts in which it survives, Harley 4866, Royal 17.D.vi, and Rosenbach 1083/10, the painted Chaucer points back at the text, his right hand emerging from the rectangle against which his face and upper body are depicted.) But beyond this special case, traces of the act of writing are pervasively present in the poem’s style. Hoccleve’s manner is often casual and chatty, much of the prologue takes the form of dialogue between him and the Old Man conveyed in oratio recta, and he moves discontinuously from one topic to another in ways that reflect the process of thought itself. Ethan Knapp claims that at the end of the preamble, when Hoccleve begins to write the Regement proper, he “creates a break not between genres but between two representations of language. The prologue, which had been presented through conventions of direct discourse that render the question of speech vs. text invisible, is suddenly marked as speech that must be recorded.”60 I find this formulation thought-­ provoking but not quite right, because the preamble’s imitation of speech is itself conveyed in forms that are essentially textual and that in fact foreground “the question of speech vs. text.” A comprehensive demonstration of this would be intolerably lengthy, but I hope a few examples will be sufficient to make the point.

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Chaucer’s General Prologue begins with an eighteen-­line sentence of great syntactical complexity, in which we do not encounter a main verb till line 12—“Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” Troilus and Criseyde begins with a sentence of only five lines, but one even more remote from speech in its syntax and word order: The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye, In lovynge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie, My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye. —— [To recount the double sorrow of Troilus, who was the son of King Priam of Troy, how what befell him in love shifted from misery to happiness, and afterward out of joy, is my purpose, before I leave you.]

There too the main verb—“My purpos is . . .”—is deferred to the last moment. The preamble to the Regement, in a way doubtless modeled on these spectacularly hypotactic Chaucerian beginnings, opens similarly with a long series of subordinate clauses, participial and relative, one embedded in another, and leaves us waiting till the end of the first stanza for the main verb: Musynge upon the restlees bysynesse Which that this troubly world hath ay on honde, That othir thyng than fruyt of bittirnesse Ne yildith naght, as I can undirstonde, At Chestres In, right faste by the Stronde, As I lay in my bed upon a nyght, Thoght me byrefte of sleep the force and might. (1–7) —— [Musing on the restless worry which this troubled world always has at hand, and which, so far as I can see, yields nothing other

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than bitter fruit, as I lay in my bed one night at Chester’s Inn,61 very close to the Strand, anxiety deprived me of the efficacy and power of sleep.]

The word order of the stanza’s final line, containing the main verb “byrefte,” is so unnatural as to be impossible in speech. At first glance, it appears to be saying, “Anxiety deprived me of sleep,” but a word-­for-­word translation of the line would run, “Anxiety from me seized of sleep the power and efficacy.”62 That order would do very well if Hoccleve were writing Latin verse, but in the vernacular the line is an “unspeakable sentence” in my extension of Ann Banfield’s concept. It can be spoken, of course, but it could only have originated as writing, not as speech. The accepted view for the last century and more has been that writing is a representation of speech, but here and at many other points in the preamble we find the opposite: speech that exists only as an imitation of writing. In the introduction to his edition of The Regement of Princes, Charles Blyth refers more than once to the “speaking voice” in Hoccleve’s poetry, and in this he is not alone—he also quotes Pearsall, for example, as using that term.63 What seems to me characteristic of Hoccleve’s style is something more complicated, a combination of opposites: on the one hand a manner that is often casually colloquial, but on the other Latinate features that have never had any basis in normal spoken English and that we are kept aware of by the poem’s repeated references to material textuality and the process of writing.64 Nicholas Perkins writes penetratingly about the relations between voice and textuality in the Regement, rightly observing that “written appropriation of the spoken word is common to many of Hoccleve’s poems.”65 He does not, however, focus on the details of style in which this appropriation is realized; for example, he quotes lines such as “Ey, what is me that to myself thus longe / Clappid have I?” (Male Regle 393–94: hey, what’s wrong with me that I’ve been chattering to myself for so long?) as giving the impression of “oral exchange”66 without noting how markedly the word order diverges from that of speech. But this is a matter not only of word order but also of grammar, and especially of the

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use of absolute participial constructions modeled on the Latin ablative absolute. Tauno Mustanoja notes that that such constructions became more frequent in English writing in the second half of the fourteenth century “under the influence of French and Latin and, in Chaucer’s works, also of Italian,” and adds that “the Wycliffite Bible tends to render literally all the ablative absolutes of the Latin original.”67 My first illustration is taken not from the Regement but from the Dialogue; I choose it because it is such an extreme case, so strikingly unidiomatic that to readers without Latin it might well be incomprehensible. In a passage to which I shall return in chapter 6, Hoccleve is writing in a colloquial way about a recent time when the prevalence of coin clipping meant that people used to insist on weighing gold coins before accepting them, and then he comments, “Thei weyed gold, unhad auctoritee” (Dialogue 135). “Unhad auctoritee” (“without having obtained authority”; literally, “without authority being had”) is an absolute construction completely unnatural to spoken English, and it includes in “unhad” the past participle of a verb that appears to have had no previous existence.68 In the Regement such constructions occur frequently, and it is not always easy to be sure how to interpret them. Thus Hoccleve writes of how a ruler bears responsibility for oppressive actions carried out by those who serve him: . . . If his men peple oppresse, Witynge him, and nat rekke of the duresse, He may by right be clept no governour, But of his peple a wilful destroyour. (2552–55) —— [If his men oppress people, witynge him, and do not care about the harshness, he can properly be called not a governor but a deliberate destroyer of his people.]

Blyth glosses “Witynge” as “blaming,” from “wı¯ten,” seeing it as a participial adjective qualifying “men.”69 That could well be right, but given Hoccleve’s penchant for absolute constructions, I think it

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possible that this is a late instance of “the absolute construction . . . in the oblique case” (of which there is an undoubted Hocclevian example in the later Complaint),70 and that Witynge comes from “wı˘ten,” to know; the phrase would then mean “with him knowing,” that is, “to his knowledge.” In context that would make a more pointed sense, because the fact that the ruler’s subordinates blame him for their actions has no bearing on whether he is a true “governour.” A more clear-­cut example occurs when Hoccleve is writing about the king’s responsibility if he recommends someone to the pope for preferment to a benefice: he must take care that he writes only what he believes to be true, For if that execut be youre preyeere, The persone unworthy, yee shul ful deere Reewe it . . . (2930–32) —— [For if your request is put into effect, the parson being unworthy, you will bitterly regret it.]

Here there can be no doubt that “The persone unworthy” is an absolute construction, of a kind that could not have originated in English speech. These two examples of phrases belonging only to textuality are admittedly taken from the regiminal part of the poem, but I will conclude with an illustration from the preamble, which is simpler but perhaps even more telling. It is taken from the passage discussed above, in which Hoccleve, wandering through the fields, is politely greeted by the Old Man but is too distracted to hear him. The Old Man shouts and shakes him until, with a sigh, Hoccleve comes to and asks, “‘A, who is there?’ ‘I’, quod this olde greye / ‘Am heer’ ” (134–35). “Who is there?” and “I am here” are entirely natural and indeed banal scraps of conversation (and, given the proximal deictic functions of “I” and “here,” the proposition “I am here” is necessarily true and therefore conveys no information whatever). What is not natural to speech is the insertion of the extended inquit

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clause “quod this olde greye” between “I” and “am” (an insertion that also separates subject from verb by a line ending). The effect is amusing: “quod this olde greye” makes us wait for a moment to get what turns out to be a completely uninformative answer to Hoccleve’s question. It is hard to imagine a more conspicuous conversion of the spoken into the textual, of the kind characteristic of the dit. A clear and logical discussion of a piece of writing that I claim is dit-­like and thus belongs to a genre qui n’en est pas un is not easy to achieve. In this last paragraph let me try to summarize what I see as the chief characteristics of Hoccleve’s extraordinarily long preamble to the Regement of Princes. Writing in the first person and often about the first person—a person explicitly named as “Hoccleve”—he liberates himself from the tyranny of narrative sources and preconceived blueprints into a more loosely articulated structure, allowing for unplanned changes of topic and direction. This brings the preamble closer to the texture of lived experience, in which we can never be certain what will come next. I see no reason to think this free composition a mask for a more systematic treatment of political themes: we must suppose that Hoccleve expected his readers to enjoy for their own sake the effects he creates of undignified vulnerability and intimacy. Seen in our terms, autography here is beginning to move toward autobiography; but we must not suppose that in his own time Hoccleve conceptualized what he was doing in those terms or that he was writing precisely what we would call autobiography. The “I” of the preamble is a textual “I,” itself fragmented, and composed out of fragments of other texts, predominantly Chaucerian. Hoccleve’s debt to Chaucer, as his “son” and his “apprentice,” is of a kind that may not always be recognized, because it involved learning from Chaucer to do things that Chaucer had not done, and especially to apply to the first person a manner of exposing weaknesses (timidity, cowardice, self-­indulgence) that Chaucer had applied only to third persons. The textual subject, a bricolage of Chaucerian shreds and patches, remains distinctively clerkly, a “composer or compiler of manuals,”

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to repeat Sarah Kay’s words—in this case, as it turns out, a manual for princes. That subject belongs to the world of writing, and one of Hoccleve’s themes is writing itself; and, though he often imitates colloquial speech, he embeds the mimesis of speech in forms that call attention unmistakably to their origin in writing. This cluster of associated characteristics identifies the Regement’s preamble as a late medieval version of the dit, derived partly from Hoccleve’s reading in French but still more from his reading of his father and master Chaucer.

Chapter 6

H o ccleve ’ s S e r i e s

The last and most peculiar of Hoccleve’s major works in English is the compilation of texts known as the Series.1 It is a montage made up of a number of distinct parts, brought together within a single written space,2 and these parts are as follows. First comes a verse Complaint, in which Hoccleve, as in the preamble to the Regement, presents himself as suffering from anxiety, now intensified by the fact that (as it seems to him) people do not believe that he has recovered from an earlier mental breakdown. In this anxiety he gains comfort from a book in which Reason consoles an unhappy man, even though the book’s owner takes it back from him before he has finished reading it. Second is a verse Dialogue, in which an unnamed Friend visits him, listens to him reading the Complaint, and advises him not to release it because it will only remind people of his former “wildhede” (D 523: craziness). Hoccleve disagrees, claiming that both his earlier breakdown and its subsequent cure are tokens of God’s power and mercy. He explains that he was also intending to translate a Latin work called “Lerne for to Die” (D 206) as a penitential exercise and to present it to King Henry V’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester. (Gloucester had acted as regent in England while the king was in France.) Besides that, Hoccleve wishes to write something more cheerful for the duke but needs help in deciding what will be most suitable. The 171

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Friend reminds Hoccleve that he has given offense to ladies by his previous writings (and especially by The Letter of Cupid), and so Hoccleve promises to translate a tale from the Gesta Romanorum “in honur and plesance” of ladies (D 821). This is the third part, the verse Tale of Jereslaus’ Wife, an account, evidently modeled on Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, of the many adventures undergone by a virtuous, persecuted empress. The Friend then intervenes to urge Hoccleve to add to Jereslaus’ Wife a moralization found in his own fuller copy of the Gesta Romanorum, and Hoccleve does so, in prose. Fourth comes “Lerne for to Die,” a dialogue in verse translated from Henry Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, followed by a prose version of part of an All Souls’ Day sermon attributed to Saint Augustine. The fifth part, again added at the Friend’s request, is a translation of another tale from the Gesta Romanorum, this time about the cunning and punishment of a wicked woman, Jonathas’s mistress Fellicula. This too is followed by a prose moralization, and here the Series ends. The various parts are ingeniously framed and linked together, but it seems clear that they are separable and that there could well have been more or fewer of them—and indeed Burrow notes that items from the Series sometimes “appear [in manuscripts] independently of the framing narrative,”4 while in the one manuscript in Hoccleve’s own hand there is a small additional item in the form of a stanza at the end dedicating the collection to the Countess of Westmorland, the Duke of Gloucester’s aunt, rather than to Gloucester himself. In the Dialogue, as we saw in chapter 5, the Friend, in a stanza based on Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, warns Hoccleve of the need to plan a work carefully in advance before starting to write it down—it must be seen with the mind’s eye, “purposid, cast and ment,” before pen is set to parchment or paper—and yet it is hard to believe that Hoccleve actually followed this advice in putting together the Series, whether or not he intended to do so. The Series’ relation to the dit is more obvious than that of the preamble to The Regement of Princes. J. A. Burrow writes that “in

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structure, though not in content, the Series belongs to the tradition of those French dits in which a sequence of what might otherwise be free-­standing pieces is held together by the author’s presence in the text as the ‘I’ who composes them.”5 Certainly many of the terms used to characterize the dit as a genre could be applied to the Series: it is “a discourse that stages an ‘I’ ”; the “I” is “a compiler or composer of manuals, a clerk”; it is discontinuous in substance; it “mimes speech in a piece of writing”; and, as with Machaut’s masterpiece in this genre, the Voir Dit, it is in a mixture of verse and prose, and one feature that holds it together is a concern with its own composition. In this chapter I shall be chiefly concerned with the first two parts, the Complaint and the Dialogue, because in them the “I” of the compilation is more prominent than in the later parts, but I shall also say something about the short passages that link those later parts and sustain a first-­person framework for the entire sequence. The “I” of the Series is named as “Hoccleve” and “Thomas,” and what we learn about him (chiefly in the Complaint and Dialogue) has much in common with what can be learned or deduced from the documentary record of the real Hoccleve’s life— so much so that it seems justifiable to refer to the “I” simply as “Hoccleve.” That is less misleading, at any rate, than to call the “I” a “narrator” or “persona.” Even more than the Regement preamble, the Series seems to show autography evolving into autobiography—or better, into what one scholar calls “autobiographical fiction,”6 or better still, what others call “pseudo-­autobiography,”7 since we have no reason to believe that the specific events narrated in the Series either did or did not occur in reality. Did someone really lend Hoccleve a book containing a dialogue between Reason and an unhappy man, and then take it back before he had finished reading it, as recounted in the Complaint? Did a friend really try to dissuade him from “publishing” the Complaint, as recounted in the Dialogue, and did the same friend provide him with a fuller copy than his own of the story told in Jereslaus’ Wife, as recounted at the end of that part? I think it unlikely, but there is no certain way of telling, and that is

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one reason why I believe autography remains a more satisfactory generic term than autobiography. Another reason is that autobiography as now understood implies an intelligible and coherently developing self that both writes and is written about, and I cannot find that in the Series.8 Burrow has written that “the Series has deep roots in painful human experience,”9 and David Watt has shown that the experience is in important ways that of “commercial scribes” involved in “material book production,” as Hoccleve himself really was;10 but to recognize those truths may also be to run the risk of entering too uncritically into the illusion that the poet and his “painful human experience” are somehow fully present in the words he wrote. Or, to put it differently, there may be a danger of reading Hoccleve as a whole self back into a text in which he appears as a fragmented subject. The fragmentation is especially apparent in the numerous recollections of passages from different parts of Chaucer’s work out of which Hoccleve composes the “I” of the Series and the situation in which that “I” appears, and this will be one of my chief concerns in the present chapter. The Series, as Burrow convincingly argues,11 was begun in the winter of 1419–20, perhaps in late November 1419, if the beautiful autumnal chronographia in the opening stanzas can be taken literally in its reference to “th’ende of Novembre” (C 17). It may have been completed, at least in a first version, in 1420. It begins, though, as I have indicated, by looking back to an earlier occasion, when Hoccleve suffered from a “wylde infirmitee” (C 40), a severe mental breakdown or even an attack of madness, from which he believes he recovered, with God’s help, on All Saints’ Day, November 1, exactly five years previously.12 That this breakdown really happened gets some support from the absence of any record that the Michaelmas 1414 installment of Hoccleve’s annuity—in effect, his salary—was paid to him: that may have been when his illness made him unable to work in the Privy Seal Office. Like the Russian writers discussed by Morson, Hoccleve apparently put himself at the mercy of real events, allowing his writing to be shaped and if necessary misshapen by occurrences over which he had no control, so that it becomes, as Watt puts it, “open-­ended.”13 In the

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later stages of the Series he then dramatizes that lack of control by putting himself at the mercy of a series of interventions by third persons, predominantly the one addressed only as “Friend”—that is, Hoccleve finds ways to fictionalize what seems to have been his real situation of powerlessness. If the preamble to the Regement is an instance of free composition, then the Series is an instance of “free compilation,” but one that paradoxically grounds its freedom in a fiction of external constraint. However apt the links among the various parts of the Series, the overall effect is of a freely composed miscellany, reflecting “life as it is experienced”—not necessarily the actual experience of the specific individual Hoccleve, but experientiality, the morphology of experience, the way experience goes. The experience belongs to a distinctive milieu, clerkly and bookish, within the advanced manu­ script culture that developed and became commercialized in the years before the introduction of printing. It is an exclusively masculine milieu, though not one of monastic celibacy: women are there in the background and are spoken and written about, but in the autographic framework, whether praised or blamed, they are always objects, never subjects. The experience is shaped by accidents, such as a book being recalled by its lender before the borrower has finished reading it and another book turning out to exist in variant versions, one with a moralization and the other without. Because the Series is a compilation, it is not governed by any preconceived narrative form; it is not story-­shaped. To repeat part of a passage quoted from Morson in chapter 4, “the creative process typically traces not a straight line to a goal but a series of false leads, missed opportunities, new possibilities, improvisations, visions, and revisions. It is constituted by an intention that evolves over time. To be sure, authors typically remove the traces of this process and present their work as if it were the product of a clear plan, known from the outset.” In the Series, however, Hoccleve does not do what authors typically do; he does not remove the traces of the creative process so as to give the impression of a clear plan, known from the outset. The most striking illustration of this occurs in a passage near the beginning of the Dialogue. Hoccleve is arguing that, contrary

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to what his Friend advises, he has no reason to keep silent about the “wylde infirmitee” from which he previously suffered, because it is not something to be ashamed of, as it would be if he had committed a crime such as homicide, extortion, robbery, or coin clipping. At random, as it seems, he returns a few stanzas later to the last of these topics: But, freend, among the vices that right now Reherced I, oon of hem, dar I seye, Hath hurt me sore—and I woot wel ynow So hath it mo—which is feeble moneye. Many a man this day, but they gold weye, Of men nat wol it take ne receyve, And if it lakke his peys, they wole it weyve. (99–105) —— [But, friend, among the vices that I listed just now, there is one that I venture to say has done me serious harm (and I know well enough that it’s harmed others too), and that is money of poor quality. Nowadays many people refuse to accept or receive gold coinage without weighing it; and if it falls short of the proper weight, they’ll reject it.]

He goes on for four more stanzas, in a way that can only seem obsessive, about the damage done, especially to the poor, if people are forced to accept coins that are “thynne . . . narw and smal” (123). But then comes a fifth stanza: Whan I this wroot, many men dide amis: They weyed gold, unhad auctoritee. No statut maad was thanne as now is. But syn gold to weye charged now been we, Resoun axith that it obeied be: Now tyme it is unto weightes us drawe, Syn that the parlement hath maad it a lawe. (134–40)14 ——

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[When I wrote this, many people were doing wrong: they weighed gold without having obtained authority. No statute had been made then such as the one that now exists. But since we are now obliged to weigh gold, Reason demands that it should be obeyed: since the parliament has made it a law, now it is time to apply ourselves to weights.]

Plainly, this stanza was a later addition to the Dialogue, and we can say more precisely that it must have been added after May 1421, when Parliament passed an act to require the weighing of gold coins. In the winter of 1419–20 Hoccleve presumably could not have known that such an act was going to come into effect, but it is significant that he did not attempt to erase from the text the traces of its own composition. An interpretation that emphasized political motives might see this as evidence that Hoccleve pleased his betters by teaching servile obedience to Lancastrian rule, whether it forbade or required the weighing of coins; but surely in that case he would have been better advised to delete the preceding five stanzas. No such deletion is found in the manuscripts, and it appears more likely that he desired, and thought his readers would enjoy, an improvisatory effect, by which we seem able to enter into the very process by which the text was produced.15 A graphic artist might create such an effect by including alternative lines that we would see in simultaneity; a poet can do so only by extending his work in length, so that spatial extension will stand in for the passage of time. “Whanne I this wroot” apparently stands outside the text we have been reading, conveying an impression of conversational spontaneity, an impression emphasized by the threefold “now” of the stanza, contrasting with the “thanne” to which it relegates the preceding stanzas: “No statut maad was thanne as now is.” Yet besides referring to the writtenness of the existing text (to which “this” must refer in “Whan I this wroot”), the added stanza underlines its own writtenness by using the “unspeakable” expression “unhad auctoritee”;16 on the other hand, the stanza evokes writing

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itself as a form of experience, unfolding in a continuous present marked by the three occurrences of “now.” This is an instance of the effect noted by Watt in connection with the way Hoccleve represents his addition of “Lerne for to Die” to the collection: “The Series defies aesthetic conventions by representing the passing of time not in terms of the reader’s experience of the text, but in terms of its production.”17 The relations between speech and writing in the Series are complex and flexible, and we can only suppose that this was what Hoccleve wished. The Series, especially in the Complaint and Dialogue, but also in the first-­person frames of the other parts, is a form of méta-­ écriture, much concerned with the process of its own creation, an apparently (and perhaps really) improvised textual performance that never allows us to forget its textuality. Along with the pre­amble to The Regement of Princes, this is the work of Hoccleve’s that most clearly purports to imagine his inner life. The first five stanzas of the Complaint, separated from the rest by the rubric, “Heere endith my Prolog, and folwith my Conpleynte,” play a personalizing, late medieval variation on the formal chronographia: spring is where medieval poems are most likely to begin, as in Chaucer’s General Prologue, but Hoccleve substitutes autumn, its opposite and destroyer. (The likelihood of a conscious link with the General Prologue is perhaps strengthened by his reference to the pilgrimages that his friends made “for myn helthe” [C 47].) The season is appropriate for an “I” suffering from what he calls “the thoghtful maladie” (21) and “thoghtful disese” (388). As we have seen, the Regement similarly begins with an “I” troubled by “thoght,” which renders him sleepless. “Thoght” in Middle English can cover a semantic area including “memory” and “melancholy” as well as “anxiety.” For Hoccleve, self-­absorption and the first-­person writing to which it gives rise are symptoms of the disturbance of the bodily humors that constitutes melancholia, a condition that was understood to be prevalent in autumn. We might think of Seasonal Affective Disorder as a milder modern equivalent. There has been a long tradition of seeing melancholy as inspirational and creative; this conception of melancholy is probably

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most familiar as part of Renaissance thought, but it goes back further than that. Chaucer was the first English-­language poet to make the connection. He did so in the opening lines of The Book of the Duchess, in which an “I” suffering from an unnamed loss turns it into what Ellen Martin calls a “generative site of poetry”:18 he dreams a dream that is also a poem, made up of “fantasies” arising from “sorwful ymagynacioun.” Martin describes melancholia as “the illness of a mind fixated on mutability,” and that is precisely Hoccleve’s position at the beginning of the Complaint, reminded by the yellowing of green leaves in autumn That stablenesse in this world is ther noon; There is no thyng but chaunge and variance. (9–10) —— [That there is no stability in this world; there is nothing but change and mutability.]

Martin also writes of the “shaking of the sense of a viable self” and of how “this loss of self is the melancholic phenomenon that precipitates the poetic refiguration of experience”—and that again is exactly what we find in the Complaint.19 In the fourteenth-­century encyclopedia On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa writes that bad dreams are also a symptom of melancholy: the melancholic “meteth dredeful swevenes and of derknes, griselych to se”20 (has dreams that are fearful and full of darkness, horrible to see). Chaucer several times shows a lover’s melancholy giving rise to dreams and/or fantasies. One such case is that of Arcite in The Knight’s Tale, whose dream of Mercury follows an account of how his melancholy, arising from frustrated desire for Emelye, had grown into a condition more like mania: for al the world he ferde Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye, Engendred of humour malencolik Biforen, in his celle fantastik. (I 1372–76)

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—— [For all the world he acted as if he was suffering not only from the lover’s sickness (amor hereos) but rather from mania, arising out of melancholic humor in the cell of imagination at the front of his brain.]

Another case is that of Troilus, who, after being separated from Criseyde, dreams of “the dredefulleste thynges / That myghte ben” (V 248–49: the most dreadful things that could be) and fantasizes in his “malencolie” (V 622) that others are talking about him behind his back: Another tyme ymaginen he wolde That every wight that wenten by the weye Hadde of hym routhe, and that they seyen sholde. “I am right sory Troilus wol deye.” (V 624–27) —— [Another time he would imagine that everyone who walked past him had pity of him, and that they would say, “I am really sorry Troilus is going to die.”]

That is very like the situation of which Hoccleve complains at the beginning of the Series: as in the preamble to the Regement, in borrowing from Chaucer he is exposing in himself the vulnerabilities that Chaucer reveals in third persons. Hoccleve’s sleeplessness belongs to the tradition of dream poetry: he is in bed, and a medieval reader, here as in the Regement, would probably have expected him to take up a book to pass the time and then fall asleep and have a dream influenced by it (as happens to Chaucer in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls). In this case, though, Hoc­cleve’s “thoght” keeps him awake, and it is a book that later provides consolation for his melancholy. Hoccleve looks back: since he was last scourged with “seeknesse,” he has lost the favor of Fortune—once bright, she has now afflicted him with a “dirke shour” (25: dark shower) that has

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deprived him of pleasure in living. He explains, in terms of medieval physiology, that the swelling of grief about his heart forces him to burst out into words. What is within cannot be kept “cloos” but must be forced “oute” (31–32): the outward expression of inner life is itself the symptom of sickness. He allows this to happen, he writes, “for to preeve I cam of a womman” (34: to prove I came from a woman), and I think this implies two things: that he is merely human in being unable to repress his misery (because we are all born of women) but also that there is something unmasculine about this excessive self-­expression. As Catherine Batt notes of the “I” of the Regement, “he displays those qualities antifeminist literature especially condemns in women: he wanders aimlessly about, he is prey to excess, as is his poem . . . , and he is overly garrulous.”21 The autographic lament is thus both normal and abnormal, peculiar to melancholics and common to all humanity. The idea of an abnormality that is also somehow normal is continued in the opening of the complaint proper (after the “prolog” rubric): such divine visitations of “los of good and bodily seeknesse” (38: material loss and bodily sickness) occur “al day, as men may see” (37: all the time, as people can see), yet it is surely not an everyday event that can be described as a wylde infirmitee Which that I hadde, as many a man wel kneew, And which me out of myself caste and threew. (40–42) —— [wild infirmity that I had, as many people well knew, and that tossed and threw me out of myself.]

Subjectivity becomes a theme for writing when some displacement has occurred, and these lines already indicate the form in which the poem conveys subjectivity. It removes the subject from a stable selfhood, which is then perceived as unattainable and perhaps illusory; and it is a subjectivity subjected to the knowledge or speculation of others, founded from the beginning in the awareness of being

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alienated from itself. Hoccleve seems to be groping for a distinction such as we might now draw between inner life or subjectivity (that is, the general realm of inwardness, which is unstable, and may change coloring according to season or mood) and selfhood (the putatively stable structure, providing a sense of self-­consistency and ontological unitariness, that is disrupted by madness). In self-­alienation there could be none of the privacy associated with selfhood: It was so knowen to the peple and kowth That conseil was it noon ne nat be mighte. How it with me stood was in every mowth. (43–45) —— [It was so well-­known and obvious to the public that it neither was nor could be kept secret. How things were with me was on everyone’s lips.]

What might have been experienced as the secrecy of the self is now appropriated and redefined by others in a way that can only seem threatening. Hoccleve evokes this alienation in a variety of metaphors, implying a subject split so that “I” is only one of its parts. While it lasted, “the substance of my memorie / Wente to pleye as for a certein space” (50–51: the substance of my memory went on holiday for a certain length of time). Here the continuity of selfhood seems to be identified, as in many recent theories, with personal memory: it is the ability to remember past experience as subjective, as centered in oneself, that makes one believe in the subsistent re­ality of that self. But when it was over, “My wit and I” regained their previous accord (59–60) and “my wit” came back home (64). Later he states that he came “to himself ageyn” (231) like a drunkard regaining sobriety; his wit, “a pilgrym, . . . wente fer from hoom” (232–33), but then returned; God “voidid” (234: emptied) him of the poison that had infected his brain and made it wild; and the quarrel “twixt me and my wit” (247) came to an end,

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Althogh that ther were a disseverance As for a tyme betwixt me and it. (248–49) —— [Although there was a separation between me and it just for a time.]

Yet others are still behaving as if they cannot see him; he hears them speaking about him as if he were not present, in ways that seem to reshape him as an animal or a monster, a “wylde steer” (120: wild young ox), with a “bukkissh . . . brayn” (123: brain like a buck), starting “as a ro” (128: like a roe), with feet “wavynge to and fro” (131), and wandering eyes that “soghten every halke” (133: searched every corner). In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor writes, “The very way we walk, move, gesture, speak is shaped from the earliest moments by our awareness that we appear before others, that we stand in public space, and that this space is potentially one of respect or contempt, of pride or shame.”22 When Hoccleve describes the onset of his mental illness, the question of how others see him and speak about him is introduced almost immediately and then repeatedly: “many a man wel kneew” (41) of his craziness; “It was so knowen to the peple and kowth” (43: it was so known and familiar to people); and: For thogh that my wit were hoom come ageyn, Men wolde it nat so undirstonde or take. With me to delen hadde they desdayn; A riotous persone I was, and forsake; Myn old frendshipe was al overshake; No wight with me list make daliance. The world me made a straunge contenance. (64–70) —— [For though my wits had come back to me once more, people wouldn’t understand or accept that it was so. They scorned to have dealings with me; I was a dissolute and abandoned person;23 my former circle of friends had completely vanished.

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Nobody wanted to make conversation with me. The world showed me the face of a stranger.]

Both in the Privy Seal Office at Westminster and among the London crowds, I sy the cheere abaten and apalle Of hem that weren wont me for to calle To conpaignie: hire heed they caste awry Whan I hem mette as they nat me sy. (74–77) —— [I saw the faces of those who used to call me to join them fall and cloud over; they turned their heads aside when I encountered them, as if they didn’t see me.]

The attitudes of others were wounding, but they may have assisted him to write about himself, because they would have enabled him to see himself as an object and thus a possible theme for words. In writing he adds the further perspective provided by the inner awareness of a person who knows that he is being objectivized. At the same time, there is an important religious dimension to the way Hoccleve depicts himself as an outcast. It is generally accepted that after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the church’s growing emphasis on regular confession, aided by the proliferation of handbooks on the sins (intended first for parish priests and then for the educated laity), encouraged self-­analysis. This is reflected in the Series when Hoccleve tells his Friend that he intends to make an “open shrifte” (D 83: public confession) of his madness and its cure, so that God’s mercy toward him will be known. Moreover, the Psalms provided a model of a righteous man recounting the reproaches to which he is subjected by the unrighteous, and that model soon becomes explicit in the Complaint: As seid is in the Psalter mighte I seye: “They that me sy fledden away fro me;

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Foryete I was al out of mynde aweye, As he that deed was from hertes cheertee. To a lost vessel likned mighte I be; For many a wight aboute me dwellynge Herde I me blame and put in dispreysynge.” (78–84) —— [I might say what is said in the book of Psalms: “Those who saw me fled away from me; I was forgotten and completely out of mind, like someone dead to the heart’s affection. I might be compared to a broken vessel; for I heard many of the people living around me blame and dispraise me.”]

A marginal gloss alongside this stanza in the Selden manuscript supplies the verses from Vulgate Psalm 30 of which it is a close paraphrase. In the Douay-­Rheims version they read: They that saw me without fled from me: I am forgotten as one dead from the heart. I am become as a vessel that is destroyed, For I have heard the blame of many that dwell round about.

In the Vulgate the phrase translated as “a vessel that is destroyed” is vas perditum, literally “ruined vessel.”24 In Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things the article on passio melancolya states that some melancholics “trowith that they beth erthene vessellis and dredeth to be touchid lest the[y] beth ibroke” (believe that they are earthenware vessels and dread to be touched in case they should be broken);25 so for Hoccleve the broken container may be not just a simile but a literal fantasy. The stability of the self does not come only from within: it depends on confirmation both by other human beings and by God, and it is associated with the personal name by which others address him and which is confirmed as his before God by baptism. We should not disregard the importance for medieval Christians of God as the ultimate guarantor of selfhood. In Hoccleve’s case, though, religious faith appears insistent rather than

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serene; as in the hysterical opposition to heresy expressed in some of his other poems, it appears to be an outward projection of his fear of inner disintegration. Hoccleve’s sense of himself and his ability to express that sense seem to derive especially from the gap between his outward appearance (referred to repeatedly in terms such as “contenance,” “cheere,” “look,” “visage,” and largely defined by what others say of him or the way they look at him) and what he feels himself to be inwardly. In the Dialogue Hoccleve several times uses “mirour” as a metaphor in its common medieval sense of an ideal image of something to be followed or avoided.26 Thus the Friend tells him, “The smert of studie oghte be mirour / To thee” (D 409–10: the pain of study ought to be a warning to you), meaning that Hoccleve should recognize from the pain of studying that he cannot safely engage in it. Hoccleve claims that a benefit of writing a chronicle of Gloucester’s martial deeds would be that It is a greet avauntage A man before him to have a mirour, Therin to see the path unto honour. (D 607–09) —— [It is a great advantage for a man to have a mirror before him in which to see the path to honor.]

When the Friend repeats Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s image of the man planning carefully before building a house, he tells Hoccleve, “This may be unto thee in thy makynge / A good mirour” (645–46: This may be a good example for you to follow in your writing). Hoccleve also uses “miroure” as a verb in the course of Jereslaus’ Wife— “Let Goddes wreches hensfoorth yow miroure” (727: Let God’s punishments henceforth be an example to you)—and again in the introduction to Jonathas, when the Friend explains that he wants Hoccleve to translate this tale both to rebuke wanton women and “Eek to miroure wommen vertuous / What ende takith swich lyf vicious” (76–77: also to show virtuous women what end follows such vicious lives).

