Parting Shots

In the third chapter I argue that the Libelle (1436–7) was written by Richard Caudray, clerk of the council until 1435, thereafter secretary to John Holland, admiral of England, and dean of St Martin le Grand in London. The Libelle, I maintain, is not an attempt to mask his identity; on the contrary, the intended recipients were council members and, together with the approving authority, John Hungerford, all of them were familiar with the author. The textual ‘I’ of the Libelle is Caudray, and the poem is an example of an instance of indexical and self-referential writing misread as deliberately anonymous.

Ecce patet tensus

The first chapter examines how in 1400 Gower oversaw and ultimately withdrew his last ambitious project, the Trentham manuscript (British Library MS Additional MS 59495) conceived for the recently crowned Henry IV. I show that the Trentham manuscript remained in Gower’s possession at the monastery of St Mary Overy in Southwark, where he lived and died. It started out as a trilingual collection for the king, offering the new ruler robust advice on foreign policy, yet Gower chose not to present this work, instead withdrawing from public life. Henrici Quarti primi, the final poem in this manuscript, which I argue is written in Gower’s own hand, features the poet’s most personal self. The trilingual Trentham manuscript, just as Gower’s trilingual tomb in Southwark Cathedral, is an indexical work, explained only through recourse to Gower himself.

The Indexical Self

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticize them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of the most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life.

Afterword

Perhaps one way of understanding the textual ‘I’ in late medieval narratives is to think of it as the pragmatic self of the author. Never quite divorced from the porous indexical self of the writer, the textual ‘I’ is the authentic guise sociocentric persons assume in public contexts. To some extent, the public selves we ourselves project are real and certainly reliable, yet they are rarely exact extensions of our private selves. But unlike medieval persons, we can actively construct and use our public selves as means through which we influence and control our environment. For the indexical self such an operation is fraught with danger. Their identity is not self-contained or even clearly separated from the environment: they are at the mercy of the spiritual and politicized forces exerting pressure on them. Such persons construct pragmatic selves much less consciously than we do, and their textual selves are closely tied to themselves, so closely, in fact, that they are exposed to their surroundings, just as their authors were. To effect change through the textual ‘I’ asked of the premodern writer to invest much of their personal reality in their textual reflection. The thinner the membrane separating the respective personae of Thomas, George, and Geoffrey from those of Hoccleve, Ashby, and Chaucer, the more propitious the likely public consequences of their creative efforts....

The Signet Self

Chapter 5 identifies the autograph hand of the signet clerk and poet George Ashby across twelve documents, five of which bear his scribal signature. I also demonstrate that the Cambridge manuscript of his Active Policy of a Prince, Cambridge University Library, Mm.IV.42, is a holograph intended for Prince Edward of Westminster. At the same time, this work marks Ashby’s withdrawal from public life, and I date the poem to 1461–2. I also show that Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflection was composed between Michaelmas 1463 and 24 March 1464. Ashby’s narrative self dominates the Prisoner’s Reflection, and his defining context is that of the signet clerk, constantly attached to the person of the king or queen. The exile from this situation in 1461 triggers the poetic impulse that leads to his two known works—narratives that signal the uprootedness of his sociocentric self in an attempt to realign himself with his environment.

Lydgate’s Kneeling Retraction

In this chapter I show that John Lydgate’s Testament is not a rejection of his secular career but a literary palinode that attempts to impress a sense of coherence onto a diverse body of work. As the language of conversion, the repetitive liturgical code at the end of the poem is vindicated by the earlier performance of poetic bravado. Lydgate’s textual piety, which I show to be indebted to the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, is paradoxically sustained by the displacement of prior secular forms. In a central gesture, the kneeling monk-poet presents his life’s work to God, who acts as his patron. Finally, I demonstrate that manuscript illuminations depicting a kneeling Lydgate confirm the reception of such a pose as pious yet secular. The Testament, then, is not about Lydgate’s ‘self-erasure’ but about reconciling his porous self with the spiritual demands of preparing for his own death.

The Series

Chapter 2, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’s Year of Mourning’, introduces a new life record for Hoccleve that demonstrates his ties to the Bedfordshire village of Hockliffe and shows that he owned property there in the 1420s. The new document, a will by Hoccleve’s fellow Privy Seal clerk John Bailey, provides a revised context for the Series, which I read as the poet’s attempt to mourn the death of a friend and contemplate his own mortality. I adjust the dating of the Series to November 1420 to Spring 1421, and consider this cycle of poems as an attempt to fulfil Hoccleve’s public self spiritually and socially, through his textual alter ego Thomas, and in preparation of his own death. The structural emphasis on Learning to Die in the Series is crucial for understanding the spiritual aspiration of the porous self to achieve a harmonious balance with its surrounding metaphysical reality.