Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship 9781487563479, 9781487563493, 9781487563486, 1487563477

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Sybil and Merlin: Political Prophecy in the French and English Royal Courts
2 William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies
3 Henry IV and the Ex Post Facto Construction of a Prophetic John Gower
4 The Legacy of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RETROSPECTIVE PROPHECY AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH AUTHORSHIP

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KIMBERLY FONZO

Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2022 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-6347-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4875-6349-3 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-6348-6 (PDF)

____________________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Retrospective prophecy and medieval English authorship / Kimberly  Fonzo. Names: Fonzo, Kimberly, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210278684 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210278706 |   ISBN 9781487563479 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487563493 (EPUB) |   ISBN 9781487563486 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and   criticism. | LCSH: Prophecy in literature. | LCSH: Chaucer, Geoffrey, –   1400 – Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH: Langland, William, 1330?–1400 –   Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH: Gower, John, 1325?–1408 – Criticism   and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR275.P63 F66 2022 | DDC 820.9/358–dc23 ____________________________________________________________________________ We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  3 1 The Sybil and Merlin: Political Prophecy in the French and English Royal Courts  12 2 William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies  35 3 Henry IV and the Ex Post Facto Construction of a Prophetic John Gower  70 4 The Legacy of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame  104 Afterword  142 Notes  147 Bibliography  177 Index  181

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Acknowledgments

Medieval authors adopted prophetic roles within their works because the prophet is an authoritative but intermediary figure. Although the prophetic subject position allowed authors to imply their own importance, it also allowed them to acknowledge external sources of inspiration. I suspect that most medieval authors would appreciate the sentiment of the contemporary, formal “Acknowledgments” section, even if its execution is considerably less artful than their own methods of acknowledging others. I myself appreciate the opportunity to thank the people who helped me write this book. I would like to acknowledge Blair and Barbara Labatt’s generous financial support of the five-year Labatt Scholar fund, which allowed me to conduct manuscript research and attend conferences to develop the ideas in this book. I also appreciate the support of the Cecelia Jacobs Endowment in British Literature, which helped to fund this book’s publication. I am grateful to Robert W. Barrett, Lynn Staley, Karen Fresco, and Martin Camargo for their useful feedback on this project at its earliest stages. True to character, Charles D. Wright also selflessly offered his prompt and thorough input on my drafts of chapter 1. Robert Adams magnanimously read drafts of chapter 2 and shared valuable insights on William Langland’s historical contexts. I am also indebted to Andrew Rabin for helping me polish various portions of the first two chapters and to R.F. Yeager for sharing his input on the Vox clamantis portions of chapter 3. I have been blessed with a generous mentor in Dominique Battles, who provided advice on chapter 4 and moral support throughout the process of writing this book. Eric Weiskott serendipitously organized a conference session about medieval prophecy at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at just the right moment for me to share and revise some of the ideas in this book, and he has since invited me to multiple conference sessions

viii Acknowledgments

sponsored by the Piers Plowman Society. I am thankful for his collegial support and encouragement. Aaron T. Pratt gave me assistance with bibliographic details as I researched early print editions of medieval works, and Ann Hubert was kind enough to confer about my Latin translations on multiple occasions. My colleague, Mark Bayer aided me in writing my book proposal and navigating the publication process. It has been a privilege to work with acquisitions editor Suzanne Rancourt as well as the external readers of this book, who dedicated their time and expertise to helping me improve it. I deeply appreciate the support of my parents, Raymond and Joyce, who have always encouraged my love of history and literature. My sister, Colleen, is one of the best editors of early drafts that I have found. Finally, this book would not be possible without my husband, Stephen. He has done over a thousand things, large and small, to support me during its composition. If I have a source of sublime inspiration as I write, it is he.

RETROSPECTIVE PROPHECY AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH AUTHORSHIP

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Introduction

The prescience of medieval English authors has long been a source of fascination for readers. In The Art of English Poesie, written in 1589, George Puttenham describes how William Langland “bent himselfe wholly to taxe the disorders of that age, and specially the pride of the Romane Clergy, of whose fall he seemeth to be a very true Prophet.”1 Ostensibly, Puttenham emphasizes Langland’s foresight for two interrelated reasons. First, his claim bolsters Langland’s reputation as a wise authority, worthy of study. Even as Puttenham characterizes England’s fourteenth-century past as an age of “disorders,” he emphasizes Langland as a bright luminary in a supposedly dark time. Second, Puttenham portrays his present as being not only superior to the past but also anticipated by great thinkers like Langland. This perpetuates a comforting historical view that the English nation is progressing and improving, led by its best artists and scholars. Modern readers have focused on medieval authors’ supposed predictions of historical events with similar enthusiasm. In 1968, Russell Peck wrote of the dedications to Henry of Lancaster in the Prologue of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, “That he sees hope for England residing in a man like Henry of Lancaster … even as much as seven years before Henry would become king, is indeed clairvoyant.”2 This perspective on Gower, hardly limited to Peck, also celebrates the author’s wisdom and implicitly makes the case for studying his works. Although medieval literature now has a place in most university English departments, Gower rarely garners much attention on syllabi or in academic conferences. In this sense, Peck’s pronouncement of Gower’s clairvoyance shares an aim with Puttenham’s declaration of Langland’s prophecy. By focusing on Gower’s “true” predictions, an editor can enhance the author’s reputation as a compelling vox clamantis in deserto, demanding our due attention. To a lesser degree, Peck, like Puttenham,

4  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

is advancing a comforting view of history by touting Gower’s clairvoyance. The notion that Gower predicted Henry IV’s rise to power does not do much to affirm the present day, but it does imply that destiny and justice have guided England’s past. The aim to see the seeds of contemporary progress in past prophetic authors is still evident in literary criticism about Geoffrey Chaucer. The modern tendency to view Chaucer as an aberrant medieval secular humanist arguably has its roots in Chaucer’s early modern reputation as a proto-Protestant. This reputation was developed in apocryphal poems and prophecies that were attributed to Chaucer after the Reformation.3 Building on Chaucer’s established reputation as a man ahead of his time, a good deal of contemporary criticism discusses him as a proto-Marxist, proto-feminist, proto-environmentalist, or protohumanitarian. Tracing the origins of ideas is the natural and admirable project of historicist scholars, but an exaggerated view of Chaucer as the herald of our modern age has significant drawbacks especially insofar as it obscures Chaucer’s inventive work within his own fourteenthcentury milieu. Langland, Gower, and Chaucer each creatively adopted prophetic language and subject positions to develop their authorial personae and speak to the problems of their own times. However, misinterpreted, proleptically added, or apocryphally attributed prognostications have influenced their reputations in deceptive ways for centuries. I call these “retrospective prophecies” – predictions that readers have ascribed to authors ex post facto. Later editors and readers have influentially misconstrued William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer as prophets of the English Reformation, the deposition of Richard II, and modern rational scepticism, respectively. Even in cases where critics have recognized aspects of these authors’ prophetic reputations to be fabrications or exaggerations of past scholarship, vestigial features of popular retrospective prophecies remain influential in subtle ways. The enduring remnants of retrospective prophecy are especially problematic insofar as they distract from the innovative ways that medieval authors actually used prophetic symbols and language. This book therefore endeavors to tell two stories, that of the retrospective prophecies that have dominated Ricardian authors’ reputations and that of the authors’ meaningful engagement with prophetic discourses and identities. Why did medieval authors seek to invoke the persona of the prophet, and what were the dangers in evoking it too well? What were the different ways in which prophetic writing gave authority to literature? Why have post-medieval readers been so willing to accept a prophetic status for medieval literature but often changed the nature of

Introduction 5

the “prophecy” in question? Why were Ricardian authors particularly susceptible to retrospective prophecy? Coopting Political Prophecies and Authorial Identities Political prophecy was a popular discourse in fourteenth-century England. Broadly speaking, political prophecies are predictions about political events, sometimes attributed to a famous individual, often fabricated to garner support for a particular action like entering a war or removing a monarch. Sometimes political prophecies appeared in works of literature, such as when Merlin prognosticates in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the prose Brut. Chroniclers like Adam of Usk and Thomas Walsingham cited such prophecies within their narratives of history, implying that the events that they predicted were destined to happen.4 In roughly two hundred extant English manuscripts, one can find political prophecies copied together in groups.5 The grouped prophecies often share similar messages, but in some cases, it seems that people were compelled simply to collect predictions. Rupert Taylor first identified medieval English political prophecy as a type of literature in 1911. He identified several recurring features of the form, especially symbols that stand in for people and places, which he calls “prophetic disguise.”6 Taylor notes that Sibyllic prophecies, so named because they derive from the Oracula Sibyla, usually employ letters to refer to individuals and that Galfridian prophecies, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlinii, use animal symbols instead.7 As Lesley Coote has observed, these “disguises” were intentionally recognizable to their intended audiences.8 For instance, the fleur de lis might stand in for the King of France. Presumably, this kind of symbolism was designed to make predictions appear to be authentic. If verses attributed to the Sibyl spoke directly of the war victories of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, everyone would understand the verses to have been fabricated after the fact, but if the key figures of the prophecy were represented with “prophetic disguise,” readers might believe that the Sibyl had accurately foretold something that she did not completely understand. Essentially, the ambiguity offers an air of verisimilitude to an unrealistic form of writing. This element of “prophetic disguise” made political prophecies remarkably easy to adapt to new circumstances. People who recopied political prophecies could simply revise the symbolism to change the subject of a prediction without altering the overall message. Lesley A. Coote and Laura Chuhan Campbell have both underscored the extent

6  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

to which the same political prophecies were appropriated and adapted for a variety of causes in medieval England.9 A similar kind of appropriation took place in the reception of works written by or attributed to famed English authors of the fourteenth century. Langland, Gower, and Chaucer had vastly different approaches to political prophecies. Langland teasingly invoked and ridiculed them, Gower actively adopted them, and Chaucer avoided them entirely. Nevertheless, regardless of their approaches, later audiences retrospectively imbued each author with the reputation of a political prophet, championing a particular cause. Like the voices of the Sibyl and Merlin, the voices of canonical medieval authors proved to be famous, distant, and nationally significant enough to coopt. The Roman poet Virgil was subject to this kind of appropriation in the medieval period. In De civitate Dei, St. Augustine quotes Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, written from the perspective of a prophetic narrator foretelling the birth of an important child. Augustine argues that ­Virgil’s source is the divinely inspired Cumaean Sibyl, who foretold the coming of Christ. Augustine did not believe that Virgil understood the prophecy himself, but in the famous Oration of Constantine to the Assembly of the Saints, recorded in Eusebius’s Vita Constantini, the Roman emperor points out what he believes to be an acrostic in the fourth Eclogue spelling out “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross” and insists that the proto-Roman Catholic Virgil made his prophecy intentionally vague in order to escape persecution from pagan rulers.10 By the twelfth century, Virgil’s ostensibly real prophetic powers were even more amplified. The classical poet began to appear among the ranks of Moses, Daniel, Ezekiel, and other biblical prophet-authors in the Laon and Limoges Ordo Prophetarum (plays consisting of monologues by a series of prophets). Around this time, Virgil also began to be portrayed as a magician, most notably in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, in which Virgil offers talismans to travelers who later return to seek his bones as relics for France.11 Augustine’s interpretation of the fourth Eclogue no longer exerts undue influence over Virgil’s authorial reputation because readers have had centuries to reexamine it. This book aims to give Langland, Gower, and Chaucer their own prophetic reexamination by simultaneously debunking retrospective prophecies and uncovering the more overlooked prophetic approaches that these authors took. Chapter 1 traces the history of the two most cited political prophets, the Sibyl and Merlin, to illuminate just why Ricardian poets had such a strained relationship with political prophecy. Versions of the Sibyl’s Last Emperor prophecy that were written about the Valois kings flourished in France, and Charles V and Charles VI tolerated

Introduction 7

the adaptation of these political prophecies in the works of authors like Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan. Even though the Last Emperor prophecy politically pressured the French monarchy, it was ultimately flattering and rarely threatening. Far from merely repeating political propaganda, Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan developed new ways to inhabit the role of the Sibyl to comment on the nature of their own creative authority. In contrast, the British Isles’ Galfridian or Merlinic tradition of prophecies was threatening to those on the throne from its inception. The prophecies’ volatility became elevated during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II after Edward II had already been deposed. English authors were not patronized to write political prophecies until the reign of Henry IV. Nevertheless, Ricardian authors adopted other prophetic identities, especially within dream visions, to elaborate upon their sources of inspiration and authority. Chapter 2 examines the unusual parodic function of the political prophecies within Piers Plowman and how it has been overshadowed by the famous sixteenth-century Protestant appropriation of one of these prophecies, attributed to Clergy, to claim that Langland had foretold the monastic disendowment. The prognostications within Piers Plowman imitate several popular fourteenth-century political prophecies in order to illuminate the greed that motivated them. Yet, beyond merely criticizing political prophecies, Langland repurposes them to propose practical moral actions in place of corrupt ones. This chapter traces the history of misunderstanding the prophecies in Piers Plowman. Initially, Langland’s parodies were so convincing that they inspired several different iterations of political appropriation, undermining the prophecies’ original messages of personal reform. Now that we no longer see Langland as a Wycliffite or proto-Protestant, contemporary criticism has shifted to interpreting the prophecies’ apocalyptic spiritual messages only, overlooking their satirical political contexts. By reexamining the prophecies’ reception, this chapter seeks to recover both the moral and political layers of Langland’s creative work with prophetic satire. Revisiting manuscript evidence, chapter 3 posits that Gower’s prediction of Richard II’s undesirable sors (meaning “fate” or “destiny”) and other seemingly prescient observations about the monarch were added to the Vox clamantis after 1400, when Gower appended the Cronica Tripertita to the work. In contrast, Lancastrian supporters rather than Gower himself are likely responsible for amplifying Gower’s prophetic reputation in the Confessio Amantis. They copyed more versions of the first recension of the work, dedicated to Richard II, in order to make it appear as if Gower had predicted his deposition. Gower’s self-

8  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

cultivated prophetic reputation, rooted in the vox populi and the biblical Daniel would have made his authorial voice a particularly appealing one to coopt for Lancastrian apologism. Making it look as if a prophetic Gower had foreseen Richard II’s downfall helped make it look as if Richard II’s deposition was not only deserved but ordained by God. Gower is a rare example of a fourteenth-century English author who incorporated political prophecies into his works. However, he only did so after Henry IV took the throne. Because Gower himself was complicit in the revisions to his own work, this perception of a prophetic Gower persists in contemporary criticism. Chapter 4 illuminates Chaucer’s work with a classical practice that I term prophetic citation in several of his dream visions and explores Chaucer’s cultivation of a prophetic role in The House of Fame. Inspired in part by Dante, Chaucer adopts the moral role of Enoch and Eli, the prophets tasked with quelling and quieting a slanderous crowd. This chapter argues that Chaucer’s reputation as a secular, rational sceptic has bolstered nationalist misreadings of The House of Fame as a text that mocks the supposedly superstitious and hopelessly Catholic Dante. The chapter traces the various editorial missteps and intentional deceptions that allowed the apocryphal “Chaucer’s Prophecy” to become a prominent threshold work within collections dedicated to Chaucer, helping to define him as a man ahead of his time. Retrospective Historicism A historicist approach to literary criticism naturally involves some amount of educated speculation, and this book is no exception. Scholars consider literary works in their historical contexts in order to illuminate meanings that would not otherwise be apparent to a contemporary audience. However, analysing early literature through a historicist lens can lead to mistaking hindsight for insight. Readers should be reluctant to claim that a text anticipated a future historical event or movement, especially insofar as they may perpetuate myths of an always-improving historical timeline. As Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant have observed, despite the fact that the term “Dark Ages” has fallen out of favour, “the concept persists, in part, because the idea of a time so much worse than our own allows us to feel superior.”12 Readers who perceive the Middle Ages as an especially backward time, whose ills were amended by subsequent early modern advances, are likely to read medieval authors’ enlightened observations and criticisms of their surroundings as prophecies of a considerably better future. Yet,

Introduction 9

for reasons that Kaufman and Sturtevant have enumerated, this future was not innately better: The Protestant Reformation, for instance, may have resulted in a more accessible faith, but it was also a violent and destructive revolution. People were executed over minor theological disagreements like the doctrine of transubstantiation, monasteries were raided and burned, churches were whitewashed, wiping centuries-old art off their walls, and sculptures and artifacts were smashed in systematic raids – not unlike the path of historical devastation ISIS wages against art and architecture in the Middle East. Moreover, the Renaissance saw the beginning of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Explorers like Christopher Columbus devastated and enslaved whole populations in search of plunder, not to prove anyone wrong about the earth being flat.13

Belief in an inferior Middle Ages and linear historical progress is one of the dominant factors that inspires readers to create and perpetuate retrospective prophecies. Those retrospective prophecies, in turn, reinforce this oversimplified narrative of gradually improving stages of humanity. Early modern editors and critics were especially apt to portray the medieval world as a backwards one, making medieval authors a special target for retrospective prophecy. The Gawain-poet is notably absent from this study for this very reason. The Gawain-poet did not inspire the same kind of Renaissance antiquarian interest that Langland, Gower, or Chaucer did and has therefore been largely exempt from retrospective prophecy. The four poems of Cotton Nero A.x (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) did not even appear in print until the early nineteenth century.14 Furthermore, although most scholars consider the manuscript to be the work of one author, no one’s name or identity has been consistently attached to the poems. The Gawain-poet makes ample use of prophetic figures in the four poems in a manner that reflects back on the poet’s own message of accountability to God. Jonah in Patience and Daniel in Cleanness are both biblical prophets who echo the anonymous poet’s admonitory voice. The maiden in Pearl, citing Revelation and revealing heaven to both narrator and reader, also functions as a prophetic memento mori. Even the Green Knight has a somewhat similar prophetic function, reminding the members of Arthur’s court of their own mortality. Although the author does not promote a recognizable identity, the prophets within the manuscript provide the closest thing to a consistent authorial persona. Prophecy serves a powerful function in the Gawain manuscript as it does in the works of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, but it was never misconstrued

10  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

in the same manner because early audiences never had the chance to coopt the persona of the Gawain-poet and establish a prophetic reputation. This is not to say that the poems, or any famed work for that matter, are not potentially vulnerable to such manipulation.15 Stereotypes of the Middle Ages as a backward time, the prophetic content of medieval works, and the exultation of famed authors all combine to shape the retrospective prophetic reputations of medieval authors. Yet, retrospective prophecy can apply to any work of note, including those in the present day. In 2015, African American playwright Lynn Nottage wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, which highlights working-class Americans’ resentment of bourgeois globalism.16 Within the play, the white factory workers end up turning their anger with class exploitation on the people of colour in their lives, including close friends. The action of the play alternately takes place between two different years, 2000 and 2008, which illustrates just how long frustrations with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were brewing. Yet, because Sweat debuted in 2015 and because it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017, when many people were reflecting on the surprising outcome of the 2016 American election, critics began to refer to Lynn Nottage’s play as a prophecy of Donald Trump’s presidency. For instance, theatre critic David Cote writes, “Prophetic before the 2016 election, the piece now reads as a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t know how to resist.”17 Critic Susan Saccoccio similarly claims, “Lynn Nottage’s prophetic 2015 play, Sweat could have been a bellwether of the 2016 election.”18 Alexis Soloski refers to Nottage as “the writer who foresaw the Trump era.”19 Nottage herself has been reluctant to agree that she could ­foresee some kind of inevitable future. When asked if she was surprised when Trump became President, Nottage explains, “All of us were shocked. But in some ways I understand how it happened.”20 Despite Nottage’s more nuanced perspective about the relationship between her play and the 2016 election, critics have used the play and playwright’s noteriety to advance a particular view of recent history. Sweat insightfully depicts class and race resentments that had been developing in the United States for decades. Yet, to claim that Nottage’s apt observation of these cultural issues was prophetic of the election of Donald Trump advances a problematic view of cause and effect. The election of Trump was not the sole natural outcome of resentment for NAFTA and indeed may have had far less to do with class disparity than with other cultural and political factors. Workingclass voters were not even Trump’s dominant voting base.21 The kind of labour exploitation seen in Sweat was also not the only inspiration for the racism that propped up Trump’s candidacy. For instance, it is

Introduction 11

doubtful that economic hardship motivated all or even most of the people who supported the “Birther Movement,” which purported that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. Furthermore, more than half of Sweat’s exploited working-class characters are Black or Hispanic Americans, groups who overwhelmingly voted against Trump in the 2016 election.22 Claiming that this is a play about future Trump voters, as many headlines have, ignores several of its major characters and a wide swathe of working-class American voters.23 The portrayal of Sweat as a predictor of Trump’s presidency is part of a larger, oversimplified narrative that attempts to pin the responsibility for Trump’s victory on economically disadvantaged Americans. It also explains away the racism that propelled Trump to victory as something that is specific to the poor. The result is that a play that looks thoughtfully at race alongside widespread, long-spanning, and persisting problems with the treatment of working-class people in America becomes a play about one election. Similarly, when a medieval author like William Langland complains about ecclesiastical corruption (amid numerous other kinds of societal and governmental corruption), some later readers see the work as a prophecy of the Protestant Reformation. Although such ecclesiastical corruption undoubtedly inspired many Protestant reforms, those reforms were not the natural outcome of Langland’s complaints any more than the Trump presidency was the logical consequence of Nottage’s characters’ criticisms of NAFTA. Pretending otherwise implies that the English Reformation successfully rectified all of Langland’s grievances, some of which (like the treatment of the working poor) remain relevant. It also ignores the other factors that led to the English Reformation, some of which had little to do with amending ecclesiastical corruption (namely, the monarchy’s power struggles with the papacy). Framing every criticism of the Church as a precursor to Protestantism erases the myriad ways that medieval people, including Langland, addressed religious reform. In addition to oversimplifying history, retrospective prophecy robs works of their more timeless messages. Ironically, by calling authors prophets (or their works prophetic), we fix them squarely in the past. A work that contains valuable advice for those of us living in the present day becomes a work that predicted something that already happened years ago. This book undertakes the excavation of the critical traditions of reading Langland, Gower, and Chaucer as prophetic in order to recover the complex and creative prophetic personae that they themselves sought to cultivate, often in defiance of rather than compliance with the discourse of political prophecy.

