Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France 9781526144225

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
List of abbreviations
Introduction: the home life of information
Knowledge production in the late-medieval married household: the case of Le Menagier de Paris
Knowing incompetence: elite women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower
Renovating the household through affective invention in manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1
The Christmas drama of the household of St John’s College, Oxford
Household song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale
Field knowledge in gentry households: ‘pears on a willow’?
Domestic ideals: healing, reading, and perfection in the late-medieval household
Macrocosm and microcosm in household manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38
The multilingual English household in a European perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the traffic of texts
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France EDITED BY GLENN D. BURGER AND RORY G. CRITTEN

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HOUSEHOLD KNOWLEDGES I N L AT E - M E D I E VA L E N G L A N D AND FRANCE

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Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-​ medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures of medieval Britain and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-​Norman, Anglo-​Latin and Celtic writings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more widely, and beyond. Titles available in the series 14. Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Pavlov and Elisabeth Kempf (eds) 15. The Scottish Legendary: Towards a poetics of hagiographic narration Eva von Contzen 16. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture James Paz 17.  The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture Laura Varnam 18. Aspects of knowledge: Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (eds) 19. Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages Joshua Davies 20. Participatory reading in late-​medieval England Heather Blatt 21. Affective medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg 22. Performing women: Gender, self, and representation in late-​medieval Metz Susannah Crowder 23. The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice Mary Raschko 24. Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine (eds) 25. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry: Spolia in Old English verse Denis Feratovic´ 26. Rebel angels: Space and sovereignty in Anglo-​Saxon England Jill Fitzgerald 27. A landscape of words: Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–​1250 Amy Mulligan 28. Household knowledges in late-​medieval England and France Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten (eds)

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Household knowledges in late-​medieval England and France Edited by GLENN D.  BURGER AND RORY G. CRITTEN

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4421 8 hardback First published 2020 An electronic version of chapter 5 is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the editor(s), chapter author and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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For our fellow householders, Steve and Ralf

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Contents

List of figures List of contributors List of abbreviations 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

Introduction: the home life of information Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten Knowledge production in the late-​medieval married household: the case of Le Menagier de Paris Glenn D. Burger Knowing incompetence: elite women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower Elliot Kendall Renovating the household through affective invention in manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 Myra Seaman The Christmas drama of the household of St John’s College, Oxford Elisabeth Dutton Household song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale Sarah Stanbury Field knowledge in gentry households: ‘pears on a willow’? Nadine Kuipers Domestic ideals: healing, reading, and perfection in the late-​medieval household Michael Leahy Macrocosm and microcosm in household manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 Raluca Radulescu

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74 100 129 154 178 201

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10 The multilingual English household in a European perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the traffic of texts Rory G. Critten Bibliography Index

Contents

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Figures

1 A blackbird in its cage in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS fr. 1444, f. 259v (1250–​1300). Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 142 2 A blackbird in its cage, flanked by a man and a woman. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308, f. 92v (1300–​1325). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. 143 3 A fifteenth-​or sixteenth-​century birdcage from the Rhone Valley. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.Open access image. 144

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Contributors

Glenn D.  Burger is Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Dean of Graduate Studies, Queens College, CUNY. His main areas of research are in medieval literature, with particular emphasis on Chaucer, Scottish literature, medieval marriage, conduct literature, gender and sexuality, and affect and emotion. He is the author of Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minnesota, 2003) and Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Pennsylvania, 2017), and editor of Hetoum’s A Lytell Cronycle (Toronto, 1988). With Lesley Cormack, Jonathan Hart, and Natalia Pylipuik, he is co-​editor of Making Contact:  Maps, Identity, and Travel (Alberta, 2003); with Steven Kruger, co-​editor of Queering the Middle Ages (Minnesota, 2000); and with Holly A.  Crocker, co-​editor of Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge, 2019). His articles have appeared in The Chaucer Review, English Studies in Canada, Exemplaria, Florilegium, PMLA, postmedieval, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Studies in Scottish Literature, as well as in numerous edited collections. Rory G.  Critten is a Maître d’enseignement et de recherche (Assistant Professor) in the English Department at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research focuses on medieval literature in English and French and on the history of the book. Particular interests include the histories of French-​and English-​ language authorship, home life in late-​ medieval England and France, and medieval English multilingualism. His publications on these topics have appeared in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Modern Philology, Studies in Philology, The Chaucer Review, The Journal of the Early Book Society, The Modern Language Review, The Review of English Studies, and Viator. His first book, Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature, was published by D. S. Brewer in 2018.

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Contributors

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Elisabeth Dutton is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her book, Julian of Norwich:  The Influence of Late Medieval Devotional Compilation (D. S. Brewer, 2008) is the first to argue for compilation as a literary ‘form’. She is a theatre director who has published extensively on early drama, and she heads the Early Drama at Oxford project with James McBain, and the Medieval Convent Drama project with Liv Robinson. These projects explore two very different forms of institutional drama through archival study and performance research. Elliot Kendall is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on the literary expression of late-​ medieval aristocratic and royal politics. His work focusing on the elite household includes Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household (Oxford, 2008)  and essays in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and the Harlaxton Medieval Studies series. His current book project explores literature and political centralisation from the Wars of the Roses to Henry VIII. Nadine Kuipers is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. Her current research is on the agricultural, horticultural, and managerial treatises that were read by the landed gentry in late-​medieval England. Through an analysis of individual agricultural texts, the household manuscripts in which these works appear, and the networks in which they circulated, she aims to obtain a fuller understanding of this genre. Nadine is also a co-​ founder of the Skelton Project (www.skeltonproject.org), which is dedicated to the life and works of the Tudor poet John Skelton. Michael Leahy is an honorary visiting fellow at the University of Nottingham. He is currently completing his first monograph, Circulating Medicine:  Medical Discourse and its Cultural Dissemination in Late Medieval England. This study examines how the absorption of medical knowledge in Middle English writings across various genres offered authors new ways of representing the body and the self. He has authored an article appearing in postmedieval on healing spaces and has a chapter on leprosy in a volume entitled Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (Berlin,  2018). Raluca Radulescu is Professor of Medieval Literature and Director of the Centre for Arthurian Studies at Bangor University, Wales. She has published work on Arthurian and non-​Arthurian romances, vernacular chronicles and genealogies, and the medieval miscellany. Her most recent monograph is Romance and Its

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Contributors

Contexts in Fifteenth-​Century England: Politics, Piety and Penitence (D. S.  Brewer, 2013). With Margaret Connolly, she co-​ edited Insular Books: Medieval Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain (Oxford, 2015)  and Middle English Texts:  Editing and Interpretation (Brepols, 2018). She is currently preparing a special issue of Arthuriana on the history of emotions in Arthurian romance and a monograph on the Middle English Brut tradition and its role in shaping English literary culture. Myra Seaman is Professor of English at the College of Charleston. She is a founding editor of postmedieval and co-​editor of Fragments Toward a History of a Vanishing Humanism (Ohio, 2016), Burn After Reading, vol. 1: Miniature Manifestoes for Post/​ medieval Studies (punctum, 2014), Dark Chaucer:  An Assortment (punctum, 2012), and the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2017). Her recent publications have appeared in the last two of these collections and in Pedagogy, JMEMS, and The History of British Women’s Writing to 1500, vol. 1. Her book Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England will be published by Manchester University Press. Sarah Stanbury is Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (UPenn Press, 2007) and Seeing the Gawain-​Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (UPenn Press, 1991). Her essays related to household knowledges have recently appeared in Chaucer: Visual Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (Penn State, 2016), in The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse (Ohio, 2015), in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and in Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ancient and Medieval Pasts.

newgenprepdf

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Abbreviations

EETS e.s. EETS o.s. EETS s.s. GSP ISTC MED OED REED STC

Early English Text Society, Extra Series Early English Text Society, Original Series Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series Godfridus Super Palladium Incunabula Short Title Catalogue http://​data.cerl. org/​istc/​ Middle English Dictionary http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​ m/​med/​ Oxford English Dictionary www.oed.com Records of Early English Drama A Short-​Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English books printed abroad 1475–​1640, 2nd ed., W.  A. Jackson, F.  S. Ferguson, and K. F. Panzer (1976–​1991)

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1 Introduction: the home life of information Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten

Wel seyde Salomon in his langage, ‘Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous’, For herberwynge by nyghte is perilous. Wel oghte a man avysed for to be Whom that he broghte into his pryvetee. (I. 4330–​4)

The cynical response of Chaucer’s Cook to the Reeve’s Tale—​ where the Cambridge clerks, John and Alayn, conspire to have sex with the miller’s wife and daughter in his own bedroom—​sets the scene for the Cook’s own aborted story of Perkyn Revelour and his riotous meynee.1 Both narratives emphasise the permeability and thus the vulnerability of the late-​medieval household, not only as a physical structure but also as a group of disparate individuals bound together through the experience of cohabitation: husbands, wives, children, lodgers, guests, servants, and apprentices. With its London setting and its representation of the contemporary guild practice of apprenticeship, the Cook’s Tale offers a particularly pointed reflection on the importance of regulating admission to the household and on the responsibility of its male head to maintain order under his roof.2 Thus Perkyn’s master resolves to eject Perkyn from the household in order to prevent his other servants from being infected by Perkyn’s bad example, reasoning that it is better to throw out a rotten apple than to let it rot his whole store: ‘Wel bet is roten appul out of hoord /​Than that it rotie al the remenaunt’ (I. 4406–​7). But the Cook’s Tale also foregrounds the dancing, singing, music, gambling, and love-​making that go on in and about the house, and thus it focuses our attention, more ambiguously, on the household as a location in which personal ‘solas’ might be found. Recreational pastimes are not forbidden entirely by Perkyn’s master, who waits almost until the end of his unruly apprentice’s contract before

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abandoning him. What the Cook’s Tale suggests, therefore, is that the late-​medieval bourgeois household could be a site of individual negotiation as well as of social discipline, of creative volubility and improvised exchange as well as of regulated interaction. Perkyn was, we are told, ‘snybbed [rebuked] bothe erly and late’ (I. 4401) on account of his misbehaviour:  what is most odd about him might be his incorrigibility, not his waywardness. Finally, the domestic atmosphere of dialogue and debate adumbrated in the Cook’s Tale is shown to be conducive to particular forms of knowledge. The proverb about the rotting apple that comes to Perkyn’s master’s mind as he is looking through his papers speaks to his predicament not only as a householder but also as a victualler, a man whose job it is to store and bring forth good food for a hungry clientele. Straddling a border zone between materiality and abstraction, and between the vagaries of individual experience and social authority, the localised deployment of such proverbial wisdom by Perkyn’s master encapsulates the complexity, instability, and uncertainty of knowledge transmission within the urban mercantile household. There are, of course, many other tales in the Canterbury Tales where the household is a privileged space for knowledge transmission, consumption, and, at times, production. Indeed, one could argue that the household, as much as the matter of woman, is integral to the structures—​social as well as aesthetic—​that undergird the Canterbury project. More often than not, such transmission is facilitated (or blocked) by the proper (or improper) management of forms of companionate married relations. In the first instance we might think of Cecilia’s ability to convert Valerian to a higher form of spiritual marriage in the Second Nun’s Tale, or, more ambiguously, of Dorigen’s proof in the Franklin’s Tale of the value of female virtue as she exemplifies the precepts of contemporary conduct literature by remaining obedient to husbandly authority at all costs. We might also call to mind how lay attempts to incorporate authoritative textual knowledge into the ‘middling’ married household are comically mocked through the learned debate of Chaunticler and Pertelote that opens the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, or satirically undercut in January’s wilful misrepresentation of his lust for May’s body in the Merchant’s Tale as the ennobling desire to benefit from the sacrament of marriage. Perhaps the fullest, most complex representation of knowledge production within the married household occurs in Chaucer’s own tale of Melibee. Here too, the potential vulnerability of the household—​and with it, masculine honour and the integrity of the

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male head of the household—​is exposed when three of Melibee’s ‘olde foos’ break into his house one day after he has gone out to the fields. Melibee’s enemies beat his wife, Prudence, and wound his daughter, Sophie, ‘with fyve mortal woundes in fyve sondry places […] and leften hire for deed and wenten awey’ (VII. 968–​72). While Melibee initially calls upon his professional male counsellors in order to decide how to avenge himself, reproducing a traditional authoritative model of advice literature, Prudence intervenes in private to reject this mode of action as unwise. The rest of the long prose narrative consists of an extended conversation between husband and wife, with Prudence, by means of extensive quotation from a wide variety of textual sources, guiding Melibee to arrive at the kind of practical wisdom that will address the specificities of his current situation in a way that will allow him to take effective and ethical action in the world. In contrast with the tepid reception that Melibee has received in modern criticism, the tale was popular among Chaucer’s medieval audience, who found in the tale a useful collection of authoritative citations, as Seth Lerer has shown.3 Whether or not the carefully staged dialogue between Melibee and Prudence echoes actual conversations between husbands and wives in gentry, mercantile, or aristocratic homes of the period is thus not so much the point here. What is especially interesting—​and what connects this allegorised account of the deployment of prudential wisdom to the Cook’s Tale—​is how Melibee captures the centrality of the aristocratic, bourgeois, and gentry married household unit to late-​ medieval sociality, as well as the increasingly complex and crucial entanglements of such households in both the consumption and the production of knowledge.4 The chapters collected in this book examine how the range of household experience that we have been discussing might foster the propagation of particular kinds of knowledge. When late-​medieval householders reach for a means of understanding their world, on what kinds of information do they fall back, and how does their engagement with that information transmute it into usable knowledge? As we have seen, when Perkyn’s master transports the proverb about the rotten apple into his own situation, he revives and personalises an old adage. So too Chaucer’s Melibee encourages us to think again about how such an active consumption of knowledge occurs within the late-​medieval household and what that might signify. The chapters in this collection are interested in defining the contexts of recollection in which

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information circulated in and between households and in the synergies that such contexts promoted. Our title insists on the energising plurality of the knowledges generated through such interactions. Contributors to Household Knowledges pose the question: in what ways could the late-​medieval household act as a sorter, user, and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made? The scope of the materials treated by our contributors is broad. While a number of authors concentrate on advice texts, including treatises on conduct, housekeeping, medicine, or agriculture, others address canonical literature, comic writing, and scripts for student plays. Several contributors also attend to the crucial role played by non-​textual, material elements in the transmission and development of household knowledges and to the important role played by non-​humans in shaping how knowledge is developed and experienced by men and women in the late-​medieval home. What unites our contributions is a series of related interests: in the reception within the late-​medieval household of texts, objects, and ideas generated beyond it; in the active and thoughtful incorporation of these external elements into everyday domestic life; and in the retransmission of adapted forms of information—​of specific pieces of household knowledge—​back out into the world beyond the home. Our engagement with household knowledges builds upon what is by now a well-​developed and diverse body of scholarly work—​ archaeological, art-​historical, historical, and literary—​on the late-​ medieval household. Initially, for many scholars, as for the popular imagination, the royal household and other great aristocratic households in the period provided the obvious starting point for any investigation of the late-​medieval home. As C.  M. Woolgar notes in his study of the great household in late-​medieval England: the way in which a household was conducted was a formal expression of lordship and a political statement. Its magnificence and splendour could be quite deliberately stupendous; likewise its size. This was a society in which display, lavish hospitality, prestige and social competition were all important, in which such distinctions came to be carefully weighed, nuances closely regarded and the overwhelming detail of ceremony recorded for posterity.5

Such households became the object of emulation, and, just as aristocrats imitated the royal style of living in their own great households, so too the gentry modelled their far more modest

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establishments on those of their aristocratic betters. Woolgar goes on to note that, by the end of the fifteenth century, there were probably between 1,000 and 2,000 households of vastly differing means that aspired to live in the style of the great household.6 Without denying the importance of the great household as a model for elite social organisation in the period, other scholarship has sought to widen the range of investigation to include urban bourgeois and peasant households, and to tease out the specificities of gentry households and points of difference between them and the great households of the aristocracy.7 The Household Group at the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies (UK) and its team publications have provided a major impetus for recent new research. In The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850–​ c. 1550:  Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body, for example, while the first group of essays (titled ‘The Public Household and Political Power’) largely focuses on royal and noble households, subsequent sections range much more widely to include urban bourgeois, gentry, and peasant households. As the titles of these sections indicate—​ ‘The Moral Household’, ‘Household Economics:  Money, Work, and Property’, and ‘The Material Household’—​these collected essays not only examine other social strata but also take up a wider range of issues relating to everyday domestic experience, such as the gendered nature of household spaces, the role of households in controlling the body, urban vernacular housing, household consumption, women and household work, household objects, male householders, and single women’s homes.8 Other volumes of essays arising out of conferences organised by the York Household Group also reflect an interest in everyday domestic life within the urban, gentry, and peasant home.9 The extant scholarship articulates a highly nuanced and multiple understanding of late-​medieval households, including such subjects as the physical structures of the late-​medieval household and the lifestyles that these structures promoted; the demography of the household, whose members might be linked through blood or other connections, such as apprenticeship; the development of the household as an idea, in particular in relation to marriage and child-​rearing, and to developments in civic law; the household as the location of work and recreation; and the household as a site of personal memory.10 As late-​medieval household studies have expanded beyond the great house model, so new opportunities have been laid open for literary and cultural studies to address the multiple roles of the

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household and its social implication. Middle English romance has proved a particularly rich site for investigating what D. Vance Smith has so suggestively termed ‘the Middle English household imaginary’.11 Smith’s work on the deeply rooted concern with assets management that characterises this genre draws on developments in romance studies, which have for some time been engaged in exploring the productive intersections of class and gender in these texts.12 In particular, the work of Felicity Riddy has yielded fresh insight both into romance reading and into the construction of gendered and classed identities in bourgeois and gentry homes via the literate, lay culture that centred on the late-​medieval home.13 Most recently, the capacity of individual romances to implicate their readerships in both regional and national household networks has been studied by Michael Johnston and Raluca Radulescu.14 Drawing on the recent re-​invention of manuscript scholarship, these studies bring together methodologies that have often been kept separate, combining literary, historical, social, palaeographical, and codicological enquiry in order to arrive at more precise understandings of the significance of Middle English romances for the readers of the household books in which they frequently circulated.15 Alongside the genre of romance, advice literature and conduct texts also provide a cultural terrain for the cultivation of household identities in this period. Seth Lerer has considered the anthologisation of Chaucerian texts in household collections and their uses for household instruction in bourgeois and gentry homes in England, and Rory G. Critten has shown how, in the case of one particular medieval book, Middle English conduct texts and romances might be played off against each other in order to arrive at a fresh conception of late-​medieval bourgeois ethics.16 Looking further afield, Kathleen Ashley has examined why Books of Hours appear to be the texts of choice for recording family history during the late-​ medieval and early modern periods in France and England, and, in a series of articles, Roberta L. Krueger has examined the role of class and gender in constructing bourgeois and aristocratic identity in key fourteenth-​century French conduct texts such as Le Menagier de Paris, Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-​Landry, and Christine de Pisan’s Livre des Trois Vertus.17 Both Lynn Staley and Carolyn P.  Collette have argued for a particular interest on the part of Charles V of France (r. 1364–​1380) and his court in the married household as a model for state relations, thereby emphasising a correlation between the head of the household and the sovereign.18 Building on these studies and expanding the range

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of such conduct literature to include the journées chrétiennes, or daily guides for Christian living, and literary narratives such as the Griselda story, as well as secular counsel from husbands, fathers, and clerics, Glenn D. Burger has recently argued for consideration of the married gentry and bourgeois household as a privileged space in late-​medieval culture for the ‘invention’ of the good wife and of modern forms of heterosexuality.19 The chapters collected in Household Knowledges consider the dynamic relationship between the domestic experience and the modes of cultural expression that this experience generated. They are especially interested in the connections between the individual household and the wider world. In this ‘age of the household’, as David Starkey has pointed out, home was not so much a microcosm of the world as its fundamental constitutive unit, ‘the central institution of society’.20 In a society so made up, the household attained considerable representational value. It could be understood not only as a tangible reality but also as an idea via which issues of broad cultural importance might be approached and reformulated. Thus the cohabitation of men and women in secular lay households led to home becoming the scene for a range of attempts to reset the balance of power between the sexes, for example. Concurrently, it led to the revival of the classical analogy of the household as a model of the state, with a ruler’s relationship to his people understood in terms of the husband’s relations with a wife.21 On a smaller scale, but no less significantly, individual households could structure the interface between the individuals they comprised and the wider world, transmuting the cultural goods that they received from beyond their four walls into products more apt to suit their needs and providing the conditions of composition for those materials that they originated.22 The bulk of the chapters compiled in this volume treat artisanal, mercantile, or gentry households in England in the later medieval period. Nevertheless, with the aim of facilitating a broadening of the perspective on the connections maintained by the late-​ medieval home, several contributors to the volume extend this Anglo-​centric scope to include consideration of texts written or circulating on the continent, or look forward to the medieval inheritance enjoyed by the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The collection opens with Glenn D. Burger’s chapter, ‘Knowledge Production in the Late-​ Medieval Married Household:  The Case of Le Menagier de Paris’. Presenting itself as a collection of useful practical material and moral advice collected by an old

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husband for his young wife, the Menagier de Paris (c. 1394) offers a masterclass on the modes of domestic knowledge consumption, processing, production, and retransmission that we have sought to delineate in this Introduction. While the majority of criticism on this text has focused on its more tightly structured first section, which anthologises a range of popular exempla relating to ideal conduct within the home, Burger expands his perspective on the work to include its looser second section, which sets an allegorical poem, Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse, alongside a mix of culinary, horticultural, and husbandry texts. Considering the whole text in this fashion, Burger is able to show how the instruction offered by the husband develops out of a lesson on the correct sorting and interpretation of a pre-​established canon of advice texts to include a demonstration of the creative work of adaptation and reformation that precedes the application of authoritative precepts in a given, local context. Focusing for example on the additions and corrections made to the culinary recipes compiled in the Menagier’s second section, Burger illustrates how the husband models the grafting of information gathered from practical experience onto traditional forms of knowledge in order to ensure the recipes’ usefulness and agreeability in the particular household environment that he shares with his wife. On this reading, the Menagier de Paris is revealed to be not only a vital repertory of information pertinent to the running of a late-​medieval household but also a manual including instruction in the best ways to use, perpetuate, and proliferate household knowledges as such. The topic of marital advice-​giving and its figuration in continental conduct literature is also broached in Elliot Kendall’s contribution to the volume, ‘Knowing Incompetence:  Elite Women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower’. Kendall examines William Caxton’s translation of the Livre du chevalier de la Tour-​ Landry (1371), the Book of the Knight of the Tower (1484), picking out the social conservatism of Caxton’s Book, which, in contrast to the Menagier, situates women in a clearly subservient position within their households and vis-​à-​vis their husband’s knowledge and authority. Kendall’s study constitutes an object lesson in the principle that knowledge does not always equal power: the learning that Caxton serves up to his women readers directs them towards a recognition of the supposed limitations to their competence and confines their potential influence over their household’s members to the more thorough inculcation of these limitations (this is what it means to ‘know’ the incompetence to which the title of Kendall’s

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chapter refers). At the same time, Kendall is alert to the complex strategies deployed in the Book with the aim of making this unprepossessing deal palatable. Reading the Book against itself, Kendall uncovers tensions at the heart of its conception of companionate marriage regarding, for example, the place of violence within the household. This subtle re-​reading of the Book of the Knight of the Tower thus highlights aspects of the text liable to have provoked resistant reactions among the audience of Caxton’s translation, which, owing to the print publication of his text, will necessarily have been bigger and more varied than that of the manuscripts of the French original. The politics of cultural reception are central to Myra Seaman’s study of three comic texts compiled in two late fifteenth-​century household books. In her chapter, ‘Renovating the Household through Affective Invention in Manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1’, Seaman participates in an ongoing reassessment of these books and related codices that sees them less as testaments to an aspirational mindset among their readers—​that is, as part of an attempt to assume the lifestyles and prestige associated with some of the texts that they compile—​than as part and parcel of the complex ethical universes constituted by individual medieval homes. Drawing on affect theory and object-​relations theory, Seaman shows how the particular configuration of people, animals, and things in The Hunting of the Hare (compiled in Advocates 19.3.1), Sir Corneus, and The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools (both compiled in Ashmole 61)  generate new lessons on the spirit of empathy and tolerance as well as on the sense of shared responsibility on which the success of the household must depend. Thus, rather than offering a brief escape from the moralising and devotional works alongside which they are compiled, these comic works offer a route towards the renovation of the home and of the complex assemblage of agents that it comprises. Seaman’s theoretical approach to the household assemblage is paralleled by the historicist treatment of this subject by Elisabeth Dutton, whose chapter considers early modern academic drama performed at St John’s College, Oxford. In ‘The Christmas Drama of the Household of St John’s College, Oxford’, Dutton begins by describing the college household materials on which such performances drew, adopting a productively broad definition of this category that includes the people working, studying, and teaching at St John’s, as well as their immediate neighbours in town; the college’s domestic furnishings, such as tables, paintings, and

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candles; the matter covered there in lectures; and the university’s own medieval foundations. Working first from a text now known as The Christmas Prince, a richly informative but often overlooked account of the 1607–​ 1608 Christmas festivities at St John’s, Dutton describes the financing of the St John’s plays as well as the practicalities associated with their staging and rehearsal and with the sourcing of actors. Both in the productions performed as part of the Christmas Prince celebrations and in the earlier and later examples of St John’s college drama that Dutton examines,  the college play emerges as a means of reaffirming and celebrating the local, collegiate culture as well as constituting an interface with the outside world across which people and ideas might move both into and out of the college household. Household entertainment—​ more specifically, household music—​also constitutes the focus of Sarah Stanbury’s chapter, ‘Household Song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale’, which treats the lost ‘soundworld’ evoked in the Chaucerian text. Whereas criticism of the last poem in the Canterbury Tales has typically focused on what it has to say about the vexed relationship between language and power, Stanbury affords new attention to the intermingled melodies of birdsong and ‘minstralyce’, or musical instruments, that filled Phebus’s house prior to his crisis. The chapter presents a richly nuanced understanding of this atmosphere, discussing topics ranging from Chaucer’s enhancement of the musical interest of his tale as he discovered it in his sources, to the musicality of the poet and his peers, the shifting relationship between poetry and music in the fourteenth century, and the late-​medieval practice of keeping—​ and caging—​songbirds. The polyphonous world in which the notes of Phebus’s harp, lute, cittern, and psaltery once blended with the song of the untransformed crow contrasts sharply with the silence of the broken instruments and the tight-​lipped eloquence conjured at the end of the tale in the Manciple’s re-​narration of his mother’s urging to ‘thenk upon the crowe’ (IX. 362). If, as Paul Strohm has suggested, Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales to imagine an alternative community after he had lost his home in London, then, Stanbury argues, the Manciple’s Tale might be viewed as a poignant record of the vibrant household world filled with music and song whose loss the poet lamented. The interest in matters of text transmission and reception that is touched upon by Kendall in his commentary on the print life of The Book of the Knight of the Tower and developed in Seaman’s chapter on Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 assumes

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central importance in the collection’s four final chapters. These contributions each treat an individual household book or group of household books, considering not only the home cultures that such manuscripts shaped and reflected but also the connections that might be detected between these books, their readers, and the world beyond the individual home. In ‘Field Knowledge in Gentry Households:  “Pears on a Willow”?’ Nadine Kuipers offers a broad perspective on the tradition of agricultural and estates management literature in England that affords special consideration to the books in which works belonging to this tradition circulated. Examining texts dating from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, Kuipers determines that, whereas the earliest agricultural texts would seem to have little to do with the practicalities of farming, treating instead the legal or administrative aspects of landownership, or offering instruction in the French and Latin necessary to participate in the written culture of landowning, later texts demonstrate an increasing interest in practical matters. This interest would culminate in such sixteenth-​ century manuals as Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandry (1523), which contains long descriptions of farming tools for the uninitiated gentleman farmer. In the period directly before the introduction of the early modern manuals, there flourished a kind of hybrid agricultural and estates management text that gestured towards practicality as well as serving other social and aesthetic purposes. Kuipers examines the circulation of a selection of these texts in manuscript household books and discusses the ramifications of their compilation alongside works belonging to other genres, principally romances and conduct texts. The end result of Kuipers’s enquiry is a renewed sense of the vast (and, currently, largely unrecognised) potential of medieval English agricultural and estates management literature on the one hand, and, on the other, a fresh appreciation of the complex ethical and aesthetic values cultivated by users of late-​medieval household books. The re-​use of practical literature in household contexts is a topic also picked up by Michael Leahy in his chapter, ‘Domestic Ideals:  Healing, Reading, and Perfection in the Late-​Medieval Household’, which considers the transmission and reception of John of Arderne’s treatise on the delicate matter of treating anal fistula, the Practica de fistula in ano (1376). Leahy points out that Arderne’s appeal was unlikely to have been restricted to the medical practitioners who are known to have possessed copies of his work:  the author-​surgeon’s sensitive depiction of

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the power dynamics of the medieval household and his deployment in his writing of features deriving from the chronicle and romance traditions implicate a broader, less specialised readership. That Arderne’s work met with such an audience is indicated by the inclusion of a Latin text of the Practica alongside two less specialised Middle English texts dealing with the matter of self-​ care and the apparently miraculous properties of rosemary in an early fifteenth-​century compilation, London, British Library MS Additional 29301. This manuscript presents an interesting mix of perspectives on the matter of healthy living, adumbrating the tensions that might exist between members of the household, who favoured their own homegrown cures, and professional medical practitioners. More importantly, however, as Leahy argues, such a constellation of texts enabled the readers of the Additional manuscript to imagine the household as an idealised realm of bodily control and perfect living. In this way, the texts collected in the book display a domestic aesthetic where everyday health regimes are re-​presented as elevated and culturally significant practices. Whereas Additional MS 29301 is an impressive parchment manuscript, complete with gold leafing, decorative borders, and arresting illustrations, the book that constitutes the focus of Raluca Radulescu’s chapter—​ now Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38—​is less immediately impressive. When this paper household manuscript has been addressed in scholarship, it has been found remarkable for its representative qualities as a marker of the devotion and ‘modest’ intellectual accomplishments typically assumed to belong to the provincial gentry audience with whom so many fifteenth-​century household books can be associated. In her contribution to the volume, ‘Macrocosm and Microcosm in Household Manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38’, Radulescu takes issue with this point, arguing that the inclusion of two popular texts in the Cambridge book—​the penitential romance, Roberd of Cisely and Pety Job, a Middle English retelling of the Lessons of the Dead—​indicates the connections existing between the ‘microcosm’ of the Leicestershire household associated with the manuscript and the ‘macrocosm’ comprising national developments in political poetry that linked expressions of penitence with assertions of royal power. Indeed, Radulecu points out, the particularly Job-​ like portrayal of king Roberd in the Cambridge text of the poem suggests that the poem was selected, or doctored, in response to the contemporary vogue for Job-​like portrayals of royalty. The ‘provincial’ household audience of Cambridge MS Ff.2.38 is thus shown to

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be well connected with cultural developments taking place concurrently in the metropolitan London milieu. Finally, the propensity of medieval household books to demonstrate the external connections of the household, as well as its internal tastes and priorities, is examined in Rory G. Critten’s contribution to the volume, ‘The Multilingual English Household in a European Perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the Traffic of Texts’. To date, scholarship on Harley 2253 has sought to determine how this fourteenth-​century book might have served the interests and priorities of a small group of West Midlands families with which its scribe can be identified. While acknowledging the usefulness of this context for understandings of the manuscript, Critten argues that Harley 2253 also demonstrates the connections pertaining between such insular audiences and a pan-​ European network of textual transmission. His chapter explores the relative connotations of Latin, French, and English across the texts compiled in Harley 2253 and demonstrates that the shifting associations of French in particular both enabled and inflected the cross-​ Channel traffic of texts. Most importantly, Critten shows that native English facility in French and Latin meant that the main scribe of Harley 2253 and his readers could conceive of themselves not only as passive recipients of texts from beyond England but also as active participants in the transfer of texts into and throughout the continent. The volume thus closes with a reconsideration of the household not only as a storehouse, but also as a productive cultural unit in and of itself. Notes 1 Citations from Chaucer are by line number from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2 On this last point, see Neil Cartlidge, ‘Wayward Sons and Failing Fathers: Chaucer’s Moralistic Paternalism—​And a Possible Source for the Cook’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 47 (2012), 134–​60. 3 See Seth Lerer, ‘ “Now holde youre mouth”: The Romance of Orality in the Thopas-​Melibee Section of the Canterbury Tales’, in M. C. Amodio (ed.), Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 181–​205. 4 For further useful discussion of Melibee within the married household context, see Carolyn P. Collette, ‘Heeding the Counsel of Prudence: A Context for the “Melibee” ’, Chaucer Review, 29 (1995), 416–​33. See too Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 172–​3.

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5 C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1999), p.  1. On the great household, see too Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household 1250–​1600:  Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1988), and, more recently, Theresa Earenfight (ed.), Royal and Elite Households in Medieval Europe: More Than Just a Castle (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 6 See Woolgar, The Great Household, p. 5. 7 For an early example of work on these topics see, David Herlihy’s ­foundational Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1985). See also Peter Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 8 See Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic, and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850–​c.1550: Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). 9 See Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller, and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); and Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity:  Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10 For a review of research on these topics conducted by members of the York Household Group, and for useful lists of further reading, see Sarah Rees Jones, Felicity Riddy, Cordelia Beattie, Charlotte Carpenter, Matthew Holford, Lara McClure, Sarah Williams, Jayne Rimmer, Jeremy Goldberg, Bethany Hamblen, Isabel Davis, Rachel Moss, Wanchen Tai, Bronach Kane, and Kate McLean, ‘The Later Medieval English Urban Household’, History Compass, 5 (2007), 112–​58. 11 D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession:  The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 12 See, for example, the work of Harriet Hudson, ‘Middle English Popular Romances: The Manuscript Evidence’, Manuscripta, 28 (1984), 67–​78; ‘Construction of Class, Family, and Gender in Some Middle English Popular Romances’, in Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (eds), Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 76–​94; and ‘Linear or Nuclear? Family Patterns in Some Middle English Popular Romances’, Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, 12 (2005), 26–​51. 13 Among several important studies, see Felicity Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 66–​86; ‘Middle English Romance:  Family, Marriage, Intimacy’, in Roberta L. Krueger (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235–​51; and ‘Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home’, in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds), Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 212–​28.

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14 See Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014); and Raluca Radulescu, Romance and its Contexts in Fifteenth-​Century England: Politics, Piety and Penitence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013). 15 On the taxonomy of late-​medieval household manuscripts, see Julia Boffey, ‘Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and Definitions of the “Household Book”’, in A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (eds), The Medieval English Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths (London: The British Library, 2000), pp. 125–​34. 16 See Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-​ Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 85–​116; and Rory G. Critten, ‘Bourgeois Ethics Again: The Conduct Texts and the Romances in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Chaucer Review, 50 (2015), 108–​33. 17 See Kathleen Ashley, ‘Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32 (2002), 145–​65; and Roberta L. Krueger, ‘Intergeneric Combination and the Anxiety of Gender in Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles’, L’Esprit Créateur, 33 (1993), 61–​72; ‘Christine’s Treasure: Household Economies in the Livre des Trois Vertus’, in Barbara Altman and Deborah McGrady (eds), Christine de Pizan: A Casebook (New  York:  Routledge, 2003), pp. 101–​14; and ‘Identity Begins at Home: Female Conduct and the Failure of Counsel in Le Menagier de Paris’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 22 (2005), 21–​39. 18 See Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); and Carolyn P. Collette, Performing Polity: Women and Agency in the Anglo-​ French Tradition, 1385–​1620 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 19 See Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). See too Anne-​Marie De Gendt, L’Art d’éduquer les noble damoiselles: Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (Paris: Champion, 2003). 20 David Starkey, ‘The Age of the Household: Politics, Society, and the Arts, c.  1350-​c. 1550’, in Stephen Medcalf (ed.), The Later Middle Ages (New York: Homes and Meier, 1981), pp. 225–​90. 21 Besides the studies by Staley and Colette, cited above, see too the discussion of the importance of marriage symbolism in defining a king’s authority in Margaret D. Carroll, Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), pp. 22–​3. 22 For an example of how these patterns of transmission and adaptation might work in practice, see Rory G. Critten, ‘The Secrees of Old Philisoffres and John Lydgate’s Posthumous Reputation’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 19 (2016), 31–​64. This essay charts the passage of the Secrees, which has traditionally been attributed to Lydgate, across a variety of household contexts.

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2 Knowledge production in the late-​medieval married household: the case of Le Menagier de Paris Glenn D. Burger

At the beginning of the Menagier de Paris, the much older husband-​ narrator reminds his young wife of a request that she made to him one night shortly after their wedding: My dear, because you were only fifteen years old the week we were married, you asked that I be indulgent about your youth and ­inexperience until you had seen and learned more. You expressly promised to listen carefully and to apply yourself wholeheartedly to preserving my contentment and love for you … beseeching me humbly in our bed, as I recall, that for the love of God I not rebuke you harshly in front of either strangers or our household, but that I admonish you each night, or on a daily basis, in our bedroom … You said that you would not fail to improve yourself according to my teaching and correction, and you would do everything in your power to behave according to my wishes. (p. 49)1

As part of this project of self-​improvement, the husband notes, in addition to the oral advice she requested, he has gathered together in book form everything she needs to achieve her full potential as woman and wife. That way she can draw on his advice when he is not present or, at some future point, when she needs to provide guidance to servants and female relatives put in her care. I would nonetheless desire that you have a real understanding of virtue, honor, and duty, not so much for my sake, but so that you can better serve another husband, if you have one after me, or so that you might more ably instruct your daughters, friends, or others, if you wish and if they need it … I have often and repeatedly wondered if I could find an easy and general introduction that could guide you in your efforts and work. Then you could teach yourself, without burdening me with the task described above. (p. 50)2

As important as the Menagier’s autobiographical frame is in helping situate its discussion of female virtue within the material

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conditions of the late-​medieval bourgeois married household, even more important, I argue, is the way that the Menagier foregrounds how knowledge is consumed, processed, and produced within it. Recognising proper conduct as inextricably linked with questions of knowledge acquisition and deployment, the text asks: What kind of knowledge does the recently married wife need in order to become a good merchant’s wife? How can her older, more experienced husband provide her with appropriate instruction? How best can she absorb that information and bring it to bear in the new domestic sphere of the bourgeois household that she finds herself inhabiting? In creating such an individualised storehouse of knowledge for his wife and the household she manages, the husband-​ narrator draws not only on his personal experience as a successful member of an emergent mercantile class, but also on the extensive personal library he has at his disposal. And he explicitly reminds his wife that as she matures she should learn to draw on her own resources in a similar fashion in order to rule the domestic sphere to the best of her ability. In organising this storehouse of knowledge, the narrator adopts many of the indexical devices that we associate with late-​medieval scholarly texts so that his readers can not only read sequentially with advance knowledge of what will be covered but also access specific items at will. To that end, he first divides his material into two sections (or books), then subdivides each section into numbered articles (or chapters), each with a content-​indicative title, and finally, divides each article into discrete, numbered units (or items). In addition, immediately following the Prologue, the narrator provides a table of contents, outlining what will be discussed in each section, and giving detailed titles for each article. Section One, with nine articles, provides an extended treatise on proper female conduct adapted to the needs of his young wife: focusing first on the wife’s moral and devotional life, then on her relations with her husband, and, finally, on the proper display of private virtue in public. Section Two, with five articles, recalibrates the earlier section’s attention to self-​management more broadly in terms of the kinds of detailed household knowledge necessary for the wife to rule over the domestic life of the household successfully. While Section One includes a wide range of exemplary stories drawn from a variety of contexts, including family history, folk stories, and biblical and literary sources, it consistently returns to the narrative arc of this husband advising this particular wife as its structuring device. As a result, the disparate kinds of knowledge accumulated in Section One coalesce into a clear picture of

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how a young wife might herself become a model of authoritative female virtue, and does so clearly within the domestic context of how marital affection can structure husband–​wife relations for the better. Compared to the first section, Section Two is characterised by a much wider range of genres (including, in many of its articles, the list) and a much greater disproportion in length of articles, as well as much less reference back to a structuring narrative frame. While still situated within the dramatic context of an older husband advising his younger wife, Section Two directs our attention outward to the material specificities of household governance. As a consequence, it radically expands the kinds of knowledge imparted—​ everything from the proper training of servants, to copious recipes and menus for every kind of meal, to information about how to handle household pests or to clean clothing. Thus, in Article 2.1, after a brief introductory recapitulation of the book project, the narrator announces that he will continue by copying in its entirety Jacques Bruyant’s 2,500-​line allegorical poem, Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse. After that, Article 2.2 discusses horticulture (pp. 209–​14); Article 2.3 tackles choosing and caring for servants and horses (pp.  215–​28); Article 3.2 is a treatise on hawking (pp. 233–​52); Article 2.4 is a selection of menus for feasts (pp.  253–​70); and Article 2.5 gives recipes (pp.  271–​339).3 As a result, Section Two can seem at first glance more like a haphazard collection of miscellaneous items than a scholarly, encyclopaedic account of how a wife should rule herself and the domestic household economy she manages.4 It is possible that this profusion of apparently undigested knowledge may simply reflect a text that never got finished or an amateur mercantile author losing control of his material, but the evidence suggests otherwise. What I  argue instead is that the attention to household knowledges that in Section One lurks in the background—​ behind that book’s exploration of what a new married identity politics can mean for the issue of female conduct—​now comes to the fore in Section Two. This attention to household knowledges specific to the material needs of this bourgeois household—​and the ways that their consumption and production are complexly entangled with each other—​thus becomes a central feature of Section Two. As a result, I want to shift critical attention more directly to the question of knowledge in the Menagier and what it can tell us about the text’s materialist methodology and innovative vision of the bourgeois household as a new social unit.5 I  will therefore focus more on the less studied

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second half of the Menagier in order to understand how it explores the bourgeois household as a consumer, processor, and producer of valuable knowledges. I  argue that having established a more flexible identity politics in Section One, the husband/​narrator in Section Two pivots to a more finely detailed, materialist approach to personal agency within the social and the body politic, one that requires a different kind of knowledge production and that dramatically alters the received wisdom about how written authority (textual, political, social) is properly and usefully transmitted to its consuming subjects. Experience as a category in Section Two thus becomes a crucial, if shifting and elusive, quantity in this equation. By attempting to understand and represent how this circulation of household knowledge occurs, the Menagier necessarily explores how issues of power are negotiated in the model of delegated agency the husband articulates for his young wife, and, as a result, how a new vision of the social might emerge from this model of household management. Making knowledge from within the married estate: Section One Elsewhere I  have discussed how, especially in its autobiographical frame and in the exemplary stories found in Section One, the Menagier explores the new kinds of interpersonal relations and individual self-​improvement made possible by the conjoined masculine/​feminine body of the married estate and its capacity to incite marital affection between husband and wife.6 Throughout this discussion of the maturation of the wife, the narrator is implicitly making the point that a femininity that realises its full potential is one that has also learned to utilise fully the knowledges available within the household, and to contribute to the dissemination of such knowledge. While the husband begins with greater access to knowledge because of the youth of his wife, as she matures, he is intent on her becoming a second ‘him’ in terms of her ability to access and deploy the different kinds of knowledge needed to run the domestic side of their household.7 He imagines her using his extensive library, learning to distinguish between the different use value that knowledge has depending upon where it is deployed, and figuring out how to search out and apply the appropriate ‘moral’ depending upon the particular need. The husband-​ narrator’s personal experience as a male bourgeois householder has placed him in conflicting social positions, and given him access to sometimes apparently conflicting ‘truth’. The latter has therefore required him as an individual to decide what version of truth is the

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proper one for his own individual situation and specific time and place without disturbing the universal sense that there is a transcendent truth and an inviolable social order. The narrator implies that such a flexible understanding of the truth value of particular forms of knowledge will be especially appropriate for his young wife. For while she has access to certain modes of agency because of her noble birth and her current status as a wealthy merchant’s wife, at the same time she experiences a certain degree of subalternity because of her female sex and her youthful immaturity. In Section 1.7, for example, when compiling a series of exemplary stories on the subject of a wife’s obedience to her husband, the husband-​narrator makes no effort to organise them in a way that constructs one coherent moral, preferring instead to provide a set of often conflicting morals and situations that might be deployed by the wife (and other projected readers, such as female relatives or future husbands) in ways adaptable to a wide variety of situations. By the end of Section One, then, the Menagier’s husband-​narrator has outlined a programme of performative reading for the wife that effectively allows him (and us) to imagine with some success and in some detail how the young wife might mature as a woman and become a good wife. This project of self-​ improvement depends upon an understanding of femininity—​previously imagined as the weak link in the medieval sex/​gender system—​as inherently capable of amelioration. Within the conjoined body of the married estate, husband and wife/​masculinity and femininity, can work together in a shared project of inciting marital affection and mutual care, with each engaged as fully as possible within individual limitations in becoming fully ethical subjects in the world. While the Menagier continues to accept the inevitability of unequal power relations as the norm, the productive interchange around personal conduct that the text lays out for this wife and husband has the capacity to change how individuals have agency within such social situations. The husband-​narrator makes this point explicitly later in Section 2.3.6 when he notes that ‘after your husband’ the wife should be ‘mistress of the house, giver of orders, inspector, ruler, and sovereign administrator over the servants’ (p. 217).8 Household knowledge in an ecological field: Section Two The opening of Section Two not only recapitulates the gendered and sexualised mode of knowledge acquisition articulated in the

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first section but also returns us to the autobiographical frame that began Section One. In Section Two, however, the husband-​ narrator focuses more directly on the problems that embodiment poses for knowledge acquisition. The result is not only a more explicit articulation of the delegated agency that resides in the wife as manager of the domestic sphere of the household, but also, in what follows in Section Two, a turn away from exemplary narrative as the dominant mode of knowledge acquisition to a more apparently miscellaneous accumulation of different kinds of knowledge and a ‘textualised’ transmission of knowledge that is repeatedly reminding us of the material contexts in which that transmission occurs. Section Two, as it were, explores the consequences of the kinds of limited agency imagined by the husband for his wife in Section One, and as a result, comes to the recognition that an agency delegated by husband as ruler of the household to a wife understood in regential terms as a ‘sovereign administrator over the servants’ is always to some extent necessarily a kind of distributed agency. As we come to understand the bourgeois married household in Section Two, it does not consist simply of two autonomous subjects—​husband and wife—​working together companionately, but instead operates as a complex network of relations among human actants—​husband, wife, Dame Agnes the Beguine, Master Jehan the steward, chambermaids, house varlets, trades people, shepherds, field hands—​as well as unpredictable interactions with non-​human objects, domestic locations, and the various urban and rural material conditions of the household that together establish it as a distinct ecological field.9 The first article of Section Two, titled ‘Recapitulation’, begins by raising the issue of whether the husband-​narrator should continue or whether his young subject has already received more advice than she can take in: My dear, I must say that I am filled with distress over whether to end my book here or to continue, because I fear that I may bore you … I would be most ashamed if you were afraid that you could not accomplish what my instructions demand and were in despair of ever being able to bear the heavy burden of all my advice … So first I wish to consider the amount of instruction I have given you, and what part of it is indispensable, and whether I should entrust you with additional material, and how much, or if there really already is more to do than you are capable of, in which case I will help you. (p. 181)10

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Briefly summarising the substance of his guidance about wifely conduct in the first section, the husband goes on to emphasise that in this enterprise the wife is not a singular agent acting on her own: Certainly, in the sections above you learned that you must be in charge of yourself, your children, and your belongings. But in each of these things you can certainly have assistance. You must see how best to apply yourself to the household tasks, what help and what people you will employ, and how you will occupy them. In these matters, you need take on only the command, the supervision, and the conscientiousness to have things done right, but have the work performed by others, at your husband’s expense. (p. 181)11

As a result, the husband concludes that ‘you are hardly overburdened’ and that he should continue with further advice.12 At this crucial moment, however, the husband-​narrator dramatically shifts how he will present further advice and reconfigures the relationships to textuality and textual authority that have been developed in Section One. There, he began with the most obvious demands from external authorities that the wife would need to meet:  an informed attention to public and private devotion that would satisfy expectations about orthodoxy and piety, and an attention to orderly dress and behaviour in public suitable to her station and sex so that she would not bring shame on herself, her husband, or the household. While Article 1.3, ‘The Mass, Confession, the Vices and Virtues’, is one of the one of the longest chapters in this section, it is also reproduced largely unchanged from its clerically authored sources. The rest of Section One, thematically organised according to different aspects of the wife’s relations to her husband, engages with the demands of exemplarity in real-​world life decisions, such as how to obey different kinds of husbands in radically different situations. With the exception of longer narratives such as the Griselda story (Article 1.6, ‘Obedience’) and the Melibee (Article 1.9, ‘Providing Your Husband with Good Counsel’), the narrator’s method in Section One is to draw on short moralising stories, fabliaux, romance narratives, and family and personal experiences in order to explore the full range of possible analogies for potential real-​life problems. Without denying the ultimate authority of a transcendent truth lying outside the household—​whether that of God and Church, state authorities, or the local instantiation of the social that would determine individual ‘reputation’—​ the narrator nonetheless stresses the value of an experience-​oriented ethics arising from

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within the household. Thus, he models for his wife the need to juggle sometimes conflicting demands of theological, moral, ethical, and social wisdom in determining proper conduct within the material conditions of married household life. And he demonstrates how such bourgeois authority is achieved only by carefully negotiating the complex entanglements between textual and oral culture, husband and wife relations, and the public and domestic spheres. As he moves into Section Two, however, the narrator foregrounds more explicitly just how the material conditions of bourgeois life might pose limits to such modes of embodied cognition and to the ability of the married household to take in, process, and make manifest the full authoritative truth of textual culture. Since this enterprise in Section One had been built around the ability of the good wife to ameliorate as fully as possible the limitations of femininity, the narrator expresses this concern in terms of her ability to process as much information as is possible. In some ways, then, his decision to continue, but to continue in a different, more challenging narrative mode, can be seen as an effort to find ways to move past these limitations of the married household as a generator of valuable knowledge. Ultimately, the narrator frames this move in terms of the desire, even need, to push beyond the limitations of traditional forms of exemplarity. In Section Two the narrator largely abandons the exemplary story and personal narrative that in Section One acted as a kind of structural middle between outside and inside, and between transcendent truth and individual good conduct. While he continues in Section Two to incorporate supposedly truthful ‘facts’ produced by an external textual culture, he does so now in ways that foreground the complex action of how individual experience of those facts both transforms and makes real their truth in the world. The limits of exemplarity: horticulture and Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse The first indication that Section Two will grapple more directly with exemplarity and its limits occurs when, rather unexpectedly, the husband-​narrator turns to allegorical poetry as the first form of ‘additional material’ he will provide as further instruction for his wife:  as he copies verbatim the lengthy allegorical poem, Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse, written by Jacques Bruyant, a notary at the Châtelet in Paris.13 Like the Menagier, the Chemin provides a narrative frame that focuses our attention on the

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problems a newly married couple might face. In the Chemin, however, marriage brings masculine and feminine together in chaotic ways with potentially disruptive effects for masculine happiness and productivity. Thus the husband-​narrator’s vision occurs in the midst of such husbandly anxiety one night, nineteen or twenty days after he was married: The festivities of my wedding and the feasting were past, and it was time for troubles to begin. One evening I was lying in my bed, where I had little enough delight, and my wife was sleeping soundly at my side. (p. 183)14

The vision that the husband then experiences is notable for its fusion of a theological understanding of Labour and Riches with a more material one. Reason discourses at length about the seven deadly sins and their remedies as a way of countering the despair caused by the appearance of Want, Necessity, Penury, and Scarcity in his bedchamber. With Reason, the husband travels to the Castle of Labour, where he finds Attention-​to-​Duty and Mindfulness, the gatekeepers of the castle. They receive him gladly and lead him directly to Pain, the chatelaine of Labour. She immediately welcomes and accompanies him throughout the day. The scene the narrator encounters at the Castle of Labour is that of late-​medieval urban industry in all its variety: more than a hundred thousand workers toiled throughout the city, each one exerting himself at his designated task. No one was idle. This castle was so noisy with pounding and hammering that one would be hard pressed to hear God’s thunder. (p. 204)15

The poem does not finish with this harmonious vision of life in the Castle of Labour, however. For at the end of a successful workday, Toil sends the narrator to Repose, who, according to Toil, provides the castle’s hard workers with food, drink, and sleep. Attention-​to-​Duty quickly sounds a more ominous note about Repose: ‘you will not find anyone more deceitful! Repose has led many people to the hideous road of Sloth that turns its backside toward Riches’ (p. 206).16 And according to the dreamer, Repose awaited him at his house in the form of his wife, whom he finds there ‘heedless of any disgrace, busily and cheerfully preparing my meal’ (p. 207).17 Upon hearing her husband’s account of what happened that night, the wife, unlike the allegorical helpmeets the husband encountered in his vision, viciously mocks her husband and his dream experience:

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What are you talking about? Are you out of your mind? You are not making any sense rambling on to me about your night—​it is a fantasy invented out of some kind of lunacy! (p. 208)18

The wakened dreamer remains silent in the face of his wife’s verbal assault. As he ruefully acknowledges, there is no use contradicting a woman, whose nature requires that she be praised and have her way. Instead, he goes straight to bed, placing his tinderbox beside him under the stool so that he can light his candle in the morning without getting up and thereby get to work more quickly. The Menagier’s husband-​ narrator gives as his reason for including the Chemin that he did it ‘chiefly to avail myself of the teachings within it about the diligence and perseverance a new husband must have’ (p. 183).19 This seems a particularly strained instance of moralising on the part of the husband, even when compared to the conceptual challenges posed by the often contradictory exemplary stories about obedience in Article 1.7 of the first section. Reducing a lengthy and complex allegorical poem such as the Chemin to a single point in this way is not only obviously reductive but also perplexing in a way that the simpler, short exemplary stories in Article 1.7 are not, despite the different, sometimes conflicting, morals one could take from them. Even more striking here is the fact that the narrator feels the need to avail himself of teachings on the diligence and perseverance that a new husband should have when he has just dilated at length about the potential weakness of the wife because of her sex. But we need to approach this question from the point of view of the Menagier’s exploration of knowledge production in the bourgeois household. After all, the text introduces the Chemin in order to consider the many trials that a new husband can face at a crucial point in the programme of education the husband-​narrator is planning for his young wife, just as she is ready to take up more fully her role as ‘mistress of the house, giver of orders, inspector, ruler, and sovereign administrator over the servants’. The conjunction of the stereotypically gendered marital scene we see played out at the beginning and end of the Chemin with the tightly knit husband–​wife teams organising household labour in the dream vision itself provides a compelling justification for the reconceived identity politics of masculinity and femininity within the conjoined body of the married estate that the Menagier has argued for in Section One. Moreover, the enriched experience of married life that the dreamer experiences in his vision implies new possibilities

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for masculine subjectivity that the Menagier more explicitly takes up. As the Menagier’s husband-​narrator emphasises here, he himself can learn about masculinity by teaching his wife, just as many of the issues faced by a new husband might be applicable for his young wife, especially as we pivot towards the issue of labour more directly in Section Two. In turn, this might lead us back to the various ways that the Chemin reproduces many of the epistemological tensions that the Menagier struggles with. For the Chemin’s allegorising mode begins within an older representational system that privileges transcendent knowledge, where we move teleologically from a simple material experience of labour and riches to a ‘truer’ moral and theological knowledge of what they might signify. But the poem’s shifting allegorical mode overlays such a received moral hermeneutic with a newer one, one that focuses attention on how actual labour and material riches might be something that ethical subjects can legitimately strive for. And the poem ends by moving from transcendent dream experience back to real life in a way that looks forward to making real life ‘richer’ through such complex entanglements of material and ethical striving. Like the Chemin, the Menagier reconfigures the relationships between authority and clerical and lay experience, and book culture and labour culture, in ways that create a kind of teleological movement towards different experience-​oriented modes of knowledge production and agency. In this regard, it is particularly interesting that the narrator follows his transcription of the Chemin with a discussion of horticulture in Article 2.2. While the topic of horticulture might seem a world away from the issues discussed in Bruyant’s poem, Article 2.2’s steady march through the agricultural year charts a comparable kind of teleological programme of practical, experiential knowledge acquisition that will work to make household labour truly productive: From All Saints’ Day bog beans can be grown … In January, again in February, and through June, plant sage, lavender, coq, mint, and clary sage … Violets and clove pinks are sown in March … After the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady (September 8) plant peonies, serpentine, lily bulbs, rosebushes, and currant bushes. (pp. 209–​12)20

But there are other reasons why it might seem ‘natural’ to the Menagier’s narrator to move easily between two such apparently separate forms of knowledge. As Nadine Kuipers outlines in her chapter in this volume, late-​medieval agricultural and estates management texts tended to be hybrid creations that gestured towards

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practicality as well as serving other social and aesthetic purposes. As a result, they frequently circulated in manuscript compilations alongside works belonging to other genres, principally romances and conduct texts.21 Moreover, such treatises frequently include supposedly authoritative advice that would not necessarily prove effective in their readers’ actual geographical locations. For example, the Godfridus Super Palladium (written by Gottfried von Franken c. 1350 and the most widespread medieval treatise to deal with the topic of grafting) derives its information from Mediterranean sources.22 As a result, and as Kuipers points out, many of the fruit trees described in the text are not suitable for the northern European climate: ‘There seems only to be a small chance that Gottfried’s northern readers actually performed his horticultural experiments before the invention of greenhouses. Instead, reading about exotic fruit trees could offer an edifying or leisurely activity in itself.’23 Unlike Gottfried’s text, much of the Menagier’s horticultural advice would seem to be geared to its French location and to arise from actual observation—​ such as the text’s advice about the best time of the year to plant various vegetables or the best way to get rid of ants in the garden. But in the case of its advice about grafting, textual authority seems to trump experience. In Article 2.2.43, for example, in a manner reminiscent of Gottfried’s reliance on textual authority over experience, the narrator gives detailed advice about grafting ten to twelve different kinds of fruit trees onto the trunk or stump of an oak tree, even though such combinations would be incompatible.24 On the other hand, in 2.2.45, the husband notes more practically that ‘Gardeners say that rosemary seeds do not ever grow in French soil, but if you pluck little branches from a rosemary plant, strip them from the top downward, take them by the ends, and plant them; they will grow’ (p. 214).25 The hybridity characterising agricultural texts of the period that Kuipers discusses would also suggest a different way of approaching larger questions of how aesthetic form and knowledge, textual authority, and experiential wisdom born out of embodied cognition might be foregrounded by the choices made by the narrator in Section Two. At its opening, in Article 2.1, the husband-​narrator gives pride of place to the aesthetic and epistemological forms of high culture, noting that he must give Bruyant’s allegorical dream vision in its entirety rather than mutilate it by excerpting sections.26 The poem thus epitomises the narrator’s turn to more complex forms of knowledge that a woman

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might have difficulty absorbing but which he thinks his young wife is now ready to take on. Yet the narrator then reduces Bruyant’s complex poem to the most basic of exemplary morals. The horticultural material and the additive lists that dominate Article 2.2 might seem a turn in the opposite direction, away from any aesthetic or epistemological complexity towards pragmatic knowledge pure and simple. But the more prosaic knowledges included in this article might instead manifest a different kind of engagement with book culture and offer its own aesthetic pleasures to a reading public of the ‘middling’ class. Might it be more productive, then, to approach this juxtaposition—​of epistemologically and aesthetically important ‘high’ culture with the formlessness of ‘simple’ practical experience and ‘low’ culture—​as an intentionally hybrid learning moment intended to provoke reflection on such questions of cultural value? Household knowledge/​hybrid knowledge Such moments of hybridity foreground the complexity of ‘experience’ as an area of investigation for Section Two, and with that, the need to be both wide-​ranging in kinds of information and sources and selective in adapting information to one’s own concerns and day to day knowledge. In Article 2.2, as well as subsequent articles such as Article 2.4, ‘Menus’, or Article 2.5, ‘Recipes’, it often looks as if the narrator is boring down to actual, material ‘real life’ in his detailed horticultural advice, or in the menus of feasts at noble houses, or in the extensive recipes he provides for every kind of meal. Clearly, there is some presumption of direct connections to actual households and real time and space in moments such as the one in Article 2.4, ‘Menus’, when the narrator provides detailed statistics about the butchers in Paris and the meat consumption of princely houses. For example, he lists all of the most important meat markets in Paris at that time as well as providing specific information about their relative output:  the Porte-​de-​Paris, the major meat market for Paris, sells weekly 1,900 sheep, 400 beef cattle, 400 pigs, and 200 calves, while the parvis, located in the precincts of Notre Dame Cathedral, sells 80 sheep, 10 beef cattle, 10 calves, and 8 pigs weekly (p. 253). Similarly, he notes that the Queen’s household (and likewise the duke of Orleans and duke of Berry’s households) consumes 80 sheep, 12 calves, 12 beef cattle, 12 pigs; and 120 pieces of salted pork a year; and 300 chickens, 36 kids, 150 pairs of pigeons, and 36 goslings daily (p. 254).