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In the Complaint, however, this repeated metaphor is literalized, when Hoccleve takes up an actual mirror in an attempt to see whether his face corresponds to the ideal of sane normality by which his acquaintances are evidently judging him: And in my chambre at hoom whan that I was Myself allone, I in this wyse wroghte: I streighte unto my mirour and my glas To looke how that me of my cheere thoghte, If any othir were it than it oghte; For fayn wolde I, if it had nat been right, Amendid it to my konnynge and might. Many a saut made I to this mirour. (155–62) —— [And when I was in my chamber at home by myself, this is what I did: I reached for my mirror and my looking-­glass, to see how my expression seemed to me, if it was any different from what it ought to be; for, if it hadn’t been right, I would gladly have improved it to the best of my knowledge and ability. I jumped up to seize this mirror many times.]

Yet Hoccleve sees the hopelessness of this attempt. To look at oneself in a mirror is to recognize that self-­consciousness can only be consciousness of self-­division; the attempt to use the mirror as a means of self-­fashioning involves entering a dangerous regress: And therwithal I thoghte thus anoon: “Men in hire owne cas been blynde alday, As I have herd seyn many a day agoon, And in that same plyt I stonde may.” (169–72) —— [And furthermore I at once thought this: “People are always blind in their own cases, as I have heard said many days ago, and it may be that I am in the same plight.”]

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He is reliant on others even for the generalization that tells him that true self-­knowledge is impossible. It is hard to resist comparing this with Lacan’s famous conception of the stade du miroir as the origin of the child’s false self-­image.27 The infant, Lacan claims, identifying with its own image, seen in the mirror or in others, thereby constructs a whole self, an ego, which is in fact an alienating fiction—the ego as the carrier of neurosis. When the adult Hoccleve looks in the mirror, it is perhaps a reenactment of that primal moment of alienation. What he sees is not a stable or organically developing self, as would be dramatized in the classic novel and in Romantic poetry, but an unstable and blurred image (of the kind that you would see in a medieval mirror, more likely to be made of polished metal than of glass), an image that varies according to the perceptions of those looking at it. Here yet again Hoccleve exposes in the first person the kind of weakness, at once comic and pathetic, that Chaucer was more likely to have attributed to others: he shows himself caught in the very act of fashioning a self from the outside in. I cannot point to an exact parallel in Chaucer, but a likely precedent is the moment in The Knight’s Tale when the lovesick Arcite wakes from the dream in which Mercury tells him to go to Athens: And with that word he caughte a greet mirour, And saugh that chaunged was al his colour, And saugh his visage al in another kynde. (I 1399–1401) —— [And with that word he seized a great mirror, and saw that his whole appearance was changed, and saw his face quite differently.]

Hoccleve’s aim is “My troublid spirit for to brynge in reste” (174: to bring rest to my troubled spirit), but he has looked into the abyss: he has seen that the self is a social construct as well as a reflexive consciousness. Much of the Complaint consists of motion back and forth between those two ways of conceiving the self: inward intuition and the “taaste and assaye” (210: trial and test) of others. And

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ultimately the “I” can be stabilized and guaranteed as a self not from its own resources but only by total reliance on God—and that is what Hoccleve presents himself as achieving at the end of the Complaint, which concludes in prayer. The book from which Hoccleve receives comfort and which thus makes possible this conclusion to the Complaint has been identified by Rigg and Burrow as an abbreviated version of Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma.28 In it the “woful man” (310), as M. C. Seymour puts it, “complains . . . of the general willingness to accept false rumour without proof, and . . . of the need to keep silent in face of provocation.”29 Once the book is introduced, the “I” goes temporarily out of focus as a theme, and Hoccleve turns to traditional teaching, attributed to Reason, about the need for patience. But then the “I” returns, when Hoccleve explains that Lenger I thoghte red have in this book, But it so shoop that I ne mighte naght; He that it oghte ageyn it to him took, Me of his haaste unwar. (C 372–75) —— [I intended to have read this book for longer, but it so happened that I couldn’t; the man who owned it took it back again—I didn’t know what a hurry he was in.]

This amusing incident, besides exposing Hoccleve’s powerlessness, reminds us that “the book” is not simply the source of authoritative and transcendent wisdom; it is also a material object that has its place in the everyday world of ownership, contingency, and inconvenience. As literacy began to become more widespread in late medieval England and books became more familiar objects, their power as symbols of absolute “auctoritee” must have been diminished— and that would have been especially the case for those like Hoccleve who were professionally concerned with producing them. Hoccleve as a scribe was intimately familiar with the material existence of books as the products of human labor. In chapter 5 I mentioned the heartfelt expression of that awareness in the

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five-­stanza passage of The Regement of Princes detailing the pains of writing, pains that allow the mind no escape from the body’s torment. And at the end of the third part of the Series a vivid insight into the merely contingent authority of books is given when a difference emerges between two copies of the Gesta Romanorum, Hoccleve’s and his Friend’s. One contains the moral to the story of the Roman empress, and the other does not—so which is right? Books turn out to be as unstable as human subjects. The timid Hoccleve once more gives way to his authoritative Friend, subjecting poetic narrative to prose moralization:30 And to this moralyzynge I me spedde, In prose wrytynge it hoomly and pleyn, For he conseillid me do so, certeyn. (976–78) —— [And I hurried to include this moralization, writing it in prose in a familiar and straightforward way, because, to be sure, that was what he advised me to do.]

Yet at the same time (to borrow a useful term from Burrow) the “bookness”31 of the Series itself can never be disregarded, however conversational Hoccleve’s language may seem. As in the preamble to the Regement, a conversational style is imitated in a form that includes absolute constructions belonging not to speech but to writing, as in “He that it oghte ageyn it to him took, / Me of his haaste unwar” (374–75), where a plain, almost completely monosyllabic vernacular line is followed by a learnedly compressed absolute clause. And in the same stanza Hoccleve explains that, even though the book was taken from him, he has retained some of the wisdom taught by Reson “as above have I said” (377)—where, obviously enough, “said” refers to speech extended in time, while “above” refers to writing extended in space. In our time, phrases such as “none of the above” can occur in speech, with a joking allusion to their use in writing; I know of no evidence that that was so in the fifteenth century.

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The Dialogue begins with the written text being put into a living context in another way. Just as Hoccleve is ending the Complaint, someone knocks at his chamber door: writing is a private activity, conducted in a private room, the chamber as opposed to the hall, and thus can be associated with the private space of the inner life. (Here Charles of Orleans’s evocative phrase “the chambir of my thought”32 comes to mind.) The intruder addresses him with hearty masculine familiarity: “How, Hoccleve, art thow heere? Opne thy dore! Me thynkith ful yore Syn I thee sy. What, man, for Goddes ore, Com out, for this quarter I nat thee sy, By aght I woot.” And out to him cam I. (D 3–7) —— [“Hey, Hoccleve, are you here? Open your door! It seems like ages since I saw you. Why, man, for God’s mercy, come out, because for all I can tell I haven’t seen you for the last three months.” And out to him I came.]

“How, Hoccleve, art thow heere?” is a question for Hoccleve about his uncertain place in the world, and even perhaps his identity (the “I” on which the stanza ends); at the same time it is a question for us about the nature of the written text. A rubric separating the Dialogue from the Complaint—“Heere endith my Conpleynte and begynneth a Dialog”—occurs in three of the Series manuscripts, while in the Selden manuscript, which Burrow takes as his copy text, a blank space has been left for a missing heading. We cannot be completely certain that the rubric is authorial, because this part of the holograph Durham manuscript is missing, but the reference to the Complaint as “my complaint” seems unlikely to have been invented by a copyist. As James Simpson has pointed out, “Heere” in the rubric is an instance of textual deixis: it “can refer only to the place on a page before us.”33 Simpson, one of the few critics fully sensitive to the pervasive element of méta-­écriture in the Series,

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nevertheless wishes to avoid a Derridean reading, one in which there would be nothing outside the text, and he argues that the Dialogue does not collapse into textuality, as the Complaint finally does when Hoccleve reads it aloud to his friend and they discuss whether or not it should be “published.” Hoccleve, Simpson writes, uses formal devices “to create the effect that the Dialogue is not itself a text,”34 so that we forget its writtenness. It is true that Hoccleve shows extraordinary skill in fitting a mimesis of directionless everyday conversation into stanzaic verse. A good example comes from the Friend later: And of o thyng now wel I me remembre, Why thou purposist in this book travaille. I trowe that in the monthe of Septembre Now last, or nat fer from, it is no faille— No force of the tyme, it shal nat availle To my mateere, ne it hyndre or lette— Thow seidist of a book thow were in dette Unto my lord that now is lieutenant, My lord of Gloucestre—is it nat so? (526–34) —— [And now I well remember one thing, why you propose to labor at this book: I believe that in the month of September, the one just past, or near it, certainly—the time doesn’t matter, it won’t assist what I want to say, or disrupt or hinder it either— you said you owed a book to my lord who is now regent, my lord of Gloucester—isn’t that so?]

This is delightfully engaging, and for a moment it may indeed make us forget that the Dialogue is a text, but the effect is only momentary and is by no means typical of the Dialogue as a whole. It begins in its very first line with one of those absolute constructions that could not originate in speech but only in writing—“And, endid my conpleynte in this maneere” (D 1: And, my Complaint being

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finished in this way)—and this whole part of the Series is full of references to textuality. At the very beginning I see no way of distinguishing completely between the “Heere” of the rubric and the occurrences of “heere” in line 3 (quoted above) and also line 19— And, that doon, thus he seide: “Syn we tweyne Been heere, and no mo folk, for Goddes peyne, Thomas, suffre me speke. . . .” (18–20) —— [And, that done, he said as follows: “Since we two are here, and no other people, for the sake of God’s pain, Thomas, allow me to speak. . . .”]

—a passage in which once more we find an absolute clause, “that doon,” that belongs to writing, not speech. “Howe, Hoccleve, art thow heere?”—not just, is Hoccleve present in the fictional room inside the door, but is Hoccleve truly present here in these words we are reading? Does naming imply presence? The whole Dialogue, in my view, recurrently raises Derridean questions about the relation between textuality and presence. I will mention a couple of similar effects. First, when Hoccleve praises the Latin ars moriendi that he intends to translate, he adds, Man may in this tretice heere aftirward, If that him lyke, reden and beholde, Considere and see wel, that it is ful hard Delaye acountes til lyf gynne colde. (225–28) —— [Afterward in this treatise here/here in this treatise at a later time, one can, if one pleases, read and recognize, consider and well see, that it is very dangerous to delay making one’s reckoning until the body begins to grow cold.]

In line 225, the proximal deictic phrase “heere aftirward” functions in two ways: it refers to the future within the time of the fiction

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but also to what follows in the space of the book that contains the fiction. Second, at the end of a “digression” about friendship (if any part of a text that has no preordained goal can be described as a digression), Hoccleve writes that he could quote more authoritative sources, but he needs to stop, Or elles wole it be ful longe and late Or I have endid my purposid werk. (362–63) —— [Or else it will be a long time and very late before I have finished my intended work.]

Here “my purposid werk” must mean not just “the task I have undertaken” but “this text that you are reading.” And it is not only in the Dialogue that such ambiguous relations between presence and textuality are found. To mention one example among many, in the link passage introducing Jonathas, the Friend asks Hoc­cleve to add it to the book for the benefit of the Friend’s unruly son. He claims that “Nat fer the tale fro which thow maad haast / Of th’emperice this tale is” (29–30: this tale isn’t far from the tale you have composed about the empress [i.e., Jereslaus’ Wife]), thus evoking the material textuality of the Gesta Romanorum as a space within which distances can be measured. The link passage concludes with Hoccleve’s own words: The copie on the morwe sent he me, And thus Y wroot as yee may heer see. (83–84) —— [He sent me the copy on the next day, and I wrote thus, as you can see here.]

The relation between “he” and “me” exists within the incomplete fictional narrative; that between “I” and “you” evokes a shared presence of writer and reader outside the completed narrative, now a material book that is “here” to both of them.

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The blame for lack of action against coin clippers and counterfeiters is laid on “maintenaunce / Of grete folk” (150–51: the influence of important people), but Hoccleve is careful to add “I speke of no persone in special” (159: I’m not referring to any person in particular) and also to say that it is kept hidden from the king—he later puts the blame on the personified abstraction “Lady Moneye” (184). Growing increasingly vehement, he refers to the criminals as “that false secte” (191) and to the crimes as “stynkyng errour” (193) and “cursid falshede” (196); it is as if he were identifying them with the heretical Lollards. Finally he apologizes for “my long tale” (198), and the Friend asks if he intended to have composed anything more than the Complaint. Hoccleve answers that, influenced by “a devout man” (235), he had in mind to translate a “smal tretice” in Latin called “Lerne for to Die” (205–06), for the spiritual benefit of himself and others, and then to have no more dealings with English. “Of age am I fifty wyntir and three” (246: I am fifty-­three years of age): he no longer takes pleasure in writing, and “The nyght approchith, it is fer past noon” (245). The precise number of years hints at autobiographical accuracy, while line 245 vaguely evokes the darkness and shadows with which Chaucer in The Parson’s Prologue prepares for the end of The Canterbury Tales. The Friend advises him to give up this idea at least until “right wel stablisshid be thy brayn” (307: your brain is completely restored), but Hoccleve objects that his Complaint shows that “it standith wel with me” (318), and a true friend would not disbelieve him. This leads into the “digression” on friendship (lines 323–64). The Friend insists that he really is Hoccleve’s friend, but warns him that his earlier breakdown was caused by “studie” (379) and that the same thing may happen again. The Friend’s depiction of Hoccleve as an obsessive student— joie hastow for to muse Upon thy book and therein stare and poure Til that it thy wit consume and devoure. (404–6) ——

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[You take pleasure in pondering over your book, staring and poring in it, till it consumes and eats up your wits.]

—is an exaggerated version of Chaucer’s self-­representation in his dream poems as a solitary reader. As the eagle tells Chaucer in the House of Fame, once he has finished his daytime work of “rekenynges” (653), Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed ys thy look. (655–58)35 —— [You go home at once to your house, and sit as dumb as a stone at another book, until your sight is completely dazed.]

Here for once the Hocclevian subject derives from Chaucer’s first person rather than what he writes about third persons, but with an important difference. Chaucer’s solitary reading is productive: the eagle has earlier told him that Joves halt hyt gret humblesse And vertu eke, that thou wolt make A-­nyght ful ofte thyn hed to ake In thy studye, so thou writest, And ever mo of love enditest (630–34) —— [Jove considers it great humility and virtue that, by writing so much, you will often make your head ache at night in your study, and you always write about love]

while in The Parliament of Fowls, if the product of reading is not writing at least it may lead to better dreams: I wok, and othere bokes tok me to, To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey.

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I hope, ywis, to rede so som day That I shal mete som thyng for to fare The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare. (695–99) —— [I woke, and picked up other books to read, and I still keep on reading. I hope, indeed, that one day my reading will make me dream of something that will make things better for me; and so I won’t give up reading.]

In the Dialogue the Friend does not acknowledge that Hoccleve’s obsessive studying brings any such benefits, and, in the same stanza in which he describes Hoccleve as reading till he loses his wits, he unflatteringly compares reading to theft: Hoccleve’s inability to resist reading even after his breakdown makes him like a thief who has escaped the gallows once yet still cannot resist pursuing his “sory craft” (403: wretched trade). Hoccleve replies that the breakdown was caused by sickness, not study, and that he has waited “a tyme resonable” (442). The Friend is finally convinced, but begs Hoccleve not to overtax himself with “hard mateere” (496). Hoccleve assures him that if he finds anything too difficult, “Adieu, my studie! anoon my book I close” (504: farewell, my studies! I’ll close my book at once), a line that reads like a combination of the versions of a single line in the two texts of the prologue to The Legend of Good Women. There Chaucer writes of how devoted he is to books, but when May comes, “Farewel my bok and my devocioun!” (F 39) or “Farwel my stodye, as lastynge that sesoun!” (G 39: farewell to my study, as long as that time of year lasts). Hoccleve would surely have had the Legend in mind, because at this stage, if not earlier, he had arrived at the intention of making the Dialogue, on the model of the prologue to the Legend, at once an apology for his earlier work already in circulation and an explanation for the existence of a succeeding collection of narratives. The Friend encourages Hoccleve to go ahead on this basis, and in the passage quoted above, recalls that he said he owed a book to the Duke of Gloucester. This book is what Hoccleve now intends

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to write on the duke’s return from France, but he asks the Friend’s advice as to what would be most suitable. He had thought of translating Vegetius, De re militari, but Gloucester has shown by his feats of arms at Cherbourg, Cotentin, and elsewhere that he has nothing to learn about knighthood, and Hoccleve, cowardly clerk that he is, is certainly unqualified to tell of his exploits: And thogh every act come had to myn ere, To expresse hem my spirit wolde han fere, Lest I his thank parchaunce mighte abregge Thurgh unkonnynge if I hem sholde allegge. (585–88) —— [And even if every deed had come to my ears, my spirit would be frightened to express them, in case, if I did mention them, my lack of skill might perhaps make me fall short of the gratitude due to him.]

And so once more he asks for advice. The Friend says that it needs thought to decide on something that will be “plesant and agreable” (634) to the duke, and it is here that Hoccleve inserts the extract from Geoffrey of Vinsauf on the need to plan one’s work in advance. (In the holograph Durham manuscript Hoccleve quotes the beginning of Geoffrey’s Latin as a marginal gloss.) So Hoccleve asks the Friend to help him, and is advised that, it being now Lent, he should repent, confess, and make satisfaction for his previous misogynist writings and thus obtain “pardon . . . and remissioun” (689) of these sins against the religion of love. The materiality of his previous writings is once more evoked: they are “in whyt depeynted . . . with blak” (670: written with black ink on white parchment), and they “fille wolde a quarter sak” (669: would fill an eight-­bushel sack). The reader must be aware that the black and white text he is reading is no less material. (I refer to the reader as “he” because, as I have mentioned, despite the dedication of one copy to the Countess of Westmorland, the whole poem sees women through men’s eyes and seems to assume a male public.)

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This is where the Friend invokes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in the passage mentioned in chapter 3, as “auctrice” (694) or female authority for the truth that women do not like being criticized by men, and urges that Hoccleve should now make good in writing the harm he has done in writing. But, Hoccleve objects, surely that will not give pleasure to the duke? Ah, but it will, says the Friend, because the duke enjoys “daliance” (706: friendly conversation) with ladies, always of course within the bounds of “honestee” (705: respectability); and perhaps he will show them “this” book (707)— one of many ambiguous proximal deictics, since it could refer to the book Hoccleve is going to write or (as textual deixis) to the book that we are reading, in which Hoccleve and the Friend are part of the fiction. Then surely, as Hoccleve’s “good lord” (708), the duke will encourage ladies—always imagined as “they,” a group about whom male generalization is possible—to forgive him. The whole discussion is jokingly antifeminist, with an irony on both sides that for a while makes it hard to tell who is supposed to be speaking. Ellis in his edition attributes lines 722–38 to Hoccleve, while Burrow in his attributes them to the Friend. This empirically unfixed position for the “I” is characteristic of autography (and in a medieval manuscript the ambiguity need not be resolved because there would be no quotation marks). The Bible is cited in contradictory ways: God told the serpent that “the woman . . . shall crush thy head” (Genesis 3:15), and since woman was granted such power, “To breke a mannes heed it seemeth light” (728: it seems easy [to her] to break a man’s head); therefore no man should think it shameful if “his wyf do to him that selve same” (731: his wife should do the very same to him). Thus, though Holy Writ bears witness that men should dominate women, “It is the revers in probacioun” (735: it’s the opposite when put to the proof). At this point the Friend abruptly asks, “Thomas, how is it twixt thee and thy feere?” (739: Thomas, how are things between you and your mate?). Hoccleve declines to give a straight answer to this ad hominem (and ad mulierem) question but mumbles that if he appeared discontented, his wife might well scorn and

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disdain him. So the Friend tells him that, if he wishes to lead a quiet life, he should seek the goodwill of women: Whatso they seyn, take al in pacience. Bettre art thow nat than thy fadres before, Thomas, han been. Be right wel waar therfore. (747–49) —— [Whatever they say, accept it all patiently. You’re no better, Thomas, than your forefathers have been. So be very, very careful.]

It is characteristic of medieval clerkly antifeminism to claim to be based on universal and unchanging male experience, and correspondingly for it to be desperately repetitious in doctrine. Hoccleve manages it with a fairly light hand (compared, say, with Lydgate), but it may be hard for modern readers, as likely to be female as male and no longer convinced by these allegedly timeless generalizations about the sexes, to appreciate the skill with which he plays the game of antifeminism, or indeed to see it as a game at all. Mrs. Hoccleve’s views are not sought; the Wife of Bath—herself not a woman but a male textual performance—is the only female in sight. It is not until now that Hoccleve asks what precisely he has done to offend women, and the Friend answers that his specific offence is “th’epistle of Cupyde” (754), which has made women “swart wrooth and ful evele apaid” (756: black with anger and very ill pleased). Hoccleve’s defense returns to familiar Chaucerian territory. Like Alceste in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women, exculpating Chaucer of his alleged heresies against the religion of Love in the Romaunt of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde, Hoccleve points out that he was not “auctour” of The Letter of Cupid: I nas in that cas but a reportour Of folkes tales: as they seide, I wroot. I nat affermed it on hem, God woot. (761–63)

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—— [In that matter I was nothing but a reporter of other people’s stories: as they said, so I wrote. God knows, I didn’t affirm it against them (i.e., women).]

It is significant that Hoccleve omits the Legend’s idea that writings critical of women are heresies against the God of Love’s religion: by 1420 heresy was a much more dangerous topic than it had been in the closing decades of the fourteenth century, and one by which Hoccleve himself was terrified. He goes on to generalize: Whoso that shal reherce a mannes sawe, As that he seith moot he seyn and nat varie (764–65) —— [Whoever is to repeat someone’s words must say what he says, and not vary from it]

This is close to Chaucer’s statement in the General Prologue, when he explains that he is not to be blamed for anything offensive in the pilgrims’ tales, because: Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan Everich a word. . . . (I 731–33) —— [Whoever is to repeat what someone has said must repeat every word as closely as ever he can. . . .]

The following discussion of whether The Letter of Cupid is really antifeminist brings out the uncertainty of the Letter’s tone. The Friend takes his leave, with the wish that “The love and thank of wommen God thee seende” (791: God may send you the love and gratitude of women), but he promises to return before Hoccleve has finished the book that he is now going to write in order to win the love of women. He will “oversee” it (796) and make sure that

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nothing in it would get Hoccleve into trouble—with the implication that Hoccleve cannot be trusted to understand the effect of his own writing. Hoccleve ends the Dialogue with three stanzas addressed to ladies, assuring them that “I am al othir to yow than yee weene” (811: I am quite different [in my attitude] toward you than you suppose) and saying that he will translate a story from the Gesta Romanorum “in honur and plesance” (821) of women, or else flee to France, “Thogh I nat shapen be to prike or praunce” (824: though I am not shaped to spur or prance on a horse)—another reminder of the clerk’s inferiority to the knight. The persistent uncertainty about the status of the text we are reading is brought out by the way Hoccleve introduces the final three stanzas: “Lo heer, the fourme how I hem obeye” (803: See here, this is the form in which I [will] obey them [i.e., women]). The line is modeled on one near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, “Lo here, the forme of olde clerkis speche” (V 1854: See here, this is the form of ancient scholars’ speech). Both lines are examples of textual deixis, with “here” pointing to the text in which it occurs, but whereas Chaucer’s line looks back on the almost-­completed work, Hoccleve’s looks forward, introducing the envoy-­like stanzas as something that he is about to write and yet that for any reader already exists as the next part of the text. (Since Middle English has no separate future tense, “obeye” might have either a present or a future sense.) To a greater extent than Simpson acknowledges, the fictive reality of the Dialogue is constructed out of literary sources and is intended to be recognized as such. It is obvious enough that the later stages are modeled on the prologue to The Legend of Good Women, with Hoccleve treating his Letter of Cupid, adapted from Christine de Pizan, as a book that has given offense to ladies, that can be defended as no more than a translation, but that may nevertheless require him to do literary penance. The relation to Chaucer is manifest but also bafflingly complex. Christine de Pizan wrote her Epistre au dieu d’amours as a genuine defense of women against the misogynistic tradition; Hoccleve’s selective translation, written under the influence of Chaucer’s Legend, destabilizes it, making

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possible, though not requiring, a reading that brings out the absurdity of attributing a defense of women to Cupid, the patron of the courtly tradition that sees them only through male eyes. Hoccleve adds a passage in praise of the virgin martyr Saint Margaret, thus making it necessary for Cupid to explain in some embarrassment (using the royal “we”), But undirstondith, we commende hir noght By encheson of hir virginitee. Trustith right wel, it cam nat in our thoght, For ay we werreie ageyn chastitee, And evere shal. . . . (428–32) —— [But understand that we are not commending her by reason of her virginity. Trust very well, that didn’t come into our mind, for we always make war on chastity, and always will. . . .]

The Letter of Cupid also stresses the exaggeration and distortion necessary to invert misogyny. Hoccleve points out, too, that the Friend has not read the whole of The Letter of Cupid (as indeed the Friend admits) and would interpret it differently if he had. That makes it all the more difficult for us to interpret Hoccleve. Throughout the Dialogue there is also a running debt to a Chaucerian source more unexpected than the ones I have mentioned. The Friend’s first words, as we have seen, name Hoccleve, but in a form that questions his self-­presence: “How, Hoccleve, art thow heere?” Thereafter the Friend addresses Hoccleve as “Thomas,” and the more often he repeats that name, the more one senses an attempt to impose on him, under the guise of familiarity, an identity that is in fact alien, to pin him down as what the Friend would have him be. The twenty-­four occurrences of “Thomas” are as follows: “Thomas, as thou me lovest, telle anoon” (10) “Thomas, suffre me speke and be not wrooth” (20) “Nay, Thomas, waar, do nat so” (25)

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“O now, good Thomas, what?” (203) “Yis, Thomas, yis” (295, 703, 754) “Yis, Thomas, herkne a word, and be souffrable [patient]” (369) “O Thomas, holdist thow it a prudence / Reed weyve, and wirk aftir thyn owne wit?” (449–50: O Thomas, do you consider it prudent to reject counsel, and act in accordance with your own judgment?) “Forsoothe, Thomas, to my conceit, yis” (473: Indeed, Thomas, as I understand it, yis) “Now Thomas, by the feith I to God owe” (484) “Sikir, Thomas, if thow do in swich wyse / As that thow seist, I am ful wel content” (512–13: For sure, Thomas, if you act in accordance with what you say, I am entirely content) “Thomas, than this book haast thow to him ment?” (539: Thomas, then did you intend this book for him?) “O no, pardee, Thomas, o no, ascaunce [not at all]” (620) “Wel, Thomas, trowest thow his hy noblesse / Nat rekke what mateere that it be?” (624–25: Well, Thomas, do you suppose that His Noble Highness doesn’t care what the subject matter may be?) “O Thomas, many a throwe / Smertith the fool for lak of good avys” (649–50: O Thomas, many a time the fool feels pain for lack of good advice) “Thomas, sauf bettre avys I holde it good . . .” (661: Thomas, in the absence of better advice I consider it good . . .) “By wordes writen, Thomas, yilde thee” (698: Submit, Thomas, in written words) “That thow repente it sholdest ay [always], Thomas” (721) “Thomas, how is it twixt thee and thy feere?” (738: Thomas, how are things between you and your mate?) “Now, Thomas, if thee list to lyve in ese . . .” (743: Now Thomas, if you wish to live in comfort . . .) “Bettre art thow nat than thy fadres before, / Thomas, han been” (748–49: You are no better, Thomas, than your forefathers have been)

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“‘Thomas, I noot, for nevere it yit I say.’ / ‘No, freend?’ ‘No, Thomas’ ” (782–83: ‘Thomas, I don’t know, because I never saw it.’ ‘No, friend?’ ‘No, Thomas’) “Thomas, how so it be, do as I seide” (785: Thomas, however it may be, do as I said) “And, Thomas, now adieu and fareweel” (797)36

When these repeated addresses are brought together, it is easy to see that nearly all of them, whether commands, admonishments, contradictions, or questions, put Hoccleve in an inferior position, an effect heightened by the fact that, while the Friend addresses Hoccleve with the familiar “thou,” Hoccleve addresses him with the respectful “ye” or “yow.” It must be remembered, too, that Middle English “yis,” occurring eight times in conjunction with “Thomas,” has a more emphatic sense than modern English “yes”: like the French si, it tends to imply contradiction of an opposing view, and of course it is especially emphatic in the three occurrences of the repetitive “Yis, Thomas, yis.” The Friend addresses Hoccleve as if he were an adult speaking to a child, and in a reversal of the situation in the preamble to The Regement of Princes, it is the adviser who is the dominant party, and advice or counsel here seems less helpful than overbearing. The unexpected Chaucerian source for this systematic use of a Christian name to bully the person addressed is The Summoner’s Tale. There a hypocritical flattering friar visits a wealthy but sick householder whose name is also Thomas, in the hope of siphoning off some of his wealth in return for the spiritual benefits that will allegedly be gained from the friar’s prayers. The friar incessantly repeats the householder’s name in addressing him, just as Hoc­ cleve’s friend does: “‘Deus hic [God be here]!’ quod he, ‘O Thomas, freend, good day!’ ” (III 1770) “‘Thomas’, quod he, ‘God yelde [reward] yow!’ ” (1772) “O Thomas, je vous dy, Thomas! Thomas!” (1832)

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“But herkne, now, Thomas, what I shal seyn” (1918) “Thomas, Thomas! So moote I ryde or go [as I may ride or walk] . . .” (1942) “O Thomas, dostow so?” (1954) “Thomas, that jape nys nat worth a myte” (1961: Thomas, that trick isn’t worth a farthing) “Nay, nay, Thomas, it may no thyng be so!” (1966) “Thomas, noght of youre tresor I desire” (1974) “And therfore, Thomas, trowe me if thee leste [believe me if you please]” (1985) “And, Thomas, yet eft-­soones I charge thee” (1992: And, Thomas, yet a second time I direct you) “What nedeth yow, Thomas, to maken stryf?” (2000) “Now, Thomas, leeve brother, lef thyn ire [give up your anger]” (2089) “Now help, Thomas, for hym that harwed helle [for the sake of Christ who harrowed hell]!” (2107) “So God me save, Thomas, by youre leve . . .” (2112) “Now Thomas, help, for seinte charitee!” (2119)

There are many differences between The Summoner’s Tale and the Dialogue, the most obvious being that one is a fabliau and the other a component part of an autographic dit. That Hoccleve should have thought of The Summoner’s Tale when writing the Dialogue suggests that what interested him was something relatively technical, the vocative repetition of a Christian name, and beyond that the human situation of dominance and submission conveyed by the repetition. There is no sign that the difference in genre concerned him or that it had occurred to him to read the Chaucer tale as an expression of the consciousness of its fictional speaker. Other, subtler differences include the fact that Chaucer’s householder, though in his sickbed, has more power than Hoccleve’s “I” (and is eventually able to triumph over the friar by deploying the ultimate deterrent of a fart) and that the Friend is correspondingly more overbearing than the friar and never needs to employ flattery

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to get what he wants. It was mere coincidence, of course, that the name Chaucer gave the householder was the same as Hoccleve’s real name, but I suspect that the name “Thomas” came to have even more resonance for Hoccleve than one’s own given name usually does, as a result of the fact that he, who regarded Chaucer as his literary father, shared that name with Chaucer’s actual son. Whether or not that was so, it was surely recollection of The Summoner’s Tale that led Hoccleve to have the name “Thomas” used by the Friend as an instrument of domination, somewhat in the way cold-­calling telephone salespeople now attempt to be persuasive by addressing the victims they have never met by their given names. And, as usual, we find Hoccleve here applying to his first person a method of belittlement that Chaucer had applied to a third person. Naming is obviously not an act of single and simple significance, and Hoccleve uses it in such a way as to raise questions repeatedly about name, identity, and presence. The inner life evoked by the Dialogue, constructed out of recognizable literary fragments, keeps on dissolving into a completely free textuality, unanchored by any single voice. As in the manuscripts of The Regement of Princes, though less explicitly, Hoccleve’s text calls the reader’s attention to the image of Chaucer, and the image of Chaucer points back at Hoccleve’s text.