1 The Sybil and Merlin: Political Prophecy in the French and English Royal Courts

The term “Ricardian Poetry,” first used by J.A. Burrow, has primarily functioned as a name of convenience, referring to four authors who produced now-famous works during the reign of Richard II: William Langland, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet.1 Although these authors wrote their major works around the same time, few studies have shown meaningful connections among them, especially as they relate to the reign of Richard II. The king has proven a challenging contact point to use when studying the literature produced during his time in power. Derek Pearsall and V.J. Scattergood have both raised questions about the degree to which Richard II patronized literature at all.2 To counterbalance, Joyce Coleman has presented evidence that Richard’s wife, Anne of Bohemia, spurred on royal literary patronage.3 Because of gaps in historical records, we know very little about how Richard II encouraged the production of literature in his court. As Richard Firth Green has put it, “Even with an author who has been as thoroughly studied as Chaucer, we are left with inference and conjecture when we seek to discover whom precisely he was writing for; it is easier to call him a court poet than it is to decide what we mean by this term.”4 Nevertheless, the term “Ricardian poet” is helpful in the current study insofar as it calls attention to the unusual circumstances facing authors who adopted a prophetic voice during Richard II’s reign. Authors working in the Valois court of France, where the Sibyl’s political prophecies had been most popular, prominently likened themselves to her in their works while producing their own political prophecies. Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan integrated Sibyllic political prophecy about monarchs directly into their poetry because it promoted the sacral kingship of their royal patrons. In contrast, authors working in Ricardian England did not adopt such a straightforward approach. If Richard was patronizing authors at all,

The Sybil and Merlin  13

he would have had little inclination to encourage them to promote political prophecy. This is because unlike France, where prophecies of the Sibyl had flourished, England had developed a more volatile prophetic tradition revolving around Merlin during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. This chapter will outline the history of Sibyllic political prophecies and their impact on French authorial identity before tracing the related but diverging history of Merlinic political prophecies in England. This story of two prophets and their political influence illuminates the political pressures that Ricardian authors faced when incorporating prophecy into their work. These political pressures account for the unexpected and diverse approaches to prophecy that Ricardian authors took. The Origins of the Sibyl as Prophetic Author In ancient Greece and Rome, sibyls were prophets who spoke words inspired by Apollo. They became the symbols of various Hellenistic cities; Erythrae and Cumae both dedicated grottos to their respective sibyls.5 The first-century BCE Roman scholar, Varro, created a catalogue of ten sibyls, named by their location. The list survives in the writing of Lactantius, who explains that none of the Sibylline writings (save one by the Erythraean Sibyl) is attributed to a specific author, so he will refer to the author of all of them as “the Sibyl” (1.6.13).6 Referring to one Sibyl despite the purported existence of many has remained a standard practice. The Roman Senate established the Sibyl as an important authorial figure. Varro wrote of how the Cumaean Sibyl attempted to sell nine books of prophecies to Tarquinius, Rome’s last king before it became a republic.7 Tarquinius refused to pay the Sibyl’s requested fee, so she burned three of the books and then asked once again for compensation. When Tarquinius refused a second time, the Sibyl burned three more books, spurring the king to purchase the three that remained. These libri Sibyllini resided in the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. At special times, the Senate called upon a group of men known as the (quin) decemuiri to interpret the Sibyl’s oracles and devise a course of action.8 From a practical standpoint, the Senate used these prophecies to reassure the public that they were taking the appropriate actions, in accordance with divine authority. This practice presumably ended during the fourth century, and the contents of the once-extant libri Sibyllini are unknown.9 Rome’s use of the Sibyl’s writing established her reputation as a special kind of author who possessed direct divine inspiration in her composition of the written word.

14  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

The Sibyl was therefore a convenient pseudonym for anonymous authors with religious agendas. The most comprehensive collection of classical books attributed to the Sibyl, the Oracula Sibyllina, was compiled by a Byzantine scholar in the sixth century, collecting explicitly Jewish and Christian reworkings of Sibylline prophecies.10 The oldest and most famous of these books, Or. Sib. 3, was composed in the first or second century BCE by a Hellenistic Jewish author.11 It is written from the perspective of Noah’s daughter-in-law, who claims that she came to be known as the Erythraean Sibyl to the Greeks when she traveled from Babylonia to their land.12 In this way, the anonymous author unites the pasts of pagan and Jewish people while attributing the pagan Sibyl’s powers and wisdom to the Jewish god. The prophecy in Or. Sib. 3 imitates the style of Daniel’s prophecy to Nebuchadnezzar in Jewish Scripture. Adopting the persona of Daniel himself would have been counterproductive to an author attempting to win a pagan audience over to Judaism, so the author simply transfers stories associated with Daniel to the respected pagan Sibyl. For the author of Or. Sib. 3, Daniel’s story was a convenient way to offer a religious model of history, but it later became an opportune vehicle for political predictions as well. In the second chapter of the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, consults Daniel about a dream that he had about a statue. Its head was gold, its breast and arms were silver, its belly and thighs were brass, and its feet were iron and clay. Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed that a stone struck the statue, destroying it. Then, only the stone remained, but it grew into a mountain. Daniel interprets the dream to Nebuchadnezzar and says that the head of gold represents his Babylonian empire. The various other metals represent the increasingly inferior empires that will follow. All of these empires will crumble, but the rock, representing God’s church, will remain. Although the Sibyl’s prophecy of Or. Sib. 3 does not include a dream analysis, it imitates Daniel’s structure of explaining the world as a series of empires that will ultimately crumble, leaving only faith in the one true God. When describing the reign of Augustus Ceasar, the Sibyl alludes to the birth of Jesus, which later, more explicitly Christian Sibylline works like Or. Sib. 1 would expand upon.13 Early Christian authors like Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, and Lactantius quoted these passages of the Sibyl’s prophecies of Jesus and claimed her as a Christian prophet.14 Augustine famously quotes the Sibyls in De civitate Dei, leading to his conclusion that Virgil was quoting the Erythraean Sibyl in his fourth Eclogue. The Sibyl’s classical past as the Roman Senate’s textual authority and her early Christian tradition as an alternate Daniel gave her voice

The Sybil and Merlin  15

political authority that the anonymous author of the sixth-century Byzantine Oracle of Baalbek exploited. The highly influential Oracle of Baalbek draws even more inspiration from the book of Daniel by presenting the Sibyl’s prophecy as an explanatio somnii – the interpretation of a dream – and having the Sibyl function as a similar governmental advisor.15 The text details how, upon the Tiburtine Sibyl’s visit to Rome, one hundred judges summon her to explain the identical dream that they all had of nine suns, each with a different appearance.16 The Sibyl then explains the suns in the way that Daniel explained Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, claiming that each one represents a generation of humanity (31–172). During the explication of the fourth sun, the Sibyl predicts the coming of Jesus, born to Mary, maintaining her tradition as a Christian prophet (59–75). The later predictions are of future emperors, most of whom are presented via vatincinium ex eventu, the practice of predicting events that have already happened in an effort to build credibility before predicting events that have not happened yet. In the pseudonymous mouth of the ancient Sibyl, a recapitulation of the past is a prediction of future events. For instance, the Sibyl predicts the coming of the Emperor Anastasius I and the Persian War – both events that had already happened in the sixth century, when the Byzantine Oracle of Baalbek was composed. The author of the work uses the Sibyl’s prediction to criticize Anastasius, saying that he will “hate all the beggars” and “ruin many from among the people” (168). She goes on to predict the end of time after the reign of Anastasius, during which a “King from the East” will rise, slay his enemies, forgive all public taxes, and restore the cities in the east and Palestine, expressing the anonymous author’s hopes for what an ideal ruler would do. The Oracle of Baalbek explicitly politicized the Sibyl’s predictions in a way that would remain influential for several centuries. The Medieval Sibyl and Her Role in French Poetry The eleventh-century Latin prophecy of the Tiburtine Sibyl (sometimes attributed to the Cumaean Sibyl) was based on the Greek Oracle of Baalbek, but it notably added a prediction of the Last Emperor to the end of its predictions of future rulers. The Last Emperor is a figure who will conquer all of Europe and the Holy Land before turning his crown over to the second coming of Christ, who will in turn defeat the Antichrist.17 Latin versions of the Tiburtine Sibyl were produced during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (983–1002) but were also copied a great deal over the course of the twelfth century, when the list of kings was periodically updated to promote or critique a number of

16  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

then-contemporary leaders.18 The Sibyl names leaders by their initials, presumably to make her predictions more believably like hazy forecasts of the future. Because of the book’s appeal as a retelling of history, the prophecies remained well known even among readers who were not reading the work for its prophetic content.19 The Sibyl’s reputation was therefore widely associated with the concept of a Last Emperor. Various authors began to cite the Sibyl as the source of their predictions of a great ruler’s future victories in war. For instance, both Otto of Freising and Godfrey of Viterbo claimed that the Sibyl had predicted victories for Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I.20 Sibylline prophecies promoting a French Last World Emperor, otherwise known as the Second Charlemagne, were written for Charles VI upon his accession to the throne.21 This version of the prophecy, promoted by the Valois court, circulated throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.22 During this time, French poets adopted the politically powerful persona of the Sibyl while retaining their own authorial personae. Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan are the most salient examples of this phenomenon. Eustache Deschamps was Charles V’s huisser d’armes, which placed him in charge of the king’s security, and he served in various administrative capacities for Louis, Duke of Orleans. His ballades were often addressed directly to the king, whom he could assume would read his work and consider his opinions. Deschamps began several of his ballades with the phrase, “Je, Sebille.”23 Unlike the anonymous authors of prophecies like Or. Sib. 3, the Oracle of Baalbek, and the Tiburtine Sibyl, who attribute their predictions to the Sibyl, Deschamps melds his own authority with that of the famous prophet. Deschamps never clarifies whether he is quoting a particular Sibyllic prediction or composing his own, but in using the phrase, “Je, Sebille” to begin poems that he has presented to his royal patrons as his own, Deschamps implies that he is doing both at the same time. Deschamps is known for employing voices other than his own in his poetry, and one in thirty of his poems takes on the voice of a woman.24 In adopting the voice of a Sibyl, Deschamps is emulating predictions that she has famously made while crafting his own prophecies, addressed to the king. This narrative stance is quite possibly Deschamps’ emulation of that of the Venerable Bede. Perhaps because he had written about the Christian prophecies of the Sibyl in his Sibyllinorum Verborum Interpretatio, Bede was sometimes erroneously identified as the true author of the Tiburtine Sibyl.25 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people began to cite Bede himself as a prophet. Deschamps’s citation of the historian alongside Merlin and the Sibyl in his Contre

The Sybil and Merlin  17

l’Angleterre (1385) is one of the earliest-known mentions of a prophetic Bede.26 Deschamps’ decision to refer to Bede in such a way may have been based on his own perception of what constitutes a prophet. After all, his ballades cite the same prophecies as coming both from Bede and the Sibyl. Since Deschamps seems to have believed that Bede wrote the famous predictions of Tiburtine Sibyl, his assertion that Bede was a prophet implies that the act of assuming the role of Sibyl – interpreting and applying her predictions to public events – makes one a prophet in one’s own right. Rewriting a prophecy is not necessarily a deceitful act. While some readers clearly accepted certain Sibyllic texts as genuine (especially as they related to Christian prophecy), others seem to have understood their political predictions to be a combination of folklore and artistic license that was nevertheless authoritative. The scribes who updated the names of the kings in the Tiburtine Sibyl knew that they were altering the previous predictions, and they surely did so knowing that a series of scribes before them had done the same. To these scribes, the alterations may have seemed to be corrections rather than forgeries, making the sanctified predictions more likely to come to pass when applied to a still living leader. Deschamps’s adoption of the Sibyl’s authorial identity is at once symbolic and literal. The opening phrase, “Je, Sebille,” draws attention to the fact that Deschamps is not an ancient authority but a contemporary individual with timely concerns. Yet, at the same time, the phrase announces that Deschamps’s predictions express the longstanding and oft-repeated collective hopes of a nation. The Sibyl is a mask that Deschamps wears, but in presenting the poems beginning “Je, Sebille” as his own, he puts on the mask in front of his audience, acknowledging what we all know – that the mask and the face behind it are speaking as one voice only for the space of a poem. The Last Emperor was a prediction that Deschamps used repeatedly to encourage Charles VI’s battles, and Deschamps at once knew this as the prophecy of the Sibyl, Merlin, Bede, and himself. In Ballade 67, which is written in honor of Charles VI, Deschamps predicts the coming of the “cerf volant” (1) [flying deer].27 This symbol was taken from Merlin’s prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Bri­ tanniae, which Deschamps interpreted as predicting the Last Emperor. Charles VI had adopted the flying deer as his own personal emblem.28 Deschamps makes his prophecy in propria persona while also referring to what “ce dist la lettre escripte” (6) [it says in the written letter]. Like his predictions that begin with “Je, Sebille,” Deschamps acknowledges that the poem’s prediction is at once borrowed and newly crafted. The

18  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

poem predicts that when the deer is thirteen “cors fera craindre son nom” (4) [hearts will fear his name] and that when he is fifteen “Qu’il destruira, ce dist la lettre escripte, / L’isle aux geans et l’asne” (6–7) [he will destroy, it says in the written letter, the Isle of Giants and the Donkey]. The fear that Charles will invoke at the age of thirteen refers to his defeat of the English-allied Flemish forces at the Battle of Roosebeke in 1382.29 The Isle of Giants represents England, and the Donkey signifies Richard II, Charles VI’s opponent in the Hundred Years War.30 Deschamps combines familiar prophetic symbols like the “cerf volant” with his own newly invented predictions to advance his own agenda and version of the Last Emperor prophecy. He most likely penned this poem in late 1382 or early 1383, after the Battle of Roosebeke, so the prediction of his victory there is vaticinium ex eventu.31 Charles VI did not end up taking on battles with the English in the same manner that his father had, but Deschamps advances his hope that Charles would, by emphasizing that his victory is both certain and preordained by God. The poem goes on to predict the stag’s future victory over the followers of “Mahom” (17) [Mohammad]. This reiteration of the Second Charlemagne prophecy implies that if Charles were only to continue battling the English, he could eventually unite and convert the rest of the world. Deschamps’s close relationship with the royal family allowed him to write political prophecies to argue for specific political actions. Christine de Pizan, who shared a mutual admiration with Deschamps, also made the Sibyl central to her authorial self-representation. However, she could not expect Charles VI to take strategic war advice from her in the same manner. Even in her treatise on war, the Fais d’armes et de chevalerie (1410), Christine spends the first several pages apologizing for her gender. She acknowledges that writing a war treatise is unusual for “femme qui communement ne se sieust entremettre ne mes de quenouilles, fillaces et choses de mainaige” [women, who generally are occupied in weaving, spinning, and household duties] but assures her audience that she understands the subject through her scholarship.32 Although Christine’s gender more generally placed her at a disadvantage in offering political advice to the king, it gave her a much stronger link to the respected authority of the Sibyl. The Sibyl appears repeatedly in Christine’s works. Emulating the Aeneid, Christine makes the Sibyl her own guide along the Chemin de long estude (1402–3). Christine lists all ten sibyls before telling the story of the Erythrean and Cumaean Sibyls in the book of the Cité des dames (1405). The older, wiser friend whose advice punctuates the book of the Duc des vrais amans (1405) is even named Sebille de Monthault – a

The Sybil and Merlin  19

nod to her prescience in predicting the downfall of the lead character’s relationship and reputation. The legends surrounding the authorial persona of the Sibyl would have been valuable to Christine. For instance, the Sibyl’s efforts to seek recompense from Tarquinus for her written work and the Roman Senate’s subsequent reverence for her books’ wisdom emphasized the importance of paying for and heeding the advice of a wise female author. While Deschamps had cause to call attention to the Sibyl as a kind of mask for wise authors like Bede (supposedly) or himself, Christine had every reason to affirm the Sibyl’s historical reputation as one of the most authoritative writers of all time. Therefore, when she adopts the mantle of the Sibyl in her final poem, the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (1429), she begins not with “Je, Sebille” but with “Je, Christine,” using her own voice to make predictions of the Last Emperor. The Ditié, dated 31 July 1429, after Joan of Arc’s victory at Orléans and Charles VII’s coronation at Rheims, is explicit political propaganda, urging public support for Joan and French unification under the leadership of Charles VII. The Ditié celebrates Joan of Arc’s triumphs as a sign of providential grace and makes two connected prophesies – the first foreseeing a great ruler of France who may or may not be Charles VII and the second prophesying Joan’s defeat of the English and the conquering of the Holy Land in aid of this great ruler. Between these two prophecies of her own, Christine mentions prophets often cited in political prophetic verse – Merlin, the Sibyl, and Bede.33 She offers their testimony in support of Joan’s validity as an agent of God, arguing: Car Merlin et Sebile et Bede, Plus de Vc ans a la virent En esperit, et pour remede En France en leurs escripz la mirent, Et leur[s] prophecies en firent, Disans qu’il pourteroit baniere Es guerres françoises, et dirent De son fait toute la maniere. (XXXI, 241–8) [For more than 500 years ago, Merlin, the Sibyl, and Bede foresaw her coming, entered her in their writings as someone who would put an end to France’s troubles, made prophecies about her, saying that she would carry the banner in the French wars and describing all that she would achieve.]34

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The Sibyl’s appearance in the poem is a brief reference, confirming predictions that Christine otherwise presents in her own voice. Yet, as Kevin Brownlee has noted, “In this context the figure of the sibyl has a privileged status, for her appearance here is, as it were, overdetermined as a result of her singular importance in Christine’s earlier works.”35 Christine’s mention of the Sibyl anticipates her own assumption of this role within the poem. The prophecy that Christine does not cite but delivers herself is that of the Second Charlemagne, a variant of the Last Emperor prophecy: Car ung roy de France doit estre Charles, filz de Charles, nommé, Qui sur tous rois sera grant maistre. Propheciez l’ont surnommé “Le Cerf Volant,” et consomé Sera par cellui conquereur Maint fait (Dieu l’a à ce somé), Et en fin doit estre empereur. (XVI.121–8) [For there will be a king of France called Charles, son of Charles, who will be supreme ruler over all kings. Prophecies have given him the name of ‘The Flying Stag,’ and many a deed will be accomplished by this conqueror (God has called him to this task) and in the end he will be emperor.]

In repeating the prophecy without attributing it to the Sibyl, Christine is stepping into the role of the Sibyl herself. Furthermore, in tenuously applying the prophecy to King Charles VII, Christine is taking on the Sibyl’s traditional role as a woman using her wisdom to advise a potentially misguided male leader. Christine warns Charles, “Je prie à Dieu que cellui soies” [I pray to God that you may be the person I have described] (XVII.130). Rather than simply citing the prophecy as a known fact, Christine plays with the ambiguity of prophetic discourse to emphasize the importance of Charles VII’s decisions. Furthermore, she continues her Last Emperor prophecy, applying it only to Joan: En Chistienté et l’Eglise Sera par elle mis concorde, Les mescreans dont on devise, Et les herites de vie orde Destruira, car ainsi l’acord

The Sybil and Merlin  21 Prophecie, qui l’a predit, Ne point n’aura misericorde De lieu, qui la foy Dieu laidit. Des Sarradins fera essart, En conquerant la Saintte Terre. Là menra Charles, que Dieu gard! Ains qu’il muire, fera tel erre. Cilz est cil qui la doit conquerre. Là doit-elle finer sa vie, Et l’un et l’autre gloire acquerre. Là sera la chose assovye. (XLII–XLIII, 331–44) [She will restore Christendom and the Church. She will destroy the unbelievers people talk about, and the heretics and their vile ways, for this is the substance of a prophecy that has been made. Nor will she have mercy on any place which treats faith in God with disrespect. She will destroy the Saracens, by conquering the Holy Land. She will lead Charles there, whom God preserve! Before he dies he will make such a journey. He is the one who is to conquer it. It is there that she is to end her days and that both of them are to win glory. It is there that the whole enterprise will be brought to completion.]