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Indeed, the very specific, corrected information that he provides about the duke of Berry’s household suggests personal knowledge. Not only does he initially think the numbers about food consumption for that household to be inflated, only to change his mind having verified the information, but for the duke of Berry’s household he is also able to provide details about how certain meats are divided according to rank: Monseigneur de Berry’s people say that on Sundays and great feasts they need 3 beef cattle, 30 sheep, 160 dozen partridges, and as many rabbits as is necessary, but I  doubt it. (This has since been verified. It is certainly so on great feasts and Sundays and Thursdays, but usually the other days it is 2 beef cattle and 20 sheep.) Nota again that at the court of Monseigneur de Berry the valets and pages receive the ox cheek as their allowance. The muzzle of the ox is carved sideways and the mandibles left for the allowance, as was said. Item, the neck of the ox is also given as allowance to the varlets. (Item, and the part just below the neck is the best part of the beef, for that which is between the front legs is the breast and that which is above is the noyau). (p. 254)27

Still, the connections between that knowledge and the actual production of recipes and meals in the narrator’s own bourgeois household are less clear. It is not a simple matter of hierarchy, as the distribution of the muzzle of the ox at the duke of Berry’s household is. The princely household obviously cannot provide a clear day-​to-​day model for consumption in the Menagier’s bourgeois household, even though such a great household might provide an aspirational model for it. Similarly, the statistics about Parisian butchers and the quantities of meat they sell would not provide an actual housewife with practical information about where to go to get the best meat or how to do so. It is true that immediately following the section on butchers and the consumption of meat in royal and princely houses, the narrator does provide some specifically useful information on the day-​to-​day, advising that the wife can buy on credit and giving the cost for specific cuts of meat that his household might be likely to use: for example, that ‘a quarter of a sheep contains 4 pieces, or 3 pieces plus the shoulder, and costs between 8 blancs and 3 sols; a quarter calf costs 8 sols’ (p. 255).28 More often, though, what the text focuses on is a kind of virtual space opened up between dramatised husband and wife sorting this out and text and reader, between the knowledge of ‘authority’ and books and ‘experience’. So too, the narrator in Section Two frequently admonishes the young wife to go to Master Jehan the

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Steward and Dame Agnes the Beguine for on-​the-​ground information and action, or for them to use the information in this book, but again, without clear vectors established about how that knowledge would be put in place in the world. In Article 2.3 (‘Choosing and Caring for Servants and Horses’), for example, the narrator advises the young wife to leave the hiring of day labourers to Master Jehan the Steward and the hiring of domestic help to Dame Agnes the Beguine. While there is always the possibility that this advice may be taken from another written textual authority, the actual naming of individuals gives it the sound at least of real-​life knowledge being passed on. The dramatised differences in power and knowledge—​Steward and Beguine versus rich merchant and his wife, or younger, inexperienced woman learning to be wife and sovereign administrator versus experienced older managerial ‘servants’ to whom agency has been derogated (in ways akin to how husband derogates to wife)—​also work to destabilise the vectors of knowledge production, what we see and understand as to-​be-​ valued ‘experience’. In this sense the virtual, dramatised nature of this narrative, even in the moment where it appears to become factual and material, crucially disturbs traditional ‘straight’ links between subject/​object, between what is being represented and who is representing it. There are also moments in this article devoted to domestic staff where the kind of attention to female conduct that we saw in the first section of the Menagier is restaged with similarly destabilising effects. At one point the wife is admonished to take on the educating role that the caring husband has occupied vis-​à-​vis his young wife, in order that their servants should not use ribald language, just as honourable women should not: It is incumbent upon you to require submission and obedience to you and to teach, reprove, and punish the staff. Thus, forbid them from such excess or gluttony of life that would ruin them. Also, do not allow them to quarrel with each other and your neighbors. Forbid them to speak ill of others, unless in private to you, and only insofar as the misdeed touches upon your welfare to avoid harm to you, and not otherwise. Prohibit them from chattering falsehoods, from unlawful gaming, swearing crudely, and using vulgar, lewd, or ribald words, like some miserable people who curse with ‘bloody bad fevers’, ‘bloody bad week’, bloody bad day.’ They seem to know well what a bloody day, a bloody week, etc., is, but in fact, they don’t; they certainly should not know what a bloody thing is. Nay, worthy women do not know about such things; they are completely

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disgusted at the mere sight of the blood of a lamb or pigeon slain before them. Assuredly, women should not speak of anything filthy, especially about cunt, ass, or other private parts, for it is an indecent topic for women to discuss. (pp. 217–​18)29

The narrator then provides, in an abbreviated form, the kind of exemplary story that he told in Section 1 when guiding his wife to better conduct, and he now encourages his wife similarly to adapt the things she has learned from him, such as the Melibee story, to suit the more limited capabilities of those under her: I once heard of a young gentlewoman who was seated in a crowd of friends, men and women. By chance she said just in fun to the others:  ‘You are pressing me so hard that my cunt is squashed.’ Although she said it in jest and among friends, thinking herself to be acting merry, nevertheless, in private the other wise gentlewomen, her relatives, rebuked her for it. Item, such ribald women sometimes say of a woman that she is a wanton slut, and it seems that they know what ‘slut’ or ‘wanton’ means; but honorable women should not know what it means! Therefore, forbid servants from using such language, for they do not know what it means. Prohibit revenge, and teach them with great patience through the example of Melibee recounted above. As for you yourself, my dear, conduct yourself always so that by your actions you provide our servants with an example of goodness. (p. 218)30

We have condensed in this example the paradox of knowledge production in the Menagier. On the one hand, we hear the voice of an external (male, clerical, moral) authority being reproduced in a male bourgeois context as if there is no translation involved—​ in the pious exclamation ‘they certainly should not know what a bloody thing is’. On the other hand, in the process of instructing the young wife, the husband makes such ‘unknowable’ knowledge for her sex part of the known skill set she needs as female regent to the husband in managing the domestic sphere of the household. And the narrator’s comments here also imply that such knowledge is actually part of the day-​to-​day experience of lay people, women as well as men. Proper conduct for wives (and presumably husbands) in his class consists, at least partly, in the public performance of successful handling such contradiction and thus in demonstrating that no loss of reputation has occurred in doing so. Moreover, something that is complexly represented in terms of the husband/​wife, bourgeois identifications that we saw in Section One—​the attention to conduct, where the wife supposedly absorbs the husband’s

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authoritative knowledge, just as the husband has absorbed it from the books he has read and the experience he has garnered—​is here imagined as put in play in the future by the wife as she applies this new knowledge and performances of conduct to those ‘under’ her. This is a manifestation of the fungible nature of knowledge as represented in the text, which in turn makes possible a delegated mode of agency that can be duplicated down the social ladder, applied in terms appropriate to each, making them ‘better’ and the working of the household function more efficiently, without fundamentally disturbing the idea of the social as a stable, ordered, inequitable system. As the second quotation from 2.2.7 makes clear, in this discussion about how to keep servants’ language pure, the narrator also adds:  ‘Prohibit revenge, and teach them [servants] with great patience through the example of Melibee, as recounted above.’ Presumably, in teaching the servants, the wife will not recount the story of Melibee in its entirety, as the husband did for the wife in Section One. Instead, she will have learned how to adapt both form and moral to the specific material contexts it needs to be active in. In a somewhat different way, in Article 2.2, Item 12, the narrator’s advice about how to get stains out of clothes, which derives from a textual source, is made to sound very much like personal experience in that it is the kind of information that every good middle-​class housewife (or her housekeeper) would know: The Beguine knows well and will tell you that if there is any oil or other grease stain, here is the remedy:  Take urine and heat it until it is warm, and soak the spot in it for two days. Then without wringing it, compress the part of the cloth with the spot. If the stain is not removed yet, have Dame Agnes the Beguine put it in more urine with ox gall beaten into it, and do as before. Or you can choose this: Have fuller’s earth soaked in lye and then put on the stain. Let it dry, and then rub. If the earth does not come off easily, have it moistened in lye, let it dry again, and rub until it comes off. Or, if you do not have fuller’s earth, prepare ashes soaked in lye, and put these well-​moistened ashes on the spot. Or … . (p. 220)31

This representation of the production of knowledge within the household as working within an ecological field, demanding both the careful calibration of information and its form of delivery to the particular social and material situations in which one finds oneself as well as providing more information than needed in order to make that choice possible, provides a different way of approaching

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the amassing of ‘facts’—​both textually derived and experiential—​ that characterises so much of Section Two. Such a compulsion to inclusivity may simply be evidence of the narrator’s desire to be encyclopaedic, or it may be proof that because of the effects of widespread upward mobility late-​ medieval bourgeois and gentry readers need conduct advice about everything. But it seems just as likely that this kind of impulse to inclusivity is yet another instance of the narrator putting non-​book kinds of experience—​what a mother would teach her daughter, or what a good servant would know—​alongside book knowledge (which might have authority, but which might not be adaptable to a new region or zone of experience, such as the horticultural advice about grafting, or adapting princely menus to bourgeois dinners). Thus, in Article 2.3, Item 9, the narrator provides three different recipes and methods of poisoning wolves that would seem clearly to have come from textual authorities. But he presents this information in terms of its potential use value to this wife and this household: ‘If you are in a region where there are wolves’ dens, I will instruct Master Jehan your steward, or your shepherds and servants, on your behalf how to kill wolves without striking a blow, by the following recipe’ (p. 219).32 Similarly, the extensive and detailed advice about how to purchase and care for horses technically does not have to be included, since the narrator explicitly says: ‘Now at this moment I want to allow you to rest or be merry and will address you no more while you amuse yourself elsewhere. I will turn to Master Jehan the steward, who oversees our property, so that if any of our horses, whether cart horses or riding horses, are in pain or if it becomes necessary to buy or trade a horse, he will be acquainted with the subject’ (p.  223).33 While this approach has similarities to household miscellanies, the narrator seems to be at pains to present this as anything but miscellaneous. The autobiographical frame allows him to represent the act of choosing itself as something crucial to household subject formation, something which is often only implied in the apparent randomness of the multi-​text manuscript miscellany. Yet this representation of knowledge formation as subject formation does not seem intent on the creation of something like the modern autonomous subject. The choosing represented here as often as not is the result of the actions of external forces: the movement of the seasons, the needs of the land, the region one finds oneself in and how that affects planting, or more specifically, the sex one is or the class position one finds oneself in (and hence the various

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demands made on a household in terms of type of meal, manner of dress, mode of speech, etc.). Similarly, the range of recipes included in Article 2.5 is extensive and varied enough to cover any need that a bourgeois household would have as well as to cater to individual taste. As with so much other information in Section Two, the recipes are generally thorough and practical in how they present information. Article 2.5, Item 267, ‘Water parsnip [Escheroys]’, for example, not only tells the reader that the freshest are best but also how to recognise such freshness: ‘The best are the newest taken from the ground and freshly pulled, harvested in January, February, etc. The freshest are recognised because they snap when you break them, whereas those not freshly pulled from the ground will bend’ (p. 320).34 Only then does the text provide instructions on how to cook them:  ‘Scrape them and remove any bad parts with a knife as for turnips. Then wash them thoroughly in warm water, boil slightly, and dry on a towel. Then flour them and fry, then serve nicely arranged on little plates, and sprinkle sugar on top’ (p. 320).35 Often, as in the case of water parsnip, the narrator provides additional information about other possible ways of cooking or other relevant information for a discerning housekeeper:  ‘Item, if you wish to make pasties with them, do as above up to the frying, and then put them in pastry, breaking them in two pieces if too long, and instead of sugar as said above, you put small pieces of figs and grapes’ (p. 320).36 In a preceding recipe for ‘A meat arboulastre for 4 people’, the text notes: ‘If you have killed a kid goat, you can make a dish of the stomach, rennet stomach or abomasum, the omasum, etc. in yellow sauce with bacon and liver, lungs, viscera, and other tripe’ (p. 320).37 The narrator then adds the following information: Nota that with kid goat the bowels are not included with the viscera as they are with pork. The reason is that pig intestines are large and can be washed and turned inside out in the river, but not those of a goat. But all the other things are used as with the pig—​the head, the throat and the neck, the liver, the lights or lungs, for it is the same thing, the spleen and the heart—​and all together it is called the viscera, all the same as with pigs. (p. 320)38

As with the grafting example in horticulture discussed above, the need to be practical here combines with the need to satisfy the variety of needs and interests represented by a textual audience, as well as, perhaps, with a desire for an aesthetic that appreciates material example on its own terms.

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While many of the recipes, such as the one for water parsnip, could be drawn from experience or oral testimony, the Menagier’s narrator refers at several points to ‘the recipe’, that is, to a clear textual source, probably the Viandier, Taillevent’s contemporary culinary collection of over 220 recipes.39 Moreover, as the recipe for ‘a meat arboulastre’, which requires killing a kid goat, or the repeated recipes for complicated sauces and spiced dishes, would indicate, many of these recipes, like those in Taillevent’s Viandier, are for elaborate meals in high status households. Yet the reception of such ‘authority’ by the Menagier narrator is never simple reproduction and evinces a performative reading practice at work. At several points (for example, 2.5, Items 105, 108, and 110), the Menagier’s narrator corrects recipes that he has taken from Taillevent, based on his own experience or common sense knowledge. Thus, in 2.5.105, for a vinaigrette, Taillevant’s recipe does not require toast or any darkening agent, yet says that the dish will be brown in colour. The Menagier’s narrator adds: ‘Brown? How will it be brown if there is no toast? Item, I think it should be thick for I find it above in the chapter on thick pottages. And for these two reasons I think that it needs toasted bread to thicken it and color it brown’ (p.  290).40 And in 2.5.108, ‘German Broth [Brouet d’Alemaigne]’ the original Taillevant recipe the narrator is copying gives the following instructions: Take rabbit meat, poultry, or veal and cut it into pieces. Parboil it in water and then fry it in bacon fat. Put finely minced onions in a pot on the fire with some fat and stir often. Grind ginger, cinnamon, grain of paradise, nutmegs, livers roasted on a spit on the grill, and some saffron diluted with verjuice. The mixture should be yellowish and thick. And primo take bread toasted on the grill, ground, and sieved and set it all to boil together with some parsley and sugar added. (p. 291)41

But the Menagier’s narrator adds the following correction based on his own reading of other texts, perhaps, or even his own personal discussions with those having culinary experience: Nota that he is in error. For some cooks say that German broth should not be yellow, and this one says that is should. So if it must be yellow, the saffron should not be passed through the strainer, but it ought to be well ground and dissolved and put into the pottage; for saffron that is strained is for coloring; that which is sprinkled on top is called frangié. (p. 291)42

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And in 2.5.110, a recipe for Savoy broth where you add saffron and parsley, one yellow and one green, the Menagier’s narrator adds that put together these two ingredients make an unfortunate colour and it would be better to use toasted bread and saffron (which makes a green colour). Experience as a category here, as it is throughout Section Two, becomes a crucial, if shifting and elusive quantity in defining household knowledge and its use value in the world. If a supposedly authoritative textual authority sets itself up as providing ‘the recipe’ for structuring the household, consuming that knowledge in a way that will make it effective in material terms requires actively embodied forms of cognition. Household knowledges as represented by the Menagier, then, are never inert intransitive commodities, but are always being taken apart, rendered fungible, and therefore capable of circulation and redistribution in unpredictable ways. Thus, the text argues that the movement of knowledge within the bourgeois household can never be simply top-​down, as authoritative social models would maintain; instead there is an inherent back and forth built in to the production, transmission, and consumption of knowledge in such situations. Whether imagined in terms of the companionate relations between unequals that characterises the gender politics of the bourgeois married estate, or the conflicted interminglings of the many human and non-​human actants in the household domestic sphere, it is this increased possibility for the circulation of knowledge as embodied cognition in this virtual space, and the increased use value such circulation produces, that the Menagier explores with such delight and desire. Notes 1 ‘Chiere seur, pour ce que vous estans en l’eage de quinze ans et la sepmaine que vous et moy feusmes espousez, me priastes que je espargnasse a vostre jeunesse et a vostre petit et ygnorant service jusques a ce que vous eussiez plus veu et apris; a laquelle appreseure vous me promectiez d’entendre songneusement et mettre toute vostre cure et diligence pour ma paix et amour garder … en moy priant humblement en nostre lit, comme en suis recors, que pour l’amour de Dieu je ne vous voulsisse mie laidement corrigier devant la gent estrange ne devant nostre gent aussi, mais vous corrigasse chascune nuit, ou de jour en jour, en nostre chambre … et lors vous ne fauldriez point a vous amender selon ma doctrine et correption et feriez tout vostre pouoir selon ma voulenté, si comme vous disiez’ (p. 22). Contemporary with Chaucer’s

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Canterbury Tales, the Menagier de Paris includes versions of texts that feature in it, notably Melibee, Petrarch’s Griselda story, and the story of Lucretia. Composed around 1394, it survives in four manuscripts: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS fr. 12477; Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 10310–​10311; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS nouv. acq. fr. 6739; and Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale MS I:95. The standard scholarly edition (now out of print) is Le Menagier de paris, ed. Georgine Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1981). Their edition has been re-​published in the Lettres Gothiques series with a facing-​page modern French translation as Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. and trans. Karin Ueltschi (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1994). For a full and vibrant English translation, see The Good Wife’s Guide: Le Ménagier de Paris, a Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2009). Citations of the English translation of the Menagier (and of Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse, which is included within that text) are by page number from Greco and Rose’s edition. The French original is cited in the endnotes by page number from Ueltschi’s text. 2 ‘[S]‌i vouldroie je bien que vous sceussiez du bien et de l’onneur et de service a grant planté et foison et plus que a moy n’appartient, ou pour servir autre mary se vous l’avez aprez moy, ou pour donner plus grant doctrine a voz filles, amies ou autres, se il vous plaist et besoing en ont … ay pensé pluseurs foiz et intervalles se je peusse ou sceusse trouver de moy mesmes aucune generale introduction legiere pour vous aprendre, et par laquelle, sans moy donner charge telle comme dit est dessus, par vous mesmes vous peussiez introduire par my vostre paine et labour’ (pp. 24–​6). 3 Page references are to The Good Wife’s Guide, ed. Greco and Rose. The narrator’s original plan for the Menagier—​as outlined in the opening table of contents—​promises three sections (or books). But in the surviving manuscripts of the text only the first two sections are included. According to the author’s plan, the third section would have contained three articles (or chapters) treating games and amusements that would help the wife socialise, the first and third articles dealing with parlour games (such as chess and dice), and riddles and arithmetic games, respectively. All manuscripts of the Menagier insert the second of the three articles planned for the missing third section—​a chapter on hawking—​between 2.3 ‘Choosing and Caring for Servants and Horses’ and 2.4 ‘Menus’. 4 Chapters in this volume by Kuipers, Leahy, Seaman, Critten, and Radulescu address more directly questions of miscellaneousness and of knowledge production and consumption in medieval multi-​ text manuscripts. For a recent discussion of questions of definition and cultural significance raised by such multi-​text manuscripts, see Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (eds), Insular Books:  Vernacular

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Manuscript Miscellanies (London: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 1–​29. Below, in note 9, I outline why I think that the model of assemblage, network, or ecological field, rather than that of miscellany or anthology, better describes the mode of knowledge production in the Menagier. 5 Feminist criticism has been especially interested in the gendered nature of the power relations between husband and wife and thus has tended to focus more on the exemplary stories found in Section One. See, for example, Mireille Vincent-​ Cassy, ‘Quand les femmes deviennent paresseuses’, in Femmes, mariages-​lignages:  XIIe-​XIVe siècles. Mélanges offerts à Georges Duby (Brussels: De Boeck, 1992), pp. 429–​47; and Christine M. Rose, ‘What Every Goodwoman Wants: The Parameters of Desire in Le Menagier de Paris’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia:  International Review of English Studies, 38 (2002), 393–​ 410. Initially, attention to Section Two came primarily from historians of cooking. See, for example, Terence Scully, ‘The Menus of the Ménagier de Paris’, Le Moyen Français, 24–​5 (1989), 215–​42. More recently, Roberta Krueger has engaged more directly with the variety of material included in the Menagier as evidence of the ‘intricate network of overlapping, complementary systems that comprise the habitus and that determine social distinction’ for the late-​medieval bourgeoisie. Roberta L. Krueger, ‘Identity Begins at Home:  Female Conduct and the Failure of Counsel in Le Menagier de Paris’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 22 (2005), 21–​39. Ionut Epurescu-​Pascovi has also attempted a reassessment of the text’s complex relation to the social imaginary of the later Middle Ages through a comparison of the Menagier with the libri rationis or livres de raison, compilations of sale deeds and charters, notes on family events, and sometimes the personal reflections of the paterfamilias. See Ionut Epurescu-​Pascovi, ‘From Moral Agent to Actant:  Conduct in Le Ménagier de Paris’, Exemplaria, 24 (2012), 214–​37. 6 See Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 105–​41. 7 The gendered relations to knowledge production that I am outlining thus have certain similarities to the conflicted agency for women imagined in Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry, as discussed by Elliot Kendall in his chapter in this volume. But as I will argue, the bourgeois context for the Menagier’s companionate married relations encourages a somewhat different approach to (female) household agency. 8 ‘apres vostre mary … estre maistresse de l’ostel, commandeur, visiteur, et gouverneur et souverain administreur; et a vous appartient de les tenir en vostre subjection et obeisance, les endoctriner, corriger et chastier’ (p. 440). 9 I have found a variety of theoretical frameworks useful for thinking about the household in this way, as a kind of network/​assemblage/​ ecological field, and agency as distributed among a variety of human

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and non-​human actants that together make up the household: Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-​ Network-​ Theory (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New  York:  Continuum, 2006); and Paul Holchak, ‘Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing From Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower’, unpublished dissertation, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017. But, given the significance of performative reading practices in developing such agency and in entangling knowledge consumption and production in such useful ways, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s use of Esther Newton’s discussion of drag as spatially as well as temporally performative has been particularly useful. Sedgwick cites Newton’s study of the performances of female impersonators in relation to the floor plans of two drag clubs—​in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Newton’s attention to what was happening in the ‘multisided interactions among people “beside” each other in a room’ underlines, in Sedgwick’s words, ‘Newton’s continuous assumption that drag is less a single kind of act than a heterogeneous system, an ecological field whose intensive and defining relationality is internal as much as it is directed toward the norms it may challenge’. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling:  Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2003), p.  9. See also the chapters by Seaman and Dutton in this volume for engagements with agency and the materiality of the household. 10 ‘Belle seur, saichez que je suis en grant melancolie ou de cy finer mon livre ou d’en faire plus, pour ce que je doubte que je ne vous ennuye … et que mon conseil vous donroit charge et si grant nombre de faix et si greveux que vous desepereriez de trop grant ferdel, pour ce qu’il vous sembleroit que vous ne le pourriez tout porter ne acomplir; dont je seroye honteux et courroucé … je vueil premierement adviser combien je vous ay chargé, et se c’est du plusgrant neccessaire, et se je vous doy plus chargier et de combien; et se plus y a a faire que vous ne pourriez, je vous vueil donner aide’ (pp. 408–​10). 11 ‘Or est il certain aussi que aprez ce que dit est vous avez a penser de vous, voz enfans et vostre chevance. Mais a ces trois choses et a chascune pouez vous bien avoir aide; si vous couvient dire comment vous vous y entendrez, quelles aydes et quelles gens vous prendrez, et comment vous les embesoignerez; car de ce ne vueil je que vous ayez fors le commandement, la visitacion, la diligence de le faire faire par autres et aux despens de vostre mary’ (p. 410). 12 ‘vous n’estes gueres chargie’ (p. 410).

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13 There are fifteen manuscript versions of the poem, two of which are extensively illustrated with painted miniatures:  Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia MS Widener I; and New  York, Morgan Library MS M.0396. Little is known of the author other than his name. See A. Langfors, ‘Jacques Bryant et son poème: La Voie de povreté et de richesse’, Romania, 45 (1918), 49–​83. Although the Menagier tells us that Bruyant was formerly a royal notary at the Grand Châtelet in Paris, Ionut Epurescu-​Pascovici notes that ‘[d]‌uring Bruyant’s time this was a minor office, and it is unclear whether he even held it; the documentary record does not support the Menagier’s assertion. The Chemin, however, is permeated by legal culture, and it may be that Bruyant served at the Châtelet temporarily or in a related capacity. He might have received some university training, but it is unlikely that he graduated. The poem’s autobiographical references suggest that Bruyant lived a difficult life of work and modest achievement … The comparison with the Ménagier reveals the limits of Bruyant’s learning: the latter’s author, an educated bourgeois but hardly an intellectual, cites a plethora of literary works and makes our legal professional appear, by comparison, quite unsophisticated’. See Ionut Epurescu-​Pascovici, ‘Le Chemin de Povreté et de Richesse and the Late Medieval Social Imaginary’, French Historical Studies, 36 (2013), 19–​51 (21). An adapted and abridged version of the poem, Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau de labour, was printed in France in 1499, and shortly after that Alexander Barclay translated this version into English. Wynkyn de Worde printed Barclay’s poem in England in 1506 as The Castell of Labour. See the introduction to Alexander Barclay, The Castell of Labour (1506), ed. A. W. Pollard (Edinburgh: Constable, 1905). 14 ‘Que passés furent les foiriez /​De mes nopces et de ma feste, /​Et qu’il fut temps d’avoir moleste, /​Un soir me couchay en mon lit /​Où je eus moult peu de délit, /​Et ma femme dormoit lez moy /​Qui n’estoit pas en grant esmoy’ (in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Ueltschi, p. 813). 15 ‘plus de cent mille /​Ouvriers ouvrans par la ville, /​Dont chascun faisoit son mestier /​Si comme il lui estoit mestier; /​Là n’ot homme ne femme oiseux. /​Tant estoit ce chastel noiseux /​De férir et de marteller /​Qu’on n’y oïst pas Dieu tonner’ (in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Ueltschi, p. 833). 16 ‘Plus décevable ne trouvas /​Puis que tu fus de mère nés; /​Repos a maintes gens menés /​Ou hideux chemin de Paresse /​Qui tourne le cul à Richesse’ (in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Ueltschi, p. 835). 17 ‘m’appareilloit à mengier /​A lie chière et sans dangier’ (in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Ueltschi, p. 836). 18 ‘Qu’est-​c que vous me dictes cy? /​Vous estes, je croy, hors du sens, /​Car ne me congnois en nul sens /​En ce que vous m’alez disant /​Et toute nuit cy devisant, /​Car ce n’est tout que fantasie /​Que vous dictes par frenaisie’ (in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Ueltschi, p. 837).

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19 ‘seulement pour moy aidier de la diligence et parseverence que son livre monstre que un nouvel marié doit avoir’ (p. 412). 20 ‘Des la Toussains sont feves des maraiz … Encores en janvier et fevrier sauge, lavende, coq, mante, toutebonne soient plantez … Violecte, girofree semee en mars … Apres la septembresse pivoine, serpentine, oignons de liz, rosiers, groseilliers soient plantez’ (pp. 414–​24). 21 As Kuipers notes in her contribution to this volume, ‘after the twelfth century, Latin tracts and their vernacular translations go side by side in some manuscripts, suggesting that an attempt might be made to cater to diverse levels of literacy … Women readers were also included. Some time in the 1240s, bishop Robert Grosseteste reworked in Anglo-​ French the Latin Rules regarding the management of his own monastic estate, addressing his translation to the recently widowed countess of Lincoln, Margaret de Quincy’ (p. 156). 22 According to Kuipers, ‘when writing about grafting, Gottfried augmented the text that he found in Palladius’ fifth-​ century Opus Agriculturae by borrowing from Columella, Aristotle, Isidore of Seville, and Avicenna; he also added in gleanings from several experts whom he had met during his travels across the Mediterranean. The Latin version of Gottfried’s treatise is extant in at least eighty-​six manuscripts and was translated into several European vernaculars; a Middle English version of the work was apparently prepared by Gottfried’s friend, Nicholas Bollard, a Westminster monk whose aim would seem to have been to make the text available for a public beyond the monastic sphere’(p. 158).For the Middle English text, and for further discussion of Godfridus Super Palladium, see David G. Cylkowski, ‘A Middle English Treatise on Horticulture: Godfridus Super Palladium’, in Lister M. Matheson (ed.), Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 301–​29. 23 See p. 159 in this volume. Kuipers invokes Lisa Cooper’s invitation that ‘we might want to ask whether (like their classical forebears, who were entertained as well as instructed by the didactic verse of Lucretius and Virgil) medieval readers did not themselves take aesthetic enjoyment from practical literature’. See Lisa Cooper, ‘The Poetics of Practicality’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Oxford Twenty-​First-​ Century Approaches to Literature:  Middle English (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 491–​505 (499). 24 Oak’s only known compatibility is with the chestnut tree, but even there the union is not a stable one. See Selime Ada and Engin Ertan, ‘Histo-​cytological Study of the Graft Union of the Chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill)/​Oak (Quercus vulcanica Boiss)’, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2 (2013), 110–​15. My thanks to Nadine Kuipers for drawing my attention to this point. 25 ‘Les gardinners dient que la semence de rommarin ne vient point en la terre de France, maiz qui d’un rommarin arracheroit et demenbreroit

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en devalant aucunes petites branchectes, et les tendroit par le bout et les plantast, ilz revendroient’ (p. 430). 26 ‘Because I have no wish to mutilate his book, or extract a fragment or excerpt it from the rest, and likewise, because it is all of a piece, I help myself to the whole to reach the only point that I desire. So for the first article I  include the entire book that, in verse, relates the following’ (p. 183) [Et pour ce ne vueil je mie son livre estrippeller, ne n’en oster un coippel ne le departir du remenant; et mesmement que tout est bon ensemble, je me aide de tout pour obtenir au point ou article que seulement je desire. Et pour le premier article je prens tout le livre qui en rime dit ainsi (p. 412)]. 27 ‘Les gens de Monseigneur de Berry dient que aux dimenches et grans festes il leur couvient troiz beufz,.xxx.moutons,.viii. vins douzaines de perdriz, et connins a l’avenant; maiz j’en doubte (Averé depuis. Et est certain que plusieurs grans festes, dimenches et jeudiz; mais le plus commun des autres jours est a deux beufz et.xx. moutons.) Nota encores que a la court de Monseigneur de Berry on fait livree a paiges et a varlez des joes de beuf, et est le musiau de beuf taillé a travers et les mandibules demeurent pour la livree, comme dit est. Item, l’en fait du col du beuf livree ausdis varlectz (Item, et ce qui vient apres le col est le meilleur de tout le beuf, car ce d’entre les jambes de devant c’est la poictrine et ce de dessus le noyau’ (pp. 540–​2). Interestingly, in 2.5.25 (‘Recipes’), the value of the noyau as a cut is further explicated: ‘Nota that one of the best morsels or prime pieces of beef, whether for roasting or for stewing, is the noyau. And nota that the noyau of beef is the piece below the neck and shoulders. Additionally, this piece is supremely good sliced and put in pasties. After the pasty is cooked, pour on some lamprey sauce’ (p.  275). [Nota que ung des meilleurs morceaulx ou pieces de dessus le beuf, soit a rostir ou cuire en l’eaue, c’est le noyau du beuf. Et nota que le noyau du beuf est la piece apres le col et les espaulles. Et aussi icelle piece est souveraine bonne tranchee, mise en pasté. Et quant le pasté est cuit, gectez dedens saulse de lamproye (p. 602).] 28 ‘le quartier de mouton a.iiii. pieces, ou.iii. pieces et l’espaule, et couste. viii. blans ou.iii. sols; le quartier de veau.viii. sols’ (p. 542). 29 ‘Et a vous appartient de les tenir en vostre subjection et obeissance, les endoctriner, corriger et chastier. Et pour ce deffendez leur a faire excez ne gloutonnie de vie, tellement qu’elles en vaillent pis. Aussi deffendez les de rioter l’une a l’autre ne a vos voisines. Deffendez leur de mesdire d’aultruy, fors seulement a vous et en secret, et en tant comme le meffait toucheroit vostre prouffit seulement, et pour eschever vostre dommage et non plus. Deffendez leur le mentir, jouer a jeux illicites, de laidement jurer, et de dire parolles qui sentent villenies ne parolles  deshonnestes ne gouliardes comme aucunes mescheans qui maldient de males senglentes fievres, de male senglente sepmaine, de

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male senglente journee. Il semble qu’elles sachent bien qu’est senglente journee, senglente sepmaine, etc., et non font; elles ne doivent point savoir qu’est senglente chose. Maiz preudefemmes ne le scevent point:  car elles sont toutes abhominables de veoir seulement le sang d’un aignel ou d’un pigon quant on le tue devant elles. Et certes, femmes ne doivent parler de nulle laidure, non mye seulement de con, de cul ne de autres secretz membres de nature, car c’est deshonneste chose a femme d’en parler’ (pp. 440–​2). 30 ‘Je oy une foiz raconter d’une jeune preudefemme qui estoit assise en une presse de ses autres amis et amyes. Et par adventure elle dist par esbatement aux autres:  “Vous me pressés si fort que bien la moictié de mon con me ride.” Et jasoit ce qu’elle l’eust dit par jeu et entre ses amis, cuidant fair la galoise, toutesvoyes les autres sages preudefemmes ses parentes l’en blasmerent a part. Item, telles femmes gouliardeuses dient aucunes foiz de femme qu’elle est putain ribaulde, et par ce disant il semble qu’elles sachent qu’est putain ou ribaulde, et preudefemmes ne scevent que ce est de ce; et pour ce deffendez leur tel langaige, car elles ne scevent que c’est. Deffendez leur vengence, et endoctrinez, en toute pacience, a l’exemple de Mellibee dont il est cy dessus parlé; et vous mesmes, belle seur, soyez telle en toutes choses que par voz faiz elles puissant en vous prendre example de tout bien’ (p. 442). 31 ‘[La] beguine scet bien, et le vous dira, que se il y a aucune tache d’uile ou autre gresse, le remedde est tel:  Ayez pissat, et le chauffez comme tiede, et mectez la tache tremper dedens par deux jours, et puis estraingnez le drap ou est la tache sans le tuerdre; et se la tache ne s’en est alee, si le face dame Agnes la beguine mectre en ung autre pissat et batre ung fiel de beuf avec, et face l’en comme devant. Ou vous faictes ainsi: Faictes prendre de la terre de robes et tremper en leissive, puis mectre sur la tache et laissiez secher, et puis froter. Et se la terre ne s’en va legierement, si faictes moullier en laissive et laissiez encores secher, et frotez tant qu’elle s’en soit alee. Ou se vous n’avez terre de robes, faictes mectre cendres tremper en lessive et icelles cendres bien trempees mectez sur la tache. Ou …’ (p. 450). 32 ‘Et se vous estes en pays ou il ait repaire de loups, je vous enseigneray maistre Jehan, vostre maistre d’ostel, ou voz bergiers et gens de les tuer sans coup ferir par la recepte qui s’ensuit’ (p. 446). 33 ‘Or veuil je en cest endroit vous laissier repposer ou jouer et non plus parler a vous; vous esbaterez ailleurs. Je parleray a maistre Jehan le despencier qui noz biens gouverne, afin que se aucun de noz chevaulx tant de charrue comme a chevauchier est en essoine, ou qu’il couviengne achecter ou eschanger, qu’il s’i congnoisse ung petit’ (p. 460). 34 ‘Les plus nouveaulx mis hors de terre et fraiz tirez, cueilliz en janvier, fevrier, etc., sont les meilleurs:  et sont les plus fraiz congneuz a ce que au plaier ilz se rompent, et les vielz tirez hors de terre se ploient’ (p. 746).

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35 ‘Il les couvient rere et oster le mauvaiz au coustel comme on fait les navez. Puis les couvient laver tresbien en eaue tiede, puis pourboulir ung petit, puis les mectre essuier sur une touaille, puis enfleurer, puis frire, puis drecier par petiz plateletz arrengeement, et mectre du succre dessus’ (p. 746). 36 ‘Item qui en veult faire pastez, il les couvient faire comme dessus jusques au frire, et lors les mectre en pasté, rompuz en deux les trop longs, et au lieu du succre dont dessus est parlé, couvient mectre figues par menus morceaulx et des roisins avec’ (p. 746). 37 ‘Une arboulaste de char pour.iiii. personnes. Se vous avez fait tuer ung chevrel, vous pouez fair assiected de la pance, mulecte ou caillecte, aultier, etc., au jaunet avec du lart et du foye, mol, fressure et autres trippes’ (p. 744). 38 ‘Nota que du chevrel les boyaulx ne sont point laissiez avec la fressure comme ilz sont laissiez avec la fressure du porc. La raison est: car les boyaulx de porc sont larges et se peuent laver, retourner et renverser a la riviere, et les boyaulx de chevrel, non. Maiz toutes les autres choses y sont laissiees comme au porc, scilicet a la teste, le gosier et le col, le foye, le mol ou poumon (car c’est tout ung), la rate menue et le cuer, et tout ensemble est appellee fressure, et autel de porc’ (pp. 744–​6). 39 For example, 2.5.98:  ‘and then afterward the recipe mentions “eggs”, which is another way to thicken it’ (p. 288) [et il dit apres ‘oeufz’, qui est autre lyoison (p. 646)]. See Scully, ‘The Menus of the Ménagier de Paris’; and The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of all Extant Manuscripts, ed. Terence Scully (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988). 40 ‘Brune, comment sera elle brune s’il n’y a du pain hallé? Item, je croy qu’elle doit estre lyant, car je la treuve ou [chappitre] des potages lyans cy devant. Et par ces deux raisons je croy qu’il y couvient du pain harlé pour lyer et tenir brune’ (p. 650). 41 ‘Prenez char de connins, de poulaille, ou de veel et despeciez par pieces, puiz cuiz en l’eaue comme a moictié, puiz friolez au sain de lart. Puiz ayez de l’ongon menu mincié en ung pot sur le charbon, et du sain dedens le pot, et hoschiez le pot souvent. Puis broyez gingembre, canelle, graine de paradiz, noiz muguectes, des foyes rostiz en une brochecte sur le greil, et du saffran deffait de vertjus; et soit sur le jaune et lyant. Et primo pain sory sur le greil, broyé et passé par l’estamine; et soit tout, avec des feuilles de percil, mis boulir ensemble oudit pot, et du succre dedens’ (p. 652). 42 ‘Nota qu’il fault: car aucuns queux dient que brouet d’Alemaigne ne doit point estre jaune, et cestuy dit que si fait. Et doncques, s’il doit estre jaune, ne doit mie le saffren estre passé parmy l’estamine; maiz doit estre bien broyé et alayé et mis ainsi ou potage, car celluy qui est passé c’est pour donner couleur, celluy qui est mis pardessus est dit frangié’ (pp. 652–​4).

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3 Knowing incompetence: elite women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower Elliot Kendall

William Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower, printed in 1484, imagines a rich but constrained, household-​centred identity for women of Europe’s social elites.1 Capitalising on a late-​medieval boom in conduct literature at the end of the age of penitential manuals, Caxton translated a well-​known and unusually lengthy and complex French example of material dedicated to the proper behaviour of privileged young women. Geoffrey de la Tour-​ Landry’s Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry (1371) was written for his daughters a century before Caxton set up his press at Westminster; it elaborates upon the precepts characteristic of simpler conduct poems and treatises with numerous exemplary tales and a debate about lovers between the knight-​narrator and his wife.2 Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and its German and English translations model for women of elite families—​most particularly aristocratic but also aspiring mercantile and professional ones—​a selfhood enmeshed in the marital household and (unequal) partnership with husbands.3 Unusually in de la Tour-​ Landry’s lifetime (when, if survivals are good evidence, the vast majority of conduct texts addressed males), and still in Caxton’s time (after some expansion in such writing for females), the text is a sustained statement that elite women should have fully formulated ethical knowledge about their own gendered role and shared responsibility for the fortunes of the household.4 With this knowing comes authority, but it pays not to jump to conclusions about how authority enhances agency. The woman who learns obediently from The Book of the Knight of the Tower knows that she should lead her household by example, manage its resources, instruct her daughters, and guide her husband. But she also knows a very important set of incompetencies: that her dangerous instincts defy all but the most strenuous efforts of self-​control; that she has few options to resist men’s dangerous instincts and

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reactions to her; and that her ability to use political capital beyond the household is severely restricted by both her own limitations and others’ lack of regard. While misogynist satire and courtly love discourse most obviously ask audiences to think about women as objects of male concern and to inhabit male subjectivities, the Book is directly interested in female subjectivity while sharing much of those discourses’ patriarchal impetus.5 The domestic role framed for wives and daughters (on their way to becoming wives) is conditioned by the larger political role of the husband or father. This is not a gendered separation of domesticity from the political sphere so much as a subsuming of female agency within a political agenda that is understood to belong to the lord.6 At the same time, the Book sponsors patriarchal dominance obliquely. I shall concentrate in this chapter on structures in the Book which portion out household knowledge in support of the basic patriarchal model of masculine political-​ domestic agency abetted by feminine domestic support while building up an imaginary of companionate marriage and repressing the notion of patriarchal coercion within the household. This chapter argues that the Book expends art and effort to fashion patriarchal meaning, which is not to claim that it was always successful in leading its readers’ responses. The very insistence, industry, and repressions with which it sets out its message indicate that its values did not go without saying. In its forms of teaching, the text anticipates subjects who are not about to take on its norms securely without concerted effort on the part of both text and audience.7 Indeed, the knight’s earliest remembered audience—​the fast-​living ‘felauship’ that he ‘oftyme’ (p.  12) reproved in his youth—​is a flatly uncooperative one and his final, extended exemplum is the story of a son who ignores his father’s instruction (chs 137–​44). At the same time, the Book supplies material for potential counter-​ readings. Any of the countless representations of transgressive conduct that the text produces in order to stigmatise them might slip out of its control. At least one sixteenth-​century patriarchal commentator was convinced of this possibility. Despite the knight of the Tower’s ‘fatherly loue’ and ‘a good entente’ to help his daughters ‘flee from vyces’, sighs John Fitzherbert, sexual seductions are ‘so naturall’ and ‘soo subtylly contryued, and craftely shewed’ that they are inevitably hard to resist, and the knight ‘hath made bothe the men and the women to knowe more vyces, subtyltye, and crafte, than euer they shulde haue knowen, if the boke had not ben made’.8

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More recently, Roberta Krueger has made the Barthesian argument that the knight forces disparate materials into a moral frame that might not hold. Krueger explores the example of the tale of the ropemaker (ch. 62), in which the knight’s fabliau source and its combination of fast-​talking female ingenuity and patriarchal gullibility threaten to escape the violently corrective work he adds to the end of the narrative.9 Similarly, we can imagine the vivacious, fashionable youths of many exempla holding more appeal for some readers than the pious, elderly moralists who preside over their disgrace. The knight furiously moralises his myriad stories of vice and craft, but medieval readers and listeners were accustomed to the lively interplay of conflicting ideas. Schools taught fables (alongside conduct texts) in ways that asked (male) students to think about multiple possibilities for moralising a single narrative. Education at university and the Inns of Court centred on debate without necessarily privileging its resolution. The critical, dialectic structures reproduced in these institutions fed into literature that was available to women as well as men.10 Experience of textual diversity also generated interpretative potential. Nicola McDonald’s work on household books shows that their reproductions and combinations of texts could either build up or undercut paternalistic meaning and that the sternest moralising on women’s conduct could be found competing for attention in these books with ‘precisely the kind of material—​social criticism, political complaint, vulgar comedy, and erotic verse—​that we almost never imagine being read or talked about by respectable lay women’.11 A second kind of fuel for subversive readings is the Book’s positive rendering of female agency, which is presented as modifying patriarchal oppressiveness in the direction of partnership but simultaneously models the stuff of female independence. Thus, the knight wishes his daughters to be able to read—​a skill not necessarily confined to the particular didactic purposes that he intends for it (p. 13)—​and, as I discuss below, he portrays women as calming influences on hot-​headed men, emphasising female meekness but nonetheless positing a deficit of self-​control on the male side. In the debate between himself and his lady, he gives us a virtuous woman lending her voice to the Book’s patriarchal instruction who is simultaneously a positive representation of a woman wielding authority against a man.12 Further, the length and density of the Book must have increased the likelihood of partial or selective

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reading, though it is repetitive enough that partial reading would not automatically subvert its patriarchal meaning.13 The wide readership at which Caxton aimed for his print edition would have shortened the odds on the text’s encountering an audience resistant to strongly patriarchal ethics, and even the original Livre was never kept exclusively for Geoffrey de la Tour-​Landry’s daughters. It enjoyed impressive circulation in manuscript, with over twenty copies now surviving.14 Caxton’s preface recommends the Book’s lessons ‘for al maner peple in generally but in especial for ladyes & gentilwymen douȝters to lordes & gentilmen’ (p. 3). An early readership of gentlepersons would fit both this advertisement and wider evidence of the contemporary market for Caxton’s output, taking gentlepersons in that inclusive sense of gentility current in the fifteenth century, which embraced landed elites, merchants, lawyers, administrators, and other professionals.15 Women in these groups sometimes enjoyed particular kinds of independence that might have made them more likely to interpret conduct literature in favour of female agency and, on the other hand, might have intensified a patriarchal interest in constraining their views and behaviour. Aristocratic women, of both the nobility and the gentry, for instance, were often called on to act on behalf of absent husbands—​ the example of Margaret Paston will be considered towards the end of this chapter—​while urban life gave elite women other opportunities for independence as apprentices and businesswomen. Caxton’s Book and its source, like much late-​ medieval complaint and satire, are obsessed with high fashion and sexual conduct, both markers of economic change.16 Freedom in terms of consumption, employment, and choosing when and whom to marry increased for women in some towns because of the demographic crisis brought about by the Black Death and recurrent epidemics in the decades that followed. It would be a mistake to generalise about Caxton’s readers in this regard, however, since the effects of demographic crisis were uneven, economic opportunity did not march in step with political advancement, and the full flood or ‘golden age’ of economic advantages for women was, in Caroline Barron’s summation, ‘confined to some English towns (perhaps only London and York) and to … the hundred years from about 1370–​1470’.17 The Livre and Caxton’s translation of it more or less bookend this peak century for a kind of social change that violently agitates these texts, fearful as they are of female independence. Opportunities for urban were in decline by the time Caxton published his Book.

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Knowledge and power Before exploring the alarm that The Book of the Knight of the Tower beseeches all of its readers, including women, to take on board regarding fully independent female behaviour, it is important to take stock of the text’s enhancement of female authority. Women are granted clear didactic power in the Book. They even show some powerful men that they have a thing or two to learn. Caxton frames the whole text within elite female decision-​making and domestic experience when his preface attributes the project’s design to ‘a noble lady which hath brouȝt forth many noble & fayr douȝters which ben vertuously nourisshed & lerned’ (p. 3).18 The knight-​narrator himself credits a queen of Hungary and ‘her book’ (p. 11) as his prototype, though when it comes to compiling his own ‘examplayre’, he turns to ‘two preestes and two clerkes that I hadde’ and the male-​dominated literary tradition of scripture, ‘gestes of the kynges’, and chronicles, as well as less easily categorised ‘straunge historyes’ (p.  13).19 The knight remembers another lady, beloved but long dead, as a profound inspiration to him. Indeed, poignant thoughts of love have returned to him in a garden in springtime to give the conduct book a fleeting courtly love opening. His remembrances soon turn, however, to the more frankly sexual and exploitative operations of the companions of his youth, and his mind thus tracks the logic according to which desire can make women both a source of emotional and ethical refinement for men and subjects to be guarded and restricted by them.20 The Book is already, in its prologue, then, divided between contrary images of women as transmitters of social power and vulnerable beings. When viewed as subordinates to be kept chaste for exchange in marriage and legitimate childbearing, daughters and wives blended both images, their agency diluted for the transmission of property, social capital, kinship ties, and lineage. In the ‘grete debate and stryf’ (p.  163) about paramours between himself and his wife which the knight-​narrator recounts towards the end of his treatise (chs 122–​ 33), female authority reasserts itself dramatically in the role of ethical guide occupied in the preface and prologue by Caxton’s ‘noble lady’ patron, the queen of Hungary and the knight-​narrator himself. The knight’s wife dominates the debate, which is less an argument than a lecture broken into periods by the knight’s furtive queries about the value of pre-​or extra-​marital flirtation. His capitulation is tacit but total. It does not need to be spelled out because his wife’s arguments agree with his own ethics in the rest of the book. Thus, the Book

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as a whole, addressing an audience beyond the knight’s daughters, performs a male voice and seems to confirm the wife’s disclaimer in the debate that ‘myn entencion and wyll is not to ordeyne vpon none ladyes ne damoysels but yf hit be vpon myn owne doughters of whome I  haue the chastysement and charge’ (p.  174). Yet the debate exposes (by ventriloquy) the wife’s confident, authoritative, generalising voice as the root of the knight’s own mature, evolved ethics—​the ethics which he has grown into by the time he looks back, in the prologue, on his youthful desires. Her responsibility for her husband’s developed ethics is comically underlined when she adduces his own experience against him. When he suggests that their daughters could safely ‘be amerouse’ (p. 167) with a high-​ status and sincere suitor, she reminds him of his own rejection of a lady whom he had meant to marry but who showed excitement at the prospect and behaved in a manner insufficiently ‘secrete and couered’ (p. 168). An authentic show of female emotion was enough to put the knight to flight, but it is his wife who, much later, reasons about the experience, which he has yet to interpret (by the time the knight comes to tell his daughters the same story, earlier in the Book, he has learned how to moralise from it; pp. 27–​8). The passage crystallises the impression, sustained by the debate as a whole, of female wisdom acting on embryonic male morality. Hard upon his wife’s last utterance, and unmarked, so that their voices might momentarily be confused, the knight’s exemplary storytelling resumes with the tale of the provost of Aquileia, his wife, and the hermit (ch. 134), in which a hermit, set on gauging the virtue of the provost and his lady, finds himself unprepared for the household’s practised integration of luxury and ascetic living. The lady, especially, demonstrates her mastery of the hybrid lifestyle and, with the help of a tub of ice-​cold water and her own commanding presence, gives the hermit, drunk in her bed, an object lesson in the challenges of managing carnal temptations as opposed to escaping them by retreating from society. Early and late in the knight’s text, authoritative women engender and even preside over the lessons which he sponsors. In his wife’s embedded performance in the debate, the Book goes as far as to figure her upending a patriarch’s authority in the presence of those expected to obey him:  ‘Therfore I  charge yow my fayre doughters that in this mater ye byleue not your fader’ (p. 164). No account of female authority in the Book is complete, however, without considering the text’s strategies for determining that authority and compromising its potential to enhance female

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agency. With the help of a relentless focus on the household and of assumptions about male ungovernability, a narrow construction of female authority and depictions of women as out of their depth when it comes to politics proliferate as the Book’s didactic tales accumulate. This can work against the Book’s more enabling dimensions and might for some readers have overwhelmed these. How to use an eel The Book grants women authority on household economics and politics on the condition that they learn and repeat their own exclusion from political roles. On this reading, women’s knowledge—​ or its highest order—​serves the household interest but does not claim to direct it. Discipline over household properties, including consumables and women’s own bodies, is central to this knowledge. The purpose of this discipline is above all to preserve these properties for patriarchal use, for politics governed by men, not for female initiatives, domestic or otherwise. The Book attempts this disarming of female knowledge by partially infantilising women. Until, like the lady of the Tower or the provost’s wife, they have attained their self-​limiting knowledge, women are imagined to be appetitive and naive. In an array of stories, for either or both of these reasons, they are shown to be unable to direct in politically productive ways elements of the household economy, from their own speech to luxury goods, from food to sexual contact. Their elevation to the status of good wife depends on their practising a kind of household management that abjures an active political role. The Book, as I  shall argue, strives to present this gendered partitioning of household knowledge in terms not of confinement but of realisation of self, reconciling it to a non-​antagonistic, companionate ideal of marriage by distancing coercion and ‘corrective’ violence from male agency and casting discipline as self-​discipline and a sensible recognition of social limits on agency. A story of an eel (ch. 15)  is one of the more sophisticated examples (and the most humorous) in a raft of narratives that work in similar ways to naturalise the exclusion of independent female political agency. The eel is being kept by a lord ‘moche derworthely for to gyue it to som good lord of his or to somme frende yf they come to see hym’ (p.  31). The lord’s wife and her chamber servant secretly eat the eel, but, in the style of Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale, the lady’s talking magpie blurts out their domestic transgression to the lord.21 After ‘grete sorowe and noyse’ in the house, the

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conspirators, now adopting the role of the Manciple’s Phoebus Apollo, punish the too-​talkative pet, plucking ‘alle the fethers of his hede sayeng Thou hast discouered vs of the ele’. But the punishment backfires. Fro than forthon yf ony man cam in to that hows that was balled or pylled or had an hyhe forhede the pye wolde saye to them ye haue told my lord of the ele … This damoysell was after moche scorned & mocked for that ele by cause of the pye that so ofte remembryd it to suche as cam thyder so ballyd or pylled. (pp. 31–​2)

Part of the joke, of course, is that the embarrassing bird thinks that the domestic affairs of its particular household lie at the centre of the universe. It is thus aligned with the lady herself, who has acted with no regard for the outward-​facing household policy of her husband and his attempts to secure connections within wider political networks. Although antagonists, the lady and the bird are also aligned by their lack of impulse control. The magpie, true to type, ‘spak and said all that she sawe’ (p.  31) and the lady evidently acts on the stimulus ‘good to ete’ rather than more abstract, social incentives. Husband and wife would score differently in ‘now versus later’ intertemporal choice studies designed to distinguish between automatic emotional responses and controlled cognition when subjects decide between immediate and delayed rewards.22 Their contrasting motivations are of a piece with Aristotelian antifeminist discourse that characterises the body and appetite as female and the soul and reason as male.23 The impulsive creatures’ respective failures of oral control (eating and speaking) overlay a proverbial linking of woman and bird through the misogynist trope of uncontrolled speech. A household book from this period belonging to a Suffolk gentry family, for example, lists ‘a pie’, ‘a iai’, and ‘a woman’ as solutions to a cipher puzzle under the heading ‘claterars’.24 From this perverse perspective, the talkative stereotype, not to be denied by this lady’s unnatural verbal restraint, comes home to roost in her pet. The association of the lady with her pet confirms her separation from her deliberative husband, who sees the household as part of its wider social situation. In the eel tale and others, in short, women privilege intra-​at the expense of inter-​household exchange. In the three exempla in the Book that are closest in form to the eel story, a spoilt daughter marries and eventually gets caught wasting delicacies in a noisy party solely for household servants (ch. 6); a squire’s wife resents

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her husband’s talking to outsiders and ends up fighting with a perceived rival (ch. 16); and a pet-​pampering lady feeds her hounds food that could have been used for alms (ch. 19). In all four cases, women’s household mismanagement is driven by appetite or solipsistic instinct, sometimes with the addition of insular domestic sociability, and they disregard or suspect community beyond the household. The tales’ men, on the other hand, reason politically about economics. Network-​ building requires planning (the eel owner keeps his fat, phallic eel in a pond box ready for political opportunity) and a level of restraint that the women of these tales conspicuously lack. Household economics is socially centripetal for these women but centrifugal for their lords.

Domestic wholeness and domestic violence Despite this particular, dyadic formulation of gender and other strains of antifeminism that I will only touch on here, the Book, as Glenn Burger and Lynn Staley separately argue, is invested in marriage as a mutual heterosexual enterprise, one in which both sexes find fulfilment ‘as part of the conjoined body of the married estate’.25 How does the Book reconcile its allegiance to misogyny of a kind that is at home in satire of married life and the molestiae nuptiarum [pains of marriage] tradition with its pro-​matrimonial outlook?26 At one level, the Book is just doing what satire of marriage does if it is read as showing women what they ought not to do (and men what they ought not to tolerate) if they want to make a success of marriage. But Burger, situating Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-​Landry within a late-​medieval turn in conduct literature to an expanded view of exemplary female conduct, draws attention to the ways in which the text presents the good woman not as the negation of the antifeminists’ uncontrolled woman, not as simply obedient and exceptional, but as an ordinary (albeit socioeconomically privileged) woman who participates in mutually regarding marriage and her own fully informed self-​regulation. This regulation is determined by patriarchal discourse such as the Livre’s and, by extension, the Book’s. Especially in the knight’s wife’s authoritative contributions through the spousal debate over paramours, however, it accommodates some measure of respect for female agency (‘agential obedience’ is Burger’s phrase) and aspires to affectionate and dialogic marriage.27

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Accordingly, in the four selfish lady or ‘eel-​type’ tales I have just singled out, husbands are distanced from their narratives’ punitive measures against wayward women and, in three of the tales, discovery and punishment emerge from an ordinary conjoined marital condition, an idea of the household as an unavoidably intra-​connected whole, which it is plain folly to subvert. The tales’ father figures neither court conflict nor embrace opportunities for violent discipline in the family. That scenarios such as those of the eel-​type tales do not lead to violence being directed by men towards women is a sine qua non for the Book to align itself with an idea of companionate marriage. Above this bedrock, the Book generally works hard to limit and to blur the relationship between patriarchal authority and domestic violence. Before examining the Book’s eschewal of, and indirection around, domestic violence, however, it is worth noticing when patriarchs are directly violent against wives or daughters in the text. Women who suffer intentional violence at the hands of a worthy husband or father in the Book have, as a rule, either subverted the patriarchal exchange of women through adultery or fornication or otherwise been so openly insubordinate that their example might be understood by an audience as an existential threat to patriarchal authority (for example, chs 3, 17–​18, 55–​6, 62–​3). A story of Herod (ch. 63) merges the twin justifications of patriarchal domestic violence when the king kills his wife in a mistaken belief of her adultery and is exculpated by the narrator on the ground that his victim pleaded her innocence ‘to proudely and to lyghtly’ (93). Elsewhere, the text hesitates on the fringes of directed domestic violence against aristocratic women especially or settles for indirect violence. ‘Gentyl wymmen’, opines the knight-​narrator, ‘ought to be chastysed by fayre semblaunt and by curtosye’ and not by the ‘buffettys and strokes’ used by ‘moyen’, or middling, people (p. 37). Later stories in the Book adhere to this maxim only if we extend ‘curtosye’ to include imprisonment (ch. 64) and a lady’s shaming by being sat to dine with her lord’s swineherd (ch. 72). The porousness and anaemia of its norm against aristocratic domestic violence is both unacknowledged by the text and manifest. A will to violence against the unmeek woman—​the woman who asserts that she knows better—​presses in on it, despite the knight-​narrator’s pious high-​mindedness. Not only do sexual transgressions cancel the norm, but even where the norm rules, violence is often very near at hand. It is socially adjacent in the acceptable domestic violence of urban elites (chs 17–​18). It is minimally displaced in the form

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of violence that is beyond the patriarch’s control but nonetheless functions in the narrative to punish a woman’s domestic offence, as in the gang rape of a woman who fled her husband ‘for a lytel occacion’ (p.  101) or injuries suffered by women in the eel-​type stories.28 At these moments of violence, a husband’s silent presence compounds the sense that agents for whom he is not responsible and who are far less disciplined than he are nevertheless partially aligned with him, expressing, as it were, his darker purpose. And this thin separation of patriarchal agency and violence wears down to an infinitesimal thickness with the spoilt lady’s maiming by a splinter from a blow that her husband has aimed elsewhere.29 Domestic violence flickers at the threshold of narrative because of an acceptance that it is a natural male response to being challenged and that women, knowing this, are responsible for preventing its irruption. We see this in the righteous anger of the emperor of Constantinople, who would beat his daughters for discourtesy but for his wife’s intervention (ch. 95), or in theorising about courtesy’s power over the volatile ‘courage’ of a man (p. 33) and the sparrowhawk, ‘a wylde byrde whiche hath in hym no reson’ (p. 24) or accountability. This line of argument infantilises (or bestialises) a man as himself intemperate, weak in reasoning, and incapable of squaring up to his own sins when confronted directly, ‘for a man is of suche courage that when they be ronne on with fyersnes and rudesse they done hit [their offence] the rather and ben the worse’ (p.  33). In this light, especially, the lady of the Tower’s calm conversation to her husband about paramours (including her glossing of his own experience) makes him appear naive and unskilled in argument. From a different vantage point, however, the discourse reproduces a victim-​blaming logic, which is excruciatingly on show in the sober advice that, should a wife cede to her husband ‘the hyghe talkyng’ and wait to dispute with him ‘but as his wrath is gone’, then ‘she shalle not make her self to be blamed ne to be bete ne slayne by her lord’ (p. 93). That the knight’s wife once comprehensively ‘repreuyd … her lord of his folye’ (p. 96), to use the language of an earlier moralisation, makes a vivid claim for the role of female authority in a companionate marriage when ‘wrath’ is absent. In forging the meaning of the Book, however, this oasis of reason vies with lingering intimations that male domestic violence is immanent and justifiable.30 Its boundaries starkly delineated and its principles shaded by stories of sensational violence, then, a mood against the prescribed corporal chastisement of aristocratic women more or

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less prevails in the Book. The father figures of the eel-​type tales remain embodiments of the Book’s largest vision of married life as mutually supportive and free of antagonism and internal surveillance, even as their tales take action against the women who have betrayed this vision. Patriarchal aggression is conspicuous by its absence. All the ladies suffer but none directly at the hands of her husband. In each case, facial (or cranial) disfigurement follows transgression. The eel thief remains physically unscathed but suffers socially as a result of her own disfiguring of the magpie. The spoilt lady is blinded by a splinter, her eye ‘smeton oute’, when her husband lashes out with a staff at a male servant collaborator. The squire’s jealous wife picks her own fight with another woman and, courtesy of another staff (the weapons are thoroughly feminine-​domestic), ends up with a ‘croked nose’ (p.  32). The dog-​loving lady is visited on the verge of death by ‘two lytel black dogges’ which ‘were about her mouthe and lycked her lyppes’, leaving a devilish stigma there ‘as black as a Cole’ (p. 38). All the disfigurements translate inward, appetitive self-​assertion into outwardly conspicuous, shameful lack of wholeness, which attends the woman’s own unfixing from the heart of the household. The lady of the hounds is dying; the maimed wives lose their husbands, who find their affections dispelled by the injuries. As a result, the spoilt lady’s ‘houshold and menage wente all to nought and to perdicion’ (p. 18). The eel thief hangs on to married life, but can never again be settled in the midst of the household because of the bald magpie’s perverse new greeting and the mockery that it is always about to reawaken. Even as these disfigurements make shame legible and cause ostracism based on patriarchal norms, they are separated from patriarchal will. Two husbands are bystanders and, while the spoilt lady’s spouse becomes ‘moche wrothe and felle’ and his violence is exceptional in this company, he does not intend to harm his wife, much less cause her gruesomely literal loss of face. The text stresses the accidental nature of the injury by spelling out the circumstances that led to it (‘his wyf … was by hym in suche manere …’) and categorising it as ‘mysauenture’ (p. 18). No directing hand is explicitly identified behind the divine or demonic black dogs of the remaining tale. The image is akin to a passage in the widely circulating Awntyrs off Arthur, in which the horrifying ghost of Guinevere’s mother, ‘blak to the bone’, its own animal—​a toad—​ attending to its skull, warns of the divinely punitive consequences of contempt for the poor and, particularly, failure in almsgiving.31

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Innocent (or only partially culpable) of the wayward woman’s punishment in each tale, the patriarch’s allegiance to companionate marriage is not contaminated by aggressive assertion of dominance and spousal hierarchy, albeit, in two of the tales, that allegiance is subsequently negated by his wife’s shame. Moreover, patriarchs’ actions in the eel-​type tales help to construct an idea of marriage as a partnership much as their omissions of violence protect that construct. The spoilt lady is paired with a teacherly man who tries to intervene constructively long before the fateful midnight party: he ‘knewe her manere whiche was euyll bothe for the body & the soule and told and shewed this to her moche honestly and swetely many tymes’ (p.  18, emphasis added). We are told that he tries more than ‘faire spekyng’, but nothing explicitly intrudes on the gentle nature of his (futile) instruction. Here and in the friar who preaches to the lady of the hounds, these tales present a patriarchal commitment to mutuality and dialogue in the face of transgression. The story of the eel does not follow the same pattern, but the immediate fall out of the spousal dispute is described simply as ‘grete sorowe and noyse’ in the house (p. 31). Individual agency and moral stances are collapsed into one undivided disruptive energy collectively owned. In this instance, the text insists on the household’s importance as a social unit by having spousal conflict reverberate as a kind of mutuality. The differences between the tales, however, are instructive from a gendered perspective. The familiar double standard of sexuality plays out in expectations, moralising the tale of the squire’s jealous wife (ch. 16), that a woman is to proceed extremely tentatively against adultery whereas a similar, and in any case less restrictive, strategy is recommended to men merely in relation to mismanagement of household food supplies.32 Indeed, the Book’s imagery suggests that one appetite blends into another as far as women’s dangerous lack of control is concerned. Although the ladies of the eel-​type tales have not committed sexual sins, there is surplus meaning available in the fat eel, the ‘croked nose’ (p. 32) and the hounds’ sensual attention to the lips if any reader would link the ladies’ selfish drives to sexuality.33 A more subtle opposition is at work, however, in the tales’ representations of modes rather than causes of disagreement, whereby the narratives sharpen the Book’s ethics of courtesy by simultaneously underscoring the onus on women to accommodate male aggression and threatening to exclude women from receiving courtesy. After condemning the squire’s jealous wife, the

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knight-​narrator praises his own aunt for knowing that a good wife ought ‘to suffre fayre and curtoisly their sorowe yf they haue ony’ (p. 32). This aunt, lady of l’Anguillier, dealt with her husband’s routine adulteries by promising him ‘pryuely’ never to break decorum over his behaviour while asking that he continue to love her and to make her ‘good semblaunt’ (p. 33). Eventually—​and there is neither speedy nor steady reform here—​her husband ‘repentyd hym and kepte hym only to her’ (p.  33). Across these chapters, then, we observe patient, unaggressive persuasive strategies from both men and women in line with the Book’s wider support for aristocratic marital ‘courtesy’; but one of courtesy’s purposes is to forestall male violence, as we have seen, and some persuaders need to be softer, sweeter and more patient than others. For the spoilt lady’s husband, rectitude is the theme, tuned to sweetness, and this arrangement is inverted for the lady of l’Anguillier. Moreover, the men’s persuasions are supported by their tales only up to a point, before more violent interventions, whereas the lady is committed to her self-​abnegating strategy ‘duryng her lyf’ (p. 33). Persuasion is discussed as something that works on men (and is the only viable option) but cannot tame female appetites. The households of the non-​aggressive husbands of the Book’s eel-​type tales are whole where the households of more overtly antifeminist tradition (in which some other tales of the Book can be included) are split. Internal connectedness means that illicit acts cannot be kept secret. The jealous husband of fabliau is typically antagonistic, set against his wife’s interests from the outset, always waiting for his household to be infiltrated and divided against him; and he often ends up deceived and unknowing about that household, its activities, and its allegiances, until it is too late. The husband of the story of the eel, and his peers, are differently situated. Through the initial tranquillity of these men, free of aggression and surveillance, the tales present the household as a site available for partnership and harmony. One of the husbands (the spoilt lady’s) is portrayed as an active moral guide to this end. Such wholeness, or potential wholeness, of the household is both challenged by the knowledge of shameful behaviour that comes easily to light and partially attested by it, for everything is in view of the household and therefore the patriarch. The discoveries of the ladies’ sins come about not through any special surveillance or any cunning contrivance gone awry but unbidden through the ordinary life of the household: waking from the night’s first sleep (when the spoilt lady’s husband finds her gone from his side), a

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noisy pet, an encounter of no specified circumstance (‘so it happed on a tyme’, p. 32), or a final lying in the chamber (where the black dogs visit the uncharitable lady).34 The household is intensively connected. It is an echo chamber for a lady’s supposedly insulated selfish conduct. The knowledge of outsiders The knight’s Book promises his daughters and other elite women command of the identity of good wife, enabling them to instruct others, including men, on the management of household life, a life they can direct in unequal partnership with their husbands. This knowledgeable identity, however, is constrained, even disarmed, by the lessons on which it is predicated. If a lady comes to know everything the Book ‘knows’, she will know a great deal about the limitations of her power, though she will also have gained a sense of disruptive potential. The Book teaches that she is susceptible to her appetites; that these threaten the political work of the household; that her individual honour is completely subsumed within the honour of her father’s or husband’s household; that she can do little herself to direct the household’s political work, which occurs where it intersects with the larger social world; that this is largely a matter of women’s inability to govern reputation regardless of their own self-​government. If there is a common principle here it is that elite women’s proper social horizons are set chiefly within the household.35 Efforts to connect beyond the household are dangerous. A  lady is to support such endeavours by men but not to undertake them on her own initiative, except in a very restricted set of situations. Yet, as we have seen in the eel-​type tales, the wife who thinks only inside the household, who seeks to use it for her own gratification at the expense of external connections, invites shame. Just as Aristotelian thinking held, there is no segregating economy (the law of the household, oikos nomos) from politics and therefore no cutting the household off from politics.36 There is thus a considerable tension in the Book between the discursive forces that would box a woman into the household and those that would enlist her in the household’s political self-​fashioning. Where this tension is at its height, a norm of domestic incorporation emerges as the Book condemns women for failing to construe themselves as instruments of patriarchal honour and the social capital of their father’s or husband’s household and instead falling prey to narrowly personal drives, in the form of either carnal

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appetite (as in the eel story) or an individual, self-​centred conception of honour or social capital. The norm explains how eyebrow plucking (ch. 53) and incest (ch. 55) can come to be adjacent and morally equivalent—​each an activity to provoke ‘abhomynacion’.37 Both sins direct female agency (the narrative makes much of Lot’s daughters’ initiative in their incest) at a woman’s person as an independent site of fulfilment in contrast to its potential as an instrument of patriarchal honour. Similarly, the knight’s exempla of Eve’s discussing the fruit of the tree of life ‘withoute takyng ony counceylle of her husbond’ (p. 63), of one lady’s selfish intent ‘to daunce and synge well’ (p. 43), of the rape at Gibeah (ch. 71), and of sinful fashion-​consciousness and early adopting (chs 48–​50, 54) speak to the same comprehensive norm, which lends one kind of coherence to the Book’s variegated texture of biblical history and scenes from late-​medieval life. As one possible reading of Eve’s initiative-​taking goes, even if women are sometimes aware of the possibility of leading the household and its political engagements, the Book sees almost no scope for this to succeed. The provost of Aquileia’s wife has total mastery of a domestic routine, but her partnership with her husband is decisively split into primary and secondary, defining and supplementary roles, symbolised by his riding out with a retinue to do justice in a homicide case (ch. 134). In the tale of Cato’s son which is the Book’s finale, men are graced with the same shorthand for doing politics—​riding horses to make crucial judicial interventions—​ while women are associated with weeping and politically reckless gossip, speech which shows awareness of neither its political implications nor the official mechanisms (such as imperial command) that might enact these (chs 140–​2).38 The knight and his wife argue that women cannot risk being active in their own exchange between households because many men are averse to female expressions of desire (chs 12, 125). Indeed, the mingling of contemporary and biblical stories sets up a tacit analogy between late-​medieval ladies’ independent interaction with other households and the intertribal dalliances that are so gruesomely punished in some of the Book’s biblical exempla. The ‘fowle damoysel’ who leads her lady into adultery ‘for a hood that a knyght gaf her’ and has hood and neck ‘bothe cutte to geder’ (p. 81, ch. 55) is gathered together by the knight-​narrator with Dinah’s fornication with Shechem the Hivite (ch. 56, evidently consensual in this retelling of Genesis 34)  and the literal skewering of a Midianite and a Simeonite during sex (ch.