Chapter 7

B o k en h am ’ s A ut o g r a p h ies

The second fifteenth-­ century poet in the Chaucerian tradition whose autographic writings I wish to examine, Osbern Bokenham, is less well known than Hoccleve. To judge from the survival of manuscripts, he was far less widely read in his own time, though I hope, and think it likely, that interest in him will increase in future years. In the lectures on which this book is based I jokingly suggested that a young medievalist looking to make a quick scholarly profit should not buy shares in Hoccleve, whose value in terms of academic fashion had probably reached its peak, but would do better to invest in Bokenham, whose price had not yet been driven up so high. That was in 2007, when it was still possible to make jokes about the stock market, but my advice, though differently phrased, would remain the same, both because of the intrinsic merit and distinctive interest of Bokenham’s work and for the fortuitous reason that in 2004 a manuscript was discovered containing a large number of his writings in verse and prose, many of them previously unknown. Bokenham’s exact dates are uncertain, but he was born about 1393 (probably in the Norfolk village now called Old Buckenham1), and he may have been still alive in 1467. Thus he belongs to a later generation of Chaucer’s followers than Hoccleve—Chaucer’s grandsons rather than his sons. Unlike Chaucer and Hoccleve, but like many other English fifteenth-­century poets, including John Lydgate, John Capgrave, 209

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and John Skelton, Bokenham was a cleric, in the sense of being in holy orders. He was an Augustinian friar, who studied in his order’s house at Cambridge, rising to the level of doctor of divinity, and spent most of his life based in the friary at Stoke-­by-­Clare in Suffolk. By birth and residence, then, he was an East Anglian, and in his time East Anglia was the most prosperous area of England and a major cultural and religious center. (The three Johns mentioned above all had East Anglian links: Lydgate as a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk; Capgrave as an Augustinian friar, like Bokenham, but at Lynn—now King’s Lynn—in Norfolk; and Skelton as rector for many years of Diss, also in Norfolk.) The Augustinians, like the other orders of friars, were not enclosed, and Bokenham traveled widely, not only within East Anglia, where he had many connections among the nobility and gentry, but also abroad: he specifically mentions visits to Italy and Spain. In 1461 and 1463 he was vicar general for meetings of the Augustinians’ provincial chapter—a man of some eminence, then, whose interests were both local and international. At one point he asserts that “spekyn and wrytyn I wyl pleynly / Aftyr the language of Suthfolk speche” (4063–64: I will speak and write plainly in accordance with the spoken language of Suffolk), but at another he refers rather grandly to “The laste tyme I was in Itayle” (108: the last time I was in Italy). His poetry similarly ranges between pungent colloquialism and a Latinate high style in touch with classical mythology and through it with what T. S. Eliot called “the mind of Europe.”2 None of Bokenham’s works can be described as famous, but the least unread, and the one I shall discuss in this chapter, is a group of lives of female saints, now generally known as the Legendys of Hooly Wummen, the title supplied by the editor of the Early English Text Society edition, Mary Serjeantson. The manuscript from which Serjeantson edited this collection, the only one then known, British Library MS Arundel 327, has no title, but she explains that she took her title from a passage in the preliminary material to the vita of Mary Magdalene, in which Bokenham refers to

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dyvers legendys wych my rudnesse From Latyn had turnyd into our language Of hooly wummen. (5038–40)3 —— [Various legends of holy women which, in my clumsy way, I had translated from Latin into our language.]

The Arundel collection contains vitae in verse of thirteen saints, all female and in most cases adapted from the Legenda aurea. Interspersed among these are autographic passages in the form of substantial prologues and of interludes in two of the vitae. These passages indicate, among other things, that some of the vitae were commissioned by or presented to specific members of the East Anglian nobility and gentry, including such important ladies as Isabel Bourchier, Countess of Eu (sister to Richard, Duke of York), and Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Oxford. A note at the end of the manuscript4 identifies Bokenham as the author and explains that the collection was put together in Cambridge in 1447 by another Augustinian friar, Thomas Burgh, for the benefit of a “holy place of nunnys” where his sister was enclosed. In a preamble to the first item in the collection, a vita of Saint Margaret, Burgh is addressed by Bokenham as a friend. The endnote and the separate dedications of several of the legends would seem to indicate that the Arundel legendary was a compilation for which Bokenham was not primarily responsible, but despite this, most modern commentators have claimed or assumed that the volume has a significant aesthetic and ideological structure attributable to Bokenham himself. Three such commentators are Sheila Delany, Carroll Hilles, and Catherine Sanok. Of these, Delany proposes the most elaborate theory. She argues first that the Arundel legendary is modeled, subtly but in some detail, on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, writing that, in a curious and perhaps unique episode in literary history, Bokenham parodies his predecessor’s parody in order to

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rehabilitate the original. If Chaucer parodies hagiography ultimately to validate it, if his aim is expose the moral shortfall of desire, Bokenham misreads Chaucer to criticize (what he sees as) Chaucer’s courtly classical jeu d’esprit and to revalidate orthodox hagiography in an unambiguous way. . . . I believe that Bokenham’s selection of lives and his arrangement of them were deliberately aligned with the sequence in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women.5

In Delany’s view, Bokenham saw Chaucer as a “courtly classicizer” and mounted an “implicit critique” of his style for its “abuse of eloquence”—necessarily implicit, as she sees it, because the Lancastrians’ posthumous laureation of Chaucer made it dangerous to criticize him directly. Further, Delany claims that “Bokenham deliberately produced a somaticized text; that is, he meant his text to be seen as a body, specifically a female body, at first fragmented but finally reassembled.” Moreover, this female body was also for Bokenham the body politic, and Delany sees him as giving expression to “a partisan Yorkist politics,” so that “to choose to compile an all-­female hagiography was the first step in the statement of a complex and forward-­looking social vision.”6 Hilles accepts much of Delany’s argument, and she too believes that the Arundel collection has “a meaningful and intentional structure, and that the legends and their prologues show the progressive development of an authorial voice as Bokenham works out his relationship to the classicizing, aureate tradition of writing represented by Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate.” Like Delany, Hilles sees Bokenham as favoring an “unadorned style” that opposes this aureate tradition, but she goes further than Delany in claiming that “the links Bokenham establishes between the fertile bodies of his female patrons and the spiritually generative power of the bodies of the legendary’s female saints . . . draw attention to the legitimacy of, and even confer divine authorization on, Yorkist monarchical ambitions.”7 Sanok, finally, sees Bokenham as imagining a “feminine literary community as an alternative to the contentious political world

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of fifteenth-­century England.” In her view, “Bokenham’s representation of a woman’s devotional and narrative desire organizes a distinct and conspicuously gendered canon.” More specifically, she suggests that references to witchcraft in the vita of Saint Margaret would have recalled the accusation of witchcraft against Eleanor of Cobham, Gloucester’s wife, though once the betrothal of Henry VI to another Margaret (of Anjou) became known, “Bokenham’s legend of her name saint would be more likely to have been read as flattery to her than as sympathy for the duchess of Gloucester. This is, admittedly, conjecture. . . .”8 As with Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, it would seem that interpretations of Bokenham’s legendary in terms of contemporary politics are indeed largely conjectural, so that each scholar has her own interpretation, and there is no general agreement as to what the poet may have intended or his readers understood. (And, of course, whereas the Regement is explicitly concerned with the principles of rule, the explicit concern of the legendary is with saintliness, and any political significance it may have is only implied.) On the basis of the Arundel manuscript alone, it was possible for scholars to reach conclusions likely to encourage skepticism about recent readings of the kind I have been summarizing. One such scholar is A. S. G. Edwards, who established in 1994 that the hands of three scribes are evident in this manuscript: one responsible for the first vita, that of Saint Margaret, with its prologue; a second responsible for the second vita, that of Saint Anne, with its prologue; and a third responsible for the remaining vitae and their prologues. This and other codicological details make it likely, according to Edwards, that “the creation of this manuscript was in some respects a rather piecemeal affair,” with nothing in the first part “to suggest any larger design or plan” and “no controlling schematic or other necessity to the sequence of legends as we now have it.” Edwards persuasively suggests that what Burgh had available as he arranged for the production of the Arundel manuscript was “not a single exemplar, but a series of separate quires or booklets containing Bokenham’s fair copies.”9 Thus it would be Burgh, not Bokenham, who was responsible for the choice and sequence of legends, and there

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would not necessarily or even probably be any overall authorial meaning. Edwards’s proposal is supported by his observation that the opening of Bokenham’s vita of Saint Dorothy is found on the final surviving page of a different fifteenth-­century manuscript,10 which presumably once contained a complete text of this one of the Arundel vitae, circulating independently of the others. If Delany, Hilles, or Sanok had given serious consideration to Edwards’s brief study, they might have been led to question their assumption of what Hilles calls a “meaningful and intentional structure” imposed by the poet on the whole collection. The discovery in 2004 of a new manuscript of Bokenham’s saints’ lives has made that assumption seem still more questionable.11 In another work of Bokenham’s, the prose Mappula Angliae, he refers to an “englische boke the whiche y have compiled of legenda aurea and of other famous legendes at the instaunce of my specialle frendis” and lists a number of the vitae contained in it, including those of saints Cedde, Felix, Edward, Oswald, “and many other seyntis of Englond.”12 This book cannot be the Arundel collection, which does not include these vitae or those of any other male or English saints, and for long the scholarly consensus about Bokenham’s “englische boke” was as stated by Serjeantson in 1938: “Nothing more is known of the whole work, which may have perished” (xviii). In 2004, however, in the course of cataloguing the library of Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford House, the Faculty of Advocates came upon a manuscript that was identified by Simon Horobin as being this long lost “englische boke.” As described by Horobin, “the manuscript contains a Middle English prose translation of the Legenda Aurea, supplemented with a number of other saints’ Lives, in both prose and verse, not found in the Legenda.”13 One of the scribes responsible for this newly discovered manuscript was also the copyist of the single manuscript of another work generally attributed to Bokenham, a translation of part of Claudian’s De consulatu Stilichonis. Nine of the seventeen verse vitae in the Abbotsford manuscript also appear in the Arundel legendary; four of the thirteen Arundel vitae are therefore missing from it, but the

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Abbotsford manuscript has lost some quires, and Horobin is able to show convincingly that these vitae would have been on the quires that are lacking. The Abbotsford versions of the vitae found in both manuscripts differ from the corresponding Arundel texts, in that they omit the autographic passages that will be my main concern in this chapter, many of which relate to the commissioning of individual vitae by, or their dedication to, specific persons. On the other hand, Horobin notes that in some of the vitae that appear only in Abbotsford, Bokenham “adds material based upon his own experiences to supplement that derived from his sources.” As an example he mentions that Bokenham explains in the verse vita of Saint Winifred that he has no personal evidence of the miracle by which stones in the saint’s well at Holywell are covered with red spots, but whan y was there myn hoost told me That yt soth was wythowte drede, For hymself had seyin yt doon in dede. —— [When I was there, my host told me that it was true without doubt, because he had actually seen it happen himself.]

And in the prose vita of Saint Laurence, Bokenham adds, concerning another miracle, “And as I remembre me weel the fryste tyme that I was at Rome in Pope Martyns tyme I saw the same myracle writyn on a table [tablet] hangynge on the north syde of his tumbe.”14 The Abbotsford manuscript is being edited for the Early English Text Society by Horobin and at the time of this writing has not been published, but for my present purpose that does not matter, because the passages in the verse lives on which I wish to focus are precisely those present in Arundel but evidently missing from Abbotsford. One significance of this newly discovered manuscript, however, is that it provides strong support for a skeptical view of the recent attempts to read the Arundel legendary as a unified text,

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devised by Bokenham to serve a political purpose and/or to convey a detailed critique of The Legend of Good Women and of the classicizing poetics of the Chaucer tradition. Horobin points out that the Arundel vitae appear in Abbotsford in a different order from that allegedly relating them to Chaucer’s Legend, an order based on the liturgical calendar; and his overall assessment is that “the most likely explanation for the [Arundel] Legends is that it represents a selection of Bokenham’s work, assembled at a particular time and intended for a specific audience. . . . The manuscript’s particular focus on female lives seems more likely to have been driven by the interests of its intended readership than by the author’s political alignment.”15 I do not think the arrangement of the lives and prologues in the Arundel manuscript is entirely random. It seems likely, for example, that Margaret was placed first because its preliminary material could appropriately serve as a prologue to the whole collection, and Elizabeth was placed last as the most recent and only modern saint. It is of course possible that Bokenham played some part in organizing the Arundel collection, and even that he composed passages for that specific purpose.16 On the other hand, there remain striking discrepancies. For example, in the legend of Saint Agnes, one of those that has an autographic prologue, the “I” of the vita itself is that of Saint Ambrose, supposed author of Bokenham’s source, and the “you” is the “holy virgyns” addressed by that source: Y, servanht of Cryst, bysshop Ambrose, To you holy virgyns sende gretynge. (4099–4100)

As with Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, I suggest that modern scholars have been too ready to look for intricate literary and ideological patterns that would establish the unity of the Arundel Legends, and too willing to persuade themselves that they have found them. More generally, as I have been arguing elsewhere in this book, scholarship has been reluctant to accept that a medieval text may legitimately be compilatory and rather loosely organized, and

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to recognize the pleasure that medieval readers might have found in free composition and the evocation of experientiality that it makes possible. Like Hoccleve, Bokenham looks back to Chaucer as the originator and master of the poetic tradition in which he is himself an unworthy successor, but now, for him as for other fifteenth-­ century poets, Chaucer is not the sole master: Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate are regarded as joint founders of a tradition within which recollections of specific passages by Chaucer are vaguer and less common. The trio of founders is mentioned four times in the Arundel collection, always embedded in humility topoi. In the vita of Saint Margaret, Bokenham writes that if only he possessed the “crafth of descrypcyounn” (407), he would fully describe the saint’s beauty, But sekyr I lakke bothe eloquens And kunnyng swych maters to dilate, For I dwellyd nevere wyth the fresh rethoryens, Gower, Chauncers, ner wyth Lytgate (Wych lyvyth yet, lest he deyed late) (414–18) —— [But certainly I lack both eloquence and skill to amplify such matters, for I have never dwelt with the fresh rhetoricians, Gower and Chaucer, nor with Lydgate (who is still alive, unless he died recently)]

Bokenham presumably wrote these lines between 1443 (the date given in the preamble to Saint Margaret) and 1447 (the date of the Arundel collection), and Lydgate’s long life did not end until 1449. One might be tempted to suspect a joke, along the lines of Dorothy Parker’s comment on being told that former president Calvin Coolidge was dead—“How do they know?”—but there is no other indication that Bokenham’s admiration for Lydgate was not genuine. By the time he wrote the prologue to the vita of Saint Agnes, Bokenham knew that his fellow East Anglian was not yet

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dead. He imagines that when he begs Pallas for her favor, she sternly tells  him, Thou commyst to late, for gadyrd up be The most fresh flourys by personys thre, Of wych tweyne han fynysshyd here fate, But the thrydde hath [A]tropos yet in cherté— As Gower, Chauncer and Joon Lytgate. (4054–58) —— [You come too late, for the freshest flowers have been gathered up by three persons, two of whom have completed their fated lives, while the third is still regarded with favor by Atropos17— namely Gower, Chaucer, and John Lydgate.]

The compiler of the Arundel legendary was content, like Hoccleve discussing the weighing of coins in the Dialogue, not to erase an earlier passage that a later one corrected,18 and thus to evoke the passage of time not only in the saint’s life but in that of the poet and his tradition, and to embrace what Morson calls “a genuine process of unpredetermined becoming.” “Thou comest too late”: a simple but powerful expression of the sense of belatedness that shadowed the minds of so many of Chaucer’s successors as they contemplated the master’s unmatchable achievement. The prologue to the vita of Saint Anne begins with a passage very similar to that in the vita of Saint Margaret, but it goes on to make a different application of the sense of belatedness: If I hadde cunnyng and eloquens My conceytes craftely to dilate, Als whilom dede the f[ry]sh rethoryens, Gowere, Chauncere, and now19 Lytgate, I wolde me besyn to translate Seynt Anne lyf into oure langage; But sekyr I fere to gynne so late, Lest men wolde ascryven it to dotage;

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For wel I know that fer in age I am runne, and my lyves date Aprochith fast, and the fers rage Of cruel deth—so wyl my fate Inevytable—hath at my gate Set hys carte to carye me hens; And I ne may ne can, thau I hym hate, Ageyn hys fors make resistens. (1401–16) —— [If I had the ingenuity and eloquence to amplify my ideas skillfully, as in the past did the fresh rhetoricians Gower and Chaucer and, in our time, Lydgate, I would apply myself to translate the life of Saint Anne into our language; but truly I am afraid of beginning so late, in case people should attribute it to aged folly; for I know well that I have reached a great age, and the end of my life is fast approaching, and cruel death, in his fierce anger—for so my unavoidable fate wills—has stopped his cart at my gate to carry me off; and, hate him though I may, I neither can nor may offer resistance to his force.]

(In this and subsequent quotations from Bokenham I emphasize occurrences of “now” to call attention to his insistence on proximality in relation to a shifting deictic center.) “I fere to gynne so late”—so late in life, at an age when, as the next stanza puts it, he would do better to “leve makynge” (1418: give up writing poetry) and devote himself to amending what is amiss in the way he lives. When Bokenham wrote these lines, he was only fifty or a little more. He had another twenty years to live, but he could not have known that, and in any case he was not writing an autobiography. Whether or not Bokenham expected to die soon, his “I” is autographic and is here a means by which he allows his work to be infected by the temporality and unpredictability of human existence. The fourth passage in which Bokenham mentions his predecessors is very near the end of the Arundel collection, in the vita of Saint Elizabeth. If readers want more examples than he has given of

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her “holy conversacyoun” (10521: holy way of life), he writes, they can turn to the Legenda aurea, but for himself it is best to make an end, For thow I had kunnyng for to ryme And eek to endyten as copyously As had Gower and Chaunce[r]s in ther tyme, Or as now hath the munk of Bery, Joon Lytgate, yet cowd not I Thys blyssyd wumman Elyzabeth commende After her merytys suffycyently, And therfore to secyn I now intende. (10529–35) —— [For even if I had the skill to compose verse and to write as copiously as Gower and Chaucer in their time, or as the monk of Bury, John Lydgate, now, I would still not be able to praise this blessed woman Elizabeth adequately in proportion to what she deserves, and so I now intend to cease.]

The stanza is firmly placed in a “now” that is both that of the line of poets (with Lydgate emerging from the trio as the still-­living successor to Gower and Chaucer) and that of the present of writing, a present in which writing is about to cease. Whoever collected the Arundel legends, this passage is well placed: less than a hundred lines from the end of the book. Bokenham writes sometimes in couplets and sometimes in stanzas, always in forms derived from Chaucer, such as rhyme royal and the eight-­line Monk’s Tale stanza. The variety of verse forms in the legendary suggests a keen and experimental interest in poetic craft. The most complex stanza is illustrated in lines 1401–16, quoted above, from the prologue to Saint Anne: a sixteen-­ line unit, rhyming ababbcbccbcbbaba—that is, a Monk’s Tale stanza followed by an inverted Monk’s Tale stanza on the same rhyme sounds. The Saint Anne prologue consists of six of these technically challenging stanzas. Moreover, if, as seems highly likely, Bokenham

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was the author of the translation from Claudian mentioned above,20 he was the inventor of a very rare medieval example of unrhymed nonalliterative English verse—an apparent attempt to find a vernacular equivalent to Claudian’s Latin hexameters, which in the one manuscript appear on pages facing the translation. Yet, as will be obvious from the extracts quoted in the preceding paragraph, Bokenham’s grasp of meter seems to have been very uncertain. At best, he mingles octosyllabic with decasyllabic lines, and at worst it is impossible to grasp his metrical intentions at all or even to tell whether his verse is intended to be syllabic or accentual. After Hoccleve, however, this is true of much fifteenth-­century English (as opposed to Scottish) verse in the Chaucerian tradition, in part as a result of changes in pronunciation. Bokenham, like his contemporaries, knew Chaucer’s work only in writing, and for all his professions of humility, he must have believed himself to be composing the same kind of verse as Chaucer. What Robert R. Edwards has written of Lydgate is perhaps even truer of Bokenham: “In general, the metrical features that Chaucer used occasionally and even then with a rhythmic purpose in mind become frequent and systematic. Chaucer’s metrical variants are the recurring elements of Lydgate’s metrical program.”21 In the main bodies of his legends, Bokenham shows himself to be a lively and often amusing storyteller, and one who makes effective use of verse forms to serve narrative purposes. This is not my chief topic, but I can briefly illustrate the point from the first legend, that of Saint Margaret. After an autographic preamble in couplets and a section in Monk’s Tale stanzas headed “Prologus,” Bokenham uses rhyme royal for the vita itself. He takes particular pleasure in the section of the story in which the saint confronts her supernatural adversaries as they appear to her in the form of a dragon and a devil. Having been violently scourged as a Christian at the command of the tyrannical pagan prefect Olibrius, and then confined to “a ryht derk presoun” (668), Margaret prays that she may see her enemies face to face. Her prayer is answered with a vengeance: “An huge dragoun, glasteryng as glas” (689), appears

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from a corner, lays his tongue under her heel (a detail taken from the Legenda aurea), and swallows her whole. But her cross does not suit the dragon’s digestion, and “He brast on two, and she scapyd harmlees” (714: he burst in two, and she escaped unharmed). That line is the last of a stanza, and it is one of many showing that Bokenham, when he chooses (or when he is inspired), can clinch a stanza with a confidently metrical conclusion. Earlier last-­line examples include “To whom alle prestys dede obecyaunce” (343: to whom all priests did obeisance), “The foure gret vertuhs clepyd cardynal” (427: the four great virtues that are called cardinal), “And they in helle suffryn peynys smerte” (525: and they suffer severe pains in hell), “Of gold and sylvyr wyth gret habundaunce” (546: with great abundance of gold and silver), and “In helle thy peyne shal ben endeles” (630: your sufferings in hell shall be eternal). After the explosion of the dragon, a devil appears to Margaret, and explains to her “Wyth a snevelyng voys” (721) that the dragon was his “dere brothyr” (722) and that he has come to take revenge. At this the saint womanfully seizes him by “his longe herys” (730) and tramples him underfoot. A great light “Illumyned sodeynly that derk presoun” (737), and a dove descends to welcome her to paradise. Having thanked God, Margaret turns back to the devil and demands that he should tell her where he comes from. At which, “Servaunt of Crist,” quod he, “I the preye Fro my nekke thy foot remeve aweye, And alle my werkys I wil the telle.” (746–48) —— [“Servant of Christ,” he said, “I beg you to lift your foot away from my neck, and I will tell you of all my activities.”]

And so of hyr jentylnesse, Owt of his nekke hyr foot remeve Softely she gan, and of his distresse

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Whan he hyr felt hym so releve, “Gramercy,” he seyd. . . . (750–54) —— [Out of her kindness she carefully began to remove her foot from his neck, and when he felt her relieving his distress in this way he said, “Thank you very much.” . . .]

He proceeds to give her useful information about the administration of hell and how he and his fellow devils have come to roam the earth, but now the time for “jentylnesse” is past: “This governance,” quod she, “forsothe is ylle, Wherfore go, Sathanas, hom to thy kyn.” And wyth that wurd, the erthe swelwyd hym yn. (775–77) —— [“This way of behaving,” she said, “is truly wrong, and so, Satan, go home to your kindred.” And with that word, the earth swallowed him up.]

That strong last line once more marks the end of a stanza, and of this episode. It seems clear that Bokenham greatly relishes such stories, treating them as entertainment in the manner of Middle English romances, while confident that it will make them all the more effectively edifying. For my purpose, though, his most interesting work comes in autographic passages that stand outside the hagiographic narratives and also in most cases outside the fairly brief prologues translated from the Legenda aurea. These original passages too must be intended to entertain, but if they tell stories at all, they are not those of the saints but of Bokenham’s composition of their legends. In them the experience-­effect is very strong, but there is no need to decide whether they are biographically reliable; it is enough to recognize their function as méta-­écriture. The chief examples of autography are the preamble to Saint Margaret (lines 1–240) and an interlude in her vita (869–938), part of the prologue to Saint

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Anne (1401–80), part of the prologue to Saint Agnes (4035–66) and also a brief epilogue (4708–35), the “prolocutory” to Saint Mary Magdalene (4982–5263), and a brief interlude in Saint Elizabeth (10521–36). These are what I shall discuss in the remainder of this chapter. The vitae in the Arundel collection are to a large extent translations from the Latin of Jacobus de Voragine, author of the Legenda aurea; Bokenham refers to him as “Januence,” Genovensis, because he was born in Genoa. Jacobus, then, was Bokenham’s source, but though the word “source” and its equivalents in other languages (fons, Quelle, and so on) imply a spontaneous springing up, a text is not simply a spontaneous overflow of its source; obviously enough, it comes into existence only through a later writer’s engagement with that source. Like Chaucer, Bokenham refers frequently to his dealings with sources. Often it is simply to state that he is following them: Nowe I have shewyd, aftyr the gospel, O this Maryis lyf a greth party; Of the remnaunht furth now wyl I tel, Lych as Januence yt doth dyscry (5731–34) —— [Now I have recounted, according to the Gospel, a great part of this Mary’s life; now I will proceed to tell of the remainder, just as Genovensis discloses it]

Sometimes, in a very Chaucerian way, it is to state his ignorance of them: “I kan in no wyse remembre me” (365), he writes, about the pagan ceremonies equivalent to christening, and “my wyt is schort” (1612), or I would be able to tell you more about Saint Anne’s genealogy. Sometimes (again in a Chaucerian manner) it is to tell us what we should read in order to learn about topics he has abbreviated or omitted so as to “eschewyn prolyxité” (1612)—one of his favorite phrases. Those wishing to read more praise of the Blessed Virgin, “lat hem looke / Of owre Ladyes lyf Jhon Lytgates

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booke” (2006–7: let them look into John Lydgate’s book of the life of Our Lady); to gain more knowledge of the early life of Saint Katherine, seek out My fadrys book, maystyr Joon Capgrave, Wych that but newly compyled he (6356–57) —— [The book of my spiritual father, master John Capgrave, which he has only recently put together]

and to learn more about dysentery, from which Saint Lucy’s mother suffered, read “Ypocras, Constantyn, or Galyen” (8992: Hippocrates, Constantinus Afer, or Galen22)—this in a twenty-­seven-­ line digression in which Bokenham tells us more about dysentery than most readers will wish to know. Sometimes it is to attribute to his source something he is unwilling to assert on his own authority: after Saint Agatha was tortured, an old man appeared to her and offered healing ointments, but when she said that she wished to be healed only by God, he vanished, “softly smylyng” (8697), and “Januence seyth that seynt Petyr yt was” (8704: Genovensis says it was Saint Peter). Sometimes it is to regret that his source does not reveal something we might like to know: how old Mary was when Joseph married her “I ne can devyse” (1626: I can’t recount), and “no scryptur I fynd that kan descrye [reveal]” (8359) any of the details of Saint Agatha’s ancestry. All these are recognizably Chaucerian gestures, and I think it all too likely that, as more attention comes to be paid to Bokenham, the next scholarly move will be to invent a fictional narrator, who, like the alleged Chaucerian narrators invented by critics over the past century, is naïve or unreliable or obtuse. My point is that, in Bokenham as well as in Chaucer, the effect of such first-­person interventions is to foreground not just the sources but the role of the poet as translator and commentator, at work in a present that runs alongside the past of the narratives. Still more is that the case with the more sustained autographic passages mentioned above.

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I have used the term “preamble” to refer to the opening 240 lines of the legend of Saint Margaret, which, like the much longer preamble to Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, form a freely composed autographic passage preceding a more formal prologus. Yet initially this preamble seems committed to imposing a predetermined, clerkly, intellectual scheme on the following text: Two thyngys owyth every clerk To advertysyn, begynnyng a werk, If he procedyn wyl ordeneelly: The fyrste is “what,” the secunde is “why” (1–4) —— [Every scholar should announce two things at the beginning of a work, if he wishes to proceed in an orderly way: the first is “what,” the second is “why”]

Bokenham goes on to refer to what “philosofyrs us do teche” (7) as the basis for his poetic theory, and what they teach is that a text is to be analyzed by determining its “foure causys” (6). So this is evidently to be a vernacular version of the “Aristotelian” accessus mentioned in chapter 2. For the moment Bokenham proceeds along the scholastic path: the efficient cause is “the auctour” (13), the material cause is “the begunne matere” (15: the subject matter taken up), the formal cause is the “forme ordinat” (20: the ordered form—that is, the forma tractandi, the shaping of the subject matter), and the final cause is the reason why the work was begun, the intentio auctoris: That is to seyne, what was the entent Of the auctour fynally, and what he ment. (23–24) —— [That is to say, what was the author’s final goal, and what did he intend.]

So from the auctour (meaning not, as would usually have been the case with Chaucer, the Latin source from which the vernacular text

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is derived, but the vernacular poet himself) we are led back to the auctour “and what he ment.” And the generalizing, impersonal, or third-­personal focus on order—proceeding “ordeneely” (3), “dew ordre” (18), “forme ordinat” (20)—rapidly dissolves into a fiction of presence involving the first and second persons: “Lo, thus ye seen mown” (25: Look, thus you may see), “But to oure purpoos” (29), As for the fyrste, whoso lyst to here, Certeyn the auctour was an Austyn frere, Whos name as now I ne wyl expresse (31–33) —— [As for the first, whoever cares to hear, the author was certainly an Augustinian friar, whose name I will not reveal for the moment]

For a few more lines the auctour remains a third person, whose name is not to be revealed in case dislike of him should rebound on the work and cause it to be thrown into “the angle of oblyvyoun” (40)—a forgotten corner or the corner of things forgotten. But then the pretense of a distinction between the clerkly expositor and the auctour of the werk to come is dropped, and they merge into a single “I”: And yet me thinkyth it were peté That my werk were hatyd for me; For this, I suppose . . . (41–43) —— [And yet it seems to me it would be a pity if my work were to be hated on account of myself; for this, I suppose . . .]

In its chatty way the preamble (to repeat Jacqueline Cer­quig­ lini’s formulation) “mimes speech in a piece of writing”: there are many references to listeners and to hearing—“whoso lyst to here” (31), “As they shul heryn wych lyst attende” (82: as those who choose to pay attention will hear)—but what Bokenham is producing is a werk (a word frequently repeated), a text in writing,

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which might then be read aloud for the benefit of listeners. He frequently refers to those two ways of receiving what he writes, as for example in the vita of Saint Elizabeth, where he mentions both “every wytty man . . . That dylygently redyth hyr legende” (9486–67: every intelligent man who reads her legend attentively) and “whoso abyde tyl hyr lyf red be” (9506: whoever will stay till her life has been read). The preamble proceeds discontinuously, skipping from topic to topic, yet always returning to the “I” whose namelessness at least protects him against the domineering appropriation that “Thomas” suffers at the hands of his friend in Hoccleve’s Dialogue: if my werk be sure, Lete not disdeyn it disfigure Of the auctour, I lowly beseche ...................... The matere wych I wil of wryte, Althow but rudely I kun endyte, Is the lyf of blyssyd Margarete (67–69, 73–75) —— [If my work is sound, let it not be disfigured by disdain for the author, I humbly beg . . . The matter about which I intend to write, though I know how to compose only clumsily, is the life of the blessed Margaret]

Bokenham is well grounded in the formal poetics that implies careful advance planning, but he uses the posture of humility to justify his escape from its requirements into a freer kind of writing. His knowledge of poetics is not only a matter of familiarity with the scholastic accessus: like Hoccleve, and like Chaucer before him, he knows Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, and knows it well enough to be aware that Geoffrey illustrates rhetorical devices even as he defines them, producing poetry as well as poetics, but Bokenham purports not to be capable of following in his steps23:

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The forme of procedyng artificyal Is in no wyse, ner poetycal, After the scole of the crafty clerk Galfryd of Ynglond, in his newe werk, Entytlyd thus, as I can aspye, Galfridus Anglicus in his Newe Poetrye, Enbelshyd wyth colours of rethoryk So plentevously, that fully it lyk In May was nevere no medewe sene Motleyd wyth flours on hys verdure grene; For neythyr Tullius, prynce of oure eloquence, Ner Demostenes of Grece, more affluence Nevere had in rethoryk, as it semyth me, Than had this Galfryd in hys degré; But forasmeche as I nevere dede muse In thylk crafty werk, I it now refuse (83–98) —— [The method of procedure is in no way artistic, nor is it poetic according to the teaching of the skilful scholar Geoffrey of England in his new work, entitled, as I recall, Galfridus Anglicus in his Poetria nova.24 That is so plentifully embellished with rhetorical colors that no Maytime meadow, motleyed with flowers on its green verdure, was ever to be seen quite like it. For neither Cicero, our prince of eloquence, nor Demosthenes of Greece ever had a greater abundance of rhetoric, in my view, than this Geoffrey had on his own level. But because I have never paid close attention to that skilful work, I now set it aside]

This is one of a number of first-­person passages—others occur in the prologue to Saint Anne (1449–64) and the “prolocutory” to Saint Mary Magdalene (5023–34)—in which Bokenham, with an explicit or implicit pun on “colors,” identifies rhetorical devices with flowers in a springtime meadow and claims that his own writing is free of them. The passages largely derive from a passage of méta-­écriture in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Prologue:

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But, sires, by cause I am a burel man, At my bigynnyng first I yow biseche, Have me excused of my rude speche. I lerned nevere rethorik, certeyn; Thyng that I speke, it moot be bare and pleyn. I sleep nevere on the Mount of Pernaso, Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Scithero. Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede, But swiche colours as growen in the mede, Or elles swiche as men dye or peynte. Colours of rethoryk been to me queynte; My spirit feeleth noght of swich mateere. (V 716–27) —— [But, sirs, because I am an unlearned man, as I begin I first beg you to let me be excused for my clumsy speech. Certainly, I never learned rhetoric; anything I say has to be bare and plain. I never slept on the Mount of Parnassus nor learned Marcus Tullius Cicero. Doubtless, I know no colors but such as grow in the meadow, or else such as are used for dyeing or painting. The colors of rhetoric are strange to me; my mind has no experience of such matters.]