Any reader familiar with the Last Emperor prophecy would know that these predictions go with the ones of the “cerf volant” and “Charles, filz de Charles” that Christine has just addressed to Charles. Yet, Christine applies these predictions solely to Joan, essentially implying that if Charles wishes to fulfil his destiny as a great ruler, he must do it with her aid. Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker have suggested that Christine composed this at a time when Charles VII disagreed with Joan about the invasion of Paris, which was under the control of the Duke of Burgundy, and they have argued that Christine gave the poem an earlier date in order to lend the predictions authenticity through vaticinium ex eventu.36 Regardless of when Christine composed the poem, she apparently expected that Charles might cease his affiliation with Joan and hoped to dissuade him and his followers from doing so. The Last Emperor prophecy (and its various offshoots, like the Second Charlemagne prophecy) is a call to battle. It encourages a leader to consider the next battle as his stepping-stone to divinely ordained world domination. The political goals of Deschamps and Christine differ little from the goals of the people who copied these political predictions under the pseudonym of “Sibyl.” However, beyond those political

22  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

goals, Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan use their moments of Sibylline prophecy to comment on the nature of their own authority. Adopting the Sibyl’s voice aligns Deschamps with authorial figures like Bede and Christine with the Sibyl herself. Their declarations of prophetic futures remind their royal audience of why they are fit to make predictions in the first place and how special their insight is. The Origins of Merlin’s Political Prophecies Having outlined the history of the Sibyl’s role in political prophecy and her appearance in medieval French poetry, this study now turns to England, where Merlin was the most dominant figure in political prophecy. Merlin’s prophetic legacy is not completely separate from that of the Sibyl. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential prophecies of Merlin within his Prophetiae Merlini (1130) and Historia regum Britanniae (1137) were modeled on those of the Tiburtine Sibyl and therefore often cited alongside them. Continental prophecies making predictions about the French kings or the Holy Roman Emperor frequently mentioned Merlin as someone who corroborated the Sibyl’s prediction of the Last Emperor. In England, however, Merlin became an independent figure – one whose prognostications allowed the people glossing them to launch fierce critiques against those in power. The references to Otto I, II, and III in the Tiburtine Sibyl indicate that an earlier version of the prophecy was intended to praise Otto II and complain about the reign of Otto III.37 However, the appended Last Emperor portion of the prophecy eventually elicited the most references from people who were using the Tiburtine Sibyl to make contemporary political predictions. The Last Emperor prophecy was, at its heart, a cry to battle with an external foe. It could be used to warn a ruler, as when Christine tells Charles VII, “Je prie à Dieu que cellui soies” [I pray to God that you may be the person I have described] (XVII.130) in the Ditié, but the worst threat that the prophecy offered was merely that the king may not be the Last Emperor after all. In contrast, Merlinic prophecies in England latched onto the earlier kind of prophecy found in the Tiburtine Sibyl, which criticized the current king in favour of the next. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin fueled an unusually volatile strain of political prophecies, and this happened for several reasons. First, the Merlinic tradition, which pre-dates Geoffrey by at least five centuries, was born out of internal struggles among the Welsh, AngloSaxons, and Normans. Second, Geoffrey’s dramatic depiction of Merlin as a prophet who admonishes kings in the manner of the Old Testament Daniel or Samuel influenced how his legacy continued. Finally, certain

The Sybil and Merlin  23

anti-monarchical interpretations and imitations of Merlin’s prophecies became popular through a series of historical accidents – largely their inclusion in popular literary works like the prose Brut. As Victoria Flood has underscored, most English political prophecies have their roots in ethnic conflicts at England’s borders with Wales and Scotland.38 Geoffrey of Monmouth wished to legitimize Norman rule of England, and to do so he appropriated longstanding Welsh prophecies associated with the Welsh poet, Myrddin.39 One of the oldest poems attributed to Myrddin, Armes Prydein (c. 930), predicted the unification of the Welsh, Bretons, Cornish, Scots, and others to drive the Saxons out of Wessex. The prophecy was still being copied in the twelfth century but was revised to predict the unification of these groups to overthrow the then-ruling Normans and their king, Henry I. This reflects just how malleable political prophecies can be. A prediction once used to unite Celtic people against the Saxons could be repurposed to unite them against the Normans. Just as the Welsh were adapting the prophecies of Myrddin to spread this anti-Norman message, Geoffrey of Monmouth composed the pro-Norman Prophetiae Merlini (1130), which were also included as the seventh book of the Historia.40 Internal English strife is central to the prophecy. Although each version of Myrddin or Merlin’s prophecy has predicted the unification of England, it is a unification under a leader of a particular ethnic faction. Merlin’s prophecies do not end with a Last Emperor figure. Instead, he simply predicts a number of atrocities before the end of the world. Because of this, Merlin’s prophecies are more nationally focused and ultimately pessimistic than the Sibyl’s. Much like the Sibyl, Geoffrey’s Merlin is patterned after Old Testament prophets. Within Geoffrey’s Historia, a young Merlin gives a lengthy prophecy to the soon-to-be ousted Vortigern about the future kings of England. He metaphorically represents a series of kings as different animals in order to foretell the wars between the Britons and the Saxons, the coming of Arthur, the arrival of the Normans, and the eventual return of England to Celtic rule. Most of the over one hundred prophecies in a row that Merlin speaks have no apparent meaning, so they were easily adaptable to a number of political situations. Geoffrey had released these prophecies independently as the Prophetiae Merlini in 1130, several years before he finished the Historia, and chroniclers were immediately interpreting its contents to reflect on matters of their own time.41 For instance, in his Historia Ecclesiastica (1135), Ordericus Vitalis argues that the “leo justicie” [the Lion of Justice] mentioned in the Prophetiae Merlini referred to Henry I, who will “roar at the towers of Gaul.”42 Although this comparison was flattering to Henry I and straightforward in its prediction of his successful

24  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

battles against France, later applications of Merlin’s prophecy were often extremely critical of those in power. The “Vae tibi, Nuestra” portion of Merlin’s prophecy, found in some versions of Geoffrey’s Historia but not others, was appropriated as an anti-Norman prophecy during Henry II’s reign.43 Merlin in Early Versions of the Brut It is no wonder then that the poet Wace chose to exclude Merlin’s prophecy from his Norman translation of the Historia, the Roman de Brut, which he presented to Henry’s wife, Eleanor, in 1155.44 As Jean Blacker notes, Wace was courting the patronage of Henry II and could not afford to alienate him.45 Yet, Wace had other reasons to avoid repeating the prophecy – namely that he wished to establish a prophetic authorial persona more in line with that of Virgil than that of Geoffrey. Geoffrey of Monmouth had modeled the Historia on the Aeneid, inventing the fictional King Brutus, a Trojan fugitive like Virgil’s Aeneas, who flees Troy to found Britain. Wace translated Geoffrey but also consulted the Aeneid himself. As John Watkins has astutely observed, “The Brut presents itself as a Norman Aeneid and exalts its author as a Norman Virgil.”46 One of the ways that Wace frames himself as the Norman Virgil, unmentioned by Watkins, is by resituating the prophetic elements of the Brut. When he comes to the portion of the story containing the prophecy, Wace distinguishes himself from his source, Geoffrey of Monmouth: Dunc dist Merlin les prophecies Qu vus avez, ço crei, oïes, Des reis ki a venir esteient, Ki la terre tenir deveient. Ne vuil sun livre translater Quant jo nel sai interpreter; Nule rien dire nen vuldreie Que si ne fust cum je dirreie. (7535–42) [Then Merlin made the prophecies which I believe you have heard, of the kings who were to come and who were to hold the land. I do not wish to translate his book, since I do not know how to interpret it; I would not like to say anything, in case what I say does not happen.]47

Wace is aware that his audience may be expecting Merlin’s popular predictions and therefore needs to offer reasons for excluding them. His reason – that he is wary of misinterpreting them – acknowledges the

The Sybil and Merlin  25

complex nature of translation. Wace implies that he could not present a straightforward translation without some amount of interpretation involved. Yet, in refusing to include the easily reinterpreted prophecies, Wace also exerts control over his authorial prophetic reputation. Had Wace simply translated all or any of Geoffrey’s Merlinic prophecies about future kings, he would have fueled endless political speculation as Geoffrey had, rather than asserting himself as an inspired and wise authority. Authors like Eustache Deschamps would later appropriate the Last Emperor prophecy because it was simple, straightforward, and serviceable to their own political situations. To Wace, this list of over one hundred prophecies may have seemed unwieldy and unprofitable as a means of establishing his authority. Instead, Wace includes one classic, memorable prophecy in a more Virgilian vatic fashion. Wace contributes his own memorable prophecy to the end of the poem by transforming an ambiguous line within the Historia into a firmer prediction of Arthur’s return. Geoffrey of Monmouth had written: “Sed et inclitus ille rex Arturus letaliter uulneratus est; qui illinc ad sananda uulnera sua in insulam Auallonis” [The illustrious king Arthur too was mortally wounded; he was taken away to the island of Avalon to have his wounds tended].48 Although Geoffrey states that Arthur’s wounds were mortal, he curiously explains that they were still being treated – and on a mystical island, no less. This invites speculation that Arthur could still be alive. Wace elaborates on Arthur’s possible return: Arthur, si la gest ne ment, Fud el cors nafrez mortelment; En Avalon se fist porter Pur ses plaies mediciner. Encore i est, Bretun l’atendent, Si cum il dient e entendent; De la vendra, encore puet vivre. (13275–81) [Arthur, if the chronicle is true, received a mortal wound to his body. He had himself carried to Avalon, for the treatment of his wounds. He is still there, awaited by the Britons, as they say and believe, and will return and may live again.]

Wace embraces a connection to Merlin at this moment, as both a prophet and storyteller: Maistre Wace, ki fist cest livre, Ne volt plus dire de sa fin

26  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship Qu’en dist li prophetes Merlin; Merlin dist d’Arthur, si ot dreit, Que sa mort dutuse serreit. (13282–6) [Master Wace, who made this book, will say no more of his end than the prophet Merlin did. Merlin said of Arthur, rightly, that his death would be doubtful.]

Here, Wace compares himself to Merlin in the way that Virgil compares himself to the Sibyl in the Aeneid. In Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Sibyl uses the word “vates” to refer collectively to the prophets and poets dwelling together in the Elysian Fields, showing them to serve the same important societal function of honoring Phoebus. After this, in Book VII, Virgil famously uses the term to refer to himself when invoking the Muse, praying, “tu vatem, tu, diva, mone” [You, goddess, prompt the prophet/poet].49 Furthermore, as several scholars have noted, Virgil uses the Sibyl as a proxy for himself, especially insofar as she embraces ambiguity in her prophesying.50 Virgil’s Sibyl writes her prophecies on oak leaves, but she will not help to reorder them if the wind leaves them in disarray. Similarly, Virgil’s Aeneid includes several ambiguous predictions about the future of Rome.51 In imitation of Virgil’s use of the Sibyl, Wace employs Merlin to remind the audience that he has the poetic power to at once reveal and obscure England’s future. By referring to himself as “­Master Wace” in this moment, he carefully frames his own prophetic legacy – not as one who translates obscure predictions but as one who crafts his own. Wace’s new prophecy is only political on the surface level in that it predicts a future king. More strikingly, it is a supernatural prediction of a savior who will return from the dead – akin to ­Virgil’s purported foretelling of the coming of Christ in his fourth Eclogue. By restructuring the prophecy in his Roman de Brut, Wace asserts himself as more than Geoffrey’s translator. Rather, he transforms himself into a Norman Virgil. Laȝamon’s English translation of the Brut in 1190 likewise excludes Merlin’s extended prophecy, but it also magnifies the prophecy of Arthur’s return by ending the entire work with the promise “that an Arthur should yet come to help the English.”52 In Wace’s and Laȝamon’s twelfth-century versions of the Brut, the prediction of Arthur’s return temporarily surpassed Merlin’s litany of future English kings as the dominant prophecy of the work. A variety of political verses adapted from Merlin’s prophecy in Geoffrey’s Historia still circulated independently, but they did not reinter the Brut tradition until the fourteenth century, when the Prophecy of the Six Kings

The Sybil and Merlin  27

was worked into the Long Version of the prose Brut. This prophecy was significantly narrower than the over one hundred prophecies of Geoffrey’s Prophetiae, making it memorable and easily applicable to contemporary politics. The Prophecy of the Six Kings The Prophecy of the Six Kings had been circulating independently of the prose Brut as early as 1312 as a way of promoting the deposition of Edward II and the accession of Edward III.53 The prophecy can be referred to as Galfridian because it imitates the animal symbolism of Merlin’s prophecies in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini and Historia regum Britanniae. It describes six kings: the Lamb, the Dragon, the Goat, the Boar, the Ass, and the Mole.54 The first known version of this prophecy was written during the reign of Edward II, represented by the Goat. The prior reigns of Henry III and Edward I are represented as those of the Lamb and the Dragon, respectively, through the practice of vaticinium ex eventu. The prophecy “predicts” the Lamb’s/ Henry III’s building of Westminster Abbey and the Dragon’s/Edward I’s reign over England, Scotland, and Wales in order to make Edward II recognizable as the third king, the Goat, who will bring “graunt damage famine et mortalite des gentz et perte de terre” [great damage, famine, and death of the people and loss of land].55 The young Edward III, the Boar, is the hero of the prophecy – a kind of second Arthur who will gain back Scotland and Wales and go on to conquer France, Spain, Aragon, Germany, and eventually Jerusalem. The Boar was the symbol that Merlin had used to represent Arthur in the Historia, so this prediction of Edward III as the Boar who will make England prosper transforms Edward into a figure similar to the subject of Wace and Laȝamon’s prediction of Arthur’s second coming. By creating hope for Edward’s reign, the prophecy gives its audience permission to abandon loyalty to Edward II. Although the Boar resembles the Sibyl’s prediction of the Last Emperor or Second Charlemagne, this is ultimately not a Last Emperor prophecy. Instead of ending with the Boar’s reign, the prophecy describes the ensuing rule of the less-promising Ass and Mole. The Mole abandons England, leaving it to be divided into three parts, which Victoria Flood has interpreted as “the breaking away of Wales and Scotland from English rule, and the establishment of three independent kingdoms.”56 More than straightforward political propaganda, the Prophecy of the Six Kings is also a reflection on the supposedly impending fall of the English nation – a national apocalypse.

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The Prophecy of the Six Kings was appended to a later version of the anonymously authored prose Brut by an anonymous reviser. Unlike Wace’s and Laȝamon’s Brut, which ended with the death of Arthur, the prose Brut attempted to bridge the history between Arthurian times and more contemporary events. Even before the addition of the Prophecy of the Six Kings, early versions of the prose Brut drew from historical material postdating Wace’s Roman de Brut (namely Geffrei Gaiman’s Estoire des Engleis) to describe the reigns of English kings through the thirteenth century.57 The Oldest Version of the prose Brut had ended with the death of Henry III in 1272, but the Short Version and Long Version that were adapted from it added material so that the histories ended in the early 1330s.58 The Long Version notably also added the Prophecy of the Six Kings to the moment corresponding to Merlin’s prophecy to Vortigern in the Historia regum Brittaniae, and this addition, although it enters the text as a prognostication, continues the prose Brut’s project of linking past kings to present ones. Wace and Laȝamon had understandably wanted to avoid becoming retrospective prophets of contemporary politics and therefore avoided Geoffrey of Monmouth’s all-too easily adaptable political prophecies in the Brut. Being anonymous, the reviser of the already-anonymously authored prose Brut had no such constraints and had specific political motivations for adding the prophecy to the work. The Prophecy of the Six Kings had begun as a prediction of Edward III’s greatness as a way of promoting Edward II’s deposition but was added to the Brut with new purpose during the reign of Edward III, after Edward II had already been deposed.59 As Lister M. Matheson has surmised, comparisons between Edward III and Arthur in the prophecy would have been helpful in garnering enthusiasm for his war campaigns in Scotland and France.60 The fact that it was an alreadyestablished prophecy, perhaps familiar to some of its audience, only added to the illusion that the Prophecy of the Six Kings had genuinely predicted Edward III’s rule. Its inclusion as Merlin’s prediction within the Brut made it look much older than it was. The version of the prophecy within the Brut updates the vaticinium ex eventu portions to add events that had occurred during Edward II’s reign, such as the rebellion of Thomas Lancaster (represented as a bear) and the Despensers (represented as owls). The depiction of Edward III, the Boar, as a second Arthur remains the same, and especially within the context of the Arthur-centred Brut it appears as if Edward III will be the fulfilment of the prophecy of Arthur’s return. The addition of the Prophecy of the Six Kings to the Brut made it the most widely read prophecy in England. The Middle English prose Brut chronicle was one of the most

The Sybil and Merlin  29

popular works of the late fourteenth century. More manuscripts of it survive than any other work in Middle English, save two versions of the Wycliffite Bible.61 Prophetic Anxiety in the Courts of Edward III and Richard II Through his foundation of the Order of the Garter, Edward III emphasized parallels between his own reign and Arthur’s, but he was not responsible for the Six Kings prophecy or its inclusion within the prose Brut, nor did he encourage prophecies about his reign in the manner of the Valois court of France.62 Given the prophecy’s role in supporting the deposition of his father, one can understand why Edward III never promoted it himself. The prophecy continued to take on other meanings related to deposing kings. For instance, a revision of the Prophecy of the Six Kings in rhyming couplets would flourish in the early 1400s as a hopeful prediction of a purportedly still-living Richard II’s return from exile to conquer his usurper, Henry IV.63 Although this version of the prophecy involved Richard II in a positive role, it only came into being after his death. During Richard’s reign, it was a politically dormant prophecy, still read within the Brut but not actively reinterpreted in light of his kingship. Like his predecessor, Edward III, Richard must have viewed such prophecies with caution because of their strong associations with deposition. This association is amplified within the prose Brut because Merlin delivers the prophecy to Vortigern, the king whose political descent he has just foretold. While the prose Brut made this strain of Galfridian prophecies popular with the English people, it did not make it popular with the English kings. Edward III’s reluctance to embrace political prophecies was almost certainly fueled by his knowledge that for every positive prophecy about himself he could find a handful of extremely critical ones. Most prominently, the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington condemned Edward III after his success in the Hundred Years War had waned. It is a Latin poem, accompanied by a lengthy Latin prose commentary, and its survival in at least thirty-seven manuscripts indicates that it was one of the more popular written prophecies of its time. Internal evidence places the composition of the prophecy and the commentary sometime between November 1362 and April 1364.64 The commentary was completed by John Ergome, a fourteenthcentury Augustinian friar who studied at Oxford, collected occult literature, and had familial ties to the town of Bridlington.65 Although not attributed to Merlin, the prophecy follows the Galfridian use of animal symbols as well as Merlin’s stance of boldly decrying the current

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king in favour of a greater future one, established in Geoffrey’s Historia. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, several manuscripts attributed the prophecy to the prior of Bridlington, John Thwenge, but there is no internal or external evidence suggesting that he composed it.66 Although early scholars, most notably M.R. James, had suggested the Ergome himself composed the prophecy in addition to the commentary, Paul Meyvaert and A.G. Rigg have argued that Ergome could not have been the prophecy’s author due to differences in his vocabulary and minor errors in his interpretations of the prophecy’s probable intended meaning.67 The Vaticinium uses a great deal of what Lesley Coote has termed “precious language” – metaphors, puns, and other inventive devices to disguise (while also making obvious) the names of places and people mentioned in the prophecy.68 This precious language gives the vaticinium ex eventu portions of the prophecy an air of authenticity because it looks to the reader as if the person predicting these events could only see them partially. Nevertheless, it is written to be transparent enough to convey a certain message to those who interpret it – in this case, the message of complaint against Edward III. The Vaticinium “predicts” Edward II’s death and then goes on to deal with the disappointments of Edward III’s reign. Some of the “predictions” about Edward III are positive, like his victory against the Scottish at Halidon Hill, but many are negative, like his marital affairs. Ergome’s commentary on the prophecy claims that the return of the plague has been due to “peccata luxuriae vel regis vel papae” [sins of lust of the king and pope].69 The prophecy expresses frustrations with Edward III’s decision to cease wars with France by signing the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 and ultimately predicts that Edward III will not gain control over France but that a future leader, signified by the Cock, will win France back for England.70 The Cock corresponds to Edward, the Black Prince, who was still alive at the time of the prophecy’s composition, holding Aquitaine and Gascony as principalities. Ergome’s commentary is addressed to Earl Humphry Bohun of Hereford, and both the prophecy and commentary are aimed at an aristocratic audience that would have been dissatisfied with Edward III’s decision not to pursue the Hundred Years War further.71 Like the Prophecy of the Six Kings, the Vaticinium expresses frustration with the current monarch and then looks forward to a future king who will conquer and unite lands for England. Nevertheless, as Lesley Coote notes, Ergome’s commentary of the Vaticinium tempers criticism of Edward III with optimistic predictions about his upcoming jubilee year in 1377, making the prophecy “politically acceptable” and able to be widely circulated

The Sybil and Merlin  31

beyond Bridlington.72 Like the Prophecy of the Six Kings, the Bridlington prophecy resurfaced during Henry IV’s reign with new interpretations that presented hope that the deposed Richard II was still alive and would reclaim his throne. In 1402, a friar minor from Leicester was hanged quoting it in such a context.73 This popular English tradition of prophesying a series of monarchs of varying quality lent itself to simultaneous monarchical critique and praise, leading rulers like Richard II to be reasonably sceptical of embracing prophecies as a method of self-promotion. At least one chronicle describes Richard II as being unsettled by specific verses of the Vaticinium.74 English variations on the more-flattering Last Emperor prophecy of the Sibyl did exist, but Richard II’s advocacy for peace with France meant that he was loath to embrace those as well. Aristocrats who stood to profit from wars and wished to spur Richard II into supporting them appropriated such prophecies to promote battles. For instance, in 1383, Bishop Henry Despenser preached in favour of a Crusade against the French in Flanders, but he likely did so to protect English wool interests.75 A manuscript owned by Despenser, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian E.VIII, begins with three prophecies, “Catulus lincieus,” “The Holy Oil of St. Thomas,” and “Lilium regnans,” all predicting the English king’s eventual victory in France and the Holy Land.76 There is no indication that this manuscript was ever presented to Richard II. Rather, it seems that Despenser was using Richard II as a rallying figure for the Crusade to inspire support for the war among his supporters. Richard II remained sceptical about the value of such controversial Crusades and bade his chancellor, Michael de la Pole, to attempt to negotiate provisional peace with France in the conflict.77 Political prophecies about the monarchy proliferated in Ricardian England, but Richard had little reason to support them in general, much less in the work of poets. Charles VI was patronizing Eustache Deschamps to compose, among other things, prophecies that advised him to engage in battles that he had no wish to enter. Richard’s court honored no such enterprise. He was under far too much pressure and scrutiny from Parliament as it was, and the dominant prophetic discourse in England was focused on deposition. Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan knew that they could liken themselves to the Sibyl and speak their political prophecies in their own voices because they would be rewarded (or at least heard) by the king and his court. If Richard did patronize literature, he clearly did not care to patronize works that included prophecies about him, as Charles VI of France did. It was not until Henry IV took the crown that English authors like Gower had the incentive to write prophecies of their king in their own voices.

