Incarnational (Auto)Biography

This article examines life writing in Middle English by focusing on Julian of Norwich’s Showings as well as Margaret Gascoigne’s copy of the book and the accompanying record of her contemplative experiences. It also looks at Gertrude More’s exposition of the contemplative life as taught by Father Augustine Baker, who took over the spiritual direction of the English Benedictine nuns in exile in Cambrai in 1624. It discusses how Julian re-embodies Christ’s suffering both in Showings and in her own body, and how the text sets up a chain of explicitly English reincarnations of Christ’s suffering. It also considers the close relationship between Middle English life writing and the forma vitae, a genre that is strongly associated with monastic life. In addition, the article analyzes Julian’s Showings, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The House of Fame and Canterbury Tales as examples of Middle English (auto)biography and transubstantiation.

Multilingualism on the Page

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, England inherited a very complex and shifting linguistic situation. While English continued its slow and uneven ascent to political and literary prominence, French retained its important presence. Numerous manuscripts of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage (also called Femina) appeared throughout the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Twenty copies of guides to French letter-writing, or collections of sample letters, were also produced during the same centuries. Such works illustrate the continuing practical uses of Anglo-French in the later Middle Ages in England. This article examines multilingualism on the page—occasions and usually specific written spaces where contextually unexpected languages suddenly, even dramatically, appear. It considers languages of authenticity, which shift considerably in varied settings from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and the broad move from authenticating French to authenticating Latin.

Introduction

This book examines Middle English literature and includes works by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and John Lydgate. Essays deal with topics ranging from romances to drama, chronicles, and other narrative forms, as well as gossip, orality and aurality, translation, and multilingualism. The book also looks at vernacular texts that harbor refined ideas about beauty, aesthetics, and literary genre; authorship, an unstable category lurking in the undiscovered space between manual and intellectual labor; and the presence of “literature” in apparently “nonliterary” environments.

Imaginative Theory

The literary theory of the medieval schools, found in academic prologues or commentaries, is often articulated in an analytical and explicit language. However, in both Latin and vernacular literary texts literary self-theorization may also be expressed in figured and metaphorical form. An example would be Guillaume de Machaut’s “Prologue,” but other widespread and recognizable literary theoretical figures include the dream, the mirror, the reading of a book, or the conversation overheard. It is important for scholarship in Middle English literature to focus more on these “imaginative” articulations of literary theory. This article examines one particular literary-theoretical figure, the chanson d’aventure (“the song of adventure”), which, depending on how it is put together, can perform an array of literary self-commentaries.

Beauty

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that error is part and parcel of the human understanding of beauty. Medieval writers regarded beauty with some suspicion; in the modern era, it is typically associated with “taste” and judgement. This article examines the notion of beauty as depicted in medieval literature by focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “Miller’s Tale” and his description of the main actor, Alisoun. It considers how a new aesthetic enters the poem and with it an attempt to redefine both poetry and beauty.

Episodes

Medieval narratives create order on the basis of causal sequences in time. However, cyclical and episodic structures, formal fragmentation, incompletion, and the existence of multiple versions can offset the ordering power of narrative causality. Episodic narratives typically expose the artifices required to create both narrative and social order, thus raising the question of social continuity. By eschewing causality, episodes are heavily reliant on reiterated symbols and language. This article explores the relationship between narrative incoherence and dynastic discontinuity, how narrative discontinuity reveals social concerns, and how episodic form functions as a method for anticipating and shaping audience response. It considers repetition in Athelston, a Middle English romance, and coherence in James Simpson’s essay on Sir Degaré, Thomas Malory’s “Sir Gareth,” and the Folie Tristan d’Oxford. It also analyzes episodic structure in Beves of Hampton and The Seven Sages of Rome.

Authority

Authority can refer to a person, a quality that one possesses, a governing institution a text containing crucial information or founding principles, or a exemplary event. In other words, authority is never properly one thing. An integral part of authority is recognition, insofar as the signs of power or status are encoded or displayed. During the medieval period, authority was an important subject for writers. In medieval theories of authorship, authorship was consistently identified with authority. Modern critics of medieval literature consider authority to be perhaps the most persuasive connection between art and context. This article examines authority, with emphasis on textual authority and how it extends the purview of medievalist literary criticism, in part by historicizing textual production. It also discusses the use of textual authority by both medievals and medievalists to understand literary innovation. In addition, it analyzes two sets of texts that offer complex investigations into the nature of lordship: the fifteenth-century biblical cycle plays and William Langland’s alliterative poem Piers Plowman.

Translation

Translation is an ubiquitous practice in both literary and non-literary writing during the medieval period. It underwrote cultural and ideological transfers from distant times and places, as well as the practical transaction of daily life in much of the Middle English period. This article explores what “Middle English literature” might look like if new approaches to and definitions of translation are adopted. More specifically, it considers what might happen to the literary tradition if translated texts constituted an aesthetic grouping independent from authorial and generic categories, or if this grouping were granted the same critical value as the most prestigious authors and genres. It also discusses the possibility of locating monolingual texts in a cultural environment saturated with translating activities. To address these issues, the article focuses on translation theory, cultural studies, analyses of translatio studii et imperii, and source studies that all contribute essential elements to the repositioning of translated literature.

Authorial Work

Michel Foucault declared that authors became subject to punishment and discourse became transgressive. In the late fourteenth century, both “discourse” and the very act of writing itself were perceived as transgressive, a notion that resulted in a new kind of authorial self-representation in England. By the late fourteenth century, writing had assumed an ambiguous role: while it was the means by which social norms regarding labor were communicated and enforced, it could also be the object of such enforcement. This article explores how late medieval literature came to have authors by looking at literary production in the context of contemporary discourses about daily work. It considers how post-plague labor laws forced authors to situate their work not just between the venerable poles of imitatio and inventio but also between the social polarities of idleness and industry, and how post-plague writers meditated on the value of literary work in the marketplace of work more generally. Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales as a lens, it discusses the strategies employed by late medieval writers in positioning their work in a literary landscape characterized by explicit understandings of the material value of labor.

Heresy and Humanism

A controversial idea associated with religious culture in the late Middle Ages is that anyone who considers himself a part of mainstream religion must know his difference from heretics. A religious writer in this period who does not hew closely to orthodox teachings may be accused of being a heretic in his lyrical or prosaic musings about Church hierarchies, the Scripture, or the sacraments. This notion has become a subject of considerable debate among some specialists in Middle English literature. This article considers other paradigms that may broaden our notions about religious literature in fifteenth-century England. In particular, it proposes a paradigm that includes bishops rather than heretics, in part because bishops are mainly responsible for innovations that are neglected in a focus on Wycliffism. It also explores the critically neglected innovations within what it calls ecclesiastical humanism, some of its features, and how it emerged during the fifteenth century. It argues that the prevailing cultural obsession with the Wycliffite heresy had largely disappeared between the 1430s and the 1480s and was replaced, in part, by attempts to promote ecclesiastical institutions as centers of patronage and humanist literary culture.