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60, Numbers 25.6–​18). The analogy is pointed up in one case by an embroidering of a biblical source: Dinah (identified only as Jacob’s daughter) takes her fateful journey ‘for to goo and see the atoure [finery] or aray of the wymmen of another lande’ (p. 81–​2) and is thus explicitly driven by the fashion-​consciousness that has preoccupied the immediately preceding chapters on contemporary society.39 The knight-​narrator knows, of course, that aristocratic women could sometimes find themselves in positions of lordship, especially as widows. He accommodates this situation to his ideology of patriarchy and domestic incorporation by idealising for women who are without a male lord a zone of maternal and spiritual agency. This agency takes precedence over, obscures, or overtly excludes broader political possibilities. Within a cluster of good widows from local history, one is praised because she ‘kepte good Iustyce and held her land and peple in pees’ (p. 149), but her clean living and admirable child-​rearing are more pressing claims to fame. It is moral probity, maternal nurture, and a widow’s loyalty to her dead husband’s lineage (by not remarrying) that are the recurrent themes of this passage (chs 111–​12). Politics is more firmly stood down in the early exemplum of St Bernard and his sister (ch. 26), a conversion story for a great household. Bernard’s sister, ‘a grete lady’ (p. 47), rides with retinue and robes—​the trappings which, for ‘the sight of the folke’, are associated with the patriarch’s ‘good Iustyce’ in the tale of the provost of Aquileia’s wife (pp.  178–​9). Bernard’s contemptus mundi preaching rebukes his sister and reconfigures her establishment for ‘soo hooly a lyf’ (p. 47) and almsgiving instead of (more assertive) political display. Elaborating the same theme, the Book’s penultimate exemplum, before the long tale of Cato’s son, glorifies the knight’s grandmother or step-​grandmother, Olive de Belleville (called Cecily in Caxton’s text).40 Faced with political independence, this good dowager dedicates herself to an extensive devotional and charitable routine and the prudent management of her household (ch. 136). Where she deploys her wealth in political society it supports funerary display for impoverished aristocrats (political enough but chiefly redolent of an ideology of nobility of blood with incidental effects on local balances of power) or is channelled belatedly into the exchange of women system, not to determine matches but to ornament ‘ony poure gentyll woman that shold be wedded’ (p. 181). One of the Book’s shrewdest strategies for securing the norms of domestic incorporation and female political passivity is to insist

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that, whatever their authority within the home, elite women are powerless to control public opinion and, furthermore, that public opinion is significantly influenced by those who wish to damage their standing. The political question is not where truth lies but who controls honour and reputation; and the answer to that is decisively men. Knowing that the lady who flirted with him was later ‘blamed’ in another regard, the knight is not surprised; nor is he troubled by whether she was shamed ‘with wrong or right’ (p. 28). Likewise, an anecdote featuring a famous knight, the first Marshal Boucicaut, contemptuously makes the point about powerlessness in relation to powerful men early in the Book (ch. 22). When several ladies summon him to face accusations of courting all of them simultaneously, Boucicaut complacently controls the scene (‘late me haue a chayer or a stoole to sytte on’, p. 42) while discrediting their social perception with a lewd joke about how they would misread his clothes’ accidentally coming undone should he sit on the floor. Then he simply disdains his accusers (‘there is here no woman that I wyll abyde with’, p. 42) and walks out. His joke that the ladies hold ‘youre parlementes vpon me’ (p. 42) is cutting in its ironised equation of female authority and a public institution, and the power gap between the sexes is underscored by the following exemplum. Here, a knight threatened by ladies with summary justice pleads not his innocence but brandishes his superior power over public opinion by requesting that ‘the strongest hore of you smyte me the first stroke’ (p. 43). The ladies are nonplussed because they recognise that the knight’s stunt, not their own sexual behaviour, will determine reputation if they strike. We see these ladies and Boucicaut’s accusers at the moment of their realising that the sovereign lady is a literary trope (a trope which, in any case, mystifies historical lordly power that is usually held by men). The knight-​narrator’s lady might be able to embarrass a wooer by calling attention to his desirings before ‘many knyghtes and ladyes’ at play (p. 173), but ‘Cecily’ de Belleville and Geoffrey de Liège are firmer markers of the Book’s gendered poles of social power (chs 136, 116). The lady eschews shaming speech (except of those who would enviously shame); the knight purposefully shames ladies and makes them ‘drad’ by conspicuously visiting or shunning them according to their reputation. The pious widow takes high moral ground on the question of malicious speech, but the Book nonetheless works to instil anxiety about the power of such speech. Its condemnation of ‘jangling’, or unethical speech, always accepts that its power is inescapable.

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Moralising about how ‘good ladyes’ at parties might ‘gete moche blame and noyse withoute cause’, the text’s reformative impetus is much less to stigmatise a culture of baseless blame and damaging speech than to heighten women’s scrupulous (and restrictive) preventative strategies, in particular that of remaining in the company of friends lest ‘it so happed that the torches or lyght were quenchyd and put oute that they myght abyde by yow not for doutyng of ony euyl but for the perylle of euyll eyen and of euylle tonges that alweye espye and seye more harme than ther is’ (p. 45). This is entirely in tune with the Book’s victim-​blaming attitude to domestic violence. Ladies are encouraged by the Book to imagine mockery as naturally, inevitably the keenest and most elusive of enemies. They should know that they can only be on the wrong side of a (true or false) information asymmetry with the scornful. Mockery will strike should they so much as relax a disciplined posture and it burgeons behind their backs even when they believe their shameful behaviour is being overlooked (ch. 106)  or their trend-​chasing admired (chs 49–​50). The physical posture required is to hold one’s gaze straight ahead ‘as the hare’, so rigorously that to change view one should ‘torne youre vysage & youre body to geder’ (p. 25), pivoting like a music box doll. So posed, the lady refuses to engage with the chance and circumstance of the world and reinforces her alienation from elite society in the round, which is always busy and not well apprehended, always looking at her yet difficult safely to look at.41 As in the story of the knight who welcomes the blow of the ‘strongest hore’, the acceptance that power lies with influential speakers, however motivated, and not with justice, underpins the text’s cultivation of a paranoic female attitude to good name and the need to forestall public judgement. The cultivation of paranoia runs very deep in the Book. It almost goes without saying that the entire pedagogic project is geared around shame, but more particularly, the ingredients of paranoia are central to the project’s narratorial frame, including its origin story and its vivid authorial drama of parental care and debate. In the Book’s prologue, when the knight of the Tower sees his daughters and is put in mind of the imperative that they be ‘endoctryned’ well, his train of thought leads straight to memories of his own youth and unprincipled companions who, in their dishonourable pursuit of ‘good ladyes and damoysellys’, were as ‘endurate’ or hardened as they were ‘wel bespoken’ (pp.  11–​12). The knight remembers specifically these companions’ incorrigibility, the ineffectuality of his preaching as an isolated voice of

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reform. The alternative defensive strategy represented by his ‘lytel booke’ for young ladies is immediately inspired by these memories (p.  12). At the other end of the Book, in the debate about paramours, when the knight of the Tower is innocent of these concerns, his lady is insistent about them. ‘Deceyuable’ men who ‘requyre euery gentylle woman that they may fynde’ (p. 166) now combine with ‘false watches & bacbyters’ (p.  164) to surround a notional lady with an environment perfectly inimical to her honour and confidence in her own judgement and agency. Thus, the Book’s inception and the ethics of its most salient female voice share the premise that women’s exchanges are dangerous and that, whatever a woman intends, there will be men and women ready to exploit information asymmetries to exaggerate her mistakes and to derange her good purposes. Knowing incompetence In the eel-​type tales, in the Boucicaut exemplum, and elsewhere, the Book no sooner anticipates female agency in or between households than it hedges it with the woman’s psychological inferiority and her subjection to forces of the community arrayed against her independence. By keeping political power out of its female characters’ heads (or reach), the Book constructs a politics without staging its most powerful counterpoint, even for the purposes of negation. By keeping punishment out of lords’ hands, it minimises the sense that this politics or household authority is oppressive or contestable. Contrast this with Malory’s Arthuriad, printed by Caxton the following year, in which Guinevere to some extent resembles the solipsistic and politically naive women of the disfigurement tales but numerous other women, most notably Morgan, wield masculine political power and strategy and draw men into contesting their power.42 Or, thinking instead of historical gentry households—​probably central to the Book’s audiences—​ consider Margaret Paston, who died the year the Book was printed, in 1484, but who gives us the richest evidence of any for the life of a gentry woman in this period. In the famous collection of letters from this Norfolk gentry family, we see Margaret Paston doing Paston politics when her husband, John, is away—​using hospitality to manage political contacts, for instance, or ordering men to hold manor courts to keep a grip on contested lands.43 When the Paston manor house at Gresham was occupied by aggressive rivals, John sent his wife (possibly pregnant or with a newborn,

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and with two young children) to captain local resistance while he sought support from powerful men in London. From the ensuing stand-​off, we have a letter of supreme competence that combines military planning and everyday supply in the same cool domestic register. It begins ‘Ryt wurchipful hwsbond, I recomawnd me to ȝu and prey ȝw to gete som crosse bowis, and wyndacis to bynd þem wyth, and quarell’, and describes enemy defences, then closes with requests for almonds, sugar and cloth: ‘As for þe childeris gwnys, and I haue cloth I xal do hem maken.’44 Margaret even coaches her husband on network-​building. In one letter she counsels that ‘it is right necessary for you to haue Hew of Fen to be yowr frende in yowr materes’ and in another she advises on friendly appointments to the peace commission.45 She outlived John by nearly twenty years, held her own share of the family estate for this time, and was capable of vehemently disputing her eldest son’s lordship and his management of the Paston patrimony (‘Do as I advyse you in this behalffe or ell trost neuer to haue comfort of me’).46 Yet Margaret is not entirely free of the domestic-​incorporative discourse we see in the Book. She typically presents her advice as something that only a man can enact. So, despite the work we have glimpsed her doing in the Paston network, she protests to her son that ‘your frendes’ need ‘summe comfort’ directly from him ‘þat thei be no more discoraged’ over a long-​running land dispute. In the same letter she remarks, ‘I can not wele gide ner rewle sodyours, and also thei set not be a woman as thei shuld set be a man’.47 Similarly, she presents advice (including the advice about Hugh Fenn) as arising from her consultations with local men of wisdom and substance (as well as female kin, we should notice), couching her politics at least partially in male authority. Moreover, Margaret was horrified when her own daughter, Margery (the child born around the time of the Gresham stand-​off) made an independent sexual choice. Worse, Margery found love within the Paston household. In marrying the Pastons’ trusted servant, Richard Calle, she embodied the intra-​household desire and politically disruptive agency of the knight of the Tower’s eel thief and her literary cousins. Margaret strove to discipline her daughter, and Margery evidently never relented.48 Margaret Paston’s negotiations of patriarchy are fascinating. The family breakdown over Margery’s marriage reveals her mother, albeit as a widow, in the position of the lady of the Tower: resting on generational hierarchy, she independently advocates gender ideology inimical to the independence of her own sex (‘remembyre

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ȝow … þat we haue lost of here but a brethele [wretch]’).49 Margaret shares the Book’s conventional values on the exchange of women while believing that it behoves her as much as her son, now head of the family, to secure the Pastons’ political interests. She knew the role of good wife; she knew how to support her husband’s lordship while avoiding the kind of judgement that audiences are invited to level against the inward-​looking wives of the Book. She knew the socially construed limits of her competence and how to signal her incompetence. More fundamentally, however, she knew how to wield aristocratic household power and had her own ideas about how to pursue her household’s patriarchal interests, whether in relation to tenants, finances, property disputes, or marriages. The medieval household was, McDonald sums up, ‘a place of work, devotion, and sociability, of intimacy and the everyday, where friends and neighbours, business and family converged and where social and sexual ideologies were taught in the face of life’s inevitable messiness’. She goes on to argue that the textual community of a household is best understood less in terms of ‘the sharing of (an agreed) meaning but rather the sharing of texts whose meanings may well remain contested’.50 Margaret and Margery Paston never had a chance to share Caxton’s Book, and there is no evidence that they knew either the Livre or its other fifteenth-​century English translation, but they certainly would have had conflicting responses to the knight of the Tower.51 The Book fundamentally seeks patriarchal order, but the complexity of its social and ethical imagination acknowledges the messiness of life and the unsatisfactory nature of any bluntly patriarchal pedagogy. The Book’s complexity, in turn, produces household knowledge that might provoke or permit interpretative counter-​play to the text’s patriarchal, selfhood-​cramping agenda. Merchants’ wives, whether or not they thought themselves gentle, might have resisted the maxim that violent punishment suited them but not their social superiors (ch. 18). Economically independent women might not have aligned themselves with the devout ‘dayly ordenaunce’ of ‘Cecily’ de Belleville (ch. 136)  or even the commanding but economically and politically secondary role of the provost of Aquileia’s wife (ch. 134), much less the naive appetites of the eel-​type stories. Such women were somewhat more likely to feature among the audiences of conduct literature in the fifteenth century than at other times due to social conditions and the expansion of conduct literature. Margery Paston might well have preferred, over the ‘moost agreable’ placidity of their sister, the mental and verbal energies of the Danish princesses who mar

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their chances of a royal marriage (ch. 12). Margaret Paston was no rebellious wife, but she might have resented the message in the tale of Cato’s son that husbands should not trust their spouses and the implication that psychological trauma (Cato’s son lies to his wife that he has killed the emperor’s son and disguised his heart as confectionary for his parents to eat) is acceptable collateral damage when putting a wife’s discretion to the test. The Book of the Knight of the Tower’s vigorous preceptive and narrative combinations build restrictive, patriarchal household knowledge. The text’s concern that the household should not be (overtly) oppressive and its varied strategies for presenting inhibition as self-​fulfilment within the household community must have ensured that, among women, and men for that matter, it enjoyed a complex reception. Notes 1 See William Caxton, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS s.s. 2 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1971). References to Caxton’s text will be to Offord’s edition by page or chapter number. 2 See Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: P. Jannet, 1854). 3 Besides Caxton’s text, there exists one other English translation of the Livre, for which, see The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, ed. Thomas Wright, EETS o.s. 33 (Oxford: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906). For the German translation, see Der Ritter vom Turn, ed. Ruth Harvey (Berlin: Schmidt, 1988). 4 On late-​ medieval conduct literature and its audiences, see Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.  A. Clark (eds), Medieval Conduct (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry:  The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy 1066–​1530 (London:  Methuen, 1984), ch. 3; and Felicity Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 66–​86 (focusing on urban elites and young female servants). On the Menagier de Paris, another advice text addressed to a bourgeois readership, see Glenn D. Burger’s contribution to this volume. 5 For perceptive discussions along these lines of the possibilities and limitations of a wifely identity in Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, see Glenn Burger, ‘Conduct Becoming:  Gender and the Making of an Ethical Subject in The Book of the Knight of the Tower’, in Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (eds), Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (London:  Routledge, 2014), pp. 117–​ 25; and Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard  II (University

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Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 269–​75. See too Glenn Burger, ‘Labouring to Make the Good Wife Good in the journées chrétiennes and Le Menagier de Paris’, Florilegium, 23 (2006), 19–​40. 6 Compare Felicity Riddy’s contention that ‘domesticity as a “state of mind” does not necessarily rest on a distinction between working and residing, or the home and the world, or on a separation of spheres along gender lines’ and that ‘for the pre-​modern era we need a different model’. Felicity Riddy, ‘ “Burgeis” Domesticity in Late-​ Medieval England’, in Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity:  Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 14–​36 (17). 7 For discussion of the anxieties driving conduct texts’ responses ‘to the perceived variety and inexperience of their audiences’, see Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 27. 8 Cited from [John] Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London:  Trübner, 1882), p.  98. The Book of Husbandry was first printed in 1523. 9 See Roberta L. Krueger, ‘Intergeneric Combination and the Anxiety of Gender in Le Livre de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles’, L’Esprit Créateur, 33 (1993), 61–​ 72 (67–​ 8). See also Allen, False Fables, pp. 27–​52. Allen observes that ‘education through stories demands an interpretative activity whose effects may exceed the moral parameters [the narrator] sets forth’, and argues that the Book implicates its narrator and its readers in ‘the excitements of narrative’ and even ‘spectacular vice’ (pp. 30–​1). 10 See Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 100–​4, 123–​4; Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), esp. pp. 32–​51; and Thomas L. Reed, Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), esp. pp. 41–​96. Note also Reed’s discussion of nominalism’s authority-​ destabilising separation of ethical value and empirical verifiability (p. 11, pp. 355–​62). 11 Nicola McDonald, ‘A York Primer and its Alphabet: Reading Women in a Lay Household’, in Greg Walker and Elaine Treharne (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 181–​99 (196). See also McDonald’s essays ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader’, Chaucer Review, 35 (2000), 22–​42 (33–​9), and ‘Fragments of (Have Your) Desire:  Brome Women at Play’, in Kowaleski and Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity, pp. 232–​58. 12 For brief elaboration upon another fictional instance of female instruction, see the discussion of Patience in Chaucer’s Melibee in the Introduction to this volume.

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13 On audiences engaging selectively with texts, see Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 63–​ 8. Coleman notices that the narrator of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne is confident that haphazard use of his book will not thwart its edifying purposes (p. 66). 14 See Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. Offord, pp. xviii–​ xxiii. This is against seven survivals from Caxton’s edition, which would have run to hundreds of copies. 15 For Caxton’s market, see Margaret Lane Ford, ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, III: 1400–​1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 205–​ 28 (213–​ 18); and Julia Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London c.1475–​1530 (London: British Library, 2012), pp. 125–​61. On gentle status in the fifteenth century, see Philippa Maddern, ‘Gentility’, in Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove (eds), Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 18–​ 34; and Rosemary Horrox, ‘The Urban Gentry in the Fifteenth Century’, in John A. F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), pp. 22–​44. 16 For an essay that interprets the Book’s strictures on female conduct in terms of social class and as a reaction against mercantile social mobility, see Mark Addison Amos, ‘Violent Hierarchies: Disciplining Women and Merchant Capitalists in The Book of the Knyght of the Towre’, in William Kuskin (ed.), Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 69–​100. 17 Caroline M. Barron, ‘Introduction:  The Widow’s World in Later Medieval London’, in Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (eds), Medieval London Widows 1300–​1500 (London: Hambledon, 1994), pp. xiii–​xxxiv (p. xiv; cf. p.  xxxiv). For a forceful rejection of such optimistic views on women’s social and economic positions in late-​medieval Europe, see Judith M. Bennett, ‘Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–​ 1600:  Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 147–​75. I view this last piece as a compelling reminder to pay attention to the limiting specifics of arguments about improved opportunities for women rather than as a rebuttal of careful claims that certain groups of women were relatively better placed for a limited time. See, for example, Caroline M. Barron, ‘The “Golden Age” of Women in Medieval London’, Reading Medieval Studies, 15 (1989), 35–​58; and P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘ “For Better, For Worse”: Marriage and Economic Opportunity for Women in Town and Country’, in P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c.1200–​1500 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), pp. 108–​25.

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18 N. F. Blake conjectures that Caxton’s commissioner was Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville. See his note:  ‘The “Noble Lady” in Caxton’s “The Book of the Knyght of the Towre” ’, Notes and Queries, 12 (1965), 92–​3. Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-​Fuchs are sceptical on this point. See their essay: ‘Richard III’s Books, XI: Ramon Lull’s Order of Chivalry translated by William Caxton’, The Ricardian, 9 (1991–​1993), 110–​29 (115–​16). For an essay that doubles down on Blake’s attribution, viewing the Book as part of the queen’s resistance to her brother-​in-​law’s efforts to gain the throne and discredit her royal and dynastic authority, see Theresa D. Kemp, ‘The Knight of the Tower and the Queen in Sanctuary: Elizabeth Woodville’s Use of Meaningful Silence and Absence’, New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2001), 171–​88. 19 Roughly half of the Livre (and thence Caxton’s text), including its large core of biblical stories, was taken from a Franciscan conduct book, the Miroir des bonnes femmes (probably late thirteenth century). See John L. Grigsby, ‘A New Source of the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry’, Romania, 84 (1963), 171–​208. On the Miroir and its use in Caxton’s time, see Kathleen Ashley, ‘The Miroir des bonnes femmes:  Not for Women Only?’ in Ashley and Clark (eds), Medieval Conduct, pp. 86–​105. 20 See Glenn Burger, ‘ “Pite renneth soone in gentil herte”: Ugly Feelings and Gendered Conduct in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’, Chaucer Review, 52 (2017), 66–​84 (74–​6). 21 On Chaucer’s crow and on the atmosphere of music and song that he inhabits in Phoebus’s home, see further Sarah Stanbury’s contribution to this volume. 22 See Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them (London: Atlantic, 2014), pp. 137–​9; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 47–​9; George Ainslie, ‘Specious Reward:  A Behavioral Theory of Impulsiveness and Impulse Control’, Psychological Bulletin, 82 (1975), 463–​96; and Samuel M. McClure, Keith M. Ericson, David I. Laibson, George Loewenstein, and Jonathan D. Cohen, ‘Time Discounting for Primary Rewards’, Journal of Neuroscience, 27 (2007), 5796–​804. 23 See Aristotle, Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1942), I:  738b; and R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp.  25–​35. 24 The Boke of Brome: A Common-​Place Book of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (London:  Trübner, 1886), p.  12. See too Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 13–​22, 49–​63. The stereotype is central to the Book’s culminating exemplum, in which Cato’s son tests his wife’s ability to keep a secret for high stakes, with predictable results (chs 137–​44). On the Brome book, its ciphers, and its potential

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for contested meaning, see McDonald, ‘Fragments of (Have Your) Desire’, esp. pp. 242–​7. 25 Burger, ‘Conduct Becoming’, p.  123. Staley asserts that the Livre presents wives as ‘seconds-​ in-​ command, subordinate but companionate’ (Languages of Power, p. 275). On related texts, see Carolyn P. Collette, Performing Polity:  Women and Agency in the Anglo-​French Tradition, 1385–​1620 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), esp. pp. 1–​18, 41–​57. 26 On molestiae nuptiarum discourse, see Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage:  Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); and Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Theophrastus in the Middle Ages’, Viator, 2 (1972), 251–​70 (259–​68). 27 Burger, ‘Conduct Becoming’, p. 122. 28 In its biblical source, Judges 19–​20, the story of the Judean woman raped in Gibeah is primarily homosocial, focused on intertribal aspects of the exchange of women, hospitality and conflict. The husband hands his wife over to her rapists to protect himself (Judges 19. 22–​25). 29 On conduct literature’s awkward combination of support for ‘mildness in correction’ with a reliance on imagery of violence, see Anna Dronzek, ‘Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-​ Century Conduct Books’, in Ashley and Clark (ed.), Medieval Conduct, pp.  135–​59 (145–​7). 30 For Staley, the Livre’s stories ‘suggest less the need for wise husbands than that for vigilant wives’ (Languages of Power, p.  275). On a medieval ‘assumption that violence and marital affection are interdependent’, see Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 28–​34. 31 See The Awntyrs off Arthur, in Sir Gawain:  Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 1995), ll. 105, 114–​17, 172–​86, and 248–​55. 32 Dronzek remarks that ‘while inappropriate bodily behavior could certainly disgrace a man, the sexual element so prevalent in [fifteenth-​ century English conduct books for girls] is absent entirely from those for boys’ (‘Gendered Theories of Education’, p. 147). 33 On the ‘connotations of blemish, sin and sexuality’ attached to nasal disfigurement in the Middle Ages, with a focus on South German cities, see Valentine Groebner, ‘Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town’, trans. Pamela Selwyn, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 1–​15 (6; citing the jealous wife in the Livre at 8). 34 On premodern sleep patterns, which routinely divided the night into two separate sleep periods, see A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close:  A History of Nighttime (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 300–​11.

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35 Staley posits that the Livre ‘presents the husband as the sole figure of power in a wife’s field of concentration’ (Languages of Power, p. 274). See also Bennett on the ‘defining’ and ‘primary’ status of a husband’s work in the ‘medieval family economy’ versus the ‘secondary’, supplementary and supportive status of that of wives and children, together with its less specialised quality (‘Medieval Women’, pp. 152–​3). 36 See D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. xiii–​21; and James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry:  Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 220–​3. 37 Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, p. 77 (referring to a lady’s facial cosmetic efforts and her hellish punishment for these) and p. 80 (Lot’s daughters’ ‘abhomynable synne’ of incest). 38 On the social powers of gossip and their representation, see Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 39 In the Vulgate, baldly but with a similar inference, Dinah goes out to see the Hivite women (‘ut videret mulieres regionis illius’, Genesis 34.1). Caxton and the Livre (p. 117), following the Miroir des bonnes femmes, are true to the sense of curiosity and spectatorship in the Hebrew, which Robert Alter translates as ‘Dinah … went out to go seeing among the daughters of the land’. See The Five Books of Moses:  A Translation with Commentary, ed. and trans. Robert Alter (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 188 and n. 1. 40 The manuscript of the Livre that Offord describes as ‘textually so close to’ the Book ‘that it could almost have been the copy from which Caxton made his translation’ (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 9308) has Celine de Belleville (Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. Offord, pp. xxiii–​xxvi (xxiii), p. 254). 41 The Livre, according to Staley, envisages a regime for young women to acquire ‘habits of semimonastic self-​control’ in preparation for marriage (Languages of Power, p. 272). Injunctions against looking about are a commonplace of conduct discourse for females and males; see ‘How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter’, ll. 57–​8, and ‘Stans puer ad mensam’, ll. 56–​7, in Codex Ashmole 61:  A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 2008). 42 See, for example, Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (London: Tauris, 2006), pp. 7–​96; and Geraldine Heng, ‘Enchanted Ground:  The Feminine Subtext in Malory’, in Thelma S. Fenster (ed.), Arthurian Women (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 97–​113 (esp. 104–​8) 43 See Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, Richard Beadle, and Colin Richmond, EETS s.s.

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20–​2 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004–​2005), nos 189, 190, 192. Generally, see Rowena E. Archer, ‘ “How Ladies … who Live on their Manors ought to Manage their Households and Estates”: Women as Landholders and Administrators in the Later Middle Ages’, in Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight, pp. 149–​81. 44 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, Beadle, and Richmond, no. 130. For the conflict over Gresham, which led to violence, see Helen Castor, Blood and Roses: The Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses (London: Faber, 2004), pp. 42–​54. 45 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, Beadle, and Richmond, nos 166, 181; cf. nos 199, 200, 210 to Margaret and John’s eldest son. 46 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, Beadle, and Richmond, no. 214. The letter is written in the midst of financial difficulties and disagreement about whether to sell the manor’s woods at Sporle. See Castor, Blood and Roses, 242–​6; and Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century:  Fastolf’s Will (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 23–​4, 261–​9. 47 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, Beadle, and Richmond, no.  199, emphasis added; cf. nos 179, 180 to her husband. 48 See Paston Letters, ed. Davis, Beadle, and Richmond, nos 203, 861; and Castor, Blood and Roses, 214–​19. 49 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, Beadle, and Richmond, no. 203. 50 McDonald, ‘A York Primer’, pp. 193–​4, emphasis in original. 51 On the Paston family and books, see G. A. Lester, ‘The Books of a Fifteenth-​ Century English Gentleman, Sir John Paston’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 88 (1987), 200–​17.

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4 Renovating the household through affective invention in manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 Myra Seaman

Marie de France’s lai Bisclavret continues to enchant readers for a host of reasons, key among them the way its narrative soundly rejects its own opening description of the supernatural creature known variously as the ‘garwulf’ or ‘bisclavret’. The poem first actively spooks its audience by calling on the garwulf’s reputation as a ‘beste salvage’ [wild beast] (l. 9) who ‘hummes devure, grant mal fait’ [devours people and does great harm] (l. 11).1 But the narrative of the particular bisclavret that follows showcases a kind, gentle hound who does only good and treats humans wholly appropriately. First, he bows to the king upon encountering him while hunting in the woods; further, just as he would have done while in his knightly human form, he uses his physical power to distribute court justice and uphold social mores. Through her poem, Marie takes the negative emotional response to the not-​fully-​human that is typically encouraged—​in this case, the fear and horror aroused by the stories of the werewolf that she summarises in her opening and that are exhibited in the way the wolf-​knight’s wife responds to her husband’s revelation—​and transforms that fear and horror into their opposites: admiration and wonder. The king, upon first seeing the creature says, ‘Ceste merveille esgardez, /​Cum ceste beste se humilie! /​Ele ad sen de hume, merci crie’ [Look at this wonder, /​how this beast humbles itself! /​It has human understanding, it begs mercy] (ll. 152–​4). Later, when Bisclavret viciously attacks his former wife, the wise man of the court praises the beast for lacking any wickedness and interprets his actions as indicating his need for justice (ll. 240–​50). In this way, Marie’s lai demonstrates Holly Crocker’s recent observation that literatures ‘not only represent affects; just as frequently, they also invent new affects’.2 Marie’s narrative encourages empathy for the unfamiliar, replacing a socially constraining emotional response with an inclusive one. Modern audiences have been

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trained to expect such affective invention from canonical authors such as Marie, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, whose influence on their respective cultures’ subjectivity has been much documented.3 The possibility of such active intervention is not usually granted, however, to late-​ medieval vernacular household books. Critical assessment of these manuscripts traditionally regards them as repositories of texts that were originally written and enjoyed earlier in the Middle Ages by more aesthetically sophisticated cultural elites. Such scholarship has deemed these texts’ late-​medieval purposes, for their lower gentry and bourgeois audiences, to be socially conservative and morally prescriptive.4 That is to say, the texts preserved in household books are assumed to represent and reinscribe traditional affects, those of social superiors being clumsily claimed by a non-​aristocratic household. In contrast, revisiting conduct texts and other morally didactic writings of the kind that fill most late-​ medieval household books, Crocker shows how, with ‘affects [… as their] principal vehicle’, such texts can actually build with their audience an innovative local moral ecology.5 Through close readings of texts compiled in two fifteenth-​century household books—​Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1—​ this chapter aims to demonstrate that even in such contexts literature can, indeed, ‘invent new affects’. An investigation of three unique comic texts from these two fifteenth-​century household books reveals how moral relationships within the household are constructed affectively. Emotions bind humans and others in their local household community such that the household itself generates new possibilities. Affects and objects In the Western Middle Ages, as Tracy Adams explains, ‘emotion was … a communal rather than private phenomenon’.6 One site where the construction of moral affectivity can be observed is in ‘readers’ and audiences’ responses, imagined or “real” ’, to the texts that they encountered together.7 Medievalists—​whether calling their subject of study feeling, affect, or emotion (no one term is a comfortable fit for all)—​share a focus on ‘the integration of the somatic, affective, and cognitive’ recorded in texts from the period.8 Such a structuring of affect generation points towards a subjectivity produced in relation to, and out of relation with, others. Jo Labanyi describes how this concept understands

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‘feelings, not as properties of the self, but as produced through the interaction between self and world’,9 what Glenn D.  Burger describes as ‘the border zone between inner and outer, individual and social’.10 Patricia Ticineto Clough extends the implications of such an approach to include a particular understanding of embodiment. In her more presentist orientation, the affective turn expresses ‘a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter’.11 These aspects of embodiment are further clarified in Sara Ahmed’s conception of emotional community-​building as a process that results from ‘how we respond to objects and others’.12 Indeed, a distinctive feature of community-​building so conceived is the formation of subjects specifically through contact with objects, not only with other subjects. Feelings (Ahmed’s term) are generated through this contact, and the shaping is not a direct, simple effect of a single cause; rather, affective assemblages are products of ongoing interaction. It is the very ‘nonresidence [of emotions that] makes them “binding” ’.13 Because they are not restricted to a subject’s interiority, because they do not exist in isolation within a particular subject, emotions have that binding capacity. They ‘circulate as social goods’ and ‘accumulate … affective value as they are passed around’—​a practice which, Ahmed concludes, makes emotions ‘sticky’.14 Ahmed describes the community’s boundaries as actively constructed through this circulation, taking the form of judgements of value.15 Importantly, this evaluation is not autonomously generated and controlled by the subject, but rather it is culturally and socially informed, through contact in which lie prior histories of contact. Affect produces social subjects by producing particular kinds of social bodies in response to and in relationship with particular kinds of objects.16 It is within distinct emotional communities with ‘a common stake, interests, values, and goals’ that the circulation of social goods occurs, with value judgements adhering and amassing.17 Circulation within particular emotional communities generates and regenerates the local norms of emotional literacy, and such circulation tends to include what Ahmed describes as a ‘slide between affective and moral economies’.18 In this view, social norms are not reinforced by the active suppression of ‘actual’ or ‘authentic’ emotions, with only the rare ‘real’ emotion breaking through. Instead, as Piroska Nagy explains, ‘norms and practice deeply interpenetrate each other’.19 Norms do not contain and control sincere emotion, which itself remains unaltered but hidden; rather, the experience (not just expression) of emotion can occur only in

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relation to the community’s affective ecology. Such a perspective helps generate one of the keenest insights of Ahmed’s affective economies, namely that emotional scripts are not rigidly produced or rigidly enforced. Instead, such evaluations and resulting habits depend on what she terms ‘the hap of what happens’ and occur ‘only as an effect of how objects are given’.20 This focus on improvisation and circumstance does not deny the potential influence on emotional experience of ritual or performance but instead reads ritual and performance as, in their very social appropriateness, providing structures that support emotional expression and encourage experimentation.21 Crocker clarifies the experimental potential in this conceptualisation of communal affective production when she says that ‘[m]‌edieval structures of feeling are not just conventional, predictable joinings; rather, because they put objects together with bodies in a moral relationship, they cross boundaries’.22 Two fifteenth-​century household manuscripts This boundary crossing of objects and bodies not only in a physical but also in a moral relationship—​a relationship that is continually being negotiated—​is apparent in late-​medieval English household manuscripts that offer a number of such experiments performed collectively by the books and their readers. Household books are largely unadorned paper manuscripts produced locally by one or two scribes for what seems (as we are certain of precious little about the individuals who originally owned these books) to have been a wealthy merchant, yeoman, or gentry household outside of London.23 Michael Johnston describes the suitability of the household to such production, as it was ‘the provincial institution that brought together a series of individuals immersed in the documentary practices necessary to run a landed estate and maintain a home full of servants, practices that could easily be applied to copying out literary texts’.24 The household manuscripts that remain make appeals, across their contents, to the full range of household members who would have read and have been read to from the collection—​extending from adults to children of all genders and from those with local economic and social authority to those whose sustenance depends on their serving the physical and emotional needs of others.25 In such settings, ‘performative reading practices … do the crucial work needed to fabricate emotion as a socially recognizable phenomenon’.26 Felicity Riddy has shown how such books, for instance, actively guide the social development of young

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women in temporary service in preindustrial town households, aiming to redirect ‘female energy and enterpreise’ towards the household’s primary purpose, ‘production and trade’.27 Building on Riddy’s approach, Rory G. Critten has recently shown how one household book’s conduct texts address those who ‘will at some point head the house, or already do’, while also attending to ‘the roles and ambitions of their servants and children, or future children’. Critten concludes that ‘[t]‌he interests of the household are warmly recommended to all of these addressees’.28 Household books are thus agents enabling the circulation of affect throughout the late-​medieval lower gentry and bourgeois household. Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 are both household books in the sense that I  have been discussing. Developments in book history over the past twenty years and a significant increase in manuscript study performed by medieval literature scholars have opened up previously neglected anthologies such as these to holistic readings, after a century and more of their being considered primarily as archives of mediocre versions of (and poor witnesses to) previously existing texts.29 Manuscript study can help demonstrate, further, how such books performed social roles, like helping to generate the assemblage of the household—​the book joining with the household’s people and animals, its furnishings and utensils, its rituals and practices, to produce the household’s identity and procure its livelihood. As Crocker argues, ‘Medieval affects … rely on material particulars, since … they arise from fine-​grained experiences that transform the identity of those who experience them’.30 Perceived this way, the household miscellany functions as much more than a storage device: it generates affective knowledge vital to the material and moral sustenance of the household ecology. The books discussed in this chapter have been attached to mercantile and yeoman households located in Leicestershire and Derbyshire, contiguous counties around fifty miles northeast of Birmingham. They are thought to have been written in the last quarter of the fifteenth century or possibly in the very early sixteenth century.31 It has become commonplace to understand the texts within such manuscripts as engaging their readers so as to instruct them in behaviours and attitudes that are spiritually and socially beneficial. Much less commonly acknowledged, however, is the way non-​human agents that are not themselves texts—​‘objects [that] assume emotive investments’—​ are acknowledged within the texts, for what and how they contribute to the household’s

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corporate vitality.32 These books, along with other non-​ human agents inhabiting their texts, actively shape the moral and affective ecology of their households. Manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 have spent their post-​medieval lives as residents of two different manuscript libraries hundreds of miles apart, the Bodleian Library in Oxford (the Rate Manuscript) and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh (the Heege Manuscript).33 In contemporary scholarship, though, they are consistently associated with one another, based on similarities in the nature of their contents, as well as on their shared time and place of inscription, within about forty miles and at most fifty years of one another. Both books contain around forty items that are primarily religious in orientation, such as prayers, saints’ lives, psalms, and penitential texts; they also include a significant number of romances and conduct texts.34 Both are relatively inexpensive paper manuscripts, and their decoration is modest, consisting of the mildest of textual flourishes, including extended ascenders and enlarged monochromatic capitals. While Ashmole 61 was copied by one scribe, who signs his name ‘Rate’ at nineteen moments in his book, Advocates 19.3.1 is the product of several hands: its main copyist signs his name ‘Heege’. Both books include an initial quire that apparently existed as an independent booklet; the Heege Manuscript is composed via the compilation of such booklets whereas Rate’s book is through-​written.35 The first quire of the Heege Manuscript is particularly intriguing in that all of its items are comedic, in contrast to the subject and tone of the remaining thirty-​five items in the codex. All three of these items are, furthermore, unique texts, and they are the only unique texts in the book.36 The Rate Manuscript also includes comedic texts, but they appear there scattered throughout the collection.37 As with the Heege Manuscript, each comic text compiled in Ashmole 61 is extant only in that manuscript, whereas most of its other thirty-​eight items also appear in other books. The makers of both collections thus seem to go out of their way to include comedic texts alongside the more familiar and widely distributed didactic and religious items, and their inclusion might reflect a different purpose than does the inclusion of the more well-​ known, more readily available non-​comedic texts. Given the overt orientation towards spiritual and/​or social instruction of nearly all of the other items in both books, these comedic texts stand out: their comic mode opens up space for social renovation.

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Among the six comic tales across the two manuscripts there are three in which aristocratic entertainments—​the hunt, the banquet, the courtly debate poem—​are transformed into non-​aristocratic educational tableaux. On the surface, these texts appear to confirm the conventional wisdom that household books offer social fantasies to emergent groups, such as the yeoman and wealthy merchant owners associated with these two manuscripts.38 According to traditional readings, such fantasies might tempt non-​aristocrats to claim elite cultural identity by wielding aristocratic art forms and inhabiting aristocratic material culture. However, in the comic texts I study, the emotional practices and moral affirmation of the original setting are not simply translated to a new, unfamiliar landscape. Instead, in their particular household contexts, these poems serve as active interventions in the very social structures that they have often been said to reify. In the first item in Advocates 19.3.1, The Hunting of the Hare, representatives of human and non-​human society seem to ‘naturally’ inscribe social hierarchies, affirming who should and shouldn’t be where and who should and shouldn’t do what. In the process, however, the poem reveals that such structures exist only though their active, ongoing, rigid maintenance; in so doing, it draws attention to the human fallout of such enforced exclusion. Through its comedic reversal, The Hunting of the Hare points towards the cultural gaps that are gleefully celebrated by Sir Corneus, a text compiled in Ashmole 61, in which a drinking horn, in tandem with its royal owner, publicly and tangibly outs misbehaviour so that banquet tables can restructure society in support of brotherhood and forgiveness. Also in Ashmole 61, The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools presents a collection of tools that critique and defend their layabout master, taking him to task for shirking domestic and professional duties. The comedy here comes in the collective shaming of the master who harms his apprentices, his wife, and his artisanal community, demonstrating the larger dangers of individual insistence on socially sanctioned, but not individually generated, authority. Three comic tales The comic tale The Hunting of the Hare that opens the Heege Manuscript is grounded in the production of community through ritual actions instigated by a non-​ human participant.39 In this case, the effect is achieved through two contrasting versions of a human–​non-​human assemblage that instructs and acculturates the

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reader. One version is present, the other absent. This tale conveys group identity in part through a specialised vocabulary that reflects a shared society, with the desired community defined through its discourse. The rest it does through subtle attention to genre cues. The Hunting of the Hare is a short 270-​line burlesque composed in tail-​rhymed ballad stanzas in which a melee ultimately breaks out because of a hare who looks at a yeoman as he passes by. The yeoman, riding alone, ‘lokud besyde hym lyght glydand [riding briskly]’ and ‘fond a hare full fayre sittand, /​Apon a falow lond’ (ll. 10–​12). The light shines down on an area beside him, drawing his attention to a hare sitting beautifully in a fallow field. The narrative is generated by a lyric moment that aesthetically incorporates flora, fauna, and human into an aristocratic and courtly scene, rather than, as one might anticipate given the individual identity of two of the group’s three members—​the fallow field, the hare—​an agricultural or rustic one. The vision inspires the yeoman to immediate action: taking note of the hare’s location, he races ‘as fast as he myght go’ (l. 14)  to pursue this opportunity for a hunt. The first person he meets happens to be Houkyn of the Hall, ‘A gud mon and a trowe’ (l. 18), not fair like the hare, to be sure, but, as is perhaps more pertinent to his status, dependable. The yeoman inquires if there are any gentlemen about, referencing the hare and proposing a ‘cowrs’ (l. 24) as if the relationship between the two is self-​explanatory. Houkyn’s response reveals that it is not. David Scott-​ Macnab, the most recent editor of the poem, explains of a ‘course’ that ‘this type of hunting implies, among other things, the ability to appreciate the chase as a spectacle and as a sport’. In a ‘course’ the hunted animal is often let go once it has made its way to safety, so the virtue lies in the experience of the chase, rather than the capture of the prey. Scott-​Macnab calls this understanding of the chase as sport a ‘fine aesthetic appreciation’; significantly, it is an understanding available only to those for whom the labour of food-​acquisition is performed uniquely by one’s servants.40 Viewed from such a perspective, Houkyn misinterprets the yeoman’s proposal from the start. When the stranger asks who in the area might have greyhounds for the course, Houkyn replies, ‘What nedes that?’ (l. 25). He doesn’t indicate whether or not greyhounds could be procured (along with their gentlemen owners), but instead refuses the assumption of their necessity. Houkyn insists that he and his fellow peasants have a dog or two each, and that is all they need; he reassures the visitor, ‘Dred not, mon, sche [the hare] schall not goo, /​þu schalt se hur drawon

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down’ (ll. 34–​5). Immediately, one kind of aristocratic assemblage (greyhounds and hunters trained in the course, elegantly pursuing the prey who will, if sufficiently clever to escape, be rewarded with her life), initially presented to the audience as the proper and valuable one through the gorgeous depiction of the course’s inspiration, is replaced by another that dismisses (through the villagers’ ignorance) the significance of such a collection. Houkyn’s belief that the local dogs owned by a range of labourers are sufficient stand-​ins for greyhounds reflects a wholesale misreading of the task’s purpose. Citing a long list of sample dogs (owned by Jac of Bonham, Jac of þe Wall, Dave of þe Dale, Jac Hals, Jac of þe Bregge, Wylle of þe Gappe, to list not even half of the figures he calls on), he explains how they will take down the hare the way each can take down a bear, a bull, and any number of other large (principally agricultural) beasts. Houkyn assures the yeoman that the dogs will even gnaw the hare’s throat in two (l. 48), translating the refined challenge of the course into the more familiar challenge of physical self-​defence. Once gathered, one hundred and more of them on the village green indeed ‘buskyd hom [prepared themselves] blyþe to beytt þat hare’ (l. 94). ‘Dred not’, Hawkyn assures the yeoman (l. 34). The yeoman is at no risk, however, and not only because the hare is too small to pose an actual threat to his safety. After spooking the hare to get it all started—​and this despite his full awareness that the ingredients for a course are lacking—​the yeoman leaves the scene. Once the dogs and the husbands have gathered, the men grasping their mauls (an agricultural device entirely inappropriate to the prey) and their dogs pulling at their makeshift leashes, the yeoman ‘houyd [waited] apon þo hyll’ (l. 97). He perches himself above the fracas and watches the chaos unfold. The untrained dogs start fighting one another, and then their masters join in. They even attack the constable when he asserts his authority to stop the brawl, harming him so badly ‘þat ever aftur he lokud awry /​And hongyd owt þe tonge’ (ll. 197–​8), while the ‘þrydborro’ (another minor official) also tries to arrest them but is hit on the ear, and thereafter ‘His chyn ley on his brest’ (l. 204). Notably, the physical abuse of those responsible for maintaining the peace causes their bodies to visually express their ineptitude as leaders: both appear not only mentally but also physically insufficient to the task. Similarly, the positioning of the yeoman’s body announces his internal worth. Given his awareness that what he has put into motion is no course, marking the fine distinction between himself

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and the farmers is vital to confirming his identity.41 This identity is generated by the long, detailed description of the husband-​mutt assemblage of the ‘hunt’, extending to the wheelbarrows later used to haul the wounded off the field in place of carts.42 This community stands in stark contrast to all the things that mark the yeoman: the horse on which he rides, his easy spotting and assessing of the hare, his proposal of a course, his knowing when to leave, and so on. The yeoman responds by riding off, rejecting the chaos of the makeshift hunt:  ‘Whyle þei wer besy in þis warke, /​þe yomon rodde awaywarde, /​And wold no lengur abyde’ (ll. 225–​7). Significantly, the description of the hunt as ‘warke’, or work, at this juncture may suggest that even when attempting acts of prowess, all the text’s protagonists can really do is labour.43 Nevertheless, despite the fact that the mayhem is anything but a refined, aristocratic sport, the narrator concludes the poem by remarking, ‘þe cowrsse y wold þat ye had sene’ (l. 264), maintaining the language of the yeoman (‘cowrsse’). The narrator thus justifies his perception of the hare as an occasion for aristocratic self-​identification through rule-​bound adventure. The hare seemingly stands outside it all, simply being that which inspires the initial chase. Like the yeoman, the hare runs off, completely unharmed: ‘þus þe hare is gwon hur gate’ (l. 261). However, the hare is as much a participant as the others: the glance she gives the visiting yeoman instigates everything, and she appears repeatedly here and there to renew the dogs’ interest; she is even described attacking two of her pursuers, kicking one in the shin and treading on the other’s beard (ll. 143–​50). Thus the hare participates in one kind of assemblage when part of a courtly game of identity-​ affirmation (that familiar to the yeoman) and another when part of the husbandmen’s pursuit of the hare’s meat. Her different status is thereby affirmed in terms of the peasants’ behaviour at the same time as their relative material precarity is stressed. The knowledge conveyed through these competing assemblages (that of the yeoman and that of the husbandmen) is that status is not simply a matter of blood or of behaviour but of an entire nexus of practices and objects, all of which together generate—​and declare—​status. Scott-​Macnab argues that the humour of The Hunting of the Hare clearly turns on the peasants’ aspiring to participate in a hunt to which they are culturally unwelcome and for which they are conditionally unprepared. Such a perception depends on a reader’s understanding the terms used to describe the very activity from which the great majority of the poem’s human actors are

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excluded—​an exclusion resulting from more than their lack of discursive understanding. Scott-​Macnab observes that ‘[t]‌he joke at the heart of this entire event, and upon which the mechanics of the poem’s humour depends, requires a sophisticated understanding of the etiquette of aristocratic hunting practices’, in particular the word ‘cours’. Further, he calls the dramatic events of the poem ‘a connoisseur’s peasant brawl’, adding that, ‘[a]s with other peasant brawls, a fairly robust sense of humour is necessary to appreciate everything that happens’ in the poem.44 In many ways the poem supports such a reading. And yet, it also encourages empathy for the hunt-​assemblage that is manifest in the poem, alongside the respect it assumes and enables for the hunt-​assemblage that never actually materialises. When the hare first escapes from the dogs, the narrator interjects: ‘þe doggus wer no-​þyng to blame, /​þei knew not wele of þat game, /​þei had seyn non full yorne’ (ll. 124–​6). The poem conveys its ethical complexity through drawing audience attention to the dogs’ lack of cultural preparation for such an event. Once that association is made, the human actors are similarly to be excused by association. This tale takes an aristocratic scene and literally overturns it. The humour in The Hunting of the Hare depends on mocking its non-​aristocratic human participants for their cultural ignorance. For this error, however, the peasants are ultimately forgiven. The emphasis on the lingering physical trauma of this event, begun by a yeoman out seeking personal pleasure and unconcerned with its effects, emphasises that these differences in experience result not from a natural inclination towards honourable pursuits distinct from an inclination towards lowly violence; rather, finding humour in the harm the others experience depends upon a detachment made possible only by culturally maintained protections. The drinking horn in Sir Corneus assesses human behaviour and its moral implications, too, although all of it occurs within the socially privileged space of the royal hall. The horn draws public attention to those at court who fail to maintain the community’s shared values. Its means for doing so is through a ‘bowrd’ (a joke) that is called by its narrator ‘full gode and trew’ (l. 5).45 Here it is playful and lighthearted, structured around a trick and pushing at the boundaries of social norms. Indeed, the introduction of King Arthur in this narrative comes early: he is ‘of grete honour’ and has many towers and castles and is renowned (l. 79). More unusually, ‘Cokwoldys he lovyd, as I you plyght; /​He honouryd them both dey and nyght’ (ll. 13–​14). His holdings affirm his honor, yet his

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most noteworthy characteristic appears to be his great support of those husbands whose wives are unfaithful. In this way, from the start, empathy, rather than disdain, is shown to be the aristocratic emotional response to the plight of others. Notable, too, and supportive of this project, is Arthur’s ‘bugyll horn’ (l. 22), which stands before the king at mealtimes wherever he goes. This horn has a special, unanticipated feature: should a cuckold drink from the horn, its contents will spill all over and thus identify him. Arthur’s horn is one of a number of ‘chastity-​testing objects’ (primarily horns or mantles) featured in English, French, and German narratives of the later Middle Ages.46 Like those objects, it has the ability to reveal unfaithful wives, either through such wives’ inability to drink from the horn or, as in Sir Corneus, through their husbands’ inability to do so. Initially, the narrative states that whenever Arthur sits at table, ‘Anon the horne schuld be fette, /​ Therof that he myght drynke’ (ll. 25–​7). However, even before the horn is introduced, the narrator states that Arthur ‘was kokwold sykerly—​/​For sothe it is no lesyng’ (ll. 17–​18). Thus, the purpose of the horn is not to reveal to the audience Arthur’s status as betrayed husband (as is the case in other related texts that include magical cuckold-​revealing objects), for his identity as such has already been acknowledged. Instead, the horn is kept close because through it, Arthur knows what he otherwise would not:  ‘myche crafte [Arthur] couth therby’ (l. 28). The horn’s agency lies in its ability to reveal to Arthur hidden truths about others, rather than to others about himself. It is worth noting that in an analogue to Sir Corneus, Robert Biket’s late thirteenth-​ century Anglo-​ Norman Lai du cor, the narrative begins with the gifting of the horn to Arthur by an unknown visitor. There, Arthur feels betrayed by the horn’s revelation that he is a cuckold and responds by wanting to kill Guinevere; he refrains from doing so only once he learns that many other men at court cannot drink from the horn and thus must join him in their shame.47 In great contrast, in Sir Corneus, Arthur sees the value of the object’s knowledge capacity and keeps it on hand for that very feature. Further, in the context of Sir Corneus, the horn exhibits great affective agency:  Arthur introduces it into the feast specifically ‘To make solas and game’ (l. 39), that is, to provide entertainment and joy. And yet, despite Arthur’s intent, those revealed as cuckolds by their being unable to drink from the horn are displeased:  ‘Therfor thei were not glade. /​Gret dispyte [humiliation] thei had therby, /​… And than changyd the cokwoldys chere

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[expression]’ (ll. 31–​5, 40). Rather than delighting those affected, the horn, as part of Arthur’s intended game, causes them, through its distinctive power (referred to here as ‘vilony’ [l.  35]), to feel shame, which changes their appearance. Indeed, as the horn wields no instrumental agency for a cuckold drinker, failing utterly, it holds strong affective agency, transforming their bodies through moral shaming. Like the yeoman’s game in Hunting of the Hare, Arthur’s game humiliates those for whom the game is a moral test. The horn is joined in its public maintenance of private morality by other non-​human inhabitants of the royal hall: the tables at which guests are seated hierarchically, according to social status. The revealed cuckolds are publicly exiled from the dominant non-​cuckold community and seated at a cuckolds-​only table that extends their public shaming in the act of not-​drinking from the horn. This particular positioning, though, offers opportunities for penance. This penance centres on their emotional status, for Arthur requires them to simultaneously experience and deny their shame: he feeds them the best food, crowns them with willow garlands (traditionally held to be the mark of ‘the lovelorn’), and sends minstrels to ‘glad the cokwoldys’ (l. 131).48 Decking them in garlands acknowledges their emotional torment, expressed through a material object; sending minstrels also recognises the emotional scarring the horn causes, being an attempt to replace feelings of sorrow and anger with those of joy. Arthur reinforces this attempt at what appears to be a deep and active denial of the very harm the horn has caused by telling them to ‘take no greffe /​ Bot all with love and with leffe [willingly], /​Every man with other’ (ll. 133–​5) and to ‘be glad everychon, /​For [my] sake make gode chere’ (ll. 65–​6). Having publicly outed them, the king then offers them superficial entertainment and demands positive public affect. Further, he forbids negative emotion even in private:  ‘Be never angry with your wives, for no reason’ (l. 68). The horn’s revelation of their wives’ infidelity does not give the cuckolds the chance to restore domestic order; instead, the public shaming serves only as penance (desired or not) for the husbands. The narrative in tracing this production of suffering focuses on the emotional response encouraged by the horn and by the king, the horn’s in accord with social norms (shame and displeasure) and the king’s in contrast (forbidding anger, requiring gratitude). Ultimately, because this is, after all, a bowrd, Arthur himself leaps right in: ‘King Arthour … went to have dronke of the best, /​Bot sone he spyllyd on hys brest’ (ll. 175–​9), thus announcing to

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all (beyond the already-​aware narrator and textual audience) that he is a cuckold too, at which point the cuckolds at the table ‘lokyd yche on other, /​And thought the kyng was there awne brother’ (ll. 181–​2). In fact, this happens while the Duke of Gloucester is visiting, so that Arthur himself is publicly shamed in front of an esteemed guest. To this guest, however, Arthur has just prior to his own outing explained the nature of the willow-​garlanded brotherhood: he calls it the men’s penance (l. 108), but he says that ‘none hurte thei have do’ (l. 104), which is to say, they are doing penance for no actual fault on their part. Arthur explains that their wives ‘hath be merchandabull, /​And of ther ware compenabull’ (ll. 109–​ 10), so that they simply have been ‘generous of their wares’, have ‘use[d]‌wele the lecherus craft, /​With rubyng of ther toute’ (ll. 119–​20).49 Because, that is, the women have effectively and profitably used their resources and their skills, Arthur proclaims that ‘Me thinke it is non herme’ (l. 111). And if anyone is authorised to make such judgements, it would be the king. Arthur tells his guest the duke they should eat and ‘make us glad, /​And every man fle care’ (ll. 122–​3). While the duke refuses Arthur’s invitation to drink from the horn, saying that ‘Not for all a reme to wyn /​Befor you I schuld begyn, /​For honour of my curtassy’ (ll. 172–​4), Arthur’s attempt to drink fails. As a result, Guinevere is ‘schamyd sore’ and blushes, wishing she could escape. But, revealing himself a true king and no tyrant, Arthur places no blame on his own wife, who like the other unfaithful wives used her goods well. Further, he maintains his tradition of singling out the cuckolds, ‘For I ame one and aske no leve’ (l. 194). He willingly joins their dance and seats his brothers at the high table, honouring them at the feast through elevating their status to his. In this, the horn’s agency extends beyond the affective and moral, no longer merely recognising those who fail to maintain stability within their household and giving opportunities for their social and emotional penance. In finally outing the king, the horn unifies the community by reincorporating the absolved with their leader. The hierarchically ordered, and ordering, tables perform that unification by refusing to maintain moral divisions within the community. The playful punning of the poem’s title, Sir Corneus—​which renames each outed knight, and ultimately the king, in relation not to his military prowess but to his domestic failure to satisfy and control his wife—​thus dissolves.50 Finally, in the Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools, everyday objects intervene not by symbolically failing to operate or by redistributing

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social order, but by directly providing pragmatic moral judgement and much-​needed emotional instruction. Ashmole 61 contains the only remaining copy of this relatively short debate poem, which is a highly unconventional example of its type: as the poem’s modern title indicates, the debate narrated in this poem takes place among tools; further, it centres not on their own merits—​the focus of all other extant debate poems involving inanimate debaters—​but on those of their human master, the carpenter.51 Some of the tools critique the carpenter for his constant drunkenness and his resulting insufficiency as a worker and a master, while others defend him and declare him a model of thrifty living. The topic, then, is not love, as it is in many other medieval debate poems, such as The Owl and the Nightingale and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls. Instead, the topic here is labour, and the issue not esoteric but eminently practical. The poem also appears to be directed at members of the occupation it represents:  it uses highly specialised names for the various tools participating in the debate (the gabull-​rope, the rewle-​stone, the grooping iron, and so on). As one of the poem’s modern editors, Edward Wilson, notes, ‘though it is satiric, it is not critical of carpenters as such; the satire is directed from within the craft and not at it’. This reading is rooted in part in the poem’s ‘immersion in the quotidian concreteness of the carpenter’s life’.52 Wilson interprets the knowing detail in the representation of the materials necessary to support carpentry as indicative of a respect for the craft itself. Further, rather than supporting the views of an outsider—​say, a non-​labouring gentleman—​these tools voice the concerns of workers, speaking from within rather than from without (the latter being the case, for instance, with most fabliaux). The poem’s humour results not from tools attempting to appropriate an elite, poetic form and misapplying it to mundane matters, although the scenario of the poem seems well suited to such an approach. Instead, the poem immerses audience members in the risks of being a craftsperson, in one’s dependence on others’ choices and behaviour for one’s own survival. In the hands of these tools, the debate pursues the correct evaluation of the carpenter’s suitability to his occupation and social status, an evaluation of social worth—​which is indistinguishable from moral worth—​that is here provided, unexpectedly, by things. The various tools of this carpenter’s shop are not simply the tools that he uses but are also, themselves, his apprentices, and in this their relationship takes on its moral valence. Some tools emphasise the servitude and loyalty each apprentice (that is, each

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tool) owes its master, while others emphasise the master’s responsibility to provide his apprentices with training and the means to effective social incorporation. To this, his defenders assert that they will work so hard for their master that he will achieve prosperity. The tools of critique redirect the discussion to their true focus:  the master’s morality. He simply spends too much time drinking to prosper, they claim. The tone of the poem indicates that they clearly have the moral upper hand here, as is further confirmed when the master’s wife appears in the role traditionally held by the judge in debate poems. The carpenter’s wife presents a classic ‘wife’s lament’, complaining that her husband spends on ale not only his own income but also all the money she makes through spinning. The master’s supporters in turn challenge the morality of her behaviour, claiming that even if that is the case, she is ‘to blame /​To gyffe my mayster syche a name. /​For thoff he spend more than ye have, /​Yit his worschype ye schuld save’ (ll. 211–​14). That is, since she is, as they are, the carpenter’s subordinate, she should publicly support her master’s reputation however immoral his actions.53 In response, the wife borrows their terms and emphasises their relationship to the master, through which she ironically challenges their moral authority, because of the corrupt source of their authority: ‘For hys servant I trow thou be, /​Ther thou schall never thé [thrive]. /​For and thou lerne that craft at hym, /​Thy thrift I trow schall be full thine’ (ll. 217–​20). Indeed, once the morality of the carpenter’s supporters themselves comes into question, the critical Draught Nayle (Nail Puller) finds them lacking in precisely the way their master is: they work for just an hour or two before going to the alehouse, and when they do work they work lightly so as not to hurt themselves through any exertion. The Draught Nayle concludes that ‘thus with fraudys and falsyd /​Is many trew man deseyvid … They schall never thryve ne thé’ (ll. 259–​62). The carpenter infects the entire community, and the morally upright tools provide him an education in how all its members are bound together through their shared rituals (harmful as well as beneficial) which, repeatedly enacted, generate community values. This poem’s approach has suggestive implications about its audience in the Ashmole 61.54 While Wilson searches for a suitable occasion at which this text might have been read directly to carpenters, its existence in the midst of this collection—​its immediate manuscript neighbours are a number of prayers—​indicates that its scribe, Rate, saw its thematic investments and poetic delights

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as flexible. The objects here tackle matters of immediate concern to the audience of a book like Ashmole 61, whatever their individual professions, crafts, or positions. Rather than pondering who is the winner, who the loser, in a game of romantic love played by the leisured class, as non-​humans like the owl and nightingale did in the popular thirteenth-​century English debate poem, these tools—​who know of what they speak, given their total immersion in the labouring world, and without whom the carpenter could not practice his craft, whatever his will—​address concerns of commitment, responsibility, and authority in relation to the family and the community. In such ways, non-​human objects who share the household community with the readers of Ashmole 61 provide their insights and encourage judgement and behaviour adaptation based on their shared investment in and dependence on the health of the household. A reconfigured household These comic texts demonstrate how, as Crocker observes, ‘[m]‌ edieval structures of feeling … put objects together with bodies in a moral relationship’ and in so doing ‘cross boundaries’.55 The morally inflected affective relationships of objects and bodies, human and non-​human, allow for a reconfiguration of household society in these two vernacular collections. Objects and animals from the aristocratic realm of the hunt and the royal feast mix in these household books with objects and animals from rustic and artisanal spheres—​all of which lie at the fringes of the home environments of the emergent groups of the lower gentry and wealthy merchants who appear to have comprised the intended audiences for the Heege and Rate books. The peasant animals and tools of The Hunting of the Hare and the carpenters’ tools that debate their master’s worth do not share the immediate everyday experience of these texts’ secondary readers. Similarly, the drinking horn of Sir Corneus appears from an aristocratic past encountered by such readers only through literary resurrections. Instead, these sticky objects bring with them the affective significance of their home communities, whether rustic or royal, but through the comic mode in which they appear, they disrupt the social structures assumed by the genres that spawned them, be it the aristocratic romance or the courtly debate poem. The transformation that comes with a new generic identity allows these comic tales to be a means for building empathy and positing alternative social formations, rather than representing a temporarily chaotic world only to replace it with the

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usual, presumably natural, social order, as is typically observed of comic texts. In the process, these poems create new affective bonds that support the moral self-​fashioning encouraged by the array of conduct texts and devotional materials that these two household books offer their readers. Appendix Advocates 19.3.1: table of contents (adapted from The Heege Manuscript, ed. Hardman) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

The Hunttyng of the Hare Mock sermon in prose (Mollificant olera durissima crusta) ‘The mone in the mornyng merely rose’ (nonsense verse) Sir Gowther Urbanitas Seynt Katheryn Sir Ysumbras The Lay Folks’ Mass Book ‘The almighty kyng of blys/​Assumpsit carnem virginis’ (a macaronic carol of the nativity) ‘Herken to my tale that I schall to yow schew’ (non.v) Deceyte (a stanza from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ll. 4432–​8) R. Stokys: Proverbs Rhyming proverbs A tryppe off Deere (terms of hunting and carving game) For a malaundre (medical receipt) Aue regina coelorum þat pes mey stond Sir Amadace The Lytylle Childrenes Lytil Boke For the Cholyc (medical receipt inserted later) R. Maydestone: Miserere mei Deus Ecce Ancilla Domini (Ay Merci God and graunt merci) ‘As I wandrede her bi weste’ ‘Servis is no Heritage’ (Deo Gracias) lacks st. 4 and 5 Verbum caro factum est (omnis caro fenum est) (satirical carol) Form of indulgence granted to all who carried… (from Pope Leo to King Charles) Vision of Tundale W. Lychefelde: Complaint of God (lacks st. 1–​6) A fragment of song

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38 39 40 41

Myra Seaman Memorandum of household expenses (later addition) (Lamentacio Peccatoris) (Four things that make a man fall from reason) ‘Worship wymmen wyne and vnweldy age’ (Precepts in –​ly) A Guidonian hand J. Lydgate: The circumsision (Life of Our Lady Book IV) A prayer against bleeding (charm for healing wounds; later addition) þe Ephyphanye (Lyfe of Our Lady Book V) The purification marie (Lyfe of Oure Lady Book V; ll. 1–​301) (Dialogue between the Blessed Virgin and her child) ‘This louely lady sat and song’ Prescription (later addition) Prognostications of thunder Trentalle sancti gregorii

Ashmole 61: table of contents (adapted from Codex Ashmole 61, ed. Shuffelton) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Life of St Eustace Lydgate’s Ram’s Horn How the Wise Man Taught his Son Good Wife Taught her Daughter Ysombras 10 Commandments (from Speculum Christiani) Lydgate’s Stans Puer ad Mensam Dame Curtasy Latin epigram 12 rules for purchase of land Latin epigram Latin epigram Evening prayer Morning prayer 10 Commandments Prayer to Mary (from Speculum Christiani) The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools Prayer at the Levation The Knight Who Forgave the Slayer of His Father (from Handlyng Synne) Earl of Tolous Lybeaus Desconus Sir Corneus

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Renovating the household 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35a 35b 36 37 38 39 40 41

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Miracle of Blessed Virgin Mary (The Knight and his Jealous Wife) Tale of an Incestuous Daughter Sir Cleges Feast of All Saints & All Souls King and His Four Daughters Ypotis Northern Passion ‘Short Charter of Christ’ Lament of the Virgin Mary Lydgate’s ‘Dietary’ Maydestone’s Seven Penitential Psalms Prick of Conscience Minor ‘Stations of Jerusalem’ Sinner’s Lament Adulterous Falmouth Squire Legend of the Resurrection Life of St Margaret The Wounds and the Sins (On the 7 Deadly Sins) King Orfeo ‘Vanyte’ King Edward & the Hermit

Notes 1 Citations of Bisclavret in French and English are by line from The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Claire M. Waters (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2018). 2 Holly A. Crocker, ‘Medieval Affects Now’, Exemplaria, 29 (2017), 82–​98  (92). 3 See, for example, the essays collected in Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-​Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf (eds), Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 4 I offer a critique of such tendencies in the critical reception of medieval romance, a genre often transmitted in household books, in my article, ‘Tugging at the Roots: The Errant Textography of Middle English Romance’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39 (2009), 283–​303. For a recent analysis of the ethical complexities developed in household compilations, see Rory G.  Critten, ‘Bourgeois Ethics Again:  The Conduct Texts and the Romances of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Chaucer Review, 50 (2015), 108–​33. With its focus on the comic texts in Ashmole 61, this chapter extends Critten’s work on the romances and the conduct texts anthologised in the book.