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Ricardian Poetic Prophecy Although Ricardian authors found little encouragement to adopt the political prophetic voices of the Sibyl or Merlin, they nevertheless cultivated prophetic personae, drawing from a variety of extant literary prophetic traditions. Broadly speaking, a prophet is an intermediary between a deity and an audience. A prophet always has a message, but that message may or may not involve prognostication, the prediction of future events. Even if prophets do not prognosticate, they often speak with admonitory voices, warning of potential outcomes that may befall those who fail to heed good advice. Like prophets, medieval authors were interpreters as well as advisors. Modern audiences often consider originality to be one of the foremost attributes of a talented author, but in a time before copyright laws and book contracts, medieval authors could be just as (if not more) prized for their roles in compiling, translating, and interpreting pre-existing texts.78 As an intermediary figure, the prophetic subject position allowed medieval authors to comment on their own roles as creative messengers of earlier stories and wisdom. Developing their personae also allowed authors to convey advice more convincingly. The structure of the dream vision, newly popular in late fourteenthcentury England, gave Ricardian authors a straightforward way to develop and elaborate upon their own prophetic poetic identities as artistic mediators. The dream vision has its roots in classical literature, but The Romance of the Rose, written first by Guillaume de Lorris in the 1230s and then completed by Jean de Meun forty years later, established new conventions of the medieval genre. The Romance of the Rose was the second-most-copied vernacular medieval work, after Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, which was itself inspired by the dream-vision format.79 In a medieval dream vision, the narrator begins the poem by describing a problem had before falling asleep. The narrator then typically describes a dream of an allegorical landscape and an enlightened guide who leads the narrator through it. In some way, the dream usually answers the narrator’s problem, and the guide sometimes directs the narrator to write about the dream when it concludes. Although the narrator of the dream is not always named, the tradition of aligning the persona of the dreamer with the identity of the poet gave authors the possibility of naming themselves as the first-person speakers in their dream visions, thereby developing aspects of their authorial personae.80 For instance, the narrator of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The House of Fame identifies himself as “Geoffrey” and even has the character of the eagle comment on how much he weighs, bringing the author’s name and physical presence into the poem through alignment with the dreamer. The dream

The Sybil and Merlin  33

vision not only invites authors into their own works as characters; it also allows them to define their own artistic identity through the narrative subject position of the prophet. The dream vision is inherently prophetic insofar as it is a work written in the first person that claims to be an inspired vision that sheds light on life events. Dante boldly expands the theological elements of the dream vision, representing himself as a second Paul who was granted a vision of the afterlife. The degree to which Dante was claiming actual divine inspiration and physical transportation remains a debated subject.81 Langland, Gower, and Chaucer take a more symbolic approach to amplifying the prophetic aspects of the dream vision. All three of them compare themselves to biblical prophets in strategic ways that highlight their own authorial identities and messages. Michael C. Kuczynski has illuminated the importance of the Psalms within Piers Plowman and the ways in which William Langland gestures to their author, David, as a prophetic poet who strove, as he strives, towards moral reform.82 Alistair Minnis has also examined the manner in which John Gower draws comparisons between himself and the apocalyptic prophet, John of Patmos, in order to assert similar auctoritas – a special kind of authority only ascribed to great thinkers of the past.83 Russell Peck has drawn attention to Gower’s prominent use of Daniel as a double for himself in both the Vox clamantis and the Confessio Amantis.84 As I will argue in chapter 4, Chaucer also likens himself to Enoch and Eli in The House of Fame. Beyond comparing themselves to biblical prophets, these authors all creatively work within several prophetic and paraprophetic traditions in ways that have yet to be fully appreciated. In each case, one can see the prophetic subject position as allowing authors to clarify their relationships to their sources and their audiences. In the prophetic role, authors can address the nature of their inspiration, whether it is Langland’s thorough deconstruction of a variety of ecclesiastical authorities, Gower’s attention to the vox populi, or Chaucer’s intimate knowledge of both the classics and court gossip. Likewise, their prophetic positions emphasize the importance of their moral and ethical messages to resolving the problems of their times. Despite their similar explorations of prophetic authorial personae in dream visions, Langland, Gower, and Chaucer took distinct approaches to adapting political prophecies from the traditions of the Sibyl and Merlin. Langland mimics political prophecy to ridicule and revise its purpose. Gower only works with political prophecy via vatincinium ex eventu in the Visio of the Vox clamantis until he more earnestly adopts the mantle of political prophet during the reign of Henry IV. Chaucer stands out as the Ricardian author least apt to engage with any form of political

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prophecy whatsoever. Rather, he delves deeply into the classical roots of the dream vision to use the prophetic subject position as a place to emphasize his inspiration from previous authors. Regardless of the disparity of their approaches to political prophecy, all three authors have been subject to misleading retrospective prophetic interpretations by later readers. The prophetic registers that Langland, Gower, and Chaucer claimed for themselves, combined with their status as canonical authors, made them ideal voices to appropriate for political purposes. Furthermore, once the appropriation occurred, the retrospective prophecies that were applied to Langland, Gower, and Chaucer influenced subsequent readings of their works. Because they have their own discreet beginnings and endings, predictions are easily lifted out of a lengthy text. They can become the subject of their own discussions, redefining or even sometimes eclipsing the literary work that contains them. Such was the case with Piers Plowman, which was not published in full between 1561 and 1813.85 Because the lengthy and complex text remained out of grasp for several centuries, its reputation and, by extension, Langland’s, was solely based on political interpretations of its short prognostications. When readers rediscovered the whole work of Piers Plowman, the parodic nature of the political prophecies within it became practically imperceptible to an audience primed to see them as genuine foresight.

2 William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies

As the last chapter has illustrated, political prophecies like those of the Last Emperor were repeatedly revised to endorse different and even opposing leaders. Langland adapts these and several other prophecies to suit his own purposes, but he does so in a radically creative way. The Vision of Piers Plowman presents predictions that satirize the self-serving nature of political prophecies while also promoting a better cause – social and political reform instituted for the common good. By putting elaborate prognostications into the mouths of Conscience, Will, and Clergy, Langland not only responds to but amends several English political prophecies. Revising political prophecies that would have been familiar to a fourteenth-century audience, Langland uses his narrative position as a morally guided prophet to endorse social ethics above personal gain. Critical recognition of these prognostications’ satirical nature has been hindered by their unusual reception history. Fueled by sixteenthcentury historians’ early efforts to present Langland as a protoProtestant, readers and editors continually interpreted Clergy’s prophecy as a prediction of the English Reformation for centuries. In the famous prognostication, Clergy declares: Ac þer shal come a kyng and confesse yow religiouses, And bete yow, as þe Bible telleþ, for brekynge of youre rule, And amende monyals, monkes and chanons, And puten hem to hir penaunce – Ad pristinum statum ire, And barons wiþ erles b[iy]eten, þoruȝ Beatus vires techyng, That hir barnes claymen, and blame yow foule: Hij in curribus et hij in equis: ipsi obligati sunt … And þanne freres in here fraytour shul fynden a keye Of Costantyns cofres [which þe catel is inne]

36  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship That Gregories godchildren han yuele despended. And þanne shal þe Abbot of Abyngdoun and al his issue for euere Haue a knok of a kyng, and incurable þe wounde. Quomodo cessauit exactor, quieuit tributum? Contriuit Dominus baculum impiorum, virgam dominancium cedencium plaga insanabili.1

If one pays little attention to the middle of the prophecy and focuses solely on the king who will “bete” and “amende” the monks and “knok” the Abbot, this looks from hindsight like a prediction of the Reformation to anyone willing to see it. Specifically, it appears as if it foretells Henry VIII’s dissolution of the English monasteries, Abingdon included. This interpretation of the prophecy is not as widely accepted as it once was, but it has never truly gone away. Pedagogical materials often highlight the proto-Protestant interpretation of Clergy’s prophecy without giving other explanations for its content. For instance, the Longman Anthology of British Literature states that Piers Plowman “was ultimately regarded as a prophecy of the English Reformation” without pronouncing that reputation to be earned or unearned.2 In his introduction to Piers Plowman on the British Library’s webpage, Lawrence Warner asks, “Was Langland a prophet, foreshadowing Henry VIII’s spearheading of the English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41)?”3 Although Warner does not proclaim Langland to be a prophet, he leaves the provocative question unresolved. The question has remained unresolved because few critics have offered a satisfactory explanation for the several elaborate and enigmatical prognostications within Piers Plowman. Morton Bloomfield and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton have made efforts to better historicize the prophecies within Piers Plowman by viewing them within the context of medieval religious thought rather than England’s Protestant future. However, they have done so by situating the prophecies in the tradition of reformist apocalypticism, especially that which was inspired by Joachim of Fiore.4 Joachim of Fiore was a twelfth-century Calabrian monk who believed that the Antichrist had already been born and that a “third age” of spiritual perfection on earth would arrive after his defeat.5 Although the Fourth Lateran Counsel condemned several of Joachim’s ideas in 1215, his perspective on the apocalypse remained influential in certain circles.6 Most notably, sometime around 1240, some of the Franciscans began appropriating Joachim’s prediction that two groups of viri spirituales (spiritual men) would lead the resistance against the Antichrist.7 Joachimist Franciscans perceived these viri spirituales as themselves and the Dominicans,

William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies  37

and they looked forward to the reign of an angelic pope in the third age.8 Bloomfield and Kerby-Fulton both see Joachimist influences in Piers Plowman, especially in Conscience’s and Clergy’s prophecies of a king described as a new David, who will bring about an era of peace and the reform of monastic orders.9 Yet, both Bloomfield and KerbyFulton struggle to explain how Langland knew of Joachimism in fourteenth-century England, so this explanation for the prophecy within Piers Plowman has not convinced most scholars. David Aers, Robert Adams, and Richard K. Emmerson have questioned the Joachimist influence on Langland, arguing that he could have gotten similar ideas from the more orthodox writings of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, who describe Christ’s post-apocalyptic kingdom on earth.10 While these apocalyptic interpretations of the prophecies account for their positive view of the future, they do not explain their enigmatical symbols as coherently as the Joachmist readings do. They also overlook the more immediate meanings of the prognostications, which offer practical solutions to the major problems that Piers Plowman underscores. It is unlikely that Langland was knowingly echoing Joachim’s prophecy of a third age. However, Joachimist predictions of an ideal third age did shape medieval incarnations of the Last Emperor prophecy.11 Langland touches on Joachimist themes of ecclesiastical and social renewal through his imitation of these political prophecies. In doing so, he confronts the skewed utopias proposed in prophecies of the Last Emperor. Langland only came to the Joachimist ideas that Bloomfield and Kerby-Fulton identify indirectly through political prophecies. Not only do the prognostications in Piers Plowman not espouse Joachimist theology, but they also expose and critique prophecies that have coopted Joachimism to endorse cheap solutions to communal salvation – namely faith in one monarch or fraternal order to restore justice. Langland’s creative work with political prophecies has been overlooked and misunderstood for two intersecting reasons. Piers Plowman’s original audience would have been familiar with the prophecies that he was parodying, but because early modern interpretations appropriated them for Protestantism, that initial context was difficult for later critics to recover. Furthermore, Langland’s work with parody is unconventional and all the more confusing when its major referent, political prophecy, has been forgotten. Gérard Genette has remarked that Aristotle’s examples of parodia within Poetics “share a certain mockery … the mockery being obtained by separating the letter of the work – the text, the style – from its spirit.”12 Langland’s use of parody goes beyond this kind of mockery. He uses political prophecies satirically

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and earnestly at the same time by mimicking their content yet changing their meaning. While deconstructing their false promises of a future utopia, motivated by greed, the predictions instruct readers on ways to prepare for Judgment Day while also striving towards communal renewal. This chapter first explains Langland’s unusual method of parody and subsequently considers how retrospective Protestant misinterpretations of Clergy’s prognostications have had lasting effects on Langland’s prophetic reputation. Conscience’s Prophecy: Critiquing Prophets for Profits13 The first imitation of political prophecy that appears in Piers Plowman is that of Conscience. Conscience’s prognostication comes in the context of his political debate with Mede about advising the character of the King during war. It is the perfect context within which to introduce a parodied political prophecy. Lady Mede begins an argument with Conscience after he has refused the King’s offer to wed the two of them. Taking offense, Mede defends her own worth by strategically turning the discussion to how well she can help kings. Conscience counters by pointing out that Lady Mede was a poor advisor to King Saul, whose fall is described in the book of Samuel. Conscience then prophesies: I, Consience, knowe þis, for Kynde Wit me tauȝte – þat Resoun shal regne and reumes gouerne, And riȝt as Agag hadde, happe shal somme: Samuel shal sleen hym and Saul shal be blamed, And Dauid shal be diademed and daunten hem alle, And oone Cristene kyng kepen [vs] echone. Shal na moore Mede be maister on erþe, Ac loue and loȝnesse and leaute togideris. (A.III.260–7)

This version of the prophecy is in the A-text, the first version, produced in the 1360s. In the B-text, revised in the late 1370s, Conscience goes on to describe how this Davidic King will bloodlessly convert the Jews and the Saracens. This version of the prophecy also remains in the C-text, written in the late 1380s. Conscience’s predictions of the fall of Saul and rise of David, a unifying Christian emperor, as well as his predictions of the peaceful conversion of the Jews and Muslims, are all paralleled in English political propaganda used to promote battles in the late fourteenth century. While no evidence shows that Edward III or Richard II patronized or encouraged the prophecies written about them, powerful people

William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies  39

who stood to gain from war campaigns often used the king as a rallying symbol to promote battle. When Langland was writing the A-text of Piers Plowman, English nobility, who stood to gain money from the war with France through plunder, patronized a variety of poems referring to France’s ruler, Phillip VI, as Saul, the king who lost God’s favour through disobedience, and England’s ruler, Edward III, as David, the king who gained God’s favour instead. For instance, the anonymous Latin poem, “An Invective Against France,” warns France in apostrophe: Spiritus aspirans bonus a te, Saule, recessit, Ad David accessit, felicia prælia spirans. Est David Edwardus, sancto cum crismate clerens, Philip corde carens Saul est ad prælia tardus. [The good spirit blowing from you, Saul, withdrew, It came to David, ushering favorable battles. Edward is David, shining with holy consecrated oil, Phillip, lacking in heart, is Saul, slow to battle.]14

The poem, written in support of the English war effort just after Edward III’s victory at Crécy in 1349, describes the reason for Phillip VI’s lack of holy favour as his reluctance to wage war.15 The poem urges Edward and England to war not only with the message that Edward is the chosen ruler of France but also with the message that being chosen depends upon one’s willingness to fight. By implication, Edward III must fight or risk losing his holy favour by giving up his claim to the French throne. The Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington, glossed by John Ergome between 1362–4 for the notable war profiteer Humphrey de Bohun, also compares Phillip to Saul and Edward III to David, recalling that “Rex Saul erravit quærens occidere David, / Quem Deus elegit.” [King Saul erred trying to kill David, whom God chose.]16 Ergome glosses this portion of the prophecy as referring to Edward’s victory in Crécy.17 Each of these prophecies praises Edward III by comparing him to David, the victor, but also implies that he could become defeated like Saul by failing to wage the appropriate battles. These comparisons play upon longstanding associations of the French kingship with an anointed leader in the tradition of David. In the book of Samuel, God’s election of David, manifested through Samuel’s anointing him, symbolized a theocracy, legitimized by God. This symbolism was especially useful during regime changes, wherein the new ruler could claim God as the source of his authority. The legitimacy of a king who ousted another king might easily be questioned by his

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new subjects, but the example of David, the king whose victory over the ousted king Saul signaled his favour from God, aided in sanctioning even the most violent regime changes. For instance, when Pepin deposed Childeric in 751, Pope Zachary anointed him to symbolize his Davidic status. Zachary and subsequent popes referred to the Carolingian rulers as “new Moses and David,” implying that the former Merovingian kings, like Saul, had fallen out of favour with God.18 As Lesley Coote has noted, the French kings “either called themselves, or claimed to be, David, with a right to be the secular leader of the Christian world.”19 The English coopted this French symbolism of the anointed leader during their own attempts to supplant the French kings. Beginning in the reign of Edward II and continuing all the way through Henry IV’s reign, a prophecy attributed to St. Thomas Becket circulated, relating how the Virgin Mary had appeared to Becket. She purportedly presented him with a flask of oil and said: Est eternim rex futurus qui per ista[m] unccionem ungetur qui terras a parentibus amissas videclicet Normanniam & Aquitaniam recuperabit sine vi. Rex iste maximus erit inter reges & est ille qui recuperabit multas ecclesias in terra sancta & effugabit omnes paganos de Babilonia & ibidem plures ecclesias sanctas edificari faciet. [Truly, it is a future king who will be anointed with this oil, who will recover the lands lost by his ancestors, that is, Normandy and Aquitaine, without force. This king will be the greatest among kings and it is he who will win back many churches in the Holy Land and will drive all the pagans out of Babylon and he will cause many holy churches to be built there.]20

Asserting that the English had the true God-given oil, passed down through Thomas Becket, this story and prophecy imply that an ­English king will fulfil the role of the Last Emperor, foretold in the p ­ rophecies of the Tiburtine Sibyl. The prediction of the English king as the Last Emperor found its way into several prophetic predictions. For instance, “Adam Davy’s Dreams” describes how “þe kyng Edward com corouned myd gret blis; / þat bitokeneþ he shal be / Emperour in cristianete” (3.80–2).21 In the fourteenth century, a prophecy about England’s war with France appears in several manuscripts, including the chronicle, the Eulogium Historiarum.22 The prophecy describes Edward III as a Leopard (taken from the English royal arms) who will tear apart the lilies of Gaul (taken from the French royal arms).23 The Leopard will then go on to conquer the world before handing it over to Christ:

William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies  41 Ecclesiæ subquo libertas prima redibit. Huic Babylon veniet, crucis aras hic teret omnes Acon Jerusalem leoparde posse redemptæ, Ad cultum fidei gaudebunt se redituros Imperium mundi sub quo dabit hic eremita. [The first liberty of the Church will return under him. Babylon will return to him. He will grind the altars of the cross so that Acre and Jerusalem can be redeemed by the Leopard. They will rejoice, those who will have returned to the cult of the faithful. He will give the empire of the world under him to a hermit.]24

This prophecy is similar to that of the Boar in the Six Kings prophecy from the prose Brut but by focusing solely on Edward III, it grants him the Last Emperor position denied to him in the Brut. These prophecies not only promoted the cause of English rule over France but also English translatio imperii and divine right. In a time when the papal office was asserting its supremacy over monarchies and tending to favour the French during the Hundred Years War, these prophecies affirmed the English kingship as divinely appointed and approved.25 In several cases, the prophecies are explicitly antipapal. The English prophecy “Lilium regnans,” for example, predicts that the French king (represented by the lily) will lose his crown before the English king (called the “filius hominis” or “son of man”) will rule the whole world, but it also predicts the fall of the pope.26 The common thread of all of these prophecies was that they urged Edward III into war with France and were typically patronized by people who stood to benefit from such a war. Studies of the possible identity of William Langland have suggested that he may have been a member of the well-connected Rokele family.27 If he was indeed a member of this family, Langland would have had exposure to prophecies about the English monarchy. Evidence within Piers Plowman indicates that Langland was a cleric who moved frequently and does not seem to have been especially wealthy. Nevertheless, the current likeliest candidate for Langland’s identity, William Rokele, had continuous close ties with more powerful members of his family, like John Rokele, the king’s sergeant under Edward III.28 William Rokele’s father’s side of the family had maintained a relationship with the loyalist Despenser family for several generations.29 His grandfather, Peter Rokele, worked in conjunction with the Despensers to attempt to free the imprisoned Edward II before his deposition.30 The note on the last page of Trinity College MS 212, which first helped Piers Plowman scholars identify the author as William Langland, names