Such repudiations of rhetoric are themselves rhetorical, and to proclaim “Thyng that I speke, it moot be bare and pleyn” in an ostentatiously bare and plain monosyllabic line is to follow Geoffrey of Vinsauf in illustrating what one defines. To return to the “I”: Bokenham uses autography to emphasize the human origin of the literary work; the theory of the four causes leads into an untheoretical stress on experience (which includes the experience of reading).25 He will tell the life of Saint Margaret “aftyr the story” (100: according to the history) and then will explain “what wyse, / Be whom, and how oftyn she translatyd was” (104–5: in what manner, by whom, and how often she was translated)—tracing, that is, the movement of her relics from place to place after her death. But his own work is also “thys translacyoun”

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(124), shifted from one language to another and also from one place to another, because he came to know the story not in England but “The last tyme I was in Itayle” (108), Wych story is nothyng unkowthe At mownt Flask—who me not leve, Lete hym go thedyr and he shal it preve (110–12) —— [Which story is by no means unknown at Montefiascone—if anyone doesn’t believe me, let him go there and he’ll find out by experience]

Bokenham adds more and more authenticating detail: Montefiascone is some fifty miles this side of Rome, weary pilgrims are deceived there by being given Trebbiano wine instead of Muscatel, and he was on his way from Rome when he was held up by heavy rain, visited the saint at her shrine, wrote down her story, and brought it with him to Clare. The holy legend comes through, and is held in place by, thick layers of earthly experience, here that of an astute and convivial man of the world who has traveled widely and knows all about the tricks played by foreigners on pilgrims who are desperate for a drink. Perhaps these things really happened, and happened to a “represented, biographically identifiable observer,” as I put it in chapter 1, but we do not need to know whether all this is true or not. The point of the detail is not to contribute to a Bokenham autobiography; it is to create the literary effect of a human medium through which ancient holiness is transmitted to the fifteenth-­century present. Bokenham returns to Aristotelian concepts, mentioning two final causes, the first being to arouse people’s devotion to the saint so that they will gain the benefits she promises. Then he digresses once more into the experiential: it is no wonder if he is eager to please Saint Margaret himself, because one of her feet, “bothe flesh and boon” (138), is preserved at an old priory near his birthplace and can be seen “thorgh a cristal bryht and pure” (139), all except

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for the big toe and the heel, which are “in a nunry . . . Redyng clepyd, as they there seyn” (142–43: in a nunnery called Reading— as those there say). But—a word that underlines the implied doubt as to whether what the Reading nuns say is true—the foot itself has certainly brought about many miracles, especially if people touch it with a brooch or ring and then, when in trouble, promise to return the precious object to the priory and leave it there. And he knows this to be true because “I had herof good experyence” (158: I had reliable experience of this), about five years previously, when a cruel tyrant drove him with five others from Venice into a fen and he expected disaster; but, soon after he promised to return the ring with which he had touched the foot, the saint rescued him. Once more the detail is irresistible, and then Bokenham remembers to mention the second final cause of his being moved to compose the saint’s legend: it was the earnest request of a dear friend who was devoted to Saint Margaret; but Bokenham, knowing his own lack of ability, hesitated until September 7, 1443 (the precise date, so different from the vaguer indications of time that are more common in medieval narratives, adds yet more authentication), when he recalled the request and thought he should delay no longer. He was still afraid of criticism, and so—moving from the past into the present—he omits his name and begs the friend not to reveal the work where it might be rudely received, and pryncypally At hoom at Caunbrygge in your hows, Where wyttys be manye ryht capcyows And subtyl, wych sone my lewydnesse Shuld aspye . . . (206–10) —— [And especially at home at Cambridge in your house,26 where there are many very carping and subtle wits, who would soon detect my ignorance . . .]

The Cambridge ethos has evidently changed very little since the fifteenth century: “wyttys . . . ryht capcyows / And subtyl” are just

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what I remember from my time as chairman of the Cambridge Faculty of English. This timidity on the part of the textual “I” is so different from his earlier confident worldliness as to underline the point that what is at issue is not autobiography or even dramatic monologue but the experience-­effect itself. And Bokenham goes even further: if the friend feels obliged to let others see the legend, he should still not admit who wrote it, but should say it was sent him from Lincolnshire by a friend who sells horses at fairs. That a saint’s legend should come from the medieval equivalent to a car salesman must be meant to be seen as absurdly unlikely. In concealing his own name, Bokenham reveals that of his friend, Thomas Burgh—the fellow Augustinian who will be responsible four years later for the production of the manuscript in which this preamble survives. At last, “to drawe to a conclusyoun / Of thys long tale now finally” (226–27), he begs Burgh to pray to Saint Margaret that his sins may be forgiven and that, after this outlaw state of human life, they may both dwell with her in heaven. “Now finally”: “now” is a frequent and important word in these autographic passages, a proximal deictic evoking a continuously moving present, which is that of writing, not of what is written about—of the énonciation, not of the énoncé. A text that began with clerkly formality and repeatedly showed awareness of the need for order has melted into personal chat: the academic prologue has turned into a dit. Within it the scholastic circumstantiae are still discernible, but among them the author and his intention are by far the most important. The effect is to present the legend through the experience of an author-­ translator, in an intensified form of the way that, in the Dit des monstiers, the churches of Paris seem to be presented through the experience of the anonymous writer wandering the city’s streets. Next comes a prologus to Saint Margaret in twelve Monk’s Tale stanzas, more formal, and partly elaborated from the Legenda aurea, but still including some autography: I me now delyte The lyf to translate, if me wil respyte

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Attropos a whyle and not to hastyly My fatal threed asundyr smyte Wych Lachesys hath twynyd ful yerys fyfty. (244–48) —— [It now gives me pleasure to translate the vita, if Atropos will grant me respite for a while and not cut apart my fatal thread, which Lachesis27 has been spinning for a good fifty years.]

This prologue also includes many of those brief reminders of the activity of a poet making sense of ancient sources that are so common in Chaucer’s more clerkly works: “as I do gesse” (263), “if we wyl speken of cheryté” (273), “as I doo wretyn fynde” (281), “I you behete” (293: I assure you), “as I do wene” (311: as I suppose). Mary-­Ann Stouck has noted that the idiom of Bokenham’s contemporary Capgrave in his Life of Saint Katherine strikes one generally as “Chaucerian” because he uses the kind of proverbial sayings, interjections and exclamations which Chaucer introduced into English narrative poetry: “I dar wel sey”; “shortly in a clause”; “sothly dar I seyn”; “O mercy God”; “in such cas”; “no wonder is, certeyn”; “non but we two”; “wyth-­outen othyr company”; “these wordes went so depe,” are all phrases used frequently by both poets, as are continued citations of author and source: “as myn auctour seyth”; “as we in bokes rede”; “myn auctour telleth noght.”28

The same is true of Bokenham’s legends, but perhaps a slightly different point can be made. A high proportion of the identifiably Chaucerian elements in Bokenham belong to the apparatus of narration, as though what Bokenham found especially striking and imitable in Chaucer were the devices by which the current present of narration is repeatedly evoked alongside the past present of what is being narrated. These devices do not characterize a specific narrator or speaker; what they do is to keep us aware of the process of storytelling. They break the continuity of the énoncé and call attention to the art and labor of the poet as he tells the story (or, more

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specifically, as he writes the story). And in Bokenham, whereas these recollections of Chaucer’s narratorial manner are usually apt, Chaucerian recollections in the story being narrated are more often apparently random and sometimes completely inappropriate. An example in the vita of Saint Margaret occurs in Bokenham’s effictio or formal description of her appearance: he refers to her “bent browys blake” (450: curved black eyebrows), a phrase that surely derives from Chaucer’s Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two, And tho were bent and blake as any sloo (I 3245–46) —— [Both her eyebrows were very finely plucked, and they were curved and black as any sloe]

—that is, from the effictio of the deliciously unsaintly Alisoun in The Miller’s Tale. Saint Ursula promises that if her pagan suitor will be converted to Christianity, “I hym ensure / To lovyn hym abovyn ony creature” (3207–08: I promise him that I will love him more than any creature), just as the equally unsaintly May in The Merchant’s Tale promises her unscrupulous suitor Damyan, “I hym assure / To love hym best of any creature” (IV 1983–84). And Saint Katherine, urging women not to weep at her execution, addresses Many a matrone of hy wurthynesse, Many a wedwe, and many a maydyn ying (7280–81)

—recalling the passage in The Wife of Bath’s Tale where we are told that “Ful many a noble wyf, and many a mayde, / And many a wydwe” (III 1026–27) sat in judgment on the rapist-­knight. In such cases I see evidence not of an ironic intention but rather of a memory indiscriminately steeped in Chaucer. To return to Saint Margaret: The vita itself comes next, up to the point of the saint’s death (which is as far as the Legenda aurea goes); and then, unexpectedly, after an apparently conclusive “Sey eche man Amen, pur cheryté” (868: Let everyone say, “Amen,” for

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the love of God), there is a one-­line gap in the Arundel manuscript, the meter changes from rhyme royal to couplets, and a new autographic passage is inserted. Bokenham tells his addressee, Thomas Burgh, that “now” he has completed what “I you promysyd / In the prologe” (870–71), And now of you I aske leyser and space Of reste a whyle, for certeynly Evene as a pilgrym so fare now y (878–81) —— [And now I beg you for leisure and time to rest a while, for, to be sure, I am now like a pilgrim]

—and he adds details about how the traveling pilgrim is weary and in low spirits until he reaches his lodging and finds a good meal and a comfortable bed, and then, next morning, he has the strength to go on.29 The extended simile is applied to the “I” as professional writer, with a bodily concreteness reminiscent of Hoccleve writing in the preamble to the Regement about the hardships of life as a Privy Seal clerk, and with a merging, as there, of writing as composition into writing as physical labor:30 For sykyr myn handys gynne to feynte, My wyt to dullyn, and myn eyne bleynte Shuld be, ner helpe of a spectacle; My penne also gynnyth make obstacle, And lyst no lengere on paper to renne, For I so ofte have maad to grenne Hys snowte upon my thombys ende, That he ful ny is waxyn unthende; For evere as he goth he doth blot, And in my book makyth many a spot (895–904) —— [For truly my hands are beginning to weaken and my brain to get dull, and my eyes would be blinded if it were not for the

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aid of spectacles; my pen too is beginning to make difficulties, and no longer wants to run across the paper, for so often have I blunted his snout on the ball of my thumb that he has grown almost useless; for he keeps on smudging as he moves forward, and makes many spots in my book]

The passage is so vivid that one almost expects to find a blot at this point in the Arundel manuscript.31 But the most powerful effect of this passage, as it breaks the narrative continuity to evoke the scene of writing, may be to remind us that what we are facing as readers is not a transparent window giving on to historical reality, but a material text produced by human work. So both the writer and his pen need a holiday until Michaelmas, and since “this day is seynt Matheus eve” (912), that means a break of ten days, and so, This grauntyd, fareweel! Now am I free Nyne dayes heraftyr for to pleye me. (919–20) —— [This being granted, farewell! Now I’m free to amuse myself for the next nine days.]

Of course the vacation must be granted, since Burgh is not really present, Bokenham is granting it to himself, and the “space” he has asked for is really only space on the page; but the light-­hearted ingenuity with which he creates in writing the illusion both of speech and of a temporal process in which speech and writing occur is truly extraordinary. Then comes another one-­line gap in the manuscript and yet another “now”: Now Myhilmesse day is come and past; To acomplyse I wyl me hast The promys wych that I behyht Of my cunnynge aftyr the myht. (921–24) ——

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[Now Michaelmas day has come and gone, and I will hasten, to the best of my ability, to fulfill the promise that I made.]

The exchange rate between time and space is extremely variable, but of course it must be so, because during this passage of time the writer has not been filling space with writing. Already the holiday is over, and a new start is to be made on the second half of Bokenham’s task, to recount the translation of the saint’s relics, which involves moving from a continuous to an intermittent narrative. Once more he ends with a prayer that God may guide “Bothe my wyt and eek my pen” (937) to the land of the virgin and martyr Saint Margaret: “I prey eche treuman to seyn Amen” (938: I pray every good man to say, “Amen”). Here there is a longer gap of five lines in the manuscript, but that is probably only because the prayer takes the text near to the foot of the verso page. At the head of the facing recto the verse reverts to rhyme royal, and the second half of the legend begins, interspersed with a few Chaucerian reminders of the poet’s reliance on his sources: “as wrytyng doth preve” (1161: as writings show), “As be old wrytynge I undyrgrope” (1172: as I understand from old writings), “as I wrytyn haf see” (1178: as I have seen written), “As cronycles dryve” (1222: as chronicles deduce). These too amount to a dilute form of autography, and indeed in the vitae, as in many of Chaucer’s longer narratives, narrative and autographic commentary cannot be completely distinguished, because even details such as verb tenses and conjunctions belong to the deixis, creating small-­ scale effects of proximality and distality.32 But these effects do not necessarily proceed from a single deictic origo, and even in the concentrated passages of autography, chiefly in prologues, which are my main concern here, there may be no single, stable focus in the shape of an impersonated speaker or narrator. Bokenham may be getting closer to a form of self-­impersonation that we might now call autobiographical, but one has only to ask about any event recounted in the autographic sections, Did this really happen? to recognize that the question is unanswerable and, more important, irrelevant.

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Bokenham’s next move into concentrated autography comes in the prologus to Saint Anne. In extraordinarily intricate sixteen-­line stanzas, it begins with the second of the Chaucer-­Gower-­Lydgate passages already discussed, and goes on to express the poet’s fear of beginning too late and his sense that he would do better to abandon poetry and focus on his moral amendment and his hope of salvation. But then he writes that, nevertheless, he believes Jesus and Mary will accept his good intention—to arouse “mennys devocyon” (1438) to Mary’s mother—and he promises that if he should encounter (in his source, presumably) either “errour . . . Geyn good maners, or heresye / Ageyn the feyth” (1443–45: error contrary to good manners, or heresy against the faith), he will do his best to reform it. He warns readers, though, that they should expect no coryous speche, For Tullyus wolde me never non teche, Ner in Parnase wher Apollo doth dwelle I never slepte, ne never dede seche In Ethna flowrs, wher, as Claudian dothe telle, Proserpina was rapt; nor of the sugird welle In Elicona, my rudnesse to leche, I nevere dede taste, to me so felle Wher ever the Muses, and the cruel wreche Orpheus,33 whiche hys wyf dede seche In helle, of me wolde never take hede, Nor of his armonye oo poynt me teche In musical proporcyon rymes to lede. (1452–64) —— [No elaborate speech, for Cicero would never teach me any, nor did I ever sleep in Parnassus, where Apollo dwells, nor did I ever seek flowers in Etna, where, as Claudian tells, Proserpina was abducted; nor did I ever taste the sweet spring in Helicon (always so hostile to me were the Muses), to remedy my clumsiness; and the cruel scoundrel Orpheus, who sought his wife in the underworld, would never pay attention to me, or teach

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me a single point of his harmony, to arrange rhymes in musical proportion.]

This is another of those ostentatiously elaborate modesty topoi, like the one in the preamble to Saint Margaret, in which Bokenham claims that he cannot do exactly what he is doing in the way of “coryous speche.” The allusions to elements of classical mythology that relate to poetic inspiration display his learning, the remarkably complex syntax with its repetitions of “nevere” displays his rhetorical skill (and thus contradicts all the “neveres”), and the final line is another instance of his ability to clinch a stanza with a metrical flourish—and the “musical proporcyon” he claims never to have learned is precisely what it shows. This is a passage that consciously outdoes Chaucer in one of the modes of stylistic elevation that Chaucer had first introduced into English. It borrows from The Merchant’s Tale for Etna, Claudian, and Proserpina (though, whether or not Bokenham was the translator of Claudian’s De consulatu Stilichonis, he would probably have had firsthand knowledge of his De raptu Proserpinae34), but the chief model is The Franklin’s Prologue, as discussed above. Here as there, to take literally Bokenham’s assertion that he lacks inspiration and skill is to read naïvely and unhistorically. Moving into rhyme royal, Bokenham smoothly continues, “Yet notforthan” (1465)—yet, nevertheless, he will not fail to embark on the legend of Saint Anne, for the sake of “my frende, Denston Kateryne” (1466): Katherine, born into a Suffolk gentry family, the Cloptons, and married to John Denston, a Suffolk landowner and civil servant. He asks Katherine to pray to the Blessed Virgin, “Whiche of seynt Anne the dowter was” (1470), to assist him by “hyr specyal grace” (1472) to receive “influence dyvyne” (1474) to aid him in completing the legend before they both die. If one thought for the moment that Bokenham was repudiating pagan mythology in favor of divine influence, the thought would not last, because the way he expresses “before we both die” reverts to the mythology of the fates:

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Or than Deth the threed untwyne Of oure fatal web, whiche is ryht thynne. (1477–78) —— [Before Death untwines the thread of our fatal cloth, which is very thin.]

At the end of the legend, Bokenham reveals the particular purpose of its dedication to Katherine Denston, who presumably commissioned it. He prays that she should bear John a son, and I cannot improve on the way Gail McMurray Gibson explains the poignant circumstances in which both Katherine’s mother and her stepmother had died when giving birth: “Daughter of mothers dying in childbirth, mother of a daughter called Anne, Katherine Denston asks of Bokenham creative writing in the most primary sense, for Bokenham’s poem on the life of Saint Anne both invokes the mothering saint as answer to his patroness’s fear and longing and offers the hope that the dark and painful mystery of childbed might be transfigured by grace.”35 The Denstons had to be content with their daughter Anne, “yung and fayre of face” (2096); the prayer for a son was not answered. Several vitae later, we find more autography in the prologue to that of Saint Agnes. (This is one of the places, mentioned above, in which Bokenham invokes the Chaucer-­Gower-­Lydgate trio to represent the English literary tradition to which he is a latecomer.) Bokenham begins by praying to the saint to aid him in translating into English a life by Saint Ambrose, “Wych wyth hey style it doth endyte” (4038: who composes it in high style). This is an obvious recollection of what Chaucer wrote in The Clerk’s Prologue about his Petrarchan source—“with heigh stile he enditeth” (IV 41)— and repeated near the end of The Clerk’s Tale (IV 1148). Bokenham then embarks on one of his classicizing humility topoi, begging forgiveness for his clumsy manner: For Pallas certeyn wold me nevyr lede Of Thully rethoryk into the motleyde mede

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Flourys to gadyrn of crafty eloquens, But evere thedyrward whan I me dede spede, Wyth greth dysdeyn she me bad go thens. (4046–50) —— [For Pallas would certainly never lead me into the motleyed meadow of Ciceronian rhetoric to gather flowers of skilful eloquence, but always, when I hastened toward it, she ordered me away with great disdain.]

Here we find the familiar recollection of The Franklin’s Prologue, with the idea of rhetoric as a field dotted with “colours” or “flowers.” Unlike Chaucer, Bokenham imagines Pallas as presiding over eloquence, perhaps because the warrior-­goddess was also patroness of crafts, and especially of weaving,36 an idea developed further in the “prolocutory” to Mary Magdalene’s life. In a passage from the prologue to the life of Saint Agnes, discussed above, Pallas forbiddingly tells him “Thou commyst to late” (4054), Wherfore, syth Pallas me thus dede rate And drof me awey so sturdyly, I wyl nevyrmore wyth hyr debate, Nere presume to commyn Tullius medwe ny; And therfore speken and wrytyn I wyl pleynly Aftyr the language of Suthfolk speche; And whosoevere lyke not therby, Whereevyr he lyst he bettyr do seche. (4059–66) —— [And so, since Pallas berated me thus and drove me away so sternly, I will never again argue with her or presume to come near to Cicero’s meadow; and so I will speak and write plainly in accordance with the spoken language of Suffolk; and if anyone doesn’t like it, let him seek something better wherever he pleases.]

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This is one of the passages that modern scholars have interpreted as Bokenham’s sturdy rejection of “crafty eloquence” in favor of a plainer style. As Hilles puts it, “The ‘language of Suthfolk speche’ offers a regionally specific alternative to the ‘crafty work’ of those poets in the garden of eloquence who follow the universalizing precepts of the Poetria Nova. . . . Bokenham considers and ultimately rejects the sophisticated style and classical subject matter of these paternal authorities.”37 But, as usual, we need to think back to The Franklin’s Prologue to grasp what Bokenham is saying about poetic language, and we need to take note that he does not say that he is rejecting Pallas but that she has rejected him. Moreover, as Horobin has shown in a study of Bokenham’s language, he tends to use Suffolk forms when necessary to provide rhymes but otherwise generally avoids them: He appears to defend and support a regional dialect that he also works hard to conceal. . . . It seems to me that this presentation of himself as a simple, rural poet is more a literary persona than a genuine defence of dialect usage. . . . Despite such claims and protestations and apologies for the use of a rude and simple style, Bokenham’s style is characterised by the adoption of a huge number of Latin vocabulary [sic], including a vast quantity of words that had not been attested in English before his employment of them. This practice of borrowing was clearly a deliberate attempt to forge a high style that was appropriate for his subject matter and for his literary ambitions. Rather than wishing to adopt the humble voice of the rural and local poet, Bokenham’s works reveal his efforts to create a literary language that would rival and even surpass that of his vernacular predecessors.38

The term “literary persona” may be misleading, because it implies a stable form of fictional self, a mask that is fixed, while Bokenham’s performance as the “I” of the Arundel manuscript, as I have tried

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to show, has him playing many varied parts. Of these the “simple, rural poet” is one, as in the blunt challenge of the last two lines quoted above: And whosoevere lyke not therby, Whereevyr he lyst he bettyr do seche.

But immediately after that, Bokenham turns to the speculative etymology of his chief source: Agnes of agna, whoso wyl it seke, Dyryvyid was, seyth Januence. Agna is a lamb, a best ful meke And sympyl also, aftyr his sentence, Wych tuo to Anneys by good congruence Longyn, for in hem so groundyd was she That fro meke and symple eek innocence Remevyn hir myht noon adversyté. (4067–74) —— [Genovensis says (if anyone wishes to find out) that Agnes was derived from agna. Agna is a lamb, a very meek and also simple beast, according to his statement, and those two qualities belong to Agnes most appropriately, because she was so grounded in them that no adversity could dislodge her from meek and simple innocence.]

The meek and simple lamb may be appropriate to the “simple, rural poet,” but terms such as “dyryvyid,” “sentence,” “congruence,” and “adversité” belong to the clerkly world of Latin learning, and the remainder of the prologue also belongs to this world, concluding with a prayer to Agnes that is distant from daily speech in vocabulary and especially in word order: Me wyt purchace, lady, and language Thy lyf begunne wyth to termyne. (4097–98)

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—— [Lady, obtain for me intelligence and language to complete your life on which I have begun.]

I suspect it is the expectation of finding in the textual first person a single self, whether stable or intelligibly developing, that has led many scholars to read Bokenham’s work in ways that distort its sophisticated flexibility. As Agnes is the only saint in the Arundel collection in whose vita Bokenham adopts an “I” explicitly different from his own (that of Saint Ambrose), so this is the only vita that has an epilogue—a passage of four rhyme royal stanzas, with the marginal gloss Epilogus operis precedentis, in which he reverts to the role of translator commenting on his task. I have completed the life of Saint Agnes, he states, “In the prologe lych as I promysyd” (4710: just as I promised in the prologue), following “the wrytyng of sent Ambrose” (4711), though not “wurde for wurde” (4713) but “fro sentence to sentence” (4715: from meaning to meaning). But, he adds, even that is hard, for most straungely Among alle doctours, and most unkouthly, He endytyth, and whoso me not leve, If hys bookys he rede, he it shal preve. (4718–21) —— [For among all the Doctors of the Church he writes most peculiarly and most oddly, and anyone who doesn’t believe me, if he reads his books, will prove that it is so.]

In that challenge we may get another glimpse of the “simple, rural poet,” but to take up the challenge would demand an ability to read difficult Latin, and it is only a glimpse, because in the next stanza Bokenham returns to a more Latinate idiom himself to thank Ambrose for taking the trouble to write the life of Saint Agnes, “Wych in an angle thou founde of oblyvyoun / Pryvylye hyd”

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(4726–27: which you found secretly hidden in a forgotten corner). Bokenham was evidently pleased with the distinctive phrase “angle of oblyvyoun,” which he had used in the preamble to the vita of Saint Margaret. The final stanza of this epilogue thanks Saint Agnes herself for inclining her ears to the “prohemyal preyer . . . for now I have alle do” (4732–33: prologal prayer, for now I have done everything), and begs that his reward may be to see her in heaven. The “now” refers to the moment at which the translation was completed, the real or virtual time at which the final stanza was written. The fiction is that we are reading the poet-­scribe’s own writing, which directly records the series of “nows” occupied by the acts of praying, translating, commenting, pausing, and so on. The next concentrated passage of autography, and perhaps the most engagingly sophisticated of all, comes before the next-­but-­ one of the Arundel vitae, in what the manuscript rubric calls “The prolocutorye into Marye Mawdelyns lyf.” The prolocutory is a kind of prologue to the prologue, in which we are told at length how the vita of Mary Magdalene came into being. As usual, we do not need to know whether it tells the literal truth; it is enough that the lavish detail produces an experience-­effect. The prolocutory, in couplets, begins with an exact dating in the year 1445, “Aftyr the cherche of Romys computacyoun” (4983: according to the computation of the Roman church), which begins the year with January; then comes an elaborate astronomical chronographia on the movement of Phoebus through the zodiac, “As the Fyrste Mever ordeynyd hymselve” (4988: as the First Mover himself ordained). This is broken off after fifteen lines with “But in this mater what shuld I lenger tarye?” (4996: But why should I delay longer over this matter?), followed by the substitution of a Christian dating at Twelfth Night. Inevitably, this has been interpreted by recent scholarship as a repudiation of classicizing rhetoric: the Phoebus passage is described by Delany as “so elaborately aureate in diction and imagery as to approach burlesque,” while she sees the interrogatio or rhetorical question as heralding a “move from overblown rhetoric to plain language and from classical erudition to Christian doctrine.”39 I think this must

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be a mistaken reading, since the opening chronographia is scientific in the manner established by Chaucer rather than classical, and after all includes references to the Roman church and the First Mover; nor can what follows be seen as “plain language,” since the Christian dating is also circumlocutory, filling seven lines. After this lengthy mora comes a plain statement—“In presence I was of the Lady Bowsere” (5004: I was in the presence of the Lady Bourchier)—and then further circumlocution as Bokenham expounds the lady’s Yorkist pedigree. Contrary to Serjeantson’s punctuation, the passage of thirty-­one lines from the opening of the prolocutory forms a single sentence, its complex syntax embracing astronomy, religion, and genealogy without a break. Then Bokenham makes a fresh start with “I saye” (5023). In this festive season, he tells us, the four sons of Lady Isabel Bour­ chier,40 Countess of Eu, sister of Richard, Duke of York, were reveling and dancing, And othere mo in there most fressh aray Dysgysyd, for in the moneth of May Was nevyr [wyth] flouris [whyt], blewe and grene, Medewe motleyid freshlyere, I wene, Than were her garnementys; for as it semyd me Mynerve hyrself, wych hath the sovereynté Of gay texture, as declaryth Ovyde, Wyth al hire wyt ne coude provyde More goodly aray thow she dede en[cl]os Wythynne oo web al Methamorphosyos. (5025–34) —— [And others too, decked out in their freshest attire—for never was a meadow in the month of May more freshly motleyed with white, blue, and green flowers, I believe, than their garments were; for, as it seemed to me, Minerva herself, who, as Ovid declares, rules over the art of weaving, could not with all her inventiveness provide goodlier attire, even if she enclosed the whole of the Metamorphoses within a single fabric.]

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Here the familiar comparison of the motleyed May meadow is applied not to poetry but to the courtiers’ motley garments— no doubt with a recollection of Chaucer’s Squire in the General Prologue: Embrouded was he, as it were a meede Al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and reede. Syngynge he was, or floytynge, al the day; He was as fressh as is the month of May. (I 89–92) —— [He was embroidered as if he were a meadow all full of fresh flowers, white and red. He was singing or playing the flute all day; he was as fresh as the month of May.]

Then Bokenham deftly moves from garments back to poetry. Minerva is of course another name for Pallas, and Serjeantson suggests a reference to Ovid’s Fasti 3:815ff, describing how Pallas teaches all the skills associated with cloth making. Since Bokenham mentions the Metamorphoses, it is perhaps more likely that he had in mind Metamorphoses 6:19ff, where the same point is implied, and Arachne’s skills of spinning and weaving are all said to be granted by Pallas, while in Metamorphoses 4:32ff the exercise of these skills by the daughters of Minyas is associated with storytelling: But why don’t we also relieve the toil of our hands by telling stories of different kinds and take it in turns to speak while the rest of us quietly listen? The time will go by more quickly.41

The link between spinning and storytelling has deep roots, as in the phrase “spinning a yarn.” Bokenham’s description of the Twelfth Night festivities, though based on a familiar cluster of words (fresh, May, meadow, flowers, motleyed) is a remarkable piece of rhetorical virtuosity, with its double comparison: a Maytime meadow was never more freshly “motleyed” with flowers than the revelers’

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motley garments, and Minerva, goddess of handicrafts and the arts, could never have supplied goodlier array even if she had depicted the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a single piece of cloth. Beneath the surface is a pun on texture and text, the weaving of cloth and the weaving of words,42 to produce a kind of mise en abyme in which Bokenham weaves his own words into a depiction of clothing. This passage has a richness and intricacy unparalleled elsewhere in the Arundel legendary, and it makes clear yet again that he is not really repudiating classicizing rhetoric. This is followed by a second “I seye” (5035), which at last leads into Bokenham’s narrative point. The countess took him aside and mentioned various legends of holy women that he—“now in my last age” (5040)—had translated from Latin: those of Anne, Margaret, Dorothy, Faith, Christina, Agnes, the Eleven Thousand Virgins, and also Seynt Elyzabeth, whos lyf alone To alle wyvys myht a merour be Of very perfeccyoun in sundry degré, Whos holy legend as at that tyme I newly had begunne to ryme, At request of hyr to whom sey nay I nethyr kan, ne wyl, ne may, So mych am I boundon to hyr goodnesse, I mene of Oxenforthe the Countesse, Dame Elyzabeth Ver by hyr ryht name (5046–55) —— [Saint Elizabeth, whose life by itself could be a mirror of true perfection to all wives of any social rank, and whose holy legend at that time I had recently begun to put in verse at the request of one to whom I neither can, will, nor may say no, I am so much obliged to her goodness—I mean the Countess of Oxford, Lady Elizabeth Vere by her own name]

These lines are part of a sentence of over a hundred lines (5035– 142); Serjeantson inserts several periods, but each of them is

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followed by a relative construction or a conjunction. The Countess of Eu asks Bokenham to compose in English a life of Mary Magdalene, to whom she is devoted, At wych wurde, what I myht seye I stood in doute, for on the to part My lytyl experyence in rymy[n]gs art, My labyl mynde, and the dulnesse Of my wyt and the greth rudnesse I wel remembyrd, and on the tothir partye I thowt how hard it is to denye Astatys preyer, wych aftyr the entent Of the poete is a myhty comaundement; Wherfore me thoht, as in this caas, That my wyt were lakkyd bettyr it was Than my wyl, and therfore to do My ladyis preyere I assentyd to (5076–88) —— [At which word, I felt doubt as to what I could say, for on the one hand I recalled my little experience in the art of verse, my unreliable memory, and the dullness and great clumsiness of my intelligence, and on the other hand I thought how hard it is to deny the request of great people, which, according to the poet’s opinion, is a powerful command;43 and so I thought that in this case it was better that my intelligence should be blamed rather than my will, and I therefore agreed to do what my lady requested]

Bokenham is elaborately tactful in this scene, in which he presents himself as an intimate of the Countess of Eu and implies a situation in which countesses are jealously competing for his literary services.44 It is easy to imagine him as the still-­familiar type of polished, worldly, celibate clergyman with a strong appeal for ladies, and for him no doubt the Christmas season was more agreeably spent at the countess’s seat of Clare Castle than at the nearby

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Augustinian priory. Bokenham only stipulates that she should give him respite until he has completed a pilgrimage to Compostella, a topic on which again he informatively extends his sentence, and the countess agrees. As in the interlude in the vita of Saint Margaret, Bokenham once more evokes the rapid passage of time with a proximal deictic: And I now have performyd and do Aftyr myn entent myn pylgrimage (5112–13) —— [And now I have carried out and completed my pilgrimage as I intended]

This is another of those “nows” that purport to evoke the moment of writing and that make sense only in writing—I’ll fulfill my promise, “But fyrst . . .” (5118)—and this leads into yet another mora on how he will follow Plato’s advice in the Timaeus to begin with a prayer to “the sovereyn dyvynyté” (5131: the supreme God).45 Bokenham is teasing the reader with one delay after another. If pagans do this, he argues, Christians should certainly do so. Here the sentence really ends, and the prayer begins. The prayer is an encyclopedia of basic Christian doctrine, once more in the form of a sentence that seems to extend itself endlessly, in a way that Serjeantson’s punctuation obscures. Bokenham explains that he appeals only to God, And neythyr to Clyo ner to Melpomené, Nere to noon othir of the Musys nyne, Ner to Pallas Mynerve, ner Lucyne, Ner to Apollo, wych, as old poetys seye, Of wysdam bereth both lok and keye, Of gay speche eek & of eloquencye; But alle them wyttyrly I denye, As everé Crystene man owyth to do, And the oonly, Lord, I fle onto;

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Not desyryng to have swych eloquence As sum curyals han, ner swich asperence In uttryng of here subtyl conceytys, In wych oft tyme ful greth dysceyt is, And specyally for there ladyis sake They baladys or amalettys lyst to make, In wych to sorwyn and wepyn thei feyn As thow the prongys of deth dede streyn Here hert-­root, albe thei fer thens; Yet notforthan is here centens So craftyd up, and wyth langwage so gay Uttryd, that I trowe the moneth of May Nevere fresshere enbe[l]shyd the soyl wyth flours Than is her wrytyng wyth colours Of rethorycal speche both to and fro; Was nevere the tayl gayere of a po, Wych than enherytyd alle Argus eyne Whan Marcuryis whystyl hym dede streyne To hys deed slepe; of wych language The craft to coveyte where grete dotage In m[yn] oold dayis and in that degré That I am in . . . (5216–46) —— [And neither to Clio nor Melpomene, nor to any other of the nine Muses, nor to Pallas Minerva, nor Lucina, nor to Apollo who, as old poets say, carries both lock and key of wisdom and also of fine speech and of eloquence; but I utterly reject all of them, as every Christian ought to, and only to you, Lord, do I flee; not desiring to have such eloquence as some courtiers have, nor such harshness in expressing their subtle ideas, in which there is often very great deceit; and especially for the sake of their ladies they like to compose ballads or charms, in which they pretend to sorrow and weep, as though the prongs of death pierced their hearts to the root, even though it’s far from being so; yet all the same their meanings are so elaborately

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crafted and expressed with such fine language that I believe the month of May never so freshly embellished the earth with flowers as their writing is embellished back and forth with the colors of rhetorical speech; never was the tail of a peacock finer, which inherited all the eyes of Argus when Mercury’s flute charmed him into a dead sleep.46 It would be great folly to covet the art of such language in my old age and in the social rank that is mine . . .]