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5 Crocker, ‘Medieval Affects Now’, 84. 6 Tracy Adams, ‘Introduction: Devotions and Emotions in the Middle Ages’, Digital Philology, 1 (2012), 173–​83 (174). 7 Stephanie Downes and Rebecca McNamara, ‘The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature’, Literature Compass (2016), 1–​13 (3). 8 Sarah McNamer, ‘Feeling’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Oxford Twenty-​ First-​ Century Approaches to Literature:  Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 241–​57 (247). McNamer’s preferred term for the object of her study is ‘feeling’. Those working deliberately in the History of Emotions tend to use ‘emotion’. Glenn D. Burger explains the challenges facing medievalists at work in this arena when determining how to frame their subject of study. See ‘Towards a Premodern Affective Turn’, postmedieval, 5 (2014), 102–​14. In that essay, Burger describes medieval affective devotion as a ‘technology to turn to in seeking answers to these questions’ and makes a case for the utility of the term ‘affect’ to medievalists (103). 9 Jo Labanyi, ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11 (2010), 223–​33 (223). 10 Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 69. 11 Patricia Ticiento Clough, Introduction to Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn:  Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–​33 (2). 12 Ahmed quickly connects affect and object(s)—​in the sense of not-​ subject—​when she says that ‘happiness also turns us toward objects. We turn toward objects at the very point of “making.” To be made happy by this or that is to recognise that happiness starts from somewhere other than the subject who may use the word to describe a situation.’ See Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 31–​51 (31). 13 Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, 22 (2004), 117–​ 39 (119); emphasis added. This depiction of affective economies maintains the subject–​object distinction, which I  tend to read as an artificial boundary that gives opportunities for granting, to the objects that we determine deserve it, the status of subjects with an exclusive claim to agency. However, this is no limitation to Ahmed’s argument, for her particular treatment of objects (and subjects) weakens that boundary and makes her affective economies useful models for an object-​oriented approach. 14 Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, p. 31. 15 In a similar trajectory, Steven Shaviro calls on Graham Harman’s notion of the ‘allure’ of the object. In Shaviro’s words, ‘A lure is anything that, in some way, works to capture my attention. It may entice

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me, or incite me, or seduce me, or tempt me, or compel me, or even bludgeon and bully me. But in any case, it addresses me from beyond’. See Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p.  8. Shaviro turns to Alfred North Whitehead to highlight the agency of the object in this transaction: ‘When I respond to a lure—​and even if I respond to it negatively, by rejecting it—​I am led to envision a possibility … and thereby to feel something that I would not have felt otherwise’ (p. 9). 16 In this connection, see further Stephanie Trigg’s description of Ahmed’s thinking in her article, ‘Emotional Histories:  Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory’, Exemplaria, 26 (2014), 3–​15. 17 See Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2006), p.  25. Importantly, as Rosenwein notes elsewhere, ‘people move (and moved) continually from one such community to another—​ from taverns to law courts, say—​adjusting their emotional displays and their judgments of weal and woe … to these different environments’. See Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–​45 (842). 18 Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, p. 30. 19 Piroska Nagy, ‘Historians and Emotions:  New Theories, New Questions’, Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity, 24 October 2008. http://​emma.hypotheses.org/​147, n.p. 20 Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, p. 37, p. 36. 21 Nagy, ‘Historians and Emotions’, n.p. As Trigg puts it, ‘Bourdieu’s habitus does not constrain emotion, but provides … an orientation for feeling’ (‘Emotional Histories’, 9). 22 Crocker, ‘Medieval Affects Now’, 89. 23 For example, see National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1 (‘The Heege Manuscript’), Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, Cambridge University Library (CUL) Ff.2.38, and British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.  ii. The Heege manuscript has been convincingly associated with the yeoman Sherbrooke family in Derbyshire, with signatures of three family members appearing in the manuscript in late fifteenth-​ /​ early-​ sixteenth-​ century hands. The Sherbrooke family sold the manuscript to Sir Walter Scott (in service to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh) around 300 years later, in 1806. See Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 142–​ 53, esp. p.  144. Much less is known about the producer(s) or owner(s) of Ashmole 61, CUL Ff.2.38, and Cotton Caligula A. ii. CUL Ff.2.38 seems to have been produced on commission. See Johnston, ‘Two Leicestershire Romance Codices:  Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Journal of the Early Book

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Society, 15 (2012), 85–​100 (89, working from Felicity Riddy’s analysis). CUL Ff.2.38 and Ashmole 61 do share certain material, linguistic, and other features: for instance they share a paper stock (the fourth of four in CUL and the third of three in Ashmole 61), and they were both copied by a scribe (not the same one) in Leicestershire. Leicester was an active site for book production at this time, with a scriptorium at the Abbey of St. Mary de Pratis, just outside the city walls. See further Johnston, ‘Two Leicestershire Romance Codices’, 87–​8. On CUL Ff.2.38, see to Radulecu’s contribution to this volume. 24 Johnston, Romance and Gentry, pp. 122–​3. 25 Wendy Matlock’s reading of The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools—​a text addressed later in this chapter—​contextualises the poem in the household dynamics of the later fifteenth century posited by Shannon McSheffrey in which household and family were more narrowly defined and distinguished from one another, wherein ‘housing began to develop separate spaces for kin and non-​kin, which solidified the different status of servants and relatives within the same space’. See Wendy Matlock, ‘Reworking the Household in The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools’, English Studies, 95 (2014), 109–​30 (110). Even in the midst of such developments, the full array of texts in the household books produced at this time attend to the diverse needs of a household’s members. 26 Burger, Conduct Becoming, p. 69. 27 Felicity Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best:  Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 66–​86 (74, 67). In this article, Riddy considers the particular household dynamics of a series of manuscript locations for the poem How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter. Ashmole 61 is one of the manuscripts in which this text is compiled. 28 Critten, ‘Bourgeois Ethics’, 115. 29 See, for example, the essays collected in Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (eds), The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 30 Crocker, ‘Medieval Affects Now’, 89. 31 Shuffelton dates the production of Ashmole 61 to ‘either the last decade of the fifteenth century or the first decade of the sixteenth’. See Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), p.  3. On the Heege book, see note 23, above. The consensus of opinion is that both manuscripts were produced in the period 1475–​1500. 32 Crocker, ‘Medieval Affects Now’, 89. 33 No modern edition of Advocates 19.3.1 exists, although a print facsimile is available. See The Heege Manuscript:  A Facsimile of National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1., ed. Philippa

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Hardman (Leeds:  University of Leeds, School of English, 2000). For an early discussion of the compilatory dynamics of this book, see too Philippa Hardman, ‘A Mediaeval “Library in parvo” ’, Medium Aevum, 47 (1978), 262–​73. Ashmole 61 received close attention from Lynne S.  Blanchfield in her 1991 dissertation at the University of Wales, from which Blanchfield extracted two key articles. See Lynne S.  Blanchfield, ‘ “An Idiosyncratic Scribe”:  A Study of the Practice and Purpose of Rate, the Scribe of Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, unpublished dissertation, Aberystwyth: University College of Wales, 1991; ‘Rate Revisited: The Compilation of the Narrative Works in MS Ashmole 61’, in Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers, and Judith Weiss (eds), Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 208–​20; and ‘The Romances in MS Ashmole 61: An Idiosyncratic Scribe’, in Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M.  Meale (eds), Romance in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 65–​87. Ashmole 61 has become much more accessible since TEAMS published George Shuffelton’s modern edition of the manuscript:  Codex Ashmole 61, available online at no charge. I thank the Bodleian Library (both Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room and, more recently, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room of Weston Library) and the National Library of Scotland’s Special Collections Reading Room in the George IV Bridge Building for making possible my extended engagements with both manuscripts in recent years. 34 See the appendix tables of contents of the two manuscripts. Both books include the romance Isumbras (among the five romances in Ashmole 61 and the three in Advocates 19.3.1); different Lydgate satires (Right as a Ram’s Horn in Ashmole 61, Deceit in Advocates 19.3.1); different psalms by Maidstone; a female saint’s life (of St Margaret in Ashmole 61, St Katherine in Advocates 19.3.1), and various conduct texts (none of them shared). 35 For more detailed physical descriptions of Advocates 19.3.1 and Ashmole 61 see The Heege Manuscript, ed. Hardman, pp.  1–​57; and Codex Ashmole 61, ed. Shuffelton, pp. 1–​8. See too Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, pp.  114–​ 20 (on Ashmole 61)  and pp.  142–​ 9 (on Advocates 19.3.1). 36 Besides the Hunting of the Hare, discussed below, the first booklet of the Heege Manuscript also transmits an untitled mock sermon and the Battle of Brakonwet. 37 Besides The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools and Sir Corneus, discussed below, Ashmole’s other main comic text is King Edward and the Hermit. Sir Cleges, also compiled in Ashmole 61, offers some comic moments in the midst of an otherwise broadly earnest narrative. 38 I thank Glenn Burger for the term ‘emergent groups’.

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39 David Scott-​ Macnab’s introduction to his edition of the poem provides important information about its form, language, and poetic patterns. See David Scott-​Macnab, ‘The Hunttyng of the Hare in the Heege Manuscript’, Anglia, 128 (2010), 102–​23. Citations of the poem are by line number from Scott-​Macnab’s edition of the text in this article. 40 Scott-​Macnab, ‘Hunttyng of the Hare’, 106. 41 On this point, and on its potential significance for the audience of the Heege Manuscript, see further, Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, p. 151–​4. 42 As Johnston points out of the would-​be huntsmen, ‘even their lack of agricultural implements is fruit for derision, as they were too poor to possess a wain (i.e. a four-​wheeled vehicle drawn by oxen)’ (Romance and the Gentry, p. 151; see ll. 253–​5). 43 While ‘work’ carries a range of significations in the fifteenth century, most of them relating to ‘doing’ rather than to the more specific ‘labouring’, the context here suggests the possible specialised meaning of ‘to labour’ that had been in use since Old English (see OED s.v. work [III.12.a] and MED s.v. werk [6a]). 44 Scott-​Macnab, ‘Hunttyng of the Hare’, 104, 105. 45 Citations of Sir Corneus are by line number from Codex Ashmole 61, ed. Shuffelton. 46 For a brief survey, see Ten Fifteenth-​Century Comic Poems, ed. Melissa Furrow (New York: Garland, 1985), pp. 273–​4. 47 See Ten Fifteenth-​Century Comic Poems, ed. Furrow, pp.  273–​4; and Robert Biket, Lai du Cor, ed. E.  T. Erickson (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1973). Furrow further notes that a ‘comparable episode’ in Malory’s Tristram centres on a horn intended for Arthur that winds up at King Mark’s court, and the wives are the ones to drink from the horn to prove their own fidelity. Needless to say, the dynamics of that situation differ significantly from those in Sir Corneus. The horn also functions differently. In Malory, the wives’ inability to drink from the horn is taken as proof of their fidelity. 48 For this reading of the willow garlands, see Ten Fifteenth-​Century Comic Poems, ed. Furrow, p. 383. 49 For the gloss, see Codex Ashmole 61, ed. Shuffelton, p. 167. 50 While an actual knight named Sir Corneus appears in Malory as the name of the father of Lucas the Butler, the name there lacks the double-​entendre that is played up in this assignment of the name to all cuckolded knights in Sir Corneus. See Ten Fifteenth-​Century Comic Poems, ed. Furrow, p. 385. The identification of cuckholds with horns worn on the forehead apparently stretches as far back as Ancient Greece. See OED s.v. horn. 51 Shuffelton offers the contrasting example of The Debate between Water and Wine, wherein the water and wine each present ‘their own merits as refreshment’ (Codex Ashmole 61, p. 456).

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52 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools’, Review of English Studies, 38 (1987), 445–​70 (452). Wilson concludes that the poet ‘is himself either of their [of the ‘wryȝtes’ whom he addresses at the conclusion] number or has some intimate involvement with them’ (448). 53 Citations of The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools are from Codex Ashmole 61, ed. Shuffelton. 54 Wilson considers that ‘such a particular craft, as carpenter, is not one with which a wide audience could readily identify’ and it is not ‘the subject of widely shared experience or the object of widely shared dreams’, but provincial bourgeois households mingled individuals of different status and purpose (‘The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools’, 450). 55 Crocker, ‘Medieval Affects Now’, 89.

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5 The Christmas drama of the household of St John’s College, Oxford Elisabeth Dutton

In the late-​medieval and early modern periods, several colleges of the University of Oxford were sites of regular theatrical activity. The Records of Early English Drama [REED] volume for Oxford gives evidence of plays and interludes being staged at Magdalen College from 1485 onwards; in the first half of the sixteenth century there are records of comedies, tragedies, and interludes being performed at New, Lincoln, Exeter, and Trinity Colleges; in the 1560s Christ Church and Merton were regularly theatrical venues.1 Plays were staged in the colleges to mark special occasions, such as official visits by royalty or ambassadors, as well as for Christmas parties for staff and students:  these plays were statements of a college’s understanding of itself as a community. The choice of subject might reflect a college’s identity—​for example, the first play for which we have a title is St Mary Magdalene, which was staged at Magdalen College in 1506–​1507—​or the occasion of a play might be relevant, as when Trinity College staged a spectacle for Trinity Sunday in 1564–​1565. But Christmas plays have left the most abundant records, especially in the late-​medieval period. The tradition of colleges marking Christmas with some kind of theatrical activity has medieval roots, and St John’s Christmas drama must be understood in this tradition, though the first extant record of a play at St John’s College is at Christmastime 1568–​1569.2 Many plays, and the historical records of the circumstances of their performance collected by REED, provide more or less oblique insights into the functioning of the colleges not only as centres of intellectual activity but also as material households. The material life of the household becomes caught up in the presentation of material which is the official study of the students within colleges: classical texts. When dramatically presented, these texts become dependent on the labour of chefs, carpenters, and painters in the household staff of the colleges, and they are enlivened

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and made contemporary through the household activities of the students, most notably eating. College hospitality was referred to as ‘Domus’—​to be a ‘domus’ guest is still to eat at the college’s expense—​and the term is richly suggestive in relation to college drama. As Tiffany Stern has recently shown, ‘house’ is a term commonly used in commercial theatre to refer to locations with specific functions—​playhouse, tiring-​house—​and those functions included storage of valuable items such as costumes and props.3 In Oxford, the term might prompt us to consider, in relation to drama, what was ‘stored’ in a college household. This chapter will define the ‘materials’ of a college household broadly as including: people who work within the college, whether as domestic servants, students, or tutors; elements of the university curriculum and the books that preserve the knowledge the colleges sought to impart; domestic furniture and objects such as tables, paintings, and candles, and the account books that, while household objects themselves, also record expenditure on domestic objects and labour. Plays were often presented within college halls, which were also the focus of the household as the places in which members of the community met at meals. Unsurprisingly, several surviving plays feature feasts prominently in their action. For example, William Gager’s Dido was staged in 1583 in Christ Church dining hall to honour a visit from the Polish Ambassador. As a royal establishment, Christ Church was expected to host the Queen’s guests in royal style, and the production famously featured a storm of rose water, hunting dogs, and a marzipan reconstruction of the City of Troy.4 When Gager’s learned, Latin play was presented as a dinner entertainment, the feasting guests and the serving staff were identified with the guests and servers of the fictional feast presented—​ the feast at which Dido falls in love with her guest, Aeneas, but also the feast at which she displays her power as a lavish and generous host. Five decades later, by contrast, Grobiana’s Nuptials, a short, vernacular, in-​ house and after-​ dinner production at St John’s College, mercilessly and obscenely parodied the pretensions of learned and polite society through a staged dinner that again probably identified its feasting audience members with dinner guests within the play. This chapter will focus on St John’s College, where were written and performed a large number of the scripts that survive as examples of early drama from the University of Oxford. These survivals are early-seventeenth-century, but they participate in a late-​medieval festive playing tradition, to which they sometimes

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explicitly refer. They reflect and sometimes satirise, from their seventeenth-​century perspective, aspects of the college household that survive from the medieval period into the early modern—​ and indeed in some cases to the present day. And they present, sometimes in earnest and sometimes in parody, material and ideas that were fundamental to the late-​medieval, as well as the early modern, Oxford curriculum, rooted as it was in the study of Latin and Greek language, literature, and philosophy. This chapter will discuss the surviving plays written in English, which have been less frequently examined by scholars than those written in Latin. It will first briefly characterise the St John’s College household as a site for dramatic performance, through description of pertinent features including institutional history, the identity of the students, academic curricula, college personnel, and dining habits. It will then discuss The Christmas Prince, an exceptionally detailed early dramatic record that illuminates many material details of dramatic performance at St John’s including finance, play-​texts, play language, rehearsal practices, stage construction, scheduling, audience and actor identities, and interaction with the world beyond the college through dramatic representation. The chapter will then examine in more depth two further St John’s plays: Narcissus, which shortly pre-​ dates The Christmas Prince, and Grobiana’s Nuptials, which post-​dates it. Narcissus offers moments of insight into the influence of the commercial theatre on college theatre: the discussion here considers props and women’s roles. Grobiana’s Nuptials offers a parodic treatment of many aspects of college life and college plays, exemplified in this chapter through a close study of repeated, varied uses of candles in the play. The overarching goal of this chapter is to explore under-​studied college drama by illuminating the relationship between dramatic form and the movement of objects, people, and ideas into and out of a particular collegiate household. The St John’s College household as a site for college drama The College of St John the Baptist was founded in Oxford in 1555, on the site of the dissolved Cistercian St Bernard College. Strictly speaking, St John’s is thus an early modern institution, though on a medieval foundation, and maintaining the function of the medieval colleges—​training men for the Church. St John’s was intended primarily to be a seminary for the secular clergy, and, being founded in the reign of Mary, to contribute to the reform of

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a Church recently reconciled to Rome: it was thus both reforming and conservative, a college re-​ affirming the medieval, Roman Catholic, origins of Oxford.5 Its statutes were ‘almost a verbatim copy’ of the 1517 statutes of Corpus Christi College.6 The founder, Sir Thomas White, had been Master of the Merchant Taylors Company, and by 1564 twelve places at the college were allocated to boys from the Merchant Taylors School; there were also places for boys from Tonbridge, Bristol, Coventry, and Reading Schools. Boys could be admitted between the ages of thirteen and twenty. By 1583 there was a president and fifty fellows (the term applies to undergraduates and graduates, though fellows within their first three years came to be known as scholars). The government of the college was in the hands of the president and the ten senior fellows, who included the Vice-​President, the Dean of Theology, and two Deans of Arts—​Deans of Law and Philosophy were subsequently added—​who supervised students’ attendance at lectures and disputations. These positions reflect the priorities of the Oxford curriculum. While it is difficult to be certain exactly what was studied in medieval Oxford, fundamentally, medieval concepts of the unity of knowledge prevailed well into the seventeenth century, and informed educational ideals. As Mordechai Feingold puts it: Every educated man received instruction in the entire arts and science curriculum which … included mathematics as well as logic, rhetoric, music and philosophy—​and was deemed capable of contributing to any one of its constituents. Similarly, the conviction that grounding in the various arts and sciences was a prerequisite for the study of theology continued to command respect, as did the belief in the inherent interdependence of all the arts and sciences. The product of such an ideal of education continued to be the ‘general scholar’.7

Elizabeth I’s Nova Statuta (1564/​ 1565) required for the BA three terms of arithmetic, two of music, four of rhetoric, two of grammar, and five of dialectic; Edward VI’s Statutes (1549) had placed more emphasis on mathematics, including arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and cartography, and this emphasis was reasserted by the Savilian Statutes (1619) that were incorporated by Laud, along with moral philosophy. To qualify for his MA, a student had to be examined in geometry, astronomy, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and other liberal sciences that may have included, as at Cambridge, astronomy, perspective, and Greek.8

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Residence within the college was required almost year-​round:  a probationer could be absent from St John’s only thirty days in the year, a full fellow only sixty days. St John’s, like other Oxford colleges, then as now, was therefore concerned with material as much as intellectual provision for its residents. Like the Inns of Court and Army barracks, the colleges of the universities became ‘venerable institutions that provided domestic services for lone men’, providing them with room and board, and society.9 In the seventeenth century there was also increased interest among the upper classes in sending their sons to the universities, ‘that their reason, and fancy, and carriage, be improved … that they may become Rationall and Gracefull speakers, and be of an acceptable behaviour in their countries’.10 From the foundation of St John’s, there were appointed two bursars who received rents and revenues and kept accounts in two books, one the president’s and the other their own:  the survival of many of these books ensures the preservation of many details of the historic domestic functioning of the college. There were various college servants; two servants allocated to the president, a manciple under the order of the bursars, whose primary duty was the purchase of food; the butler and the under-​butler, to attend the company at meals; the cook and the under-​cook; the porter, who had charge of the various gates and also functioned as the barber to shave and cut the hair of the president and fellows. There was also a clerk of accounts and a wood reeve. The butler and under-​butler and the porter were required to be celibate, as of course were the fellows, so the college would have been an exclusively male environment. Laundresses were employed but did not work on site; they came to collect clothes on Monday or Tuesday mornings at 8am and brought back clean linen by 3pm on Saturdays. Dining was of course materially and socially important. ‘Quasi-​ domestic, but bother-​ free, institutional dinners were custom-​ made for ambitious bachelors.’11 At St John’s, as at many other colleges, board was provided not only for the fellows but also for a number of ‘commoners’, that is, men who lodged and ate at the ‘common’ table in the college without being fellows there. Often these commoners were former fellows who had given up their fellowships in order to marry, or because they declined the ordination that was, at the college’s foundation, the envisaged purpose of St John’s students; there were also some who, on ordination, took livings elsewhere. In 1600, in addition to the fellows of St John’s, there were twenty commoners who had the right to dine

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in college. These included for example Thomas Aldworth, who had taken his BD at St John’s and then moved to a living in Somerset, and Jerome Kyte, who had taken his BCL and lost his fellowship on refusal to take holy orders in 1598.12 The dinners at which these commoners and the college fellows met were the locus for occasional college plays; these commoners and fellows constituted the pool from which local audience members and performers might be drawn. Christmas at St John’s, 1607–​1608: The Christmas Prince In the first century of the history of St John’s College, one of its ‘most characteristic’ institutions was the Christmas revellings.13 These could be on a very large scale. In one known case the festivities lasted from 31 October 1607 to Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 1608, and began with the election from among the students of a Christmas Prince to preside over the proceedings that included plays in Latin and in English. An account of the events of 1607–​ 1608 is preserved in Oxford, St John’s College Library MS 52, pp.  5–​260, under the title:  ‘A True, and faithfull relation of the risinge and fall of THOMAS TUCKER Prince of Alba Fortunata, Lord of St. Iohns’. This text, known as The Christmas Prince, offers considerable insight into the use of college resources for culinary and cultural purpose.14 These celebrations were costly. Money for the revels was raised from former members (£16. 10s.) and one of the college’s most important benefactors, Sir William Paddy (£3), as well as from the residents (£52. 13s. 7d., including £9. 11s. 5d.). Resources were also donated by tenants of friends of the college, in ‘extraordinary prouision against euery Feast … Some sendinge money, some Wine, some Venison’.15 The connection between dinner and drama is thus clearly demonstrated in these accounts. The letter with which Tucker sought donations alludes to ‘ye fame of our Kingdome in ye entertaynment of forraine Princes & Embassadours’—​suggesting the diplomatic purpose of academic plays like Dido. But Tucker alludes also to the need for resources to ensure ‘ye safetie of our owne person, and ye whol Common wealth for the praeuentinge of warrs and tumults’.16 This seems to indicate some rather rougher aspects to the Christmas Prince festivities, and some rather less stately activities that might include town–​gown fights or simply festive miscreancy on the part of a community of young men. When some students could not get into the hall to watch a performance of Periander, they made ‘a hideous

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noice, and raised … a tumult wth breaking of windows all about the Colledge throwinge of stones into the hall, and such like ryott’.17 In total The Christmas Prince records the performance, in the extended festive period of 1607–​1608, of eight plays:  in Latin, Ara Fortunae, Saturnalia, Philomela, Philomates, Ira Fortunae, and in English, Time’s Complaint, The Seven Days of the Week, and Periander. The significance of the language of composition of each play is not always clear. Although there was a prohibition for some years on Cambridge students performing publicly in English, this prohibition was apparently not always observed even there, and no parallel prohibition seems to have been enacted in Oxford.18 Of the ‘English Tragedy’ Periander, The Christmas Prince does record that ‘many arguments were alleged against it’, including that it was ‘English, a language vnfitt for the Vniversitie especially to end so much late sporte wthall’.19 Maybe it was particularly inappropriate to perform tragedy in English; certainly, it was inappropriate to let an English tragedy be the climax of the Christmas Prince revels. The Christmas Prince also records further masques, processions, songs, and addresses that formed part of the festivities. The generous funding of the revels was not, apparently, sufficient to guarantee the quality of all theatrical productions, for Tucker himself walked out of one horribly under-​rehearsed ‘device’ illustrating the twelve days of Christmas: ‘most of them were out both in there speeches and measures, having but thought of this devise some few houres before.’20 This comment indicates, intriguingly, that at least some of the festive presentations were spontaneous, almost improvised events. Other productions were large-​ scale and required considerable planning, not least because St John’s, in common with the other colleges, had no permanent theatre structure, and so employed carpenters in the construction of temporary stages and scaffolds. The most spectacular constructions were probably at Christ Church, which received financial contributions from other colleges to support the occasional grand entertainments required of it as a royal foundation. At St John’s, it seems that some, but not all, plays were judged to merit the building of a stage—​of the play Ara Fortunae, which was put on for the installment of the Christmas Prince, we read that This Showe by our selues was not thought worthye of a stage or scaffoldes, and therefore after supper ye tables were onlye sett together, wch was not done wthout great toyle & difficult by reason of ye great multitude of people (wch by ye default of ye Dore-​keepers,

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an diuers others, euery mann bringinge in his freinde) had fild ye Hall before wee thought of  it.21

The implication seems to be that the actors performed on the tables that were pushed together to provide a raised platform. This certainly provides a cheap and easy stage, its improvised nature indicated by the fact that the audience had arrived in the hall before the actors had come up with the idea.22 There does not seem to have been any concern about damage to the tables from the actors walking on them, although where scaffolds were not used there may have been some concern about damage to the hall floor from the actors’ boots. Perhaps, however, this is an aspect of parody where the actors are presenting working men, as in the case of Narcissus, in which the ‘Second Actor’ asks the College Porter to put something down to protect the floor from his boots, for ‘wee have pittifull nailes in our shooes’ that will otherwise make ‘abhominable scarrs in the face on’t’.23 That the lack of bouncers at Ara Fortunae led to the St John’s men each bringing along friends and filling the hall seems to imply the popularity of these events. Indeed in spite of the performers’ reservations the audience enjoyed the show so much that their applause caused the backdrop to collapse: ye Canopie wch hunge ouer ye Altare of Fortune (As it had binne frighted wth ye noise, or meante to signifie that 2 plaudites were as much as it deserued) suddenly fell downe.24

Where a play, or perhaps the occasion of its production, was thought to merit the building of scaffolds, there was a risk that the workmen might not prove reliable. Carpenters caused a day’s delay in the performance of Philomela: The next day being Innocents’ Day, it was expected, & partly determined by or. selves, that the Tragedy of Phylomela should have been publikely acted wch (as wee thought) would well haue fitted the day by reason of the murder of Innocent Itis. But the Carpenters beeing no-​way ready wth the stage or scaffold’s (whereof notwithstanding some were made before Christ-​mas, wee were Constrained to differe it till the next day wch was the 29 of December.25

This comment also reveals details about the scheduling of these plays. There were expectations of a performance appropriate to the Feast Day, and the performance was to be ‘publik’. As Philomela is in Latin, ‘publik’ perhaps here implies only a broader university audience.26 On the other hand, Ovid’s tale of Philomela would have been familiar to any boy with a grammar school education.27 Of the

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play Time’s Complaint the author notes that ‘wee onely proposed to our selves a shew but the toune expected a perfect and absolute play’.28 The ‘publik’ therefore may well refer to an audience of town as opposed to purely gown.29 Time’s Complaint, for all that it apparently did not go down very well with its audience, is a play appropriate, perhaps, to a more general, less purely academic audience.30 It is in English, and takes place partly at the pub of Good-​wife Spiggot. It features other non-​ academic figures such as Humphrey Swallow, a drunken cobbler, Manco, a lame soldier, and Bellicoso, a ‘casheere corporall’, as well as Philonics, a rangling lawyer who has ruined the poor country-​ man Clinias. The Scholar, Studioso, is brought in by Clinias to help him search for Lady Veritas, Time’s daughter. The play allegorises the process of learning, revealing, for example, that Studioso will ‘live and die’ to protect Veritas, that Veritas has a friend called Industrie, but only a very few studious scholars are interested in her, and that Opinion is great in his own eyes but small in those of others.31 However, Time’s Complaint is also a social satire in which Clinias and Bellicoso lament the corruption that has ruined them—​the corrupt law, that has thrown Clinias off his land, and the brutal army that has not paid Bellicoso and has beaten him when he protested, so that he is now a vagabond.32 The play asserts that poverty endangers scholars’ work, too, for Veritas explains that scholars who are poor are unlikely to attract her: Schollars I graunt loue mee and speake mee faire, But there hard fortune is to plaine a baite, To sharp a hooke for truth to nibble at.33

Veritas has, we are told, been banished from the royal Court, the lawcourts, and the city, but when her father, Time, advises that she should therefore live in the fields, Veritas protests that she was not born to be ‘a countrie lasse’ and will instead live with Error and Opinion.34 The idea of Veritas living in the fields might remind the audience of Clinias’s earlier dialogue with Time: Clinias:  Why should not I recouer Veritas   As well as Schollars? I am zure of  this   I tread more ground than they, I take more paines   And can endure more hardnes. Time: That doth shewe   Thy grosser substance: finest worke’s most weake,   Though learning cannot toile yet it can speake.35

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If Time here challenges Clinias’s assumption that by hard physical labour and travel he should be able to win Veritas as well as any scholar, by the play’s conclusion, Time, at least, seems to have been persuaded that Veritas could do worse than to live a humble, rural life like Clinias’s. Certainly, this play, while engaging with anatomies of learning, seems also to reach beyond the immediate concerns of a scholarly community to the social order of town beyond gown. It features comic scenes in ale-​houses, which were sites of town–​ gown encounter, and even throws in some pyrotechnics for good measure. When Time describes the grove in which Veritas has been enchanted by Error and Opinion, the stage direction enjoins: ‘Here fire-​workes beginne.’36 The St John’s plays seem to have been variously ‘in-​house’ student shows, produced rather spontaneously and therefore presumably without constructed stages, and ‘publik’ performances which were open to the whole university and to Oxford townsfolk, and apparently involved more elaborate preparations, set, and rehearsal. These plays were perhaps ‘expected’ by the college officers, perhaps by the Oxford citizens, or perhaps by both. It is not difficult to imagine that some productions might have functioned to build ‘town–​gown’ relations, that local people would look forward to once a year being welcomed into the college for an annual St John’s Christmas play. By contrast, the appeal of some shows was their in-​house intimacy. Saturnalia was performed for a private audience, ‘After Suppr’—​once again food and performance go hand in hand.37 The Christmas Prince writer comments that the private nature of the performance, together with the youth of its amateur actors, contributed to audience pleasure: ‘This shew was very liked … because itt was the voluntary service of a younge youth, Nexte, because there were no straungers to trouble vs.’38 It seems that St John’s College sometimes hosted visitors from the town not as audience members but also as performers. In the 1602 play Narcissus, ‘youths of the parish’ appear as wassailers and present the tragedy in the hope of reward. The play’s editor argues that the actors were in fact students, but that they were fictionalising an actual practice of festive performances for the college by parishoners.39 The Christmas Prince records: St Steevens day was past over in silence, and so had St Iohns day also; butt that some of the Princes honest neighbours of St Giles’s presented him with a maske or morris wch though it were but rudely performed yet itt being so freely and lovingly profered, it could not but bee as lovingly received.40

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It is not impossible that the ‘neighbours of St Giles’ are fellow students, since St John’s College is on St Giles’s street, but the phrase seems more likely to indicate the local parishoners. Similarly on 10 January, the last day of the Vacation, there was ‘a Mocke play’ called The Seven Days of the Week: ‘after supper it was presented by one which bore the name of the Clarke of St Gyleses, and acted priuately in the lodging’.41 The Prologue is spoken by the Clarke, who is ‘poore, though not vnletterd’ and who introduces ‘these yor subjects of St Gyles his parishe’.42 It is however possible that this play, like Narcissus, was actually presented by students pretending to be parishoners, because the production was apparently created for those whose voices and appearances were inadequate for public performance, but whom it was felt should be required to participate in some way in ‘so publicke a business’. It sounds as if the actors are co-​opted members of the college. The days of the week are characterised, revealingly, in terms of class timetables and dining. Thursday describes himself as ‘Perpetuall play-​day for the boyes at schoole’ and ‘I that in tender care and kinde compassion/​ Giue scollers leaue to play for recreation’, referring to the practice of allowing grammar school boys and Oxford students Thursdays off.43 He is also ‘A mortall enemy to fish and white-​meats’, presumably by contrast with the fast-​day to come.44 Friday declares: ‘I am leane friday brought vpp in a Colledge,/​That never made good meale vnto my knowledge.’45 It seems that Friday fasting was particularly resented in St John’s. As with the St John’s day performance the audience’s enjoyment of the production did not depend on top quality performance: the actors were typecast so that even their bad performances would prove enjoyable, and ‘it was resolued that the worse it was done, the better it would bee liked, and so it fell out’.46 Christmas at St John’s, 1602: Narcissus In 1607 the Christmas Prince was elected for the first time in thirty years. By contrast with the expansive arrangements in that year, in 1599, 18 d. was given for one night of merriment, ‘to the schollers for the chardg of the sporte on twelfth night’. Slightly more lavishly, in 1600 £3. 5s. 9d. was given for the ‘expenses of a Comedie & a Tragedy publickly acted 23  & 24 February’. In 1601 the scholars presented ‘the Interlude’ at a cost of 2s. 6d.; and in the following year a similar sum, £3. 12s. 4d. was ‘allowed by the House towards the Tragedye over and above £4 put on the

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Students Heads’.47 1602 was the year in which the play Narcissus was presented in English, and the Narcissus narrative is of course a tragic one, so the ‘Tragedye’ mentioned is presumably this production; however, the tone of the Narcissus play is far from tragic and is better characterised in the manuscript in which it is preserved as ‘A Twelfe night merriment’.48 Narcissus presents a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which, like the story of Philomela discussed above, would be familiar not only to any Oxford student but also any schoolboy. Schoolboys would memorise passages from Metamorphoses, construe and parse them, pick out and define figures and tropes; they would learn the mythology connected with the proper names mentioned by Ovid, explore prose themes, and even glean moral teaching. From Metamorphoses they would also learn versification.49 The Narcissus playwright has clearly been greatly influenced by Shakespeare’s treatment of Ovid in his mechanicals’ production of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the professional playhouse, too, a knowledge of the Metamorphoses as source would have contributed to the appreciation of this celebrated scene.50 Shakespeare heightens the already parodic tone of Ovid’s breathless treatment of Pyramus and Thisbe’s tragedy, partly through comedic versification of a text through which schoolboys were taught to versify, and partly by showing his actors’ theatrical workings. His play-​ within-​ a-​ play is an after-​dinner entertainment for a wedding, and is performed by amateur parishoners whom we see first in rehearsal: the mechanicals’ over-​literalism, their lack of faith in an audience’s capacity to body forth anything with only words as prompts, leads them to insist on material presences to ‘present’ wall, moonshine, and a lion. Narcissus is presented for the feast of Twelfth Night by youths of the parish, and though we do not see their rehearsals we hear about them from the Porter: ‘I tooke you all a gabling tother day in mother Bunches backside by the well there, when Tom at Hobses ranne vnder the hovell with a kettle on’s head.’51 The charming but comical image here presented, the domestic kettle enlisted, perhaps, to represent a military helmet, prepares the Narcissus audience to respond to a potentially tragic tale tamed to a household comedy. Where Pyramus and Thisbe have ‘Wall’, Narcissus has ‘Well’:  ‘Enter one with a buckett and boughes and grasse’, who delivers a fairly close translation of Ovid’s description of the well in which Narcissus falls in love with his reflection, and then explains his props:

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Elisabeth Dutton Suppose you the well had a buckett, And so the buckett stands for the well; And ‘tis, least you should counte mee for a sot O, A very pretty figure cald pars pro toto.52

Wall’s ‘loam, roughcast, stone’ are perhaps more costume than prop, since they simply reveal his identity; similarly, the lantern, thornbush, and dog that Moonshine brings with him are more like the attributes by which, for example, a saint is identified in art than props with which anything is done, theatrically. Well, featuring as he does in an academic drama (of sorts), explains not only the symbolism of his prop but also the rhetorical figure by which it can be defined: a prop can be a synecdoche, by which the part stands for all. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a collection of stories with one thing in common: each one concludes with a human protagonist being transformed into something different and non-​ human. While Shakespeare omits this ending from Ovid’s tale, knowledge of his source text adds irony to the mechanicals’ transformation of men (actors) into walls, moonbeams, and lions; Narcissus, on the other hand, makes great explicit play on the transformation with which Ovid finishes his story, when the fair Narcissus, having fallen in love with his own reflection, is transformed into a flower. The dying protagonist exclaims:  ‘The flower of youth, shalbee made flower againe’, a process of physical metamorphosis that inverts the literary process of metaphorisation exemplified in the phrase ‘the flower of youth’.53 The metamorphosis also allows Narcissus to toy with his audience’s expectation in a rather more sophisticated manner than the rude mechanical who, to reassure timorous ladies, explains that he is not in fact a lion but Snug the joiner: For if you take mee for Narcisssus y’are very sillye, I desire you to take mee for a daffa downe dillye; For so I rose, & so I am in trothe, As may appeare by the flower in my mouthe.54

The audience, especially if acquainted with Snug, might expect at first that this is the actor explaining that they would be ‘silly’ to believe he is Narcissus. However, whereas Snug’s lines collapse the theatrical tension between actor and character, Narcissus’s lines create a different binary—​ not actor-​ Narcissus, but Narcissus-​ a narcissus flower. That the term ‘daffa downe dillye’ was used figuratively as an insult adds comedy to Narcissus’s assertion that this is how he wishes the audience to understand him. How exactly

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should the audience now interpret the acting body they see, or indeed the voice that they hear (itself complicated by the presence in this scene of the nymph Echo)? The audience are perhaps further disorientated by the pun on another flower name in the next line—​‘For so I  rose’—​before everything collapses in Narcissus’s assertion ‘so I  am in trothe’. In truth the actor is Narcissus? Narcissus is a daffodil? The actor is a daffodil? The irresolution is unchallenged by the ‘appearance’ of a ‘flower in my mouth’. Does ‘appear’ suggest a true or a fictional message? And, clearly, if the flower is in the mouth of Narcissus, or of the actor playing Narcissus, then the actor/​Narcissus and the flower cannot be identical; neither can the flower be metonymic, pars pro toto, since it is not part of anything else; neither can it be a prop or attribute by which Narcissus is known, since the logic of metamorphosis implies that the young man and the flower cannot be present simultaneously. The impulse of Shakespeare’s mechanicals to over-​ explain, which draws attention to the conventions of theatre, is shared by the parish youths who present Narcissus, but in the latter case they play not only with theatrical convention but also with pedagogical practice: the actors explaining their props parody the teacher explaining rhetorical tropes. It would be entirely unsurprising if an in-​ house Christmas play at St John’s College, Oxford, satirised set texts and teaching methods. However, Narcissus draws on sources that are far from being the exclusive intellectual property of the university household. The play-​ within-​ a-​ play structure that sets the actors up as local youths is perhaps designed to justify the play’s dependence on an elementary Latin source, the Ovid known to every schoolboy, as opposed to a more intellectually exclusive source accessible to students of St John’s, a more localised piece of household knowledge. The classical learning of the grammar schools is indeed parodied, a little Latin and less Greek, for example, in the comically laboured versification of Narcissus’s mother Lyriope, who responds to Tiresias’s prophecy that Naricussus will die if he comes to know himself:     I bethinke at Delph, One Phibbus walls is writte: Knowe thyselfe. Shall hee not know himself, and so bee laught on, When as Apollo cries, gnotti seauton?55

The comedy of a maternal nymph citing her auctoritas in Greek, and the rhyming of that Greek as a punchline with the English

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feminine-​ended ‘and so bee laught on’, provides a formally anti-​ climactic effect that is actually dependent on skilled, if parodic, versification. But, perhaps more importantly, the auctoritas presented in the bathetic half-​Greek line is that on which the whole humanist educational project was built: the philosophical invocation, nosce teipsum, which informs humanist education. Lyriope indicates that a young man must acquire self-​knowledge in order to win respect and avoid being ridiculed. This injunction was frequently reiterated in the grammar school syllabus, and discussed by numerous writers including Erasmus, whose Adagia ‘stressed the difficulty of knowing oneself, the obligation to improve oneself, and the need to observe others in order to understand oneself’.56 However, this is clearly not knowledge acquired in the fourth form and then forgotten, but rather an underlying principle for education itself, the grounding in which scholars were expected to grow, and the challenge presented by the college household to the young men who lived so closely together in it. To ‘know himselfe from other men’ is both to understand oneself as distinct from others, and to learn about oneself from watching others, and colleges provided opportunity for intensive study of other young men alongside classical auctores. That there is also a professional playhouse source for the St John’s Narcissus, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, might be barely respectable: the playhouse, the plays presented there, and the actors who presented them were regarded with considerable suspicion within the universities. In 1584 and 1593, statutes forbade players from performing within five miles of Oxford.57 There is evidence, much discussed by scholars of the university plays, that the authorities at Cambridge, at least, were very keen to differentiate the activities of student actors from those of professional players:  academic drama was considered respectable, playhouse plays not.58 Furthermore, the requirements of the curriculum and the obligation on students to remain within Oxford for most of the year ought to have curtailed student visits to the London playhouses. However, it is difficult to be certain that university authorities were consistent in their attitudes, between the universities and indeed across time. And of course letters and legislation can sometimes indicate, precisely by their efforts to assert or forbid something, that the undesirable thing is happening, the contradicted attitude common. If the student actors do not directly acknowledge their indebtedness to the playhouse Shakespeare, though, their play echoes him structurally and verbally. The Porter

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is unafraid to acknowledge that he is an afficionado of the Globe. As he clears the stage at the end of the performance he remarks to the audience that he has ‘seene a farre better play at the theater’.59 The all-​male community of the college household inevitably required that men take on the roles of women:  it was also true, of course, that the professional stage required male performers to play female roles, and perhaps this influenced the ways in which the students performing in college plays understood theatrical drag; certainly cross-​dressing appears to have been occasion for anxiety and mirth in both playhouse and college settings. Flute tries to avoid playing the woman’s role because ‘I have a beard coming’; the ‘Second actor’ in Narcissus is apparently anxious about his ability to present femininity: Sec.   Have you ere a gentlewomans picture in the house, or noe? Por.  Why? Sec.  If you have, doe but hange it yonder, & twill make mee act in conye.60

Lee suggests that either the performance will be ‘incony’, meaning delicate, or that ‘acting in coney’ must mean to play a woman’s part.61 The Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. cunny) supports the former reading, and the play does not elsewhere make explicit that Secundus plays a woman’s role. It is thus possible that a woman’s portrait simply inspires a ‘delicate’ performance of a man’s role. However, given that at least some of the actors must undertake female roles in the play, it seems far more likely that Secundus seeks a painting to inspire a delicate performance as a woman: the immediate presence of a female portrait will enable him to play the female roles more convincingly. Or perhaps the implication is more that the actor must learn from art about that which is institutionally impossible in an Oxford college as on the professional stage: a woman. The lack of female portraits in Oxford colleges is often remarked today, and indeed there have been active campaigns, for example in Trinity College, to include women on the walls. Though unsurprising in historically all-​male institutions, the dominance of portraits of men creates an ongoing sense for women of exclusion from the college household. Though not necessarily for theatrical purposes, students may benefit from having the images of influential women available for imitation. The female characters within the play of Narcissus offer an intriguing view of womanhood as it appeared from inside the all-​male

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household. In addition to the Greek-​ citing maternal nymph Lyriope, there are two young women, Cloris and Florida, who adore Narcissus as if he were the sun, and seek, moon-​like, to reflect his beams: ‘Shine thou on mee … Ile beare thee light.’62 The function to which they aspire is thus not dissimilar to the fate that befalls the other woman in the play, Echo, who is doomed only to repeat, to reflect, the words of others. Cloris, Florida, and Echo, female suitors of Narcissus, do not, apparently, learn to know themselves from others, though they could be mirrors in which young men can reflect (on) themselves. These women are, in a way, intra-​theatrical female audiences—​and the Christmas Prince provides intriguing evidence that actual women might similarly function as a female fanbase. After the Epilogue to Periander, which begins, ironically, ‘Gentlemen, welcome’ and then asks for applause—​‘By many hands was Periander slaine, /​Your gentler hands will giue him liue againe’—​we are told that: A Certain gentlewoman vpon the hearing of those two last verses, made two other verses, and in way of an aunswer sent them to the Prince, who having first plaied Periander afterwards himselfe also pronounced the Epilogue.              the verses were  these.          If that my hand or hart him life Could give         By hand and hart should Periander live.63

Clearly there were non-​ college members in the audience of Periander, as there was at least one woman of a certain social status. She ‘answers’ the Prince by mirroring his verse request for life-​ giving applause, and her letter appears to be an admiring, perhaps flirtatious one. She might remind us of the behaviour of women in the audience at the professional playhouse, who, at least if John Manningham’s 1602 diary entry is to be believed, set up trysts with actors they had admired on the stage.64 However, this gentlewoman seems hesitant, if not in her admiration then in her confidence as to what that admiration will achieve. She seems to be sure neither that the Periander-​actor will respond to the offering of her hand and heart, nor that her hand or heart could make the character of Periander live—​whether by applause, or perhaps even by writing more than these two lines. She might, perhaps, aspire to write, but she is in the end only a female fan. The Christmas Prince does not relate how the Prince responds: Cloris and Florida are shortly spurned by Narcissus, and then depart with a revealing comment on the roles they have played: ‘Looke you for maids no more, our parte is done, /​Wee come but to bee scornd, & so are gone.’65

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The all-​male nature of the college household as paralleling that of the early modern stage is also commented on in The Seven Days of the Week:               Enter a woman Chorus. Woman: A play without a woman in’t           Is like a face without a  nose;        Therefore I come that strife to stinte        Though I haue nought to say God knowes;        And since I can no matter handle        I’le come sometymes to snuffe their candles.66

This un-​named character makes explicit that she is ‘the token woman’, appearing only because there has to be a female in a play; she thus seems to stand for womankind. Her apparent conviction of the importance of a woman to a play is intriguing and perhaps surprising:  ‘Woman’ has nothing of her own to say, cannot be entrusted with any ‘matter’, and thus serves only to appear now and again for manual labour. This is certainly ‘Woman’ as seen by the college household—​excluded from academic study, by which students learn to debate serious ‘matter’, and consequently unable to speak in her own right, women simply appear on a Tuesday to pick up laundry. Of course, ‘Woman’ is, presumably, being played by a male student and thus represents not female actors but female characters—​this could thus also be a reflection on ‘Woman’ as the students perceive her in the plays they watch, read, and write. She may be present, even central, as a nose is on a face, but like a nose her role is receptive and she cannot speak her own words, nor carry the action or define the ‘matter’ herself. Christmas and candles at St John’s, 1636–​1637: Grobiana’s Nuptials ‘Woman’ appears at the end of each Act of Seven Days to change the candles, drawing attention to a material circumstance of dramatic performance in a college hall that is parallelled in the indoor theatres like Blackfriars, where the length of an Act may even have been dictated by the life of a candle and the necessity that candles be replaced. That the Acts of Seven Days are far shorter than the life of a candle must have added humour. But candles seem also to have held a particular significance at St John’s, where an enormous Christmas Candle was burned on the high table during the twelve nights of Christmas. As John Brand records, an ancient stone candle-​socket, carved with the agnus dei, was used to hold the candle, and can still be seen in the college buttery.67 The agnus

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dei, of course, is associated with the college’s patron saint, John the Baptist, who declared on seeing Christ: ‘Behold the lamb of God’ (John 1:29). Furthermore, John the Evangelist writes of John the Baptist that ‘he came as witness, to bear witness about the light’—​ that is, the light of Christ that is celebrated in Christmas readings. Thus, although the association of candle-​light and Christmas is clearly far from unique to St John’s, there may have been a particular association of Christmas Candles with the college, one that motivated a Christmas Prince play: After Suppr there was a private Showe perfourmed in ye manner of an Inter-​lude, contayninge the order of ye Saturnall’s, and shewinge the first cause of Christmas-​candels, and in the ended there was an application made to the Day, and Natiuite of Christ.68

As the St John’s play Saturnalia shows, the pagan feast involved inversion of the social order, with masters serving their slaves—​ much like the Christmas Prince tradition; it also corresponded to the period of Advent in the Christian calendar, associated with the winter solstice and, as it was known through the writings of Macrobius, was celebrated with numerous candles symbolising the quest for knowledge and truth.69 Details of the Roman Saturnalia could have been available to students in any number of classical writings including those of Horace, Justinus, Pliny, Lucien, and Suetonius.70 In the ancient world gifts, including candles, were exchanged. Similarly, John Brand records, in English tradition candles were given by chaundlers and grocers to their customers at Christmas.71 In the St John’s play, Hercules declares ‘sint hominu loco /​Postea sacrati cerej accensi deo’ [henceforth, let consecrated candles be lit for the god in place of men],72 and the Epilogue to the play, explaining the parallels between the feasts of Saturn and Christ, notes that as sacras lucernas [holy lamps] were lit in the temple of Saturn, so the vera lux [true light] of Christ comes into the world.73 If Saturnalia brings classical knowledge to bear to explain a traditional practice of the St John’s household—​the Christmas Candle—​a later student play satirises that practice alongside many other domestic details of college life. Charles May’s Grobiana’s Nuptials was presented at St John’s during the Christmas revelries of 1636–​1637.74 Probably coincidentally, in 1637 the college invested 5s. in the purchase of two brass candlesticks for the chapel.75 In Grobiana’s Nuptials, candles feature heavily but are stripped of

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all religious significance and endowed with decidedly non-​spiritual significance—​indeed the play as a whole is entirely unconcerned with spiritual matters, and satirises instead the social order, parodying table manners, sartorial fashion, and the conventions of law and romance through the basest scatological humour. It is a one-​act play, in nine scenes, that presents Grobiana’s many suitors and her choice of Tantoblin, who assaults another suitor, Ursin, but is then reconciled to him in court. There is a dinner at which Grobiana meets her suitors, and at the end, the characters depart for the heroine’s nuptial feast. The play was presented to the St John’s president, almost certainly after dinner or between the courses of a meal, so that the audience are identified with the Grobian guests. The kitchen is ‘offstage’ but brought onstage by the Cook, Lorrell, who is famous for a ‘flying pudding’. This is a parody of spectacular works of culinary art like Christ Church’s marzipan Troy, but is in fact nothing but an accident—​Lorrell dropped a wet pudding in a barrell of feathers and could not be bothered to clean the feathers off. Nonetheless, Lorrell ‘has’t deserv’d the bayes from all poets else’—​poetry and cookery are made equivalent, and slovenly cookery at that.76 The two primary functions of the St John’s household, teaching the humanities and feeding its scholars, are also shown to be connected through their use of an important material resource: paper. Tantoblin tells us of the ‘Auter’, perhaps the playwright, Charles May, that he hath a monopoly for all Butterie bookes, kitchinge bookes, besides all declamations and theames, which to the wonder of the world he spends very punctually, and constantly, you scarce can get any paper to put under pyes, against a good tyme for him.77

The numerous books at the author’s disposal appear to be both the volumes of the household accounts and recipes, and scholarly tomes. However, he does not appear to read these books or write in them, but rather to ‘spend’ them, so prolifically that the cooks no longer have any paper to use in baking pies. The author has in fact torn up papers for his personal use in the privy. This suggestion is reinforced by Tantoblin’s exit line: ‘Lets away, my belly rumbles. Ursin, hast any paper?’78 The characters effectively declare their own script to be toilet roll, though the comparison does not offend them since the Grobians consider bodily functions not only necessary but also good.

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Two scenes feature the Grobian court, the precise nature of which is elusive, but the functions of which are both legal and institutional—​it tries a case, and it also has the power to admit members to the society of Grobians. It is perhaps like the governing body of an Oxford college, since colleges historically had the power to arbitrate crimes involving their members. The Grobian court’s proceedings, however, recall the inept legal blunderings and malapropisms of Dogberry and Verges (‘But now to the matter, for as I conceive, we have not yet spoke anything to the purpose’) and its final adjudication in the matter of Tantoblin’s blow to Ursin is pragmatic, but scarcely attentive to the law: ‘Let that passe, a blowe … Laugh upon there and be friendes.’79 The Grobian court is presided over by Vanslotten, a chaundler, who complains that the court session is keeping him from his business of making candles. He is apparently over-​worked because of the festive season. This chaundler, at least, is unhappy about having to give his customers Yule candles: Vanslotten: I told my dislike concerneinge newyeares gifts, and I  hope it is ordered soe that we shall have noe more Christmas Candles given. Tantoblin: It was most superfluous, I have seene a candle soe bigge it would serve to take the altitude and profunditie of the great Mogulls barbadoes as well as my pole. Ursin: Besides the intolerable charge of makeing snuffers for that great candle. Tantoblin: Snuffers? Our uppon u’m, that’s a thinge not to be suffer’d in a Grobian commonweale. Vanslotten: True, Tantoblin, they cut of the theife that steales the tallow for our profit. Tantoblin: Noe, every candle shall end of himself, goes out peaceably without an extinguisher, that the insence proper the burial may be smelt and perfume the roome.80

Tantoblin’s reply to Vanslotten’s complaint, played as Grobiana’s Nuptials was in St John’s, must surely describe the apparently celebrated college candle, so enormous it renders further candles unnecessary. Ursin’s practical concern about the costs of snuffers is dismissed by the others because the guiding principle of Grobianism is the rejection of law and order, and of social convention and nicety. Vanslotten apparently has a racket involving thieves stealing back tallow for recycling; Tantoblin adds that a snuffer is unnecessary since a candle will go out of its own accord, and to the Grobian the resulting odour is a perfume to be savoured.

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The stink of the extinguished candle is invoked as an aid to reviving the faint: when the love-​sick (though also wind-​afflicted) Grobiana swoons, her father, Grobianus, enjoins her maid Ungartered to blow out a candle and hold it to her nose. He explains that: ‘There’s nothinge so good, they say, to revive an old Grobian as this smell. Feathers are nothinge to it, a turd new laid is better then most receipts, but that is rare.’81 Grobiana, like a candle, turns out to be ‘not quite extinguish’d’, and comes round with an exclamation on the ‘ravishinge odor’ that has revived her:  Grobianus explains that the curative powers of the candle are a family secret, better than ‘harts horne, or bezar stone, or patable gold’.82 The absurd exchange parodies the treatment of the romantic heroine, whose swoon might more conventionally be treated with smelling salts or nosegays; household remedies are reduced to a scatological reference, and turds pronounced rare. The playful inversions of Grobiana’s Nuptials seem to offer a Saturnalian revel in which the Fellows of St John’s could recognise aspects of the college household life parodied, and its sacred objects brought low. Grobiana’s Nuptials, like The Seven Days of the Week, finally makes the candle a theatrical object. Ungartered comments to Grobianus, talking of his daughter:  ‘Did your highnes marke what a yawne shee gave, truely beyond my stretch, when I  hold your worships candlestickes in a play night.’83 Actors in indoor performances often had to carry their own light, or have a servant carry their lights for them.84 Ungartered has clearly been employed in theatricals in the Grobian household as the candle-​bearer for her master: as the Grobian court reflects the governing body of a college, so the Grobian household imitates the St John’s College practice of in-​ house amateur theatrical entertainment. The playwright’s satire seems concerned to parody theatrical, as well as collegiate, practices:  Grobianus’s Prologue comments scathingly on the Prologues of the theatre in which ‘a Coxe-​combe in a cloke must scrape his lease of leggs to begge Sir Tottipate’s applause in dogrime verse’.85 His Epilogue also attacks the obsequious nature of the theatrical Epilogue, for he comes ‘Not to begge applause’ but ‘to tell you … You may goe away, the play is done’.86 The line is particularly offensive in an in-​house production, since Grobian dismisses the men of St John’s from their own home ground. Grobian’s blunt rudeness is his point of pride:  he introduces the play as ‘sport’ in which the audience will see ‘the true shapes of men, not in the visor and shaddow of garbes and postures, but verie pure pate man, such as nature made u’m’.87 In the context

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of the Prologue, the speech attacks the affectations of theatre, a place of ‘shadows’ where costumes and poses obscure men’s true form, at the same time as attacking the performative conventions of polite society, the traditional target of Grobianism as a literary convention popularised by Sebastian Brant’s German Narrenschiff (1494). Brant’s ‘Saint Grobian’ is the patron saint of drunkards and gluttons, and has appalling table manners; Dedekind’s Latin Grobianus et Grobiana (1549) expanded Brant’s theme and was translated into English in 1605 by ‘R. F. Gent’, who explains that he seeks to teach men to eschew bestial behaviour by portraying its ugliness, but while describing vices as ‘rusticke’ also challenges the social order: Had we not all one father ‘Adam’, and one mother ‘Eve’? Shall earth and ashes thrust thee downe? At that who would not grieve? When as our Grandsire ‘Adam’ dig’d, and Grandam ‘Eve’ span, Who then, I pray, amongst us all was the best gentleman?88

In citing the famous dictum by which John Ball stirred up the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, ‘R. F.’ highlights the potential for Grobianism to be more than a comedy of bad manners.89 Charles May’s play, however, shows little interest in social revolution, and simply lampoons college institutions in a play that simultaneously lampoons the conventions of theatre. What connection is being drawn between college household and theatre? According to Grobianus, the honesty of the Grobians is guaranteed by their lack of show. They do not dress fashionably, or perform according to convention. They are not polite, and they are not actors. It was apparently important to the student actors of St John’s and other colleges to distinguish their theatrical activities from those of the professional theatre, to insist that they were not, by profession, actors. However, manners are, also, a type of performance, and are governed by rules developed in institutions like monasteries and colleges to facilitate communal living. Perhaps, also, since the seventeenth-​ century undergraduate intake was increasingly upper-​class and dilettante, the Grobians represent a protest against St John’s becoming a training ground for life in society rather than the Church or the academy. However, at the end of the play, the candidates Jobernole and Hunch are admitted to the Grobian hall, and are sworn in with the following oath: You must sweare never to buy a suit but at Longe lane, and that on of our fashion, its noe matter though it be lac’d like a footman, never to weare stockins, but when they are ruff’d like a pigeon, not

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gloves, till they have beene twice dippt in a dripping panne, nor shoes, till the phisitian hath given them ore to a dunghill; you shall sweare allsoe never to eat beefe, till the salt be alive in’t, nor any meat till on saviour has put out anothere, soe kisse the butter, and grease yourselves into our companie.90

The Grobian community rebels against the niceties of polite society and the order of institutions, but in breaking one set of laws they simply set up another. The drama that was generated in the Oxford college households, as well as those of Cambridge and the Inns of Court, forms a significant proportion of the surviving scripts of early English drama. Oxford drama was often theatrically innovative, when it could draw on large budgets unavailable to the commercial—​and economically precarious—​playhouses.91 At the same time it presents, from the medieval through the early modern periods, a continuous tradition of amateur playing; of household performance, often accompanied by a meal, in private spaces; of festive, occasional theatre. Nevertheless, it remains obscure by comparison with the drama of the playhouse, the conventions of which are more readily and generally accessible, transmitted in traditions that continue in the modern theatre. Many of the traditions of the Oxford college household do survive, but are opaque to all but the insider and indeed often observed but not understood by college students; and although there is plenty of play-​making among today’s students, the tradition of institutional college production is long gone. In order to appreciate many aspects of Oxford college plays, it may be necessary to study first, in the archives and volumes of a college history, the material contents of the medieval college household:  the intellectual capital colleges preserved and transmitted, and the provision for the body they ensured—​bed and board.92 Notes esearch for this article was funded by the Swiss National Science R Foundation project grant, ‘Early Drama at Oxford’, PI Elisabeth Dutton. 1 See Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, ed. John R. Elliott, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 846–​8. 2 REED: Oxford, ed. Elliott, p. 848. 3 See Tiffany Stern’s keynote speech at the conference ‘Digitizing the Stage:  Rethinking the Early Modern Theatre Archive’, University of Oxford, July 2017. 4 An account of these elements of the play, recorded in Holinshed, is provided in REED: Oxford, ed. Elliott, pp. 190–​1.