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his father as “Stacey de Roykale” and describes him as a tenant of Lord Despenser. Therefore, Langland’s family ties to the Despensers were strong enough to warrant mention. Henry Despenser, the bishop of Norwich, preached a Crusade against the French in Flanders in 1383. During the Papal Schism, each pope was sanctioning “Crusades” against the other Christian nations that were loyal to his rival.31 Despenser’s Crusade was economically motivated, meant to prop up England’s ability to trade wool.32 To promote it, Despenser collected a number of political prophecies, all centred on Richard II as a Last Emperor figure who would conquer the Holy Land and even reform the monasteries in the process.33 British Library MS Cotton Claudius E.VIII, which was owned by Henry Despenser, begins with three prophecies, “Catulus lincieus,” “The Holy Oil of St. Thomas,” and “Lilum regnans,” all predicting the English king’s victory against France and conquest of the Holy Land. Because it was written to support the Crusade in Flanders in 1383, it was produced only shortly after Langland added the Last Emperor predictions to Conscience’s prophecy in the B-text. Langland’s probable family was associated with the kind of people advancing political prophecies for war campaigns, and it is from this familiar milieu that he would have drawn the language of his apocalyptic prognostications in Piers Plowman. Especially if Langland was William Rokele and was first showing Piers Plowman within his own social circle, he could have expected his early audiences to recognize Conscience’s prophecy as a political one. Langland makes the political nature of Conscience’s prophecy all the more apparent by placing it after Lady Mede’s strong arguments on behalf of war profiteering. Lady Mede As Warmonger Since political prophecies were championed by war profiteers, it is only fitting that Conscience’s imitation of political prophecy appear in an argument with Lady Mede, who is a personification of reward and, in her most negative contexts, political greed. Just before Conscience’s prophecy, Lady Mede had been blaming Conscience for the King’s bad decision “in Normandie” (B.III.187) – an overt reference to Edward III’s controversial decision to sign the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, withdrawing his claim to the throne in exchange for a ransom payment of 3,000,000 écus for King John II of France. Lady Mede herself personifies reward, so her primary complaint against the treaty is, appropriately, its economic repercussions. Edward III gave up his claim to the French crown in exchange for a hefty ransom for King John II. While having Lady Mede speak in opposition to a monetary ransom may seem

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counterintuitive, the rationale of her critique is that the king and his subjects could have made much more money had they stayed in the war. She refers to the ransom as “a litel siluer” (B.III.207), a paltry sum in contrast to ruling France, “þe richest Reaume þat reyn ouerhoueþ” (B.III.208). Lady Mede’s rebuke of Conscience represents the increasingly common negative public opinion of Edward’s decision to sign the treaty, especially among powerful magnates who had profited a great deal from the war. At the time of the treaty, the French had not defeated the English in battle for fifteen years, and the influx of French ransoms and spoils of plunder during the 1340s and 1350s had given the English a taste of economic prosperity.34 Langland composed the A-text of Piers Plowman in the 1360s, during which time this negative opinion of the truce formed in Normandy in 1360 began to grow. After the peace treaty failed, and the war began again in 1369, the English began to suffer more casualties and economic losses. An increasing number of English citizens developed a negative view of the treaty, believing that the negotiation had prevented them from victory when they had held the upper hand.35 Lady Mede’s complaint, “He sholde haue be lord of þat lond in lengþe and in brede, / And also kyng of þat kiþ his kyn for to helpe, / The leeste brol of his blood a barones piere,” (B.III.203–5), echoes that of the Anonimalle chronicler, who claims that the treaty was entered into a graunt perde et damage al roy Dengleterre et a ses heirs pur toutz iours, qare bien pres toute la communalte de Frauns fuist en subieccion et raunsoun a eux et si purroient les ditz captains od lour gentz deinz brief avoir conquis la roialme de Frauns al oeps le roy Dengleterre et ses heirs sil les voldroit avoir soeffre. [to the great loss and harm of the king of England and his heirs forever, for nearly the whole of the community of France was in subjection and ransom to them; and within a brief period the said captains and their men could easily have conquered the kingdom of France to the advantage of the king of England and his heirs, if he had allowed them.]36

Langland uses Lady Mede to voice the popular opinion that the treaty was a poor financial decision, not only for the king himself, but also for the entire realm of England, which had suffered without the king’s largesse. Mede’s counsel, “It bicomeþ a kyng þat kepeþ a reaume / To yeue [men mede] þat mekely hym serueþ / To aliens, to alle men, to honouren hem with ȝiftes” (B.III.209–11), draws attention to the king’s economic responsibility to his citizens and his personal failure to take that responsibility into consideration when deciding to sign a peace treaty.

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Yet Lady Mede’s critique of the treaty also highlights the greed of Edward and others who supported entering the war in 1337 and reentering it in 1369. When Langland wrote the A-text of Piers Plowman, Edward III was in the process of once again declaring war on France. As Denise N. Baker argues, Mede’s “opposition to peace serves to interrogate the values of the warrior class and Edward III himself.”37 Mede’s championing of the cause of Edward’s war is even more damning to him than her criticism of his handling of the Treaty of Brétigny. Mede’s lamentations over what Edward had lost through the treaty, such as “The leeste brol of his blood a Barones piere” (B.III.205) highlight England’s less noble motives for entering and reentering the war. Never does Lady Mede invoke the rhetoric that Edward is the rightful ruler of France. Her focus is entirely on the financial boons of war. Edward III As Saul While Mede’s complaint emphasizes the greed of the warmongers, Conscience’s subsequent retort about how bad Mede was at advising Saul highlights how the peace treaty itself was also motivated by money. In response to Lady Mede’s claim that she is helpful to kings in wartime, Conscience reminds Mede of the story of Saul and David. Through his explication of the kings’ story, Conscience illustrates that Mede herself was to blame for Saul’s loss of life and crown. He explains that God spoke to Saul through Samuel, instructing him to exact divine vengeance upon the people of Amalec: “Forþi,” seide Samuel to Saul, “god himself hoteþ To be buxom at my biddynge, his wil to fulfille. Weend to Amalec with þyn oost and what þow fynst þere – sle it. Burnes and beestes – bren hem to deþe! Widwes and wyues, women and children, Moebles and vnmoebles, and al þow myȝt fynde – Bren it, bere it noȝt awey, be it neuer so riche; For mede ne for monee, loke þow destruye it! Spille it and spare it noȝt – þow shalt spede þe better.” (B.III.264–72)

Amplifying his biblical source, Conscience points to greed (the improper love of Lady Mede) as the source of Saul’s transgression against God’s orders to burn everything and take no prisoners: “And for he coueited hir catel and þe kyng [Amalec] spared, / Forbar hym and his beestes boþe” (B.III.273–4). Because Langland places this

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example immediately after Lady Mede’s complaint against the Treaty of Brétigny, it is easy to note the parallels between Saul’s decision to hold King Amalec for ransom (instead of following God’s orders) and Edward’s decision to take John II’s hefty ransom (instead of pursuing his supposedly divinely mandated claim to the throne). Conscience’s allusion to Saul’s ransom implies that the peace treaty was motivated by Edward’s avarice – desire for the “siluer” that Mede had disparaged as a lesser form of remuneration. While Edward III had paid for the war with taxes on the English people, all of John’s ransom went into Edward’s own pocket.38 Chronicles of the late fourteenth century depict Edward’s decision as one of self-interest above all else. Froissart reports that Edward would have continued the war had it not been for the remonstrance of his greedy cousin, the Duke of Lancaster, who argued that “This war … is not too favorable to you. Your people are the only real gainers by it.”39 Many people saw Edward’s decision not only as an unwise economic one for the country, as Lady Mede conveyed, but also as an act of greed – a critique of the king that Conscience can only intimate, not explain. After describing Saul’s unwise decisions, Conscience announces: The culorum of þis cas kepe I noȝt to shewe; On auenture it noyed m[e], noon ende wol I make, For so is þis world went wiþ hem þat han power That whoso seiþ hem soþes is sonnest yblamed! (B.III.280–3)

Conscience’s declaration that he does not care to interpret it only drops more hints that the story of Saul’s greedy transgression is an indictment of the king’s actions. He is not at liberty to analyse it because the story relates to one of those who “han power” and is standing just before him. However, it is obvious, through the juxtaposition of Lady Mede’s and Conscience’s arguments, that Edward (on some level embodied by the character of the King) is quite similar to Saul. Identities of the Davidic King Conscience’s example of Saul’s greed, which precedes his prophecy of the Davidic king, implies that Edward is not God’s appointed emperor, since he, like Saul, has been seduced by Lady Mede. This has led many recent critics, especially Robert Adams, to consider that the “cristene kyng” whom Conscience describes is Christ himself.40 The prophecy of Ezekiel 37:22–4, to which this part of Conscience’s prophecy alludes, similarly describes a future national unification of Israel: “And

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I will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king over them all … And my servant David shall be king over them.” The Glossa Ordinaria identifies this king as Christ.41 Furthermore, “Christ” means “anointed one.” David is the king who prefigures Christ in the Bible, so prophesying the coming of David could be a prophecy of the Second Coming. Because political prophecies are inherently ambiguous in their phrasing, they are easily adapted to multiple circumstances. This accounts for the continued repurposing and appropriation of political prophecies throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Langland exploits the inherent ambiguity of this format, allowing for multiple interpretations. The apocalypse is the fixed meaning of the prophecy – the outcome that, at least according to Christian believers, will certainly come true. Yet, other readings of Conscience’s prophecy are possible, and Langland encourages them with this political prophetic format. Although it seems unlikely that Edward could fulfil the role of the Davidic king, David was a famously reformed ruler whose realm suffered because of his own relationship with Bathsheba, just as Edward’s kingdom suffers for his relationship with Lady Mede, the allegorical personification of monetary greed (and a double for his mistress, Alice Perrers). By invoking David as a model of kingship throughout Piers Plowman, Conscience implies that Edward too could reform and prove successful in his reign. Much of Conscience’s advice to the king comes from David’s Psalms. He poses the central question of kingship with David’s question, “Domine, quis habitabit in tabernaculo tuo? / Lord, who sahl wonye in þi wones wiþ þyne holy seintes, / Or resten in þyne holy hills: þis askeþ Dauid” (B.III.234–6). Then Conscience describes how “Dauid assoileþ it hymself” (B.III.237) by answering: Qui ingreditur sine macula et operatur Iusticiam. Tho þat entren of o colour and of one wille And han ywroght werkes wiþ right and wiþ reson, And he þat vseþ noȝt þe lyf of vsurie, And enformeþ pouere [peple] and pursueþ truþe Qui pecuniam suam non dedit ad usuram et munera super innocentem. (B.III.238–42)

Because he is denouncing Mede, Conscience ends the answer with a direct quotation from Psalm 15 that specifically deals with usury and bribes. Conscience sets up David as a model for the king in the story, and therefore to Edward III as well. However, instead of urging war in

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order to bring about a Davidic reign, Langland singles out the banishment of Mede – the vice that caused Saul to fall in the first place. In the subsequent passus, the allegorical king fulfils Conscience’s prophecy that “Reson shal regne and Reaumes gouerne” (B.III.285) by sending for Reason to be his advisor and ultimately banishing Mede from his court. In this way, Langland demonstrates a path to reform for the current king. Conscience’s prophecy and its advice to Edward imitates a major rhetorical strategy of English political prophecies, like the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington and “An Invective Against France”. These prophecies compare Edward favourably with David but also gesture to the negative example of Saul as a warning. Political prophecies often predict the end of one king’s reign and the hope of another. The Prophecy of the Six Kings of England does this with Edward II and Edward III, respectively. Conscience’s prophecy imitates this aspect of political prophecy but changes the warning. It is not a failure to enter battle that will prevent Edward III from being the anointed David; it is a failure to reform himself and rid himself of Mede. In fact, battle that is entered for monetary gain will impede the king from becoming the Davidic king of the prognostication. In this way, Langland appropriates the discourse of political prophecy to send a message that is utterly antithetical to its typical purpose to promote war. The message of this prophecy extends beyond Edward III as well because the king of Conscience’s prophecy is not a war hero. Langland makes this especially clear in his revisions to the B-text of Piers Plowman. England had already reentered the Hundred Years War by the time that Langland revised the text in around 1378–9, and opportunity of the Papal Schism was leading more people like Langland’s family associate, Hugh Despenser, to preach battles with the French in places like Flanders as part of a larger Crusade.42 It is therefore in the B-text that Conscience goes on to make a prophecy related to the Crusades. He describes a ruler who will conquer the Holy Land in the manner of a Last Emperor figure: And er þis fortune falle, fynde men shul þe worste, By sixe sonnes and a ship and half a shef of arwes; And þe myddel of a moone shal make þe Iewes torne, And Sarȝynes for þat siȝte shul synge Gloria in excelsis – For Makometh and Mede myshappe shul þat tyme; For Melius est bonum nomen quam diuicie multe. (B.325–30)

Yet, Conscience is describing a peaceful conversion. Noting another reference to “the myddel of the mone” made by Patience in a riddle

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in Passus XIII, Andrew Galloway has cited analogous riddles from the Secretum philosophorum to identify the “myddel of a Moone” as the beginning of a popular riddle whose answer is cor (heart, and by implication, love).43 This analysis is in keeping with Conscience’s previous prediction: And swich pees among þe peple and a parfit truþe, That Iewes shul wene in hire wit, and wexen wonder glade, That Moyses or Messie be come into þis erþe, And haue wonder in hire hertes þat men beþ so trewe. (B.III.301–4)

Here, Langland is likely playing on anti-Semitic stereotypes of greed among Jewish people, claiming that if Christians, within their own confessional community, can reform to such an extent that they banish Mede, Jewish people will be inspired by their example and convert. The riddle within the prophecy reinforces the idea that a change of heart, not a war, will convert the Muslims to Christianity as well. Curtis A. Gruenler offers a convincing reading of “sixe sonnes and a ship and half a shef of arwes” by using the Secretum philosophorum as well: “In this case, the number vi, the first letter of ‘ship,’ and the number xii could combine to spell vis xii, the power of Christ.”44 Riddles appeared in English prophecy, particularly in Ergome’s glosses of the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington.45 By incorporating new riddles into Conscience’s prognostication, Langland could imitate the style of wartime prophecies while introducing differing content. Even if one does not solve the riddles, the message of a bloodless conversion inspired by the banishment of Mede is apparent in the rest of the prediction. These two riddles do not appear in any of the otherwise analogous political prophecies because communal reform is a new concept that Langland is introducing into predictions of “conquering” the Holy Land. This change is not necessarily led by the king. Although Conscience begins by advising the king, his prophecy speaks to all readers and gives them active strategies to bring about a better future, regardless of the monarch’s actions. Political prophecies focus hope on war, which is led by the king, but Conscience’s prognostication focuses hope on peace, which is led by the people. He predicts that each man will “dyngen vpon Dauid” (B.III.312), meaning to read the Psalms for spiritual guidance. This is the final way in which Conscience’s prophecy of David’s reign can be true. If everyone studies the Psalms, David’s wisdom will rule the world. Although Conscience predicts an ideal future in which everyone does what they ought to do, its meaning is still open-ended, just as the future is. The reign of

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David could be brought about by a real monarch, a less covetous public, or Christ himself. In any case, the ideal action for readers remains to “dyngen vpon Dauid,” to attempt to bring about a better world and to prepare one’s self for judgment at the Second Coming. In this way, all meanings of the prophecy converge. Kerby-Fulton has characterized Conscience’s prediction as one of “a millennial society” – a one thousand year reign of reason in the tradition of Joachim of Fiore’s teachings.46 While it is possible that Langland had encountered millenarian beliefs, the ideal society that he gestures towards is most likely a byproduct of the kind of political prophecies that he has imitated and adapted. Most predictions of a Last Emperor figure predict his ushering in a new age of perfection because they had exploited and incorporated Joachimist ideas into their political messages.47 All of the English political prophecies that Langland draws from are a byproduct of that tradition. Rather than adopting Joachim’s prophetic view of the world as heading towards an age of perfection, Langland is casting doubt on the promise of the future offered by political prophecies and presenting a different way forward. Langland made alterations to Piers Plowman again in the 1380s, when Richard II had been king for several years, but the prophecies that he parodied remained relevant because the predictions originally written about Edward III were still being used to encourage Richard II into battle.48 Most of all, the broader, timeless, redemptive message of Conscience’s prognostication remained relevant to Langland’s audience. Clergy’s Prophecy: Clerical Reform from within Clergy’s prophecy in Passus X of the B-text of Piers Plowman harks back to Conscience’s prophecy of Passus III by predicting the coming of a savior king who can ambiguously symbolize either the King of England or Christ himself. This prophecy is not in the A-text, so it appears that Langland added it at the same time that he expanded Conscience’s prediction to incorporate more imagery associated with a Last Emperor figure. In this case, Clergy predicts the coming of a king who will return England’s religious orders to their original, uncorrupted states. This prognostication, like Conscience’s previous one, illustrates reformist actions that the king should ideally take while also posing doubts that he can or will take them. Likewise, the prophecy points to far more practical solutions that the king and the broader community can take to bring about the changes shallowly promised by political prophecy.

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Clergy foretells: Ac þer shal come a kyng and confesse yow religiouses, And bete yow, as þe Bible telleþ, for brekynge of youre rule, And amende monyals, monkes and chanons, And puten hem to hir penaunce – Ad pristinum statum ire, And barons wiþ erles b[iy]eten, þoruȝ Beatus vires techyng, That hir barnes claymen, and blame yow foule: Hij in curribus et hij in equis: ipsi obligati sunt … And þanne freres in here fraytour shul fynden a keye Of Costantyns cofres [which þe catel is inne] That Gregories godchildren han yuele despended. And þanne shal þe Abbot of Abyngdoun and al his issue for euere Haue a knok of a kyng, and incurable þe wounde. (B.X.316–26)

As with Conscience’s prophecy, these predictions could be a foretelling of Christ’s Second Coming, in which he returns to judge and punish everyone, including monks and canons. As Michael P. Kuczynski has noted, “Beatus vir” are the first words of the Psalms and were often used to refer to David, their author, and the Psalms as a whole.49 The Psalms contain some of the most violent imagery in the Bible, especially with respect to God’s judgment. The first Psalm warns that God will protect the faithful “like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season” (Psalm 1:3) but will remove the wicked “like the dust, which the wind driveth from the face of the earth” (Psalm 1:4). The king of Clergy’s prophecy could be God, coming with his angels, to judge humanity, just as the Psalms warned that he would. Just after his prediction, Clergy says, “Ac er þat kyng come Caym shal awake, / Ac Dowel shal dyngen hym adoun and destruye his myȝte” (B.X.328–30). This reference to Cain appears to be a reference to the Antichrist, whom the archangel, Michael, will conquer before the Second Coming.50 While the prophecy gestures to the impending apocalypse, it is also tied to some of the same traditions of political prophecy that informed Conscience’s predictions. The Eulogium Historiarum chronicle, contemporary with Langland’s composition of the B-text, describes a king named Sextus, the Leopard, who symbolizes the king of England. The prophecy is primarily war propaganda, predicting the Leopard’s conquering of France. However, it goes on to describe how he will reign over the world, free the Holy Places and “reducet clerum in statum pristinum et privilegia ecclesiastica renovabit.” [restore the clergy to its original state and ecclesiastical

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privileges.]51 The concept of returning the monastic orders ad pristinum statum goes back to the Gregorian Reform of the twelfth century, which, as Bernard McGinn has explained, sought “to repair the diseased state of the church in light of the imminence of the end.”52 Kerby-Fulton has therefore linked Clergy’s prophecy to those by Hildegard of Bingen and Bridget of Sweden, who predicted ecclesiastical upheaval based on ideas of the Gregorian Reform.53 However, Clergy’s prediction’s focus on the king, especially following Conscience’s prophecy of a wartime king, make it more similar to the prophecies of war propaganda like those found in the Eulogium Historiarum chronicle. The idea of leading the monastic orders ad pristinum statum found its way into war propaganda because the Franciscan Joachimists, who had built on the ideas of Gregorian Reform, appropriated prophecies of the Last Emperor to apply to their concept of the angelic pope.54 Some prophecies present an angelic pope alongside a Last Emperor, but some would eventually absorb the predictions associated with the angelic pope into one Last Emperor figure.55 That is precisely what this prophecy of Sextus the Leopard does. Because Clergy’s prophecy focuses on a king as the agent of change, it seems to come to the idea of leading monastic orders ad pristinum statum from this royalist line of political prophecies. Because some vestigial traits of the angelic pope persist in these political prophecies, the scenario presented in Eulogium Historiarum is somewhat confusing. One might imagine how an angelic pope could accomplish ecclesiastical reform, but the expectations that a victorious king might are more difficult to understand. Clergy’s prognostication of the king who will lead the clergy in “prisitinum statum ire” (B.X.325) confronts this confusion and presents a more logical pathway for a king to enact such reforms. In the condensed account of this prophecy in the C-text of Piers Plowman, reassigned to the character Reason, Langland makes it apparent that he is immitating the political prophetic tradition. At the end of the prophecy, delivered in the context of his sermon to the fair field of folk, Reason promises, “Ac ar that kyng come, as cronicles me tolde, / Clerkes and holy kyrke shal be clothed newe” (C.V.179). The “cronicles” to which Reason refers are those like the Eulogium Historiarum that contain prophecies of a king who will bring about general clerical reform. This prophecy of the coming king, like that of the Leopard, speaks of a ruler who will lead the clergy to reform themselves. Yet, the reference to Psalm 19:8 casts doubt on the ability of a war leader to bring about such a change. Psalm 19: 8 reads: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God.” In the context of a political prophecy, one can consider chariots and horses to