Yet again, Bokenham’s rejection of deceptive courtly rhetoric deceptively employs rhetorical art in the most ostentatious way. The scene, we remember, is one of courtly revelry; there is an obvious parallel between the gay garments of the revelers and the “colours” of rhetoric, both being compared to a Maytime meadow in a context in which we are likely to recall the metaphor by which speech is the garment of thought; and the rhetorical colors are evoked by means of a learned allusion to classical mythology that directly belies Bokenham’s claim that it would be foolish for him, at his age and his social rank, to desire rhetorical skill or to call on the classical Muses. The extraordinarily complex syntax of this whole “prolocutorye” (along with the dislocation of natural word order that is a feature of Bokenham’s verse throughout the collection) is a continuous reminder of the poet’s mastery over language. Bokenham is doing what Chaucer did in places such as the rhetorical denial of rhetoric in The Franklin’s Prologue and the showily extended occupatio in The Knight’s Tale, in which he spends nearly fifty lines (I 2919–66) telling us what he is not going to tell us about Arcite’s funeral ceremonies, but Bokenham is outdoing his predecessor. I am reminded of Dante’s challenges to Lucan and Ovid in canto 25 of the Inferno: Taccia Lucano omai là dove tocca del misero Sabello e di Nassidio, e attenda a udir quel ch’or si scocca! Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio! (94–97)

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—— [Let Lucan now be silent with his tales of wretched Sabellus and Nasidius, and let him wait to hear what now comes forth! Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa!]47

Bokenham, in renouncing the courtly rhetoric of the Chaucerian tradition, with its roots in pagan poetry, at the same time matches and outdoes it. We cannot take his renunciation literally. He is a highly sophisticated poet, and an important element in his sophistication is his constant play with the functions of the first person and other proximal deictics. The concluding clauses of the prayer take us back to the courtly setting in which the prolocutory began. Bokenham prays that he may have sufficient skill to obey the Countess of Eu’s command to translate in wurdys pleyne Into oure langwage oute of Latyn The lyf of blyssyd Maré Mawdelyn, To hyr goostly confourth in especyal, And of them generally wych it reden shal (5252–56) —— [Translate the life of the blessed Mary Magdalene out of Latin into our language in plain words, for the spiritual comfort of the countess in particular and of all those in general who shall read it]

and that the readers may first gain remission of all their sins and then join the saint in heavenly bliss. After all this comes the formal prologus to Saint Mary Magdalene in Monk’s Tale stanzas. The last autographic intervention of any length into the Arundel collection appears many lines later in the final vita, that of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. It consists of two Monk’s Tale stanzas, the second of which I quoted above48 but will repeat here: Of the holy conversacyoun of this wumman, Blyssyd Elyzabeth, whoso lyst to knowe

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Mo exaunplys, he redyly may han In Januencis legend, wych ys kouth and knowe; Two or thre stondyn evene by rowe Next this wych last I of made mende. But as for me, now best ys, I trow, To eschewe prolyxité, to make an ende. For thow I had kunnyng for to ryme And eek to endyten as copyously As had Gower and Chaunce[r]s in ther tyme, Or as now hath the munk of Bery, Joon Lytgate, yet cowd not I Thys blyssyd wumman Elyzabeth commende Aftyr hyr merytys suffycyently, And therfore to secyn I now intende. (10521–36) —— [Anyone who wishes to know of more illustrations of the holy way of life of this woman, the blessed Elizabeth, can readily find them in Genovensis’s legend, which is familiar and well known. Two or three stand side by side next to this last one that I related. But as for me, so as to avoid prolixity, I think it best to make an end now. For even if I had the skill to compose verse and to write as copiously as Gower and Chaucer in their time, or as the monk of Bury, John Lydgate, now, I would still not be able to praise this blessed woman Elizabeth adequately in proportion to what she deserves, and so I now intend to cease.]

These stanzas conveniently bring together several characteristic features of the Chaucerian rhetoric of narration: mention of the source and recommendation to consult it further, modesty topos, reference to literary tradition, reference to the audience, and use of the technical terminology of rhetoric (“exaunplys,” “prolyxyté,” “copyously”). But beyond these features, something especially noteworthy is the realization of the text and its source text as material objects, occupying physical space; other exempla stand in successive lines of the source next to this one I have just recounted.

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The deictic center is located in a specific place and time, which are those of the writer and his readers: place indicated by “Next” and “evene by rowe”; time by “last” and the triple “now” (the second referring to the present into which the poetic tradition survives, the first and third to the more immediate present in which Bokenham intends to cease writing his legend). At the same time the re­flex­ ivity of the reference to “ryme” reminds us of the textual nature of what we are reading. For all the chattiness of Bokenham’s manner and the likeliness that at least some of the content of such passages is truly autobiographical, they remain within the bounds of autography: writing in the first person, freely composed and following no preconceived blueprint; writing that creates the illusion of speech but remains unmistakably textual; writing that takes writing as its theme.

Af t e r w o r d

As I wrote in chapter 1, in this book “I am not purporting to offer a comprehensive theory of subjectivity in discourse, nor am I even proposing a program for detailed interpretation. I am only offering an invitation to try out a different kind of reading”—a way of reading that would help us to recognize in medieval English literature, and to interpret as such, the category of texts that I call autographies, extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, in which “I” and the other first-­person singular pronouns function not as labels for a real or fictional individual but as means of evoking proxi­mality and experientiality. One gain from this approach would be that we should no longer need to distort medieval first-­ person writings by trying to read them as dramatic monologues of a more recent kind (or to cast them aside as imperfect because they do not seem like very satisfactory or interesting dramatic monologues). Another gain would be a more pleasurable kind of reading of the freely composed, loose-­jointed structures that were evidently among the sources of literary pleasure for late medieval readers. The pleasure involved would depend on a willingness to tolerate ambiguities and inconsistencies, contradictions and loose ends, as opposed to an insistence on obtaining resolution by attributing these features to the errors and inadequacies of supposed “speakers” or “narrators.” In place of a backward-­looking summary or a conclusion that could only be forced, it may be helpful if I end by looking forward, mentioning briefly some other late medieval English writings that invite reading as autographies. Pleasure is not in­com­patible with seriousness, and one work that I believe would benefit greatly from reading in these terms is the greatest English religious poem, 257

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perhaps the greatest English poem, of the Middle Ages, the intensely serious and no less pleasurable Piers Plowman. Langland’s poem (or poems) can be understood as a far more profound successor to Wynnere and Wastoure, about which I wrote in chapter 1. I suggested in a note to that chapter, “The concept of autography may be especially useful in thinking about Piers Plowman,” but added that “Langland’s poem would require a book to itself.” The confluence of genres that gave Piers Plowman its shape as a compilatory and improvisatory text in and of the first person, with unforeseeable changes of direction and apparent divergences from successive plans, may well have included the tradition of the dit, with Rutebeuf as one likely influence.1 Another debt may be to medieval ideas about preaching. It is generally recognized that in both manner and content Piers Plowman owes much to medieval sermons,2 and its autographic features may also have been influenced by medieval treatises on the art of preaching. The writers of the artes praedicandi, while setting out intricate structural models for sermons, are also insistent that if the preacher finds an unplanned opportunity for edification or is inspired by the Holy Spirit to diverge from his blueprint, he should not hesitate to “turn aside the flood of his eloquence” until it may be possible to “fall back into the channel of his prepared speech.”3 Piers Plowman surely works in this way: it is as much an exploratory as an expository poem—and even, for all its unease about vagrancy, a vagrant poem. I would add that, if the A text was written first, it looks like a project that Langland began without knowing for certain how to bring it to an end, perhaps without having a “channel of his prepared speech” to fall back into. I regret that a fuller account of Piers Plowman as autography is not included in this book, but Langland’s poem is now surrounded by an overwhelming accumulation of distinguished scholarship, and I see no way of coming to terms with it to the extent necessary to enable me to write about it at length.4 Another area that seems ripe for reconsideration along the lines I have been drawing is that of the preexisting story retold,

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renewed, enriched, and fruitfully destabilized by the addition of freely composed autographic commentary. I illustrated this possibility in chapter 4 with some comments on Troilus and Criseyde, but Chaucer’s poem itself might be discussed in more detail, and so might later large-­scale narratives-­with-­commentary influenced by it, such as Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine. Glossing or annotation as a model for autographic commentary has the great advantage that we expect it to be plural, multilayered, and discontinuous, not singular and unitary like the discourse of a supposed fictional narrator. It may take a first-­person form, often that of a “professional reader,”5 but we need feel no compulsion to reduce it to consistency by relating it entirely to a single “speaker” of the kind invented by twentieth-­century criticism of Troilus and Criseyde and other major narratives by Chaucer. Commentary in general stands in a fluctuating relation to the retold story. It may be more authoritative, simply because later, and thus able to make use of more than one version of the story, with the marginal position (that of the glosses surrounding the text in a medieval manuscript) paradoxically outranking that of the center. On the other hand, it may sometimes be less authoritative—because the earlier the telling, the closer to its origin (hence Chaucer’s deceptive claim to be working with authentically ancient sources in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale)—but therefore all the more effective in enticing readers to participate in the creation of meaning. If the purported goal is to narrate historical truth, there are bound to be real uncertainties as to what actually happened—as for example at the moment in The Man of Law’s Tale when, instead of stating how Alla invited the emperor to dinner, Chaucer as commentator remarks only that “it is bet to deeme” (II 1091: it is preferable to judge) that he approached the emperor himself rather than that he sent young Maurice as a messenger—and still more uncertainties as to what the characters said and what they thought and felt. Many of the features of autography as defined in the preceding chapters are to be found in Troilus and Criseyde’s narratorial commentary, but here I shall mention just one, the element of

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méta-­écriture, focusing on a single aspect of that. From the very beginning, Chaucer indicates that he will tell a story that belongs to the past and therefore has a fixed shape, the story of how Troilus’s experience of love moved “Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie” (I 4); but he also opens to us what Morson calls “the real present of the creative process,”6 an unfixed, unfolding story of how the story of Troilus gets to be told. It has been told before: as Chaucer later explains, “of no sentement I this endite, / But out of Latyn in my tonge it write” (II 13–14: I am not writing this out of my own experience, but translating it from Latin into my own language). We know, as Chaucer’s original readers probably did not, that his main source was not a Latin work by the fictional auctour Lollius but Boccaccio’s Italian poem Il Filostrato, but this makes no fundamental difference to the interest Chaucer invites us to take in the problems of writing. One of the most striking places where his commentary takes the form of literary-­critical méta-­écriture is the account in Book II of the exchange of letters between Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer adds to Boccaccio’s narrative three stanzas (II 1023–43), in which Pandarus gives Troilus detailed advice about the style of the letter he is to write to Criseyde: don’t write pretentiously or overformally, don’t repeat yourself, and Ne jompre ek no discordant thyng yfeere, As thus, to usen termes of phisik In loves termes . . . (1037–39) —— [Also, don’t jumble discordant things together, as, for example, by using the language of medicine in referring to love . . .]

These stanzas are not themselves specifically autographic, but they take up a central concern of autographic writings, especially prologues, from Wynnere and Wastoure to Bokenham. In Troilus’s response in the following stanza, based on a stanza of Boccaccio’s, Chaucer adds more concern for literary decorum:

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I am ashamed for to wryte, ywys, Lest of myn innocence I seyde amys. (1047–48) —— [I feel bashful about writing, indeed, in case in my inexperience I should say something wrong.]

A little later in his conversation with Pandarus a more explicit concern for epistolary art emerges when Chaucer adds Troilus’s prayer to Minerva to grant him “wit my lettre to devyse” (1063). At this point Boccaccio gives Troilus’s complete letter verbatim in eighty-­ eight lines (eleven stanzas of ottava rima), but Chaucer reduces this to a twenty-­one-­line summary in oratio obliqua, which can be seen as a distinctly unfavorable literary-­critical account of the Italian source as an unrestrained torrent of clichés. He dismisses Troilus’s (that is, Boccaccio’s) verbosity and insincerity, and his stereotyped language. “It axeth muchel space” (1071: it demands a great deal of space) to give a complete account of how Troilus commends himself to Criseyde: he addresses her as his lady, his bliss, his heart’s life, “his sorwes leche” (1066: the physician of his sorrow)—thus using precisely the medical language against which Pandarus has warned him—until Chaucer cuts short the list with a weary summary: “thise other termes alle / That in swich cas thise loveres alle seche” (1067–68: all these other terms that all these lovers choose in such a case). Here the repeated “alle thise,” conveying a sense of boredom, produces the proximality characteristic of autography and thus suggests a confidential judgment shared between an “I” and a “you,” a writer and his readers. Chaucer continues his sharply abbreviated summary: “And after this ful lowely he hire preyde / To be nought wroth . . . And after that he seyde—and leigh ful loude— / Hymself was litel worth . . . And after that than gan he telle his woo— / But that was endeles, withouten hoo . . .” (1072–73, 1077–78, 1082–83: And after this he begged her very humbly not to be angry . . . And after that he said, lying quite openly, he was worth little . . . And then after that he told her his grief—but that was endless, without

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a stop . . .). The repeated “And after this . . . And after that . . . And then after that” (always at a line opening, drawing an increasingly weary breath) conveys both the unstructured monotony of what is being summarized and the tedium of summarizing it; and now that we are in a position to read Boccaccio’s overelaborate original, we can understand and sympathize with Chaucer’s impatience, in a way that his medieval readers probably could not. The summary is impersonal, but it implies an “I” who at this point in the poem is a sharp-­witted poet and critic, certainly not the naïve “narrator” of much twentieth-­century interpretation. A little later, Chaucer summarizes the letter that Criseyde writes in reply, also in oratio obliqua, giving Boccaccio’s original even shorter shrift. This time he reduces fifty-­six lines of Italian to seven lines of English, and adds a layer of explicit narratorial subjectivity to the letter’s content, “Of which to telle in short is myn entente / Th’effect, as fer as I kan understonde” (1219–20). “As fer as I kan understonde” gives an impression of modesty (perhaps that of the translator who writes “of no sentement” but can only rely on his auctour), but once we know the source, it also implies a genial impatience with the convolutions of the original, the sense of which is indeed hard to follow through Boccaccio’s intricate syntax. Interwoven with the story is an intermittent commentary on the task of telling it, a commentary that surely must, at least in part, have been improvisatory and opportunistic. Did Chaucer know in advance that when he reached this stage in Book II, his response to Boccaccio’s version of the epistolary exchange would provoke him to treat the lovers’ letters so critically? It seems unlikely: here we encounter “the real present of the creative process,” with Chaucer responding to the successive phases of the Filostrato as he experienced them. I do not mean to imply, of course, that he had not read through Boccaccio’s poem before embarking on his adaptation— he had obviously studied it carefully—but there is a real analogy between Morson’s case of a literary work that changes in unplanned ways in response to changing external events and one that changes in response to the movements of a long and complicated source.

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If Tolstoy and Dostoevsky put themselves at the mercy of current affairs in order to free their writing to respond to “life as it is experienced,” perhaps Chaucer took an analogous risk in putting himself at the mercy of Boccaccio’s complex poem. His commentary on the task of telling his story is made up of several kinds of annotation—informative, affective, interpretative, questioning, and so on—of which I have discussed here only a single sample of a single kind, the literary-­critical. The commentary, taken as a whole, is so richly elaborate and so deeply interwoven with the narrative materia that it goes far toward turning the whole poem into a form of autography, making it possible to think of Troilus and Criseyde as an infinitely more sophisticated descendant of the experien­tialization of a catalogue of churches in the Dit des mons­ tiers. I suggest that new kinds of pleasure and understanding might be gained from the Troilus and some of Chaucer’s other narratives-­ with-­commentary if more attention were to be paid to their autographic dimensions. This possibility might also apply to fifteenth-­century verse narratives in the Chaucerian tradition. Among them would be some of the saints’ legends by Bokenham discussed in chapter 7, but also more substantial works such as (to take a single example) the Life of Saint Katherine by John Capgrave, mentioned by Bokenham as “but newly compyled” in a passage quoted above from his own vita of that saint.7 Capgrave’s Saint Katherine is a poem of 8,372 lines in rhyme royal stanzas, set in pagan antiquity, and divided into five books, each with a prologue. The parallel with Chaucer’s Troilus—also in rhyme royal, also in five books, and in standard modern editions containing almost exactly the same number of lines, 8,329—is striking, and there can be no doubt that, though Capgrave never mentions Chaucer, he deliberately took Chaucer’s poem as his model—in many ways a paradoxical choice, given the fundamental differences between the two heroines, the martyred Christian virgin and the promiscuous pagan. It would seem that Capgrave read Troilus and Criseyde less as “the book of Troilus” than as “Crisseyde,” seeing it as the story of a young woman

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desiring the freedom to live life on her own terms but under intolerable pressure not to do so. Karen Winstead observes the similarity of theme, writing perceptively that “in his legend, Capgrave revisits an issue that Chaucer broached in Troilus, namely, whether it is possible for a woman to live as she pleases, given the force of tradition and the attitudes of men”8; but much remains to be understood about the uses Capgrave made of his model. Far more elaborately than the proem to Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, the prologue to Book I of Saint Katherine tells an invented story about the origins of the story Capgrave is going to translate. The prologue, addressed as prayer first to Christ and the Blessed Virgin and then to Katherine, evokes an “I” fitfully emerging from the “we” of the Christian community, to be defined ultimately (far more precisely than Chaucer identifies himself) as an Augustinian friar and a local man—“My cuntré is Northfolke, of the town of Lynne” (240)9—bringing material distant in time and place back to his East Anglian neighbors. Saints’ legends, like stories from classical history, have to conform to existing narrative shapes, to be not just tellings but retellings, and the legend of Katherine of Alexandria was especially popular and well known. There was even more reason with the Life of Saint Katherine than with Troilus and Criseyde for a late medieval poet to appeal to his readers’ desire for “the pleasure of intimacy”10 by weaving autographic commentary and metanarrative into the narrative itself.11 A small-­scale example can be found in a section of Book I in which Capgrave gives details of the genealogy of Katherine’s mother, the widow of King Costus. Somewhat as in the Dit des monstiers, the material is essentially a catalogue, but in Capgrave’s retelling it is beguilingly subjectivized. He begins with a fiction of orality, as an “I” addressing a potentially restive group of listeners as “you,” assuring them of the advantage they will gain by being patient, in that they will not need to search through the written sources themselves: . . . Ye shal sone here If ye wyl be stylle and no man now speke

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But I myselve. Ye schal not nede to seke Mo cronycles or storyes; ye schal lere of me Alle the lyne and the lordes aftyr her degré. (I 528–32) —— [You will soon hear if you will be quiet and let nobody speak but I myself. You will not need to search through more chroni­ cles or histories; you will learn from me about the whole line­ age and the lords according to their rank.]

By the end of the “lyne,” some 150 verse lines later, repeated proximal deictics (“this,” “this same,” “here,” “I”) have penetrated deeply into the list, setting it and the process of constructing it afloat on an ocean of subjectivity: This same Claudace Costus fadyr was, And this same Costus fadyr to Kateryne. Here may ye se of what men and of what place Cam this woman, this lady, this virgyne; Here is it schewyd hooly al the lyne. Thus I behyte you that I schuld doo. In this reknyng myne auctour and I are too, For he acordyth not wyth cronicles that ben olde But diversyth from hem, and that in many thyngis. There he acordyth, there I him hold, And where he diversyth in ordre of these kyngis I leve him, and to othir mennis rekenyngis I geve more credens, whech before him and me Sette alle these men in ordre and degré. (680–93) —— [This same Claudace was Costus’s father, and this same Costus was father to Katherine. Here you may see from what men and what places this woman, this lady, this virgin, came; here the entire lineage is completely set out. That is what I promised you I would do. In this account, my auctour and I part ways, for he does not agree with ancient chronicles but diverges

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from them, and that in many respects. Where he agrees, I follow him, and where he diverges in the order of these kings I part from him, and give more credence to the accounts of others, who, before him and before me, set all these men in order and rank.]

An “I” is still addressing the “you” whose patience he began by soliciting, but now the “here” in which the lineage is detailed must be a location on the page of the book we are reading, and the “I” is part of the text of that book, a textual subject not necessarily to be identified with the individual John Capgrave. In the closing lines of Book I Capgrave once more slips unobtrusively between the spoken and the written: It wyl be long or that this tale be told; Therfore I counsell that we make here a pause And eke a rest ryth evene at this clause. (I 1041–43) —— [It will be long before this tale is told; therefore I suggest that we should make a pause here, and also take a rest, exactly at this clause.]

“Long” implies the time of listening along with that of telling, the effort of composition, but “here” (as opposed to “now”) once more implies a place in the book, as does the textual deixis of “this,” indicating the very clausula or point of closure that completes the last sentence of Book I. I have been examining some relatively trivial examples of subjectivization and méta-­écriture by means of which, in a single passage of one poem, hagiography is converted into autography, but I suggest that much other post-­Chaucerian narrative poetry could profitably be read with an eye to the dit-­like elements woven into it. One last category of late medieval writing that might benefit by the approach I am suggesting is that which is never completed but always in process of revision, by additions to the text or by glosses

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to what has already been composed. The most prominent writer of this kind is perhaps John Skelton, about whom Jane Griffiths has recently written, “Skelton’s works are never finished, but can always be extended by an envoy, or some marginal glosses, or be rearranged and in part inserted in a different poem.”12 The most striking case within Skelton’s work is Speke Parott, an exuberantly obscure political and religious allegory directed against Cardinal Wolsey, accompanied by a series of additions—“Lenvoy primere,” “Secunde Lenvoy,” “Le dereyn lenveoy,” and “Lenvoy royalle”13— appended in response to news coming from Calais in the course of 1521, concerning developments at a peace conference that involved Wolsey, the emperor, and the king of France. Here, for at least the first 230 or so lines, and also in some later sections, there really does seem to be an identifiable fictional speaker who might appear to be offered as the basis for stabilization of meaning; but that speaker is Parott, a bird that has no language of its own and can only gather together and repeat “shredis of sentence” (line 92: fragments of meaning) from what it has heard said by others in many different languages. Thus the notion of the speaker or narrator is put forward only to be made to undo itself, and the poet and his readers are left with a nerve-­racking freedom from the constraints of structural completeness and vouloir-­dire. Moreover, Latin glosses survive for part of the poem; they are anonymous, their origin and authority are uncertain, and their relation to the main text is not a matter of voice but only of the marginal space they occupy. Speke Parott is the ultimate instance of the poem as collage, but if we look back for a moment, it can also be seen as an extreme development of Langland’s practice in Piers Plowman, an often obscure allegory, also never complete, and unendingly rewritten out of the evolution of the poet’s experience of life and his understanding of religious truth. Skelton may indeed have thought of himself as writing in the Piers Plowman tradition. And there, or rather here, I bring this book to its provisional end. Heading the text of Speke Parott, but itself with no defined

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speaker, is the statement Lectoribus auctor recipit opusculy huius auxesim—“By his readers the/an author receives an amplification of his little work.” My hope is that the present opusculus will suggest to its readers possibilities for a better reading of other poems.

Notes

C h a p t e r 1 .  The Textual First Person

1. Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 37. Cf. Fludernik, Introduction to Narratology, 1–2: “Narrative is associated above all with the act of narration and is to be found wherever someone tells us about something. . . . Narrative is therefore closely bound up with the speech act of narrating and also with the figure of a narrator.” 2. Adams, Pragmatics and Fiction, 10. 3. Chaucer is quoted from Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, with book/fragment and line numbers given in the text. 4. Irvine and Thomson, “Grammatica and Literary Theory,” 30–31. 5.  Minnis, “Influence of Academic Prologues,” 346. 6. Jajdelska, Silent Reading, 11. 7. I first did so in Spearing, “Book of Margery Kempe,” 626. For an earlier application by John M. Bowers to Hoccleve, see chapter 2, note 13. 8. Barbour, Bruce, Book 1, lines 1–5, 11–13. 9. Cannon, Grounds of English Literature, 29. 10.  For discussion, see Fleischman, “On the Representation of History,” and Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, especially chaps.1, 2, and 6. 11.  Boffey and Edwards, “Literary Texts,” 555–56. 12. Genette, Narrative Discourse. 13. Tamir, “Personal Narrative,” 415 (my italics). 14. Fludernik, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters,” 252n6. 15. E.g., Wallace, ed. Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, and Simpson, 1350–1547. Lerer, “Endurance of Formalism,” notes the marginalization in such histories of types of writing for which the tradition of study remains formalistic. A welcome exception is Cannon, Grounds of English Literature. 269

270  Notes to Pages 9–15

16. See Minkova, “Forms of Verse,” 182. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is quoted from Andrew and Waldron, eds., Poems of the Pearl Manuscript; here line 132. 17. For a sketch of some of these marks, see Spearing, “Margery Kempe.” 18. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 224. 19. Thanks to Chris Krentz for information about this. 20.  Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 91. 21. Fleischman, “Discourse as Space/Discourse as Time,” 299. Roland Barthes had gone further, claiming, in connection with Flaubert, that “the very being of writing (the meaning of the labor that constitutes it) is to keep the question Who is speaking? from ever being answered” (S/Z, 140). 22. The topos goes back at least as far as the first line of the Tristia, dispatched by Ovid from the shores of the Black Sea to distant Rome. 23.  Fleischman, “Discourse as Space/Discourse as Time,” n.17. 24. Searle, Speech Acts; see also Svenbro, Phrasikleia, for an important critique of “the conviction that the first person necessarily implies an inner life and a voice” (42). I am grateful to Vance Smith for calling my attention to Svenbro’s work. 25. Heller-­Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, 33, citing Zink, Subjectivité littéraire, 16–17, and Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 1. Heller-­ Roazen’s point, in context, is that this is the medieval grammarians’ conception of all personal pronouns, including the third person. 26.  Cf. Nagel, View from Nowhere, especially chap. 4. 27.  For “experientiality,” see the discussion on p. 20 and in note 46 below. 28. To take a single example, Stephen B. Davis, in an article of considerable sophistication and perceptiveness, refers to the Book of the Duchess’s “narrator” (a term used some twenty times) and “Dreamer” (used some thirty times) as “a Machaut-­like central character” (Davis, “Guillaume de Machaut, ” 392) and as the poem’s “primary character,” “a Machauldian poet becoming a Chaucerian one” (403). Those formulations point to an important truth but at the same time distort it, because for much of the poem the “I” is no more than a transparent medium, lacking the specificity and thickness implied by “character” in the sense evidently intended. 29. Newman, God and the Goddesses, 66.

Notes to Pages 15–19 271

30. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 69. Another scholarly account of the De planctu calls the textual first person the narrator, but without apparently distinguishing him from the author: Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex, 13, refers in successive sentences to the same figure as the “narrator,” the “dreamer-­poet,” and “Alan.” 31. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 72. 32. Ibid., 87. 33.  France, ed., New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, 476. 34. Duncan, ed., Medieval English Lyrics, no. 94, lines 1–7. 35. See Sandison, “Chanson d’aventure,” and Zeeman, “Imaginative Theory,” 227–40. 36. Duncan, ed., Medieval English Lyrics, no. 105, lines 1–6. Note how in the first line the proximal “this” supports and heightens the proxi­ mality of “I.” 37. Ibid., lines 55–56. 38. Phillips, “Frames and Narrators,” 80. Phillips is here discussing fifteenth-­century poetry in a specific tradition, but her insight into the reciprocal functions of the first and second persons applies more generally. 39.  Sir Isumbras, lines 7 and 33; Sir Gowther, lines 28–29; Emaré, lines 20–21. All quoted from Mills, ed., Six Middle English Romances. 40. On the persistence of reading aloud, regardless of the spread of literacy, see Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public. 41.  Genette, Narrative Discourse, 245. 42.  Butterfield, “Chaucer’s French Inheritance,” 28. More recently, Butterfield has added that she “cannot find an earlier example” than Froissart’s of “the use of ‘je’ to start a narrative dit” in French (“France,” 34). For a recent survey of possible dates for the Book of the Duchess, see Foster, “On Dating the Duchess.” 43. The number, order, and date of the extant versions of Piers Plowman are disputed, but if the A version is the earliest, it was probably written in the late 1360s. I think it likely that Langland knew Wynnere and Wastoure and originally intended to write a poem of the same kind; at any rate, in Piers Plowman the textual “I” begins as an observer of allegorical events, and in one of his early dreams a character called Wastour plays an important part (see Kane, ed., Piers Plowman, VII 139: “Thanne gan Wastour arise and wolde have yfoughte [Then Waster rose up, intending to fight]”)—though Langland’s Waster is a very different manifestation of the idea of “wasting” from the Waster who is opposed to Winner. As

272  Notes to Pages 20–22

the poem develops, however, the “I” becomes more than an observer—an unstable subject deeply implicated in both dream and waking actions. The concept of autography may be especially useful in thinking about Piers Plowman, but Langland’s poem would require a book to itself. 44.  See Spearing, Medieval Dream-­Poetry; see also Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, 153–58. 45. That date was originally proposed by Gollancz in the preface to his heavily emended text of the poem, A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster, and by Steadman, “Date of ‘Winnere and Wastoure.’ ” Its certainty has been questioned by Salter, “Timeliness of Wynnere and Wastoure”; by Lawton, “Literary History and Scholarly Fancy”; and by Trigg, “Israel Gollancz’s ‘Wynnere and Wastoure.’ ” Gollancz’s date, though less certain than he supposed, remains the most probable; see Turville-­Petre, “Wynnere and Wastoure: When and Where?” 46.  “Experientiality” is a term also used by Monika Fludernik (see especially Towards a “Natural” Narratology). I have benefited from her published work on natural narrative and also from personal discussion with her, but I use “experientiality” in a different and more restricted sense than hers. For Fludernik experientiality is what constitutes narrativity itself: “For the narrator the experientiality of the story resides not merely in the events themselves but in their emotional significance and exemplary nature. The events become tellable precisely because they have started to mean something to the narrator on an emotional level. It is this conjunction of experience reviewed, reorganized, and evaluated (‘point’) that constitutes narrativity” (Fludernik, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters,” 245). As she explains elsewhere, her “central thesis” is “that narrativity should be detached from its dependence on plot and be redefined as the representation of experientiality” (Fludernik, Introduction to Narratology, 109). I understand narrative in a more traditional sense, as the representation of a connected series of events. 47.  Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” and “Reality Effect.” 48. Barthes, Système de la mode, 268; Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 38. 49. On this, see Zeeman, “Piers Plowman,” 167–70. 50. Banfield, “Describing the Unobserved,” 278, quoting Deleuze, Cinéma I, 117. 51. Compare Kuno, Functional Syntax, chap. 5, for a sustained analogy between deixis and the film director’s use of camera angles. Kuno,

Notes to Pages 22–26 273

however, assumes the communication model for language, and parallels the director to the “speaker” of a sentence. 52. Smith, Arts of Possession, 80. 53. The only manuscript may be as much as a century later than the poem’s date of composition, and scribal corruption is undoubtedly present. Editors include Turville-­Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages; Trigg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure; Conlee, ed., Middle English Debate Poetry; and Ginsberg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure. There are helpful discussions of the prologue by Jacobs, “Typology of Debate”; Turville-­Petre, “Prologue of Wynnere and Wastoure”; and Coleman, “Complaint of the Makers.” 54. The manuscript, British Library MS Addit. 31042, is dated to the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Roney, “Winner and Waster’s ‘Wyse Wordes,’ ” suggests that there may be substantial omissions later in the poem, and that is certainly possible. 55.  Wynnere and Wastoure is quoted from Turville-­Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry. 56. Salter, “Timeliness of Wynnere and Wastoure,” 198; Chandos Herald, Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 85. I agree with Coleman, “Aurality,” 83, that the distinction being drawn in such passages is “between the moral value of the performances and texts involved, not between orality and literacy.” 57. Seniles V:2, quoted from Bishop, trans., Letters from Petrarch, 240. 58. Dante, Purgatorio 26:117, famously borrowed by T. S. Eliot in his dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound. 59. Pointed out by Turville-­Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry (note on lines 29–30). Similarly in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 1515, “werkkez” refers both to knightly deeds and to the literary works in which they are recorded, chivalric romances. 60.  Most recently by Harwood, “Anxious over Peasants,” 303–6. 61. Not all readers see it in these terms. For Nolan, “‘With Tresoune Withinn,’ ” the poem is primarily about the definition of treason and the extent and limits of royal sovereignty. Nolan’s account is learned, perceptive, and subtle, but like some other recent studies of Wynnere and Wastoure, it seems to me sometimes subtler than the poem itself. 62. Scattergood, “Winner and Waster,” 46. 63. McGrady, Controlling Readers, 8.

274  Notes to Pages 26–34

64.  Bale, “From Translator to Laureate,” 920, writes of The Owl and the Nightingale: “We never find out Nicholas’s judgement, and never discover, therefore, what meaning or conclusion should be attached to the text; the author turns out not to be authoritative. The poem closes abruptly: ‘Her is na more of þis spell’ (line 1794); the poem’s meaning is devolved to its readers, leading to the plethora of interpretations it has received in recent times.” 65. First suggested by Salter, “Timeliness of Wynnere and Wastoure,” 192. 66. Harwood, “Anxious over Peasants,” 300, suggests that the frende may be not a lawyer but “a subornable judge.” In view of the widespread concern in fourteenth-­century England about the custom of “retaining” judges, this seems likely enough. 67. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 99. Selcouthes means “wonders.” 68. Beowulf 259. 69. Hanna, “Brewing Trouble,” 9. 70. Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, lines 266–71; Nims, trans., Poetria Nova, 26. Mora (delay) in line 268 is a term used to refer to amplifying rhetorical devices.