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5 See William Conrad Costin, The History of St John’s College, Oxford:  1598–​1890 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 4–​5. The earliest, medieval colleges and halls of the University of Oxford, endowed by religious orders, guilds, and wealthy individuals, made higher education available to young men who, unlike the nobility, would not have been able to afford private tutors. This education in all cases was intended to prepare young men for service in the Church. 6 Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship:  Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 37. 7 Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 16–​17. 8 Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship:  the first chapter of Feingold’s book discusses the statutes of colleges and universities in helpful detail. 9 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 57. 10 Seth Ward, Vindicae Academarium (Oxford, 1654). Reprinted in Allen G. Debus (ed.), Science and Education in the Seventeenth Century: The Webster-​Ward Debate (London: Macdonald, 1970), p. 50. 11 Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 77–​8. 12 Costin, History of St John’s College, Oxford, p. 32. 13 Costin, History of St John’s College, Oxford, p. 18. 14 See The Christmas Prince, ed. Frederick Samuel Boas (Oxford: Malone Society, 1922). Citations from The Christmas Prince are from this edition, by page and line number. 15 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 13, ll. 342–​3. 16 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, pp. 11–​12, ll. 300–​3. 17 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 285, ll. 9230–​4. 18 On the possible significance of the use of Latin or English for a university play, see Stephanie Allen, Elisabeth Dutton, and James McBain, ‘Rehabilitating Academic Drama’, in Pamela M. King (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Early Drama and Performance (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 221–​36. 19 See REED: Oxford, ed. Elliott, p. 195 and discussion in Allen et al., ‘Rehabilitating Academic Drama’. 20 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 55, ll. 142–​5. 21 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 27, ll. 841–​6. 22 The 2013 production of Gager’s Dido by the Early Drama at Oxford project was staged in the original venue, Christ Church hall, and deployed some of the tables as staging. Footage of the production is available at www.edox.org.uk. 23 This play is discussed further below. It survives in one manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 212 ff. 67–​82. See Narcissus, a Twelfe night merriment played by youths of the parish at the College of S. John the Baptist in Oxford, A.D. 1602, ed. Margaret L.

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Lee (London: David Nutt, 1893). References are to Lee’s edition, by line number only, as there are no act or scene divisions. This citation is at ll. 104–​5. 24 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 28, ll. 853–​5. 25 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 56, ll. 1432–​9. Boas suggests that the author of this play is also the author of Narcissus, though his evidence is inconclusive. See The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. xvi. 26 The Christmas Prince writes of Time’s Complaint being ‘publicly performed in the college hall before the whole university’, by contrast with The Seven Days of the Week, which was acted ‘privately in the President’s lodgings’ (ed. Boas, p. xv). 27 Ovid’s Metamorphoses were taught at grammar school, most usually in the second half of the fourth form year. See further Lyn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom:  Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. pp. 175–​ 80. The St John’s dramatist, however, has expanded 150 lines of Ovid into a play about ten times as long. On the adaptation see The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, pp. xii–​xiv. 28 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 130, ll. 4013–​14. 29 Examples of performances of college dramas directed to town audiences do exist. Club Law, an English comedy, was performed at Clare Hall, Cambridge around 1600. Thomas Fuller’s account of the play in his 1655 history of the university describes an audience including ‘the mayor, with his brethren, and their wives’. The play lampoons the very townspeople who were in the audience. See Thomas Fuller, The History of the University of Cambridge from the Conquest to the Year 1634, ed. Marmaduke Prickett and Thomas Wright (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1840), pp. 294–​5. Note, though, that the play’s modern editor suggests that Fuller’s account of the performance may be somewhat fictionalised. See Club Law: A Comedy Acted in Clare Hall, Cambridge about 1599–​1600, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. liv. 30 The Christmas Prince comments that ‘wee should bee ashamed heere to insert’ the play in the manuscript ‘if wee thought it would please no better in the reading then it did in hearing’ (ed. Boas, p.  102, ll. 3034–​5). 31 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 116, ll. 3516–​17; p. 114, ll. 3433–​7; p. 125, ll. 3822–​3. Studioso is also the name of one of the two students whose academic progress, through the trivium, is the subject of the much more extended allegory of the anonymous play presented by students of St John’s College, Cambridge, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (1598). 32 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, pp. 109–​10, ll. 3257–​97. Clinias’ speech recalls the protest of the Poor Man that ‘interrupts’ Lyndsay’s Satire of

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the Three Estates, and Bellicoso’s complaint about the army’s failure to look after its veterans is echoed in Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman. 33 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 124, ll. 3791–​3. The theme of student poverty seems a perennial trope of English literature, at least from Chaucer’s treatment of the student Nicholas in The Miller’s Tale. The sequel to The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, known as The Return from Parnassus, presents the difficulty experienced by the graduates Studioso and Philomusus in making a living. 34 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 129, ll. 3962–​70. 35 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 115, ll. 3446–​51. Clinias’s rural accent is indicated by spellings such as ‘zure’ for ‘sure’ and ‘chill’ for ‘I’ll’. These appear to be conventional spellings for rural speech—​compare for example the spellings of Edgar’s speech when he is disguised as Poor Tom in King Lear. The convention is discussed in the fourth chapter of Jonathan Hope’s Shakespeare and Language:  Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance (London: Methuen, 2010). 36 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 114, l. 3415 sd. 37 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 46, l. 1167. 38 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 55, ll. 1405–​6. 39 See Narcissus, ed. Lee, p. xx. 40 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 55, ll. 1407–​12. 41 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 135, ll. 4150–​2. 42 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 120, ll. 4170–​1. 43 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 147, ll. 4500–​1. 44 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 139, ll. 4253–​4. 45 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 140, ll. 4268–​9. 46 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 135, ll. 4148–​9. 47 Costin, History of St John’s College, p. 18. 48 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 212, ff. 67–​82 (f. 67r). 49 See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 4 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), II. 395. 50 See further Elisabeth Dutton, ‘ “My boy shall knowe himself from other men”: Active Spectating, Annunciation and the St John’s College Narcissus’, Medieval English Theatre, 36 (2017), 68–​83. 51 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 91–​4. 52 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 508–​11. 53 Narcissus, ed. Lee, l. 731. 54 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 736–​9. 55 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 257–​68. 56 See Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-​ Knowledge (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), p. 3. 57 See REED: Oxford, ed. Elliott, p. 195, and discussion in Allen et al., ‘Rehabilitating Academic Drama’. 58 On this topic, and for further bibliography, see Allen et  al., ‘Rehabilitating Academic Drama’. 59 Narcissus, ed. Lee, l .751.

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60 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 118–​22. 61 Narcissus, ed. Lee, note to line 122. 62 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 394–​6. 63 Narcissus, ed. Lee, ll. 9217–​26. 64 John Manningham’s Diary, entry for March 1602, in London, British Library Harley MS 5353, f. 29v. 65 Narcissus, ed. Lee ll. 448–​9. 66 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 141, ll. 4310–​15. 67 John Brand, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 2 vols (London: Reeves & Turner, 1882–​1883), I. 467. 68 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 46, ll. 1167–​71. 69 Macrobius, Saturnalia  1.1.8–​9. For commentary, see Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography:  From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–​1177 (Gainesville:  University Press of Florida, 1994), p. 71. 70 Horace, Satires 2.7.4, Justinus, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus 7, 43.3, Pliny the Younger, Letters 8.7.1, Suetonius, Life of Augustus 71, Lucius, Saturnalia 1. 71 Brand, Popular Antiquities, I. 455. 72 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 53, ll. 1351–​2. 73 The Christmas Prince, ed. Boas, p. 53, ll. 1389–​90. 74 On Charles May’s authorship of the play, see Elisabeth Dutton and James McBain, ‘Fart for Fart’s Sake:  Fooling through the Body in Grobiana’s Nuptials’, Theta: Théâtre anglais, 12 (2016), 149–​70. 75 Costin, History of St John’s College, p. 70. 76 Grobiana’s Nuptials is cited by line number from Grobiana’s Nuptials, in Grobianus in England, ed. Ernst Rühl (Berlin:  Mayer and Müller, 1904). This citation is from ll. 120–​1. 77 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 210–​14. 78 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 283–​4. 79 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 860–​1 and ll. 875–​81. 80 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 152–​82. 81 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 776–​9. 82 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 788–​9. 83 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 7732–​4. 84 This practice has been recently been revived in the Sam Wanamaker theatre, which reproduces the lighting conditions of the early modern playhouse. The Staging the Henrician Court project at Hampton Court Palace, directed by Greg Walker and Tom Betteridge, experimented with reviving the practice in household—​albeit royal household—​drama. 85 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 7–​9. 86 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 921–​2. 87 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 18–​20. 88 ‘R. F.  gent’. The Schoole of Slovenrie, in Grobianus in England, ed. Rühl, ll. 424–​27. These sources are cited and discussed in more detail in Dutton and McBain, ‘Fart for Fart’s Sake’.

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89 The Revolt remained at the forefront of the English consciousness. The anonymous play The Life and Death of Jack Straw had been published in 1593. 90 Grobiana’s Nuptials, ed. Rühl, ll. 896–​904. 91 For example, Inigo Jones designed the first perspectival set for a performance at Christ Church. 92 The Early Drama at Oxford project seeks to reanimate appreciation of Oxford plays by staging them in ways that echo, creatively, the circumstances of their original creation. See the project website, www. edox.org.uk

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6 Household song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale Sarah Stanbury

The last verse tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begins in a house of music and birdsong. Phebus, who lives on earth and has slain the serpent, plays all the instruments. His singing is so melodious that it surpasses Amphion, legendary founder of Thebes, who ‘with his syngyng walled that citee’ (IX. 117).1 Musical structure, the comparison to Amphion suggests, has power over built space:  architecture and song are both forms of creative design. Phebus’s caged crow further harmonises the god’s home, the opening to the tale also says. As strangely white as a snow-​ white swan, the crow, whom Phebus also teaches to talk, sings more beautifully than a nightingale: Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, Syngen so wonder myrily and weel. (IX. 136–​8)

Phebus carefully nurtures the crow, ‘fostred many a day’ (IX. 131), in a cage that seems a structural parallel to the city created by Amphion’s musical wall-​building. Birdsong and human song are foundational and protective, these opening analogies suggest. Central to the domestic soundscape, music is a structured art that builds a safe and pleasant place to live. In this chapter I reflect on home as a site for the production, and, ultimately, the silencing, of affective sound. In so doing, I tease out desires that elide dwelling with song and lyric in the Manciple’s Tale as well as in Chaucer’s writings more broadly. If musical exuberance opens the Manciple’s Tale, it hardly concludes it, with the lyric harmonies of the opening fractured by domestic violence and threatened by warnings about the dangers of speech. For all its edenic beginnings in a world of sweet song, the story is ostensibly about endings, among them the end of music and poetry. In the Parson’s Prologue immediately following the Manciple’s Tale,

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the day is literally and figuratively ending: it is four o’clock in the afternoon, and a time of long shadows.2 When Harry Bailly, the host, invites the Parson to conclude the tale-​telling game with a fable, the Parson retorts, ‘Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me’ (X. 31): you won’t get a fable out of me. Instead, the Parson answers, he will ‘knytte up al this feeste and make an ende’ of the pilgrimage with a prose tale (X. 47), eschewing the lies of fable and verse for the truths of  prose. Those lies would seem to be potently compressed in the Manciple’s short fable, itself a story about renunciations. Ever since Donald Howard’s observation, in the 1970s, that the tale plays an important part in the closing design of the Canterbury Tales, readers have recognised and worked to unpack the tale’s complex commentary on language.3 As the tale’s often exasperated readers have noted, the story itself seems inarticulate on some level, its various threads tangling and never fully resolving in a coherent story. Peter Travis calls the Manciple’s Tale an ‘undigestible lump of a tale’ that is ‘anti-​ aesthetic, reader-​ unfriendly, and disequilibrating’.4 Yet however awkward or even unpleasant readers have found the fable, most now agree that language, and the ‘relationship between words and things’, as Britton Harwood puts it, is central to the tale’s meaning.5 The tale is about the perils of court poetry, Louise Fradenburg argues, with Phebus a figure of the prince or patron and the crow a figure of the court poet, fatally ‘counterfeiting’ the courtier’s speech. Both wife and crow, from different kinds of gilded cages, rebel against the prince—​the wife by insulting his station with ‘oon of litel reputacioun’ (IX. 253) and the crow by speaking truth to power.6 Christopher Cannon argues that the Manciple’s Tale, the Friar’s Tale, and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale comprise a ‘language group’ that explores the political or real-​time consequences of language, with the Manciple giving a particularly dire picture of those outcomes.7 When Phebus’s wife has sex with another man, the crow watches from its cage, saying not a word until Phebus returns home.8 Then the crow tells him what he has seen, first in bird song, ‘Cokkow! Cokkow, Cokkow!’ then in human language: ‘blered is thyn ye /​With oon of litel reputacioun’ (IX 243; 252–​3). In a rage, Phebus takes his bow and shoots his wife, then quickly repents and turns on the bird, calling him a traitor who must have made up the story. As punishment, he strips the crow of both song and language, pulls out his white feathers to turn him black, and throws him out the door:

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And to the crowe he stirte, and that anon, And pulled his white fetheres everychon, And made hym blak, and refte hym al his song, And eek his speche, and out at dore hym slong Unto the devel... (IX. 303–​7)

The outcome of speaking truth to power, that is, may well be death. Language is useless or, worse, a tool for obfuscating the truth, as measured by Phebus’s belated and revisionist apostrophe proclaiming his wife’s innocence: ‘O deere wyf! […] /​O rakel hand, to doon so foule amys!’ (IX. 274; 278).9 With this Ovidian fable, poised as it is in a penultimate location in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer addresses concerns that recur throughout his writing, especially the reliability of language and truth in story-​telling. Less critical attention has been paid to the tale’s soundworld—​ to its distinctions among song and other forms of vocalising and sound production—​ and to home, the place where song is both produced and silenced. In considering the siting of sound, I  borrow Emily Thompson’s idea of a soundscape as ‘simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’.10 A  soundscape combines both the physical production of sound as well as interpretive practices that make sound culturally legible. Sound involves both a producer and a listener, and the listener filters what she or he hears (or tunes out) through various registers of attentiveness. Soundscape study conjoins place and noise:  what is ambient, or part of the background? How do we cohabit with sound and associate certain sounds, or songs, with lived environments? Today we are so accustomed to living with sounds produced by the combustion of fossil fuels that we hardly hear them: tires on the interstate a mile away; a neighbour’s leaf blower; the refrigerator. Soundscape studies have perforce addressed modernity, with its ever-​increasing technology and record of audible traces, though recently efforts are attempting to recover early soundworlds. The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project uses digital acoustic modelling to recreate the auditory experience—​complete with the barking of dogs and clatter of horses’ hooves—​of listening to Donne preach his Gunpowder Sermon in St Paul’s churchyard on 5 November 1622.11 In The Sense of Sound, Emma Dillon explores artistic evocations of sound in medieval France, from the hubbub of prayer to street vendors, as signs of civic identity. Offering as an example

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a thirteenth-​century polytextual motet, a song, she argues, can also be a soundscape. Through the cacophony produced by multiple competing voices that together cancel out the sense of the words for sound, the motet is also ‘supramusical’, a ‘soundtrack of the city’, registering both the noise of Paris as well as an idea of Paris, whose acoustic vitality—​ and cacophony—​ contemporary writers celebrated as a sign of the city’s magnificence.12 In this chapter, I reflect on the Manciple’s Tale as a household soundworld comprised of voices and song, forms of what this volume calls household knowledge, associated with home. In the Tale, the contexts for ‘song’ point towards both melody as well as lyric; and while lyric composition increasingly diverged from melody in the late fourteenth century, the domestic soundworld of the tale resonates with a diffuse polyphonic medley of music, lyric, and birdsong.13 Phebus plays ‘on every mynstralcie’, and his singing is ‘a melodie’ (IX. 113–​14). The crow’s ‘song’ may offer a verse accompaniment. In comparing the crow’s song to a nightingale and in distinguishing ‘song’ from ‘countrefete’ and learned human speech, the Manciple draws on a commonplace for the poet, or for poetry.14 By endowing Phebus and his crow with musical gifts, the Manciple houses two singers, or poets, at home, with composition at home a charged association for Chaucer. Indeed, house and birdcage are twin kinds of residence. The relationships in the Manciple’s Tale are capacious and overlapping, eliding Phebus with the crow and the crow with the wife, with both Phebus and Crow—​ bard and bird—​alternate figures for the poet. As I  have argued elsewhere, Chaucer returns repeatedly to the home as an imagined locus for reading, writing, or creative plotting; the bed, as a place for reading, is the point of departure for the dream vision in the Parliament of Fowls and the Book of the Duchess; the bedroom as a place for scheming sets the fabliau in motion in the Miller’s Tale; and a meeting in a private study, site for the sale of illusions, sets the stage for the denouement of the Franklin’s Tale.15 The House of Fame situates the clamour of narrative itself within a literal and figurative ‘house’. In the House of Fame, Chaucer also gives one of his most autobiographical clues to his own reading and writing practices when the Eagle scolds ‘Geffrey’ for his antisocial habit of going not to the tavern or inn at the end of the workday but home, where he sits like a hermit in front of another book (ll. 647–​60). What evidence is there for music and birdsong as part of the soundscape of houses in which Chaucer and his contemporaries would

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have spent their time? What kinds of musical instruments were likely to be played at home in late-​medieval London? The crow in the Manciple’s Tale is a caged pet; what can we tell from inventories and manuscript images about the keeping of caged songbirds in fourteenth-​century households—​and how does the tale imagine the relationship between birdsong and human musicality? The Manciple’s Tale begins in a mythic space of musical exuberance, and stages the later foreclosures of song, which happen when Phebus breaks his instruments and deprives the crow of its singing voice, through a picture of the home as a technological assemblage, with walls, cage, bird, and musical instruments all material agents in the production of the good household.16 From the outset the Manciple distinguishes between speech as learned and imitative and song as natural or intrinsic: whereas Phebus teaches his crow to talk and ‘countrefete’ human speech, the bird’s nightingale-​like voice, along with its white feathers, appears to be an originary, avian gift that, like Phebus’s musicality, has a structural association with home. The tale is a fable, of course, and set in a mythic world of origins; yet repeatedly the Manciple reminds us of its proximity to human inhabitation and ordinary home life—​‘heere in this erthe adoun’ where Phebus ‘dwells’ (IX. 105). Middle English ‘dwell’, like the word in modern English, has connotations of proximity and domesticity; to dwell is to be near and not alien.17 Like most fourteenth-​century homes, Phebus’s is comprised of immediate family and others, in this case his wife and the crow, in the role of both pet and clever apprentice, learning human speech or his master’s craft. The tale’s fabliau-​like social hierarchies are equally familiar:  the jealous husband, the rebellious wife, the clever and subtly treacherous tenant. Even the Manciple’s odd asides on the class-​based relativism of his terms for the wife (a ‘lemman’ or a ‘wenche’) and the crow (a ‘false theef’) is a further reminder that Phebus dwells ‘here’, or in a familiar soundscape of English words (see IX. 205; 215; 295). If, as Paul Strohm has recently speculated, Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales to imagine an alternative community after he had lost his home in London, his last verse tale, however shadowed by betrayal, entrapment, and violence, offers a momentary—​and nostalgic—​ image of household musicality.18 Through song, the Manciple’s Tale insistently gives sound a place at home. That Phebus lives here, ‘in this erthe adoun’, is likely indebted to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, where Phebus inhabits a humble cottage, serving as shepherd for Admetus while pursuing his daughter.19

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In Chaucer’s retelling, the singing crow is a possession, along with his wife, that Phebus explicitly keeps ‘in his hous’. After shooting his wife in response to the crow’s tattling about her tryst, Phebus destroys his bow and arrows as well as his musical instruments, instantly remorseful about his act of domestic violence: ‘he brak his mynstralcie, /​Bothe harpe, and lute, and gyterne, and sautrie’ (IX. 267–​ 8). The Manciple gives few details to locate where Phebus is in the house, exactly, when he kills his wife and then destroys his music and his weaponry; yet the lightning speed between the tattling of the crow, which ‘heeng ay in the cage’ (IX. 240) while it observes the adulterous ‘werk’, and Phebus’s turn on the crow to accuse it of lying, suggest that these events take place literally on the spot. Phebus’s final gesture, the act that immediately precedes the fable’s moral (why all crows are black) and leads into the mother’s lecture on minding one’s tongue, also situates sound—​or by this point, the absence of sound—​within household confines:  after Phebus has ‘made hym blak, and refte hym al his song /​And eek his speche’ (IX. 305–​6), he slings the crow, now blackened and silenced, out the door. Indeed, the crow’s forced exit crosses two domestic boundaries—​the door of its own cage and of Phebus’s house. Satisfied with the punishment of a household snitch, the Manciple notes that the exiled crow is now with the devil: ‘and out at dore hym slong /​Unto the devel, which I hym bitake [i.e. to whom I commit him]’ (IX. 306–​7), reinstituting the home as a place without a songbird or song.20 How we are to ‘think upon the crow’ following its expulsion comes from a new soundscape, but one that is equally domestic: a mother telling a story to a child and a mother giving her son advice for future success. In the fabulist tradition, the story is expected to have a moral, as it has. In an oddly regressive return to the narrator’s phantasmatic childhood home, the tale ends with a long recollected and notably tedious list of proverbs, voiced by ‘my dame’, on the risks of rash speaking—​‘My sone, keep wel thy tonge’—​with the mother/​son relation reiterated in the repetition of ‘my sone’ ten times over the course of her forty-​line lecture on buttoned-​up, under-​the-​radar speaking (IX. 318–​62). Verbal restraint is a virtue one learns, or should learn, at one’s mother’s knee: ‘The first vertu, sone, if thou wolt leere, /​Is to restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge’ (IX. 332–​3). It doesn’t matter that the crow has told the truth, this pedagogical coda suggests. To ‘think upon the crow’, as the tale’s final line asks us, is to learn a lesson about verbal caution, and even the wisdom of letting immorality pass without comment. Tonally,

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it recalls home schooling. With her list of platitudes echoing proverbial wisdom literature, the son she addresses is a young man who will eventually leave home: Whereso thou come, amonges hye or lowe, Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe. (IX. 361–​2)

Quoting his mother’s reminder to ‘thenk upon the crowe’, the Manciple also implies that the fable he has just narrated is one he learned from her when he was a child. Speech at multiple points throughout the tale ventriloquises or misrepresents; after all, when Phebus teaches the crow to speak, it is to ‘countrefete’ or imitate human language. The mother’s platitudes offer one more example of verbal miming, with risk-​averse mimicry offering a best practice for safety. Echoing a maternal soundscape, the Manciple repeats his mother’s lecture, and indeed the Ovidian fable itself, as a site of adult refuge. That is, the home of maternal warnings, however mind-​numbing those warnings may be, is a safe place. Writing about the Manciple’s Tale, Peter Travis argues that the tale is about the repression of the maternal, voiced by a disciplinary, phallic mother who gets the final say, and also about the desire for a maternal return; and if so, I would add, with a desired return to a song-​filled home.21 To think upon the crow is not only to reflect on the dangers of rash speaking, tattling, and bearing bad news to big powers, as the mother warns, but also to recall or at least desire, an alternative, and affective, song-​filled domestic soundworld. Indeed, in his version of the story, Chaucer gives marked emphasis to music and song. The story of the tattling crow was a popular one, deriving from Ovid (which Chaucer knew well) and retold widely in versions that Chaucer may also have known: by Machaut, by the anonymous author of the Seven Sages of Rome, and by John Gower. In most of these versions, the story is expressly a fable about the risks of garrulousness.22 As the crow in Ovid’s Metamorphoses says, turned from white to black, ‘my punishment ought to be a warning to all birds not to invite trouble by talking too much’.23 In the Seven Sages, in Machaut, and in Gower’s Confessio, the crow’s punishment, turned from white to black, is also punishment for rash speaking. Machaut’s Phebus metes out an act-​appropriate punishment, depriving the crow of its ability to speak human language; the crow can now only ‘iangler et braire’, jabber and make noise.24 In adapting his sources, Chaucer endows both Phebus and the crow with far greater musicality than either is given in other

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versions of the story.25 Only in Chaucer’s version of the tale is the crow gifted not only with language but with song, with part of his punishment the deprivation not just of whiteness and human speech but also of his singing voice. Only in Chaucer does Phebus destroy his own musical instruments, with his stringed instruments each identified by name:  harp, lute, gittern, and psaltry. The closest his analogues come to Chaucer in this regard is the Ovide Moralisé, where Phebus’s ‘harp fell from his hands’ [sa harpe des mains li cheï].26 Also particular to Chaucer’s version of the fable is the conjoining of human minstrelsy, avian song, and a household setting, with particular emphasis given to home as a place of both pleasure and loss. While Machaut describes Phebus’s palace as resounding with the music of the harp—​‘Nil ni avoit chambre ne tour /​Dont on ne le peust oir’ [in no chamber or tower /​Could it not be heard]—​he doesn’t equate Phebus’s music with the crow, nor give the crow a singing voice.27 When Machaut’s crow spies the wife’s adultery, it flies off to find Phoebus elsewhere. Chaucer’s crow, however, tattles from its cage. The catastrophe that then ensues is all the darker for the foreclosure of pleasurable sound at home. Precisely what is meant by the ‘singing’, of both Phebus and his crow, is not specified, but it seems to be distinguished from speech or prose composition. The word ‘song’ can mean both melody and lyric in Chaucer’s time, and the formes fixes (ballade, rondeau, virelay, lay, and chant royal) that governed lyric composition in the fourteenth century could apply equally to musical composition and to unaccompanied lyric.28 Many references to song in Gower’s Confessio refer specifically to music, for example, as is evidenced by the association of the word with specific instruments or activities—​a harp (Prologue, 1057), a baby’s lullaby (2.1080), or piping (4.3346).29 At other points ‘song’ may well refer to verse without musical accompaniment. When Chaucer, in a long, worrying apostrophe about the potential reception and editorial fate of Troilus and Criseyde, prays that his poem in the future will be understood whether it is read or sung—​‘red wherso thow be, or ells songe’ (V.1797)—​by ‘songe’ he is unlikely to mean musical singing. Rather, his concern about the future of his text would seem to refer to its reception, whether it is read silently or heard performed or read aloud. Nevertheless, the references to Phebus’s musical instruments and the conventional associations of Phebus with music suggest a melodic soundscape for the Manciple’s Tale. Indeed, Chaucer’s own musical biography may place him, as a youth, within a

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domestic musical soundworld not unlike the one evoked at the beginning of the Manciple’s Tale. The many references to song and musical instruments in Chaucer’s writings indicate he had considerable musical knowledge; according to Clair Olson, twenty-​ three separate musical instruments are named in Chaucer’s texts.30 As a youth Chaucer served as a page in the household of the Countess of Ulster, and may have been expected to provide entertainment in the form of ‘pipeing or harpeing, synginges, or other actes marcealls’, as described among the duties of a squire in the Household Book of Edward IV.31 Testimonials by contemporaries and near contemporaries also suggest that as a young man Chaucer may have composed music himself; and even though no musical compositions by Chaucer can be specifically identified, he wrote two roundels and multiple ballades.32 In the Prologue to The Fall of Princes John Lydgate notes that Chaucer ‘maad and compiled ful many a fressh dite, /​Compleyntis, baladis, roundelis, virelaies’, delightful both to hear and see, ‘ful delectable to heryn and to see’.33 In Gower’s 1390 dedication of the Confessio, Venus praises Chaucer for making, in his youth, ‘ditees and songes glade’, with which the land now ‘fulfild is overall’ (8.2945). In the fourteenth century any of these terms for lyric composition could apply equally to verse, of course—​and Lydgate’s comments on Chaucer’s compositions in the Fall of Princes are immediately followed by a remark on Chaucer’s ‘making’ in ‘Inglissh’ (I. 356). Nevertheless, references to their joy and pleasure—​ Lydgate’s comment that Chaucer’s lyrics are ‘full delitable to here and see’ and Gower’s ‘songes glade’—​are fully consistent with music. Music was widely understood as an art allied with affect; it is music that moves the emotions, often leading to pleasure and equally leading to a heightened spiritual or ethical awareness. Writers in fourteenth-​ century France, as Christopher Page observes, promoted the pleasures and harmonies of secular music as beneficial to the civic good.34 For late-​medieval English writers, song becomes generically linked with the expression and inciting of emotions—​erotic desire, sorrow, longing, love—​adopting for secular song an ethics of affect that had been developed in relation to sacred music. Nicolette Zeeman argues that it is in song lyrics themselves, rather than in grammatical or rhetorical manuals, that medieval texts produced a coherent commentary on sound and affect.35 Throughout Chaucer’s writings, music consoles, gladdens, expresses sorrow, entices or leads astray, and inspires devotion. Through its appeals to the emotions, music has agency. It makes

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things happen. In the Knight’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite fall in love with Emily not only when they see her in the garden, but also when they hear her singing as ‘hevenysshly’ as an angel (I. 1055). Later, when Arcite disguised as Philostrate heads out to the grove on a May morning, after singing a roundel to spring he falls into a melancholic ‘study’ thinking of Emily, with his own music a catalyst for erotic love-​longing (I. 1529). Throughout Troilus, song, either lyric or melodic, articulates and heightens desire for love, expresses erotic longing, or alleviates love’s pain. Following his tour of Troy, mourning Criseyde’s shuttered house, Troilus makes a song ‘his woful herte for to lighte’ (V. 634). Singing also flatters and cajoles, its pleasures overriding clear thinking: the Pardoner’s singing induces people to open their wallets, and in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the fox’s wily praise of Chauntecleer’s father for his singing voice leads to near catastrophe. In Chaucer’s most agentic link between music and affect, desire for song in the Prioress’s Tale transforms the clergeon into a zealously pious Christian subject, and horror of song, in perhaps equal measure, incites the Jews to murder him. Yet above all song delights. As John Gower notes in the Confessio, ‘whan wordes medlen with the song /​It doth plesance wel the more’ (7.1586–​7). Song, when it mixes with words, makes an utterance all the more pleasurable. Even Chaucer’s Parson, in spite of his rejection of verse, admits to music’s ultimately comedic nature: if it weren’t for Jesus Christ, he says, we might all be singing a sorry song (X. 315). In the Manciple’s Tale, the power of song to move the emotions and make things happen is most evident at the point when the tale most precisely distinguishes between song and speech. This is the crow’s ‘Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!’ sung from its cage. Phebus’s response to the crow’s ‘Cokkow!’ is sorrow, moved by what he hears as a sad song: What, bryd? Quod Phebus. ‘What song syngestow? Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge To heere thy voys? Allas, what song is this?’ (IX. 244–​7)

It is only after the crow amplifies his sad song with human language that Phebus’s sorrow turns to rage and he commits a domestic crime. As a singer, that is, the crow is both lucid and ambiguous, intelligible and mysterious—​ and distinct from the speaker the mother warns about and that the crow subsequently becomes as a user of language that literally cuts friendship in two. Repeating

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the word ‘song’ three times after he hears the crow’s ‘Cokkow!’ Phebus’s first response is empathetic lament, both for the crow and for himself. A sad song makes both the singer and the listener sad. As music, the primary effect of the crow’s ‘Cokkow!’ is to move the emotions. And like the crow’s ‘Cokkow’, sung from its cage in Phebus’s house, affective secular song, in Chaucer’s writings, is often performed at home. Clair Olson observes that musical references in Chaucer reveal far more about amateur performance practices than about the work of professional minstrels.36 Music, that is, is part of the household, from the garden to the bedroom, and while some references to musical entertainment suggest performance by professional minstrels, such as the after-​dinner entertainment at Cambuskan’s court in the Squire’s Tale (V. 78), many more references indicate solo or group amateur performances, such as the after-​ dinner entertainment at Pandarus’s house, where the performers seem to be the guests:  ‘he song; she played; he tolde tale of Wade’ (III. 614). Often musical performance in the house plays to desire in the bedroom. Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale plays on his ‘gay’ psaltry so sweetly that it makes his room ring (I. 3213–​ 15); Absolon, serenading Alisoun outside her window, ‘chaunteth’ accompanied by his cithern (I. 3363). In the Cook’s Tale, located at a shop in Cheapside, a narrative aside comments that the playing of cithern and fiddle, however appealing they may seem, can’t fully conceal an apprentice’s thefts from the till:  ‘For thefte and riot, they been convertible, /​Al konne he pleye on gyterne or ribible’ (I. 4395–​6). And January in the Merchant’s Tale sits up in bed singing to May on the morning after their wedding, ‘so chaunteth he and craketh’, in a memorable moment where song’s affective power may be to terrify rather than delight: as the narrator quickly adds, ‘God woot what that May thoughte in hir herte’ when she looks at him and listens to his singing (IV. 1850–​1). All these, of course, are fictive performers, and some of them outliers or invaders. Part of the comedy of the Miller’s Tale lies in picture of assault on bourgeois values and a bourgeois home. Nicholas ensconces himself within the house, with his psaltry capping the list of his carefully placed furnishings—​‘And al above ther lay a gay sautrie’ (I. 3212)—​and Absolon serenades Alisoun from outside her window. The psaltry’s capstone place in the list of Nicholas’s furnishings may even suggest it is to be understood an aspirational object, part of a discourse of elite things rather than a commonplace presence. It is only much later in the

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fifteenth century and beyond, in fact, that musical instruments begin appearing with any regularity in London inventories and wills, as, for example in the will of Thomas Clerk in 1488, a brewer from St. Peter Cornhill, who leaves ‘my harp wt the caas belonging therto’ to one John Short, son of William Shrot a barber, or John Taillour, leatherseller of St. John Zachary in 1502, who leaves ‘a horne which was late her faders’ to the wife of William Merefeld.37 Indeed, there is little material or documentary information available to shed light on the actual presence of musical instruments in late-​medieval homes. Many reasons may be offered to account for the absence of musical instruments in earlier wills and inventories, but a possible explanation may be simply that few people actually owned them.38 The fourteenth-​century Parisian householder, the Menagier de Paris, offers no musical instructions to his young wife, even among his long list of the care and pleasures she should provide to her husband’s person.39 The only mention of music in his book of instruction appears in a list of items for a wedding:  ‘Dancer, chanter, vin et espices et torches a alumer’ [Dancing, singing, wine and spices, torches for lighting]—​with the music referred to likely provided by paid minstrels.40 Musical instruments, at home, seem to be part of a pleasure economy, richly evoked in the song-​filled home imagined in the Manciple’s Tale. When Guillebert de Metz (c. 1390–​1436) in his Description de Paris, an encomium praising the splendour of the city, describes in detail the house of Jacques Duchié, Maître de Comptes (d. 1412), nothing is utilitarian, with the aesthetic and social value of a room full of musical instruments—​harps, organs, guitars, and psalteries, all of which the Maître plays—​defined by the room’s co-​presence with hall paintings, a courtyard full of peacocks, a hall filled with chessboards and other games, and a study whose walls are covered with jewels and spices. As Philippe Contamine notes, citing Guillebert’s description at some length, the music room and gaming room look forward to similar kinds of designated household spaces in eighteenth-​century great houses.41 Guillebert’s account, written years after he could have seen (if he ever actually saw) the Maître’s house, bespeaks the exceptional, something worth conjuring years later—​ objects that were perhaps out of place and time when Guillebert saw them, but by the time he wrote his account, had acquired new and intensified aura in his memory as markers of urban magnificence. In Chaucer’s writings, Nicholas’s psaltry, displayed ‘al above’ his other furnishings and Phebus’s harp, lute, gittern, and psaltry may be

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thought of as phantasmatic things, also out of place and time, that define the home through desire and aspiration: Nicholas’s fanciful studiolo in a carpenter’s house in Oxford; Phebus’s house, poised indeterminately somewhere on ‘this erthe adoun’, filled mythically with the most chivalrous gentleman, his singing bird, and four stringed instruments. A second home for the tale’s song is a birdcage. Initially, at least, the tale draws on a wide range of visual and textual associations that equate caged birds, like musical instruments, with household pleasure. Part of the house’s melodic soundworld is produced by Phebus’s crow, whose singing is an avian counterpoint to Phebus’s musicianship. With a caged songbird, the Manciple furnishes Phebus’s house with a commonplace source of delight, delivered both by the bird’s song and also, implicitly, by the cage as a crafted object. Chaucer’s most protracted reference to pleasurable birdsong, the long paean in the Book of the Duchess, is also elided with home, even though the birds are just outside the window. The narrator is awakened into his dream by the ‘noyse and swetnesse’ of birds on the roof of his bedroom (l. 299), singing so loud and sweetly that ‘For al my chambre gan to rynge /​Thurgh syngynge of her armonye’ (ll. 312–​13). The keeping of caged birds appears to have been common, with birds kept both for food and for song. An image of a blackbird in a mid-​ fourteenth-​ century Dutch manuscript accompanies an account of the blackbird’s exceptional song:  ‘Its voice is so sweet that it moves the mind to a feeling of delight. For this reason people keep blackbirds in cages.’42 Fourteenth-​and fifteenth-​ century castle inventories often mention birds, cages, and bird food, such as the linnet kept by Anne of Brittany.43 A 1368 debt recovery inventory of London rector Thomas Kynebell lists a birdcage (‘gaioll’) with birds among items in the hall;44 and goldsmith John Cobham of York had a bird cage valued at one penny.45 A prohibition on the keeping of birds in the 1340 Statutes of Oxford attests to their popularity over a long period. In 1459 the prohibition is amplified with an itemised list outlawing thrushes, nightingales, starlings, and blackbirds, all birds known for their song.46 Birdcages could often have an aesthetic appeal of their own. In John Lydgate’s ‘Churl and Bird’, the churl is said to have made ‘withyn his hous a praty litel cage’ so that the song of the bird might ‘reioissh his corage’.47 In this instance, the prettiness of the cage mirrors the affective pleasures of birdsong:  birdsong—​and the pretty cage as well—​makes the churl happy. An interest in

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cages per se is further indicated by the frequency of their adoption as a subject for manuscript illustrations. For example, the copy of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours transmitted in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS fr. 1444 (1250–​1300) pictures a blackbird in a rectangular cage with a carefully drawn mansard-​shaped roof (­figure 1). A slightly later manuscript of the same text, now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308 (1300–​1325), shows a blackbird kept in a cage that dominates the illustration, pushing the man and woman who flank the object to the outer extremity of the frame (­figure 2). Alongside these images, the handsome finials and iron grillwork on one of the rare surviving early birdcages—​ the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fifteenth-​or sixteenth-​century birdcage from the Rhone Valley (­figure 3)—​indicates not only that caged songbirds were kept for the pleasures that might be derived from their music but also that the cages in which they were kept could themselves be objects of enjoyment, incorporating as they

1  A blackbird in its cage in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS fr. 1444, f. 259v (1250–​1300). The text accompanying the image notes the bird’s particularity: though it sings only two months out of the year, people keep it in preference to other birds for the music of its voice.

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2 A blackbird in its cage, flanked by a man and a woman, in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308, f. 92v (1300–​1325).

did details that exceeded utilitarian necessity and that elevated the cage, making it an aesthetically pleasing addition to a household’s furnishings.48 When Chaucer describes caged birds, though, he repeatedly associates caging with entrapment. In the Miller’s Tale, the carpenter keeps his young wife Alisoun ‘narwe in cage’ (I. 3224), with her metaphoric cage a literal stage for the tale’s household comedy; and in the Monk’s Tale, the narrator laments Ugolino’s imprisoned children, ‘Allas, Fortune, it was greet crueltee /​Swiche briddes for to putte in swich a cage!’ (VII. 3603–​4), punning on the double meaning of ‘brid’ as a bird and also as a child or a woman. Chaucer’s best-​known image of caging, however, is a literal bird caged against its will, a Boethian metaphor that Chaucer translated in his Boece and returned to twice in his Canterbury Tales, including the Manciple’s Tale. In a metrum praising the laws of Nature, Lady Philosophy illustrates natural desire through the bird that will always choose to ‘skip’ out of her ‘streyte’, or narrow, cage, no matter how carefully she has been tended and fed with honeyed drinks. As a creature driven by natural desire, the bird belongs out of her cage, and her song is a voice of longing for freedom. If she catches sight of the woods, she mourns for the forest and ‘twytereth desyrynge the wode with hir swete voys’

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 3  A fifteenth-​or sixteenth-​century birdcage from the Rhone Valley, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The stuffed songbird was presumably supplied by a museum curator for scale (in 2018, a Met curator was unable explain the presence of the bird in the archived photograph).

(Boece 3, metrum 2). The cage doubles as an image of both entrapment and also musical production, and it seems significant that this is the only metrum in which Philosophy mentions her own performance as a singer. It will be her pleasure—​‘it liketh me’—​to show the governing principles of Nature through ‘subtil soong’ and the ‘delytable sown of strenges’. Music or poetry emerges from longing born of constraint or caging, the fable of the caged bird seems to suggest, with Philosophy’s own ‘subtil soong’ at the opening of the metrum an analogue for the bird’s ‘swete voys’. In adapting the Boethian metaphor in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer teases out ambiguities inherent in the idea of a metaphoric ‘gilded cage’ to pit the allure of home against natural desires for freedom, complicating any simple or nostalgic idea of home as

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a safe place for the production of song. The OED gives 1854 as the first use of ‘gilded cage’ to mean a luxurious trap, yet clearly that is what the Manciple means when he notes that ‘although his cage of gold be never so gay’ (IX. 168) a bird will always try to escape. In the Squire’s Tale, the falcon, telling Canacee about the faithless tercelet, adapts the exemplum to illustrate the seductions of the new, or ‘newefangelnesse’ (V. 610), in effect explaining her abandonment as a matter of human nature. Men by their nature (‘of propre kynde’, V.  610)  love newfangledness, and in their love of novelty they are like birds. However delicately birds are fostered in their cages, they will fly away the minute they are given the chance. Ironically, Canacee’s response to the falcon’s story of betrayal and abandonment is to build a cage. After the falcon concludes her lament with the analogy of the caged bird who will always flee to freedom, Canacee tenderly takes the wounded bird home, where she bandages her up and makes her a pen, a ‘mewe’, by the head of her bed (V. 643), in effect continuing the production of domestic song. Although the tercelet has metaphorically flown the coop, his abandoned lover will be able to continue her lament from a conventional location of the love song—​the bed. In the Manciple’s Tale, the caged bird metaphor rewrites the crow’s domesticity to recast his cage as both a pleasurable and oppositional affordance, both retreat and trap, with caging a capacious metaphor for marital and linguistic relationships. Caging and keeping assume a natural fatality with birds, women, and language associated with instability and betrayal. In a study of birdcages in antique Roman art, Frederick Jones calls the caged bird a metaphor for the soul trapped in the body, and the bird cage ‘like a scale model of the house and the relationship it contains’.49 Phebus’s crow and his wife are paired grammatically and foundationally.50 Both are introduced as Phebus’s household possessions:  ‘Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe’ is followed in just a few lines by ‘Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a wyf’. One is a bird and the other a wife, but both are ‘bryds’, the eliding term in the Manciple’s transition from the caging of wives to the caging of birds: ‘taak any bryd, and put it in a cage’ (IX. 163). Both are ‘kept’ by Phebus—​like Alisoun in the Miller’s Tale, kept ‘narwe in cage’ by the carpenter (I. 3224); and the Manciple’s subsequent aside on natural inclination presents ‘keeping’ of others—​both pets and wives—​as contrary to nature. Don’t try to restrain what nature has ‘natureelly’ placed in a creature; take, for instance, a caged bird, which, even if it is in a gilded cage—​‘his cage of gold be never so

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gay’—​will forever do its best to escape. The caged bird metaphor is followed by two other examples of increasingly predatory animal inclination; a cat that will always prefer a mouse over household dainties, the she-​wolf that will hanker after the ‘lewedeste wolf’ (IX. 184). Indeed, ‘keeping’ becomes something of a thematic refrain in the tale, a hint that home can also be trap. Describing Phebus’s jealousy and then the nature of wives, the Manciple repeats ‘keeping’, with its suggestions of caging and imprisoning, three times, and then when delivering the analogy of the caged bird, comments that ‘keep it al so clenly as thou may’ (IX. 167), it will escape. And keeping can be verbal entrapment as well. ‘Keeping’ returns in the tale’s coda as the word for guarded speech, with the mother’s repeated advice to ‘kepe wel thy tonge’ picturing even the mouth as an enclosure, or soundscape, housing speech as its restive inhabitant. The tale’s images of guardianship, this is to say, are movable, encompassing at different points husband, cage, and even the body; teeth and lips, the mother says, are God-​given fortifications that protect the tongue from rash speaking. Songbirds and wives will naturally flee their cages; words will escape the best-​guarded lips. And escape to freedom is not without consequences. Phebus murders his wife for fleeing matrimonial bonds; and as the mother notes at the end, liberality of speech ‘kutteth freendshipe al a-​two’, like a sword that ‘forkutteth and forkerveth’ a limb (IX. 340–​2). When the crow actually sings from its cage, its vocalising problematises the idea of lyric restraint and interrogates the very place of song. This is the crow’s ‘Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!’, the tale’s first moment of direct speech. It is also the tale’s most out-​of-​place voicing—​and the only moment, in this otherwise dark fable, that has a hint of humour. ‘Cokkow’ is the song not of a crow, of course, but of the cuckoo, and in punning with the cuckoo’s language, the crow sings what the reader knows to be the truth: Phebus is a cuckold. In singing ‘Cokkow!’ the crow also exposes a household usurpation, in that cuckoos were known, as indeed they still are, to lay their eggs in nests of other birds.51 Yet ‘Cokkow!’ is also just birdsong, a linguistic usurpation that plays with the very idea of interpretable animal voicings. Both crows and cuckoos are named elsewhere in medieval writings as exemplars for the unintelligibility of birdsong, as Elizabeth Eva Leach observes. Marchetto of Padua, in his influential early fourteenth-​century Lucidarium, explains that a non-​articulate but literate voice ‘is like the “caw, caw”, or cuckoo, produced by birds. We are totally ignorant of the

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meaning of this utterance, even though we can write it down’.52 As Leach notes, medieval linguistic theory considered all animal speech to be unintelligible, and in this birds were no exception. Cuckoos were also famous for their ‘proverbially monotonous’ song—​which, of course, the crow brilliantly mimics in its triple vocalising:  cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.53 As the fourteenth-​century philosopher Nicholas Oresme explains, the cuckoo is an apt figure for the tone-​deaf singer: ‘A singer who is unable to vary musical sounds, which are infinitely variable, would no longer be thought best, but [would be taken for] a cuckoo.’54 The bird in Lydgate’s ‘Churl and the Bird’ gives the cuckoo as one example in a list of dullards, tone deaf to language. In spring when all the noble birds are singing, the cuckoo has just one song.55 But it is also possible, I  think, to hear ‘Cokkow, Cokkow, Cokkow!’ as an avian polyphonic refrain that plays with the polysemy of lyric song. If ‘cuckoo’ is a sign of meaningless animal language, it is also a sly register of the powers of those inarticulate sounds to actually say something.56 Although the crow only sings its triple ‘Cokkow!’ once, the repetition of ‘Cokkow!’ is citational, and itself offers a kind of comic poetic mimesis as a sign for meaningless repetition that nonetheless voices the ambiguities of song itself. In her study of French music, Ardis Butterfield argues that the refrain, often obscuring the meaning of the song’s words, becomes central to the listening experience in the fourteenth century.57 Through its inherent mobility and ‘wandering existence as a recurrent citation’, the refrain can ‘create liaisons between the different worlds of the aristocrat and the peasant, the sacred and the secular, or the animal and the human’.58 ‘Cuccu!’ in the thirteenth-​ century Middle English ‘Sumer is icumin in’ may serve as an apt early example for this category-​crossing, citational mobility. When the song is sung as a rota or round, the repeating ‘cuccu!’ sounds an echoic medley that plays on both lexical meaning and supposition: in ‘cuccu!’ we hear an English rural summer soundscape as well as a metacommentary on desire and the production of lyric song itself.59 The song, which celebrates the animal energies of spring, voices a familiar birdsong, or sound of spring, through the cuckoo echo; as the singers’ voices play off each other, the sound of the cuckoo is everywhere:  ‘Murie sing cuccu /​Cuccu cuccu /​ Wel singes þu cuccu /​Ne swik þu nauer nu /​Sing cuccu nu /​Sing cuccu /​Sing cuccu /​Sing cuccu nu.’60 The song’s insistent ‘cuccu’, alternating among singers, may also have a semantic dimension in hinting at what one can become—​a springtime nest-​usurper or a

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cuckold—​through the very energies that make spring joyful: ‘Awe bleteþ after lomb /​Llhouþ after calue cu /​Bulluc sterteþ /​Bucke uerteþ’ [The ewe bleats after the lamb; the cow lows after the calf; the bullock leaps, the billy goat farts].61 And perhaps the song, with its leaping, lowing, and farting animals, is about sound itself. Lecturing Geffrey on the physics of sound while bearing him in his talons to the House of Fame, the eagle explains that sound is nothing but broken air; and in an oddly violent analogy, the eagle adds that instrumental music is itself nothing but air that’s twisted and broken:  ‘for whan a pipe is blowen sharpe /​The air ys twyst with violence /​And rent …’ (ll. 774–​6). With its multiple plosives, ‘Cuccu!’ is perfectly pitched to the lyric’s animal sounds. The poem’s pleasure and humour lie in its call, a repetitive animal voicing that nonetheless captures the powers of song to bring humans and animals together in a playful—​and sonically meaningful—​soundworld. If the Manciple’s Tale is troubling or dark, that is due in part to the story it replays of exile. What, finally, do we long for? Is home a place of musical freedom, a trap, or a space of domestic violence—​ or what Bruce Holsinger calls Phebus’s ‘homicidal musicianship’?62 All of these possibilities are actually hinted at from the start in the comparison of Phebus’s musicianship with Amphion, whose mythic biography is shadowed with tragedy. In the Metamorphoses, Amphion commits suicide after his children have been vengefully killed by Phebus and Artemis. That is, from the outset, musical and domestic harmony are threatened by violence or even self-​destruction. The analogy between Phebus and Amphion may even have a further echo. In Statius’s Siege of Thebes, a text on which Chaucer drew in writing the Knight’s Tale and Troilus, Capaneus, ‘mashing temples and homes with jagged fragments’ from high above the city walls, shouts derisively, ‘Amphion’s Towers? So low to the ground? Disgraceful! … And what’s so great about pulling down ramparts raised by a limp-​wristed lyre?’63 Walling the city with song, as Amphion—​or Phebus—​has done, is a dubious hedge against catastrophe. It may be, though, that the crow’s affective, even comic ‘Cokkow!’ leaves its audible trace and even an enduring place for song, even after the crow is himself deprived of his ability to sing or talk, with song both human and animal, part of the household but always with escape velocity. ‘Cokkow!’ is song as well as disruptive sound, perhaps not unlike other inarticulate but otherwise expressive—​and agentic—​noises in some of Chaucer’s

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other domestic soundscapes:  Alisoun’s ‘tee hee’ in the Miller’s Tale; Thomas’s fart in the Summoner’s Tale; the family’s musical snoring in the Reeve’s Tale.64 When Phebus punishes the crow with blackness and voicelessness and flings him from the house, he returns him to the avian condition of crows in real time, re-​ establishing the fallen world in which black crows say only a caw that we can’t understand, but also giving the bird the freedom it has wanted all along. Ironically, the mother’s final words, ‘think upon the crow’, themselves refrain-​like in their repetition, are a directive to remember a fable, precisely the kind of imaginative writing the Parson condemns. To ‘think upon the crow’, then, is not necessarily to repudiate poetry but to remember, and long for, a lost soundscape of home, where verse, music, and a song from a birdcage make the house a joyful place to live. Notes 1 As Horace explains, Amphion walled Thebes by playing a lyre from Mercury that caused the stones to fall into place of their own accord. See Horace, Ars Poetica, in Oxford World’s Classics: Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 108. Chaucer is cited throughout from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2 While some readers have questioned whether Chaucer intended to follow the Manciple’s Tale with the Parson’s Tale, most concur that ordering is intentional. See the headnote to Fragment X in the Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Benson, pp. 954–​5. 3 See Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 304–​5. 4 Peter Travis, ‘The Manciple’s Phallic Matrix’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 317–​24 (322, 319). 5 Britton Harwood, ‘Language and the Real:  Chaucer’s Manciple’, Chaucer Review, 6 (1972), 268–​79 (268). The tale is about the fraudulent uses of language (Celeste Patton, ‘False “Rekenynges”: Language in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale’, Philological Quarterly, 71 (1992), 399–​417); a study in the ‘vanity of meaning’ (Warren Ginsberg, ‘The Manciple’s Tale:  Response’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 331–​7 (334)); a ‘nightmare version of Chaucer’s own poetic’ (Marianne Borch, ‘Chaucer’s Poetics and the Manciple’s Tale’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 287–​97 (287)); a tale that ‘negates the possibilities of poetry’ (Jamie Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo:  Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetic (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 225); a farewell to poetry for the prose of the Parson’s Tale (John Hines,

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‘ “For sorwe of he brak his minstralcye”: The Demise of the “Sweete Noyse” of Verse in the Canterbury Tales’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 299–​308 (300)); and a foreclosure of ‘experimental discourse’ (Leslie Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (New York: Palgrave, 2011), p. 141). For a review of studies of language and the tale, see also Louise Fradenburg, ‘The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales’, ELH, 52 (1985), 85–​118 (86). 6 See Fradenburg, ‘The Manciple’s Servant Tongue’. 7 Christopher Cannon, ‘The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales’, in Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (eds), Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature:  Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 25–​40 (28). 8 As the Riverside Chaucer notes, with reference to IX. 139, ‘wyf’ can mean wife or lover (p.  953). In Chaucer’s sources, Phebus’s lover is named (Coronis), and there is no indication that the two are married. 9 According to Borch, the tale offers a ‘disillusioned view of beautiful rhetoric as a façade covering up a sordid truth in the name of opportunism and hegemonic power’ (‘Chaucer’s Poetics’, 291). J. M. Manly observes that over 61 per cent of the Manciple’s Tale is comprised of rhetorical devices. Only the Monk’s Tale ranks more highly in this regard. See J. M. Manly, ‘Chaucer and the Rhetoricians’, Wharton Lecture on English Poetry, Proceedings of the British Academy, 12 (1926), 95–​113. On this point, see also Patton, ‘False “Rekenynges” ’, 404. 10 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–​1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 1. 11 See the website of the Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project, at https://​ vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/​. 12 Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–​ 1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 56, pp. 81–​90. 13 See James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1991), who notes that in the fourteenth century ‘lyric texts lacking music became the rule’ (p. 13). 14 See Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–​1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p.  208 n.  7; Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds:  Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 127–​8; and Patton, ‘False “Rekenynges” ’, 404. 15 Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Place of the Bedroom in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 37 (2015), 133–​61. 16 On the productiveness of such material assemblages in late-​medieval household contexts, see too the chapters by Dutton, Leahy, and Seaman in this volume.

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17 As noted in Aranye Fradenburg, ‘Among All Beasts:  Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England’, in Carolynn Van Dyke (ed.), Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 13–​31 (23). 18 Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale:  1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking, 2014), pp. 222–​37. 19 Ovid, Ars Amatoria, ed. Anne Mahoney (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 2. 239–​40; see further the note to IX. 105–​8 in the Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Benson, p. 953. 20 Kordecki argues that the tale reinstitutes the human/​ animal divide: ‘narrative subjectivity will remain apocalyptically isolated from the nonmale and the nonhuman’ (Ecofeminist Subjectivities, p.  123). On this point, see too Emma Gorst, ‘Interspecies Mimicry: Birdsong in Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” and the Parlement of Fowles’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), 147–​54 (154). 21 Travis, ‘Phallic Matrix’. 22 Wheatley argues that Chaucer didn’t draw on a single source but seems to have borrowed pieces of the story from different versions. See Edward Wheatley, ‘The Manciple’s Tale’, in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–​2005), 2: 749–​73. 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2.  565; cited in Wheatley, ‘Manciple’s Tale’, 2: 752. 24 Guillaume de Machaut, The Book of the True Poem, l. 8131; cited in Wheatley, ‘Manciple’s Tale’, 2: 768–​9. 25 As noted by Harwood, ‘Language and the Real’, 269–​70. 26 Ovide Moralisé, l. 2362; cited in Wheatley, ‘Manciple’s Tale’, 2: 756–​7. 27 Machaut, The Book of the True Poem, ll. 8011–​12; cited in Wheatley, 2: 764–​5. 28 See Clair C. Olson, ‘Chaucer and the Music of the Fourteenth Century’, Speculum, 16 (1941), 64–​91 (73); and Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, pp. 5–​6. 29 Citations of the Confessio are by book and line number from Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck, 3 vols (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2000–​2004). 30 See Olson, ‘Chaucer and the Music’, 73. See also Nigel Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 112–​13. 31 See Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, p. 112. 32 See Olson, ‘Chaucer and the Music’, 84. 33 See John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1923), I. 351–​4. See also Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, p. 124. 34 See Page, Owl and Nightingale, p. 40, pp. 33–​41; and Dillon, The Sense of Sound, p. 83.

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35 Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Theory of Passionate Song’, in Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (eds), Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 231–​51 (233). 36 Olson, ‘Chaucer and the Music’, pp. 75–​6. 37 See City of London, Metropolitan Archives 9171/​ 7, f.  139v-​ 40; and Kew, The National Archives Prob11/​13/​2147. I  am grateful to Katherine French for these references. 38 Peter Thornton also notes the absence of musical instruments in Italian inventories; See his Italian Renaissance Interior 1400–​ 1600 (New  York:  Henry Abrams, 1991), p.  272. In the late fifteenth century, musical instruments become associated with the study. See Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study:  Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 121. 39 Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. and trans. Karin Ueltschi (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1994), section 1. 7, pp. 294–​306. 40 Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. and trans. Ueltschi, p.  572. Translation cited from The Good Wife’s Guide: Le Ménagier de Paris, a Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L.  Greco and Christine M.  Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 265. 41 See Philippe Contamine, ‘Peasant Hearth to Papal Palace:  The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Georges Duby (ed.), trans. Arthur Goldhammer, A History of Private Life II:  Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press, 1988), pp. 425–​505  (469). 42 The manuscript is now The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS KB KA 16 and the image of the blackbird is on f. 92v. Images from this manuscript may be consulted online at http://manuscripts.kb.nl. 43 See Richard H. Randall Jr., ‘A Gothic Bird Cage’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s. 11 (1953), 286–​92 (286). 44 A. H. Thomas, Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls Preserved Among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, 1364–​1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 91. 45 See Randall, ‘Gothic Bird Cage’, 287. The most common cages were conical or rectangular constructions of wood or wicker with large birdcages often appearing in manuscript images of kitchens, indicating that birds kept not for song but for cooking. See Randall, ‘Gothic Bird Cage’, 290. 46 See W. B. Yapp, ‘Birds in Captivity in the Middle Ages’, Archives of Natural History, 10 (1982), 479–​500 (480). 47 John Lydgate, ‘The Churl and the Bird’, ll. 81–​2, in The Minor Poems II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS o.s. 192 (London:  Oxford University Press, 1934). 48 On the Metropolitan Museum’s birdcage, and for further examples of manuscript illustrations picturing birdcages, see Randall, ‘A Gothic Birdcage’.

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49 Frederick Jones, The Boundaries of Art and Social Space in Rome: The Caged Bird and Other Art Forms (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 108. 50 Sheila Delany notes that the crow’s name is very close to Coronis, the name of the woman in the Ovidian version; see her ‘Slaying Python: Marriage and Misogyny in a Chaucerian Text’, in Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New  York:  Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 47–​75 (68–​9). See also Fradenburg, ‘Manciple’s Servant Tongue’, 102; and Jamie Fumo, ‘Thinking upon the Crow:  The Manciple’s Tale and Ovidian Mythography’, Chaucer Review, 4 (2004), 355–​75 (359). 51 See Leslie Kordecki, ‘Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism’, in Carolynn Van Dyke (ed.), Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave), pp. 249–​60 (251). 52 Marchetto of Padua, Lucidarium; cited in Leach, Sung Birds, p. 36. 53 Leach, Sung Birds, p. 126. 54 Oresme, Tractatus de commensurabilitate; cited in Leach, Sung Birds, pp. 126–​7. 55 Lydgate, ‘The Churl and the Bird’, ed. MacCracken, l. 346. 56 For a useful recent review of distinctions made by grammarians between inarticulate sound (vox confusa) and meaningful sound (vox articulata), see Adin Lears, ‘Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38 (2016), 165–​200 (170–​4); and Leach, Sung Birds, pp. 116–​18. 57 Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France:  From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 272. 58 Butterfield, Poetry and Music, p. 131, p. 147. 59 Kordecki also comments on the lyric (‘Chaucer’s Cuckoo’, p. 256). 60 Cited from Bella Millet’s online edition of ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ in the Wessex Parallel Web Texts series, hosted at Wessex Parallel Web Texts: www.southampton.ac.uk/​. 61 Although ‘to fart’ is the meaning given by the Middle English Dictionary, there remains some critical disagreement. Silverstein argues that ‘uerteth’ means to turn or cavort. See Theodore Silverstein, English Lyrics Before 1500 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 37. 62 Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 262. 63 Cited from Statius, Thebaid, trans. Jane Wilson Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 286. 64 On the ‘counter harmonics’ of explosive noise in Chaucer’s writings, see Peter Travis, ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart’, Exemplaria, 16 (2004), 323–​48 (324). See too Valerie Allen, ‘Broken Air’, Exemplaria, 16 (2004), 305–​22.

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7 Field knowledge in gentry households: ‘pears on a willow’?1 Nadine Kuipers

If you cutt thystels xv dayes or viii dayes before mydsomer for every one thistle theare shal come up twoe or three. (Walter of Henley, translated by William Lambarde)2

It seems reasonable to assume that agricultural know-​how was at the forefront of the medieval landowner’s mind, and that this information was noted down for personal reference or posterity. Nevertheless, few texts survive that treat the inner workings of medieval husbandry and agriculture. Ruth Dean’s Anglo-​Norman Literature:  A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts lists six texts that outline the duties of seneschals and landowners.3 Under the title ‘farming and estate-​management’, the tenth volume of A Manual of Writings in Middle English lists another seven items.4 But the bulk of these vernacular compositions dealing with agriculture is not concerned with the practicalities of farming. Instead these French and English works typically present an idealised demesne or estate and discuss the hierarchy of farmhands and their duties. Peasant wisdom, such as Walter of Henley’s remark about thistles, stands out as a rarity. The broad engagement of medieval agricultural tracts is reflected in their transmission history. While literary scholarship continues to classify agricultural writing as ‘practical’, and considers its likely readers to have been those directly concerned with farming and gardening, agricultural items often appear in later medieval household manuscripts, whose audience was considerably more varied. Thus both the contents of the medieval agricultural works and their manuscript compilation suggest that individuals did not always obtain and deploy such texts for utilitarian purposes. In what follows, I  offer a survey of the agricultural materials produced and used within medieval England that considers their potential non-​utilitarian uses insofar as these may be deduced from

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the manuscript contexts in which they survive. In particular, I am keen to demonstrate the contributions made by these texts to medieval understandings of the processes of education and personal development. First, I  survey the extant examples of agricultural writing from earlier medieval England and comment upon their probable readerships. Then I go on to consider materials produced in the later Middle Ages as they appear in household manuscripts. By organising my materials in this fashion I aim to strike a contrast between the earlier works, which treat estates management principally in its legal and administrative aspects, or as a pretext for language instruction, and the later works, whose engagements would seem to have been broader. My treatment of the primary sources in this second stage is not exhaustive. Instead, I  treat a selection of works that attest to the diverse purposes of agricultural and managerial literature in late-​medieval manuscripts:  treatises on grafting and arboriculture, Middle English and Middle Scots translations of the didactic text De Cura rei famuliaris [The Care of Domestic Affairs], and the Rules for Purchasing Land. These texts represent three different facets of a landowner’s daily routine: overseeing plant production, governing staff, and investing in land. Together, they touch upon forms of knowledge that are specific to medieval landowners: language education, legal schooling, and the awareness of social matters. In my final section I discuss how the concepts of experience and knowledge are adapted in early modern agricultural writing, which sees a resurgence of interest in the practicalities of managing the land and how these might be learned through reading.