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refer to the king’s armies and the trust misplaced in them by prophecies found in such chronicles. Although Clergy imitates these prophecies, the king that he describes is a moral reformer – the very same described by Conscience in Passus III. Because Conscience has refuted Mede with the Psalms, encouraging the King to banish her from his court, such a reformed king could rebuke monasteries for their greed and encourage them to amend themselves. The phrase, “And barons wiþ erles b[iy]­ eten, þoruȝ Beatus vires techyng,” at once summons violent imagery of barons and earls joining with the king to violently suppress the monasteries and the peaceful vision of compelling them to change by directing them to the teachings of the Psalms. Exploiting the ambiguity of prophetic pronouncements, this tension promises neither the certainty of violence nor peace in such a judgment. In this way, it inspires fear without advocating brutal actions. The rest of the prediction points to a specific legislative action that the King could take – a reformed endowment redistributed to monks and friars alike. As Wendy Scase and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton have noted, the second half of this prediction resembles legislation that had been put before the English Parliament in 1371, requesting that it appropriate funds from clerical orders and distribute those funds to the friars.56 Referring to endowments, Clergy foretells, “And þanne Freres in hir fraytour shul fynden a keye / Of Costantyns cofres [which þe catel is inne] / That Gregories godchildren han yuele despended” (B.X.322–4). Here, “Gregories godchildren” are the English monks, first established by Pope Gregory. These monks, Clergy claims, have “yuele despended” the riches that they have been given. “Constantyns cofres” refers to the “Donation of Constantine,” which the emperor purportedly bequeathed to Pope Sylvester and his successors. Those in favour of clerical disendowment often invoked this tradition of Constantine because it portrayed the government as the source of the clergy’s wealth.57 If an emperor originally donated the money, presumably, the English king (as his successor via translatio imperii) would have every right to govern how that money could be distributed and spent. Langland’s Clergy does not endorse disendowment but instead describes a plan for redistribution that involves giving the friars some of the endowment from the monasteries. Clergy points to the funding as a way to prevent the friars from begging – something which Dame Study has just complained about their doing in her previous speech (B.X.71–95). Piers Plowman launches much criticism of corrupt friars who beg and steal work from other clerics. Yet, support for guaranteed, albeit modest, funding for all clergy is a recurring theme in the text. Piers himself

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claims that poor hermits “shul haue payn and potage and [putte] hemself at ese – / For it is an vnresonable Religion þat haþ riȝt noȝt of certain” (B.VI.150–1). Furthermore, in the C-text’s condensed retelling of this prophecy, Reason says: “Freres in here fraytour shal fynde þat tyme / Bred withouten beggyng to lyue by euere aftur And Constantyn shal be here cook and couerour of here churches” (C.V.173–6). In this version, Langland makes the aspects of redistribution in the prophecy even clearer: “Constantyn,” symbolizing the king, will provide for the friars so that they can live “withouten beggyng” (C.V.174). Clergy’s prediction starkly contrasts with Franciscan Joachimist predictions, which had identified the Franciscan and Dominican orders as the viri spirituales that Joachim had predicted would bring about the end of the second status of humanity and usher in the third. The Franciscans Spirituals emphasized that they would bring about the third age by returning to a state of “absolute poverty of life.”58 Yet, Clergy’s prediction insinuates that corruption among the orders can only be sorted out by giving the friars money rather than following their example of poverty. Furthermore, the prognostication points to the king rather than a new mendicant order as the savior who will lead this reform. This is because Langland is both responding to and amending royalist prophecies of a Last Emperor. Despite the solution that the prophecy proposes, the dialogue surrounding it in the B-text casts doubt upon the practicality of having an earthly king institute it. Presumably because his prophecy has just painted the monarchy in such a positive, reformist light, Will asks Clergy, “Thanne is Dowel and Dobet … dominus and knyȝthode?” (B.X.330). Scripture immediately interjects: I nel noȝt scorne … but scryueynes lye, Kynghod ne knyȝthod, by noȝt I kan awayte, Helpeþ noȝt to heueneward oone heeris ende, Ne richesse riȝt noȝt, ne reaute of lordes. (B.X.330–4)

Since Will’s question is prompted by the prophecy, Scripture’s retort, although technically about Do-well and Do-better, is also a commentary on the prophecy. If kings and their knights are solely motivated by money, how can they be the proper agents to reform the greed of the monastic orders and friars? This comment reminds readers of Clergy’s speech before the prophecy, which just addressed the importance of self-correction before the correction of others. Clergy quotes Matthew 7:3, “Quid consideras festucam in oculo fratris tui, trabem in oculo tuo non vides?” [Why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is

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in thy own eye?] (B.X.261). Clergy thus emphasizes the particular importance of self-reform when it comes to those who preach, advising, “Forþi, ye Correctours, claweþ heron and correcteþ first yowselue” (B.X.283). Clergy’s lesson sets up his subsequent prophecy because it establishes the particular need of those in religious offices to reform themselves before preaching to others. Scripture’s comment illustrates, however, that the same standards apply to the king. If those who correct others must correct themselves first, a king, who “Helpeþ noȝt to heueneward oone heeris ende” (B.X.333), can hardly be expected to reform the clergy. This lesson pinpoints the weakness in the promises of political prophecies. A top-down solution to corruption is only feasible if the person at the top is not corrupt. The apocalyptic reading of Clergy’s prophecy in which God is the reformer is the one more likely to happen, but the practicality of the solutions presented in it imply that an earthly execution of this prediction is still desirable and that everyone should at least attempt to strive towards it. The prophecy advises everyone from the kings to the monks to the peasantry to return to the teachings of the Psalms and do penance for one’s sins like David in preparation for the coming judgment. As Kuczynski argues, Piers Plowman “invokes David’s poetry both to comment on public affairs of the realm, and to testify to the soul’s private, penitential anguish and reform.”59 The prophecy foretells that a king will put the monks “to hir penaunce,” but individuals are eminently capable of penance without being forced. The prediction’s urgent warning reminds the clergy that, whether at the hands of a righteous king and nobility or God himself, the corrupt will face consequences for their actions, so they should attempt to amend themselves first. Because this prophecy was famously interpreted as a prediction of the Reformation, vestigial features of this reading continue to influence its interpretation and suppress its parodic function. For instance, the Everyman edition of the B-text of Piers Plowman, edited by A.V.C. Schmidt, explains Clergy’s speech with this note: “This famous ‘prophecy’ of the Reformation is really an ‘apocalypic’ threat that the pride and negligence of religious will be chastised by king and nobles, who will resume the lands given to the orders in former times.”60 Here, Schmidt aptly summarizes more recent interpretations of the prophecies’ apocalypticism (both Joachimist and orthodox). This reading of the prophecy essentially retains the Reformation interpretation but moves it forward to the end of the time. However, Langland’s work with fourteenthcentury political prophecies is complex and focuses on more than kings and nobles. He looks at the shallow solutions that political prophecies offer to the ills of his own time, challenges their narrative of salvation,

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and proposes a new one, all while holding the inevitable apocalypse in the background of the conversation. Exploiting the ambiguous formulation of prophecy, the prognostication invites multiple layered interpretations, but all of them lead to the same course of action and the same critique. The steps one takes to prepare one’s self for Judgment Day are the same steps that one takes to improve the world, and neither of those involve advocating for profitable war campaigns. Physical or Spiritual Labour in Will’s Prophecy of the Return of Hunger The apocalyptic prophecies in Piers Plowman shed light on political prophecies’ selfish tendency to promote wars instead of advocating for real religious reform in the face of an impending apocalypse. Will’s prophecy at the end of Passus VI of the B-text further critiques political prophecies’ agenda of tying all catastrophes and poverty to an antichrist or political scapegoat. Like Conscience’s and Clergy’s prognostications, Will’s prediction is far more practical than those that it parodies, presenting an actual path forward instead of merely inspiring fear. Passus VI gives an extended description of Hunger’s reign of terror over workers, which forces them to do their jobs to avoid suffering. Will observes that when Hunger retreats, and grain prices tumble, the poor begin to spend their money irresponsibly on expensive food and demand higher wages. They complain about wage freezes, and “corseþ he þe kyng and al his Counseil after / Swiche lawes to loke, labourers to greue” (B.VI.315–16). As a narrator with some apparent upper-class sympathies, Will laments that workers will only work their hardest during lean years and will attempt to organize for better pay during times of plenty. Will does not necessarily express approval of the “lawes” that England regularly enacts to freeze wages, but he does seem to lament out of a belief that the workers’ responses to agricultural profit fluctuations play a large part in their suffering. He then offers a prophecy as a warning: Ac I warne yow workmen, wynneþ whil ye mowe, For hunger hiderward hasteþ hym faste. He shal awake [þoruȝ] water, wastours to chaste; Er fyue yer be fulfilled swich famyn shal aryse. Thoruȝ flo[od] and foule wedres fruytes shul faille – And so sei[þ] Saturne and sente yow to warne. (B.VI.319–24)

In the A-text, the prophecy ends with the mention of Saturn – evocative of Merlin’s prophecy in the Historia, which near the end declares,

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“Saturni sideris liuido corruet et falce recurua mortals perimet.” [The malice of the planet Saturn will pour down like rain, killing mortal men as though with a curved sickle.]61 Such predictions of catastrophic weather were commonly invoked in political predictions adapted from Merlin’s. For instance, the Prophecy of the Six Kings of England, which was incorporated into the prose Brut, critically represents Edward II as the evil Goat that brings “graunt damage famine et mortalite des gentz et perte de terre” [great harm, famine, and death of people and division of land].62 Langland borrows language from Merlin to send a general apocalyptic warning, but in the B-text, at the same time that he was adding apocalyptic warnings to Conscience’s prophecy and writing Clergy’s anew, Langland expanded Will’s prophecy to include this admonition: Whan ye [marke] þe sonne amys and two monkes heddes, And a mayde haue þe maistrie, and multiplie by eiȝte, Thanne shal deeþ wiþdrawe and derþe be iustice, And Dawe þe Dykere deye for hunger – But if god of his goodnesse graunte vs a trewe. (B.VI.325–9)

This expansion adds more riddling to the prediction, just as the revisions to Conscience’s prophecy added riddles. In doing so, Langland makes the prophecy a more obvious parody of political prophecies. In this case, the prediction’s syntax most mirrors Thomas of Erceldoune. Before the prophecy, the Countess of Dunbar asks Thomas of Erceldoune when the conflict between England and Scotland will end. Thomas responds with an extended list of strange signs that will appear before the coming of a particular event. As Rupert Taylor has noted, Erceldoune’s prophecies make dramatic use of “paradox and narrating as fact things which seem impossible.”63 Erceldoune describes a world that will grow chaotic before it is brought to peace: When hares kendles oþe herston … When mon makes stables of kyrkes, and steles castles wyþ styes … When men ledes men in ropes to buyen and to sellen; When a quarter of whaty whete is chaunged for a colt of ten markes.  (4, 6, 10–11)64

The prophecy shows a world upside down, with animals invading the home, the common breakdown of grand monuments like churches and castles, the enslavement of other people, and complete chaos within the trading markets. The riddling additions to Will’s prophecy mimic

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this prophetic language, but they do not appear to change the meaning of the prediction itself in any way. Nevertheless, they establish an even more emphatically apocalyptic tone, particularly with the prediction of a maid having the mastery, which could be read as a reference to the Whore of Babylon. Furthermore, the prediction that Dawe the Diker will die of hunger unless God “graunt us a trewe” is evocative of the final intercession of God on earth. Here, Langland parodies prophecies of famine associated with kingship in the Merlinic tradition but removes the king entirely. Instead, Piers Plowman presents yet another prophecy that gives practical advice at once for life and the apocalypse. This is essentially a pragmatic warning that famine will undoubtedly return and that saving and continuing to remain employed is a wise course of action, given this threat. This would have been sound advice to Langland’s audience. A series of large-scale famines hit Europe in the early fourteenth century. The Great Famine affected many regions of Europe for seven straight years, from 1315 to 1322.65 The famine began in England with abnormally persistent rains followed by an unusually cold winter.66 In the thirteenth passus of Piers Plowman, the character representing the Vita Activa refers to a famine that had affected London in 1370 as well (B.XIII.263–70). In its most basic sense, Will’s prophecy is based on the sensible idea that plentiful harvests will eventually cease and that savings and sustained labour relationships are important to maintain. The foreboding language of prophecy highlights just how predictable the return of Hunger is. Merlin is hardly necessary to predict it. Famine will certainly come again, with or without strange occurrences to precede it. “Flo[od] and foule wedres” are enough to anticipate that. However, the prophecy, like the others, carries an apocalyptic warning that goes beyond labour preparations. Throughout Piers Plowman, prayer is metaphorically tied to labour. In Passus V, Piers explains that he is acquainted with Truth because he works for him. Conscience and Kind Wit persuaded him to “suren hym [siþþen] to seruen hym for euere” (B.V.540). He performs “what truþe kan deuyse” (B.V.547), explaining, “Idyke[d] and Id[o]lue, Ido þat [he] hoteþ” (B.V.544). Piers also attests that Truth is “þe presteste paiere þat [wye] dwelleþ.” Piers’s labour is exactly like that of the hypothetical Dawe the Diker, and because he has a good lord who pays him steadily, Piers is a loyal worker. Allegorically, Piers is serving God’s purpose and does so because it will never cease to be a fruitful endeavor. Through Will’s prophecy of Hunger, Langland extrapolates on this link between field labour and prayer as he observes features of the agrarian economy. Just as field hands seem only to be committed to labour during times of

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scarcity, many people only turn to prayer during hardship. Therefore, Will’s warning is also to spiritual labourers, encouraging them never to withhold their prayers, even in times of prosperity, lest they die eternally in the final judgment. In this sense, “Dawe the Dykere” is meant to represent all people. Both the immediate, practical reading of Will’s prophecy and the more spiritual apocalyptic reading emphasize that people can prepare to live through catastrophe, but Will emphasizes labour and faith-based preparedness rather than the kind of curse brought about by a bad king. Hunger will return, irrespective of who is on the throne, and the damage he ultimately causes will depend upon the physical and spiritual labours of those compelled to prepare for his reappearance. Piers Plowman borrows the language of political prophecies to give predictions that ultimately do not require special access to divine truth. Each prophecy points back to more universally accepted Christian concepts like the apocalypse and the importance of penitential behaviour, all while mimicking prophecies that dubiously claim to know more. Parody Becomes Prophecy What Langland surely could not have anticipated was that the riddles that he added to Will’s prophecy would suit a number of readers reflecting on sixteenth-century politics or that his work’s enduring popularity would add a layer of authority to the appropriated predictions. Although Will’s prophecy differs from the Prophecy of the Six Kings in not linking the predicted famine with the reign of a particular king, his declaration that it will happen when “a mayde have þe maistrie” (B.VI.326) made it useful in collections of prophecies critiquing the reign of Mary Tudor. Sharron L. Jansen Jaeck has determined that the British Library MS Sloane 2578 was most likely compiled in the years between Wyatt’s rebellion (1554) and Dudley’s conspiracy (1556) and that, “Through its pages, the collector of the prophecies reveals himself as violently opposed to Mary’s government, as a Protestant sympathizer, and as incredibly dedicated to one rather startling belief: the imminent return of Edward VI to the English throne.”67 A combination of Will’s and Clergy’s prophecies, extracted from Piers Plowman, appears in this manuscript.68 The combination of these two prophecies transforms both of them into the very sort of royalist propaganda that they deconstruct within the context of Piers Plowman. In Passus VI of Piers Plowman, “a mayde have þe maistrie” simply appears as one of many impossibilia within an Erceldoune-like prediction. However, when that prediction is extracted from Piers Plowman,

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combined with Clergy’s prophecy that “þer shal come a kyng” (B.X.322), and included in a manuscript of prophecies foretelling the calamities of Mary’s reign, the “mayde” becomes Mary. While Will’s prediction removed a famine prophecy from its typical royalist milieu, the prophecy found its way back to the royalist setting after all, due to these revisions. The combined prophecy in MS Sloane 2578 reads: Then I warne you, workmen, wurke while ye maye, For hunger hitherward hastethe to chaste vs. Eare V. be fulfilled suche famen shall arise; thurgh floodes & fowle wether frutes shall fall, & so Saturne send you to warre. When you see the same amys & too monkes heddes, and a maide haue þe maistery & mvlteply by right, then shall deathe withdrawe, & derthe be iustice, then Davy þe dygger shall dye for hunger, but if God of his goodness graunte vs a truce. For þer shall come a kinge & correcte you religious, and beate you as þe bible tells, For breaking of your rvle and nvnnes, mvnkes & chanons, & putt þem to þer penance ad pristinum statum.69

In this context, both prophecies lose most of their more devotional meanings. No longer warning workers to continue to labour or all individuals to continue to serve God, the famine predicted here in these lines is merely a sign of Mary’s divinely condemned rule. God’s “truce” will only come when the crown has returned to a Protestant ruler who will divest the monasteries once again. While Langland adapted popular prophecies to emphasize individual spiritual agency over royalist determinacy, this revised prophecy underscores the central role of the English monarch in salvation. The uncertainty surrounding the identity of the king of Clergy’s prophecy is completely removed. The king is Edward VI, and God’s grace depends solely upon allegiance to him. Prophecies formed of Will and/or Clergy’s predictions appear in at least six manuscripts of the early sixteenth century, and as Lawrence Warner has pointed out, not all of them are explicitly anti-Catholic.70 In the case of British Library Additional MS 60577, this early manuscript belonged to several notable loyal Catholics yet still contains a version of Will’s prophecy scribbled into an empty space.71 However, this version of the prophecy does not append Clergy’s warning, and it removes all mention of workers as well. It merely predicts:

60  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship Whene you se the sonne a mysse & ii monkes heads And a mayed bere rule & reigne & multiply by eyght Then shall fruyt of þe erth fayll by fludes & foule wether Except god of his marcy gyve & graunt a Treue Quod Piers Plowman.

This small portion of the prophecy could have had a number of meanings for the unknown person who wrote it into the manuscript, but it seems most likely to be a lamentation of the current divided state of England, a fear of impending apocalypse, and a plea for divine intervention. In its shortened form, the prediction refers directly to the Reformation and the reign of Queen Mary. The monks’ heads in the first line are evocative of Henry’s execution of Carthusian monks who refused Protestant rule. Within the second line, the copyist has altered the word “mastery” to “rule,” which emphasizes its applicability to Mary. Whether the person who wrote this approved or disapproved of Mary as a ruler is unclear. The declaration that she will “reigne & multiply by eyght” appears merely to be a reference to her father, Henry VIII. Although Warner convincingly justifies why a Catholic owner of the manuscript, who may have transcribed the prophecy, might be willing to uphold the king’s ecclesiastical authority, this prophetic quotation does not necessitate such a justification.72 In the absence of Clergy’s appended prophecy of the king who will reform the monasteries, Will’s prophecy’s reference to two decapitated monks merely seems violent and tragic. Rather than advancing a particular agenda, the prognostication appears to lament the current state of affairs, turning only to God to give his mercy and “graunt a Treue.” In removing the warning to workers to prepare for the coming famine (literally or spiritually), the prophecy removes Piers Plowman’s message of penance and instead portrays the fate of the people as firmly ensconced within the control of the English monarchy. When it was attributed to anyone, the extracted and revised prophecy was credited to the title character, Piers Plowman. In British Library Additional MS 60577, the prophecy is followed by, “Quod Piers Plowman.” Similarly, in the margins of British Library Additional MS 34779, an annotator has identified it as “pearcys Profacye.” In a copy of the second edition of Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman, British Library MS C.122.d.9, a sixteenth-century annotator wrote “pearcys P[ro]facye” into the margins next to Will’s prediction of Hunger’s return in Passus VI.73 This indicates that the prediction was known and repeated as “Piers’s Prophecy.” The fact that Will clearly speaks the passage and not Piers Plowman, yet the reader still wrote “Piers’s Prophecy” next to

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it, seems to indicate that this attribution was based upon a popular title of the prophecy rather than anything the reader found in the context of the passage. This attribution of the prophecy to Piers Plowman is part of a larger mystery as to why the poem itself was often attributed to its title character. The character was named in broadsides produced by rebels during the Rising of 1381 and as one of the leaders in the Dieulacre chronicler’s accounts of the events.74 Anne Middleton argues that this tendency to misattribute the poem is a byproduct of Langland’s “authorial evanescence,” and Robert Adams and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton also suggest various reasons that William Langland might have been compelled to keep his name within the text fairly obscure.75 George Kane speculates that Langland included anagrams of his name that would be recognizable only to those who already knew him.76 Walter William Skeat observes, in his several late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions of the poem, that people were continually misinterpreting the title, The Vision of Piers Plowman: “The mistake of taking ‘of’ in the sense of ‘written by’ is so common and usual, that most writers (even good critics) have imagined ‘Piers Plowman’ to be the name of the author rather than of the subject.”77 Skeat’s observation is most likely applicable to the poem’s earliest audiences as well, since several manuscripts title the text as “Petro Plowman,” “Pers plowman,” and “visione Petri Plowman.”78 Some (but certainly not all) readers could have mistaken these introductory labels for the name of the author, particularly if they never actually read most of the poem. To many, “Piers Plowman” seems to have been a name upon which to hang predictions and opinions more than an authorial figure. The Emergence of Proto-Protestant Langland When Robert Crowley first published Piers Plowman in 1550, he became one of the first people to invent an authorial persona for Langland and to try to reconcile the prognostications within Piers Plowman with that persona. Crowley’s preface to the work presents Langland as a proto-Protestant and cautiously embraces Clergy’s supposed prediction of the Monastic Dissolution. Crowley associates Langland with John Wycliffe as a religious thinker who was critical of ecclesiastical corruption: “It pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geuing them boldnes of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute agaynste the worckes of darkenes, as did John wicklefe, who also in those dayes translated the holye Bible into the Englisshe tonge.”79 Several of Wycliffe’s theological convictions – his