C h a p t e r 2 .  Autography: Prologues and Dits

1. See Folkenflik, “Introduction.” 2. De Man, “Autobiography as De-­facement,” 919–20. 3. Abbott, “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction,” 598n1. 4. Ibid., 601. In a subsequent book, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Abbott discusses the autographical but nonautobiographical traces that Samuel Beckett leaves in his writings. More recently, in his Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 63, Abbott quotes a striking passage by Mark Twain on how such traces can survive even in the autobiographer’s attempts at concealment and distortion. I cannot resist repeating it, to illustrate what we do not find in medieval autography: An autobiography is the truest of all books; for though it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines,

Notes to Pages 34–35 275

where the author-­cat is raking dust upon it, which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell . . . the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. The quotation is from a letter to William Dean Howells, in Smith and Gilson, ed., Mark Twain-­Howells Letters, 2:782. I am grateful to Porter Abbott for supplying this reference, which was accidentally omitted from the first edition of his book. 5. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 143, cited by Folkenflik, “Introduction,” 3. The square brackets and their contents are taken from Folkenflik’s citation. 6. Radice, trans., Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 85. 7. Sweeney, “Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum and Letters,” 319. An earlier statement along similar lines, in my view equally mistaken, occurs in Mary M. McLaughlin’s otherwise excellent monograph, “Abelard as Autobiographer”: “Circuitous and incomplete though his search for self-­ knowledge may have been, Abelard succeeded, as relatively few autobiographers have done, in imposing on the confusions of experience an order in which both the shape of a life and the paradoxes of a personality are clearly disclosed” (472). 8. Benton, ed., Self and Society, 7, citing Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 109. Zink, Invention of Literary Subjectivity, 164–65, cites the suggestion of Labande, Guibert de Nogent, 2–3, that the term Monodiae should be understood in relation to Isidore of Seville’s definition, “When a single person sings, it is called monodia in Greek, . . . when two people sing, on the other hand, it is called bicinium,” and explains that “The title Monodiae thus defined not the content of the work but its mode of expression: Guibert intended to make himself alone heard. No other voice would be mingled with his and the point of view would be deliberately subjective.” But the distinction between solo singing and a duet does not relate to subjective point of view but to the medium of expression. I suggest that Zink’s interpretation is one of many cases in which the term “voice,” applied to writing, serves only to mislead. Zink’s important book is concerned with the expression and representation of subjectivity in Latin and French writings, not with the ways subjectivity is encoded in writing itself. 9. Lejeune, Pacte autobiographique, 315 (my translation). The ellipses mark the omission of the phrase “in prose”: prose and verse have different functions in the Middle Ages from those they have in the

276  Notes to Pages 35–37

more modern period with which Lejeune is concerned, though in fact the works by Abelard and Guibert and The Book of Margery Kempe are all in prose. 10. Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 21. 11. The suggestion that the last writer was Spryngolde was made independently by Gallyon, Margery Kempe of Lynn, and by Dillon, “Margery Kempe’s Sharp Confessor/s.” Thanks to Barry Windeatt for calling Gallyon’s book to my attention. 12. See Dillon, “Holy Women and Their Confessors”; also Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices. 13. It may be worth noting that another modern sense of autography associates it with autographs in the sense of writings such as the signatures of famous people: “autography” can mean the hobby of collecting such writings. Though the hobby is modern, this association has a medieval relevance, in the form of the development by which certain late medieval poets began to collect their own poems in manuscripts written by themselves. Petrarch and Machaut are continental examples; Hoccleve may have been the first English poet to do this, in what was once a single manuscript, now divided into Huntington Library 744 and 111. For use of the term “autography” in this context, see Bowers, “Hoccleve’s Huntington Holographs,” 42: Hoccleve is often credited with advancing authenticity in literary self-­portraiture, and his compulsive urge toward autobiography finds its parallel in his compulsive urge toward autography. Yet a poet’s aim in assembling his life’s writings is different from assembling writings about his life set within a reconstructed narrative context, as Dante did in the Vita Nuova and Hoccleve himself to some extent in the Series. Whereas the works of various Provençal poets implied personal narratives later supplemented and reified in editorial vidas, the titular notations as well as the nature of the items marshalled by Hoccleve in HM 744/111, with the exception of the early Male Regle (ca. 1405), lack any comparable substance of personal disclosure and thus foreclose the profit of being placed within such a biographical context. 14. Perreault, Writing Selves, 2. 15. Roth, The Counterlife, 366–67. Needless to say, we cannot take this as a truly autobiographical statement.

Notes to Pages 37–42 277

16. Samuels, “Eight Justifications,” 103. I am indebted to discussion with Lisa Samuels as well as to this article. 17.  Chiasson, “Entangled,” 80. 18.  Wogan-­Browne et al., ed., Idea of the Vernacular. 19. Evans, “Afterword,” 371–72. 20. Galloway, “Middle English Prologues,” 297, 298, 301, 302. 21.  Cunningham, “The Literary Form of the Prologue.” 22.  Kendrick, “Linking The Canterbury Tales,” 85. 23.  For the concept of social performance, see the writings of Erving Goffman, especially Presentation of Self. 24. The first appearance of Kittredge’s approach, in 1893, came midway between Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888) and his Turn of the Screw (1898). 25.  Culler, “Why Lyric?,” 201. 26.  Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Pardoner.” 27.  Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” 833. 28. A recent example, striking only because of the extreme to which it unknowingly pushes the implications of Kittredge’s theory, is Jones, “Chaucer’s Anxiety of Poetic Craft.” Jones sees even the alleged metrical failings of The Squire’s Tale and the details of the way it is punctuated by the scribe of the Hengwrt manuscript as the responsibility of the fictional Squire who tells it, while insisting that the tale’s “insufficient nature” is “constantly under the control of Chaucer” (315). 29. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 155. 30.  Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject, 196. The review is by Winthrop Wetherbee; the quotation is from its first sentence. It is as though Patterson had forgotten his earlier, incisive analysis of the emergence of the idea of the narratorial persona in Chaucer criticism and its consequences for interpretation (Negotiating the Past, 20–21): “the dramatizing of Chaucerian poetry meant that the referent of every statement was not an extrinsic system of value, whether or not historical, but the fictionalized personality who spoke it. At the center of Chaucer’s poetry was character, and every statement should be read in the first instance as a characterizing device.” 31. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject, 198, 226. 32. It is mentioned as such in the list of Chaucer’s works in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women, as “al the love of Palamon and Arcite” (F 420, G 408), though it survives only as the first of The Canterbury Tales.

278  Notes to Pages 42–49

33. Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 242, 254, 293. 34. Here I can no longer claim, as in chapter 1, to be using the term “poetry” merely descriptively. 35. Pearsall, “Medieval Literature and Historical Enquiry,” xl. 36. See for example Raybin and Fein, “Chaucer and Aesthetics” (the introductory essay to an issue of Chaucer Review focusing on this topic), and Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” (similarly part of a collection of articles attempting to define a larger movement). For a more recent study, at once more specific and broader in intellectual scope, see Fradenburg, “Beauty and Boredom.” 37. Everest, “Sex and Old Age,” shows, for example, how the images of the prologue reflect “medieval geriatric theory as understood by trained physician and interested layman alike” (102). 38. See MacLaine, “Chaucer’s Wine-­Cask Image.” 39. For grants of wine to Chaucer by Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV, see Crow and Olson, ed., Chaucer Life-­Records, 112–19. On the sexual implications of this image, see Heffernan, “Reconsideration of the Cask Figure.” 40.  But for fruitful uncertainty about the prologue’s function, see Ruggiers, Art of the Canterbury Tales, 69–70. Ruggiers writes, “How successfully we may integrate this monologue of the Reeve on old age into his whole performance is, I suspect, a matter of enthusiasm and zeal for seeing all that Chaucer does as a finished performance” (69), and he goes on to put a whole series of possible interpretations as questions, including: “Was the interest in the convention [i.e., the topos of old age] a part of Chaucer’s own sober and thoughtful process into old age?” (70). There have also been attempts to explain the prologue in psychological terms by relating it to the “wayside drama” in other ways. Thus Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, writes that “to get back at the Miller for exposing his ‘impotence,’ the Reeve initially launches into a confessional sermon on the vices of old age” (123). And Allman, “Sociolinguistics, Literature, and the Reeve’s Tale,” implausibly claims that “viewed within the arena of dramatic realism, the Reeve’s Prologue is a self-­defense by a subject who seems desperate in his recourse to unsightly self-­and cohort-­revelation” (388), and that in the tale the Reeve “ventriloquizes through Symkyn the description of his own agon with the pilgrim-­Miller” (391). 41. David, Strumpet Muse, 109; Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 220, 253; Pearsall, “Canterbury Tales II,” 170. Note that the

Notes to Page 50 279

tale too incorporates at least one memorable passage that, in its immediate effect, has little to do either with the story it tells or with the Reeve— two couplets of free indirect discourse that form a vehemently sarcastic denunciation of ecclesiastical corruption: For hooly chirches good moot been despended On hooly chirches blood, that is descended. Therfore he wolde his hooly blood honoure, Though that he hooly chirche sholde devoure. (3983–86) —— [For the wealth of holy church must be spent on the blood which is that of holy church by descent; therefore he would honor his holy blood [i.e., his descendants] even if he should devour holy church.] Dillon, “Life Histories,” 258–59, notes, rightly in my view, that we encounter here a change of direction in the rhetoric, signalling a new poetic objective. . . . The mode of writing here is at odds with anything that has gone before. . . . The life history of the miller’s daughter makes space for a different and more vitriolic brand of satire. The primary direction of the tale is not anticlerical satire, nor does the tale return to the figure of the parson again; but for a brief moment here Chaucer invites his audience to take, as it were, time off from the main concerns of the tale to participate in what is nevertheless a very central concern of the Tales as a whole: disgust with corruption in the church. I refer to the passage’s “immediate effect” because blood, metaphorical and literal, has a certain thematic status in this particular tale, as in the “bloody streem” (4276) that later flows from someone’s nose, and perhaps even the Prologue’s weakening stream of (red?) wine—but these allusions to blood cannot usefully be understood as self-­revelation by the Reeve. See Plummer, “Hooly Chirches Blood,” and Phillips, “The French Background,” 302. 42. The first quotation comes from Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England, 244; the second from Bronson, In Search of Chaucer, 115; the third and fourth from Wetherbee, Geoffrey Chaucer: “The Canterbury Tales,”

280  Notes to Pages 50–53

62. Some of my examples of unfavorable criticism are borrowed from the introduction to Spearing and Spearing, ed. Reeve’s Prologue and Tale. Not all critics agree; for example, Olson, “The Reeve’s Tale as a Fabliau,” writes: “The atmosphere of contest is rather at odds with the Reeve’s supposed vindictiveness. . . . There is nothing in the tale which develops the morbid concern with aging that dominates the Reeve’s prologue or that even points to an old man as its teller” (227–28). See also Gallo, “The Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf,” 84: “Does it [The Reeve’s Prologue] reveal a bitter, self-­destructive nature? (And if we say it does, it is only a short step to finding that the Reeve’s Tale, which is a rollicking bit of hilarity, is dripping with spite and impotent fury.)” 43. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 204. 44. Lerer, “Canterbury Tales,” 252; Pearsall, “Canterbury Tales II,” 168–69; Howard, Idea of “The Canterbury Tales,” 241. 45. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford, 115. (When he wrote this, Bennett had left Oxford for a Cambridge chair, but the move served only to confirm his existing preference.) 46.  Fyler, “Man, Men, and Women,” 164. In Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, chap. 4, I illustrated in detail how The Man of Law’s Tale in particular has been transformed by critics over the last sixty or so years into a bad tale, designed as such in order to expose the faults of its teller. 47. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship. Minnis and Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, begins with a collection of “Literary Prefaces” or accessus, and in his “Influence of Academic Prologues” Minnis shows how the thought and terminology of these Latin accessus can be traced in English prologues by Usk, Gower, and Chaucer, notably in Chaucer’s prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Another wide-­ ranging study of the medieval prologue that includes English examples is Geertz, Poetic Prologues; this, however, takes for granted the very concepts of “narrator” and “voice” that I want to question. 48. Davenport, Chaucer and His English Contemporaries, 9. Chapter 6 of Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality, entitled “Poetics in the Prologues,” includes interesting discussion of the literary issues raised in certain Canterbury Tales link passages but is not concerned with the prologue as a literary form. 49.  Davenport, Chaucer and His English Contemporaries, 14, 36, 35. 50. This section of the present book is based on Spearing, “Textual Performance.” This essay, like the other contents of the collection in

Notes to Pages 54–55 281

which it appears, originated as a lecture given at a symposium organized by the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Southern Denmark in November 1999; through no fault of the editor’s, I was not given the opportunity to correct proofs, and the printed version is full of errors. To the best of my knowledge, the only suggestion before 1999 of any influence of the dit as a genre of poetry in English is in Burrow, “Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets.” Hoccleve was undoubtedly well read in French poetry, but though Burrow sees “no full English precedent” (44) for this aspect of his work, I believe that much of what he suggests can be extended from this early disciple of Chaucer to Chaucer himself. 51.  Zink, “Dit” (my translation). 52. See Nolan, “Turning Over the Leaves of Medieval Fabliau-­ Anthologies” and “Anthologizing Ribaldry,” and Dane, “Wife of Bath’s Shipman’s Tale.” Dane does not refer to Nolan’s earlier critiques of the myth of the fabliau as genre and was perhaps unaware of them. I am greatly indebted to my late colleague Barbara Nolan for reminding me of the discrepancies between modern and medieval categorizations, and I regret that I can make this acknowledgment only after her death. 53. It can therefore be defined in more than one way. In a recent study Didier Lechat sees the dit as characterized by three traits: it stages an “I,” it is especially concerned (at least by the fourteenth century) with “casuistique amoureuse,” and it embeds both “micro-­récits” and “pièces lyriques” within a narrative framework (Lechat, «Dire par fiction», 11–12). The focus of Lechat’s study, “rewritings of mythological stories within works composed in the first person” (15, my translation), is different from mine, though récritures of this kind play an important part in such English offshoots of the dit as Chaucer’s dream poems. A more extreme case: Dane, “Wife of Bath’s Shipman’s Tale,” 289n8, quotes an 1815 definition of dits as “ditties or moral songs.” 54. Lechat, «Dire par fiction», begins by noting a mid-­fourteenth-­ century break between shorter and longer forms of the dit. 55.  Zink, Invention of Literary Subjectivity, 50–51. 56. Baumgartner, Histoire de la littérature française, 139; Fourrier, ed., Dits et Débats, 13. Both passages are cited by Pfeffer, “Dit des mons­ tiers,” 94 (my translations). 57.  Cerquiglini, “Le Clerc et l’écriture,” 160, 159–60. The translations from this article are my own; the italics are Cerquiglini’s. 58. Ibid., 160, 165.

282  Notes to Pages 55–60

59. Ibid., 155. 60. In Ribémont, ed., Écrire pour dire, 5 (my translation). 61.  Zink, Subjectivité littéraire, 63. 62.  Cerquiglini, “Le Clerc et l’écriture,” 158, 160. 63. Pfeffer, “Dit des monstiers.” Line numbers corresponding to Pfeffer’s translation are given in the text. 64. See Butterfield, Familiar Enemy—a transformative work of scholarship. 65.  My translation is indebted to the abbreviated version by Winde­ att, ed. and trans., Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, 26–40, and also to the more literal and complete translation by Palmer, ed. and trans., Guillaume de Machaut, from which I also take the French text. Line numbers are given in the text. 66. Brownlee, Poetic Identity, 190–91, comments on the “semantic interpenetration” effected by some of the wordplay in this passage, but he sees it as pointing to the combination of “active” and “pleasurable” responses required by the text rather than to textuality itself. Brownlee’s account of the Fonteinne amoureuse includes a minute analysis of the poem’s “I” that fragments it into various functions (clerc, narrator, court poet, poète of this dit, poète of the works of Machaut, etc.), but never puts Humpty Dumpty together again. I find this unsatisfying and untrue to the pleasure of reading the poem, a pleasure that depends, in my experience, on the reader’s willingness not to treat the “I” analytically. 67. De Looze, “‘Mon nom trouveras,’ ” 540. As de Looze observes, the anagram would make sense only to readers who already knew the names of the poet and his patron. 68. See Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 93, on “the constant tension between chevalerie and clergie” as two opposing constructions of mascu­ linity. 69. Poirion, “Traditions et fonctions,” 149 (my translation). 70. The importance of this, and the corresponding elevation of the poet’s role, is emphasized by McGrady, “‘Tout son païs m’abondonna.’ ” 71. Calin, French Tradition, 217, writes: “Morpheus, the creator of images, is assimilated to the Narrator, a creator of words; and Morpheus as a metaphoric artist parallels the implied author, a metaphoric dreamer.” I would place more emphasis on writing as the underlying idea, and I think it less misleading to refer to the poem’s “I” as Machaut than as its narrator.

Notes to Pages 61–69 283

72.  Cf. Brownlee, Poetic Identity, 199: “The text thus incorporates (in a way which heightens its textuality, its existence as poetic artifact) the extratextual situation that is presented as having generated it.” 73. An earlier medieval parallel to this strange phenomenon of the sharing of a noble’s dream by a clerc (though not a dream of love) can be found in the Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. and trans. McGurk, 3:201–3, under the year 1131: “The vision which the king [Henry I of England] experienced in his sleep was simultaneously seen by the king’s physician, Grimbald, who was present in the king’s bedchamber at the time” (cited by Given-­Wilson, Chronicles, 54). 74. Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 277. Butterfield adds (278–79) that “Machaut’s splitting and doubling games with the first person . . . are not trifling with the metaphors of love but reveal an almost obsessive concern with the fracture and dissolution of the French princely subject,” produced by the English victory at Poitiers and its consequences. 75. Derrida, Limited Inc, 41, 67. 76. Ibid., 67, 68–69, 71, 73. 77. Huot, “Dit.” 78. Derrida, Limited Inc, 62.

C h a p t e r 3 .   Chaucerian Prologues and the Wife of Bath

1. This is the title of Banfield’s important and controversial book, Unspeakable Sentences, to which I am much indebted. For her, there are two types of “unspeakable sentence,” those of “pure narration” and those of “represented speech and thought”; I use the term in a somewhat broader sense. For other discussion of linguistic features peculiar to fictional narration of the kind found only in writing, see, e.g., Hamburger, Logic of Literature, 59ff., and Kuroda, “Reflections on the Foundations.” 2. So called by Hamburger, Logic of Literature, 81ff. 3. See Adamson, “Empathetic Narrative.” 4.  Burrow, “Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets,” 44. 5. This is not intended to contradict Joyce Coleman’s arguments in favor of “aurality,” in the sense of the social habit of reading aloud a written text to listeners; see Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public. 6. Besides their fleshliness, Falstaff and the Wife have comparable textual histories. Falstaff appeared in both parts of Henry IV and had his death feelingly described in Henry V, but was then revived by

284  Notes to Pages 69–78

Shakespeare after that death to feature in The Merry Wives of Windsor in a setting quite different from the historical context of the earlier plays. The Wife similarly makes several separate appearances both inside and outside the Canterbury Tales fiction in which she originates. 7. E.g., Pratt, “Development of the Wife of Bath.” 8.  Cf. Fisher, “Chaucer and the Written Language,” 247. 9. Lindley, “‘Vanysshed Was This Daunce,’ ” 7. 10. The Dialogue and the preceding Complaint are quoted from Burrow, ed., Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, using the “Durham MS” version (based on Hoccleve’s autograph) where available and otherwise Burrow’s “Edited Text”; line numbers in text. 11. See Minnis, Fallible Authors, 252; he points out that auctrix is used in the prologue to the vita of the thirteenth-­century Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth to refer to Beatrice herself. Minnis lists the three post-­1400 references to the Wife that I discuss here. 12. On Lydgate’s mummings, see Nolan, John Lydgate, chap. 2. The “Mumming [or Disguising] at Hertford” is discussed separately at 156– 61, and Nolan (157) proposes “circa 1426–1427” as its most likely date. The year 1427 is proposed by Pearsall, John Lydgate, 28, and by Sidhu, “Henpecked Husbands”; see Sidhu’s note 10 for further references. 13.  Quoted from MacCracken, ed., Minor Poems of John Lydgate, vol. 2. The rubric is on p. 675; line numbers from this edition are given for the following verse quotation. Nolan, John Lydgate, does not consider the question who the actors or reciters might have been, but they are most unlikely to have been real “upplandisshe people.” 14. Sidhu, “Henpecked Husbands,” 435. 15. Nolan, John Lydgate, 165. Nolan adds that it is “unimaginable that . . . the illusion of objectivity conferred by a male presenter” should be granted the wives, but it is surely likely that they were played by men rather than women. 16. Scattergood, ed., John Skelton; line numbers given in text. 17. The italics in this and the next long quotation are mine. 18.  Mann, ed., Canterbury Tales, 221, suggests that there may be a pun here on “lees” (dregs); if so, it would be another recollection by Chaucer (as opposed to the Wife) of his father’s business as a vintner. 19. Lawton, “‘Glose Whoso Wole,’ ” 160. 20.  Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” 24. 21.  Cf. Delany, “Strategies of Silence,” 119: “Whatever Chaucer has Dame Alice tell us, he keeps her silent about her work and her travel,

Notes to Pages 79–83 285

those two arenas of experience that define her most distinctively as proto-­modern woman.” 22.  Mann, “‘He Knew Nat Catoun,’ ” 66. 23. Dickson, “Deflection in the Mirror,” 74. 24. The sources may also include late medieval sermons on the topic of marriage, as suggested by Galloway, “Marriage Sermons.” 25. Hanna, “Compilatio and the Wife of Bath,” 1. 26. Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 140. 27.  Baswell, “Multilingualism on the Page,” in Strohm, ed., Middle English, 47. 28. Minnis, Fallible Authors, 248. 29.  For these claims, see Tinkle, “Contested Authority,” 284n59: “I dissent from Minnis’s argument about Chaucer’s adherence to scholastic positions and unambiguous anti-­Wycliffite stance.” 30. Minnis, Fallible Authors, 253. 31. This is the title of an essay by L. C. Knights, originally published in 1933, reprinted in his Explorations, criticizing A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy as a literal-­minded reading of poetic drama as if it were an account of real persons and events. 32. Cox, Gender and Language, 18. A point similar to mine is made by Delany, “Strategies of Silence,” 119, when she refers to the “stubborn residue” of psychologism in interpretations that are in theory based on nonpsychological assumptions. 33. Cox, Gender and Language, 20n5, 20, 27. Cox further refers to “The Wife’s attempts to maintain audience interest” (23) and “her desire to maintain audience approval” (29). Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 121–22, also discusses the etymology of “gloss,” and remarks that “the glossa undertakes to speak the text”; yet exegetical glosses are not in fact spoken but stand alongside the text, related to it not vocally but spatially. For a parallel and perhaps even more extreme case of attribution of esoteric knowledge to the Wife, see Morrison, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” She notes that terms from three different languages are used for the Wife’s sexual organ (queynte, bele chose, and quoniam) and argues (108) that “the Wife’s use” of these terms “suggests she is interpreting the concept of her sexual organ through the differences among its variant signifiers and their variant sources.” If anyone is doing this (which I doubt), it is not the Wife but Chaucer. 34. A more extreme example of learning misapplied occurs when Robert Longsworth notes an allusion in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue to

286  Notes to Pages 84–85

the “obscure biblical phrase,” found only in the Book of Kings, “mingens ad parietem (literally, ‘one who pisses against a wall’) . . . as a synonym for ‘a male of the household.’ ” Emphasizing her solidarity with other women through gossip, the Wife states that “hadde myn housbonde pissed on a wal, / Or doon a thyng that sholde han cost his lyf” (III 534–35; had my husband pissed against a wall or done something that would have cost him his life), she would have revealed it to her female friends. Longs­ worth comments that “the appropriation of the colorful biblical phrase would seem to be nothing more than a witty but knowing wink,” but adds that “it suggests a greater acquaintance with the textual Authority of the Bible than an illiterate lay-­woman might have been expected to possess” (“Wife of Bath,” 383). I would argue that in medieval first-­person writing the question how the “I” comes to have knowledge of a biblical allusion (or of anything else) is likely to be a red herring: the witty and knowing wink comes not from the illiterate laywoman but from Chaucer. 35. Shaw, “Masks of the Unconscious,” 440, 451. 36. Kay, Romance of the Rose, 34, quoting Cerquiglini, “Le Clerc et l’écriture,” 164: “Le je qui apparait dans le dit n’est pas le je indifférencié, universel, de la lyrique courtoise. . . . Il fait référence à un type social” (my translation). 37. Straus, “Subversive Discourse,” is a striking example of this. 38. See Twycross, “Transvestism,” and Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama. For a contrary view, see Goldberg, “Craft Guilds.” 39.  Carruthers, “Afterword” to “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” 44. Carruthers continues: “A rhetorical performance is above all a social occasion, a speaker and an audience meeting within a text, and the occasion is intended to generate the active participation and response through ear and eye (inner ear and eye when we read silently), of the audience.” This seems to involve confusion of the real public for Chaucer’s poem with the fictional audience within it. The fictional audience consists solely of listeners; the real public included readers, and what they read might include Latin glosses. 40. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 114. Other examples of critics who describe the Wife’s prologue as her “performance” include Leicester, “Wife of Bath as Chaucerian Subject,” 203: “As a whole her performance is dramatic because she says it is”; Fradenburg, “Wife of Bath’s Passing Fancy,” 35: “The Wife of Bath’s performance asks us to consider a special kind of modernity”; Dillon, Geoffrey Chaucer, 69: “She

Notes to Pages 86–90 287

consciously performs the part of the literary type [of ‘the typical harridan of anti-­feminist satire’], acknowledging her sources or camping up the details as she proceeds”; Patterson, “‘Experience Woot Well,’ ” 137: “her entire performance can be usefully read as a complicated and provocative offer to the males in her audience.” 41.  For comparison of the Wife of Bath with the Noah’s wife of miracle plays, see Storm, “Uxor and Alison.” 42. Spector, ed., N-­Town Play, vol. 1, Play 12, lines 26, 30, 35. There is no record of any performance of this cycle. 43.  Cf. Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”; Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One; Doane, “Film and the Masquerade.” For application of this idea to the Wife of Bath, see Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 115–17. There is an obvious analogy with the concept of gender performativity associated with Judith Butler, e.g., in her Bodies That Matter and Gender Trouble, but for my purposes it does not seem necessary to plunge into these deep theoretical waters. 44. Ganim, “Literary Uses of the New History,” 221–22. See also Lindley, “‘Vanysshed Was This Daunce,’ ” 4: “She is a drag act, a female impersonation.” 45. See Ong, “Latin Language Study,” and Woods, “Teaching of Writing.” A useful illustration of this practice in the Middle Ages, in the form of a text of Walter Map’s Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum (the compilation of which Jankyn’s book is a version), fully glossed for teaching purposes, is discussed by Hanna, “Compilatio and the Wife of Bath.” 46. Translated by Blamires, ed. Woman Defamed, 1, from Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. Michael MacLagan, 42–44; the scilicet mulier insertion is noted at 184. Blamires’s translation is more idiomatic and less archaic than that of E. C. Thomas, which is included in MacLagan’s edition. 47.  Quoted from Blamires, Woman Defamed, 70, from the translation by W. H. Fremantle. 48. Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 61, notes in Deschamps and Theophrastus “the irony by which the speeches of women attacking men are made an essential part of a male attack on women.” 49.  But, for the impossibility, alas, of establishing the authenticity of such affirmations, even if sworn and signed, and especially (but not only) when reproduced in textual form, see Derrida, Limited Inc, e.g.: “Finally, I give my word of honor that I shall be of good faith in my argument.

288  Notes to Pages 90–100

I promise this in all sincerity and in all seriousness, literally, raising my hand above the typewriter” (45). 50. This term is used by Cox, Gender and Language, 37, and by others. 51.  Cf. Hanning, “Roasting a Friar,” 17: “throughout her matrimonial career the Wife has been fighting books more than people—books symbolized by Jankyn’s omnibus volume.” 52. On the repetitiveness of medieval clerical misogyny, with its aim to “remove individual women from the realm of events,” see Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 5. 53.  Crane, “Writing Lesson,” 215. The parallel between the Wife and the rebels is Crane’s. 54. Davenport, Chaucer and His English Contemporaries, 40, referring to III 1270–77. 55. Zumthor, Essai de poétique, 41 (my translation). 56. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 313. I should add that Patterson’s conception of the Wife as a transhistorical being, “the free-­floating individual whose needs and satisfactions stand outside any social structure” (246), seems to me to apply not to the Wife as Chaucer constructed her but to the Wife as reimagined by critics. 57. Ribémont, Écrire pour dire. 58.  Compare Chaucer’s statement in The Book of the Duchess that the “man in blak” delivered his “lay” in speech, “Withoute noote, withoute song” (445, 471–72). Chaucer seems determined to insist that lays can be something other than lyrics. 59.  Cerquiglini, “Le Clerc et l’écriture,” 155. 60. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality, 60. Minnis explores this topic more fully in Fallible Authors.

C h a p t e r 4 .   Why Autography?

1.  James’s authorship of the Kingis Quair is not certain but is generally accepted. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I assume that the “king’s book” was indeed written by the king. 2. See Spearing, “Dreams in The Kingis Quair.” 3. See my discussions in Spearing, “Prison, Writing, Absence,” “Dreams in The Kingis Quair,” and Textual Subjectivity, 225–47. See

Notes to Pages 101–106 289

also Epstein, “Prisoners of Reflection”; Summers, Late-­Medieval Prison Writing; and Mooney and Arn, eds., “The Kingis Quair” and Other Prison Poems. 4. Summers, Late-­Medieval Prison Writing, 100. 5.  For argument that “psychological disorder . . . may have been a stimulus to autobiographicality,” with Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve as examples (along with Julian of Norwich), see Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse” (quotation at 239). 6.  Brown and Allen, eds., Book of Margery Kempe, 105, 151. 7. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 97. Sjužet and fabula are terms used by the Russian Formalists, corresponding respectively (and approximately) to the way a story is presented and to the story itself. Some of the basic terms referring to narration, such as the French récit and raconter, may offer support to Brooks’s theory. 8. Hammond, ed., English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey, 196, lines 93–95. The manuscript is British Library MS Add.16468. 9. Vinaver, ed., Works [of] Malory, 666 (= Morte Darthur XIX:110). 10. Varvaro, “Medieval French Romance,” 160. 11. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 156 (De re aedificatoria VI:2). 12. Barolini, Undivine Comedy, 35. 13.  Chaucer refers to Geoffrey as “Gaufred, deere maister soverayn” in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII 3347) and also quotes from him in Troilus and Criseyde (see discussion later in this chapter). His praise of Geoffrey is likely to be ironically intended, and it has been suggested that Chaucer may have known only extracts from the Poetria nova (see Murphy, “A New Look”). 14. Latin text quoted from Faral, ed., Arts poétiques, cited by line numbers. 15. Nims, trans., Poetria Nova, 16–17. 16. In a passage from Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, Book IV, prosa 6, which Geoffrey could have had in mind in writing these lines, the parallel between the human craftsman and God is more explicit: Sicut enim artifex faciendae rei formam mente praecipiens movet operis effectum, et quod simpliciter praesentarieque prospexerat, per temporales ordines ducit, ita deus providentia quidem singulariter stabiliterque facienda disponit, fato vero haec ipsa quae disposuit multipliciter ac temporaliter administrat.

290  Notes to Pages 106–115

—— [For in the same way as a craftsman first conceives in his mind the form of the thing he is to make and then puts the work into effect, and produces by stages in temporal order what he had previously envisaged in a simple and instantaneous manner, just so God by providence disposes what is to be done in a single and unchanging way, but by fate accomplishes those same things he has disposed in a manifold and temporal way.] (Boethius, Theological Tractates, Consolation of Philosophy, 358–61) 17. Zukofsky, A, 61. 18. Trachtenberg, “Building Outside Time,” 124. I am grateful to Marvin Trachtenberg for advice about this matter. 19. Interview with Bertrand Tavernier on DVD of Safe Conduct. 20. Ganim, “Drama, Theatricality and Performance,” 71. 21.  For a pioneering study (to which I am greatly indebted) of Troilus as a poem of “gradually changing purposes” in which Chaucer gets involved in “greater and greater difficulty with his sources,” see Salter, “Troilus and Criseyde” (originally published in 1966; quotation at 217). See also Windeatt, “Troilus and Criseyde,” on the signs within the poem of “materials not fully worked through and assimilated, or of hesitancy and experimentation in theme” (82). 22. A document survives placing Chaucer on “the king’s arduous and urgent business” as late as 1398, though no evidence has emerged as to what that business was, and the document may have served as a form of protection against suits of debt. See Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer Life-­Records, 62–64. 23. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 24. 24. Salter, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 216. 25.  Paradise Lost VIII 82–84. 26. Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, 30. 27. Eugène Vinaver, “Introduction” to Legge, ed., Le Roman de Balain. 28. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 7. 29. Sartre, Nausea, 62. 30. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 8. 31. As is noted by Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 70, 95. 32. See Spearing, Chaucer, 60–61.