Agricultural writing in early medieval England The first vernacular agricultural instructions from medieval Britain are addressed to estate managers:  the Anglo-​Saxon texts Rectitudines Singularum Personarum and Gerefa (bothc. 900–1000) were supposedly composed to aid the reeve of a hypothetical monastic estate.5 Likewise, the Anglo-​French Senechaucy (1260–​ 1276) advises the seneschal, or overseer, of a demesne on the management of his staff.6 A related Anglo-​French treatise known as the Husbandry (c. 1300) addresses the importance of practical literacy: Le seneschal ou le chef bayllyf deyt veer au chef del an totes les menues choses necessaryes e tuz les ustelemenz, totes les ferures, e totes les choses qe en le maner demorunt petiz e graunz, e mettre

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les en escryt qe hom puysse veer en lautre an: quele chose coveynt bosoygnaument estre achate e ceo alower e le surplus retrere. The steward or chief bailiff ought to inspect at the end of the year all the small necessary items, utensils, horseshoes, and everything that remains on the manor, small and large. And he ought to put these things down in writing so that one can in the following year learn from it what it will be necessary to buy and allow for these things but avoid overcharge.7

Several later Anglo-​French and Latin tracts share the concerns with management and literacy broached in these works. The manuscripts in which they appear are often compendia of statutes for legal students or collections of secular law belonging to the libraries of monastic institutions. But some works appear to manifest an attempt to address readers beyond these constituencies. After the twelfth century, Latin tracts and their vernacular translations go side by side in some manuscripts, suggesting that an attempt might be made to cater to diverse kinds of literacy, for instance.8 Women readers were also included. Between 1235 and 1253, bishop Robert Grosseteste reworked in Anglo-​French his Latin Rules regarding the management of his monastic estate, addressing his translation to the countess of Lincoln, Margaret de Quincy.9 Grosseteste instructs the countess not only to work closely with a steward or reeve but also to involve herself in accounting. The treatise remained open to a wider public throughout its transmission because of its neutral use of pronouns. Each of Grosseteste’s rules is formatted according to the same principle, starting with ‘la [n] reule vus aprent …’ [the nth rule teaches you …]. The ‘vus’ in question might be male or female.10 Children, as well as women, could be the focus of early vernacular instruction in estates management. Walter of Henley’s Anglo-​French Treatise (c. 1286) invokes the classical topos of moral ‘father-​to-​son’ counsel, arguably a continuation of paraenetic literature.11 An earlier agricultural work also addressed to children is Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de Langage (c. 1250). Like Grosseteste’s French Rules, this is an instructional text dedicated to a noble patron, Dionysia de Munchensi; it is designed to prepare her children for estate management by familiarising them with the required lexis.12 Although it is unknown whether subsequent copies of the Tretiz were exclusively used for the education of children, Bibbesworth’s text is evidently less advanced than specialised managerial literature such as the Senechaucy and Grosseteste’s

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Rules. The Tretiz starts with a basic lexicon, listing the names of human body parts, after which the vocabulary becomes increasingly specialised. The latter part of the text includes more legal terminology, which would be necessary for estate administration and professional conversations, and thus appropriate for a landowner-​ to-​be.13 Bibbesworth’s language-​learning tract complements other Anglo-​French treatises outlining the duties of an estate accountant by priming young readers with the necessary vocabulary. The link between works of this kind is made concrete in one late thirteenth-​ century manuscript, now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Selden Supra 74, in which the Tretiz precedes Walter of Henley’s work.14 The farm accounts added to this manuscript in a fourteenth-​ century hand demonstrate that, by this period, the book was being kept in a landowning context.15 Alongside French, basic Latin was also a prerequisite for becoming a professional estate manager. With this purpose in mind, Adam of Balsham compiled his De Utensilibus in the first half of the twelfth century. Balsham offers a virtual tour of an English estate which allows the learner, who assumes the guise of the recently landed gentleman, Anselm, to acquire Latin names for utensils found on a large demesne. Essentially, the treatise is a ‘class glossary’ that relies on the linguistic principle of a word-​ field or semantic domain populated with interrelated nouns.16 A  growing need for such educational texts probably inspired Alexander Neckam to extend his own De Utensilibus (c. 1190) with interlinear French glosses to facilitate learning. For this method to be effective, children would need direct knowledge of an estate and its inventory. While it is difficult to obtain direct evidence of the interplay between the actual experience of estate management and learning its vocabulary, Nicholas Orme collects anecdotal records that show boys becoming involved in fieldwork and animal husbandry from an early age: they would have been in a position to gather the lexis of estates management in their earliest youth.17 Overall, as most early medieval texts pertaining to agriculture and estate management are closely related to the traditions of the legal language tract and glossaries, it is clear that their primary concern is not the instruction of practical farming. Instead, they teach other aspects of landownership, such as personal development and household governance, or non-​English lexis. Late-​ medieval texts build on these concerns, but also reflect a growing interest in agricultural and botanical techniques and innovations.

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Agricultural writing in late-​medieval gentry households Education—​both of children and adult readers—​continues to play a role in the production and re-​presentation of agricultural works in the later medieval period. Several later medieval composite manuscripts that were owned by gentry and bourgeois families contain a combination of educational texts and practical literature. This section will highlight three strands of agricultural and managerial writing that can be found in such household books: grafting treatises, vernacular translations of De Cura rei famuliaris, and The Rules for Purchasyng Land. Grafting treatises Since Antiquity, one of the most popular branches of agriculture has been horticulture, in particular the propagation of fruit, olive, and nut trees, and vines. Many domesticated species of fruit and nuts, as well as roses and vines, can only be cultivated through the technique of grafting a branch from one tree onto the rootstock of a related species. The most popular medieval treatise to deal with this topic is Godfridus Super Palladium (henceforth GSP). This work is attributed to the German monk Gottfried von Franken, who is thought to have composed it around the middle of the fourteenth century. When writing about grafting, Gottfried augmented the text that he found in Palladius’ fifth-​ century Opus Agriculturae by borrowing from Columella, Aristotle, Isidore of Seville, and Avicenna; he also added in gleanings from several experts whom he had met during his travels across the Mediterranean. The Latin version of Gottfried’s treatise is extant in at least eighty-​six manuscripts and was translated into several European vernaculars; a Middle English version of the work was apparently prepared by Gottfried’s friend, Nicholas Bollard, a Westminster monk whose aim would seem to have been to make the text available for a public beyond the monastic sphere.18 One might be tempted to conclude that the popularity of late-​ medieval grafting treatises reflects a desire among late-​medieval gardeners to explore new techniques of cultivation. But the contents of these supposedly practical works are frequently non-​utilitarian or represent goals that are frankly unattainable. Because Gottfried derives his information from Mediterranean sources, many of the fruit trees he describes are not suitable for the northern European climate. Moreover, the techniques he suggests seem unlikely—​literally—​to bear fruit. Thus as well as counselling the cultivation of pomegranates and figs, which are unlikely to flourish in England, the Middle English GSP suggests engrafting a

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plane tree with peach or crisomellio (l. 125), crisomellio being a word that could be used to refer to a range of golden coloured fruits, including apricots, quinces, and the bitter orange. As the aforementioned species of fruits are genetically unrelated to the plane tree, the viability of the grafting instruction appears minimal. The improbability of Gottfried’s instructions increases when he tempts his readers to recreate the ‘wondyrful thyngis’ (l. 153) that he has encountered on his journey, such as melons, gourds, and cucumbers shaped like a human head (ll. 154–​61), or writing a word in an apple core to make a tree produce writ-​bearing kernels (ll. 128–​37).19 Gottfried additionally tells his reader how to hide pearls, gems, or coins inside apples (ll. 67–​74) and how to grow nut kernels in place of fruit stones (ll. 116–​18). Such instructions could be accompanied with advice regarding the appropriate contexts for their application or the dangers that they might incur. Two Iberian translators of GSP note that creating apples with a jewel core is done for purely aesthetic purposes: they may be grown ‘per enbeliment’ [as an embellishment] or ‘por juegos en los grandes convites’ [for fun at big banquets].20 The Middle English version, on the other hand, counsels its readers to ‘mark well the braunche & the freut by som notable signe’, presumably so that a trip to the local barber-​ surgeon might be avoided (ll. 74–​ 5). English gentlemen and -​women most likely entertained similar ideas about banqueting as their Spanish peers, but cucumbers, almonds, and apricots were more probably imported than grown on British estates. There seems only to be a small chance that Gottfried’s northern readers actually performed his horticultural experiments before the invention of greenhouses.21 Instead, reading about exotic fruit trees could offer an edifying or leisurely activity in itself. As Lisa Cooper proposes, we might want to ask whether (like their classical forebears, who were entertained as well as instructed by the didactic verse of Lucretius and Virgil) medieval readers did not themselves take aesthetic enjoyment from practical literature.22

Medieval writers took inspiration from the eloquence with which late classical authorities described their latifundia, or grand estates, which often included a vineyard, fruit orchards, and olive plantations. The agronomists Varro, Columella, Virgil, and Palladius were thus crucial to the development of the medieval written tradition, in terms not only of content but also of style. For instance, Palladius’ treatise on grafting, De Insitione, is written

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in elegiac distichs, and at the opening of the prologue to the Latin text of GSP, Gottfried mimics the style of his predecessor: Palladij librum abreviatum per Gotefridum Accipe curta volens rustica cura colens; Palladium tamen non hic sequar aut Galienum; Pingitur et cespis floribus iste meis; Ordine sub certo nullo preeunte reperto Scite prius relego munus et hoc tibi do. Accept the book of Palladius, abbreviated by Gottfried, a shortened [work] on rustic care, as you desire to till fields; Palladius I will here, however, not follow, nor Galen; [Rather] he is embellished by my own green fields and flowers; found again under no definite preceding order, know that I have previously rearranged the work and give it [now] to you.23

Clearly, GSP is more than simply a text about grafting:  it is a product of nostalgia, mediated both through other literary sources and through a curiosity for Mediterranean agriculture. It is these para-​agricultural aspects of the work that appear to have motivated Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, to order a full translation of Palladius’s Opus Agriculturae.24 This translation, written in rhyme royal, was evidently not ordered for its practical content; had this been his interest, the duke could have commissioned a work adapted to the British climate.25 Like Palladius’s original, GSP also appealed to a broad scientific and intellectual readership—​after all, agronomy formed part of the educational curriculum known as the quadrivium or artes mechanicae.26 In most manuscript witnesses, the Middle English translation of GSP is conjoined with further Middle English rules for grafting, supposedly also compiled by Nicholas Bollard. Fourteen manuscripts contain this cleverly organised scientific tract that is concerned with the astrological dimension of arboriculture; it is now known under the title The Craft of Grafting.27 There is an educational purpose to Bollard’s treatise that is lacking in his translation of GSP. The treatise is aimed at scholarly experts, who are, in turn, encouraged to teach the material to ‘borell’ [unlearned, or young] ‘clerkes’ and ‘folk’ (p.  30). According to Bollard, these novices must not be burdened with zodiacal calculations. Instead, they must simply familiarise themselves with grafting in due season: þat borell clerkes may vnderstande thies auctours [Aristotle’s] wordes, let hem vnderstande hem thus, þat is to wyten for þe

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equinoccion of Somer let hem take ver [spring] and for þe equinoccion of wynter let hem take heruest [autumn]. (p. 30)

Notably, several late-​ medieval manuscripts skip the theoretical introduction and preserve only those parts of the treatise that are concerned with grafting and the days when it is best to do so. The versions of the text found in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 591 and Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Brogyntyn II.1 share an altogether different introduction and replace ‘borrell clerkes’ with ‘a man’ (I cite the text from my transcription of the Brogyntyn manuscript): Here begynnyth a schorte tretice for a man to knowe wyche tyme of the yere hit is best to graffe or to plante treys and also to make a tre to bere o manere frute of diverys colourys and odowrys with many other thyngys. (f. 28r)

This opening substitutes autodidacticism for the traditional student-​and-​teacher setting. The Aristotelian empiricism in the original introduction makes way for imprecise terminology such as ‘many other thyngys’, which conveys a sense that grafting offers limitless opportunities for the arboricultural enthusiast. In fact, many of Bollard’s instructions focus on transformation rather than propagation. Like Gottfried, who writes that fruit will take on any colour when the tree is injected with tinted water, Bollard suggests that fruit might be turned blue by inserting the painting pigment ‘azur of almayne’ (p. 33), a ferrous oxide, also known as Prussian blue, near the root. This colouring technique may work for roses, but apart from the twelfth-​century agricultural writings of Ibn al-​ ’Awwām, no scientific literature confirms that the colour of fruit can be altered in this way.28 Indeed, since Prussian blue takes its hue from a cyanide compound, this seems like rather a dangerous pursuit.29 Bollard also provides instructions for manipulating a single tree so that it brings forth ‘diuers frutes of diuers colour and diuers sauour … [a]‌nd this diuersite thou may doo at thyn owen liking’ (p. 33). In order to achieve this goal, Bollard says, apples should be grafted onto the branches of a cherry tree in the first year; then, in the following year, holes should be bored into the tree so that branches can be drawn through it of a vine, a red rose, a white rose, and other plants, at the reader’s discretion. The chances of the experiment succeeding are slight, but not impossible, when the right technique is used. Since 2011, artist and scientist Sam Van Aken has been using cleft-​grafting to produce trees that bear forty different

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types of fruit and nuts that ripen at different times of the year.30 As Ken Mudge and his collaborators specify, grafts and ­rootstock need to be selected on the basis of compatibility: ‘[b]roadly speaking, interclonal/​intraspecific grafts are nearly always compatible, interspecific/​ intrageneric grafts are usually ­ compatible, intrageneric/​ intrafamilial grafts are rarely compatible, and interfamilial grafts are essentially always incompatible.’31 Van Aken uses a species of the genus prunus, which includes stone fruit and almonds, as his rootstock, as it allows for an assortment of cherries, apricots, and plums to be grown on the same tree. Bollard opts for a cherry-​tree, which is at least compatible with scions of trees from the same genus. Nonetheless, the assumption that his instructions are based on an awareness of genetic compatibility is downplayed by the note that the reader may add any kind of graft ‘at thyn owen liking’ (p. 33), so no distinction is made between compatible and incompatible species. Despite its deliberate pedagogic framing, The Craft of Grafting seems of no greater practical use to the would-​be medieval gardener than was the Middle English GSP. Multi-​grafted trees epitomise the problematic nature of medieval grafting instructions, in which theory and practice do not always match up. Recently, Stephen Shepherd has proposed that an experienced grafter noted down instructions based on Bollard’s work on grafting in a Wycliffite bible. The scribe’s selectivity and combination of material, he argues, witness ‘an immediacy of practical application rarely seen in the commonplace books and other compendia that typically preserve these kinds of texts’. But, selective as these horticultural notations may be, they still do not convincingly attest that the scribe was a seasoned gardener. Shepherd observes ‘an immediacy of practical application’ but, rather, the opposite may be true, as the particular instructions that Shepherd discusses concern the grafting of elm upon oak and hark back to the horticultural fictions of Virgil.32 Evidently, the medieval grafting treatises could be composed and deployed to non-​ utilitarian ends, and may most often have been used in quite broad cultural contexts. Even though style and form reveal that an educational principle underlies medieval grafting treatises, it seems likely that a gentleman or -​woman could enjoy the wonders of grafting without engaging in the activity—​ a kind of armchair arboriculture. In addition, grafting treatises may have been favoured in gentry and merchant households because they conveyed a sense of hybridity that was particularly attractive to these social groups, whose

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claim to nobility depended on the interfamilial grafting of family trees. The Brogyntyn manuscript, discussed above, gives such an impression. As well as compiling Bollard’s grafting work with several texts that would have been useful in the education of children (especially girls)—​for example, The Life of Saint Katherine, The Good Wife Would A Pilgrimage, and The Book of the Knight of La Tour-​Landry—​this book also contains a list of collective nouns for beasts of venery and birds of prey that is drawn from the hunting manual of Dame Juliana Berners. As Michael Johnston shows, the manual is extended in this manuscript copy to fit the hunting practices of the gentry and yeoman classes; this observation allows Johnston to associate the whole book with that milieu.33 The manuscript also transmits the unique version of the romance Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, a text that further reflects an interest in the cultivation of a clearly defined gentry identity. As Johnston describes, Gawain’s boorish opponent, the carl, ‘teaches the Arthurian knights that provincial aristocrats deserve a place among the aristocracy’ and, in doing so, manages ‘to widen the court’s definition of aristocracy, a triumph that this romance’s gentry audience would, one imagines, have found gratifying’.34 The notion of growing exotic fruit trees at home can thus be seen to resonate with the needs of a social group that is seeking new ways of cultivating its own identity. De Cura rei famuliaris The manuscript contexts of a pseudo-​Bernardian tract of unclear origin, which is traditionally titled (Epistola) de Cura rei famuliaris, further exemplify the social context shared by managerial writings and romance literature in late-​medieval England.35 De Cura is styled as a letter from St Bernard to a newly landed knight called Raymond, in which Bernard offers Raymond advice on managing his household. Like Grosseteste’s Rules, the text embodies the interrelation between managerial literature and religious didactic literature, applying the ideals of monastic conduct to a secular household. Bernard’s letter is found in manuscripts across continental Europe, both in Latin and vernacular translations. Printed tracts also survive:  a French translation was printed in 1480 under the title Le Regisme de Mesnaige Selon Saint Bernyrd (ISTC, ib00382300); the first Latin version printed in England was Richard Pynson (c. 1505; STC, 1967.3). The text was translated into English for Robert Wyer’s 1530 printed edition (STC, 1967.5), which is attributed

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to Bernard Silvestris, but unrelated to the translations found in medieval manuscripts. Only two vernacular versions survive in manuscripts from the British Isles, one in Middle English, the other in Middle Scots. It is these versions of the text that interest me here. Consideration of the manuscript contexts in which these two texts circulated sheds useful light on their reception.36 The Scottish version of the work is found uniquely in Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5, which probably belonged to a Scottish merchant family.37 Not much is known about the compilation of the book, but its contents resemble those of other identifiable gentry and merchant household anthologies. It comprises nine booklets with items being added to the group as late as the sixteenth century. It is the book’s long, final section that interests me here (ff. 75r–​179v). This comprises a collection of Scottish legal texts and statutes, including a tract describing a Court Baron (a manorial court hosted by a landowner), political prophecies, devotional texts, and moral guides. There is a loose order to be discerned among these items, the moral guides and devotional texts being preceded by the political and legal texts. The moral guides and devotional texts are all written in the same hand; the Middle Scots De Cura opens the sequence of texts, which concludes with the Arthurian romance Lancelot of the Laik (138r–​179v). Among the texts immediately preceding Lancelot, Ratis Raving and The Council the Wise Man Gave his Son both stage moments of father-​to-​son instruction and might have been compiled with a pedagogic aim in mind. Likewise, the last instructional text in this cluster is The Thewis off Good Women, a paraenetic text aimed at daughters. Its Latin explicit, ‘Explicit Liber moralis secundum dicta antiquorum patrum, &c. &c. &c. Amen’ [here ends the book of morals according to the fathers of old], might be understood to reflect back not only upon the text at hand but also upon earlier items in the manuscript. For instance, it recalls the introduction to the Middle Scots De Cura, in which the speaker explains to his son that experience can be gleaned from the writings of wise poets: Awtenyk [authentic] bukys and storis alde and new Be wys poetys are tretit, the quhilk trew, Sum maide for law of god in document And othir for varldly regiment, Experyence throw tham that men may haffe Off sapience, and sa, amange the laiffe [remainder], A lytil epistile I fande for to comende [commend]. (ll. 1–​7)38

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‘Amange the laiffe’ in line 6 suggests that the compiler envisages the tract as part of a larger collection of texts on law and worldly matters. The addition of ‘off sapience’ in line 7, moreover, implies that the learner will not gain any applicable skills from reading this cluster of texts, but an experience or understanding of wisdom. So, contrary to the notion that undergoing a practical trial is necessary to acquire knowledge or skills, here, ‘experience’ can be defined as ‘the actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge’ (see OED, s.v. experience, n.). The knowledge to be experienced through reading De Cura is the treatment of familiari: members of the household, including servants. The relation between De Cura and the metrical romance Lancelot of the Laik in MS Kk.1.5. is also of interest. Lancelot features a long piece of political advice from the sage Amytans to Arthur. In it, the tone shifts to a didactic mode that recalls the speculum genre. Nonetheless, according to Alan Lupack, it is ‘clear that Lancelot of the Laik is not a courtesy book but a romance in which the advice plays an important but subsidiary role’.39 In addition, Lupack highlights an ‘interesting verbal echo’ in the recurrence of the word ‘flour’ (flower) in an elaborate section dedicated to the Virgin Mary.40 She is called flower in almost every line and hailed superlatively as ‘the flour of every flouris floure’ (l. 2090). About sixty lines later, when Arthur refers to Lancelot as ‘the flour of knichthed and of chivalry’ (l. 2183), Lupack suggests that the translator creates an ‘implied comparison between Lancelot on a worldly level and Mary on a spiritual level’ as the references to ‘flour’ are not found in the French redaction of this romance.41 This imagery is not confined to the romance of Lancelot but stretches across different texts in the manuscript. Thus the addressee of De Cura, Raymond, is said to be ‘of chewalry the ros’ (l. 9). Clearly, the cluster of moral texts for future householders and the romance are interdependent, rendering the manuscript itself a florilegium of chivalrous paragons. Both the romance and the courtesy tracts in MS Kk.1.5 exemplify chivalrous householders, such as Arthur, Gawain, and Raymond, and their advisers, Amytans and Bernard, casting them as role-​models for the users of this book, and binding them through the persistent use of botanical metaphor. A didactic context is also provided for the unique Middle English version of De Cura, which is preserved in London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 306.42 This manuscript comprises eleven booklets written in eight different hands and no doubt embodies a variety of purposes; De Cura appears on ff. 64r–​65r as part of a booklet

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copied in a sixteenth-​century secretary script. Otherwise, LPL MS 306 transmits a Brut chronicle, a herbal, and Lydgate’s animal fable turned political debate The Horse, the Sheep, and the Goose, which refers to mercantile conflicts as a result of the Siege of Calais in 1436: during this assault, English merchandise, especially cloth and wool, was banned in continental ports.43 The poem’s overt plea in favour of mercantile interests suggests the book’s arrival in a mercantile milieu: while the three animals are each assigned one of the three estates, the ‘lower degrees’ are nevertheless shown to have an important part to play; supporting farming, trade, and brewing, and doing ‘grete profite to eny communalte’ (ll. 106–​7).44 The addition of the initials ‘J. S’ reinforces this impression because it adumbrates a connection between the manuscript and the bookmaker John Shirley (c. 1366–​1456), who is known to have serviced members of the London gentry and bourgeoisie.45 LPL MS 306 also transmits several London-​focused texts that would have been of interest to a mercantile readership, such as lists of mayors and the names of the keepers and bailiffs of the city. Other items LPL MS 306 indicate that the readers of the manuscript were also interested in life on rural estates. There are treatises on hawking, beasts of venery, feeding nightingales, and on determining the gender of larks. Here as elsewhere, then, the readership of texts with rural applications could overlap with works of more urban relevance. The ending of De Cura seems particularly relevant to bourgeois reader implicated in LPL MS 306 since it contains a plea for primogeniture, that is, for the right of the oldest son to inherit the totality of his father’s possessions. Thus the speaker implores the reader to ask his children after their future plans, which might involve a ‘departysion of thir heritage’ (p.  13).46 If his children follow their father’s footsteps in becoming gentlemen, he advises that ‘it is better they be divided in the worlde than her heritage shulde be divided’ (p.  13). Secondly, if his children become laborers, they must simply do as they please, and, thirdly, if they become merchants, it is best to divide the heritage so as to prevent the misfortune of one from hurting the other. Clearly, the Middle English text promotes an awareness that the social fluidity of younger sons can be a blessing or a curse to their eldest siblings, depending on how the inheritance is divided. The Middle Scots text proffers the same advice, but does so from a different perspective, focusing on children’s father: ‘This nobyl clerke now wyl he spek a space /​Of yonge childyr quhilk are left fadyrles’ (l. 380). Whereas the Middle

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English translation focuses on the dangers of splitting up the family estate, the Middle Scots redaction shows greater interest in the plight of children left without an inheritance. It is thus evident that the translations of pseudo-​Bernard’s twelfth-​century doctrine offers moral guidance that could be tailored to the needs both of late-​medieval gentry and of merchant landowners, who were typically concerned with peerage and division of wealth. The Rules for Purchasing Land Concerns about inheritance and landownership also arise in a poem which appears on a pastedown of LPL MS 306, known as The Rules for Purchasing Land (hereafter: Purchasyng). This poem, which discusses the many important legal considerations involved in buying a plot of land, was particularly favoured among sixteenth-​ century landowners and, presumably, prospective ones. The poem specifies that a seller should be of legal age to purchase land from and that the land must not be mortgaged, bound, or released by any feoffee. Moreover, purchasers should mind the amount of quit-​ rent that has to be paid over the land and are informed that buying land from wedded women may cause problems with the covert baronne. In other details, the text differs from manuscript version to manuscript version. Here I examine a selection of the manuscripts containing the poem across a range of social contexts. Among them is Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.53, a household miscellany that looks to have been used for the education of gentry children. Its creation date is unknown, but the numerous different owner’s marks in the manuscript attest that the manuscript remained in the possession of one family for most of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that it sometimes functioned as a notebook for its owners. For instance, although it contains no systematic attempt at account keeping, which was probably done by a reeve in a different book, MS O.2.53 contains estate accounts dealing with the buying and selling of sheep (f. 62v). J. D. Alsop has identified the first owner of the book as Rowland Ram(p)ston and his heir Robert as a gentleman from Chingford, Essex.47 I have been able to identify Anthony Ramston, another of Rowland’s sons and probably sometime-​owner of the book (he writes his name on f.  70v), as the keeper of Walcumstowe (Walthamstowe) Walk in Epping Forest.48 Although most of the educational content in MS O.2.53 is not concerned with household management or agriculture, the

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inclusion of Purchasyng suggests that the younger members of this family were familiarised with the risks inherent in landownership in preparation for becoming a landowner. The Ramston miscellany also contains a large number of Latin items, which were likely used for language learning. For instance, f.  72r transmits these macaronic verse lines with Middle English glosses. I cite them in my transcription from MS O.2.53 (glosses to the text are given in superscript): Dum dolor est pragmaplee mea dragmapeny sit inde malagmaplaster Sit tibi sintagma multum valet inde caragma.print of the peny

The lines are part of a larger poem concerning the so-​called abuses of the ages, and was possibly used for recital, perhaps in a private chapel or chantry. Accolades designate which parts of the poem are meant to be recited by the flock (vulgus), which parts are observed (videte), and which are sung (canete). While the main share of the verse is in Latin, the glossed words (except the Latin ‘malagma’) are in Greek, of which ‘pragma’, ‘drachma’, and ‘charagma’ frequently occur in a biblical context.49 Glossing verses such as these might have prepared the younger Ramstons for further education, which they seem to have received:  f. 45v contains a draft letter written by a student urging his father to send him books so he can finish his studies (elsewhere in the manuscript there are notes on Oxford, which may indicate that the younger Ramstons received education there). These kinds of template letters are found in other medieval schoolbooks and the manuscript may have doubled up as a student’s notebook. Written underneath the letter in the same hand is a fragment of the song ‘My love she mourneth for me’, attributed to the Tudor composer William Cornysh, which notably also occurs in MS Kk.1.5. In addition, MS O.2.53 shares a number of texts with other gentry compilations, such as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lat. Misc. 16, the household book of Humphrey Newton, a member of the Cheshire gentry. The Ramston and the Newton compilations both transmit copies of the ABC of Aristotle (a text promoting modesty and moderation), Purchasyng, and instructions for tuning a harp.50 Another household manuscript combining Purchasyng with more didactic works is the late-​ fifteenth or early sixteenth-​ century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61. As George Shuffelton points out, the ownership of property is a crucial idea that is addressed from a variety of angles by the texts compiled in this book.51 The manuscript also contains five

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romances—​Sir Cleges, Sir Isumbras, The Erle of Toulous, and Lybeaus Desconus—​which are, to varying extents, associated with the theme of loss and recovery of property. Rory G. Critten lists other texts that bear witness to the compiler’s preoccupation with worldly possessions: How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter and Lydgate’s Dietary both communicate concerns with wealth, and, like Purchasyng, the Short Charter of Christ and the description of Adam’s fall in The King and His Four Daughters, are written in the ‘language of tenancy and legal ownership’.52 While Shuffelton maintains that the romances in Ashmole 61 offer complimentary treatments of worldly possessions and other prime concerns of bourgeois members, Critten demonstrates how, in fact, the romances subvert the moral messages of the didactic texts in the codex.53 The selection of materials copied in Ashmole 61 suggest that its scribe, Rate, had reasons to be preoccupied with worldly possessions, yet the copy of the text compiled in his book lacks the technical jargon present in other copies of the text and its practical utility is thereby reduced. Although these simplifications render the poem of less use for legal reference, it is still suitable enough for a young audience. Finally, the format, contents, and readership posited for Ashmole 61 resemble those posited for Oxford, Balliol College MS 354, which dates to the first half of the sixteenth century. Both Ashmole 61 and Balliol College MS 354 started as blank holster books or ledgers, a format associated with account-​keeping as well as singing and teaching.54 Yet these ledgers were filled by their merchant owners with texts suitable for the education of their children: both Ashmole 61 and Balliol College MS 354 contain copies of Lybeaus Desconus and Purchasyng. MS Balliol 354 also features a long section with the heading ‘Of graffyng’ (ff. 223r–​f.239r), which is a conflation of Bollard’s Middle English treatises, with additional information on wine-​making. Experience or knowledge? So far, examples of household compilations have not offered any direct evidence of practical agricultural knowledge being transmitted within medieval households. Indirectly, some agricultural writers instruct their readers on how to share their knowledge, but there is no way of telling to what extent such portrayals are realistic. William Lambarde, in his translation and revision of Walter of Henley, for instance, states that knowledge is power, insofar

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as it lends one authority in getting reluctant staff to work:  ‘And how a man ought to keepe cattayle, it weare not amysse if youe understoode it, to teache it your servauntes and when they see that you know it youreself they wille payne theimselves so much the more to doe well.’55 In addition, Anthony (or John) Fitzherbert envisages reading his Boke of Husbandry as a collective activity.56 He presents, in Keiser’s words, a picture of ‘idealized domestic harmony’, that is, a young landowner, book in hand, rehearsing the monthly duties with his manorial staff.57 By including a distich, he clearly stresses his indebtedness to educational traditions: For I lerned two verses at grammer scole & those be these. Gutta cauat lapidem non vi, sed sepe cadendo: Sic homo sit sapiens non vi, sed sepe legendo. A droppe of water perseth a stone, not alonely by his owne strength, but by his often fallynge. Ryght so a man shal be made wise, not al onely by hym selfe, but by his oft redynge. (STC, 10995.5, sig. 71[v]‌)

Although Fitzherbert imagines his readership as both gentlemen and husbandmen, this reference to a grammar school text would sound more familiar to a schooled landowner than to unschooled fieldworkers. As the knight in Piers Plowman admits after Piers exhorts him to harvest his own grain:  ‘Ac on the teme, trewely, taught was I nevere, ac kenne me [but teach me]’ (VI. ll. 22–​3).58 The ambiguous use of ‘teme’, which can both refer to a plough-​ team and to a ‘theme’, or topic, implies that the knight is both uneducated on the subject of husbandry and has no experience of it. Though the hapless knight is evidently typecast, his portrayal appears more realistic in the context of the sixteenth century, when urban gentlemen increasingly became involved in landownership without prior managerial experience. Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandry provides a detailed inventory of farming equipment for a less informed readership. The following excerpt from a description of a plough, which extends over two pages of the Boke of Husbandry, aims to remedy a lacuna in its readers’ agricultural knowledge: Men that be no husbandes may fortune to rede this booke, that knowe not whiche is the plough beame, the sharbeame, the plough shethe, the plough tale, the stilt, the rest, the sheldbrede, the se[n]‌brede, the rough staues /​the plough fote, the plough eare or coke, the share, the culture & plough mal. Perave[n]ture I gyve them these names here, as is used in my countre, & yet in other countrees they have other names /​wherfore ye shall knowe /​that the plough beame is the

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longe tree above, the whiche is a litel bente /​the sharbeame is the tre underneth where upon the share is set, the plough sheth is a thyn pece of drye woode made of oke, th[at] is set fast in a morteys in the plough beame. (STC, 10995.5, sig. 2[r])

It seems probable that, unlike the bulk of their medieval predecessors, early modern landowners did try to mend their agricultural inexperience through reading agricultural writings. Of course, there is a limit to what a landowner could achieve with only bookish knowledge. When it comes to ‘a connyng poynt of husbandry’, Fitzherbert argues, ‘it is so narow a point to know, that it is hard to make a man to understand it by writing, without he were at the operacion therof to teche the practyue’ (STC, 10995.5, sig. 3[v]‌–​4[r]). In other words, possession of knowledge does not equate familiarity with agricultural practices. Yet, the popularity of house-​ holding tracts grew exponentially in the early modern period. As Lynette Hunter notes, ‘some household practices and artisan secrets became aristocratic science or professional knowledge’ after the arrival of the printing press.59 The major writers on husbandry, such as Fitzherbert, Thomas Tusser, and Gervase Markham, all stressed their own experience, while they were also reliant on the written tradition. James Howell’s Lexicon Tetraglotton (1660), a so-​called ‘gentleman’s dictionary’, for example, includes a list of fruit trees very similar to GSP, a section on husbandry, and terms related to country life. Moreover, it is no coincidence that the first direct translation of a Greek text published in the English language is a house-​ holding tract:  Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, translated as Xenophon’s Treatise of Householde (1542). A  sixteenth-​century Sammelband, now Bodleian Library (OC) 70 c.103, collates the Xenophon text with four other printed books, highlighting its relation to the husbandry genre: A Glasse for Housholders (1542), John Fitzherbert’s Husbandry (c. 1534), Anthony Fitzherbert’s Surveyinge (1546), and Order of the Courte Baron & a lete (1544). It is difficult to identify the owner marks in this book, but I  have ascertained that a landowner from Denbigshire in Wales, Roger Lloyd (b. c. 1570), and his son, Ffoulk (d. c. 1609), may have owned the collection.60 In any case, the long patronyms noted down in this Welsh book indicate that the owners belonged to the Welsh gentry or nobility. Moreover, the resemblance between this early modern compilation and medieval manuscripts, such as MS Kk.1.5, is evident. Both contain fatherly advice on agriculture and house-​holding, a text for reeves, and manorial law. Nonetheless, taking the functionality

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of what appears to be a carefully curated collection of didactic materials for granted is problematic. Another one-​ time owner of a copy of Xenophon’s treatise wrote the following note on its frontispiece: I send thys boke to you that hathe noe nede there of yn exsperians but to loke there on for your plesure: to se the fowlyssnes of my selfe: & tham that neuer wold lerne to be gud husbandes. (STC, 26069)

In the sixteenth century there is an interest in garnering practical agricultural advice from texts, as the sender exemplifies. However, those who are experienced enough in husbandry, like the addressee, may simply read the book for pleasure. Although it is difficult to draw any finite conclusions about the agricultural knowledge and experience that was transmitted in medieval and early modern households, some common trends can be observed. First of all, dimensions of content, form, social function, and language suggest that for medieval readers agricultural literacy operated as a gateway to other fields of knowledge, such as French and Latin lexis, estate management, the law, and classical literature. Secondly, manuscripts that belonged to gentry and merchant households demonstrate that education concerning the tenure of land and agriculture is necessarily interconnected with personal development within these social groups. Some parents familiarised their children with the duties of an estate owner by offering them a broad spectrum of literary works featuring exemplary landowners and their protégés, as exemplified by MS Kk.1.5. Thirdly, the way in which Purchasyng offsets other texts in MS Ashmole 61 and features alongside a series of ‘practical’ texts in MS Balliol 354 indicates how managerial know-​how was woven into the educational fabric of future landowners. This suggests that it is wrong to view agricultural texts as straightforward containers of information, for a medieval audience may have sought to derive other forms of knowledge from them than a modern audience could expect. Grafting treatises generally focus on aesthetic rather than technical improvements, and their doubtful instructions imply that practical applicability is of secondary importance to these works. As the compiler of Kk.1.5 suggests in his introduction to De Cura rei famuliaris, wisdom ‘experienced’ through reading still counts as experiential. Thus, collecting courtesy literature and other texts that reinforce a genteel lifestyle, as well as texts on exotic arboriculture and ancient estate management, promoted erudition in areas that reflected the ambitions of medieval landowners. Of course,

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individual reasons for collecting works may vary greatly from person to person, but the textual interrelatedness of ostensibly haphazard household miscellanies is evident. And there are more text-​types deserving of critical attention. For instance, the parallel transmission of texts on grafting and on ink-​making and limning might constitute an avenue for further enquiry, as limning is also known to be a genteel pastime in late-​medieval and early modern England. The full potential of practical literature within these household compilations awaits proper recognition and constitutes a promising topic of enquiry for future researchers. Notes 1 The Polish proverb ‘Obiecac gruszki na wierzbie’, literally ‘to promise pears on a willow’, means to make an unrealistic promise. Proverbs relating to the impossibility of growing one type of fruit on a tree of a different kind exist in several languages, including Turkish, Bosnian, Maltese, and Latin. 2 Cited from Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting, ed. Dorothea Oschinsky (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1971), p.  323. William Lambarde (1536–​ 1601) had an antiquarian interest in rural Kent and copied Henley’s treatise in a personal notebook, providing his own translation. 3 See the listings for items 328, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396 in Ruth Dean, Anglo-​Norman Literature:  A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London: Anglo-​Norman Text Society, 1999). 4 See George R. Keiser, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–​1500. Volume 10 (Connecticut: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998), pp. 3689–​91 and 3902–​3. 5 See P. D.  A. Harvey, ‘Rectitudines Singularum Personarum and Gerefa’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 1–​22. 6 See Walter of Henley, ed. Oschinsky, pp.  75–​ 112 (discussion) and pp. 261–​305 (text). 7 Text and translation cited from Walter of Henley, ed. Oschinsky, p. 437. 8 On this point, see Walter of Henley, ed. Oschinsky, pp. 9–​10. 9 See Walter of Henley, ed. Oschinsky, pp.  191–​ 9 (discussion) and pp. 387–​415 (text). 10 On this point, see further Louise J. Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-​ Century Lincolnshire (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), p. 59. 11 Paraenesis is an umbrella term covering a range of genres and literary modes from the Greco/​Roman, Christian, and Jewish traditions. I refer to the working definition of paraenesis offered by Wiard Popkes, who writes that the ‘basic function [of paraenesis] is to promote attitudes and actions which secure the future of the recipient [who] has come

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into a state of reshaping his or her future and now needs competent advice’. See Wiard Popkes, ‘Paraenesis in the New Testament:  An Exercise in Conceptuality’, in Troels Engberg-​Pedersen and James Starr (eds), Early Christian Paraenesis in Context (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), pp. 13–​46 (17). 12 For a brief introduction to this text, see William Rothwell, ‘A Mis-​ Judged Author and a Mis-​Used Text:  Walter de Bibbesworth and His “Tretiz” ’, Modern Language Review, 77 (1982), 282–​ 93. For a recent reappraisal of the Tretiz that considers its aesthetic as well as its practical engagements, see Thomas Hinton, ‘Anglo-​French in the Thirteenth Century:  A Reappraisal of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz’, Modern Language Review, 112 (2017), 855–​81. 13 See Karen K. Jambeck, ‘The Tretiz of Walter of Bibblesworth: Cultivating the Vernacular’, in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), pp. 159–​84 (182–​3). 14 On the relationship between these works, see further George R. Keiser, ‘Practical Books for the Gentleman’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume III: 1400–​1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 470–​94 (473–​4). 15 The farm accounts are inscribed on ff. 11r-​v of MS Selden Supra 74. See further the catalogue description in Richard William Hunt, Falconer Madan, and P. D. Record, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895–​1953), II. 643. 16 For this term, see Werner Hüllen, English Dictionaries 800–​1700: The Topical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 82. 17 See Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 307–​8. 18 For the Middle English text, and for further discussion of GSP, see David G. Cylkowski, ‘A Middle English Treatise on Horticulture: Godfridus Super Palladium’, in Lister M. Matheson (ed.), Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 301–​29. The Middle English translation of GSP is cited by line number from this source. 19 While Gottfried claims to have learned about this technique from the people he met on his journeys, he actually derived this information from Palladius. 20 See Maria Antònia Martí Escayol, ‘Two Iberian Versions of Gottfried of Franconia’s Pelzbuch’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 95 (2011), 129–​57 (138). 21 There were attempts at growing peaches in northern Europe, however, on which see Alexandra Livarda, ‘Spicing Up Life in Northwestern Europe:  Exotic Food Plant Imports in the Roman and Medieval World’, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 20 (2011), 143–​ 64 (149–​50).

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22 Lisa H. Cooper, ‘The Poetics of Practicality’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Oxford Twenty-​First-​Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 491–​505 (499). Cooper’s work on the non-​utilitarian applications of late-​medieval practical literature also inspires the argument of Michael Leahy’s contribution to this volume. 23 Cited from Thomas Haye, Das lateinische Lehrgedicht im Mittelalter: Analyse einer Gattung (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 248. I thank Sjoukje Kamphorst for her help with the translation. 24 On this translation, see further A. S.  G. Edwards, ‘Duke Humfrey’s Middle English Palladius Manuscript’, in Jenny Stratford (ed.), The Lancastrian Court:  Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), pp. 68–​78. 25 Interestingly, an excerpt from this translation did find its way into the sixteenth-​century library of a Nottinghamshire gentry landowner in the form of paper note, ‘Palladius pagina MS of finding water’. On this note, now Nottingham, Nottingham University Library MS. Mi LM 31, see further Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-​Petre, ‘Additional Medieval Manuscripts in the Middleton Collection’, in Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-​Petre (eds), The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers (York: York Medieval Press, 2010), p. 114–​19 (118). 26 See Elspeth Whitney, ‘Artes Mechanicae’, in F. A.C. Mantello and A. C. Rigg (eds), Medieval Latin:  An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1996), pp. 431–​5  (432). 27 For an edition and further discussion of this text, see W. L. Braekman, ‘Bollard’s Middle English Book of Planting and Grafting and Its Background’, Studia Neophilologica, 57 (1985), 19–​39. The Middle English text is cited from this source by page number. 28 See further W. A. Roach, ‘Plant Injection as a Physiological Method’, Annals of Botany, 3 (1939), 155–​226 (157). 29 Leonardo da Vinci allegedly experimented in creating poisonous fruit by injecting tree-​trunks with arsenic. See Roach, ‘Plant Injection’, 157. 30 See Katherine Brooks, ‘This One Tree Grows 40 Different Types of Fruit, is Probably from the Future’, Huffington Post, 24 July 2014. 31 Ken Mudge, Jules Janick, Steven Scofield, and Eliezer E. Goldschmidt, ‘A History of Grafting’, Horticultural Reviews, 35 (2009), 437–​93 (440). 32 Stephen H. A. Shepherd, ‘A Scribe-​Grafter at Work: Middle English Horticultural Notes Appended to a Wycliffite New Testament’, Notes and Queries, 63 (2016), 524–​31 (525). David O.  Ross Jr. discusses Virgil’s many impossible grafting combinations, including oak upon elm, and argues that the poet purposefully invents ‘acceptable’ absurdities to construct an alternative universe. See David O. Ross Jr., Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 104–​8.

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33 See Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: University Press, 2014), p. 4. 34 Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, p. 66. 35 On the different titles of this text, see C. D. M. Cossar, The German Translations of the Pseudo-​Berhardine Epistole de cura rei Familiaris (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1975), p. ii. 36 On the trans-​Channel traffic of household texts adumbrated in this discussion of the transmission history of De Cura, see further Critten’s contribution to this volume. 37 On this manuscript and its early owners, see Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–​1540 (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2008), p. 126. For a description of the book, see Charles Hardwick and Henry Richard Luard (eds), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved by the Library of The University of Cambridge, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1863), 3: 558–​63. 38 The Middle Scots text of De Cura is cited by line from Bernardus De Cura rei famuliaris with some Early Scottish Prophecies, ed. J. Rawson Lumby, EETS o.s. 42 (London: Trübner & Co., 1870). 39 Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1994), p. 4. The romance will be cited from this source by line. 40 Lancelot of the Laik, ed. Lupack, p. 4. 41 Lancelot of the Laik, ed. Lupack, p.  4. The lexical connection does not end with Lancelot and Mary. Gawain, too, is considered a flower of chivalry: ‘But Gawane haith he clepit, was hyme by, /​In qwhome rignith the flour of chevelry’ (ll. 780–​1). 42 For a recent physical description of this manuscript, including a full list of its contents, see Jason O’Rourke’s entry for Lambeth Palace Library MS 306 at the Imagining History Project Wiki:  www.qub. ac.uk/​imagining-​history/​. 43 See further Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1961), p. 230. 44 Cited by line from John Lydgate, Horse, Goose and Sheep, ed. Max Degenhart (Erlangen: A. Deichert, 1900). 45 For the view that Lambeth 306 is a ‘manuscript of the larger Shirley circle some of whose contents parallel those in Shirley manuscripts’, see Linne R. Mooney, ‘John Shirley’s Heirs’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 182–​98. The classic study of Shirley’s activities is Margaret Connolly, John Shirley:  Book Production in the Noble Household in Fifteenth-​Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). 46 The Middle English De Cura is cited by page from The Proverbys of Saynt Bernard, ed. Henry George Webb (Chiswick: Caradoc Press, 1904). 47 See J. D. Alsop, ‘A Late Medieval Guide to Land Purchase’, Agricultural History 57 (1983), 161–​4.

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48 For Ramston’s occupation, see Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons and Command. Vol. 6 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1863), p. 107. 49 See the online concordance hosted at Bible Hub (http://​biblehub.com), s.v. πρᾶγμα (pragma). I am grateful to Kees Dekker for the following translation of the lines: ‘While pain is my business, the money comes from the emollient /​If you have order, its imprint is strong’. 50 See Deborah Youngs, Humphrey Newton (1466–​1536), an Early Tudor Gentleman (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), pp. 169, 182, and 194. 51 Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2008), p. 449. 52 Rory G.  Critten, ‘Bourgeois Ethics Again:  The Conduct Texts and the Romances of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Chaucer Review, 50 (2015), 108–​33 (118). 53 For a consideration of how the comic texts in Ashmole 61 affect this compilatory dynamic, see Myra Seaman’s chapter in this volume. 54 See Erik Kwakkel, ‘Decoding the Material Book:  Cultural Residue in Medieval Manuscripts’, in Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (eds), The Medieval Manuscript Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 60–​76 (71–​3). 55 Cited from Walter of Henley, ed. Oschinsky, p. 32. 56 The authorship of the Boke of Husbandry has been contested, see H. C. Fitzherbert, ‘The Authorship of the “Book of Husbandry” and the “Book of Surveying” ’, English Historical Review, 12 (1897), 225–​36. 57 Keiser, ‘Practical Books’, p. 494. 58 Cited by passus and line from William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman:  A Critical Edition of the B-​Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V.  C. Schmidt (London:  Dent and Dutton, 1978). 59 Lynette Hunter, ‘Books for Daily Life:  Household, Husbandry, Behaviour’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with Maureen Bell (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume IV, 1557–​ 1695 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 514–​ 53 (514–​32). 60 Margaret Lane Ford notes the names of the owners of this book, but states that they are not identifiable. See Margaret Lane Ford, ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, in Hellinga and Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume III, pp.  203–​ 28. Assuming that the owners wrote their names during the sixteenth century, it is possible to narrow down the search to Roger and Ffoulk, who were the owners of the Dugoed estate in Denbigshire. See Margaret Dunn and Richard Suggett, Darganfod Tai Hanesyddol Eryri:  Discovering the Historic Houses of Snowdonia (Aberystwyth:  Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Wales, 2014), pp. 160–​5.

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8 Domestic ideals: healing, reading, and perfection in the late-​medieval household Michael Leahy

The forsaid sir Adam, forsoth, suffrand fistulam in ano, made for to aske counsel at all the lecheȝ and cirurgienȝ that he myȝt fynde in Gascone, at Burdeux, at Briggerac, Tolows, and Neyrbon, and Peyters, and many other places. And all forsoke hym for vncurable; whiche y-​se and y-​herde þe forseid Adam hastied for to torne hom to his contre. And when he come home, he did of al his knyȝtly clothinges and cladde mornyng clothes, in purpose of abydyng dissoluyng, or lesyng, of his body beyng niȝ to hym. At laste I, forseid Iohn Arderne, y-​souȝt and couenant y-​made, come to hym and did my cure to hym and, oure lord beyng mene, I helid hym perfitely. (p. 1)1

The above excerpt from the preface to the late fourteenth-​century Practica de fistula in ano of John Arderne (c. 1307–​c. 1377)  is an account of how the surgeon cured the anal fistula of one of his most elite patients, Sir Adam Everingham, of Laxton in Nottinghamshire (c. 1311–​c. 1370).2 Although Arderne describes Everingham’s travels whilst fighting with Henry of Lancaster (c. 1310–​1361) in his Aquitaine campaign of 1345–​1346 during the Hundred Years War, his focus is on the painful condition that the knight developed and his search for medical treatment.3 By the end of this afflicted odyssey, having found no French surgeon who could cure him, Everingham is described returning home to prepare for death, his physical deterioration in marked contrast to the success of the military campaign. The story’s ending with Arderne’s intervention and his patient’s return to full health is typical of the many case studies in his treatise. The solemn description of Everingham at home in Laxton sloughing his military garb, with its masculine and hierarchical associations, for ‘mornyng clothes’ evokes the domestic environment as a place typified by the acceptance or ‘abydyng’ of physical dissolution and death.4 In this context, Arderne’s visit and his undertaking of a novel but perfect cure for the condition adds a narrative twist

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by disrupting Everingham’s resignation to his imminent demise.5 While the tone of the account is generally positive, it encapsulates a tension between domestic care and surgical intervention which, as I argue below, is implicit in Arderne’s instructions to surgeons when entering the household. At the same time, this account of the surgeon saving an elite aristocrat from death is reinforced by its appropriation of other forms of writing and its dependence on its reader’s familiarity with them for its force: Arderne’s itinerary of the invading English army and its reference to significant locations in the Aquitaine campaign, particularly Bergerac and Poitiers, is redolent of the chronicle;6 and his reference to the knight returning home having endured travails abroad resonates with a conventional romance trope (notwithstanding the bathos that might attend the privileging of Everingham’s anal fistula over his exploits in combat).7 Arderne’s treatise not only describes domestic healing practices, then, but his narrative also enfolds some of the diverse material that readers might have encountered in the household miscellany, a manuscript context in which the Practica was sometimes transmitted.8 Indeed, Arderne’s inclusion of such narrative features raises a question about the extent to which his writings might have appealed to a domestic readership and what such a readership might have sought in his work besides the practical knowledge of surgical procedures that it contained. This chapter analyses the role of medical knowledge in late-​ medieval representations of the household, particularly for how such knowledge relates to the concept of the household as a space of bodily governance and good health. The argument focuses on how domesticity is represented in terms of the accommodation of academic medicine, but also on the ways in which the tension between a Latinate scholasticism and the everyday healing practices germane to the household is itself apparent in the miscellanies in which household readers would have encountered this knowledge. In this way, it seeks to shed light on the interrelationship between household healing and reading practices during a period typified by the increased availability of scholastic and practical texts written in the vernacular and read by men and women in the domestic environment. It begins by exploring the tensions attending the surgeon entering the household in a Middle English translation of Arderne’s Practica; it goes on to chart how this work relates to two texts, John of Bordeaux’s Governayle of Health, on self-​governance, and Henry Daniel’s Treatise on Rosemary, outlining different uses of the herb rosemary, both texts being bound

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with a Latin version of the Practica in one household miscellany, London British Library MS Additional 29301.9 I claim that all of these practical writings would have encouraged their late-​medieval readers to imagine the household as an environment typified by bodily integrity and perfect living and, in doing so, enable them to understand their quotidian domestic activities as elevated and culturally significant practices. The surgeon in the house: John Arderne and domestic hierarchy The preface to Arderne’s Practica evinces a keen interest in how the visiting surgeon should assimilate himself into the household and its hierarchies and, to this end, includes detailed instructions about how he should act when attending to his (usually male and elite) patient. Arderne advises surgeons to speak plainly, to act with diligence, to wear appropriate clothing, and to avoid excessive eating or overbearing behaviour. This advice is indebted to a deontological tradition extending back to ancient Greek medicine, and consolidated in the Hippocratic corpus (written between the fourth and the sixth centuries BCE) and the writings of Galen (c. 130–​c. 210 CE), which outline the ethical behaviour the physician is expected to adopt when treating his patients.10 The academic medicine that began to emerge in twelfth-​century Western Europe, with its Arabic inflections, saw the retention of the classical ethical imperatives, although they assumed a more Christian form and, increasingly, they were subject to codification as a set of professional obligations.11 By the late-​medieval period, medical ethics were being incorporated, usually as prefaces, in the proliferating medical treatises which circulated beyond the university environs, a development which paralleled the growing professionalisation of medical practitioners.12 Arderne leans into this deontological tradition to style his ideal surgeon as an ethical and high-​status professional within the household he visits. In doing so, he places a special emphasis on the delicate power balances that have to be negotiated when entering the houses of ‘great men’, an interest that is in tune with his far more distinctive case histories of the prominent English knights and merchants he has treated.13 This is apparent in his advice that the surgeon should observe sexual decorum: Considere [the surgeon] noȝt ouer openly the lady or the douȝters or oþer fair wymmen in gret mennes houses ne profre tham noȝt to kisse, ne touche not priuely ne apertely their pappes, ne their

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handes, ne their share, that he renne noȝt into the indignacion of the lord. (p. 5)

This warning against the surgeon’s prurience is another conventional directive found in early academic medical works.14 In keeping with the patriarchal focus of his preface, Arderne justifies this advice by stressing how the surgeon’s wandering hands might cause him to ‘renne … into the indignacion of the lord’.15 The insistent negatives and exhaustive proscriptions, referencing each body part that should not be touched, voice concerns about the bodily intimacy involved in surgical care and the thin borders separating professional handling from sexual touching.16 Such apprehensions throw into relief the potential disruption attending the surgeon’s entry into the household. The idea that the practitioner might unsettle the household’s decorum is part of a larger concern in Arderne’s text related to the status of the surgeon and his need to negotiate power relations in order to establish himself professionally. Arderne raises these issues through offering quite distinctive renderings of the conventional deontological instructions pertaining to clothing and eating: Also dispose a leche hym that in clothes and other apparalyngis be he honeste, noȝt likkenyng hymself in apparalyng or berying to mynistralleȝ, but in clothing and beryng shew he the maner of clerkes. ffor why it semeth any discrete man y-​cladde with clerkis clothing for to occupie gentil menneȝ bordeȝ … And be he curtaise at lordeȝ bordeȝ, and displease he noȝt in words or dedes to the gestes syttyng by; here he many þingis, but speke he but fewe. (p. 6)

Arderne’s text is, in one sense, part of a wider effort to legitimise surgery as a professional occupation in late fourteenth-​century England and this passage points out the uncertainties that could circulate around the surgeon’s ranking in the households of his social superiors.17 He signals the surgeon’s fluid status through raising the prospect that his clothing and demeanour might align him with either the figure of the minstrel, meaning a lowly servant or an entertainer, or that of the higher status clerk, indicating a secretary, administrator, or, more generally, a scholar.18 Despite asserting that the surgeon should incorporate performative elements within his practice, such as telling cheerful tales, Arderne suggests that if a surgeon dresses and behaves like a clerk in his patient’s house, he will be recognised as a guest, rather than a servant or entertainer, and thus enjoy parity with others sitting at the lord’s table.19

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In her analysis of Arderne’s use of illness narratives, Marion Turner notes how the associations between clerks and minstrels with narrative allow Arderne to set up an opposition where literate clerks are preferred over oral minstrels. Both associations confer upon the surgeon an inferior subject position on entering the household:  ‘the surgeon is firmly established as a servile figure with a precarious social position, in sharp contrast to the depiction of the doctor in much later literature’.20 Yet, as Turner notes with reference to an image in an Arderne manuscript of the surgeon working upon and dominating the patient’s passive body, the hierarchical relationship between the surgeon and the patient is ambivalent.21 I suggest that this ambivalence is related directly to the household environment and, more precisely, to the surgeon’s need to displace the authority of the male householder in order to carry out his operation. This dynamic becomes apparent in the section immediately following the preface which describes the operation for the removal of anal fistula. At this point, the image of the deferential surgeon in the preface makes way for an authoritative one, assuming control of an operation for which success depends upon the wealthy patient’s absolute submission to the commands of his social inferior.22 This reversal would seem to account for Arderne’s deliberate elucidation of each step leading up to the operation and the importance he places on securing the patient’s acquiescence at each stage in explicitly formal terms. He describes the preliminary assessments which the surgeon should carry out to identify the nature of the condition and the patient’s disposition before he agrees to the operation. He then suggests that this can proceed only once he has established that ‘þe pacient and þe lech ar accorded in al þings’ (pp. 21–​2). Later, just before the operation is about to begin, Arderne returns to the issue of agreement, advising the surgeon to issue a final warning before commencement: Þis cure ow not only to be recced as now to þe possibilite of my gode bisynes, bot also to ȝour gode and abydyng pacience. And for als-​ mich be it noȝt hidde to ȝow þat if ȝe be vnobedient and vnpacient to my commandyngs … ȝe may falle in-​to a ful grete perile or tary longer þe effecte of þe cure. (p. 22)

The quasi-​legal and formal register of such declarations, as well as Arderne’s instructions that they should be made at a number of points leading up to the operation, indicate a sensitive balance of power between the surgeon and his patient. This transfer of power from the patient to the surgeon occurs through repeated utterances where the patient’s consent and cooperation are obtained.

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Once this has been achieved, the patient in the operating room is prepared and is positioned appropriately for the procedure: Þan be þe pacient ledde to a place made redy Where þe lech shal do þe mynysteryng of cure. And all men amoued away out-​take one or tuo, þat þe lech will haue with hym to his helping … Þise things yseid, be þe pacient putte vp-​on a bedde bifore a liȝt wyndow … lie he þan wide opne boþ his leggeȝ or þe tone raised vp after þat it semeth more spedeful and be þai hungen vp with a corde or with a towel festned aboue to a balk or a beme. (p. 22)

The reversal between the patient and surgeon is complete at this point where the focus on physical activity signalling the commencement of the operation displaces the dialogue between the two. The earlier social setting, with its constellation of guests around the lord’s dining table, makes way for the surgical one, where the patient is led to a more indeterminate ‘place made redy’ (although the mention of a bed suggests the patient’s own bedroom as the most likely site). The surgeon’s dismissal of the lord’s cohort from the room, retaining only a few who will act as assistants, configures the operating space in terms of the suspension of social activity and of the surgeon’s dominance within this private realm. This authority not only allows him to control the flow of people in the bedroom, but also gives him license to commandeer the house itself and its materials as paraphernalia for the technical execution of the operation. Thus the patient is situated near a window to afford the surgeon greater visibility, while his legs are raised and attached by a cord or towel to one of the wood beams in the house’s timber frame. From the point that Arderne begins describing the operation, the patient is represented not so much as an agent ceding control of his body to the surgeon but rather as an instrumental collection of body parts (‘þe buttoke’, ‘þe lure’, ‘þe hole’) equivalent with the surgical instruments that both cut into and sew up his flesh: ‘And when he [the surgeon] feleþ þe needle wiþ his fynger, labor he warly þat he may bring out with his fynger þe heued of þe instrument þurȝ þe lure applying and wryþng’ (p. 23). This reduction of the patient to a series of pliable material body parts is echoed in the illustrations accompanying this text in many of its manuscript witnesses where the disembodied lower body of the patient is depicted attached to the surgical implements by the thread emerging from the fistula holes.23 The tableau of this body–​instrument–​house assemblage presided over by the surgeon registers a striking contrast with Arderne’s foregoing representation of the surgeon’s deference as a household guest and marks the

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radical transformation of both social dynamics and bodily integrity attending his entry into the house.24 The demarcation of public and private spaces in the opening pages of Arderne’s treatise reflects the growing importance of compartmentalisation in wealthy late-​medieval households.25 Thus the public space of the open hall and workshop were in contrast with the (semi-​)private intimacy of the master bedroom.26 This greater spatial ordering was also related to what Felicity Riddy argues is the increasing responsibility on household heads as ‘sources of public authority and agents of good order’ in late-​medieval towns.27 Yet, Riddy also suggests, the female subordination germane to the hierarchical framework envisioned by lawmakers was undermined by the idea of home as the place of care of the vulnerable body: The language of everyday life was saturated with a sense that women, home and bodily needs go together and that these are what make the pull of home so strong for men … Patriarchal authority is never absolute and perhaps least so in the home.28

This long-​standing association between women and care of the body relates to Arderne’s image of the disruptive surgeon in the household of his patient, particularly given the authority he assumes in the bedroom, a space having strong associations with domestic intimacy and care. Indeed, Arderne makes reference to women healers as foils to his superlative healing in some of his case histories. He describes two male patients, with, respectively, an infected finger and a swollen arm, being made worse by women prior to his own intervention and successful cure (pp.  44, 49). Although it is likely that Arderne is referring specifically to those women who developed their practice beyond an exclusive domestic role by establishing themselves as empirics or healers within the community, nevertheless these case histories affirm a link between women and deficient healing.29 Arderne’s text thus suggests that the surgeon who enters the household must not simply negotiate the power structures which pertain to his social standing as a professional and authoritative figure. He must also intervene in the domestic healing practices associated with the familial relationships of the household. Household readers and self-​governance A striking feature of Arderne’s treatise is its recourse to narrative techniques as a means of informing its surgeon-​reader how to

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interact with the patient. As we have seen, Arderne’s deontology section does not simply list imperatives but sets up scenarios, such as the declamatory address to the patient before the operation, where he rehearses what is meant to become the speech of the reader he is instructing. At other points, he offers scriptural passages and other writings which the reader should recite to fearful patients as calming strategies. Given that these scenarios are fictionalised sketches of encounters between a hypothetical surgeon-​ reader and patient, which are imagined as taking place at some indeterminate point in the future, they open up a space for readings which supersede the exclusively pedagogical aims of the treatise. Lisa H. Cooper has addressed the presence of extraneous or aesthetic features in medieval practical writings and the ways that such texts draw attention to their formal qualities through the convergence of style and content. She cites, for instance, the presence of safety advice in a medical recipe for protecting the eyes which transforms it into a ‘compressed epic’ of the hazards of everyday life.30 Cooper suggests that the point at which texts admonish their reader to take care of whatever task they are outlining is when they are most prone to ‘stretch themselves to the fullest extent of their potential eloquence’.31 Similarly, Julie Orlemanski writes that the movement from the book to the tangible world it refers to can evoke the same pleasures (as well as anxieties) that are associated with literary fantasy.32 The Practica’s fictional encounters between the surgeon and the patient can thus be understood to participate in this wider tendency in late-​medieval practical writings of absorbing rhetorical or aesthetic qualities.33 Given its inclusion of strong fictional elements, we might enquire about the extent to which the Practica attracted an audience beyond a narrow coterie of apprentice surgeons. The forty-​plus extant manuscripts bearing Arderne’s work produced between the late fourteenth and sixteenth centuries suggest a wide readership. Certainly, some copies, such as those owned by barber-​surgeons, Charles Whytte (London, British Library MS Sloane 776)  and Thomas Plawdon (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 176/​97), suggest that Arderne’s work met with precisely the kind of professional readers whom the author directly addresses. Yet the presence of Arderne’s work in some exclusive manuscripts alongside other assorted material signals the possibility of a non-​ professional reception. An important example of the work’s transmission to a non-​specialist readership is provided by London, British Library MS Additional 29301. This early fifteenth-​century

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miscellany contains the Practica in its original Latin and a number of practical texts in Middle English, including a health regimen called the Governayle of Helthe and two herbal treatises, as well as more fragmented medical recipes and charms. Although the medieval provenance of this book is unknown, its illuminated borders, delicate illustrations, and production on vellum all suggest a wealthy buyer. Its persistent references to household healing across its main texts further point to its use within a domestic environment. Additional 29301 raises the prospect that Arderne’s representation of household hierarchies in his treatise might have been encountered not just by a professional readership but by the kind of household members the text references. Although the professional surgical instructions of the Practica contrast with the more improvisational orientation of the health regimens and recipes in Additional 29301, there are striking correspondences between these texts. In a basic sense, the multiple medical recipes in the Practica fit readily with the miscellaneous recipes and charms elsewhere in the volume and can be imagined to have found use in a non-​professional domestic setting. Moreover, the fictional qualities inherent in Arderne’s descriptions of patients such as Adam Everingham in his case histories and in his deontological section can be seen to have promoted reading practices that blended entertainment with information.34 Significantly, this combination of instructions pertaining to household management and narratives of decorum set within the domestic sphere works to present to the reader an ideal version of the household environment and the hierarchies around which it operates. It is important to recognise that household readers could encounter reflections of themselves and their domestic arrangements in Arderne’s treatise and this can help us understand how the various texts in a miscellany such as Additional 29301 might have been received. Indeed, critics have shown how the choices of texts within miscellanies reflected the prestigious or aspirational identities of their owners or commissioners. As Cooper argues, practical writings were, among other genres, ‘sought out by precisely those for whom upward mobility was indeed an option’.35 Similarly, Anthony Bale shows how a Norfolk gentlewoman’s patronage of practical verses by John Lydgate affirms the ‘conjunction of aspiration and cultural legitimacy rendered into domestic poetry’.36 In a similar way, Arderne’s well-​circulated text, with its list of noble and wealthy patients and its references to elite households, could assume its own cultural prestige.