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translation of the Bible, his disbelief in transubstantiation, and his criticism of the papacy – made him similar to the reformers of the sixteenth century. With some caveats, Wycliffe might justifiably be deemed a proto-Protestant. Locating Protestant ideas in the fourteenthcentury Oxfordian theologian allowed historians to represent the Reformation as essentially English rather than imported from the continent. Crowley does not go so far as to say that Langland ascribed to Wycliffe’s teachings, but he considers them united in their willingness to criticize the Church. His discussion of God’s inspiration of Langland and Wycliffe implies that the English Reformation was not only approved of but ushered forward by God himself. Highlighting Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible, Crowley also casts Langland and Wycliffe as holy prophets, ministering to the English public with the written word. Although Crowley was willing to portray Langland as a prophet of God’s words and intentions, he was less comfortable associating him with the political prognostications in Piers Plowman. This is because their parodic nature made it difficult to embrace Clergy’s supposed prognostication of the Dissolution as true. In his Introduction, Crowley claims that Langland did not write Will’s prediction of Hunger’s return. He argues: As for that written in the .xxxvi. leafe of thys boke concernynge a dearth then to come; is spoken by the knowledge of astronomie as may wel be gathered bi that he saith, Saturne sente him to tell And that whiche foloweth and geueth it the face of a prophecye is lyke to be a thing added of some other man that the first autour for diuerse copies haue it diuerslye. (sig. *2v)80

Crowley was the first editor to propose the existence of three different versions of Piers Plowman, revised by the same poet, so his reasoning that the prophecy was not written by Langland because it exists in multiple formats is contrived. Lawrence Warner and Eric Weiskott have suggested that Crowley wanted to distance Piers Plowman from the less intellectual, more superstitious, discourse of political prophecy, especially in light of the appropriated prophecies that had been circulating in political contexts.81 Michael Rodman Jones posits that Crowley may have wanted to avoid associating Piers Plowman with prophecy in the wake of Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 – a series of protests by agrarian workers seeking changes in land policies and economic conditions.82 Accounts by John Hayward and Raphael Holinshed had blamed false prophecies for instigating the violence of the rebellion.83 These factors

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surely contributed to Crowley’s dismissal of Will’s prophecy, but Crowley also seems to have felt the need to disavow other moments of prognostication precisely because he had taken one of them, Clergy’s prophecy, somewhat seriously. Crowley had good reason to approach Clergy’s supposed prophecy of the Dissolution with caution. In his Philargyrie of greate Britayne, a satire published just one year after his edition of Piers Plowman, Crowley expresses his disapproval at the manner in which Henry VIII and others greedily profited from the divested properties of the monastic orders.84 Of all of the events related to the Reformation that Langland could have been credited with predicting, this would have been one of the most complex ones for Crowley. He believed that the monasteries needed to be reformed but disapproved of Henry’s methods and greed. Therefore, Crowley discusses Clergy’s prophecy as a true prediction but completely removes mention of the king when he discusses it. Crowley explains, Nowe for that whiche is written in the l. leafe, concerning the suppression of Abbaies; the scripture there alledged, declareth it to be gathered of the juste judgment of god who wyll not suffer abomination to raigne unpunished. Loke not upon this boke therefore, to talke of wonders paste or to come, but to amende thyne owne miss. (sig. *2v)85

Despite the fact that the king factors so prominently into Clergy’s prediction, which begins, “Ac þer shal come a kyng,” Crowley focuses all of the attention on God’s own judgment on the abbeys. By seeing Clergy’s prophecy as a reworking of the biblical quotation that follows it, Isaiah 14:4–6, Crowley also shifts the focus away from Henry VIII: Thou shalt take up this parable against the king of Babylon, and shalt say: How is the oppressor come to nothing, the tribute hath ceased? The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, the rod of the rulers, that struck the people in wrath with an incurable wound, that brought nations under in fury, that persecuted in a cruel manner.86

By reading it as a reworking of Isaiah 14:4–6, Crowley removes the problematic figure of the savior monarch, especially because Isaiah warns that God can break the staff of the rulers as well. In this passage, God is the source of judgment and not a righteous king. By tying the interpretation of the prophecy to Scripture, Crowley invokes the Protestant concept of sola Scriptura. To Crowley, Scripture itself foretold the

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Reformation, and Langland’s inspired reading of Scripture is a testament to that. The discourse of political prophecy traditionally props up the king as the central figure of importance, which is precisely why Langland had parodied it. Yet, this is also why Crowley found the king figure disconcerting when attempting to read Langland’s parody as an earnest prediction of the Reformation. Crowley wanted to dissuade readers from using this and other prophecies within Piers Plowman to excuse and endorse questionable political actions, which is why he warns, “Loke not upon this boke therefore, to talke of wonders paste or to come.” In particular, he may have wanted to dissuade readers from seeing Piers Plowman as a justification for the injustices that had occurred in the name of the Reformation. As Sarah A. Kelen has observed, Crowley only had so much control over the way that people read the prophecies in Piers Plowman, and multiple readers of Crowley’s edition of the work still noted where the prognostications appeared in the margins, seeming to emphasize their importance in the work.87 Furthermore, Crowley’s own cautious reading of Clergy’s prognostication as one that anticipated the downfall of the abbeys was all the more pronounced when combined with the prophetic identity that he established for Langland when he associated him with Wycliffe. Unlike Crowley, who took a nuanced approach to Langland’s status as a peer of Wycliffe, historian John Bale was perfectly willing to fabricate the notion that Langland was Wycliffe’s ardent follower. In doing so, Bale dramatically enhanced Langland’s proto-Protestant authorial identity. Bale’s Scriptorum Illustrium was published nine years after Crowley’s preface to the poem, and it says of Langland: Illud ueruntamen liquido constat, eum fuisse ex primis Ioannis Wiclevi discipulis unum atque in spiritus feruore, contra apertas Papistarum blasphemias aduersus Deum et eius Christum sub amoenibus coloribus et typis edidisse in sermone Anglico pium opus, ac bonorum uirorum lectione dignum, quod uocabat Visionem Petri Aratoris. [It is quite clear that he was one of the first disciples of John Wycliffe, and in spirited fervor against the open blasphemies of papists against God and his Christ, in pleasant appearances and figures, he produced in the English language a noble work, worthy to be read by all good men, which he called the Vision of Piers Plowman.]88

Owen Rogers’s printing of Piers Plowman in 1561 followed Bale’s lead in presenting Langland as a follower of contemporary heterodoxies, coupling the text with a Lollard work, The Plowman’s Crede. After Crowley’s

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three editions of Piers Plowman and Owen Rogers’s 1561 edition, Piers Plowman was not published in full until the nineteenth century. Therefore, for nearly a century and a half, Langland’s reputation was discussed more than his work was actually read.89 It is in this context, of not reading Piers Plowman, that the literary persona of Langland began to resemble that of the Sibyl or Merlin – a mysterious historical individual who had had a special insight into future political events. In The Art of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham declares: He that wrote the Satyr of Piers Ploughman, seemed to haue bene a malcontent of that time, and therefore bent himselfe wholly to taxe the disorders of that age, and specially the pride of the Romane Clergy, of whose fall he seemeth to be a very true Prophet, his verse is but loose meetre, and his termes hard and obscure, so as in them is litle pleasure to be taken.90

Puttenham focuses the importance of his work solely on its prognostications. His reference to Langland’s foretelling of the fall of the Roman Clergy is a direct reference to Clergy’s prophecy. This “true” prediction allows him to embrace the work as an important one while completely dismissing its literary value, one of the unfortunate side effects of retrospective prophecy. Prophecies can be so attractive that they encourage us to ignore and fail to appreciate their contexts. Based on Langland’s reputation not as a skilled poet but as a prophet, George Hickes’s Linguarum Vett[arum] septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et archaeologicus (1709) refers to him as “divino numine afflatus” [divinely inspired].91 In this sense, Langland’s early modern audience elevated him as a religious thinker but demoted him as a creative talent. The Continued Influence of Clergy’s “True” Prophecy Piers Plowman’s first nineteenth-century editors, Thomas Dunham Whitaker (1813) and Thomas Wright (1842), were less apt to present Langland as divinely inspired but offered secular interpretations affirming that in Clergy’s prophecy Langland had anticipated the Dissolution. In his preface, Whitaker clarifies, “To the author of these Visions has been ascribed by some Protestant writers an higher inspiration than that of the muse, and his famous prediction of the fall of the religious houses has invested him with the more sacred character of a prophet … Let us however be inquired whether, after all, there is any

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thing in this prediction to exalt it above one of those lucky conjectures, which are certainly not out of the reach of natural sagacity, or casual accomplishment.”92 Whitaker insists that Langland “understood the natural tendency of enormous evils to redress themselves.”93 In this way, he characterizes Langland as a clever social observer and moral individual but not a conduit for any sort of divine plan or spiritual wisdom. This is in part because Whitaker’s hindsight allows him to see the Reformation as the inevitable product of Humanist logic and ethics. Langland’s prediction no longer seems bold and daring but simply a matter of noticing which way the wind was blowing. In the preface to his 1842 edition of Piers Plowman, Wright is more eager than Whitaker to embrace the prophecy as more than an educated guess. He observes: Clergy receives the pilgrim, and entertains him with a long declamation on the character of Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best, and on the corruptions of the church and the monkish orders, in the course of which is uttered the remarkable prophecy of the king who was to “confess and beat” the monks, and give them an “incurable knock,” which was after less than two centuries so exactly fulfilled in the dissolution of the monasteries.94

Wright marvels at Langland’s prescience in foreseeing the political event but avoids defining a precise reason for it in the more secular environment of nineteenth-century literary studies. The mystique of the unnamed author’s genius appears to be enough for Wright. In this way, notions of a proto-Protestant and prophetic Langland remained, even as editors ceased to present him as divinely inspired. Although noticing this prediction of monastic Dissolution that Langland “got right” seems harmless enough, the assumptions that it promotes deserve careful discussion. The reference to the “Abbot of Abingdon” within Clergy’s prophecy in Piers Plowman may seem to perspicaciously anticipate that the wealthy abbey would eventually incur judgment for its excessive spending. Yet, focusing on this aspect of the prediction shifts the focus from the “Abbot,” who is the subject to of the prophecy, to the abbey itself. Thomas Pentecost, also known as Thomas Rowland, who was the Abbot of Abingdon at the time of the dissolution of the abbey, cooperated with Thomas Cromwell, thereby earning a lavish pension of £200 as well as a lifelong residence in the manor-house of Cumnor.95 This is hardly the “knok of a kyng, and incurable þe wounde” (B.X.316–26) anticipated in the prophecy. Reading Clergy’s prediction as Langland’s shrewd expectation that the greediest members of the monastic orders would earn a rightful retribution sends the message that this is precisely what

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happened during the Reformation. Yet, some of the most opportunistic abbots were financially rewarded. Interpreting the prophecy of the Abbot of Abingdon as “true” requires one to assume that the Reformation was the straightforwardly just judgment of the monastic orders that polemicists like John Bale claim it was. Accepting older interpretations of prophecies promotes the historical narratives that they were intended to advance. Furthermore, focusing on only a couple of sentences of Clergy’s prophecy removes its parodic meanings, distinguishing it from the predictions of Conscience and Will. This perpetuates the idea that the prognostications are an unsolvable enigma rather than a clever form of satire. The distraction of Clergy’s “true” prophecy prevented the insightful Walter William Skeat from fully recognizing the nature of the parodies of political prophecies in Piers Plowman. In his 1869 edition, Skeat aptly notices that Conscience’s prognostication in Passus III of the B-text resembles political prophecies used to promote royalty. However, he identifies it as straightforward royal propaganda. Referring to Conscience’s prophecy, he says, “To this is appended a passage that may have been suggested by Edward’s year of jubilee.”96 Skeat does not say that Langland did not write the passage, as Crowley had said of Will’s prophecy, but he refers to it as “appended,” implying that it has a different status within the poem. He seems to believe that whoever added the prophecy (perhaps the author) was participating in political prophecy to promote Edward’s reign. While Skeat has no trouble identifying Conscience’s prediction as an emulation of political prophecies, he sees no such context for Clergy’s similar prediction. He refers to it as “the curious prophecy, that a king would one day come and beat the religious orders for breaking their rules, and then would the abbot of Abingdon receive a knock from the king, and incurable would be the wound; a passage which excited great interest in the days of Henry VIII.”97 Skeat does not claim Langland as a Protestant prophet, but he does summarize the prophecy in such a way that only highlights the aspects that would have interested people who had read it as a prophecy of Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, perhaps unintentionally continuing to replicate this interpretation. Skeat’s reference to the prophecy as “curious” indicates the kind of noncommittal approach that many academics began to take to its longstanding Reformation interpretations. This open-ended approach to Reformist interpretations of Clergy’s prophecy is especially salient in Rupert Taylor’s conclusions on Piers Plowman within his foundational study of English political prophecies in 1911. Taylor aptly identifies Conscience’s and Will’s predictions as

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examples of parodies, observing, “These passages sound very much as if they were deliberate parodies of actual prophecies that were then popular.”98 However, Taylor does not elaborate on why Langland would parody these prophecies or how the parodies advance the overall messages of Piers Plowman. Rather, he cites them as evidence of “opposition to belief in prophecies.”99 Because Taylor studied political prophecies extensively, he could recognize that the passages from Piers Plowman imitated their imagery and syntax, but he surely also observed that their substance differed significantly from the content of the predictions that they mimicked. This is why Taylor could regard them as parody rather than earnest repetition or imitation. Taylor hastily concludes that the substance of the prophecies was merely nonsensical and that their entire purpose is to mock the superstition of prognostication. This was probably the interpretation most in keeping with Langland’s lingering reputation as a proto-Protestant, or at least a Humanist, critical of the superstitions of his own time. Tellingly, Taylor neglects to mention Clergy’s prediction, which imitates political prophecies as well. This was likely because Taylor could not dismiss that prophecy as nonsensical mockery – because it had inspired a certain amount of reverence for those who thought that it had come true. To consider Clergy’s prophecy alongside Conscience’s prophecy would have required Taylor to interpret the former as parody or take the latter more seriously. This is something that Taylor, who was admittedly not writing a book on Piers Plowman anyway, was unwilling or unable to do. Richard K. Emmerson has cast doubt upon Rupert Taylor’s observation that the prophecies of Piers Plowman are parodic, observing, “If so, the parody clearly escaped later readers of the poem, who annotated such passages as ‘prophecie’ and who included them in collections of prophetiae.”100 Yet, the early readers who appropriated Piers Plowman’s prophecies clearly did recognize their resemblance to the genre that they were mimicking. It was the subsequently prevailing Reformation interpretation of Clergy’s prophecy that made it nearly impossible for early critics to analyse all of the prognostications within Piers Plowman together or to identify them as parodic. More recent critics have aptly identified the prophecies as apocalyptic but have overlooked their parodic nature, largely because the prophecies have been separated from their cultural referents for several centuries. Langland’s Enduring Prophetic Reputation The Dissolution interpretation of Clergy’s prophecy and Langland’s proto-Protestant reputation go hand in hand. Although both have

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waned somewhat over the years, they have never truly disappeared or ceased to influence contemporary readings of Piers Plowman. The association between Langland and Wycliffe, first established by Crowley and Bale, only truly dissolved in the 1980s, as more scholars began studying the poem in its historical context and discovering that it upheld many orthodox views.101 Communication between literary critics and the rest of the world can be slow, and Langland’s Wycliffite reputation endures in circles of educated nonspecialists. For instance, Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Marilynne Robinson refers to Langland as “presumably a Lollard or Wycliffite” in a 2015 article for Christian Century.102 A recent legal blog by a professor of law at St. John’s University reviews Arvind Thomas’s Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages, remarking, “I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought of “Piers Plowman” as an early Protestant work. The publisher’s introduction suggests the poem was firmly situated in medieval Catholicism.”103 One of the best ways to fully dismantle the perception of an early Protestant Langland is to acknowledge the parodic nature of the political prognostications in Piers Plowman. This requires abandoning (or at least clarifying with several caveats) the notion that Clergy’s prediction of monastic dissolution was a historical event that Langland accurately anticipated. Ironically, by asserting the aptness of Langland’s predictions of the future, we tie him too firmly to the past. The prognostications within Piers Plowman illuminate the evils of greed and war for profit, the primacy of self-reform in societal change, the utility of meditations upon the Psalms, and the necessity of preparing for hard times ahead. These are timeless spiritual messages, poetically conveyed by Langland through clever political parodies. Beyond making the decision to parody political prophecies, Langland had no part in crafting the proto-Protestant prophetic image that would define him for centuries. In contrast, as the next chapter will demonstrate, Gower took an active role in transforming himself into a political prophet.

3 Henry IV and the Ex Post Facto Construction of a Prophetic John Gower

Langland’s prophetic reputation remained prominent because sixteenthcentury historians and readers fundamentally shaped his persona in light of the Reformation. Although this image still impacts our readings of Piers Plowman in subtle ways, the concept of a protoProtestant Langland has largely been put to rest in critical circles. Gower, on the other hand, was instrumental in recasting himself as a prophet through proleptic revisions to one of his major works. As a result, the concept of a prophetic Gower who foretold the downfall of Richard II still endures. For the last two centuries, literary and historical criticism has characterized John Gower as a genuine political prophet whose major works foretold the deposition of Richard II in an uncanny way. Setting aside Gower’s supposedly real powers of prophecy reveals a more complex portrait of an author – one whose longstanding attempts to present himself as a vatic vox populi made him into the ideal Lancastrian apologist. Manuscript evidence suggests that Gower revised the Vox clamantis after Richard II was deposed in order to make it appear as if he had presciently foretold the monarch’s demise. Yet manuscript studies have leapt to circuitous narratives to explain Gower’s revisions to the Vox in a way that preserves the longstanding perception of a prophetic Gower. In contrast, manuscript evidence indicates that Gower made no proleptic revisions to the Confessio Amantis. Rather, Henry IV’s supporters promoted earlier recensions of the Confessio Amantis that made it appear as if Gower had predicted the downfall of Richard II well in advance. In this case, viewing the work with the advantage of hindsight, much like sixteenth-century readers would later view the supposed Dissolution prophecy in Piers Plowman, transformed Gower’s voice into a prophetic one that Lancastrians could exploit.1 Prophecy surrounded the coronation of Henry IV more than just about any other English political event. In his Chronicles, Froissart says

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that when he was twenty-four, an elderly knight interpreted the Brut to him, claiming that Merlin had predicted that the crown would return to the House of Lancaster in the future.2 Froissart’s prophetic story is less an endorsement of the Duke of Lancaster’s rise to the throne than it is a reassurance that God is guiding the fate of the English nation, despite recent monarchical upheavals. Many of the prophecies surrounding Henry’s accession were actually anti-Lancastrian. Hermit William Norham and others had produced prophecies that Richard II remained alive and would return to seize the throne.3 These prophecies vexed Henry so much that he, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Chancellor of England all passed laws requiring the formal interrogation of anyone claiming to have had visions.4 Yet, plenty of pro-Lancastrian prophecy circulated as well. For instance, Adam of Usk writes: Aduentus sui exilii dicti Herffordie, et per mortem sui patris iam Lanc’, ducis, sic duplici ducatu functi, iuxta illud prophecie Brydlintoun ubi uersus,

Bis dux uix ueniet cum trecentis sociatis, Phi ffalsus fugiat, non succerret nece stratis.

Iste dux Henricus, secundum propheciam Merlyny iuxta propheciam, pullus aquile, quia filius Iohannis; set secundum Bridlintoun merito canis, propter liberatam callariorum leporariis conueniencium, et quia diebus canicularibus uenit, et quia infinitos ceruos, liberatam scilicet regis Ricardi in ceruis excistentem, penitus a regno affugauit. [The return from exile of the aforesaid [Henry] duke of Hereford – also now through the death of his father, Duke of Lancaster, and thus a duke twice over – fulfilled the prophecy of Bridlington, where the verse reads:

The double duke will come with scarce three hundred men, Let perjured Philip flee, regardless of the slain.