Notes to Pages 115–124 291

33. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 38. 34. Ibid. 35. Derrida, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” 49. 36.  James, Preface to The Tragic Muse, in Art of the Novel, 83, 84, 85. 37. Ibid., 84. 38. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 15. This book, containing the Clark Lectures for 1927, was first published in the year of their delivery. 39.  James, Preface to The Tragic Muse, 89. 40.  But note the sustained argument against this approach, and in favor of recognizing the inorganic, sectional, accretive structure of long medieval poems, in Jordan, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation. 41. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 155, 161, 164, 165. 42.  “Form,” in Strohm, ed., Middle English, 184. Cannon in fact goes further (further than I should wish), arguing that we should not just consider this as a possibility but should insist that it must be so. 43. Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature, 61–65, notes the numerical pattern by which the second fit, with nine stanzas, is half as long as the first, with eighteen, and the third fit is interrupted after four and a half stanzas, to make it half as long as the second. 44. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 141–42. 45.  Weil, “Freedom Through Association?”—an article that deserves more attention than it seems to have received. 46. I offer this argument in more detail in Spearing, “Dream Poems.” 47. Chaucer’s attitude toward the Dido and Aeneas story, as has often been noted, involves tension between Virgilian and Ovidian perspectives, but the story itself remains what it has always been. 48.  Benson, “The ‘Love-­Tydynges,’ ” in Wasserman and Blanch, eds., Chaucer in the Eighties, 3–22, as reprinted in Benson, Contradictions, 198–216, at 215. 49. Phillips, “The French Background,” 299. Compare Jill Mann’s remarks about the literary content of The Parliament of Fowls in Mann, “Authority of the Audience,” 5: We have here no disciplined concentration on the individual literary work as a thing-­in-­itself, carefully analysed in terms of the rules it establishes for itself, its relations with other literary material and with life scrupulously curtailed and regulated by notions of literary decorum and methodological consistency. This is not

292  Notes to Pages 124–129

professional reading, this is real reading, producing a mish-­mash of half-­ remembered words and images whose arrangement is orchestrated by the reader rather than the writer. 50. An early example of the undoing of the freedom of composition made possible by autography is found in a work by Chaucer’s fifteenth-­ century disciple John Lydgate. His Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. Sieper, purports to be a dream or vision experienced by its “I,” containing lines such as “Thus thoght I tho in my dremyng” (1834), yet it repeatedly calls attention to its written source, with phrases such as “As seyth my boke” (1030) and “the booke seyth thus” (1035). Despite recent attempts to rehabilitate Lydgate as a poet of intelligence and sophistication, it seems characteristic of him thus to follow literary conventions mechanically without apparently noticing that they contradict one another. 51.  Benson, “The Occasion of The Parliament of Fowls,” in Benson and Wenzel, ed., The Wisdom of Poetry, 123–44, reprinted in Benson, Contradictions, 175–97. 52. See Brownlow, “Speke, Parrot,” and “The Boke Compiled.” I have discussed Speke Parott in more detail in Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 265–77, and return to it briefly below at pp. 267–68. 53. Phillips, “Fortune and the Lady,” 123. Both here and in “The French Background” Phillips takes dit in a somewhat restricted sense, to mean the courtly dit amoureux, and she does not make use of the discussions by Zink, Cerquiglini, and other recent French scholars. On un-­ Boethian use of the De consolatione in The Kingis Quair, see Spearing, “Dreams in The Kingis Quair,” 131–34; on a similarly ambiguous use of Boethius in Hoccleve’s prologue to his Regement of Princes, see Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 93–106. 54. Phillips, “Fortune and the Lady,” 123–24, quoting Brownlee, Poetic Identity, 42. 55. Phillips, “Fortune and the Lady,” 133. 56. Irigaray, This Sex, trans. Porter, 31.

C h a p t e r 5 .  Hoccleve and the Prologue

1. Thomas Chaucer was born in 1367; we do not know the exact date of Hoccleve’s birth, but J. A. Burrow, the leading scholar of his life and

Notes to Pages 130–132 293

work, regards 1367 as “marginally more probable than 1366” (Thomas Hoccleve, 2n4). 2. The Regement is quoted from Blyth, ed., Regiment. I retain Hoccleve’s spelling of Regement (rule) simply to avoid confusion with the modern word “regiment.” 3. “Fyndere” might imply that Chaucer was the first to create the beauty that is possible in English or the first to recognize it—perhaps both. 4. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, 7, writes that “contacts with noble persons and higher officials . . . would have been perfectly natural for a man in his position, moving in the relatively small worlds of London and Westminster as they then were.” See also Burrow, “Chaucer and the Court.” 5.  For French influences on Hoccleve, see Burrow, “Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets.” 6. George Mason edited six poems from the Phillips MS (now Huntington Library HM 111) in 1796. The Regement first appeared in print, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Roxburghe Club, 1860). 7.  Furnivall, ed. Minor Poems, xxxviii. 8. In addition to those from which I quote in this book—Burrow, ed. Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint, and Ellis, ed., ‘Compleinte’ and Other Poems—see also Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve, and O’Donoghue, ed., Thomas Hoccleve. 9. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve; Batt, ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve; Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse; Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment. The one earlier book, Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, is a sound scholarly study but has probably contributed little to more recent enthusiasm. 10. The shift in direction was made explicit by Larry Scanlon in 1994, when he introduced a discussion of the Regement by writing, “The recent interest in Hoccleve has centered largely on his use of autobiography. In this account . . . I want to broaden that approach to a concern with subjectivity, and to stress its political dimensions” (Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 299; my italics). 11. Tolmie, “The Professional,” 342. She adds: “The writing of poetic texts, and the implications of this action for the writer of them, and for the various readers, patrons, and buyers of them is the overriding concern of his work. . . . His investment in the mythos of Chaucer as a vernacular predecessor indicates a self-­conscious interest in an emergent poetic vocation” (342–43).

294  Notes to Pages 132–134

12.  Bowers, “Hoccleve’s Huntington Holographs,” 27–28. As Bowers notes, this suggestion was first made by Doyle and Parkes, “Production of Copies,” 182n38. By referring to a “known English author” Bowers excludes the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, which may collect the works of the anonymous Gawain poet, though it cannot be holograph. Perkins, “Thomas Hoccleve, La Male Regle,” 592, discusses HM 111 as a “‘performance’ of poetic identity.” For a brilliantly suggestive account of ideas and ideals underlying the production of such manuscripts, see Burrow, “The Poet and the Book,” and also “Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets,” 41–43. Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment, 163–64, points out that there are five nonholograph manuscripts that contain the Series alongside the Regement; these too imply decontextualization in the sense of an appeal beyond topicality. 13.  Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” 402. 14.  Batt, Introduction to Batt, ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, 7. 15. On the other hand, as is noted by Thompson, “A Poet’s Contacts,” 87, “Hoccleve . . . seems to have consolidated his reputation as a Lancastrian poet in the 1420s by personally ensuring that some record was kept of the circumstances in which so many of his English writings had once been commissioned and written. He did this by providing explanatory manuscript titles and headings for his own late copies of earlier literary works.” 16. Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes.” 17. Simpson, “Nobody’s Man,” 149–80. See also the abbreviated version of this article in Simpson, 1350–1547, 204–14; there it appears in a chapter entitled “The Political.” 18. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, chap. 7. 19.  Winstead, “‘I Am Al Othir to Yow,’ ” 148, 152–53. Having adopted this interpretation, Winstead then has to explain the dedication of one copy of the Series to a female patron, Joan Beaufort, by hypothesizing that Hoccleve may have “intended an oblique criticism of the countess” (152). 20.  Batt, “Hoccleve and . . . Feminism?” 57–58. 21. Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, 120, however, points out that Hoccleve must have consulted Geoffrey’s Latin, “because he does not make Chaucer’s mistake of translating praemetitur with the words ‘sende . . . out,’ as if the Latin had been praemittitur (or praemittetur).” 22. The Durham MS has a gloss alongside these lines quoting the beginning of Geoffrey’s Latin.

Notes to Pages 135–146 295

23. At the very least, the passage “indicates that Hoccleve is aware of the normative expectations of poetic structure against which the Series responds” (Mills, “The Voices of Thomas Hoccleve,” 87). 24. Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment, 178; Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, 218. 25. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 82, notes that a similar combination of Fürstenspiegel with “autobiographical material” is found in Christine de Pizan’s Lavision Christine. This work, dated 1405, may have been a loose model for Hoccleve, whose Letter of Cupid shows that he knew some of Christine’s writing. 26. Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment, 93. 27. Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” 408–9. 28. Greetham, “Self-­Referential Artifacts,” 245. 29. Simpson, “Nobody’s Man,” 174–75. Cf. Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 137–38: “The division between autobiography and topicality is a false one. . . . Not only do the personal and political themes echo each other throughout the poem, but they are interwoven so tightly as to be inseparable.” 30.  Boyd, “Reading Through the Regiment of Princes,” 19. 31. Bowers, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition,” hypothesizes that, while the prologue might have appealed to clerical readers, “the aristocratic audience epitomized by Prince Henry” could have skipped it and proceeded directly to the Fürstenspiegel (356). But if Hoccleve did not expect his aristocratic audience, potentially the source of patronage, to enjoy the prologue, why would he have written it? 32.  Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” 393–401. 33.  Cf. Patterson, “‘What Is Me?,’ ” 442: “This condition of simultaneous self-­enclosure and self-­fragmentation—the setting up of parts of the self as if they were other than the self, only to have them either collapse back into the self or, worse, fly apart—is characteristic of Hoc­cleve.” Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity, 139, quotes from the Complaint a passage in which Hoccleve remarks that in the past people’s questions about his mental health have left him not knowing “how in my skyn to tourne” (303: how to turn in my skin) but adds that now he will disregard them “As longe as my lyf shal in me sojourne” (306: as long as my life shall reside in me). She notes that Hoccleve “continues to make distinctions between different aspects of himself beyond his purported mental recuperation. These different bits of the narrator converse with, make promises and live—‘sojourne’—inside one another.”

296  Notes to Pages 146–151

34. An interpretation in terms of gender might queer the stanza by emphasizing that in place of the desired female bed-­companion Rest, Hoccleve is obliged to accept the male Wakefulness. This style, placing the first person on a level with personified abstractions that may include its own attributes, belongs to a tradition of allegorical narrative that goes back to the Roman de la Rose and that notably includes Piers Plowman, both of which Hoccleve must have known. In this compressed form, though, it most resembles that of the prison poetry of Charles of Orleans, roughly Hoccleve’s contemporary. See Spearing, “Prison, Writing, Absence.” 35. Some scholars have indeed read the dialogue between Hoccleve and the Old Man in Boethian terms, e.g., Kohl, “More Than Virtues and Vices.” 36.  Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, 11, 202. The Boethian passage comes from De consolatione, Book II, prosa 4, translated by Chaucer in his Boece as “For in alle adversites of fortune the moost unzeely kynde of contrarious fortune is to han ben weleful” (7–9). Hoccleve doubtless also had in mind Chaucer’s adaptation of this statement in Troilus and Criseyde III 1625–28. 37. See Calin, French Tradition, 409: “The Old Man functions as a projection and an alter ego of the Narrator”; Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, 20: “The beadsman represents everything that Hoccleve most fears in his own future—old age, penury and decrepitude”; Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 89: “There is throughout the prologue an odd sense of identification between Hoccleve and the Old Man. The Old Man appears in many ways as the exact image of the aged state Hoccleve fears, an image of garrulous, aged penury”; and Davis, Writing Masculinity, 144: “The old man is an embodied warning, a projection of what the narrator might become.” 38.  Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” 402. 39. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 130. 40.  Bowers, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition,” 354. Bowers is here repeating an observation of Jerome Mitchell: “There are very few direct allusions to Chaucer in Hoccleve’s verse and almost no indisputable Chaucerian echoes in his diction and phraseology” (Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, 122). In a recent article, “Haunted Hoccleve?,” Nicholas Perkins questions this view and lists many parallels between the Regement and poems by Chaucer, especially Troilus and Criseyde. 41.  Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” 397.

Notes to Pages 151–155 297

42. Lauritis et al., eds., John Lydgate: The Life of Our Lady, II 1633. 43.  Male Regle is quoted from Ellis, ed., ‘Compleinte.’ 44. Noted by Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, 206, and by Perkins, “Haunted Hoccleve?,” 130. Blyth also notes recollections of The Pardoner’s Tale in line 629 and of The Pardoner’s Prologue in lines 2425–26; Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 305, observes that lines 624–30 form “a stanza which explicitly recalls the Pardoner’s Tale.” Patterson, “‘What Is Me?,’ ” 441, remarks of the dialogue between Hoccleve and the Old Man that “Hoccleve’s most immediate model is almost certainly Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, where rioters whose behavior is only a slightly more extravagant version of Hoccleve’s carry on a conversation with an old man whose topic is also, although they do not know it, despair and repentance.” 45. Similarly in Male Regle 245, “If that yee been envolupid in cryme,” the unusual word “envolupid” occupies the same metrical place as in Pardoner’s Tale VI 942, “For he is moost envoluped in synne”; in Male Regle 297, “The feend and excesse been convertible,” the learned term “convertible,” in the technical philosophical sense “interchangeable,” appears as the last word just as it does in Cook’s Tale I 4395, “For thefte and riot, they been convertible.” (The low-­life London setting of the unfinished Cook’s Tale may have been what brought the word to Hoccleve’s mind in Male Regle.) In both these cases a Latinate polysyllable is used to stabilize the meter. M. C. Seymour has well observed that Hoccleve’s “lines are haunted by rhythmic echoes of Chaucer’s lines” (Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve, xxii). 46. Davis, Writing Masculinity, 152. 47.  Cf. Chaucer’s “Oure blissed Lordes body they totere— / Hem thoughte that Jewes rente hym noght ynough” (VI 474–75: they broke our blessed Lord’s body into pieces—it seemed to them that the Jews didn’t tear him enough). Mutilated bodies and separated body parts must have been a far commoner part of experience in medieval England than they are now, not least in the form of the parts of saints widely distributed as objects of worship, often in reliquaries shaped like the limbs they contained. Dismembering the body of a saint and distributing the parts might have been a virtuous aid to the orthodox devotion to which Hoccleve was fervently attached; Christ’s body, assumed into heaven, was a different matter. 48. On this aspect of Hoccleve’s work, see the valuable discussion by Lynch, “‘Manly Cowardyse.’ ” Lynch writes perceptively of cowardliness

298  Notes to Pages 156–162

in Hoccleve’s work, remarking that, as far as he knows, “Hoccleve is the only male English medieval writer to call himself a coward” (307). He does not, however, note the likely debt to Machaut’s self-­performance as a coward in the Fonteinne amoureuse, and I cannot follow Lynch all the way in his larger claim that Hoccleve “attempts a bold interiorization and transvaluation of ideas of masculine worth” (308). I doubt whether Hoccleve was aiming at anything so ambitiously systematic. 49.  “A manly man, to been an abbot able” (I 167). 50. The poem known as The Book of Cupid or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale opens by quoting, without attribution, The Knight’s Tale I 1785–86. 51.  For the hidden evidence of Chaucer’s artistic control, even as he shows himself being interrupted by the Host, see chapter 4, note 43. 52. A common way of reading passages such as these from the General Prologue sees them as turning on the biases and shortcomings of an internal narrator—as revealing, that is, the uncritical naïveté of “Chaucer the pilgrim,” who foolishly echoes the Monk’s self-­justification and even more foolishly proclaims as unquestioned truth that the Guildsmen’s wives would be wrong not to desire high social standing and corresponding public acknowledgment. A more coherent reading, I believe, will recognize that there is no “internal narrator,” no “I” with a fixed point of view within or behind the passages, and will understand them as medieval instances of free indirect style. 53. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 18–19, aptly remarks of Hoccleve: “His work occupies a curious middle ground between gossip and autobiography. He adopts the voice of the gossip, a voice of informal and scandalous revelation, but instead of using this voice to expose another, Hoccleve insistently prods at himself.” Knapp does not develop this insight, however, preferring to focus on the way that “the basic elements of Hoccleve’s poetic persona . . . were provided by the example of Chaucer’s experiments in self-­portraiture” (19). 54. Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” 407–8; see also Burrow, “The Poet as Petitioner.” 55.  Bryan, “Hoccleve, the Virgin,” 1180–81. See also Bryan’s more recent book, Looking Inward, chap. 5. 56. See above at pp. 84–85. 57. They must have included other nobles besides Prince Hal: the Mowbray family’s arms are included in British Library MS Arundel 38, one of the two early copies of the Regement likely to have been produced

Notes to Pages 163–171 299

under Hoccleve’s own supervision and the one that is the basis of Blyth’s edition. 58. Prologue to The Legend of Good Women F 544. 59. See above at p. 55. 60. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 105. 61. The hostel rented by the Keeper of the Privy Seal for his clerks. 62. The line was misconstrued by one medieval copyist, that of Rosenbach MS 1083/30, who substituted “the” for “with,” and was followed by Furnivall, ed., Minor Poems; see Blyth, “Editing The Regiment of Princes,” 12. 63.  Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, e.g., twice on 26; Pearsall, “English Chaucerians,” 224. In Spearing, “Narrative Voice,” I question modern uses of the term “voice” as applied to medieval writing. 64. Hoccleve’s precisely syllabic meter has a similar effect: because it is often at odds with the steep gradient of stress in English speech, it requires a textual form to be correctly interpreted. 65. Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment, 35, and see also 185. 66. Ibid., 37. 67. Mustanoja, Middle English Syntax, 115. 68.  Compare, in the Series, the tale of Jereslaus’ Wife 111: “my conseil and assent unhad” (without obtaining my advice and agreement). No earlier user than Hoccleve of “unhad” or any other part of the verb “*unhave(n)” is recorded in the Middle English Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary. 69.  Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, 114. 70. Mustanoja, Middle English Syntax, 115. Cf. Complaint 375, “Me of his haaste unwaar” (literally, “with me being unaware of his haste”).

C h a p t e r 6 .  Hoccleve’s Series

1.  “Peculiar” is the adjective applied several times to the Series by Patterson, “Beinecke MS 493.” 2. It survives in six manuscripts, one (unfortunately lacking the first two quires) in Hoccleve’s own hand. For a description of the manuscripts, see Burrow, ed., Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint, x–xvii. 3. In the editions used here, the parts of the Series have separate line numbering. Where necessary to avoid confusion, I abbreviate Complaint as “C” and Dialogue as “D.”

300  Notes to Pages 172–181

4. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, 28. 5. Ibid., 25–26. 6.  Markus, “Truth, Fiction and Metafiction,” 119. 7.  Cf. Gybbon-­Monypenny, “Guillaume de Machaut’s Erotic ‘Autobiography,’ ” and de Looze, Pseudo-­Autobiography. Neither Gybbon-­ Monypenny nor de Looze discusses Hoccleve. 8. Patterson, however (“Beinecke MS 493,” 86), finds in the Series “a kind of autobiography that is not merely rare in medieval literature but merits the title unique.” Meyer-­Lee, Poets and Power, 88, writes more judiciously that Hoccleve “invented a complex, conflicted literary selfhood that to us seems quite apart from the late medieval norm.” 9.  Burrow, “Hoccleve’s Series,” 260. 10.  Watt, “‘I This Book Shal Make,’ ” 134. 11. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, 27–28. I depend on Burrow for several of the details that follow. 12. As Isabel Davis notes, though, Hoccleve’s “present agitation is often difficult to distinguish from the mental illness” from which he claims to have recovered (Davis, “Expressing the Middle English I,” 859). 13.  Watt, “‘I This Book Shal Make,’ ” 148. 14. The emphases are mine. 15.  Meyer-­Lee’s argument, interestingly, is that Hoccleve was wrong in expecting his readers to enjoy these autographic effects. He sees him “a failure as a Lancastrian poet,” with the Series as “an ironic comment upon—if not, indeed, a mockery of” the Lancastrian patronage system (Poets and Power, 118, 122). 16. See p. 167. 17.  Watt, “‘I This Book Shal Make,’ ” 138. 18. Martin, “Spenser, Chaucer, and the Rhetoric of Elegy,” writes that “Spenser sees in Chaucer expandable moments of loss that are presented as the generative sites of poetry” (84). 19. Ibid., 87, 85, 90. 20. Seymour et al., eds., On the Properties of Things, 1:161. 21.  Batt, “Hoccleve and . . . Feminism?,” 61. Near the end of chapter 4 I wrote that I did not wish to propose any necessary connection between autography and the feminine, but perhaps it is not an accident that the two longest pilgrim-­prologues in The Canterbury Tales, the two that could most readily be described as “excessive self-­expression,” are

Notes to Pages 183–205 301

those of a female and of a sexually ambiguous pilgrim—the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. 22. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 15. 23. This is probably another instance of the free indirect: we are not told who sees him as “riotous,” though the implication is that it is what his former friends said or thought about him. 24. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 166, understandably misinterprets “lost vessel” as a ship “wandering on the sea.” 25. Seymour et al., eds., On the Properties of Things, 1:161–62. 26. Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward, 81, notes, however, that “in the mid-­ fourteenth century—around the time that images of material mirrors begin to appear in English poetry [as indeed happens in the Complaint]—we start to find mirror-­titles that are more explicit about reflecting readers back at themselves, not as they will or should be, but as they already are.” 27. Lacan, Écrits, 1–7. 28. Rigg, “Hoccleve’s Complaint”; Burrow, “Hoccleve’s Complaint.” 29. Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve, 135. 30. This point has been developed by Langdell, “‘What World Is This?’ ” 31.  Burrow, “The Poet and the Book,” 230. 32. Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, line 1609. 33. Simpson, “Madness and Texts,” 18. 34. Ibid., 20. 35.  Compare Chaucer as reader in The Parliament of Fowls 15–16 and 695–99 and in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women F 29–35. 36. There are four further examples in the link passage after Jereslaus’ Wife—“Thomas, hastow almoost do?” (955: Thomas, have you almost finished?); “Thomas, it is wel unto my lykyng” (960: Thomas, it pleases me well); “Thomas, heer is a greet substance aweye” (963: Thomas, important material is missing here); “Sikirly, Thomas, therof I mervaille” (968: Really, Thomas, I’m amazed at that)—and three more in the link passage introducing the Tale of Jonathas: “‘Thomas,’ he seide, ‘at Estren that was last . . .’ ” (4: “Thomas,” he said, “last Easter . . .”); “Thomas, to wikkid wommen wel maist thow / Yeve hir pars” (60: Thomas, you may well give wicked women their due); and “For, Thomas, thow shalt undirstonde this” (63: For, Thomas, you must understand this).

302  Notes to Pages 209–216 C h a p t e r 7 .   Bokenham’s Autographies

1.  Bokenham mentions in his prologue to the life of Saint Margaret that he was born very near to “an old pryory / Of blake chanons” (136– 37: an ancient priory of Augustinian canons). Serjeantson, ed., Osbern Bokenham, xiv, notes that such a priory had existed at Old Buckenham since the twelfth century. Quotations from Bokenham are taken from this edition, with line numbers indicated in brackets in the text. 2. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 16. 3. Serjeantson, ed., Osbern Bokenham, xix. 4. Ibid., 289. 5. Delany, Impolitic Bodies, 33–34. 6. Ibid., 57, 62, 78, 129, 157. 7. Hilles, “Gender and Politics,” 193, 192, 196. 8. Sanok, Her Life Historical, 51, 52, 69. 9. Edwards, “Transmission and Audience,” 158, 159. 10. Ibid., 163. 11. Although Sanok’s book was published after 2004, I assume that it was completed too early for her to take account of the discovery. Before the discovery of the second manuscript, I had expressed skepticism about the existence of an overall structure and meaning in the Arundel collection in a paper, “The Idea of a Religious Poet,” delivered in the session “The Idea of the Author in Fifteenth-­Century English Literature” at the Thirty-­Sixth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in May 2001. Douglas Gray, too, while not mentioning Abbotsford, remarks that “it is not clear” that Arundel “was consciously planned as” a collection of the lives of female saints (Later Medieval English Literature, 328). 12. Horstmann, ed., Mappula Angliae, 6. 13. Horobin, “A Manuscript Found,” 135. For an account of the discovery and identification, see Horobin, “The Angle of Oblivion.” I am grateful to Simon Horobin for letting me see a prepublication copy of “A Manuscript Found,” and to him and to Karen Winstead for information about the Abbotsford manuscript. 14. Horobin, “Politics, Patronage, and Piety,” 938–40. Martin V was pope from 1417 to 1431. 15. Ibid., 942.

Notes to Pages 216–232 303

16. An example might be the two stanzas near the end of the Elizabeth vita that conclude, “And therfore to secyn I now intende” (10536: And so I now intend to cease). See p. 255 for a longer quotation. 17. Atropos was the Fate responsible for cutting the thread of life spun by Clotho. 18. I am assuming that Bokenham wrote the Margaret vita before the Agnes prologue, not because the latter stands later in the collection, but because it appears to function as a correction of the former. 19. I emphasize occurrences of “now” in passages quoted from Bokenham for a reason indicated on p. 219. 20.  Bokenham mentions Claudian in the Saint Anne prologue, while the De consulatu manuscript states that it was written at Clare in 1445, and Bokenham is the only poet known to be associated with Clare in this period. See Edwards, “The Middle English Translation.” 21. Edwards, ed., John Lydgate: Troy Book, 13. 22. All three of these medical authorities are mentioned among those known to the Doctor of Physic in Chaucer’s General Prologue (I 431, 433). 23.  Bokenham also displays knowledge of another medieval writer on the art of poetry, Matthew of Vendôme. In the vita of Saint Margaret he writes that the description of prolixity as “stepdam of favour” comes from “the sentence / In a vers of Mathu Vindocinence” (1183–84: the saying in a verse by Matthew of Vendôme). Serjeantson identifies the source as Matthew’s De Tobia, a poem that was sometimes studied as an elementary Latin school text, but it is also possible that Bokenham took it from Matthew’s De arte versificatoria ¶19, in which a De Tobia passage is quoted as an example of communis sententia (common saying). 24. Serjeantson’s side note indicates that by “Galfrid of Ynglond” she wrongly supposed Bokenham to mean Geoffrey Chaucer. 25. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 165, writes that “there is something mechanical in Bokenham’s application of the four causes; the life seems to have gone out of the traditional idioms.” In my view he begins with the four causes in order to leave them behind as he moves into a more experiential poetics. 26. That is, the Cambridge house of the Augustinian friars, an important studium generale situated where Corpus Christi College now stands.

304  Notes to Pages 234–243

27. See note 17 above: it was Clotho who spun the thread of life. Chaucer makes the same mistake in Troilus and Criseyde V 7—“Til Lachesis his thred no lenger twyne”—and that may have been the source of Bokenham’s error. 28. Stouk, “Chaucer and Capgrave’s Life,” 289–90. 29. Margaret Bridges, “Uncertain Peregrinations,” 277, notes perceptively how “Bokenham, through his extended use of the trope of the writer as traveller, foregrounds the process of writing, or translating, as a physical activity subject to accident, and of uncertain conclusion.” 30.  But whereas Hoccleve really spent much of his life as a scribe, the Augustinians employed scribes, and a doctor of divinity like Bokenham would probably have had one of his own. As so often, what seems like autobiography is better understood as autography; we do not need to know what relation it bears to documentable truth. 31.  Cf. the  (cross) in the only manuscript of the Kingis Quair (also not a holograph), at the point where the text reads, “my pen in hand I tuke / And maid a [cros], and thus begouth my buke” (in Boffey, ed., Fifteenth-­Century English Dream Visions, 98, lines 90–91). 32.  For examples, see Spearing, “Narrative Voice,” and Textual Subjectivity, chaps. 3–4. 33. The Arundel manuscript reads “Of orpheus”; the omission of “Of,” to improve the sense, is proposed by Sherry L. Reames in her separate edition of the Life of Saint Anne in Reames, ed., Middle English Legends, 303. 34. Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, 70, notes that the De raptu was “used in elementary schooling,” and he comments, “There is humanist fashion here, but there is no full or deep humanist reading.” That is undoubtedly true, if Bokenham is to be compared with Italian contemporaries or even with Petrarch in the previous century; but not much English poetry of the mid-­fifteenth century handles classical myth so stylishly. 35. Gibson, “Saint Anne and the Religion of Childbed,” 107. 36. Homer shows Pallas (as Athene) preparing for battle by removing “her elaborate / dress which she herself had wrought with her hands’ patience” (Lattimore, trans., Iliad, V 734–35). 37. Hilles, “Gender and Politics,” 204.

Notes to Pages 243–254 305

38. Horobin, “‘Speaking and Writing,’ ” 17–18. 39. Delany, Impolitic Bodies, 54–55. 40. The earl is not part of the scene described by Bokenham; he may have been in France in January 1445. Four sons may seem rather a lot, but he and the Countess had at least eleven children, of whom at least eight were sons. 41. Raeburn, trans., Metamorphoses, 133. 42. This is noted by Delany, Impolitic Bodies, 57. 43. Delany, trans., A Legend of Holy Women, 103, renders this passage “which next, after the poet’s intention, is a mighty inducement.” I feel some doubt about this, because Bokenham does not usually refer to himself by the word “poete,” and he frequently uses “aftyr” to mean “according to,” so I wonder whether he is quoting a sententia from a Latin poet, to the effect that what is phrased as a request is a forceful command if it comes from a person of importance. 44. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 121, notes that the ability of late medieval lay patrons and patronesses to choose among writers “must have made hagiographers more inclined to please their clientele by composing legends that were, insofar as possible, compatible with secular values and interests. That inclination was doubtless augmented by the fact that religious authors had more in common with their lay readers than they had had a century ago: on the one hand, the laity had become increasingly studious and more attracted to traditionally monastic religious practices; on the other hand, monks and friars such as Lydgate and Capgrave were leading increasingly active lives.” This seems highly rele­ vant to Bokenham. 45. Plato’s advice is quoted by Boethius in De consolatione philosophiae as an introduction to the prayer in Book III, metrum 9, and it seems likely that that was Bokenham’s source, rather than the Timaeus itself. 46. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1:711–23: when Mercury killed the sleeping Argus, Juno placed his hundred eyes on the tail of her bird, the peacock. 47. Sinclair, ed. and trans., Divine Comedy. I do not suggest that Bokenham knew the Commedia, though his visits to Italy would have made that a possibility. 48. See p. 220.

306  Notes to Pages 258–267 Af t e r w o r d

1.  Cf. Burrow, Langland’s Fictions, chap. 4. 2. That recognition goes back to Owst, Literature and Pulpit, chap. 9. 3. I discussed these defenses of divergence from the mental plan in Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, chap. 5. The quotations are from Gregory the Great. 4. That was also my excuse for not discussing Piers Plowman in Textual Subjectivity in 2005. In the intervening years the situation has not become easier. 5. See Kerby-­Fulton and Hilmo, eds., The Medieval Professional Reader at Work, especially Kerby-­Fulton’s introduction. 6. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 100. 7. See p. 225. 8.  Winstead, “John Capgrave and the Chaucer Tradition,” 390. I am grateful to Karen Winstead for providing me with a copy of this article. In her John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century, 99, Winstead notes how, when pressed to marry, Katherine “dreads the loss of freedom that marriage will entail,” another similarity to Criseyde. See also Pearsall, “John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katharine,” and Stouck, “Chaucer and Capgrave’s Life.” 9. The Life of Saint Katherine is quoted from the Winstead edition, with line numbers given in the text. 10.  Jennifer Bryan’s phrase; see p. 161. 11. Winstead, however, sees the “I” of Capgrave’s narrative as an instance of the fictional narrator so widely favored by twentieth-­century scholars, “a character in his own right” who is untrustworthy and “of dubious competence and sincerity” (“John Capgrave and the Chaucer Tradition,” 394–95). 12. Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority, 6. 13.  Speke Parott is quoted from the Kinsman edition.