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The presence of the Practica in Additional 29301 offers its readers ways of imagining and idealising the household as well as of understanding how it might accommodate itself to professional healing practices. It promotes a vision of an orderly and hierarchical household space engendering impeccable behaviour through its appropriation of a deontological tradition associated with scholastic learning. Its image of the decorous household within which the surgeon must prove himself an eminent guest participates in shared notions of conduct and domestic management. But alongside representations of a familiar and stable domesticity, the manuscript’s readers would have found depictions of an arcane and painful surgical operation involving, as we have seen, the disruption of the usual household hierarchies. Indeed, just as the household is depicted as negotiating the entry of the surgeon as healer in the Practica, we can view Additional 29301, as a household miscellany, in terms of its juxtaposition of different types of medical texts representing various, potentially incongruent, modes of healing. Thus the contrast in the miscellany between the Latin and surgical Practica and the Middle English Governayle of Helthe, with its reliance on self-​care, can be seen to replicate the implicit tensions between surgery and household healing addressed within the Practica itself. The miscellany can be seen, then, as an instrument which both informs and reflects, in microcosm, the management of the household and the relationships pertaining between its members. The Governayle of Helthe, which is usually attributed to John of Bordeaux, an otherwise unknown author, is an example of a genre of writing devoted to the art of health maintenance, a mainstay of household miscellanies.37 The genre was indebted to the advice manual, the Secreta Secretorum, which purported to be a letter written by Aristotle to his student, Alexander the Great, as well as to the bespoke health plans drawn up by physicians for their elite patients in the early Middle Ages.38 After the establishment of scholastic medicine in the twelfth century, such individual plans morphed into a more general and highly popular literature outlining the optimal lifestyle for achieving complexional balance and harmonious living.39 Most Middle English regimens, many in verse, comprise different adaptations of a twelfth-​ century collection of writings on health maintenance associated with the important Italian medical school at Salerno in southern Italy.40 The genre’s promotion of an ‘ethic of moderation’ and self-​discipline paralleled contemporary penitential writings and

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their encouragement of spiritual introspection and evaluation.41 Although, as a type of household knowledge, regimen advice is based on orthodox complexional theory, its typically pragmatic character, plain style, and promotion of self-​care marks it as distinct from a more scholastic-​oriented text such as the Practica.42 The wide-​ranging advice offered by texts such as the Governayle including advice on diet, physical exertion, general behaviour, exercising charity, and maintaining spiritual devotion collapses medicine with morality. Key to the wide-​ranging perspective of regimens is their theoretical grounding in the regulation of the ‘non-​naturals’, a theory which held that both physical and environmental factors such as the quality of air, exercise, sleep, food, and the emotions exerted an influence on one’s general health.43 The abiding popularity of such texts in late-​medieval England is reflected in their enduring presence in miscellanies.44 Indeed, they were amongst the first printed books in England in the late fifteenth century:  William Caxton printed the Governayle in 1490 (STC 12138). As with Arderne’s ethical instructions to surgeons, the Governayle gathers together much generic advice concerning moderate living. The reader is given a series of short and direct imperatives which do not make any formal distinctions between behavioural and dietary advice: ‘ffle heuy charges, be noght wroth, soupe noȝt to late … kepe wel þees þre: gladnes in mende, trauayl in mesure and rewle of mete & drink’ (f. 90r).45 Whilst the text is indebted to complexional theory, it eschews the idea that the body might be inherently susceptible to involuntary physiological changes; rather it asserts the subject’s own control over his health through adherence to the instructions set out in the book (the reader is again imagined as male). The perspective it holds towards medical professionals contrasts with Arderne’s earnest concern with establishing their legitimacy. Invoking the Secreta secretorum tradition, it outlines its own rationale: Aristotile wrytyng to gret Alexander among othir þinges seid … seth man is a brotill body me semeþ I shold write to þe som profytabyl þing of lechecraft if þou wilt … Behold he seid þe ensaumple of holsom gouernance & lyue after þis precyouse ordre; þe shal nede no leche outake accidentes of batayl, þat is to say strokes & suche other. (f. 90r)

The relationship between the knowledge transmitted in the Governayle and medical authority is exemplified in the opposition

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between ‘lechecraft’ and ‘leche’ where the cultivation of ‘lechecraft’, or the art of medicine, in order to undertake self-​care becomes the means by which physicians themselves will become redundant. John of Bordeaux maintains this tension throughout the text by drawing on the learning of such authorities as Aristotle, Galen, and Constantinus Affricanus in order to advance superlative claims of the healthy life and ‘swete’ death (f. 89v) which his perfect model of living will bring about. The Governayle also links medical with domestic authority recalling, for the reader of Additional 29301, its treatment in the preface to the Practica. In a section where John of Bordeaux discusses harmful fruits and herbs, he lists ‘colewortes’ [collard greens] and ‘letys’ [lettuce] among the plants whose avoidance Galen has counselled. He includes his own father’s warnings against other foods: My fader euer forbadde me þat I  schuld ete no newe frutes and grene. He hymself dede so and was euer wiþouten seknes. And while he lyued so dede I & was also [without sickness]. When he was dede I ete frute & cawt a fever & after þat I cawt konyng to kepe my helþe & I kept me fro frutes. (f. 92v)

This touching vignette alludes to the delicate balance between submission to both medical and domestic authority and reliance on one’s own experience. Although the tale, hinging on prohibited fruit, has obvious scriptural resonances, it does not convey a moral lesson about disobedience. Rather, John suggests that, having obeyed the injunction against eating un-​ripened fruit while his father was alive, he was absolved of such restrictions following his father’s death. The paratactic syntax combined with the narrative focus on surface actions devoid of introspection gives a sense of ineluctability to his response to his father’s death. John is not so much challenging authority as adjusting to its absence. This adaptation refers to a significant purpose of the Governayle, and indeed the broader regimen genre, involving not just the absorption of dietary instructions but of the strategic development of an attitude or disposition towards healthy living.46 It comprises an art that involves orienting the body as much as training the mind, an aspect that is inherent in the description of John having ‘cawt’ knowledge in the same way that he ‘cawt’ his fever, through experience. His movement from the subject position of ‘son’ to that of an authority dispensing his own advice is mobilised by this new ability to maintain his health.

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The Governayle promises, then, that the art of styling oneself as an ethical subject through controlling one’s desires and appetites will obviate the need to rely on medical or even familial authority. Whilst this rubs against the strong insistence on the necessity of the surgeon’s presence and authority in the household in the Practica, the deferment to scholastic authorities and the stress on moderate diet and behaviour in the Governayle align it with the ethos set out in Arderne’s work. This suggests that we should understand the modes of healing germane to the household, and represented in the make-​up of a miscellany such as Additional 29301, not as split between scholasticism and lay practices but in terms of the interrelationships between both. In a similar way, the presence of the Governayle in Additional 29301 might seem to push against the principles of moderation it espouses because the miscellany convenes texts that proclaim their association with a prestigious Latinate culture. Thus the reader of the Middle English Governayle might be expected to identify not only with the regulatory subjectivity it promotes but also with a regal proxy, Alexander the Great, arising from its associations with the Secreta tradition. The princely figure of the young Alexander provides an aspirational model for the reader of the household book and mediates his absorption of its practical instructions. The tension between moderation and excess, inherent in both the Governayle and the Practica, is exemplified by the reader’s encounter with their fictional or rhetorical narratives of ethical restraint in an expensive and richly decorated book. This suggests a mode of self-​ formation that is generated not only through the incorporation of ethical living but also by an identification with the elite culture that such texts, with their aesthetic qualities and luxurious materiality, hold out. Rosemary and the ideal reflections of domesticity The attention to household healing in Additional 29301 is extended with the inclusion of the Treatise on Rosemary, a text which, in outlining the healing properties of rosemary, evokes a host of domestic management practices in decidedly non-​ academic terminology. Rosemary comprises a translation by the English Dominican Henry Daniel (fl. c.  1376–​1379) of the entry for rosemary in the Circa instans, a herbal attributed to the Salernitan physician Matthaeus Platearius (d. 1161), alongside material drawn from Daniel’s own herbal compilation.47 The popularity of the text amongst

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medieval readers is underscored by its presence in over twenty extant manuscripts and this might be connected to what Daniel claimed incorrectly to be the herb’s recent arrival in England.48 The treatise gives a long list of the seemingly interminable uses of rosemary, including its effective treatment or prevention of myriad diseases and ailments, venomous insects, and evil spirits. It begins with a colophon that alludes to the introduction of both the herb, as well as the book explaining its properties, to England: Rosa Marina is boþe tre and herbe boþe hote and drie in þe 3[rd] degre. And þeese ben þe virtues as it is founden in diuers auctorites, bokes of phisik & as [the] clerk seith þat þis book wrot at scole of Salern to the Countesse of Hennawd & she send þe copy to here douter, qwen of England. (f. 94r)49

In contrast to the male focus in the healing strategies described in the Practica and the Governayle, this passage foregrounds the transfer of therapeutic knowledge between elite women. In this case, the gift of the book by Jeanne de Valois (c. 1294–​1342) to her daughter, Philippa of Hainault (c. 1310–​1369), Edward III’s queen, is described as allowing both women to maintain a domestic intimacy despite their physical separation on either side of the English Channel due to Philippa’s marriage. The inclusion of the rosemary treatise in Additional 29301 along with the colophon making reference to its production at the famous school at Salerno establishes yet another link between household knowledge and academic medicine. In fact, the text is made even more illustrious by the revelation that the clerk was commissioned to write it by Jeanne de Valois, one of Europe’s foremost literary patrons.50 The reference to women reading and commissioning texts in the colophon to Rosemary introduces the possibility that Additional 29301 itself met with a female readership. As much scholarship has shown, evidence abounds for women’s reading of household miscellanies alongside other types of books in late-​medieval England. For instance, Carol Meale and Felicity Riddy both draw attention to the networks of book ownership and exchange among gentlewomen and nuns, which include not only devotional works and romances but also practical literature.51 Despite the male focus in the Practica and the Governayle, as well as Arderne’s dismissal of women’s medicine, the reference to female healing and reading in Rosemary opens up the possibility that Additional 29301 could have been used by a mixed or even an exclusively female readership. In any case, the colophon’s reference to the scholastic

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basis of Rosemary problematises, yet again, any attempt to erect a dichotomy between academic medicine and practical or experiential healing germane to the domestic environment. The blurring of these forms of knowledges is implicit in Monica Green’s claim that household books outlining medical recipes and healing would have given women the knowledge and the ability to perform basic medical treatments in their families.52 The blending of professional and non-​academic medicine both in the assembly of texts that make up Additional 29301 and their representations of the domestic sphere suggests a far more dynamic relationship between these modes of healing. Despite the differences in each text’s descriptions of healing and medicine in the home, the Practica, Governayle, and Rosemary each describe these activities in terms of their superlative effects. This promotion of impeccable healing strategies, predicated either on self-​ help or professional intervention, assumes something of an ordering principle in Additional 29301. Rosemary describes the herb’s beneficial effects on an extraordinarily wide range of harmful things: Also it casteth out wycked humors in al þe body … Also it suffreþ non postom [to] brede in þe body if be used be tyme … Also it conforteth & makeþ strong alle þe properties of mannes body & principaly þe hert, þe lyuer þe ribbes, þe midryf, þe lunges and þe pipes. Also it mighteþ þe bones & causeth good & gladeth and lyghteþ alle men þat use it (f. 94v)

Rosemary can produce opposing effects depending on whether it is expunging something harmful or protecting body parts: thus it removes diseased humours or swellings (‘postom’) whilst it comforts or fortifies numerous body parts and organs. Its protective functions encompass apotropaic qualities allowing it to ward off ‘deuelys & … wicked spiretes’ (f. 95r) and it can extend beyond the body to guard a person’s house from alien threats:  ‘Also lay þe leues at a dore of an hows it casteth alle venymes worms wiþ þe odure and suffreth it noȝt to entre’ (f. 95r). It is this rhetoric of a novel medicine—​a sort of ‘wonder drug’—​eliminating all kinds of detrimental and excessive qualities within the household that aligns Rosemary so well with Arderne’s representation of the disruptive surgeon entering the household with his innovative medical techniques. Both texts configure domesticity in terms of a negotiation between stability and a necessary disorganisation brought about by the intervention of new forms of knowledge.

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Yet, in outlining the radical properties of rosemary, the treatise’s reference to a wide range of domestic situations makes it a compendium of quotidian household practices. It encompasses not only a comprehensive array of illnesses but also techniques to avoid bad dreams (laying rosemary leaves under one’s head while sleeping) as well as cosmetic applications which would have relevance to various household members: ‘Also seþe þe leues in cler wyne & wasche þe wiþ þi browes and þi berd and then shal neuer breth faile and it nought mouȝten’ (f. 94v). Moreover, the various descriptions of how to process and apply rosemary constitute a panoply of domestic operations including soaking, binding, washing, anointing, mixing, chewing, wrapping, and preserving. Daniel’s recourse to rhetorical features such as repetition and tautology in advancing the remarkable claims of the herb’s pervasive healing properties might encourage us to read the text as a pointed articulation of the desire, rather than the ability, to control and govern the hazards that threaten the coherence of the late-​medieval household. The image of this panacea, activated through a host of domestic activities, shows how, like the other texts in Additional 29301, Rosemary promotes an ideal reflection of the household and its everyday practices. Moreover, as Henry Daniel’s colophon reminds us, the treatise’s evocation of domestic practices is refracted by the elite associations which frame the text and, as we have seen, the wider miscellany. Whilst the various practical and medical techniques advanced in Additional 29301 jostle with each other, all of its major texts contribute to a seamless vision of the ideal household, a place typified by bodily governance and perfect living. The references to noble personages across the miscellany—​from the more local Sir Adam Everingham to historical and regal figures such as Alexander the Great or the Countess of Hainault and her daughter Queen Philippa—​show how the ethical and moderate governance it espouses is mediated through tangible associations with elite culture. The miscellany’s own sumptuous materiality would have reminded its late-​ medieval household readers that their most mundane quotidian practices are tinged with great cultural significance. Notes 1 Cited by page number from John Arderne, Treatises of Fistula in Ano, Hæmorrhoids, and Clysters, ed. D’Arcy Power, EETS o.s. 139

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(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1910). Power’s edition is based on the Middle English translation of Arderne’s Practica de fistula in ano that is transmitted in London, British Library MS Sloane 6. 2 Anal fistula involves the formation of abscesses around the anus. Its appearance in various medical texts suggests that it may have been a prevalent condition in the Middle Ages, which could have been due either to gastro-​intestinal issues or even prolonged horse-​riding. Although it is not typically a life-​threatening condition, the greater risk of infection due to open sores in the Middle Ages might account for the attention it was given by an author like Arderne. See further Arderne, Treatises, ed. Power, p. xv. 3 See Nicholas A. Gribit, Henry of Lancaster’s Expedition to Aquitaine, 1345–​1346 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), pp. 169, 173, and 207. 4 Everingham’s choice to dress in the (presumably) black clothes of mourning in anticipation of his own death seems to accord with practices described by Christopher Daniel whereby lay people in medieval England were buried wearing cowls in readiness for entering heaven. See Christopher Daniel, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–​1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 155. 5 Arderne claimed to be the first to have discovered an effective cure for anal fistula and to have invented specific instruments to this effect. See Arderne, Treatises, ed. Power, pp.  2–​3. However, his method of treating the condition by cutting through the fistula tract is discussed in many treatises extending back to antiquity. Plinio Prioreschi claims that Arderne’s innovations were the invention of an eyed probe and peg to tighten the ligature used for cutting, as well as the use of mild agents for the patient’s aftercare. See Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine:  Medieval Medicine, Vol. V (Omaha:  Horatius Press, 2003), pp. 509–​12. 6 Henry’s forces successfully fought the Battle of Bergerac in 1345 and entered and looted Poitiers in 1346 (this assault is not to be confused with the Battle of Poitiers of 1356). See Gribit, Henry of Lancaster’s Expedition, pp. 118–​20 and 146–​7. 7 For an extended discussion of the use of romance tropes in Arderne’s writings, see Jeremy J. Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 113–​38. 8 I follow Julia Boffey’s definition of the often contentious term ‘household book’ as ‘a repository of practical information of more or less domestic kinds … which various members of a household may have wished to consult’. See Julia Boffey, ‘Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and Definitions of the “Household Book” ’, in A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (eds), The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 125–​34 (125).

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9 For further discussion of the Middle English translations of Arderne’s writings, see Peter Murray Jones, ‘Four Middle English Translations of John of Arderne’, in Alastair J. Minnis (ed.), Latin and Vernacular:  Studies in Late-​ Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 61–​89. 10 The Hippocratic Oath, with its vows to help the sick and to avoid doing them injury or harm, is a condensed version of this advice. See Carlos R. Galvao-​Sobrinho, ‘Hippocratic Ideals, Medical Ethics, and the Practice of Medicine in the Early Middle Ages:  The Legacy of the Hippocratic Oath’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 51 (1996), 438–​55. 11 See Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010), p. 431; and Michael McVaugh, ‘Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 71 (1997), 201–​23. 12 University textbooks were composed of writings by, or attributed to, Galen and other classical authors, along with their extensive commentaries by Islamic scholars. These works were gathered together in a compendium known as the Ars medicine (later printed as the Articella) in the thirteenth century as a reference work for students. See Cornelius O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine:  Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250–​1400 (Leiden:  Brill, 1998), pp. 82–​ 127. On the transmission and translation of excerpts from university textbooks amongst lay readers, see Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, ‘Vernacularisation and Medical Writing in its Sociohistorical Context’, in Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–​18. 13 In addition to Adam Everingham, Arderne claims to have treated prominent members of a London mercantile faction including, it would appear, the author Thomas Usk. For the list of personages, see Arderne, Treatises, ed. Power, pp. 1–​2. For Arderne’s London network of patients and evidence of Usk’s name in the text, see Marion Turner, ‘Thomas Usk and John Arderne’, Chaucer Review, 47 (2012), 95–​105. 14 See, for example, the paraphrase of the Hippocratic Oath by Constantinus Affricanus (c. 1020–​c. 1099)  in Medieval Medicine, ed. Wallis, pp. 434–​5. 15 Monica Green notes how the injured party in this passage is not the ‘women whose sexual propriety might be compromised, but … the male head of the household whose honour was at stake. The dynamics, therefore, are as much between men (the physician and his real client, the male head of house) as between male practitioners and female patients’. See Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine:  The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-​Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 115.

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16 It is unclear whether Arderne is referring to women as patients or as members of the male patient’s household. In keeping with the gender bias of the wider medical tradition, he represents his hypothetical patient as male, although he does allow for the possibility of treating female patients. He mentions women in his case histories, though not in relation to anal fistula. 17 Surgeons in England did not typically attend university but usually learned their craft as apprentices. The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, in particular, saw their repeated efforts to organise themselves into guilds and establish a system of licensing. See Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud:  Sutton, 1997), p.  126; Robert Gottfried, Doctors and Medicine in Medieval England 1340–​1530 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 265–​6; and Faye M. Getz, ‘The Faculty of Medicine before 1500’, in J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (eds), The History of the University of Oxford:  Late Medieval Oxford, Vol. II (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 373–​405. 18 See the entries in MED s.vv. minstral and clerk. 19 Arderne’s reference to behaviour at lords’ tables can also be seen to reflect the increased importance of the dining hall along with gastronomic etiquette and rituals in the houses of the wealthy. See Mark Gardiner, ‘Buttery and Pantry and their Antecedents:  Idea and Architecture in the English Medieval House’, in Marianne Kowaleski and P. J.  P. Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 37–​65; Claire Sponsler, ‘Eating Lessons: Lydgate’s “Dietary” and Consumer Conduct’, in Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.  A. Clark (eds), Medieval Conduct (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 1–​22; and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). 20 Marion Turner, ‘Illness Narratives in the Later Middle Ages: Arderne, Chaucer, and Hoccleve’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, 46 (2016), 61–​87. 21 Turner refers to an image of the surgeon gesturing authoritatively to the anal fistula in the lower body of a patient in London, British Library MS Sloane 2004, f. 24v. See Turner, ‘Illness Narratives’, 76; and Julie Orlemanski, ‘Jargon and the Matter of Medicine in Middle English’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 42 (2012), 395–​420. 22 Whilst it might be argued that Arderne’s very original instructions about how to perform this operation should not be read as narratively contiguous with his highly derivative section on ethical behaviour, it is clear that the positioning of the ethical section in his treatise—​it comes between his opening list of prominent patients and his operation instructions—​forms an integrated narrative unit.

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23 See, for example, London BL MS Additional 29301, f.  25r. For a detailed overview of the programme of illustrations in Arderne’s manuscripts and their close relationship with the text, see Peter Murray Jones, ‘Staying with the Programme: Illustrated Manuscripts of John of Arderne, c.1380–​c.1550’, in Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (eds), English Manuscript Studies 1100–​1700:  Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, Vol. X (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2002), pp. 204–​36. 24 I use ‘assemblage’ after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s term, ‘machinic assemblages’, a concept which challenges hierarchical and self-​contained models of the body by emphasising the connections it establishes with other bodies and things. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. 98–​101; and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. xii–​xiv. On the interaction between human bodies and things in the late-​medieval household, see too Seaman’s and Dutton’s contributions to this volume. 25 On this topic, see Mark Gardiner, ‘Conceptions of Domestic Space in the Long Term: The Example of the English Medieval Hall’, in James Graham-​Campbell, Else Roesdahl, and Mette Svart Kristiansen (eds), Medieval Archaeology in Scandinavia and Beyond: History, Trends and Tomorrow (Aarhus:  Aarhus University Press, 2015), pp. 313–​33; and C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 46–​82. 26 See Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 125–​6. For the bed as symbolic space of authority and intimacy, see Hollie L. S. Morgan, Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England: Readings, Representations and Realities (York: York Medieval Press, 2017). 27 Felicity Riddy, ‘Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home’, in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds), Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 212–​28 (212). For the importance of the medieval household to social cohesion, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession:  The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 8–​10. 28 Riddy, ‘Looking Closely’, 220–​4. See also Peregrine Horden, ‘Household Care and Informal Networks:  Comparisons and Continuities from Antiquity to the Present’, in Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith (eds), The Locus of Care:  Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London:  Routledge, 1998), pp.  21–​67.

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29 On women healers and the scepticism with which medical professionals regarded them, see Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society, pp. 170–​93. 30 Lisa H. Cooper, ‘The Poetics of Practicality’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Oxford Twenty-​First Century Approaches to Literature:  Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 491–​505 (498). For a similar reading of John Lydgate’s practical poem ‘Tretise for Lauandres’, see Maura Nolan, ‘Lydgate’s Worst Poem’, in Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-​Brown (eds), Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 71–​88. 31 Cooper, ‘The Poetics of Practicality’, p. 497. 32 See Julie Orlemanski, ‘Physiognomy and Otiose Practicality’, Exemplaria, 23 (2011), 194–​218. 33 On the aesthetic appeal of medieval agricultural and horticultural writing, for instance, see Kuipers’s chapter in this volume. 34 For discussion of miscellanies and diverse reading habits, see Julia Boffey and John Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, in Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (eds), Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–​1475 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 279–​315 (292). 35 Cooper, ‘Poetics of Practicality’, p. 502. 36 Anthony Bale, ‘A Norfolk Gentlewoman and Lydgatian Patronage: Lady Sibylle Boys and her Cultural Environment’, Medium Ævum, 78 (2009), 261–​80 (273). 37 In some versions, the Governayle is attributed to John of Burgundy, a fourteenth-​century medical practitioner from Liège, who also wrote a treatise on pestilence in the wake of the Black Death. See Medieval Medicine, ed. Wallis, pp. 422–​9. 38 For the history of the Secreta, see Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-​Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 39 Complexio described the different kinds of mixtures of primary qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry) in living creatures and the causes and effects of changes in their balance. See Valentin Groebner, ‘Complexio/​ Complexion:  Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250  –​ 1600’, in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (eds), The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 361–​83; and Danielle Jacquart, ‘Medical Scholasticism’, in Mirko D. Grmek (ed.), Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, trans. Antony Shugaar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 197–​240 (212). 40 See Medieval Medicine, ed. Wallis, pp. 485–​92. The Latin text of the Salernitan regimen can be found in The Prose Salernitan Questions, ed. Brian Lawn (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 138. For the history of the regimen, see Prioreschi, History of Medicine, pp. 266–​72. 41 See Jake Walsh Morrissey, ‘ “To al indifferent”:  The Virtues of Lydgate’s “Dietary” ’, Medium Ævum, 84 (2015), 258–​78 (264).

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42 See ‘The Dietary: Introduction’, in Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), pp. 528–​30. 43 See Prioreschi, History of Medicine, pp.  598–​602; and Luis García-​ Ballester, ‘On the Origin of the “Six Non-​Natural Things” in Galen’, in Jon Arrizabalaga, Montserrat Cabre, Lluis Cifuentes, and Fernando Salmon (eds), Galen and Galenism: Theory and Medical Practice from Antiquity to the European Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 105–​15. 44 For example, on the anthologisation of the Secrees of Old Philisoffres, a Middle English translation of the Secreta Secretorum traditionally attributed to Lydgate, see Rory G. Critten, ‘The Secrees of Old Philisoffres and John Lydgate’s Posthumous Reputation’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 19 (2016), 31–​64. 45 The Governayle is cited directly from London, British Library Add MS 29301. Punctuation has been added where required. Folio numbers are in the main text. 46 This is a point made by Michel Foucault in relation to classical dietetics. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:  The Care of the Self, Vol. III. trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp.  107–​8. 47 For biographical information on Daniel, see George R. Keiser, ‘Through a Fourteenth-​ Century Gardener’s Eyes:  Henry Daniel’s Herbal’, Chaucer Review, 31 (1996), 58–​75; Ralph Hanna, ‘Henry Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum’, in Lister R. Matheson (ed.), Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 185–​218; and John H. Harvey, ‘Henry Daniel: A Scientific Gardener of the Fourteenth Century’, Garden History, 15 (1987), 81–​93. An English translation of the Circa instans is also compiled in Additional 29301. 48 In fact, it is likely that it was introduced by the Romans. It is mentioned in a number of Old English leechbooks. See Martti Mäkinen, ‘Henry Daniel’s Rosemary in MS X.90 of the Royal Library, Stockholm’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 103 (2002), 305–​27 (305). 49 In some versions of the colophon, Daniel makes reference to the herb itself being sent to England with the book. See George R. Keiser, ‘Rosemary: Not just for Remembrance’, in Peter Dendle and Alan Touwaide (eds), Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden (Woodbridge:  Boydell Press, 2008), pp. 180–​204 (184). Rosemary is cited in my transcription from Additional 29301. 50 Jeanne de Valois was a patron for the poet-​minstrel Jehan de la Mote and owned a number of romance works as well as a deluxe illuminated manuscript containing a French translation of the Secreta Secretorum. See Juliet Vale, ‘Philippa [Philippa of Hainault] (1310x15?–​1369)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the national and international connections witnessed

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and touted in two other late-​medieval household books—​Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 and London, British Library MS Harley 2253—​ see the chapters by Radulescu and Critten in this volume. 51 See Carol M. Meale, ‘ “…alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch”: Lay Women and their Books in Late Medieval England’, and Felicity Riddy, ‘Women Talking about the Things of God:  A Late Medieval Subculture’, both in Carol M. Meale (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–​1500 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 128–​58 (Meale) and pp.  104–​27 (Riddy). A  recent study by Linda Voigts and Anne Payne of a late fifteenth-​century medical compendium in Berkeley Castle suggests that it was a household book primarily read by noble women. See Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Ann Payne, ‘Medicine for a Great Household (ca. 1500), Berkeley Castle Muniments Select Book 89’, in Cynthia Kosso and Ann Marie Scott (eds), Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, Series 3, Vol. 12 (New York: AMS Press, 2016), pp. 87–​269. 52 See Monica H. Green, ‘The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading:  Women and the Gendering of Medieval Literacy’, in Monica H. Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 1–​76.

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9 Macrocosm and microcosm in household manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 Raluca Radulescu

Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 (c. 1470–​1490) is best known as one of four major Middle English medieval romance manuscripts; the other three are the earlier Auchinleck Manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1; 1330s), the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln, Cathedral MS 91; 1440s), and London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.  ii (mid to late fifteenth century).1 Between them these four manuscripts contain a substantial number of vernacular romances.2 Like the other three manuscripts, CUL Ff.2.38 also compiles texts belonging to other genres, making it a late-​medieval English miscellany or multi-​ text book.3 Nevertheless, the combination of materials transmitted in CUL Ff.2.38 gives pause for thought. In particular, modern critics of medieval romance may be struck by the decision to compile the hagiographic romance Roberd of Cisely alongside the romances collected at the end of the volume rather than with the devotional texts compiled towards its opening. Indeed, it more closely resembles the devotional texts, which it accompanies in other manuscripts. Accordingly, the arrangement of texts in this codex raises important questions about the organisational principles governing the selection and copying of these items, and about the ways in which they were read by their first audiences. In this chapter I  reassess the ‘provincial household’ status of CUL Ff.2.38 in relation to middle-​class literary interests and with a view to uncovering evidence of a receptive approach among provincial readers to cultural developments taking place on a national scale. In particular this manuscript will be related to the increased appeal of the vernacular penitential lyric and the political discourse of penitence in the latter part of the fifteenth century. In what follows, I  develop a model of textual transmission and reception that sheds new light on the correlations between transformations

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in the political discourse of kingship and the devotional literature of repentance, as well as on the geographical scope of these phenomena. I  thus suggest that the ‘microcosm’ of this manuscript book and its audience can be placed in an open dialogue with the ‘macrocosm’ of late fifteenth-​century English culture. Specifically, it is in the cultural and political context of the Wars of the Roses that the composition and dissemination of two texts copied into this manuscript miscellany—​Pety Job and Roberd of Cisely—​will be considered. Indeed, the fall from grace of the great, and the patient suffering of both the high and the low in society were popular themes in religious and literary texts throughout the Middle Ages.4 The way in which both Pety Job and Roberd of Cisely engage with the language of penitence as well as correlate with the penitential tone of political propaganda during the Wars of the Roses suggests a broader and much more widespread link than has hitherto been acknowledged between literary production across modern generic divides and the development of political consciousness in the later part of the fifteenth century in England. Roberd of Cisely in CUL Ff.2.38 Critical assessments of CUL Ff.2.38 continue to be overshadowed by its labelling as an average book for a medieval middle-​class household. According to the facsimile editors of the book, it is a one-​volume library varied in contents but strikingly homogeneous in tone and quality; it seems ideally suited to the instruction, edification and entertainment of well-​doing, devout readers of modest intellectual accomplishments. One can easily imagine it serving for family reading in a pious middle-​class household, some items serving for ‘edification and profit’, others for ‘edification and delight’.5

The above statement could easily be applied to a sizeable proportion of miscellany manuscripts owned and read among middle-​ class readers in late-​medieval England, but the aesthetic principles guiding this broad assessment allow little room for further consideration of the value of such reading to the development of literary culture in the period. Pious texts and entertainment literature that cultivate adherence to the principles of a moral life and good conduct in society can both be considered to function as yardsticks of good living in medieval England. That piety and instruction form the broadest common denominator of texts in such manuscripts cannot be contested. However, as this chapter aims to demonstrate,

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choosing only to consider the broadest categories when looking at middle-​class reading materials can obscure helpful connections between seemingly disparate genres and texts, their textual transmission, and the cultural context in which they flourished. Codicological and palaeographical analysis of CUL Ff.2.38 has determined that the book was written by one scribe and that it was originally composed of two booklets that might have had an independent existence prior to their conjoining.6 Booklet 1 comprises eight quires (ff. 3–​156) while booklet 2 comprises five quires (ff. 161–​261). Within these broader structural units, the contents of the whole manuscript fall into a series of thematic clusters: • A cluster of devotional texts: William Lichfield’s Complaint of God (incomplete at the start) (ff. 3r–​6r), Pety Job (ff. 6r–​10r), Solomon’s proverbs (ff. 10r–​14v), some short items (‘Markys of medytacyouns’, ff. 14v–​19r; ‘The Twelve Profits of Anger’, ff. 19r–​20r; ‘The Mirrour of vices and of vertues’, ff. 20v–​21v, and Thomas Brampton’s metrical paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms, ff. 28r–​31v. • Another set of short items of relevance to family (and personal) spiritual improvement:  ‘A salutation of our Lady’ (ff. 31v–​ 32r); ‘The Ten Commandments’ (f. 32r); ‘The Seven Works of Corporal Mercy’ (f. 32r–​v); ‘The Seven Works of Spiritual Mercy’ (f. 32v); ‘The Five Bodily Wits’ (f. 32v); ‘The Five Spiritual Wits’ (f. 32v); ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ (f. 32v); ‘The Seven Virtues contrary to Deadly Sins’ (f. 32v); ‘The Seven Articles of the Faith’ (f. 33r); ‘The Seven Sacraments’ (f. 33v); ‘A Treatise […] on Doomsday’ (f. 33v); ‘The Eight Tokens of Meekness’ (f. 35r–​v). • A cluster of saints’ lives, interspersed with shorter items of the same religious nature:  Life of Mary Magdalen (ff. 35v–​ 37r); Life of St Margaret (ff. 37r–​38r); Life of St Thomas (ff. 38r–​40r); The Assumption of the Virgin (ff. 40r–​45r); Life of St Katherine (ff. 45r–​47v); (the long) Middle English ‘Charter of Christ’ (f. 47v–​50v); ‘The Fifteen Tokens before the Day of Doom’ (ff. 50v–​53r). • A cluster of romances, which form a discrete group at the end of the manuscript, preceded by several short practical texts or stories of the kind also encountered in other romance miscellanies, such as Ashmole 61 (whose contents are itemised in the appendix to Myra Seaman’s chapter in this book):  ‘How the Good Man Taught his Son’ (ff. 53r–​54r); ‘A Good Matter of

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the Merchant and his Son’ (ff. 59r–​63r) and several lamentation poems of the Blessed Virgin Mary (f. 55r–​v and ff. 55v–​ 56r). The cluster of romances includes The Erle of Tolous (ff. 63r–​70v), Sir Eglamour of Artois (ff. 70v–​79r), Sir Triamour (ff. 79r–​90r), Octavian (ff. 90r–​102v), Bevis of Hampton (ff. 102v–​134r), Guy of Warwick (ff. 161r–​231r), Le Bone Florence of Rome (ff. 239v–​254r), Roberd of Cisely (ff. 254r–​257v), and Sir Degare (ff. 257v–​261v), with the Seven Sages of Rome (ff. 134r–​156v) at the end of the first booklet in this codex and Sir Degare wanting some 400 lines as the manuscript ends abruptly, with several folios missing. An overall assessment of the contents of this manuscript would, quite rightly, identify all of these texts as ‘household-​oriented’, in that they constitute a generous selection of texts for family reading and instruction, reflecting average middle-​class literary interests, and a pragmatic approach to the basics of religious instruction, moral education, and entertainment. Here the middle-​class household is understood to comprise members of the gentry and bourgeois family, including both genders and all ages. This group would also include the extended family and servants. It is the very ‘homogeneity in tone and quality’ of CUL Ff.2.38 that should concern us, I argue, particularly from the point of view of both continuities and fractures within the book as it now stands. In the romance subgroup one recognises the pillars of recent romance scholarship, with Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick receiving full-​length volume treatment in recent years.7 Yet the fate of the other romances in this manuscript has not been so impressive. This is notably the case for Sir Eglamour and Sir Degare: though both of these romances are attested in manuscript and early print in higher numbers of surviving copies than many other romances, they have tended to be ignored in modern scholarship.8 Another romance in this manuscript, the unique copy of the Middle English Le Bone Florence of Rome, might have a place in analyses of the exotic and gender through its affiliations to the archetypal story of the exemplary heroine abducted and then rescued, and The Erle of Tolous also touches on the autonomy of the female character. The success and longevity of these romances seems to have resided as much in their content—​they relate happy resolutions of seemingly impossible circumstances, focusing on concerns such as ‘family and social conflict, codes of conduct, and moral values’—​as on their compilation with the other romances grouped in the manuscript.9

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Roberd of Cisely sits oddly among the romances compiled in CUL Ff.2.38. It is a generically ambiguous text, too swiftly dismissed as ‘penitential’ in both older and more recent studies, and hence apparently more or less disposable in terms of its value beyond that label and its association with penitential texts such as those compiled towards the beginning of the Cambridge book.10 Its plot is centred on the eponymous prideful king, who is overthrown by a look-​alike angel sent by God to teach him humility (the angel’s resemblance to Roberd is so great that he passes for him even in front of his brothers). Roberd becomes unrecognisable to his subjects and to his powerful brothers, the Emperor of Rome and the Pope, only reverting to his original appearance and being reinstated as king when he repents (Roberd’s contrition is triggered by his despair while in an abject state as court fool and by his remembrance of the fate of the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar). Roberd of Cisely stands out among its romance co-​texts in CUL Ff.2.38 thanks to its un-​chivalric tone and plot, as well as to its uninspiring trajectory. If the other romances in CUL Ff.2.38 are mostly concerned with upward social movement, Roberd can be seen to be socially static; the romance neither contains an affirmation of nobility nor demonstrates prowess in arms. In fact, its placing among the romances seems to me to demonstrate the necessity of revisiting penitential models of behaviour, as well as the conduct of kings and rulers, which is a standard feature of the romances. Indeed, as a text focusing on penitential suffering, Roberd shares numerous features, and not least a penitential vocabulary, with Pety Job. The latter is a Middle English retelling of the Lessons of the Dead or Dirige, a text now believed to have been composed as well as read in or around London in the middle of the fifteenth century. The most striking point in the present examination of CUL Ff.2.38 is therefore the unusual collocation of Roberd with the romances in this manuscript. Whether a result of a grouping copied from an exemplar or an innovation of CUL Ff.2.38, this constellation of texts contrasts markedly with the compilatory patterns in evidence in the other nine manuscripts transmitting copies of Roberd. In those books, Roberd does not typically accompany chivalric romances but rather religious and pious works. In the earliest extant versions copied into the Vernon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library English Poet a.1; c.  1400)  and the Simeon

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Manuscript (London, British Library MS Additional 22283, c. 1400), Roberd is surrounded by pious texts; in Oxford, Trinity College MS D.  57 (end of the fourteenth century) it is copied alongside The South English Legendary; in Cambridge, Caius College MS 174 and London, British Library MS Harley 1701 (c. 1450) it sits next to religious and devotional texts. The unusual version of Roberd copied into Trinity College Dublin MS 432 (c. 1461)—​unusual due its shortness (sixty-​nine lines) and much condensed story, as well as its being set as a dialogue between ‘Doctor’ and ‘Rex’—​ forms part of a sequence that includes didactic and political verse alongside the Northampton play of Abraham and Isaac but no romances or devotional texts as such.11 In Cambridge University Library MS Ii.4.9 (c. 1450), Roberd is in the company of devotional texts such as the Abbey of the Holy Ghost; and in London, British Library MS Harley 525 (c. 1450–​ 1475), the romance sits next to the Siege of Troy and Speculum Gy de Warewyke.12 In CUL Ff.2.38, Roberd of Cisely acts as a bridge that connects the discourses of the devotional and penitential texts with which it is compiled to the didactic ones that are now at the middle of the book, and to its neighbour romances. In this manuscript, Roberd seems both to provide a yardstick of good living—​read from the point of view of the repentant king—​and a measure of the spread of penitential language visible in the trend of the vernacular Pety Job. Roberd shows us such penitential language being employed across the genre divide in order to enhance the aesthetic appeal of a text as well as its didactic function. In order to understand this phenomenon, we need to consider the broader movement in political culture of the period that is towards appropriating the penitential language of devotional tracts for a political end, namely that of justifying the right to the English crown. Politics and penitence in the later fifteenth century The cultural and political context that aided the rise of a penitential discourse in fifteenth-​century political propaganda has been discussed by Dana Piroyanski.13 Henry VI’s ineffectual rule was blamed equally on his mental fragility and excessive piety, while associations between his fate and that of the biblical Job were common both in Henry’s lifetime and after his death, making him a recognisable model, a martyr or saint.14 Indeed, Henry’s canonisation was sought by his followers as late as the 1490s. Similarly,

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the royal house of York exploited the rise of popular interest in Job-​like suffering by commissioning political poetry that depicted first Richard, duke of York, and then his son, Edward earl of March, as the dispossessed, then penitent, sufferers of their fate—​ penitent, that is, for the grave sin of deposing a divinely anointed king. By 1471, the year when Edward IV recovered the throne after the brief Readeption of Henry VI, a versified form of the better-​ known Yorkist Chronicle of the Arrivall of King Edward IV—​under its modern title:  On the Recovery of the Throne by Edward IV—​ presented Edward as a saviour of the people, though also a humble penitent sinner seeking to rectify his sins. Edward thus offered his people a worthier model of behaviour than the pious, though ineffectual king Henry: How mervelous to man, how dowtfulle to drede,     How far paste mannys resoun and mynde hath it bee, The comyng of kynge Edwarde, and his good spede,     Owte of Dochelonde into Englonde over the salte see.     In what parell and trowbill, in what payne was hee! Whan the salte water and tempest wrought hym gret woo; But in adversité and ever, Lorde, thy wille be doo […] Lorde, the unkyndnes was shewid to kynge Edward that day!     At his londyng in Holdyrnes he had grett payne; His subjectes and people wolde not hym obey,     Off hym and his people thay hadgrett disdayne.     They schewid hym unkyndnes, and answerid hym playne, As for kynge he shulde not londe there for wele ne woo; Yett londid that gentill prynce, the will of God was soo. (II. 271–​2)15

The trials and tribulations that Edward encountered upon his return to England from exile are here used to connect his fate with that of the dispossessed Job and even the deposed Henry VI. The refrain in this poem is ‘Lorde, thy wille be doo’, reminiscent of the biblical Job’s patience and submission to God in all forms of adversity, yet the enduring message is also that Edward, the ‘gentill prynce’, prevailed where his own subjects betrayed him (‘people wolde not hym obey’). Indeed, Edward’s piety goes further, the poet tells the audience, as he makes promises to amend his sinful life: This prynce it perceyvid, and he let it passe and go,     That was to Cryst his creature he did calle, To oure lady and to saynt George, and other seyntes moo;     Then sodenly upponne his knes the prince dyd falle,

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Besechyng the good Lorde and his seyntes alle His ryght hym to sende, and defende hym of his foo, And said ever, ‘Good Lorde, thy wille be doo.’ Thow knowyst my riȝte, Lord, and other men also;     As it is my ryȝte, Lorde, so thou me defende, And the quarell that is wronge it may be overthow,     And to ryght parte the victory thou sende,    And I promesse the, good Lorde, my lyffe to amende, I knolege me a synner wrappid in woo. And all said with one voyse, ‘Lorde, thy wille be doo’. (II: 275, my emphases)

These stanzas indicate that Edward’s penitence for the sin of deposing an anointed king, publicly performed, presents to his people an alternative to war through repentance, complete with a fitting biblical Job-​inspired prayer to God. The refrain ‘Lorde thy wille be doo’ at the end of the stanza appears as an act of recognition that both Edward and his subjects had sinned. It functions as an invitation to the imagined audience of the poem to collective repentance. In this poem, as in other types of Yorkist propaganda, such as the presumed endorsement of Edward’s return through a miracle of St Anne in the Yorkist chronicle, Historie of the Arrival of Edward IV, the status of the (royal) penitent sinner is swiftly changed to that of (royal) saviour.16 Thus Edward becomes an even worthier model of pious behaviour than Henry VI had been for his subjects. Much has been written about Lancastrian propaganda surrounding anxieties over the deposition of Richard II and the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V at the beginning of the fifteenth century. By contrast, relatively little, if any, attention has been paid to the intersections between the development of the penitential lyric, the popular romance, and political discourse exploiting these forms in the later part of the same century. Summarising Lynn Staley’s work on the early fifteenth-​century lyric, Matthew Giancarlo notes, in his recent reassessment of the Digby Poems, that the medieval lyric discourse of penitentialism could act as a map of subjective interior self-​examination as well as a framework for ‘an understanding of the ultimate limits of sovereignty’, that is, an enquiry into the proper execution and boundaries of public power and governance.17

In his reading of the poems in the Digby Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102, c.  1400), Giancarlo connects

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the political consciousness of an age of unrest following the deposition of Richard II to the poems’ concentration on ‘drede’, here understood as both the fear of retribution for sin and the dread of God. Interestingly, the very last vernacular lyric in Digby 102 is ‘The Lessouns of the Dirige’, a much earlier and also much shorter English translation of the ‘Service for the Dead’ than Pety Job. In it, Giancarlo reads the impossibility of ‘dread’ where virtuous living is at stake, insofar as ‘[d]‌read is the result of bad lordship and governance’.18 Associations between penitential lyrics and topical issues in political culture have been discussed in the earlier and tumultuous Lancastrian period, then; the continuation of such interest and the broad appeal of penitential language in the later period, at the end of the fifteenth century, should not surprise us. Pety Job from London to Leicestershire The popularity of Pety Job in the later fifteenth century testifies to the appetite for the story of Job’s patient endurance at this time. The poem was most probably composed in the middle of the century; such devotional texts, Susanna Fein reminds us, would have been promoted by the Church to both religious and lay people as part of daily prayers.19 As a work responding to such requirements, the practical appeal of Pety Job is incontestable. As Fein states, Pety Job fits in well with developments in devotional writing: Through vernacular translation and gloss the Middle English poet  aligns the ancient words of Job to a medieval reader’s desire to comprehend his or her own mortal condition, investing words already fraught with the power of long usage with a contemporary fervor and immediacy.20

Pety Job is extant in five manuscripts, one of which is CUL Ff.2.38, where it is copied at the start, in the religious and devotional cluster of texts (ff. 6r–​10r). The other manuscripts are Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 322 (c. 1475); Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21 (c. 1475); Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 1584 (c. 1490); and London, British Library MS Harley 1706 (c. 1500).21 According to Fein, the Douce, Trinity College, and Harley manuscripts containing the poem were produced in or near London, the Trinity College manuscript carrying additional interest due its copying ‘by a scribe known to have had access to volumes that had belonged to John Shirley (c. 1366–​1456)’ whose work ‘is datable to the reign of Edward IV (1460–​83)’. Further

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circumstantial evidence places the text in the neighbourhood of St Bartholomew’s hospital, where owners and readers of these manuscripts were associated with the production of books.22 Although evidently in tune with developments in the production of Middle English devotional literature in and around London, Pety Job also found its way into the provinces, where it was selected for copying in CUL Ff.2.38, a manuscript whose origins have recently been traced to Leicestershire.23 At the same time, Pety Job shares the penitential streak characteristic of the language of contemporary royal politics, language employed in political propaganda produced for the royal houses of Lancaster and York during the troubled decades of the mid-​to-​late fifteenth century. It is here that the intersections between what might at first sight be perceived as ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture become more visible, as both Pety Job and Roberd of Cisely share not only the penitential vocabulary used in political verse, but also the moral and spiritual lessons that fit in with the trajectory of the suffering king. A close look at the penitential refrain in Pety Job reminds us of the biblical address that it paraphrases. The anonymous author frames his moving rendition of Job’s appeals to God with a short form of the biblical refrain Parce michi, Domine, nichil enim sunt dies mei (Job 7.16:  ‘Spare me, God, for my days are nothing’). Since I will go on to argue that the texts of Pety Job and Roberd of Sicily preserved in CUL Ff.2.38 share a special relationship, I cite their texts directly from the manuscript source: Parce michy, Domine! Leef Lord, my soule thou speare! The sothe I seye now sekerle: That my dayes nought they are, Ffor though I be bryght of  blee —​ The fayrest man that ys oughtwhare —​ Ȝyt schall my fayrenesse fade and flee, And y schall be but wormes ware. And whan my body ys all bare, And on a bere brought schall be, I not what I may syng thare But Parce michi, Domine. (f. 6ra; lines 1–​12; my transcription from CUL Ff.2.38)

The tone emphasises Job’s trials, in particular the downfall of the mighty, the need to accept one’s state, and hope in God’s mercy. The poem continues:

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What ys a man, wyte y wolde, That magnifyeth hym selfe alwaye, But a marke made in moolde Of a clyngyng clott of  claye? Thow shopyst vs for that we shulde Haue ben in blys for euyr and aye —​ But nowe —​allas! —​bothe yong and olde For yeten hyt bothe nyght and day! A, lord God! What shall y saye? I that stonde in thys degrée? I wote no thyng that helpe me may But Parce michy, Domine. (f. 6ra, lines 13–​24; my transcription from CUL Ff.2.38)

The start of Pety Job thus confirms a medieval audience’s expectations of the general tone of Job’s lament in the biblical story. At the same time, the emphasis on the insignificance of worldly glory and the human tendency to forget God’s grace brings to the fore a pattern familiar to audiences of the pious Middle English romances, which focus on patient suffering and the fall of the protagonist from grace. The message about a fall from status and the hope of being risen again in the eyes of the world is very poignant later on in Pety Job. In stanza 13 we read: Thyn handys, Lord, haue made me And formed me in schap of  man, And me Thow settyst in degree Of grete noble lord after than. But whan y, thorogh the sotelté, Dysceyued was of fowle Satan, Thow puttyst me fro that dygnyté Hedlyng doune on my brayn paine. Noon odur cause alogye y can But that synne hathe depreued me. Now for the blode that from The doun ran, Euyr Parce michi, Domine! (ff. 6vb–​7ra; my transcription from CUL Ff.2.38)

A similar movement takes place in the Middle English ‘penitential’ romances (with plotlines driven by male, hence Job-​like protagonists, or female, hence ‘Griselda’-​type saintly heroines), which share a discourse of suffering with that of the biblical Job.24 Even among these romances, though, Roberd stands out for its closeness to Pety Job in terms of its spirit and language. Like the biblical Job, Robert is brought low; in his case, as punishment for his great pride. He learns, through painful experiences,

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to become a better Christian, but also, most importantly, how to be a better ruler. At his lowest, when he has lost not only power and status, but also his identity, becoming unrecognisable to all, including his own family, Roberd laments his fate in words that are highly reminiscent of the Job tradition: And þat ys ryght that Y so bee. ffor lorde, Y leeuyd not on the! I had an errowre in my harte, And þat errowre haþ made me to smarte. ffor, when Y seyde in my sawe, That nothynge myght make me lawe, And holy wrytt dyspysed wyth all, And for thy, wrech of wrechys men me calle, And fole of all follys, Y am ȝyt. Ffor he ys fole, God wottyth well hyt, That turneth hys wytt vn to folye! So haue Y done. Mercy, Y crye! Now mercy, lorde, for þy pyte, Aftur my gylte, geue not me! Let me abye hyt in my lyve, That Y haue synned wyth wyttys fyve! ffor hyt ys ryght a fole that Y bee. Now lorde, of þy fole þou haue pyte! […] Euyr thy fole, lorde wyll Y bee! Now lorde, of þy fole þou haue pyte! (f. 256vb–​257ra, lines 389–​404; 417–​18; my transcription from CUL Ff.2.38; my emphasis)

Here Roberd blames himself in words reminiscent of Job’s monologue in Pety Job, referring to his wretchedness (‘wrech of wrechys men me calle’, ‘fole of all follys’), as well as his sinning (‘Y haue synned wyth wyttys five’). His added emphasis on ‘wyttys fyve’ shows a further point of contact with Pety Job. In the latter the voice is quite isolated in his consciousness, as his human outlets to the world—​his senses—​are to be mistrusted and rejected.25 In this speech, by contrast, Roberd displays full engagement with introspection and contrition, and these are important stages in the process of repentance. The tone here is rather different from that encountered in the earliest extant versions of Roberd of Cisely, where the Job-​like depth of feeling is absent. In those versions, dated to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, the monologue is enhanced through an appeal to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose intercession Roberd prays for:

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And that is right that I so be. Lord, on Thi fool Thow have pité. I hedde an errour in myn herte, And that errour doth me smerte. Lord, I leeved not on The. On Thi fol Thou have pité. Holy Writ I hedde in dispyt, For that is reved my delyt, For that is riht a fool I be, Lord, on Thi fool Thou have pité. Lord I am Thi creature, This wo is riht that I endure, And wel more, yif hit may be. Lord, on Thi fool Thou have pité. Lord, I have igult The sore. Merci, Lord, I nul no more; Evere Thi fol, Lord, wol I be. Lord, on Thi fol Thou have pité. Blisful Marie, to the I crie, As thou art ful of cortesye, Preye thi Sone, that dyed for me, On me, His fol, thow have pité. Blisful Marie, ful of  graas, To the I knowe my trespas; Prey thi Sone, for love of  the On me, His fool, thow have pité. (ll. 347–​72, Vernon Manuscript text)26

The line ‘Lord, on thy fool Thou have pité’ is employed as a refrain in these early versions of the romance, and appears more regularly there than it does in the text transmitted in CUL Ff.2.38. The same refrain ‘Now lorde, on thy fole thou haue pyte!’ is, however, more striking in CUL Ff. 2.38, even if it appears fewer times. It seems to come into sharper focus in this version due to the lack of any reference to the Virgin Mary. Interestingly, the appeal to the Blessed Virgin Mary is expanded in the versions of Roberd dateable to the middle decades of the century. At the peak of despair, Roberd says, in the version copied into London, British Library Harley MS 1701: At bettyr state kepe Y non be Lorde on thy fole thou haue pyte Blysful Marye thou were yn core To helpe man that was forlore Prey thy sone that deyde for me On hys fole he haue pyte

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Blysful Marye to the Y crye Thou art ful of curtesye Prey thy sone that deyde for me On hys fole he haue pyte Blysful Marye ful of  grace To the Y knowlyche my trespace Prey thy sone that deyde for me On hys fole he haue pyte He seyde no more alas alas But thanked God of hys grace And thus he gan himself  stylle And thanked God wyth gode wylle. (ll. 371–​88, f. 94rb–​va; my transcription from Harley 1701; my emphasis)

The emphasis on the Blessed Virgin Mary here assists with creating a more individualised image of the penitent sinner Roberd. It sits well with John Audelay’s use of Robert of Sicily in his paraphrase of the Magnificat, in which Audelay includes an anachronistic reference to Robert within the Virgin’s own earnest prayer.27 Audelay’s poem is dated to the 1420s, well before Pety Job, making it roughly contemporaneous with the Harley text of Roberd. Where the Harley 1701 text of Roberd shows us the protagonist addressing God via the Virgin Mary, in CUL Ff.2.38 we have instead Roberd’s unmediated prayer to the deity after the fashion of Job. Roberd’s lament brings the text more closely into the orbit of Pety Job; it also reminds the audience of the fate of rulers who presume themselves invincible and incur God’s punishment until they are given a second chance to repent and live a better life as leaders of their people, as Roberd does in the romance. The version of Roberd of Cisely transmitted in CUL Ff.2.28 is some one hundred lines longer than that transmitted in the earlier manuscripts containing the text. Elsewhere I  have demonstrated that the piety of the romance is enhanced as it acquires more lines.28 In other words, it would be tempting to speculate that the version of Roberd copied into CUL Ff.2.28 was ‘tailored’ to fit in with the sensibilities of an audience that was in tune with penitential language encountered in Pety Job, or was selected due to its adapted tone, which reflects a parallel development in penitential language used across generic boundaries and contemporary political discourse in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. At the same time, however, in the absence of any evidence to substantiate deliberate ‘tampering’ with the copy of Roberd in this codex, it may well be that the (now expanded) version of the romance

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became available to the scribe at a late stage in the copying process. Suffice to add that a culturally and politically well-​attuned scribe and reader would have not only noticed, but also appreciated the enhanced penitential resonances of Roberd in the ‘Job-​inspired’ climate of the late 1470s to 1490s. It is useful to remember that Roberd sits on the cusp between religious and romance narratives: Roberd learns humility while being relegated to the role of the fool, eating with the dogs under the new king’s table, until he repents for his sins and he is reinstated in his former glory, only to become an exemplary king himself. No chivalry is displayed through battles or war in this romance and there are grounds to doubt, therefore, that this text should be considered a romance at all, apart from the fact that in this manuscript context it is placed in close company with other romances. This brief examination of Pety Job and Roberd of Cisely in CUL Ff.2.38 is intended to demonstrate the rich tapestry of connections between the two texts which, viewed from the perspective of modern genre criticism, have seemed disparate. At the same time, it has shown how the overlapping of the discourses of penitence and royal self-​ fashioning that link Pety Job and Roberd of Cisely also reflect the interpenetration of these modes in late fifteenth-​century political culture. Rather than relegating this manuscript book and its readers to the margins of late-​medieval culture on the grounds of the supposedly ‘modest intellectual accomplishments’ of its users and their provincial location, this analysis shows that there is much to be gained from looking outside the manuscript book as well as inside it to gauge its importance. It also demonstrates that it is productive to consider the national as well as the local connections of this manuscript book.29 Indeed, it is the national context that will best enable us to understand how well connected the provincial middle-​class household might have been with the capital in the last years of the fifteenth century. This manuscript miscellany shows the interconnection between the languages used in high culture, in this case, the penitential idiom of political propaganda drawing on penitential texts, and languages used at the ‘lower end’, in such genres as the popular romance, a mode of writing that was enjoyed in bourgeois and gentry homes. Notes I am grateful to Margaret Connolly, Susanna Fein, and the editors for careful suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter. Any remaining errors are my own.

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1 See The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1, ed. Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham (London: Scolar Press, 1977); The Thornton Manuscript:  Lincoln Cathedral MS 91, ed. D. S. Brewer and A. E.  B. Owen (London:  Scolar Press, 1975); Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, ed. Frances McSparran and P. R. Robinson (London: Scolar Press, 1979). London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ii is not yet available in a facsimile edition. 2 See the relevant entries in Gisela Guddat-​ Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (Munich:  W. Fink, 1976). 3 On the terminology of description for such books, see Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (eds), Insular Books:  Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. the Introduction. 4 See Lawrence Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 5 Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, ed. Robinson and McSparran, p. vii (my emphasis). 6 On this last point, see Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, ed. Robinson and McSparran, p. xiii. In what follows, I assume that the booklets were conjoined soon after their copying and offer an interpretation of the reading experience fostered by the book as it now stands. In so proceeding, I follow Michael Johnston, who also assumes the early integrity of CUL MS Ff.2.38, and who emphases the ingenuity of its organisation as well as the ‘forethought invested in the manuscript’s layout and appearance’. These features suggest to Johnston that CUL Ff.2.38 was professionally produced. See Michael Johnston, ‘Two Leicestershire Romance Codices: Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. 2.38 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 15 (2012), 85–​100 (89). 7 See Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjevic (eds), Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition (Cambridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 2008); and Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (eds), Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007). 8 See Jennifer Fellows, ‘Printed Romance in the Sixteenth Century’, in Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (eds), Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (Cambridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 2009), pp.  67–​78. 9 See the Introduction to Sir Eglamour of Artois in Four Middle English Romances:  Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour, ed. Harriet Hudson, 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2006), p. 97. 10 For a reassessment of Roberd’s significance as a penitential romance read in the fifteenth century, and on the varied manuscript contexts in which it was copied, see Raluca Radulescu, Romance and its

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Contexts in Fifteenth-​Century England:  Politics, Piety and Penitence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), p. 43–​56. 11 On this version of the romance, see further Raluca Radulescu, ‘Robert of Sicily:  Text(s) and Manuscript Context(s)’, in Nicholas Perkins (ed.), Material Romance, Material Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 189–​201 (176–​80). 12 For the full contents of these manuscripts, see the relevant entries in Guddat-​Figge, Catalogue. 13 See Dana Piroyanski, Martyrs in the Making: Political Martyrdom in Late Medieval England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2008). 14 The classic study of this topic is by John W. McKenna, ‘Piety and Propaganda:  The Cult of Henry VI’, in Beryl Rowland (ed.), Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honor of Rossell Hope Robbins (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 72–​88. 15 Cited by page number from On the Recovery of the Throne by Edward IV, in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. Thomas Wright, 3  vols. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, new ed. 2012). 16 See Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England and the Finall Recouerye of His Kingdomes from Henry VI, ed. John Bruce (London: Camden Society, 1838), pp. 13–​14. 17 Matthew Giancarlo, ‘Troubling the New Constitutionalism: Politics, Penitence, and the Dilemma of Dread in the Digby Poems’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 110 (2011), 78–​104 (81), citing Lynn Staley, ‘The Penitential Psalms: Conversion and the Limits of Lordship’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (2007), 221–​69. 18 Giancarlo, ‘Troubling the New Constitutionalism’, 99. 19 Introduction to Pety Job, in Moral Love Songs and Laments, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1998), p. 289. 20 Introduction to Pety Job, ed. Fein, p. 290. 21 All of these manuscripts are well-​known and benefit from rich scholarship, including on their relationship to other miscellany manuscripts. For example, TCC R. 3.21 has been associated with Roger Thorney; Harley 1706 was copied, in part, from Douce 322. 22 Introduction to Pety Job, ed. Fein, p. 290. 23 See Johnston, ‘Two Leicestershire Romance Codices’. 24 See Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 85–​112. See too Andrea Hopkins, ‘Female Saints and Romance Heroines:  Feminine Fiction and Faith among the Literary Elite’, in Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney (eds), Christianity and Romance in Medieval England (Cambridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 2010), pp. 121–​38, and The Sinful Knights:  A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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25 I am grateful to Susanna Fein for suggesting this similarity to me. 26 Cited by line from Amis and Amiloun, Roberd of Cisely, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E. Foster, 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 2007). 27 See ‘XXX:  Song of the Magnificat’, in John Audelay, Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302), ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009), which reads: ‘Thenke on Kyng Robart Sesel: /​He went no lord had be bot he, /​Yet sodenlé downe he felle /​And was put into a folis degré! /​An angel was set apon his se, /​ Fore he had these verse in his scornyng—​Deposuit potentis de sede—​ /​ And sayd in heven ther was no Kyng’ (ll. 49–​56). 28 See Radulescu, ‘Robert of Sicily’. 29 Critten’s contribution to this volume constitutes another demonstration of the profitability of looking beyond the solely local and immediate connections of late-​medieval household books.

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10 The multilingual English household in a European perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the traffic of texts Rory G. Critten

Compiled largely in the 1330s, London, British Library MS Harley 2253 transmits a collection of materials in verse and prose, ranging from saints’ lives, biblical paraphrase, and works of practical religion, to conduct literature, political satire, pilgrimage guides, a romance, lyric poetry in English (the ‘Harley Lyrics’) and French, and a selection of fabliaux.1 It contains texts in each of England’s main literary languages—​ Latin, French, and English—​ and, as such, it belongs to a small group of trilingual manuscripts whose origins, like those of Harley 2253, lie for the greater part in  the West Midlands.2 Beginning with his landmark identification of the scribe of Harley 2253 as a legal scrivener based at Ludlow, in the diocese of Hereford, Carter Revard in particular has done much to clarify the ways in which the manuscript anticipates the interests and capacities of elite householders resident in this region.3 While no one patron has been identified for the Harley scribe and his book, its special combination of edifying and entertaining material and the orientation of the political poems that it transmits seem apt to meet the requirements of a narrow set of families living in or around Ludlow at the time of the manuscript’s production, including the baronial lords of Richard’s Castle, the Ludlows of Stokesay, and the Cheneys of Cheney Longville.4 Revard’s detailed palaeographic work allowed for the dating and localisation of Harley 2253 with much greater precision than was typical in later twentieth-​century manuscript scholarship.5 Of special interest was Revard’s establishment of the priority of three literary manuscripts surviving in the Harley scribe’s hand, which allowed for the early establishment of a discrete scribal oeuvre that might be studied for evidence of its maker’s developing tastes and methods.6 In this chapter, I want to offer a contrasting account of

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the intellectual and geographical scope of one of the Harley scribe’s books. My contention will be that, at the same time as it implicates a West Midlands scribe and a West Midlands elite household audience, Harley 2253 also demonstrates the connections between these West Midlands elements and a pan-​European network of textual transmission. The broad currency of French and Latin facilitates the book’s participation in this network, which put its Ludlow audience into contact with a range of writings shaping the household experience throughout the medieval West. In what follows, I explore the relative connotations of Latin, French, and English across the texts compiled in Harley 2253 and demonstrate that the shifting associations of French in particular both enabled and inflected the cross-​ Channel traffic of texts. Most importantly, I  argue that insular facility in French and Latin meant that the Harley scribe and his readers could conceive of themselves not only as passive recipients of texts from beyond England but also as active participants in the transfer of texts into and throughout the continent.7 The argument opens with a reassessment of the use of Latin, French, and English in the texts compiled in Harley 2253 that is inspired by recent work on late-​medieval English multilingualism. In a preliminary analysis of one page in the book—​f. 76r, which transmits three texts using all three of the book’s languages—​I emphasise the strategies of juxtaposition via which the expectations aroused by the deployment of Latin, French, and English in insular contexts are produced and might be manipulated. The special potential of French within this complex of possibilities is then demonstrated via analysis of French-​English code-​switching in two poems compiled elsewhere in the book. In ‘Gilote e Johane’, the introduction of a brief exclamation in English into the otherwise French text of this poem illuminates the possible uses of French to address an insular audience. In the Middle English ‘Flemish Insurection’, by contrast, the use of French words and French-​ derived lexis may be seen to evoke a continental French identity that is at odds with English attitudes and interests. After a run down of the international connections promoted by the Harley scribe’s compilation choices and the vibrant Hereford milieu to which he belonged, I then return to f. 76r of Harley 2253 in order to elaborate a fresh reading of the page’s final poem, ‘Dum ludis floribus’. Here I will be arguing that the editorial tradition defining this trilingual text’s appearance in print has obscured the vital evidence that it contains regarding the capacity of insular writers and readers to conceptualise their active participation in the pan-​European traffic of texts.

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Finally, I suggest two ways in which Harley 2253 may itself have functioned not only as a storehouse for texts produced elsewhere but also as a re-​transmitter of material that was rarer or potentially original to the milieu that saw its production. The relative connotations of Latin, French, and English Approaches to multilingualism in medieval England have developed a great deal since the mid-​twentieth-​century editor of the Harley Lyrics, G. L. Brook, wrote that the mixture of Latin, French, and English in the texts compiled in Harley 2253 reflected a contest between the languages that was taking place in fourteenth-​century England. ‘The three languages were competing with each other in literary use’, Brook asserted, ‘and English had not yet gained the mastery’.8 Such competitive models of England’s multilingual past have now given way to a more generous understanding of the give-​and-​take between Latin, French, and English in insular contexts. In particular, we have become alert to the ways in which the connotations traditionally attaching to these languages are not intrinsic to them. The associations, for example, of Latin with learning, of French with courtliness, and English with homeliness are now most readily understood to result from these languages’ constant juxtaposition in a shifting, trilingual language economy.9 A corollary of this shift in perspective is the recognition that the relative connotations of Latin, French, and English in England will have been susceptible to deliberate manipulation. F. 76r of Harley 2253 offers a particularly clear example of the processes by which meaning can attach to a language through switches in usage that operate both between texts, as works in French, Latin, and English are juxtaposed, and within them, in intra-​ textual code-​ switching. This page transmits three poems that share an interest in the experience of human love. The first, in English, is a meditation on Christ’s Passion that approaches its topic via the conventional setting of the secular love lyric. Seeing blossoms spring and hearing birdsong, the speaker claims that A suete love-​longynge Myn herte thourhout stong Al for a love newe. (53: 3–​5)

For a tantalising moment, it seems that a woman’s perspective on enamorment will be offered: ‘My joie ant eke my blisse /​On him is al ylong’, the speaker asserts (53: 9–​10, my emphasis). But in the

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next stanza, the poem transforms into a heartfelt meditation on the crucifixion. Christ is figured forth on the cross—​‘Thurled fot ant honed /​With grete nayles threo’ (53: 13–​14)—​and the poem ends with requests for contrition and amendment. The next poem on f. 76r is in French. It is more determinedly secular: ‘Ferroy chaunsoun que bien doit estre oyé’, the speaker of this text begins, ‘De ma amie chaunterai qe m’ad deguerpié!’ [I’ll compose a song that much needs to be heard—​I’ll sing of my love who has left me!] (54: 1–​2). The complaint is brought back into the orbit of ‘When Y se blosmes spring’ by its refrain. This takes the form of a prayer to God and Saint Thomas that the speaker’s lady will be forgiven: Je pri a Dieu e seint Thomas Qe il la pardoigne le trespas, E je si verroiement le fas Si ele ‘merci’ me crye! (54: 8–​11) I pray to God and Saint Thomas /​That they forgive her her trespass, /​And very truly will I give it /​Should she ‘mercy’ beg me!

The Thomas addressed here may perhaps be Thomas Becket. Given the speaker’s expressions of doubt regarding the intentions of his beloved, however, the saintly Thomas evoked in these lines more readily calls to mind the apostolic Doubting Thomas, who was depicted probing Christ’s crucifixion wounds in a variety of medieval artistic contexts.10 The repeated mention of Thomas’s name throughout the poem thus draws the lover’s protestations into the range of the preceding Passion lyric and further enriches the self-​conscious apposition and blending of secular and devotional experiences developed further up the page in ‘When Y se blosmes spring’. While both ‘When Y se blosmes spring’ and ‘Ferroy chaunsoun que bien doit estre oyé’ explore love’s complexities, they do so using rather different forms. The regular six-​syllable line deployed in the English text contrasts in its simplicity with the more outlandish form of the French stanzas, each of which concludes with the bouncing refrain cited above.11 These prosodic elements contribute to the poems’ overall effects: the English text is sobering in its devotion where the French text is playful despite its undertow of resentment. Either text might have been written in the other language; Harley 2253 transmits examples of lively, antipathetic love poetry in English (e.g. ‘Weping haveth myn wonges wet’, Article 33) and French is deployed to express humble devotion and contrition

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in the first text immediately following the poems transmitted on f. 76r, ‘Quant fu en ma juvente’ (Article 56). The juxtaposition of the French and English poems at the opening of f. 76r would thus seem to be a deliberate arrangement designed at once to drawn on and to reinforce possible differences between the expressive capacities of English and French. Whereas English here functions as the language of unpretentious religious sentiment, French is used to describe an impasse in a love relationship between a man and a woman. Seeing the poems one after the other heightens their impact by setting up a parallel between the different tones that they strike and the different languages in which they are written. The contrast between the first two poems inscribed on f.  76r shows how the Harley scribe’s compilation choices can create productive moments of juxtaposition between texts written in alternating languages.12 The third and final text on this manuscript page demonstrates how such juxtaposition can be incorporated within one poem. Beginning ‘Dum ludis floribus’, it is a formal tour de force in which the commonplaces of the medieval lover’s complaint are revived through a dazzling display combining Latin, French, and English. Whereas much macaronic poetry in the Middle Ages alternates between languages from line to line, here the mix is more fluid.13 In the first four stanzas of this five-​stanza poem, the rhyme words are always Latin but the rest of the line contains French and Latin in varying proportions. In the first stanza, for instance, the first line is entirely in Latin; the second and the third lines are entirely in French, except for the rhyme words; and in the fourth line, the text is split roughly into French and Latin halves. The speaker of this poem addresses a male acquaintance who, he thinks, is having more luck in his amorous adventures than he is: Dum ludis floribus velud lacivia, Le Dieu d’Amour moi tient en tiel angustia, Merour me tient de duel e de miseria, Si je ne la ay quam amo super omnia. (55: 1–​4) While you play in flowers as if in wantonness, /​The God of Love binds me in such anguish, /​Holding for me a mirror of sorrow and misery, /​Since I don’t have her whom I love above all.

The impression created by the combination of French and Latin in these and subsequent stanzas is one of virtuosic improvisation. Over the next twelve lines, the speaker develops his bilingual complaint. He says that he burns so fervently for his lady’s love that he must give up this world if he cannot prove worthy of

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her (53: 5–​8). Then he lays out the lady’s superb beauty and her refinement, which, he says, transport him into ecstasy, ‘Come est la lune celi inter sidera’ [like the moon among the stars of heaven] (53:  14). But his love is not without a terrestrial edge. He closes with a prayer that is no doubt designed to appeal to the poem’s inscribed male addressee: Dieu la moi doint sua misericordia, Beyser e fere que secuntur alia. (55: 15–​16) May God grant her to me by his mercy, /​To kiss and do the other things that follow.

Notwithstanding these witty pyrotechnics, it is the poem’s fifth and final stanza that has generated the lion’s share of the commentary on the text. I cite it here as it appears in Fein’s edition (I will subsequently return to a textual problem posed by this passage): Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis. Mon ostel est enmi la vile de Paris. May Y sugge namore, so wel me is; Yef Hi deye for love of hire, duel hit ys! (55: 17–​20) I’ve written these songs on a tablet. /​My lodging’s amid the city of Paris. /​I may say no more, as seems best; /​Should I die for love of her, sad it is!

Thus readers’ attention is drawn to the text’s status as a written artefact and to the writer’s situation in Paris. The switch to English in the poem’s last lines seems engineered to produce a particularly pathetic effect. It is as if the speaker, worn out by his artistic efforts, lets his mask slide, and, in this moment of surrender, utters a final, unvarnished account of his experience of unrequited love. After the exuberance of the poem’s opening sixteen lines, the flatness of the English is striking. The flagrantly unambitious rhyme on ‘is /​ ys’ as well as the breakdown of syntax in the poem’s last line neatly portray the writer’s exhaustion. Grammatically, the final clause requires either a future or a conditional form conjugated with will or would: ‘if I die for love of her it will or would be sad’. The only way to parse the poem’s conclusion as we have it, I think, is as a sigh: ‘If I die for love of her … Oh! This is a sorry business!’ Examining another fourteenth-​ century trilingual poem on frustrated love, Ad Putter observes how, there too, English is kept back for a last ‘heartfelt plea’, a move that he relates to a trend in medieval English epistolary culture whereby English postscripts were added to Latin and French missives apparently with the aim

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of striking a more informal note.14 But, Putter states, the conviction that English communicates genuine sentiment in a given poetic context is less the product of any value that the language holds per se than of what he calls the trilingual writer’s ‘deliberate art’.15 This can be seen to reside, Putter argues, in the poet’s purposeful ‘exaggeration of the linguistic and socio-​ linguistic differences between Latin, French, and English’.16 In her reading of ‘Dum ludis floribus’, Ardis Butterfield takes Putter’s point a step further, suggesting that multilingual poems such as this might in fact create as well as reinforce impressions of appropriate language use.17 Cleaving for now just to this text, we can certainly assert that the impression of truthfulness accruing to the final English lines of the poem relies upon their situation in contrast with the flashy macaronic performance that precedes them. If we encountered this couplet, say, scribbled in isolation on the flyleaves of Harley 2253, we would most likely find it less affecting, or perhaps even trite. French in England and French from abroad In an influential account of ‘Dum ludis floribus’, Seth Lerer asserts that the languages deployed in the poem’s final stanza reflect pragmatic choices on the part of the text’s imagined speaker: When the poet writes about the act of writing, he does so in Latin: in the language reminiscent of Martial’s epigrams and of their refraction in the schoolroom lyric. When he announces his dwelling in Paris—​and what we may take as his affiliation with the student life of the city—​he does so in French. And when he announces, in that final couplet, that he may not speak anymore and that he would die for love, he does so in the rich colloquialisms of his clearly definable West Midlands English.18

The foregoing analysis of f. 76r of Harley 2253 suggests that the alternation of languages in a poem such as ‘Dum ludis floribus’ and the book that contains it cannot be completely understood in such terms. The possible associations of Latin, French, and English were much broader than those Lerer lists; it is their particular deployment within this poem that leads to the impression that their use in the last stanza of the poem is appropriate. The connotations that French might be used to conjure were especially broad. As is demonstrated by a recent volume of extracts assembled by Jocelyn Wogan-​Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell, French could be used self-​ consciously in medieval England to

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engage a whole range of tones and generic expectations: now pious, now legalistic; now moralising, now lascivious; now documentary, now parodic.19 French could also be evoked either as a language belonging in England or as a language used elsewhere that marked its speakers as foreign. This point can be clarified via consideration of two further instances of language mixing in Harley 2253. In both cases, comic code-​switching opens fresh perspectives on the relative connotations of French and English and on the ways in which these languages could be combined to foster particular insular attitudes towards the French language and French speakers. Written in French, ‘Gilote e Johane’ (Article 37) is a fabliau-​like poem that narrates Gilote’s conversion of her friend, Johane, to a life of hedonistic love-​making. Although Johane initially upbraids Gilote for her immoral conduct, Gilote soon brings Johane around to her way of seeing things via an argument whose outrageous misappropriation of Holy Church’s teaching makes her an obvious foremother of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.20 Once Johane is convinced, the two women tour the town of Winchester offering advice to all comers. When they meet a woman who complains about her impotent husband, Gilote’s sympathy spills over into English before she returns to French to suggest a predictably practical solution: Trop est femme desçu malement E forement trahy, qe tiel honme prent. Yl ne puet foutre ne fere talent. Alas, alas, for Godes deth, such womon ys yshent! Demayn quant vostre mary vet de mesoun, Je vous froy venyr un jeouene clerjoun, Qe de geu vous trovera grant foissoun, De meyne e de tresble e de bordoun. (37: 242–​9) Too much is a woman badly deceived /​And severely betrayed, who takes such a man. /​He can’t fuck or fulfill her desire. /​Alas, alas, for God’s death, such a woman is ruined! /​Tomorrow when your husband leaves the house, /​I’ll have a young clerk come to you, /​Who will compose for you an abundance of loveplay, /​In the middle and the treble and the bass.

Gilote’s English phrase, which would not be out of place in a moralising sermon on female licentiousness, encapsulates her wanton disregard for clerical authority and the deliciously self-​ serving nature of her own alternative morality. As it does in ‘Dum ludis floribus’, the switch into English in these lines serves to suggest the ardency of its speaker’s emotion. But where in the

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previously discussed lyric the effect is pathetic, here it is comic and parodic, and the sense that the juxtaposition of French and English is being self-​consciously manipulated is heightened. The comic yield for this instance of code-​switching might have been particularly great in the context of dramatic performance, which is how the work appears to have been met on at least one occasion. At its close, ‘Gilote et Johane’ is said to have been ‘fet’, or put on, at Winchester Le mois de septembre le jour quinsyme, Le an roy Edward vyntenuefyme, Le fitz roy Henry qe ama seinte Eglise. (37: 343–​6) On the fifteenth day of September, /​In the twenty-​ninth year of King Edward [1301], /​The son of King Henry who loved Holy Church.

It is easy to imagine the success that a performance of ‘Gilote et Johane’ could have enjoyed at Winchester. Revard suggests that the original audience of the piece comprised canon lawyers and their clerks, men whose language of business would have been French and who were likely to appreciate the clever subversions of marriage law developed by Gilote on her preaching tour.21 As Revard also notes, the presentation of the text in Harley 2253 suggests that fresh renditions of the poem were anticipated in the elite household context with which he associates the book.22 On ff. 67*r and 68r, the text is presented with rubricated paraphs and marginal rubricated initials that have been added apparently in order to indicate changes of speaker and thus to facilitate reading aloud.23 Domestic performances that proceeded with the aid of these palaeographic markers might have been designed not simply to exercise participants’ French but also to improve it.24 The text of ‘Gilote e Johane’ preserved in Harley 2253 allows us to imagine French being used to address two discrete insular audiences, one comprising legal professionals, the other elite West Midlands householders. The brief switch into English identifies these audiences as also belonging to a broader constituency of English speakers. In a study that surveys some similar instances of intra-​textual code-​switching, Christopher Baswell zooms in on a moment where French intrudes into the otherwise English text of Kyng Alisaunder preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript, comparing this moment to the sudden recognition of pentimenti, or ‘first thoughts’, in a subsequently altered painting.25 When intra-​textual code-​switching occurs, a multilingual text can reveal its origins. At

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the same time, the notion of originality itself is troubled: are we to imagine Gilote speaking her own words, from the heart, when she speaks English, or is she or the actor playing her adopting English to affect such a move, or are someone else’s words being cited, perhaps, as I have already suggested, the words of a preacher known to or imagined by the work’s audiences? For my current purposes, the main point to draw from the code-​switching in ‘Gilote and Johane’ is that French is thereby revealed as a language that is found perfectly fit to address at least two discrete insular audiences that also knew English. An alternative function is accorded to French in ‘The Flemish Insurrection’ (Article 48). Written in English, this poem narrates the defeat of the French at the Battle of Courtrai on 11 July 1302. On this occasion, having first sacked the occupying French garrison stationed in their town, the burghers of Bruges rode out to Courtrai and, supported by civic militia from several Flemish towns, met and decisively routed the French knights who had been sent to destroy them.26 The speaker of ‘The Flemish Insurrection’ takes great delight in describing the humiliation of the vanquished army. Sixteen hundred French horsemen met their end at the battle, he claims, and these men now ‘leyyen y the stretes ystyked ase swyn!’ (48: 42). The Frenchmen lost their steeds, he goes on, ‘thourh huere oune prude’ (48: 44). One means by which the poet aims to capture the haughty attitude of the French is through the use of French words and phrases in the English text that appear to be recent imports into Middle English. The French defeat was not avoided, we are told, not ‘for al huere bobaunce [insolence] /​Ne fore the avowerie [sanction] of the Kyng of Fraunce’; the French forces are mockingly depicted approaching Bruges ‘pas pur pas [step by step], /​With swithe gret mounde [military force]’; and the French king is shown assembling his ‘dousse pers [gentle peers]’ after the initial defeat of his bailiffs (48: 29–​30; 35–​6; 50, my emphasis). In the cases of bobaunce, avowerie, and mounde used to mean military force, the Middle English Dictionary lists citations from ‘The Flemish Insurrection’ among the words’ earliest occurrences; the phrases pas pur pas and dousse pers look more clearly still to be determined imports from French.27 The French are also heard speaking a strangely Gallicised English. Thus when the French aristocracy meets to discuss the routing of the Bruges garrison, their promises of revenge slip into French. The count of Saint Paul swears ‘Par la goul De [by God’s throat]’ that

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     We shule facche the rybaus, wher thi wille be,      Ant drawen hem with wilde hors out of the countre, By thousendes fyve! (48: 61–​3)

Raul de Nel, count of Bologne, is then heard asserting that      Nous ne lerrum en vie chanoun ne moyne      [we won’t leave alive either canon or monk]      Wende we forth anon ritht, withoute eny assoygne [delay], Ne no lyves man. (48: 65–​8)

The effect of this Gallic colouring is surely comic. It also extends beyond the lines of direct citation in French, inviting readers to hear the English portions of the line being spoken as it were in a French accent. Like the items of French lexis cited above, several of the French-​sounding words attributed to the count of Saint Paul and Raul de Nel are, in the fourteenth century, also recent arrivals in English (e.g. rybaus, assoygne).28 Recent work on insular lexicography has stressed the difficulties faced by the editors of modern dictionaries who might attempt to distinguish between words having English, French, and Anglo-​ Norman origins. It would seem that our understanding of these languages tends to be more finely circumscribed than was the case for medieval speakers.29 Nevertheless, the frequency with which identifiably French words are associated with hostile French characters in ‘The Flemish Insurrection’ suggests that, about the time this poem was being copied, these words were recognisable as distinctly foreign loan words. Indeed, it would seem from their use in this text that they could be apprehended as belonging not only to another language or register of language but also to another place: France, not England or Flanders.30 To claim as does Thorlac Turville-​Petre that the three languages used in Harley 2253 ‘existed in harmony’ and that they represent the interests not of three independent cultures but of ‘one culture in three voices’ is thus considerably to flatten out the matter of the book’s multilingualism.31 On the one hand, as in ‘Gilote e Johane’, the contrast of French and English can be productive of exclusive community sentiment within insular contexts. On the other, as in ‘The Flemish Insurrection’, the juxtaposition of these languages can be used to establish an insular identity that is opposed to continental French interests. That the revilement of the French in that last text is triangulated via the example of the burghers of Bruges points to the complexity of the cross-​Channel networks of loyalty within the context of which the apparently proto-​nationalist

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sentiment developed in the English poem should be considered. The reading of Harley 2253 developed here is diametrically opposed to that finally proposed by Turville-​Petre according to which the Harley scribe collected his materials with a view to re-​ presenting them ‘as fitting representations of national culture’.32 Instead, I want to emphasise the flexibility of French in particular to foster communication both within and beyond England. French was an especially apt medium for trans-​Channel traffic because it was capable of embodying both the ambitions and the antipathies that were bound up with contact of this sort. International contacts ‘Dum ludis floribus’ trades heavily on the mystique attending international contacts. As it is presented in Fein’s edition, the poem offers us the pleasurable illusion of being a fly on the wall in an expatriate English clerk’s medieval Parisian cell. The interest manifest within this text in the world beyond Ludlow and Hereford is also perceptible in several of the other items compiled in Harley 2253, as, throughout the book, the Harley scribe’s copying makes available for his readers a selection of texts affording them access to the latest continental trends.33 Several of Harley’s items were pan-​European ‘hits’, such as ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ (Article 109), a Latin prose allegory in which descriptions of the movement of pieces in the game provide the pretext for a devastating social critique from which not even the king escapes unscathed. The transmission of the ‘Enseignements de Saint Lewis a Philip soun fitz’ (Article 94) was likewise broad. The Harley scribe’s copy of this work derives from a continental tradition of French texts purporting to preserve the deathbed advice of Louis IX of France (1214–​1270); it was promulgated widely in the lead-​up to the king’s canonisation by Boniface VIII in 1297. Several of the other French texts copied by the book’s main scribe also have continental analogues:  a Goliardic poem on the joys of winter, ‘Quant voy la revenue d’yver’ (Article 20); two pieces treating the nature of women, ‘Le Dit des femmes’ (Article 76)  and ‘Le Blasme des femmes’ (Article 77); and three fabliaux: ‘Le Jongleur d’Ely e le roi d’Angleterre’ (Article 75), ‘Les Trois dames qui troverent un vit’ (Article 75a), and ‘Le Chevaler qui fist les cons parler’ (Article 87). An interest in things French is made explicit in the paratextual material accompanying the works of practical religion transmitted in the book. Thus a vernacular

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translation of Gloria in excelsis Deo is touted with the otherwise gratuitous advertisement that it has been put ‘en fraunceis’ (102: 1); a prayer on the Five Joys of Our Lady is presented as a gift sent directly from the Virgin Mary to Saint Maurice, bishop of Paris (Article 104); and a list of occasions for psalms is attributed to Saint Hilary, Archbishop of Poitiers (Article 111). Other texts in Harley 2253 look to the East. ‘Pilgrimages in the Holy Land’ (Article 38), ‘The Pardons of Acre’ (Article 39), and ‘The Land of the Saracens’ (Article 95) invite readers to cast their minds beyond western Europe to imagine the topography and cultures of the Orient and their provision for Christian penitents. Still other texts look West. Among a selection of features exhibited by the Harley Lyrics that suggest a Welsh connection is John’s comparison of Annot to the fictional characters Tegeu, Wyrwein, Cradoc, and Wylcadoun in ‘Ichot a burde in a bour ase beryl so bryht’ (Article 28:  43–​5).34 The Harley scribe’s connections to Ireland are evidenced on the flyleaves of Harley 2253, which transmit accounts from County Meath.35 Some traffic of text and manuscripts across the Irish Sea is also suggested by the presence of the French lament for Simon de Montfort (Article 24) in both Harley 2253 and an Irish Franciscan manuscript, now Dublin, Trinity College MS 347.36 These international engagements bear stressing alongside the more familiar national and regional affiliations of Harley 2253. The role played by the book as a resting place for English verse has long been recognised. The demonstration via dialectal study that the origins of the Harley Lyrics were dispersed throughout England was an early scholarly achievement, as was the realisation that the exemplars with which the Harley scribe worked must sometimes have been loose leaves of parchment.37 It has long been recognised too that the concerns of many of the texts compiled Harley 2253 reflect their scribe’s particular West Midlands context. The political poetry compiled in the book manifests a distrust of centralised authority and commemorates incidents of local importance, such as the Battle of Evesham (Article 24).38 The manuscript collects the Latin lives of three local saints, Ethelbert, Etfrid, and Wistan (Articles 18, 98, 116), and its Midlands orientation is also evident in the Harley Lyrics’ occasional location of their objects of desire out ‘by West’, anywhere ‘From Weye […] into Wyrhale’ [Wye into the Wirral] or ‘Bituene Lyncolne ant Lydneseye, Norhamptoun ant Lounde’ [between Lincoln and Lindsey, Northampton and Lound] (arts. 30:  37; 28:  27; 65:  17). Marilyn Corrie has shown

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how the sharing of contents between Harley 2253 and another West Midlands trilingual miscellany, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86, is representative of a ‘localized literary culture’ that flourished in the region in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.39 Finally, Michael Richter has uncovered important independent evidence of facility in Latin, French, and English among these books’ potential readers. In his assessment of the documents surviving from the hearings associated with the canonisation of Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford (c. 1220–​1282), held in 1307, Richter notes that many West Midlands clerics and secular elites delivered their testimony in Latin or French, suggesting their expertise in one or both of these languages as well as in their native English.40 The cultural affiliations of Harley 2253 thus range broadly across contexts regional, national, and international. This should not surprise us:  Hereford, the nearest large town to the Harley scribe’s Ludlow, was a regional hub well used to looking beyond its borders. At the latest by the turn of the fourteenth century it had acquired the much fêted Mappa Mundi that affords its viewers a rich visual perspective on their place in the world.41 The internationalism of the region has been described by Daniel Birkholz, who emphasises the mobility of Hereford cathedral’s clergy and their frequent journeying between Hereford, Rome, and Avignon during the early 1300s, and who suggests that the Harley scribe acquired several of his texts thanks to his acquaintance with these well-​travelled men.42 To these researches can be added John Hines’s exposition of the links sustained by trade and pilgrimage between the Harley scribe’s West Midlands base at Ludlow and the continent. Hines notes that Ludlow’s prosperity in the Middle Ages derived from its flourishing wool trade, which is known to have opened the town to imports of continental wine and pottery; Hines also points out the early fourteenth-​century success of the town’s Palmers’ (i.e. pilgrims’) Gild, which gained formal recognition and a royal licence to acquire property in 1329, around the time when the earliest work on Harley 2253 was getting underway.43 It is my contention that ‘Dum ludis floribus’ offers a more comprehensive reflection upon the reciprocal international contacts sustained by the Hereford milieu than has hitherto been recognised. Texts as well as goods could be shared across its border. In order to make this point, it will be necessary to go back to the manuscript text of the poem’s last stanza. Above, I  cited these lines as they

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appear in Fein’s edition; here I give them in my transcription from Harley 2253, f. 76r. Scripsit hec carmina in tabulis Mon ostel est enmi la vile de paris May y sugge namore so wel me is ȝef hi deye for loue of hire duel hit ys.

The substantive difference between my text and the text printed by Fein is in the first word of the stanza, ‘scripsit’ [he has written] which, despite the clarity of the scribe’s writing at this moment, Fein, following all previous editors of the poem, emends to ‘scripsi’ [I have written].44 I think that the traditional emendation obscures the sense of the poem which, in its manuscript text, finally emerges not as a static record of its speaker’s emotional state but as a mobile letter. As it appears in the manuscript, ‘Dum ludis floribus’ ends with the reaction of the man addressed in the text’s opening line, who speaks as the recipient of its first four stanzas. On this reading, the poem concludes bitterly. Whereas the first speaker had assumed that his addressee was having a better time of it, playing in flowers as if in wantonness, here it turns out that this second man, whom we discover in Paris, is faring just as poorly, if not worse. When he mentions tablets, the speaker of the final stanza may be wistfully imagining his friend taking a quiet moment to draft his poetic epistle in wax. Alternatively, he may be registering before his own eyes the sight of the wax tablet inscribed by his friend and sent to him at Paris.45 Either way, the writer of the text’s last stanza is not up to the flexible macaronic style of his correspondent. In his response to his correspondent’s text, he composes a mere four lines, two in which Latin and French are separated out and, as his closing couplet, a simple utterance in English. What the manuscript reading of ‘Dum ludis floribus’ contributes to our conception of the international connections evident in Harley 2253 is the idea that the English could imagine themselves not only as the recipients of texts from elsewhere but also as the authors of missives into the wider world beyond the Channel. An unamended reading of ‘Dum ludis floribus’ allows us to perceive that the traffic of texts between England and the continent could run both ways. According to one of the fictions made available in the poem, a virtuosic writer of macaronic verse could send his poetry from England into France, where it might stay, and take root. The final lines of ‘Dum ludis floribus’ might

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also imply a more conscious attempt at reciprocation. One way of reading the last stanza of the text is as an attempt to write back to the author of the opening French-​Latin macaronic. If the second speaker is thought to be an Englishman, we might assume that his stay in Paris has not yet enhanced his poetic skill to the point that he can rival his correspondent at home. Or the writer of the last stanza of ‘Dum ludis floribus’ might be imagined as a Parisian native. In that case, the text’s conclusion might figure forth a continental poet who is engaged in a clumsy imitation of his insular friend. The English ego is flattered on this reading by the spectacle of a Parisian writer’s clearly inferior macaronics and by his determined but ultimately unimpressive attempt to produce an English couplet.46 Or again, what we might take from this brief poem and its indeterminate location of its speakers is the irrelevance both of geographic orientation and of native proficiency. For what is to say that the writer of the poem’s first four stanzas is not himself already in France? In the world of this poem, writers are presented for judgement not in light of the language that they grew up speaking, or of the land in which they reside or write, but with regard to their varying abilities as the authors of ambitious, mobile, multilingual verse. Two examples of the traffic of text through Harley 2253 Literary history provides corroboration for at least one of the new readings of ‘Dum ludis floribus’ that I have outlined insofar as there is a long record of not only Latin but also of French texts from England making the journey into the continent. The later thirteenth-​century Anglo-​Norman text of Boeve de Haumtone inaugurates a long tradition of storytelling throughout Europe that will see the romance rendered into Icelandic, Welsh, Irish, Middle English, and continental French, as well as Dutch, Italian, Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish.47 Le Livre des merveilles du monde attributed to Jean de Mandeville (1356) enjoyed a similarly broad readership across the European vernaculars and, according to at least one recent commentator, seems most likely also to have taken its origins in England.48 Consideration of the English origins of texts such as these involves a shift in perspective on England and the continent. In particular, as Simon Gaunt points out, we should recognise that the traffic of texts about the Île de France in the Middle Ages was not only centrifugal but also centripetal; texts flowed into as well as out of the metropolitan

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region, their passage being facilitated by the broad currency of Latin and French.49 Given its role as the transmitter of ‘Dum ludis floribus’, it is gratifying to note that Harley 2253 can shed light on at least two instances of textual traffic from England into the continent. The first of these has already been explored in a ground-​breaking article by Roy Pearcy.50 In that work, Pearcy reviews the textual history of a group of Anglo-​Norman fabliaux, two of which are transmitted in Harley 2253, ‘Le Chevalier qui fist les cons parler’ and ‘Les Trois dames qui troverent un vit’. In so doing, he demonstrates that, rather than being degraded versions of pre-​existing continental texts, as had previously been assumed, these two texts are more likely originally to have been written in England. Although Harley 2253 postdates the continental French manuscripts in which ‘Le Chevalier qui fist les cons parler’ and ‘Les Trois dames qui troverent un vit’ are also transmitted, Pearcy argues that the Harley texts testify to an older insular circulation of these works and that it is this tradition that the continental versions of the texts develop: the preponderance of digressions in the continental French texts marks them out as adaptations of earlier work. As Pearcy is well aware, his demonstration of the vitality of the Anglo-​ Norman fabliau has important cultural implications, not least as regards Chaucer’s access to examples of the genre. Pearcy’s work is especially useful for my current purposes because it illustrates how an English book such as Harley 2253 might potentially contribute to a network of textual exchange spanning time as well as geography. Harley 2253 may also hold the key to another instance of insular participation in continental textual traditions. Whereas the Harley scribe’s copies of the fabliaux discussed by Pearcy postdate their extant continental copies, his version of ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ is the earliest known copy of the work to have survived.51 Given that so many of the poems compiled in Harley 2253 can be shown to take their origins outside the West Midlands, it is possible too that the Latin prose allegory was composed elsewhere. But the connections of the work to the milieu that produced Harley 2253 are tantalising. Like so much of the political poetry in the book, ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ expresses a deep-​rooted distrust of those who either have power or crave it. In this brief Latin allegory, the movements of each of the chess pieces are listed and are found to parallel dishonest manoeuvring at all levels of society. Thus the queen’s capacity for unlimited movement is said to reflect the greed

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of womankind; the rook’s movement in straight lines is found to reflect the ideal behaviour of judges, who are said unfortunately to have become corrupt; and the knight’s consecutive movement across both vertical and horizontal planes is held to reflect the wily means by which men of his rank extract taxes from their subjects (109: 18–​ 28). Even the king does not escape entirely from criticism: In isto autem ludo REX vadit ubique et capit undique directe, in signum quod rex omnia iuste corrigat et in nullo omissa iusticia obliquari debet. Set quicquid agit rex iusticia reputatur, quia quicquid principi placet legis habet vigorem. (109: 14–​16) Furthermore, in this game the KING moves everywhere and takes from all directions directly, to indicate that a king corrects everything justly and that in no case ought justice be omitted and shunted aside. But whatever the king does is regarded as justice, because whatever suits the prince has the rigor of  law.

In its apparent distrust of royal whim, ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ shares a decentralising stance developed in several of the political poems compiled in Harley 2253, including the ‘Song of the Husbandman’ (Article 31), ‘Trailbaston’ (Article 80), and ‘Against the King’s Taxes’ (Article 114), as well as ‘The Flemish Insurrection’. Another point that ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ has in common with much of the poetry in Harley 2253 is its anticipation of a trilingual readership. The main language of the allegory is Latin, but key words to do with the game of chess are in French, leading to the elaboration of a pun apparently designed to appeal to an insular audience. If the lowly are to be pitied in their humble position, the promotion of a pawn in its eighth rank is allegorised as follows: Et tunc de poun fit fierce, et tunc incontinenti capit cum maximo dominio, et tres punctos pertransit, quia, ut dicitur in Alexandro, ‘asperius nichil est humili cum surgit in altum’. (109: 31–​41) And then from a poun he becomes a fers, and then immediately he takes with greatest power and traverses three squares because, as is said in Alexander, ‘nothing is harsher than a humble man when he rises’.

The pun here is on two of the meanings of the word fers in England—​‘chess queen’ and ‘fierce’—​the second of these meanings being rendered subsequently in the passage by a comparative form of the Latin adjective asper (‘fierce’).52

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In Harley 2253, ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ is presented without paratextual comment. In later copies, where it is not also presented anonymously, the text is attributed either to pope Innocent III (1198–​1213) or to John of Wales (fl. 1259–​1285), a Franciscan friar who spent time at Oxford and Paris and who was active on the side of the baronial revolt narrated in two of the political poems compiled in Harley 2253, the ‘Song of Lewes’ (Article 23) and the ‘Lament for Simon de Montfort’.53 It is thanks principally to the belated incorporation of ‘All the World’s a Chess Board’ into John’s Communeloquium, a compendium of preaching materials, originally compiled c.  1270, that the prose allegory gained a foothold on the continent. H.  J. R.  Murray notes the existence of the work in the edito princeps of the Communeloquium, which was printed in Cologne in 1472, as well as in several subsequent printed books; he also adduces the survival of manuscripts in which French and Italian translations of the text are preserved, apparently independently of the Communeloquium frame.54 The presence of ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ in Harley 2253 allows us to ascertain the availability of the Latin allegory in the West Midlands quite early, from the 1330s at the latest. It is unclear whether the Harley scribe’s copy of ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ served as an exemplar for subsequent copies of the work, but early in its reception history, Harley 2253 seems to have fallen into the hands of another scribe. The man that wrote a series of recipes for making coloured ink and instructions for keeping metal implements sharp on f. 52v of Harley 2253 (Arts. 10–​17) was presumably also able to copy texts from the manuscript.55 Leaving aside the speculation that such an observation might incite, it must suffice for now to note that this early copy of ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ shows just how close a West Midlands readership could come to the cutting edge of a budding European textual tradition. The late-​medieval transmission history of ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ neatly reflects the dual outlook of Harley 2253 as the text attaches both to pope Innocent III, whose appeal was international, and to John of Wales, whose appeal, at least in name, was more provincial and westerly. Harley 2253 likewise turns its readers’ gaze both out across the Welsh Marches and into the East, to the continent, and beyond. By copying texts that were popular throughout the medieval West, the Harley scribe involves its readers in a shared cultural experience that, following Jacques Le Goff, we might think of as European. Le Goff argues that it makes

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sense to conceive of the High Middle Ages as the era when the idea of Europe was born even if evidence for the medieval perception of this development is slight. It is during this time that disparate geographical regions in the West begin to fall into sync with each other, Le Goff points out, building cities, founding universities, sending soldiers on crusade, and subscribing to a set of ideals, practices, and rites whose norms might be defined and shared in writing: chivalry, courtesy, love, marriage, pilgrimage, feudal monarchy, and so on.56 Harley 2253 and multilingual English books like it deserve consideration in the context of this broader cultural trend because their particular combination of materials affords us a privileged perspective on the balancing of local and European commitments in a range of specific contexts. The multilingualism of the Harley scribe and his audience allows for the bridging of these interests, not only for the practical reason that pan-​European texts are written in pan-​ European languages but also because Latin and French supported modulating modes of address within England:  texts copied in French or Latin in England might be directed to audiences that were immediate and insular or more vaguely located in the French and Latin Sprachräume:  in the rooms, as they say in German, in which these languages were used. Insular and continental audiences for texts in French and Latin could overlap. As we have seen, the polyvalence and broad currency of French did not always work in favour of continental cohesion. Still, English facility in Latin and French allowed direct participation in the traffic of texts throughout Europe, including the capacity to add to the total store of circulating materials by authoring and re-​transmitting insular works of importance and influence. Harley 2253 gives us a valuable sense of how one West Midlands household might have thought about and participated in this traffic of texts. While Harley 2253 will remain interesting for modern scholars on account of the intimate perspective that it offers on the cultural lives of one group of West Midlands householders, the bigger picture in which they were investing in the 1330s was trans-​Channel, Latinate, and Francophone.

Notes Draft versions of this chapter were presented to the English departments at the Universities of Lausanne and Cambridge as well as at a session organised by Raluca Radulescu at the Leeds Medieval Congress in 2017.

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I am grateful for the feedback that I received from my audiences on each of these occasions. 1 See The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Susanna Fein, with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski, 3 vols (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute Publications 2014–​15). Unless otherwise indicated, citations from the manuscript’s texts and their translations will be given by article and line number from this source. 2 For a brief catalogue of these manuscripts, see Tony Hunt, ‘Insular Trilingual Compilations’, in R. Jansen-​ Sieben and H. Van Dijk (eds), Codices Miscellanearum:  Brussels Van Hulthem Colloquium 1999 (Brussels: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique, 1999), pp. 51–​70. 3 See Carter Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, in Susanna Fein (ed.), Studies in the Harley Manuscript:  The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), pp. 21–​109. 4 Revard’s analysis of the commitments displayed in the political poetry compiled in Harley 2253 has played an important role in his assessment of the possible connections between Harley 2253 and these families. On this topic, see, most recently, Carter Revard, ‘Political Poems in MS Harley 2253 and the English National Crisis of 1339–​41’, Chaucer Review, 53 (2018), 60–​81. On the connections between Harley 2253 and both the Mortimer family and the Hereford cathedral episcopacy, see too Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253, ed. N. R. Ker, EETS o.s. 255 (London:  Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. xxi–​xxiii. 5 It is noteworthy that Revard’s work anticipated by several years both Linne R.  Mooney’s identification of Adam Pynkhurst as Chaucer’s scribe and the outcomes of Mooney’s ‘Late Medieval English Scribes’ project, to cite but two recent developments in palaeographic study. See Linne R. Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 97–​138, and www.medievalscribes.com. 6 The other literary manuscripts written by the Harley scribe are London, British Library MSS Harley 273 and Royal 12. C.  xii. The broader implications of Revard’s work on the Harley scribe’s oeuvre are addressed in Susanna Fein, ‘Literary Scribes:  The Harley Scribe and Robert Thornton as Case Studies’, in Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (eds), Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 61–​79. 7 Where it stresses the extra-​ regional connections of Harley 2253, this chapter intersects with Radulescu’s contribution to Household Knowledges, in which Radulescu demonstrates how Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 both reflects and contributes to developments taking place on a national scale in the intertwined discourses of kingship and penitence.

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8 The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of MS. Harley 2253, ed. G. K. Brook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1948), p. 26. Brook’s comments relate specifically to ‘Dum ludis floribus’, whose trilingualism is discussed below. 9 On this point, see, for example, William Tim Machan, ‘French, English, and the Late Medieval Linguistic Repertoire’, in Jocelyn Wogan-​ Browne, Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter, and David Trotter (eds), Language and Culture in Medieval Britain:  The French of England c.  1100-​c.1500 (York:  York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 363–​72. 10 My reading of the poem’s reference to St Thomas echoes that advanced in Nancy Vine Durling, ‘British Library MS Harley 2253:  A New Reading of the Passion Lyrics in their Manuscript Context’, Viator, 40 (2009), 217–​307 (281). 11 Noting the irregular metre of the French verse of this poem, David L.  Jeffrey and Brian J.  Levy comment that the text seems to be a ‘deliberate play-​on-​metre rather than the work of a mere amateur or incompetent’. In the prosody of the work they perceive ‘a conscious (sometimes, perhaps, even perverse) seeking after variations of structural dimensions’. Cited in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Fein, II: 433. 12 On the Harley’s scribe’s organisation of his materials and his production of such local effects more generally, see further Susanna Fein, ‘Compilation and Purpose in MS Harley 2253’, in Wendy Scace (ed.), Essays in Manuscript Geography:  Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 67–​94. 13 Compare the survey in Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Macaronic Poetry’, in Corinne Saunders (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 277–​87. 14 Ad Putter, ‘The French of English Letters:  Two Trilingual Verse Epistles in Context’, in Wogan-​Browne et  al. (eds), Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, pp.  397–​ 408 (404). For examples of multilingualism in medieval English epistolary culture, see Herbert Schendl, ‘Code-​Choice and Code-​Switching in Some Early Fifteenth-​ Century Letters’, in Peter J. Lucas and Angela M. Lucas (eds), Middle English from Tongue to Text (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 247–​62. 15 Putter, ‘The French of English Letters’, p. 407. 16 Putter, ‘The French of English Letters’, p. 408. 17 See Ardis Butterfield, ‘Translating Fuzziness: Countertexts’, Common Knowledge, 19 (2013), 446–​73, discussing Putter’s reading of ‘Dum ludis floribus’ at 454n25. This is the third of three essays by Butterfield discussing fuzziness and the perception of languages in the Middle Ages. For the other two essays, see Common Knowledge, 18 (2012), 255–​ 66, and 19 (2013), 51–​ 64. See too Butterfield’s seminal work

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on Anglo-​ French literary relations, The Familiar Enemy:  Chaucer, Language, and the Hundred Years War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009). 18 Seth Lerer, ‘Middle English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology’, PMLA, 118 (2003), 1251–​67 (1258). 19 See Jocelyn Wogan-​Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell (eds), Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120-​c.1450 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016). 20 On this point, and for a lively rhymed verse translation of the poem, see Carter Revard, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Grandmother: Or How Gilote Showed Her Friend Johane That The Wages of Sin Is Worldly Pleasure, And How Both Then Preached This Gospel Throughout England and Ireland’, Chaucer Review, 39 (2004), 117–​36. 21 See Carter Revard, ‘Gilote e Johane: An Interlude in B. L. MS. Harley 2253’, Studies in Philology, 79 (1982), 122–​46 (139–​42). 22 See Revard, ‘Gilote e Johane: An Interlude’, 126–​7. 23 On the contexts of late-​medieval English household drama and dramatic reading, see further Carter Revard, ‘Courtly Romances in the Privy Wardrobe’, in Evelyn Mullally and John J. Thompson (eds), The Court and Cultural Diversity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 297–​308. 24 Noting similarities between the text of another of the poems in Harley 2253, ‘Quant voy la revenue d’yver’ (Article 20), and Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz, a popular French vocabulary treatise, Revard makes a preliminary exploration of the potential usefulness of ‘Quant voy la revenue d’yver’ in the context of French instruction. See Carter Revard, ‘A Golliard’s Feast and the Metanarrative of Harley 2253’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 83 (2005), 841–​67 (847–​9). 25 See Christopher Baswell, ‘Multilingualism on the Page’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Oxford Twenty-​First Approaches to Literature:  Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 38–​50 (43–​4). 26 For historical background, see John Scattergood, ‘Authority and Resistance:  The Political Verse’, in Fein (ed.), Studies in the Harley Manuscript, pp. 163–​201 (171–​4). 27 See MED s.vv. bobaunce, avou(e)rie, and mounde (3f). 28 See MED s.vv. ribaud(e) and essoine. 29 On this point, see David Trotter, ‘Deinz certeins bounds: Where Does Anglo-​Norman Begin and End?’ Romance Philology, 67 (2013), 139–​ 77. Several of the French words and phrases italicised in the preceding paragraphs are also listed in the Anglo-​Norman Dictionary in texts pre-​ dating Harley 2253 by a significant margin. 30 On the apprehension of recent French loans in the poems compiled in Harley 2253, see too Seth Lerer, ‘ “Dum ludis floribus”: Language and Text in the Medieval English Lyric’, Philological Quarterly, 87 (2008), 237–​56 (241–​3).

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31 Thorlac Turville-​Petre, England and the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–​1340 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 181. 32 Turville-​Petre, England and the Nation, p. 217. 33 My commentary on the following texts draws on the editorial notes in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Fein. 34 See A. T.  E. Matonis, ‘The Harley Lyrics:  English and Welsh Convergences’, Modern Philology, 86 (1988), 1–​12 (6–​8). 35 On the flyleaves and their significance for the history of Harley 2253, see Susanna Fein, ‘The Four Scribes of MS Harley 2253’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 16 (2013), 27–​49 (36–​8). 36 On cultural contact between Ireland and the West Midlands, see further John J.  Thompson, ‘Mapping Points West of West Midlands Manuscripts and Texts:  Irishness(es) and Middle English Literary Culture’, in Scace (ed.), Essays in Manuscript Geography, pp. 113–​28. 37 See G. L. Brook, ‘The Original Dialects of the Harley Lyrics’, Leeds Studies in English, 2 (1933), 38–​61; and Stuard H. L. Degginger, ‘ “A Wayle Whyt Ase Whalles Bon”: Reconstructed’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), 84–​90. Subsequent dialectal analysis has raised the possibility that some of the English poems in Harley 2253 were already grouped together in the exemplars used by the Harley scribe. See Frances McSparran, ‘The Language of the English Poems: The Harley Scribe and His Exemplars’, in Fein (ed.), Studies in the Harley Manuscript, pp. 391–​426. 38 See Scattergood, ‘Authority and Resistance’, pp. 178–​85. 39 Marilyn Corrie, ‘Harley 2253, Digby 86, and the Circulation of Literature in Pre-​Chaucerian England’, in Fein (ed.), Studies in the Harley Manuscript, pp. 427–​43 (441). 40 See Michael Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Untersuchung zur mündlichen Kommunikation in England von der Mitte des elften bis zum Beginn des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1979), pp. 171–​217. 41 See P. D.  A. Harvey, ‘Mappa Mundi’, in Gerald Aylmer and John Tiller (eds), Hereford Cathedral:  A History (London:  Hambledon, 2000), pp. 557–​62. 42 See Daniel Birkholz, ‘Harley Lyrics and Hereford Clerics:  The Implications of Mobility, c. 1300–​1351’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 31 (2009), 175–​230. 43 See John Hines, Voices In The Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 85–​8. 44 As noted in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Fein, II: 435. A digital facsimile of Harley 2253 is hosted at www.bl.uk/​manuscripts. 45 The miniature wax tablets discovered at Swinegate in York in the early 1990s look to have been inscribed both with a poem and with a letter, among other texts. See Michelle P. Brown, ‘The Role of the Wax

243

The multilingual English household

243

Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A Reconsideration in Light of a Recent Find from York’, British Library Journal, 20 (1994), 1–​16. 46 Retaining the traditional editorial reading of ‘Dum ludis floribus’, Birkholz suggests that the whole text might be read as the product of a French poet who, at the close of his work, is moved to ‘[experiment] with the robust verses of Herefordshire’. See Daniel Birkholz, ‘Biography after Historicism, The Harley Lyrics, The Hereford Map, and the Life of Roger de Breynton’, in Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (eds), The Post-​Historical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 161–​89 (167). 47 On the sixteenth-​century Yiddish version, and for further bibliography, see Thelma Fenster and Margot B. Valles, ‘Elia Levita’s Yiddish Bovo D’Antona:  Pulp Fiction for Women?’ in Philip E. Bennett, Leslie Zarker Morgan, and F. Regina Psaki (eds), The Epic Imagination in Medieval Literature:  Essays in Honor of Alice M.  Colby-​ Hall (University of Mississipi: Romance Monographs, 2016), pp. 161–​77. 48 See Michael J. Bennett, ‘ “Mandeville’s Travels” and the Anglo-​ French Moment’, Medium Ævum, 75 (2006), 273–​92. 49 See Simon Gaunt, ‘French Literature Abroad: Towards an Alternative History of French Literature’, Interfaces:  A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 1 (2015), 25–​61. 50 See Roy Pearcy, ‘Anglo-​Norman Fabliaux and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale’, Medium Ævum, 69 (2000), 227–​60. 51 Much work remains to be done on the genesis and early transmission of this text. For preliminary analysis, see Lynn Thorndike, ‘All the World’s a Chess-​Board’, Speculum, 6 (1931), 461–​5. 52 Compare MED entries s.vv. fers (n.) and fers (adj.). On this pun, see too The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Fein, III: 355. 53 See Revard, ‘Political Poems in MS Harley 2253’, 66. 54 See H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), pp. 559–​60. 55 On the work of this scribe, see Fein, ‘The Four Scribes of MS Harley 2253’,  33–​6. 56 See Jacques Le Goff, L’Europe est-​ elle née au Moyen Âge? (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

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266

Index

Adagia 114 Adams, Tracy 75 adultery 57–​8 Advent period 118 advice literature 3, 8 Advocates 19.3.1 manuscript 75, 78–​80 affect theory 9 agency 20–​1, 32, 45–​53, 60 agnus dei symbol 117–​18 agricultural texts 11, 26–​7, 154–​8, 169–​71 Ahmed, Sara 76–​7 Aldworth, Thomas 105 Alexander the Great 187, 190, 193 allegory 26–​7 ‘All the World’s a Chessboard’ 230, 235–​7 Alsop, J.D. 167 Anne of Britanny 141 Aquileia, provost of 50, 60–​1, 66 Ara Fortunae (play) 106–​7 Arderne, John 11–​12, 178–​89, 192 Aristotle and Aristotelian thinking 52, 59, 161, 188–​9 Arthur, King 84–​7, 165 Arthurian Knights 163 Ashley, Kathleen 6 Ashmole 61 manuscript 75, 78–​80, 88–​93 Audelay, John 214 authority, female 49–​51, 55, 62

Barron, Caroline 48 Barthes, Roland 47 Baswell, Christopher 227 Belleville, ‘Cecily’ de 62, 66 Bernard, St 61, 163 Berners, Dame Juliana 163 Berry, duke of  29 Bevis of Hampton 204 Bibbesworth, Walter of  156–​7 Biket, Robert 85 birdcages 141–​5, 149 Birkholz, Daniel 232 Black Death 48 Bodleian Library 79, 142 Boeve de Haumtone 234 Bollard, Nicholas 158–​63, 169 Bone Florence of Rome, Le 204 Book of the Knight of the Tower 9–​10, 45–​67, 163 book ownership and exchange 191 Books of Hours 6 Boucicaut, Marshal 62, 64 bourgeois households 18, 23, 25 Brand, John 117–​18 Brant, Sebastian 122 British Library 185–​6, 219 Brook, G.L. 221 Bruyant, Jacques 18, 23, 27–​8 Burger, Glenn D. 53, 76; author of Chapter 2, co-​author of Chapter 1 and co-​editor Butterfield, Ardis 147, 225

Bale, Anthony 186 Ball, John 122 Balsham, Adam of  157

caged birds 141–​6 Calle, Richard 65 Cambridge University 106, 123

267

Index Cambridge University Library 201, 206 Cannon, Christopher 130 Canterbury Tales 1–​3, 10, 129–​33, 143–​4 Cantilupe, Thomas 232 Castle of Labour 24 Cato’s son 60–​1, 67 Caxton, William 8–​9, 45, 48–​9, 64, 66, 188–​9 Charles V of France 6 Chaucer, Geoffrey 1, 6, 10, 51, 75, 88, 129, 132–​44, 148–​9, 235 Chemin de povreté et de richesse, Le 18, 23–​4, 26 Christ Church, Oxford 101, 106, 119 Christmas festivities 100, 105–​6, 109, 113, 118 Christmas Prince, The 10, 102, 105–​6, 109–​10, 116, 118 Clough, Patricia Ticineto 76 Cobham, John 141 code-​switching 220–​1, 226–​7 college households 102, 115–​18, 123; ‘materials’ of  101 Collette, Carolyn P. 6 comedic texts 9, 79–​80, 84, 88–​91 community-​building  76 compartmentalisation of households 184 complexional theory 188 conduct literature 2, 6–​8, 33, 47–​9, 53, 66, 75, 78, 91 Contamine, Philippe 140 Cooper, Lisa H. 159, 185–​6 Cornysh, William 168 Courtrai, Battle of (1302) 228 Critten, Rory G. 6, 13, 78, 169; author of Chapter 10, co-​author of Chapter 1 and co-​editor Crocker, Holly 74–​8, 90 cuckolds 86–​7, 147–​8 cuckoos 146–​7 culture, ‘high’ and ‘low’ 28, 210 De Cura rei famuliaris 155, 163–​6, 172 Daniel, Henry 179, 190–​3 Dean, Ruth 154

267 Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools 87–​90 debate poems 88–​90 Digby Manuscript 208–​9 Dillon, Emma 131 Dinah 60–​1 disfigurment 56 domestic violence 54–​5, 63 Donne, John 131 dreams 24–​7 Duchié, Jacques 140 ‘Dum ludis floribus’ 220, 225–​6, 230–​5 Dutton, Elisabeth 9–​10; author of Chapter 5 education 47, 158 Edward IV 137, 207–​8 eel-​type stories 51–​60, 64–​6 elite society 63 emotion 75–​7 encyclopaedic knowledge 33 Erasmus 114 Erle of Tolous, The 204 estate management 11, 26–​7, 154–​7 ethics 6, 180, 188, 190 Eve 60 Everingham, Sir Adam 178–​9, 186, 193 everyday life 5 exemplarity, limits of  23–​4 fabulist tradition 134 facts, amassing of  32–​3 Fall of Princes 137 farming know-​how 154, 157, 161 farming tools 11 father figures 54 Fein, Susanna 209 Feingold, Mordecchai 103 female roles in drama 115, 117 femininity 19–​20, 23–​5 Fenster, Thelma 225 Fitzherbert, Anthony and John 11, 46, 170–​1 ‘Flemish Insurrection, The’ 220, 228–​9 Fournival, Richard de 142 Fradenburg, Louise 130 Franken, Gottfried von 158–​61

268

268 Gager, William 101 Galen 180, 189 Gaunt, Simon 234 gender politics 36 Genesis, Book of  60 Gent, R.F. 122 Giancarlo, Matthew 208–​9 ‘Gilote et Johane’ 220, 226–​9 Globe Theatre 114–​15 Godfridus Super Palladium (GSP) 27, 158–​9, 162, 171 Governayle of Helthe 187–​91 Gower, John 135–​8 grafting treatises 27, 158–​63, 172 Green, Monica 192 Grobiana’s Nuptials 101–​2, 118–​23 Grosseteste, Robert 156–​7, 163 Guinevere 56, 64, 87 Guy of Warwick 204 Harley 2253 manuscript 13, 220–​1, 225–​38 Harwood, Britton 130 heads of households 1, 6 healthy living 12 Heege Manuscript 79–​80, 90–​2 Henry VI 206–​8 Hereford 232 Hines, John 232 Hippocratic corpus 180 homes as places for the production of song 129, 144–​5, 149 horses, purchase and care of  33 horticulture 28, 33–​4, 159, 162 household books 9, 11, 13, 47, 75–​80, 90, 137, 158, 190, 192 social roles of  78–​9 household knowledge 18–​23, 28, 36, 46, 51, 66–​7, 132, 188, 191 in an ecological field 20–​3 household management 18–​19, 51, 53 household studies, recent expansion of  5 household wholeness 58 households number of  5 regulation of admission to 1 wives’ interaction between 60

Index Howard, Donald 130 Howell, James 171 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester 160 Hunter, Lynette 171 Hunting of the Hare, The 80–​6, 90 husbands guiding their wives 22–​3, 31–​3 knowledge garnered by 32 Ibn al-​‘Awwām 161 identity politics 18–​19 indexical devices 17 Innocent III, Pope 237 Inns of Court 47, 104, 123 intellectual capital 123 Jesus Christ 138 Job 207–​15 John the Baptist 118 John of Bordeaux 179, 187, 189 John the Evangelist 118 John of Wales 237 Johnston, Michael 6, 77, 163 Jones, Frederick 145 Keiser, George R. 170 Kendall, Elliot 8–​10; author of Chapter 3 ‘knowing incompetence’ 64–​7 knowledge accumulation 21 knowledge and power 49–​51 knowledge production and consumption 3–​4, 7–​8, 25–​6, 31–​3, 36 Krueger, Roberta L. 6, 47 Kuipers, Nadine 11, 26–​7; author of Chapter 7 Kynebell, Thomas 141 Kyte, Jerome 105 Labanyi, Jo 75–​6 Lai du cor 85 Lambarde, William 169–​70 Lancelot of the Laik 164–​5 Leach, Elizabeth Eva 146–​7 Leahy, Michael 11; author of Chapter 8 Le Goff, Jacques 237–​8 Lerer, Seth 3, 6, 225

269

Index Liège, Geoffrey de 62 linguistic theory 147 Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, Le 45, 48, 53 Livre des merveilles du monde, Le 234 Lot’s daughters 60 Louis IX 230 Ludlow 232 Lupack, Alan 165 Lydgate, John 137, 141, 147, 186 McDonald, Nicola 47, 66 Machaut, Guillaume de 135–​6 Macrobius 118 magpie story 51–​2, 56 Malory, Sir Thomas 64 Manciple’s Tale 51–​2, 129–​38, 145, 148 Manningham, John 116 manuscript scholarship 78, 219 Marchetto of Padua 146 Marie de France 74–​5 marriage and marital relations 2, 9, 16–​22, 25, 45, 53–​8 Mary the Virgin 165, 212–​14 masculinity 24–​6 May, Charles 118, 122 Meale, Carol 191 meat markets 28–​9 medical knowledge 179 Melibee (tale) 2–​3, 22, 31–​2 Menagier de Paris, Le 16–​20, 25–​31, 35–​6, 39, 140 Metamorphoses 111–​12, 135, 148 Metropolitan Museum of Art 142, 144 Metz, Guillebert de 140 miscellany manuscripts 202 misogyny 52–​3 ‘mistress of the house’ 25 moralising 47 Mudge, Ken 162–​3 multilingual texts 220–​1, 227–​9, 238 Murray, H.J.R. 237 musical instruments 129, 133–​7, 140–​1 musical performance 129–​39, 144, 147

269 Nagy, Piroska 76 Narcissus (play) 102, 107–​16 Narrenschiff (play) 122 National Library of Scotland 79 Neckam, Alexander 157 network-​building  65 Newton, Humphrey 168 norms 76 object-​relations theory  9 Olson, Clair 137, 139 Oresme, Nicholas 147 Orlemanski, Julie 185 Orme, Nicholas 157 Ovid 107, 111–​12, 133, 135–​6 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 145 Oxford University 100–​1, 115, 123 Paddy, Sir William 105 Page, Christopher 137 Palladius 158–​60 paranoia, cultivation of  63 Paris 132, 140 parodies 121 Paston, Margaret 64–​7 Paston, Margery 65–​6 paternalism 47 patient power 182 patriarchy 46–​8, 54–​61, 66–​7 Pearcy, Roy 235 penitential language 205–​6, 214–​15 Periander (play) 106, 116 Pety Job 12, 202, 209–​15 Philippa, Countess of Hainault 191, 193 Philomela (play) 107 Piers Plowman 170 Piroyanski, Diana 206 Plawdon, Thomas 185 playhouse drama 123 poisoning of wolves 33 primogeniture 166 public opinion 62 Purchasyng 155–​6, 163, 167–​9, 172 Putter, Ad 224–​5 Pynson, Richard 163

270

270 Quincy, Margaret de 156–​7 Radulescu, Raluca 6, 12; author of Chapter 9 Ramston, Rowland 167–​8 Rate Manuscript 79, 89–​90 recipes 8, 34–​6 Records of Early English Drama (REED) 100 Revard, Carter 219, 227 Richard II 209 Richter, Michael 232 Riddy, Felicity 6, 77–​8, 184, 191 Roberd of Cisely 12, 201–​6, 210–​15 romances 204–​5, 211, 215 study of  6 vernacular 201 rosemary 12, 27, 179, 190–​3 royalty portrayals of  12 style of living 4 Rules for Purchasing Land see Purchasyng Russell, Delbert 225 St John’s College, Oxford 9–​10, 100–​5, 109, 113, 117–​22 as a site for dramatic performance 102–​5 Statutes of  103 satires 119 Saturnalia (play) 109, 118 Scott-​Macnab, David 81, 83–​4 Seaman, Myra 9–​11; author of Chapter 4 Secreta Secretorum 187 self-​improvement  20 Senechaucy 155–​6 The Seven Days of the Week (play) 110, 117, 121 seven deadly sins 24 sexes, the balance of power between 7, 62 double standards for 57 Shakespeare, William 75, 111–​14 Shechem the Hivite 60 Shepherd, Stephen 162

Index Shirley, John 166, 209 Short, John 140 Shuffelton, George 168–​9 Silvestris, Bernard 164 Sir Corneus 84–​5, 87, 90 Sir Degare 204 Sir Eglamour 204 Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle 163 Smith, Vance 6 social capital 59–​60 social horizons of wives 59 soundscapes 131–​2, 134, 149 speaking truth to power 130–​1 Staley, Lynn 6, 53, 208; author of Chapter 6 Stanbury, Sarah 10 Starkey, David 7 Statius, Thebaid 148 Stern, Tiffany 101 Strohm, Paul 10, 133 surgery 181–​5 Tailour, John 140 theological knowledge 26 ‘Thomas’ (in Harley 2253) 222 Thompson, Emily 131 Time’s Complaint (play) 107–​9 la Tour-​Landry, Geoffrey de 45, 48 Travis, Peter 130, 135 Trinity College, Cambridge 167–​8 Trinity College, Dublin 206, 209 truth value of knowledge 20 Tucker, Thomas 105–​6 Turner, Marion 182 Turville-​Petre, Thorlac  229–​30 Valois, Jeane de 191 Van Aken, Sam 161 Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project 131 Walter of Henley 154–​7, 169–​70 Wars of the Roses 202 White, Sir Thomas 103 Whytte, Charles 185 widows 61–​2, 65

271

Index Wilson, Edward 88–​9 wives domestic management role of 18, 21, 30, 45–​6, 51, 59 enforced limitations of activities of 45–​6, 59–​60 learning needed by 22, 27–​32, 51, 59 obedience to husbands 20 proper conduct for 31 see also women wives’ laments 89 Wogan-​Browne, Jocelyn  225 women as audience members 116

271 contrasting images of  49–​50 independence 48 in positions of lordship 61 supposed characteristics of  47 see also wives Woolgar, C.M. 4 Wyer, Robert 163–​4 Xenophon 171–​2 York, house of  206–​7 York Household Group 5 younger sons 166 youthful immaturity 20