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Index

Abbott, H. Porter, 34–35, 274n4 Abelard, Peter, Historia calamitatum, 34–35, 275n7 absolute constructions, 167–68, 190, 192–93 Adams, Jon-K., 2 Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae, 15–16, 21, 271n30 Alberti, Leon Battista, 104, 106–7 allegory, 25–26, 28, 267, 296n34 alliterative poetry, 9, 19, 24, 30–31 Allman, W. W., 278n40 Ambrose, Saint, 216, 241, 245 Amis, Martin, 103 amplification, 30–31 anagrams, 58–59, 63, 282n67 Anne of Bohemia, 125 artes praedicandi, 258 ASL (American Sign Language), 10 auctour, 226–27, 265 Augustine, Saint, 35, 157, 172 Augustinian friars, 209–11, 227, 233, 264, 303n26, 304n30 author/narrator binary, 16 autobiography, 74, 99–101, 131, 158, 169, 219, 231, 233, 238, 256, 293n10, 300n8, 304n30 contrasted with autography, 7, 33–34, 36–37, 145, 274n4 definition of, 35, 174 imprisonment and, 100–101 not visible goal in Middle Ages, 64, 99, 101

psychological disturbance and, 101 reveals unintended truths, 34–36 autography, 6, 51 appeal of, 9, 99–127 autographs and, 276n13 beginnings, 8–9, 19–20, 32 contrasted with heterodiegesis, 85 definition of, 1, 7, 33–36, 84, 276n13 in dream poems, 39 the feminine and, 126–27, 300n21 freedom from structure, 39 indeterminacy of tone, 133 move towards autobiography, 99–101, 158, 173 move towards individualism, 38 pre-Conquest, 8 prologues, 39, 51–53 resistance to monadic, 36–37 unfixed “I,” 199 writing as theme of, 9, 22. See also méta-écriture Badby, John, 138, 142, 150 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 112–13 Bale, Anthony, 274n64 Banfield, Ann, 22, 177 unspeakable sentences, 66–67, 166, 283n1 Barbour, John, Bruce, 6–7 Barolini, Teodolinda, 104 Barthes, Roland on writing, 270n21 reality effect, 21 333

334 Index Baswell, Christopher, 80 Batt, Catherine, 133–34, 181 Baumgartner, Emmanuèle, 55 Beatrice of Nazareth, 284n11 Beaufort, Joan, 100, 294n19 Beckett, Samuel, 274n4 Bennett, J. A. W., 51, 280n45 Benson, Larry D., 123–25 Benveniste, Emile, 10 Beowulf, 31 Bestul, Thomas H., 29 Black Prince, 23, 27 Bloch, R. Howard, 288n52 Blyth, Charles R., 166–67, 298n44 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 23, 109–10, 118 Decameron, 109 Filostrato, 121, 260–63 Teseida, 42 Boethius, 110, 118, 125, 126, 146, 288n53, 296n35 De consolatione philosophiae, 115, 125–26, 146–47, 288n16, 296n36, 305n45 Boffey, Julia, 7 Bokenham, Osbern, 52, 108, 127, 209–56, 260, 263 on Agatha, Saint, 225 on Agnes, Saint, 249 —humility topos, 241–42 —“I” of, 216 —in prologue, 216, 220–21, 241–45, 303n17 on Anne, Saint, 213, 249, 304n33 —mentions Claudian, 221 —modesty topos, 239–40 —outdoing Chaucer, 240 —in prologue, 213, 218, 229, 239–41 Arundel MS, 209–20, 224, 236–37, 243, 245–46, 249, 302n11, 304n33 as auctour, 226–27

autographic passages, 223–56 and Chaucer, 224–25, 234–35, 238, 240, 304n27 and Chaucer tradition, 217–21, 239, 241, 255 on Christina, Saint, 249 dialect, 242–43 discovery in 2004 of Abbotsford MS, 209, 214–16, 302n11 on Dorothy, Saint, 214, 249 Eleven Thousand Virgins, 249 on Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint, 216, 219–20, 228, 249, 254–56, 303n16 on Faith, Saint, 249 and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 228–30 humanism, 304n34 on Katherine, Saint, 225, 235 on Laurence, Saint, 215 Legendys of Hooly Wummen, 210–17 life of, 209–10 Mappula Angliae, 214 on Margaret, Saint, 213, 216, 221–23, 235–38, 303n17 —as “Aristotelian” accessus, 226–27, 231, 233 —autographic passage in, 236–38 —as dit, 227, 233 —as entertainment, 221–23 —“I” of, 230–33 —present of writing, 233 —in prologue, 211, 213, 216–17, 226–34, 302n1 —on writing as labor, 236–37 on Mary Magdalene, Saint, 210–11, 224 —“prolocutory,” 229, 242, 246–54 material textuality, 255–56 and Matthew of Vendôme, 303n23 meter, 220–21, 223, 233, 236, 238–40, 254

Index 335 political interpretations, 212–13, 216 and rhetoric, 229–30 self-impersonation, 238 and sources, 224–25, 238 as storyteller, 221–23 supposed narrator, 225 supposed rejection of rhetoric, 243–47 supposed structure of Arundel Legendys, 211–17, 302n11 syntax of, 247, 253 on Ursula, Saint, 235 on Winifred, Saint, 215 word order, 244, 253 writing and speech, 227–28 Bourchier, Isabel, Countess of Eu, 211, 247, 250, 254, 305n40 Bowers, John M., 132–33, 151, 276n13, 294n12, 295n31, 296n40 Boyd, David Lorenzo, 138 Bradley, A. C., 285n31 bricolage, 84, 123, 142 Bridges, Margaret, 304n29 Brooks, Peter, 102, 289n7 Browning, Robert, 13, 83–84 Brownlee, Kevin, 126, 282n66, 283n72 Bryan, Jennifer, 160–61, 298n55, 301n26 Burgh, Thomas, 211, 213, 233, 236–37 Burrow, J. A., 68, 131, 145, 147, 151, 159, 172–74, 189–91, 199, 280n50, 291n43, 292n1, 293nn4–5, 294n12, 296n37, 299n2, 300n11 Butler, Judith, 287n43 Butterfield, Ardis, 19, 61, 271n42, 283n74 Calin, William, 282n71, 296n37 Cambridge, 50, 210–11, 232–33, 303n26

Cannon, Christopher, 7, 120–21, 291n42 Capgrave, John, 209, 305n44 Life of Saint Katherine, 225, 234, 259, 263–66, 306nn8–11 Carruthers, Mary, 78, 85, 286n39 Cerquiglini, Jacqueline, 55–56, 84–85, 87, 94–95, 161, 164, 227, 286n36, 292n53 Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 23 chanson d’aventure, 17–18 Charles of Orleans, 100–101, 191, 291n34 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 57, 105, 120, 126, 134, 164, 207, 209, 212, 217–21, 224–26, 234–35, 238–39, 241, 247, 254–55, 264, 298n53, 303n24, 306n8 and Boccaccio, 109 and Boethius, 125 and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 105, 125, 289n13 influence on Hoccleve, 138, 151–55 meter, 221 as poetic father, 129–31, 145, 152, 207, 217, 293n3 not a professional poet, 111, 290n22 self-mockery not self-exposure, 156–58 and wine, 46–47, 278n39 Chaucer, Geoffrey, works of Anelida and Arcite, 122 Boece, 296n36 Book of the Duchess, 19, 57, 136, 271n42, 288n58 —avoidance of preconceived, 123 —melancholy, 179–80 —prologue, 39 —Remede de Fortune as source, 125–26

336 Index Chaucer, Geoffrey, works of Book of the Duchess (continued) —supposed narrator, 270n28 —version of Ceyx and Alcyone, 60, 65 “Bukton,” 70–71, 73 Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale —as autography, 52–53 —improvisation in, 109 —as méta-écriture, 95–96 Canterbury Tales, 53, 118, 121–22, 195, 300n21 —as compilation, 111 —Harry Bailly/Host, 39, 46, 48, 153, 156–57 —improvisation in, 109–10 —manuscript glosses, 80 —move towards fictional speakers, 5, 83 —as poetry, 45, 47–49 —read as dramatic monologues, 40–43, 46, 51 —read by Skelton’s Jane Scrope, 73 —textuality, 68–69 —unfinished, 121 Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, 95, 241 —alluded to by Lydgate, 73 —epilogue on Wife of Bath, 69–70 —prologue as autography, 53 Cook’s Tale, 122, 297n45 dream poems, 8, 100, 120, 123–25, 180, 196, 281n53, 282n65 Franklin’s Prologue —on Breton lays, 53 —as dit, 95 —méta-écriture in, 229–30, 240, 242–43, 253 Friar’s Prologue, 93

General Prologue, 39, 51, 86, 201, 303n22 —as autography, 52 —free indirect in, 67–68, 157–58 —on Guildsmen, 157–58 —“I” of, 64, 66 —on Monk, 157 —opening sentence, 66, 165, 178 —on Reeve as carpenter, 46 —on Squire, 248 —supposed narrator, 298n52 —Wife of Bath in, 78, 91 House of Fame, 90, 122–24, 156, 196 Knight’s Tale, 259 —Arcite’s dream, 179–80, 188 —Arcite’s mirror, 188 —existed before Canterbury Tales, 277n32 —occupatio in, 253 —quoted in Clanvowe’s Book of Cupid, 298n50 —read as expression of teller’s consciousness, 41–42 Legend of Good Women, 158, 197, 200–202, 216 —and Bokenham, 211–12, 216 —as compilation, 111 —prologue, 39, 142, 277n32, 280n47, 301n35 —Troilus and Criseyde in, 121, 263–64 —unfinished, 122 Man of Law’s Epilogue, 113 Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale, 1, 47–48, 51, 69, 95, 259, 280n46 —link passage as autography, 53 —model for Hoccleve’s Jereslaus’ Wife, 172 —prologue on Chaucer’s tales, 65–66

Index 337 Melibee, 52, 70 Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, 53, 235, 240 —Justinus refers to Wife of Bath, 70, 73 Miller’s Prologue and Tale, 45, 50–51, 235 —textual deixis in prologue, 68 Monk’s Prologue and Tale, 53, 95, 220–21 —unfinished, 122 —stanza, 220, 233, 254 Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale, 289n13 Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, 89, 300n21 —as autography, 52 —dismemberment in, 153, 297n47 —in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, 147, 152–55, 160, 297nn44–45, 297n47 —prologue as méta-écriture, 95 —read as dramatic monologue, 41, 83, 152 Parliament of Fowls, 124–25, 180, 196–97, 291n49, 301n35 Parson’s Prologue, 195 —as méta-écriture, 95 Physician’s Tale, 51 Prioress’s Prologue, as métaécriture, 95 prologues, 8, 39–47, 65–69, 120, 280n47, 300n21 —as autography, 84 —as Chaucerian form, 52–53, 127 —as méta-écriture, 94–96 —as textual performances, 97 Reeve’s Prologue and Tale, 77, 145, 278n41 —prologue as autography, 43–47, 53

—unfavorably compared with Miller’s Tale, 50–51 Retractions, 121 Romaunt of the Rose, 200 Sir Thopas, 122, 156–57, 291n43 Squire’s Tale, 122, 277n28 Summoner’s Tale, 203–7 Troilus and Criseyde, 1, 118, 121–22, 200, 259–64, 289n13, 296n36, 304n27 —advance planning, 108–11 —and Capgrave, 263–64, 306n8 —clerkliness in, 163 —“Go, little book,” 11–12, 90, 133 —and Hoccleve, 152, 202, 296n40 —improvisation, 109–12 —letters in, 260–62 —melancholy in, 180 —opening sentence, 165 —predetermination in, 114–16 —reading aloud in, 2, 19 —representation of third persons, 85 Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 128, 136–37, 199, 235, 300n21 —as autobiography, 80 —as autography, 52, 68–97 —clerical sources, 80–82 —demystifies textuality, 90–91 —as dit, 74, 93 —as dramatic monologue, 83–84, 96 —egocentric rhetoric, 75–76 —escape from limits, 126 —as free composition, 122 —inconsistencies, 77–80 —interiority in, 76–77, 87–88 —“I” of, 85 —Jankyn’s book, 80–81, 91–92, 96, 287n45, 288n51 —as performance of femaleness, 85–88

338 Index Chaucer, Geoffrey, works of Wife of Bath’s Prologue (continued) —and Philobiblon, 88–89 —read as feminist, 90 —read by Skelton’s Jane Scrope, 74 —temporal perspective, 76–77 —Wife as pantomime dame, 86 —Wife as text, 71–72 —Wife as transvestite, 87, 94 —Wife criticized by Friar, 93 —Wife’s afterlife, 71–74 —Wife’s deafness, 91 —Wife’s extratextual existence, 69–74 —writing and speech in, 92–93 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 235 Chaucer, Thomas, 129, 207, 292n1 Chaucer tradition, 212, 216–18, 220 Chiasson, Dan, 37 Christina Mirabilis, 36 Christine de Pizan, 92, 131–33, 202–3, 295n25 chronographia, 174, 178, 246–47 Cicero, 52, 95, 229–30, 239, 241–42 cinema, 21–22, 107–8, 272n51 Clanvowe, John, Book of Cupid, 156, 298n50 Claudian, 239–40 De consulatu Stilichonis, 214, 221, 240, 303n20 De raptu Proserpinae, 240 coherence, 3–4, 16 Coleman, Joyce, 273n56, 283n5 commentary, 4–5, 7, 8, 38, 85, 120, 126, 225, 238, 258–66 communication model, 12, 272n51 compilation, 55, 61, 68, 85, 111, 119, 136, 173, 175, 216, 258, 287n45 composition, 117–19. See also free composition confession, 54, 184–85, 198

Conrad, Joseph, 49 Coolidge, Calvin, 217 Cooper, Helen, 80 Cox, Catherine S., 82, 285n33, 288n50 Crane, Susan, 92 Culler, Jonathan, 40 Dane, Joseph A., 281n52 Dante Alighieri, 104, 106, 109, 253–54, 273n58 Commedia, 104, 108, 109, 111, 305n47 Vita nuova, 276n13 Davenport, W. A., 52–53, 92–93 David, Alfred, 49 Davis, Isabel, 154, 295n33, 296n37, 300n12 Davis, Stephen B., 270n28 debate poetry, 26 deictics, 254 encoding of subjectivity, 10 “here,” 10, 67–68, 164, 168, 191–94, 265 “I,” 10, 12–14, 16–21, 25, 27–29, 40, 45, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63–64, 66, 68, 69–70, 83, 84–85, 92, 114, 144–45, 168–69, 173, 189, 191, 227–28, 243, 257, 261–62, 264–65, 271n36, 282n66, 285n34, 292n50 “now,” 10, 45, 176–78, 218, 220, 224, 227, 229, 233, 236–37, 246, 249, 251, 255–56, 303n19 as shifters, 9–10 in speech, 9–10, 12 “this,” 10, 121, 164, 199, 271n36 in writing, 10–12 deixis, 5, 20, 57, 68–70, 193–94, 199, 233, 251, 256, 265, 272n51 discourse, 68

Index 339 includes tenses and conjunctions, 238 origo, 29 textual, 68–69, 144, 191, 199, 202, 266 Delany, Sheila, 211–12, 214, 246, 284n21, 285n32, 305nn42–43 Deleuze, Gilles, 22 DeLillo, Don, 103 De Looze, Laurence, 282n67, 300n7 De Man, Paul, 33–34 Denston, Katherine, 240–41 Derrida, Jacques, 38, 61, 192–93 Limited Inc, 12, 62–64, 287n49 “Linguistics and Grammatology,” 12, 116 Deschamps, Eustache, 54 Miroir de mariage, 80, 287n48 De Vere, Elizabeth, Countess of Oxford, 211, 249, 254–55 Dickson, Lynn, 79–80 Dillon, Janette, 276n11, 278n41, 286n40 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 85, 285n33, 287n43 dit, 6, 7, 68–69, 74, 120, 123, 125–27, 136–37, 161, 206, 233, 258, 266 and Boethius, 125–26 definitions, 53–64, 84–85, 126, 281nn53–54 escape from generic limits, 126 known to Chaucer, 53–54, 96–97 known to Hoccleve, 172–73, 280n50 textuality, 164 writing and speech in, 94–96, 169–70 Dit des monstiers, 56–57, 65–66, 68–69, 233, 263–64 Donne, John, 17, 83 Dorothea of Schönau, 36 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 113, 116, 122, 125, 263

dramatic monologue, 13, 40, 54–55, 57, 152, 257 as transhistorical genre, 83–84 dreams, 19, 21–22, 60, 61, 123–24, 136, 179–80, 233, 283n73 dream poems, 7, 8, 15–16, 19–21, 39, 136 Dumas, Alexandre, 118 East Anglia, 45, 210–11, 217, 264 Edward III, 9, 25, 28–29, 278n39 Edwards, A. S. G., 7, 213–14 Edwards, Robert R., 221 Egidius Romanus, De regimine principum, 135 Eleanor of Cobham, 213 Eliot, T. S., 210, 273n58 Ellis, Roger, 199 ethic dative, 20 Evans, Ruth, 38 Everest, Carol A., 278n37 exordium, 52, 66 experience effect/experientiality, 14, 20–22, 24, 27–28, 47, 30, 66, 100, 120, 144–45, 174–75, 217, 223, 231, 233, 246, 257, 263, 272n46 experientia, 21 fabliau, 54, 206, 279n42, 281n52 Falstaff, 69, 283n6 Fein, Susanna, 278n36 Ferster, Judith, 296n29 fictional narrative, 6–7, 67, 283n1 first person, 13–14, 24, 29, 120, 270n24. See also deictics, “I” Flaubert, Gustave, 22, 270n21 Fleischman, Suzanne, 11–12 Fletcher, Cyril, 87–88 Fludernik, Monika, 8, 19, 269n1, 272n46 foreshadowing, 113–14

340 Index forgetfulness, 93–94, 96 formalism, 45, 278n36, 289n7 Forster, E. M., 118–19 Aspects of the Novel, 291n38 Fourrier, Anthime, 55 Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye, 278n36, 286n40 free composition, 49, 96, 103, 119–22, 125–26, 136, 175, 217, 257 free indirect, 67, 157–58, 278n41, 298n52, 301n23 Froissart, Jean, 19, 54 Frye, Northrop, 42 Furnivall, Frederick, 131, 145, 155 Fyler, John M., 51 Gallo, Ernest, 279n42 Galloway, Andrew, 38, 285n24 Gallyon, Margaret, 276n11 Ganim, John M., 87–88, 95, 109, 280n48 Gawain poet, 294n12 Geertz, Sunhee Kim, 280n47 Genette, Gérard, 7, 19 Genovensis. See Jacobus de Voragine Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 117, 119, 186, 198, 289n13 and Boethius, 289n16 Poetria nova, 30–31, 103, 125, 172, 228–30, 243, 274n70, 279n42 —poem as house, 105–6, 108, 134, 295n22 Gesta Romanorum, 172, 190, 194, 202 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 241 glosses, 80, 82, 147, 185, 245, 259, 266–67, 285n33, 286n39 Gloucester. See Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester Gollancz, Sir Israel, 272n45

Gower, John, 65–66, 212, 217–20, 239, 241, 255, 280n47 grammar, 3, 13 grand chant courtois, 53, 59–60 Gray, Douglas, 302n11 Greetham, David C., 137 Gregory the Great, Saint, 306n3 Griffiths, Jane, 267 Guibert de Nogent, Monodiae, 35, 275nn8–9 Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose, 48–49 Gybbon-Monypenny, G. B., 300n7 Hanna, Ralph, 31, 287n45 Hanning, Robert W., 288n51 Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 2 Hardy, Thomas, 102 Harwood, Britton J., 274n66 Hawes, Stephen, Pastime of Pleasure, 163 Hejinian, Lyn, 37 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 13, 145, 270n25 Henry I, 283n73 Henry IV, 135, 278n39 Henry V, 135–36, 138–39, 142–44, 162, 163, 171, 195, 295n31, 298n57 Henry VI, 72, 100, 213 heresy. See Lollardy heterodiegesis/heterodiegetic, 7–8, 19, 85, 126 Hilles, Carroll, 211–12, 214, 243 history, medieval conception of, 6–7 Hitchcock, Alfred, 107–8 Hoccleve, Thomas, 73, 108, 125, 127, 129–208, 217, 221, 228, 304n30 acquaintance with Chaucer, 130–31, 293n4

Index 341 antifeminism, 199–202 collected works, 132, 276n13, 294n12 connections between life and work, 145 and dits, 280n50 fear of heresy, 150–51, 186, 201 “I” as third person, 156 instability of “I,” 145–51 mental breakdown, 146, 171, 174, 176, 181–84, 195–97 meter, 131, 223, 299n64 as obsessive student, 196–97 patronage, 162, 298n57, 300n15 political approaches to, 131–33, 177, 213, 293n10 and psychological disturbance, 101, 289n5 revival of interest in, 131–32, 209 as scribe, 130–32, 161, 163, 189–90, 236, 304n30 self-exposure, 188, 298n53 Hoccleve, Thomas, works of Complaint, 101, 171, 173, 175–76, 178–84, 191–93, 195 —absolute constructions, 168, 299n70 —broken vessel, 184–85, 301n24 —comfort from book, 189 —fragmentation of self, 182–83 —mirror, 187–88 —subjectivity and selfhood, 181–82 Dialogue, 171–73, 184, 186, 191–94, 197–207, 228, 301n26 —absolute constructions, 167 —as apology and explanation, 197 —coin-clipping, 175–77, 195, 218 —and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 134–35, 172, 198, 295n23 —improvisatory effect, 177

—melancholy, 178–80 —mirror as metaphor, 185 —presence in, 193–94 —Wife of Bath in, 71–72 Formulary, 131 Jereslaus’ Wife, 172–73, 186, 190, 194, 299n68, 301n36 Jonathas, 172, 186, 194, 301n36 “Lerne for to Die,” 171–72, 178, 195 Letter of Cupid, 131, 172, 200–202, 295n25 Male Regle, 145, 276n13 —Chaucerian recollections, 151–52, 297n45 —on clerkly cowardice, 59, 155–56, 297n48 —free indirect, 158–59 —as petitionary poem, 159 Regement of Princes, 129–73, 175, 178, 180–81, 189–90, 205, 207, 213, 216, 226, 236 —absolute constructions, 167–68 —addressed to Prince Hal, 135–36 —and Boethius, 292n53 —Chaucer portrait, 164, 207 —clerkliness, 161–63 —as petitionary poem, 159–60 —political themes, 132 Regement of Princes “preamble,” 136–73 —anxiety in, 146 —Boethius in, 146–47, 296n36 —compulsive self-exposure, 160 —connections with Regement, 137–39, 142–44 —disorderliness, 139–42 —as dit, 137 —fear of heresy, 150–51 —fragmentation of self, 146, 149–50, 295n33, 296n34

342 Index Hoccleve, Thomas, works of Regement of Princes “preamble” (continued) —freely composed, 136, 142 —hypotaxis, 165–66 —“I” as womanish, 181 —“I” constructed from Chaucerian fragments, 151, 155 —interiority commodified, 160–61 —méta-écriture, 164 —Old Man as alter ego, 146–51, 154–55, 160, 296n37 —and Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, 147, 152–55, 160, 297n45, 297n47 —on prodigality, 143–44 —summary of findings, 169–70 —textual deixis, 144, 164 —word order, 166 —writing and speech, 164–69 Series, 71, 132–35, 145–46, 149, 155, 171–207, 276n13, 300n15 —addressed to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 132 —as autography, 174 —as book, 190 —Chaucerian recollections, 174, 195–97, 200–207 —as compilation, 175 —contents, 171–72 —date, 174 —deixis in rubric, 191–93 —as dit, 172–73, 206 —“I” as Hoccleve, 173 —as méta-écriture, 178, 191–92 —and Shipman’s Tale, 203–7 —textuality and presence, 192–94 Homer, 4–5, 304n36 homodiegesis, 19, 120 Horobin, Simon, 214–16, 243, 302n13

Howard, Donald R., 50 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 71, 132, 134, 147, 171–72, 186, 192, 197–99 Huot, Sylvia, 63 impersonation, 40, 83, 238 improvisation, 107–8, 111–16, 120, 258 individualism, 38 intention, 11, 16, 35, 62–63, 89, 111–12, 226–27, 233 inventio, 23 Irigaray, Luce, 126 Irvine, Martin, 2–3 Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Remains of the Day, 13, 14 Isidore of Seville, 189, 244, 275n8 Jacobus de Cessolis, De ludo scaccorum, 135 Jacobus de Voragine, 224–25, 244 Jacques de Vitry, 36 Jajdelska, Elspeth, 5 James, Henry, 49, 117 Ambassadors, 119 Aspern Papers, 277n24 drama of consciousness, 40 preface to The Tragic Muse, 117–19 Turn of the Screw, 277n24 James I of Scotland, Kingis Quair, 100, 288n1, 292n53, 304n31 Jean II, 57, 59 Jean de Berry, 57–58, 60–61, 63–64, 162 Jean de Meun, 77 Jehan le Fèvre, 80 Jerome, Saint, Adversus Jovinianum, 89 John of Canace, 143 Jones, Lindsey M., 277n28

Index 343 Jordan, Mark D., 15–16, 21 Jordan, Robert M., 291n40 Joseph, Saint, 225 Julian of Norwich, 99–100, 289n5 Kay, Sarah, 13, 84–85, 161, 169–70 Kempe, Margery, 289n5 Book of Margery Kempe, 9, 34–36, 101, 160, 275n9 Kendrick, Laura, 39, 43, 278n40 Kittredge, George Lyman, 40–43, 46, 49, 51, 85, 96, 277n24 Knapp, Ethan, 150, 164, 292n53, 295n25, 296n37, 298n53, 301n24 Knights, L. C., 285n31 Kohl, Stephan, 296n35 Kolve, V. A., 49 Kuno, Susumu, 272n51 Labande, Edmond René, 275n8 Lacan, Jacques, 42, 188 Langdell, Sebastian, 301n30 language poetry, 37–38 Latin, 24, 78–80, 88, 244–45 Latinity, 3, 78, 88 Lawes, Richard, 289n5 Lawton, David, 272n45 Lawton, Lesley, 77 Lechat, Didier, 281nn53–54 Legenda aurea, 211, 214, 220, 222–24, 233, 235 Lejeune, Philippe, 35, 275n9 Leicester, H. Marshall, 42, 286n40 Lerer, Seth, 50, 269n15 Levinson, Marjorie, 278n36 Lewis, C. S., 122 Lindley, Arthur, 71, 287n44 Lollardy, 81–82, 132, 138, 150–51, 158, 186, 195, 201, 239 Longsworth, Robert, 285n34

Lucan, 5, 253–54 Lydgate, John, 72, 200, 210–12, 217–21, 239, 241, 255, 305n44 Life of Our Lady, 151, 224–25 Mumming at Hertford, 72–73, 86 Reson and Sensuallyte, 292n50 Lynch, Andrew, 297n48 lyrics, 8, 16–18, 53, 58, 102 Machaut, Guillaume de, 54, 125, 132, 270n28, 276n13 Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse, 57–66, 162, 297n48 Remede de Fortune, 125–26 Voir Dit, 55, 56, 173 Malory, Thomas, 103, 113 Mann, Jill, 79, 284n18, 287n48, 291n49 Map, Walter, Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum, 287n45 Margaret of Anjou, 213 Marienwerder, John, 36 Martin, Ellen E., 179, 300n18 Marx, Karl, 106 Mary, Saint, 224–25, 239–40 Mary Magdalene, Saint, 229 Mary of Oignies, 36 Mason, George, 293n6 Matheolus, Lamentations, 80 Matthew of Vendôme, 303n23 McEwan, Ian, 103 McGrady, Deborah, 26, 282n70 McKellan, Sir Ian, 87 McLaughlin, Mary M., 275n7 melancholy, 101, 178–80, 185 méta-écriture, 55, 95, 164, 178, 191, 223, 229–30, 259–60, 266 Meyer-Lee, Robert J., 300n8, 300n15 Mills, David, 295n23 Milton, John, 112, 133 Minerva. See Pallas

344 Index Minnis, Alastair J., 4–5, 51, 81–82, 280n47, 284n11, 285n29, 303n25 mirrors, 149, 186–88, 301n26 Mitchell, Jerome, 293n9, 294n21, 296n40 montage, 55, 61, 84, 142, 171 Morrison, Susan Signe, 285n33 Morson, Gary Saul, 111–16, 119–20, 122, 125, 142, 174–75, 218, 260, 262 Murphy, James J., 289n13 Muscatine, Charles, 50 Mustanoja, Tauno, 167–68 narrative as fulfillment of plan, 112–16 as retelling, 102–4, 114, 289n7 narrativity, 272n46 narrators, 173, 257, 262, 267, 270n28, 271n30, 272n46, 282n71, 296n37, 298n52, 306n11 in cinema, 22 fallible, 27 fictional, 133, 259, 306n11 first person, 8 naïve, 29 of romances, 19 supposed necessity of, 15–16, 41, 269n1, 280n47 unreliable, 14, 15–16, 40, 225 See also speakers Nevill, Thomas, 159 New Historicism, 131–33 Newman, Barbara, 15 Night of the Living Dead, 153 Nolan, Barbara, 281n52 Nolan, Maura, 73, 273n61, 284nn12– 13, 284n15 Norfolk, 45, 209–10, 264

N-Town plays, 86, 287n42 Olson, Glending, 279n42 oral delivery, 9. See also reading aloud Ovid, 4–5, 65–66, 247–48, 253–54 Fasti, 248 Metamorphoses, 247–49, 305n46 Tristia, 270n22 Owl and the Nightingale, 26, 274n64 Pallas, 218, 241–43, 247–49, 251–52, 261, 304n36 Palmer, R. Barton, 282n65 pantomime, 86–87 Parker, Dorothy, 217 Patterson, Lee, 41–42, 94, 112–13, 277n30, 286n40, 288n56, 295n33, 297n44, 299n1, 300n8 Paul, Saint, 75 Pearl, 1, 8, 109 Pearsall, Derek, 45, 49, 50, 133, 137, 166, 284n12 performance, 162 dramatic, 85–88 of femaleness, 85–88 gender as, 88, 287n43 rhetorical, 286n39 social, 40, 277n23 textual, 40, 55, 84–85, 88, 94, 97, 178 Perkins, Nicholas, 137, 166, 294n12, 296n40 Perreault, Jeanne, 36–37 personification, 146, 296n34 Peter, Saint, 225 Petrarch, Francis, 23–24, 53, 132, 241, 276n13, 304n34 Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, 35 Phillips, Helen, 18, 124–26, 271n38, 292n53

Index 345 Pialat, Maurice, 107 Piers Plowman, 8, 19, 108, 257–58, 267, 271n43, 296n34 pilgrimage, 236, 251 Plato on secondariness of writing, 2–3 Timaeus, 251, 305n45 poet/narrator binary, 30 Poirion, Daniel, 59 Prince Hal/Henry. See Henry V Privy Seal Office, 101, 130, 135, 140, 144–45, 159, 163, 174, 184, 236, 299n61 prologues, 7, 22–24, 38–53, 211, 233, 260, 264 academic (accessus), 51–52, 136, 226, 228 Aristotelian, 51–52, 226, 231 as autography, 126 mixed forms, 39, 52 types of, 38–39, 51–52 pronouns, 10, 13–14 first person, 16–19, 24–25, 28, 29, 36–37, 39, 51, 57, 271n43 second person, 75 See also deictics, “I” proximal(ity), 14, 16, 20, 29, 67–68, 121, 145, 193–94, 199, 233, 238, 251, 254, 257, 261, 265 Psalms, 184–85 Ptolemy, Almagest, 78–79 Raybin, David, 278n36 reading aloud, 2, 19, 27, 271n40, 283n5. See also oral delivery Reames, Sherry L., 304n33 relics, 230–32, 238, 297n47 retelling, 102–4, 114, 258–59, 293n7 Ribémont, Bernard, 55, 94 Richard II, 47, 123, 125, 132, 278n39

Richard de Bury, 91 Philobiblon, 88–89, 287n46 Richard, Duke of York, 211, 247 Ricoeur, Paul, 10–11 Rigg, A. G., 189 Rochester, Earl of, 83 roman, 54 romances, 18–19, 42, 55, 223 Roman de la Rose, 48–49, 77, 296n34 Roney, Lois, 273n54 Roth, Philip, 37–38, 103, 276n15 Ruggiers, Paul G., 278n40 Rutebeuf, 54, 258 Salter, Elizabeth, 23, 112, 122, 272n45, 290n21 Samuels, Lisa, 37, 277n16 Sanok, Catherine, 211–14, 302n11 Sartre, Jean-Paul, La Nausée, 114 Scanlon, Larry, 293n10, 297n44 Scattergood, John, 26 Schlegel, Friedrich, 34 Scipio Africanus, 162 Scott, Sir Walter, 214 Searle, John R., 12, 62 Secreta secretorum, 135 self-exposure, 155–61, 188 Seneca, 47–48 sentement, 58–59, 260 Serjeantson, Mary S., 210, 214, 247–51, 302n1, 303nn23–24 sermons, 258 Seymour, M. C., 189, 297n45 Shakespeare, William Henry IV, 283n6 Henry V, 283n6 Macbeth, 82, 285n31 Merry Wives of Windsor, 283n6 Shaw, W. David, 83–84 Shirley, John, 102

346 Index Sidhu, Nicole Nolan, 73, 284n12 Simpson, James, 133, 137–38, 191–92, 202, 294n17 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 9, 20, 273n59 Skelton, John, 210, 267 Phyllyp Sparowe, 73–74 Speke Parott, 125, 267–68 Smith, D. Vance, 22 speakers, 66, 83, 267 as basis for textual coherence, 4–5 supposed necessity of, 2, 13, 21, 24, 41, 76–78, 257, 259 See also narrators Spearing, A. C., 1, 5, 15, 280n46, 280n50, 292nn52–53, 299n63, 302n11, 306nn3–4 Spenser, Edmund, 300n18 Spryngolde, Robert, 36, 276n11 Steadman, J. M., 272n45 Storm, Melvin, 287n41 Stouck, Mary-Ann, 234 Straus, Barrie Ruth, 286n37 Strohm, Paul, 133 subjectivity in language, 2, 5, 10 Suffolk, 210, 242–43 Suite du Merlin, 113 Summers, Joanna, 100–101 Suso, Henry, Horologium Sapientiae, 172 Svenbro, Jesper, 270n24 Sweeney, Eileen C., 35 Tamir, Nomi, 8 Tavernier, Bertrand, 107–8, 116 Taylor, Charles, 183 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 118 Theophrastus, 89, 287n48 third person, 13 Thomas de Cantimpré, 36

Thompson, John J., 294n15 Thomson, David, 2–3 Tinkle, Theresa, 285n29 Tintoretto, 117 Tolmie, Sarah, 132, 293n11 Tolstoy, Leo, 113, 116, 118, 122, 125, 263 Trachtenberg, Marvin, 106–7, 290n18 translation, 200–202, 211, 214, 230– 31, 238, 245–46, 254, 260–62, 304n29 Trevisa, John, On the Properties of Things, 179, 185 Trigg, Stephanie, 272n45 Tristan story, 103 Twain, Mark, 274n4 unspeakable sentences. See under Banfield, Ann Valerius, 89 Varvaro, Alberto, 103 Vegetius, De re militari, 198 Visconti, Caterina, 123 voice, 15–16, 28, 79, 82, 166, 207, 212, 267, 275n8, 280n47, 299n63 vouloir-dire, 63, 267 Wakelin, Daniel, 304n34 Watt, David, 174, 178 Weil, Susanne, 122, 291n45 Westmorland, Countess of, 172, 198 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 277n30 Windeatt, Barry A., 282n65, 290n21 Wingfield, Sir John, 27 Winstead, Karen A., 133, 264, 294n19, 302n13, 305n44, 306nn8–11 writing as labor, 163 as liberation of discourse, 10–11

Index 347 as mimicry of speech, 46, 55 as representation of speech, 2–3, 12, 40, 55, 166 as theme of writing, 9, 22 Wynnere and Wastoure, 19–33, 145, 257, 260 date, 20, 272n45, 273nn53–54

prologue, 22–24, 29 Zink, Michel, 13, 53–55, 84, 86–87, 95, 126, 161, 275n8, 292n53 Ziolkowski, Jan, 271n30 Zukofsky, Louis, 106, 116 Zumthor, Paul, 94

A. C. Spearing is William R. Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and a Life Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge. He is the author and editor of fourteen books, including Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics.

M E D I E VA L I N S T I T U T E T H E C O N WAY L E C T U R E S I N M E D I E VA L S T U D I E S

“A deeply challenging and engaging book, Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text should be required reading in every graduate course in medieval English literature. In wonderfully nuanced close readings of various late medieval texts, A. C. Spearing extends and further theorizes his earlier groundbreaking work in Textual Subjectivity. His proposal of ‘autography’ as a new way of conceptualizing medieval first-person writing should have profound bearing on how future scholars conceptualize, designate, and discuss ‘character,’ ‘intent,’ and ‘voice.’” — P E T E R

W.

T R A V I S , Dartmouth College

“A. C. Spearing dares us to think without anachronistic notions, and teaches us, by impressive example, how to become better readers of medieval French and English poetry.”

— A D

P U T T E R , University of Bristol

“A. C. Spearing proposes in this new study a nuanced and persuasive theoretical framework for interpreting late medieval first-person narratives without anachronistic dependency on autobiography and modern preoccupations with narrative coherency. Drawing on postmodern theory and French scholarship on the dit, Medieval Autographies promises to spark conversation that extends beyond the Medieval English circle to include French medievalists, who will find a worthy cross-disciplinary discussion initiated, and literary theorists, who will discover a sorely understudied corpus whose relevance is made manifest.” — D E B O R A H

A .

C .

M C G R A D Y, University of Virginia

S P E A R I N G is William R. Kenan Professor of English at the

University of Virginia and a Life Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is the author and editor of fourteen books, including Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics. UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 • undpress.nd.edu