According to the prophecy of Merlin, this duke Henry is the eaglet, for he was the son of John; following Bridlington, however, he should rather be the dog, because of his livery of linked collars of greyhounds, and because he came in the dog-days, and because he drove utterly from the kingdom countless numbers of harts – the hart being the livery of King Richard.]5

Usk appropriates two lines from the lengthy Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington to claim that Henry’s triumph over Richard had been predicted. He appends and reinterprets a prophecy of Merlin to claim that multiple

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prophets foresaw the event. This not only has the effect of emphasizing that God is in control of England’s fate but also that Henry’s usurpation of his cousin Richard’s throne was not treasonous but providential. Henry would later exploit the trend of prophecy surrounding his new reign by supporting the production of retrospective prophecies predicting it.6 Many of these prophecies are alluded to in chronicles but now lost.7 Yet, the most impressive and convincing among them have been hiding in plain sight in the works of John Gower. Gower’s role in this Lancastrian agenda to produce political prophecies has been underestimated, largely because the prophetic portions of the Vox clamantis are told in future tense, rather than past tense, creating the impression of genuine foresight so convincing that it has endured to this day. Scribe 4’s Lancastrian Emendations to the Vox Clamantis The most famous example of Gower’s supposed prescience appears in a revision to Book VI of the Vox clamantis. Here, Gower critiques Richard’s role in the Rising of 1381, eerily alluding to his “destiny” to lose his crown: Rex, puer indoctus, morales negligit actus, In quibus a puero crescere possit homo: Sic etenim puerum iuuenilis concio ducit, Quod nichil expediens, sit nisi velle, sapit. Que vult ille, volunt iuuenes sibi consociati, Ille subintrat iter, hiique sequnter eum: Vanus honor vanos iuuenes facit esse sodales, Vnde magis vane regia tecta colunt. Hii puerum regem puerile more subornant, Pondera virtutum quo minus ipse gerit … Error ad omne latus pueri consurgit, et ille, Qui satis est docilis, concipit omne malum: Nondolus immo iocus, non fraus set Gloria ludi Sunt pueris, set ei sors stat aborta doli … Quo Regi puero scripta sequenda fero. (VI.vii.555–80) [The king, an undisciplined boy, neglects the moral behaviour by which a man might grow up from a boy. Indeed, youthful company so sways the boy that he has a taste for nothing practical, unless it be his whim. The young men associated with him want what he wants; he enters upon a course of action and they follow him. Vainglory makes these youthful comrades vain, for which reason they vainly cultivate the royal quarters

Henry IV and the Post Facto Construction of John Gower  73 more and more. They abet the boy king in his childish behaviour, whereby he wields the authority of virtue the less … Sin springs up on every side of the boy, and he, who is quite easily led, takes to every evil. To boys, it is not wrongdoing but joking, but dishonor but glorious sport; but his destiny does arise out of this wrongdoing … for which reason I offer the following writings for the boy king.]8

This is a revision to the Vox clamantis, which appears in four different manuscripts of the work (Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian T.2.17; London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iv; London, British Library, MS Harley 6291; Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98). The original passage, found in all of the other manuscripts, exonerates Richard II rather than scolding him: Stat puer immunis culpe, set qui puerile Insturuerent regimen, non sine labe manent: Sic non rex set consilium sunt causa doloris, Quo quasi communi murmure plangit humus. Tempora matura si rex etatis haberet, Equaret libram que modo iure caret. (VI.vii.555–60) [The boy is free of blame, but those who have instrumented this boyish reign shall not endure without a fall. So not the king but his council is the cause of our sorrow, for which the land grieves as if with a general murmur. If the king were of mature age, he would set right the scale which now is without justice.]

Since the revised passage is about King Richard II in the present tense, most critics have assumed it to have been written at least prior to 1400, when Richard was still on the throne. Eric Stockton, M.B. Parkes, and others have speculated that the poet added this passage somewhere between 1390 and 1393.9 Also in Book VI, Gower had originally offered a prayer for Richard II: Ipse meum Iuuenem conseruet supplico Regem, Quem videant sanum prospera Regna senem; Ipse iuuentutem regat et producat in euum, Semper et in melius dirigat acta deus. Consilium nullum te tangere possit iniquum, Rex nec in hac terra proditor esse tua… O tibi, Rex, euo detur, fortissimo, nostro Semper honorata ceptra tenere manu. (VI.xviii.1167–72; 1175–6)

74  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship [I pray that he keep my young king, and may his prosperous realms see him a healthy old man. May God Himself guide his youthfulness and prolong it forever, and always direct his actions for the better. May no evil counsel have the power to influence you, O king, and may no betrayer of yours have the power to exist in this land … May it be granted to you, O king, always to hold the honored scepter firmly in your hand during our lifetime.]

The same four manuscripts that had contained the aforementioned revision about Richard as a puer indoctus contain this revision in place of the prayer: Si rex sit vanus, sit auarus, sitque superbus, Quo regnum torquet, terra subacta dolet. Omne quod est regi placitum non expedit illi, Que sibi iura volunt, absque rigore licent: Mira potest regis pro tempore ferre potestas, Vana tamen finis comprobat acta satis … Nunc … in plebe vox est, quod deficient Lege dolus iura vendicat esse sua: Sic bona iusticie fraus compta subintrat, et inde Inficit occultam lex hodierna fidem. (VI.xviii.1169–74; 1179–82) [If a king is vain, greedy, and haughty, so that he torments his kingdom, the land subject to him suffers. Everything that is pleasing to a king is not beneficial to him, [but] the things which justice grants him it allows without undue severity. The power of a king can accomplish wonders for a time, but in the end there is nevertheless sufficient proof of his idle deeds … There is a cry nowadays among the people that because the law is failing, wrongdoing claims to be its own justification.]

Because nearly twenty scribes had revised the four manuscripts of the Vox clamantis containing these two (and two other) updated passages about Richard, G.C. Macaulay made the case that these and other changes to the Vox were made gradually.10 Building on Macaulay’s work, Nigel Saul suggests that the passage referring to Richard as a “puer indoctus” was made in a first round of revisions and that the prayer was revised in a second round, at least eight years before Richard’s deposition.11 Gower’s brazen critique of a not-yet-deposed Richard has led Russell A. Peck to call Gower “a fearless critic of men in high places” and George R. Coffman to refer to him as a “mentor for royalty.”12 Stockton

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asserts, “The poet is to be admired for speaking out fearlessly to his sovereign, a man who later ruthlessly exiled or executed several of the most important nobles of the realm.”13 Beyond his willingness to critique, Gower’s prescience is especially notable here, considering that he refers to Richard’s “sors” [fate] as if he can anticipate that this behaviour will lead to Richard’s deposition. Yet, Gower was neither so bold nor so prophetic, as manuscript evidence supports that he added this and other passages in 1400, after Richard was deposed and Henry had taken the crown. In 1953, Maria Wickert presented an alternate theory that has not yet received its due credit. She argued, “Gower made post eventum corrections within the second recension of the Vox clamantis when he joined the work with the Cronica Tripertita after Richard’s fall, and attempted an organic transition.”14 Wickert makes this argument based on the fact that the Cronica Tripertita, an extended scathing critique of Richard II, written after Henry IV’s accession to the throne in 1400, can be considered a late addendum to the Vox clamantis rather than a separate work unto itself. As David R. Carlson notes, “Though the Cronica also had separate circulation, it survives predominantly as a kind of coda insinuating itself at the end of the greater Vox clamantis, in four of the five manuscripts that transmit it.”15 In order to reflect his changes to the Vox clamantis to include the Cronica tripertita, Gower altered the colophon that details his three major works in several of his manuscripts. Earlier versions of the colophon describe the Vox as a work about the Rising of 1381: Secundus enim liber, sermone latino versibus exametri et pentametri compositus, tractat super illo mirabili euentu qui in Anglia tempore domini Regis Ricardi secondi anno regni sui quarto contigit, quando seruiles rustici impetuose contra nobiles et ingenuos regni insurrexerunt. Innocenciam tamen dicti domini Regis tunc minoris etatis cause indi excusabilem pronuncians, culpas aliunde, ex quibus et non a fortuna talia inter homines contingent enormia euidencius declarant. Titulusque voluminis huius, cuius ordo Septem continent paginas, Vox clamantis nominator. [The second book, composed in the Latin language in hexameter and pentameter verses, treats of the astounding event which took place in England during the time of King Richard II in the fourth year of his reign, when the lowly peasants violently revolted against the freemen and nobles of the realm. Nevertheless, pronouncing upon the innocence of the said lord the king as excusable in this matter because of his minor age, the book declares the blame, because of which and not through Fortune – such enormities take place among men, clearly lies elsewhere. And the name of

76  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship this book, which is arranged in seven sections, is called The Voice of One Crying.]

The revised colophon describes the Vox as an entirely different work: Secundus enim liber sermone Latino metrice compositus tractat de variis infortuniis tempore regis Ricardi secondi in Anglia contingent – ibus: vnde non solum regni proceres et communes tormenta passi sunt, set et ipse crudelissimus rex, suis ex demeritis ab alto corruens, in foueam quam fecit finaliter proiectus est. Nomenque voluminis huius Vox clamantis intitulatur. [The second book, metrically composed in the Latin language, treats of the various misfortunes occurring in England in the time of King Richard II. Whence, not only did the nobles and commons of the realm suffer torments, but even the most cruel king himself was finally laid low, falling because of his fault from on high into the pit which he had made. And the name of this book is called The Voice of one Crying.]

This revised description of the Vox clamantis is basically a summary of the Cronica tripertita, illustrating that Gower expected the Cronica to be viewed as a part of the Vox. Wickert argues that, since appending a biting critique of Richard II to a work that exonerates and praises him would seem rather contradictory, Gower also changed the small sections on Richard II in Book VI of the Vox. Scribal activity supports Wickert’s theory that Gower added the revised passages about Richard at the same time that he added the Cronica tripertita to the Vox clamantis in 1400. All four of the manuscripts containing the revised passage about Richard’s corruption also append the Cronica to the Vox (Hunterian T.2.17, Cotton Tiberius A.iv, Harley 6291, and All Souls 98). Those that do not append the Cronica contain the earlier passages on Richard. Based on this observation, another German scholar before Wickert, Karl Meyer, had argued that the revisions to the Vox regarding Richard II were made contemporaneously with the appending of the Cronica Tripertita.16 Macaulay’s introduction to the Vox acknowledges Meyer’s perspective but claims that he “was preoccupied with the theory that the revisions took place altogether after the accession of Henry IV, and failed to note the evidence afforded by the differences of handwriting for the conclusion that the revision was a gradual one, made in accordance with the development of political events.”17 However, Macaulay mistakes the character of the “differences of handwriting” to which he refers. All four manuscripts containing the revised passages of the Vox clamantis were each originally written

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by a single scribe and later revised by a complex network of scribes. While Macaulay had assumed these scribes to have been working in a scriptorium, under Gower’s supervision, M.B. Parkes concluded in a later, thorough study of the scribal patterns that they “reflect the activities of a few ‘neighbourhood scribes’ who were employed ad hoc on commissions from Gower’s earliest readers and admirers.”18 Yet, like Macaulay, Parkes still assumes that the revisions to Book VI about Richard and the addition of the Cronica tripertita took place over the course of several years. He postulates that Gower first revised the passage at VI.vii.555–80, referring to Richard as a “puer indoctus” instead of a “puer immunis,” in 1390–1 and calls these Gower’s “first stage revisions.”19 Parkes suggests that Gower removed the prayers for Richard’s prosperity and added the portion about the “cry nowadays among the people” to VI.xviii.1159 1200 sometime later in 1392–3 in his “second stage revisions.”20 Parkes claims that Gower added his “third stage revisions,” ten lines at VI.vii.545–54 about the pestilence affecting England, sometime in 1396–7, when he may have written a similarly themed poem, Carmen Super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia, and that he finally added his “fourth stage revisions,” the sections referring to the Cronica tripertita, in VII.xxv.1469–70 and 1479–81, when he completed the Cronica in 1400.21 Parkes’s perception that these revisions occurred in stages is based on the notion that texts by medieval authors often underwent a process of “rolling revision,” and he cites the example of Thomas Aquinas’s revisions to his commentary on Sententiarum III to support this.22 The autograph manuscript shows that Aquinas altered passages of his own commentary to address new issues in theological debate as they came up. Parkes’s comparison between Gower and Aquinas upholds Macaulay’s portrait of an author so thoroughly invested in the status of the monarchy that he was compelled to continually return to the same text to keep it apace with current events. This portrait of Gower is not based on scribal evidence so much as it is based upon a timeline of supposed shifts in Gower’s allegiances produced by Macaulay’s analysis of Gower’s supposed rededication of the Confessio Amantis.23 Macaulay argued that Gower rededicated the Confessio from Richard II to Henry Duke of Lancaster sometime between 1390 and 1391 and that this was the result of the author’s growing dissatisfaction with Richard. As Peter Nicholson has argued, a political change of heart was not only unlikely for Gower in the relatively calm years of 1390–1 but also not necessary to justify Gower’s rededication of the Confessio, since most of the first recension copies already contain a double-dedication to Richard and Henry.24 In any case, the already debated political motivations behind

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revisions to the Confessio Amantis are not an accurate way to assess the date(s) when the Vox clamantis was revised. Macaulay’s enduring portrait of a brazenly and presciently Lancastrian Gower is the primary evidence driving Parkes’s perception of an author as deeply invested in the status of the monarchy as Aquinas was in the status of doctrinal controversies. Although he does not reach this conclusion himself, Parkes’s masterful analysis of scribal revisions strongly suggests that all four of these revisions were made at the same time that the Cronica was appended to the Vox. Parkes notes that one scribe, to whom he refers as Scribe 4, “is the only scribe to appear prominently and repeatedly in five manuscripts” (four containing the Vox and one containing the Confessio). In each of these manuscripts, Scribe 4 made all four of the revisions to the Vox related to Gower’s changing opinions of Richard and copied the Cronica tripertita (although in one case, he merely began the Cronica and let another scribe finish it). Parkes argues that Scribe 4 made these revisions in various stages and supports this by noting “changes in his handwriting and … the colour of the ink,” but conceding that “there is no further evidence to indicate whether or not there was such a delay.”25 Yet, the scribe did not have to wait years to switch ink or handwriting.26 Several practical concerns explain these changes. As Parkes has established, Scribe 4 wrote all four copies of the Cronica Tripertitata found in Glasgow Hunterian T.2.17, Cotton Tiberius A.iv, Harley 6291, and All Souls 98. Each of these copies of the Cronica Tripertita is made in the same script, Bastard Anglicana, and all appear in their own quires of their respective manuscripts, which suggests that Scribe 4 wrote them at roughly the same time, probably just before adding the other revisions about Richard II to the Vox. The Bastard Anglicana script of the appended Cronica differs slightly from the Anglicana Formata script of the rest of the Vox, which was written earlier by different scribes. Therefore, when making revisions to the Vox, Scribe 4 switched scripts to match the original Anglicana F ­ ormata, both for aesthetic reasons and perhaps to make it appear as if the passages had always been there. The scribe had other practical reasons for switching ink upon occasion. For instance, in MS Harley 6291, the scribe’s revisions to VI.vii.555–80 f. 103r are in slightly darker ink than his other revisions because the palimpsest on that particular page is still somewhat visible. In any case, the idea that Scribe 4 made all of the revisions at the same time is more plausible than the idea that he uniformly came back to the same four manuscripts every few years to update them to reflect Gower’s opinion of Richard’s kingship. Parkes notes that other revisions to the manuscript, made by numerous

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scribes, “cannot be related to historical events with any confidence” and typically involve minor instances of rephrasing.27 The fact that so many scribes were involved in the revision of these four manuscripts of the Vox had given Macaulay the impression that the revisions were made over a long period of time, but the fact that the same scribe who made the changes related to Richard also copied the Cronica Tripertita into each of these manuscripts suggests that those changes were made around 1401, after Henry IV had become king. Scribe 4’s hand is also in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, which contains the Confessio Amantis. The version contained in Fairfax 3 had formerly been a first recension version of the work, dedicated to Richard II. Scribe 4, along with Scribe 5, revised the prologue, colophon, and final lines of the poem, to rededicate it to the newly crowned Henry instead of Richard.28 Fairfax 3 is widely recognized to have been revised upon Henry’s accession to the throne, as it addresses Henry as King rather than Duke. Scribe 4 may not have worked on Fairfax 3 at precisely the same time that he made the emendations to the Vox clamantis about Richard’s kingship. However, Fairfax 3 is considered to be the exemplary text for Gower’s revised colophon (the one to which Wickert refers), which recasts the Vox clamantis as a text that criticizes Richard II. It seems likely that, around the time that Scribe 4 was revising the Vox to be critical of Richard II (including the addition of the Cronica to the end of the poem), he and Scribe 5 were also making alterations to the Confessio in Fairfax 3 to promote Henry, and, in the colophon, characterize the Vox as a text critical of Richard II (because their own work had just made it so). Retrospectively Prophesying Richard II’s Deposal through the Vox Populi Beyond the artistic unity that Wickert suggests motivated the changes to these manuscripts, changing the passage would have also bolstered Lancastrian efforts to mitigate Henry’s usurpation by making Richard’s fall seem providential and deserved. Henry’s father, John of Gaunt, was involved in a campaign to forge chronicles proving his son to be the legitimate heir, thus justifying Richard’s deposition by claiming that he was never supposed to be king.29 Paul Strohm has detailed John of Gaunt’s attempts to produce convincing causes for Richard’s deposition, including “perjuries, sacrileges, sodomies, insanity, the impoverishment of his subjects and their reduction to servitude, and the feebleness of his rule.”30 In 1399, Henry’s family produced The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II, an official account of the

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purported flaws of Richard’s reign that led to his fall from power. This was distributed to monasteries for inclusion in chronicles. One of the Lancastrians’ alternate or supplementary strategies for claiming legitimacy was the retrospective use of prophecy. Strohm notes that “Henry IV’s accession was accompanied by a blizzard of prophecy, most newly generated, but all presented as matter already known, the pertinence of which is suddenly recollected under incentive of emergent events.”31 David R. Carlson has convincingly argued that Gower’s Cronica Tripertita was based on The Record and Process.32 Gower’s revisions to the Vox clamantis accompanying the Cronica allow it to function in the same way as these retrospectively produced prophecies. These revisions draw heavily on the same rhetoric that Lancastrians used against Richard during Henry’s accession to the throne. Most notably, Gower emphasizes Richard’s youth more in his revisions than in his original passage, despite the fact that even by 1390, when Macaulay and others have proposed that Gower made the revisions, Richard would have been twenty-three years old. As Wickert observes, the earlier passage uses the terms “puer,” “puerilis,” “iuvenis,” and “iuvenilis” five times, but the later passage uses them twelve times.33 Christopher Fletcher has argued that this emphasis on Richard’s youth echoes the language of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s sermon, Vir dominabitur populo, to the assembly that opposed the king. In this sermon, the archbishop contrasted the puer, Richard, with the vir, Henry, in order to justify Henry’s accession to the throne.34 The All Souls College MS 98, a manuscript containing the Vox clamantis with the revised portions about Richard in Book VI along with the Cronica Tripertita at the end, contains a dedicatory “Epistle to Arundel.” Although Parkes has discredited Macaulay’s assumption that the manuscript was made for Archbishop Thomas Arundel, the work may have been added to the manuscript for an admirer of Arundel who was also a Lancastrian supporter.35 After 1401, Gower would have had every incentive to remove a passage praying that Richard “always hold the honored scepter firmly in [his] hand during our lifetime,” since it explicitly wishes for the opposite of the Lancastrian usurpation. His prayer that “no betrayer of yours have the power to exist in this land” could also be seen as a condemnation of Henry, who had been exiled before coming back to England to seize the throne. The Vox clamantis was a natural fit for Lancastrian retrospective prophecy because Gower already presents his authorial persona as a modern apocalyptic prophet in the manner of John of Patmos or Daniel. First of all, Gower writes the Visio Anglie at the beginning of the Vox

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clamantis as if he had dreamed of the Rising of 1381 before it had happened. Similarly, Carlson has noted that Gower repeatedly writes in the Cronica Tripertita as if he is speaking of events as they are happening instead of reflecting on them long after they have passed.36 Gower pretends to have composed the Cronica in 1397 even though he clearly did so after 1400, and he addresses Henry as a duke instead of as a king to maintain this fiction.37 Because Gower obviously wrote of his “dream” after the Rising, most audiences of the Vox clamantis have not considered his implied prescience to be a serious claim from Gower, but he was certainly cultivating the persona of an author who could anticipate future events. Before describing his dream in the Visio Anglie, Gower likens himself to John of Patmos through his invocation: “Insula quem Pathmos suscepit in Apocalipsi, / Cuius ego nomen gesto, gubernet opus” (I.Prol.57–8). [May the one whom the Isle of Patmos received in the Apocalypse, and whose name I bear, guide this work] and similarly compares himself to the apocalyptic prophet, Daniel, in his testimony that “Ex Daniele patet quid sompnia significarunt” (I.Prol.8). [What dreams may mean is clear from Daniel]. Gower’s reference to these prophets within the prologue highlights the fact that his subsequent apocalyptic vision, like those of John and Daniel, consists of elaborate descriptions of various beasts and speculates on the coming of the Antichrist. In this way, as Alastair Minnis has observed, Gower “invites comparison between his mode of stylistic and didactic procedures and the procedures found by exegetes in prophetic works of great authority.”38 Gower solidifies his connection to Daniel by including his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in Book VII. Gower compares himself to biblical prophets who call for reform in apocalyptic times, highlighting his social role as a poet. When reframed to include predictions of Richard’s downfall, the apocalyptic tone is inextricably linked with the young king’s supposed degeneracy. Gower’s voice is all the more suited to predicting Richard’s demise because he roots his prophetic abilities in his connection to the vox populi. In the Vox, Gower overtly conflates divine inspiration with public sentiment, declaring: Hos ego compegi versus, quos fuderat in me Spiritus in sompnis: nox erat illa grauis. Hec set vt auctor ego non scripsi metra libello, Que tamen audiui trado legenda tibi: Non tumor ex capite proprio me scribere fecit Ista, set vt voces plebis in aure dabant. (VII.xxv.1142–8)

82  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship [I have compiled these verses, which a spirit uttered within me during my sleep. That was a hard night. But I, as an author, have not set down these lines in a book; rather, I am passing on what things I hear for you to read. It is not that a swelled head made me write them, but that the voice of the people put them in my ear.]

He presents his ability to hear the voice of the public as the result of having been spiritually elected for the task. Likewise, he insinuates that the voice of the people is itself holy. Anne Middleton has characterized Langland’s and Gower’s work as “public poetry,” noting that “in describing their mode of address, the poets most often refer to the general or common voice.”39 Middleton distinguishes public poetry from prophecy, observing, “It is [the public poet’s] task to find the common voice and to speak for all, but to claim no privileged position, no special revelation from God or the Muses, no transcendent status for the result, and little in the way of special gifts beyond a good ear.”40 Yet, claiming to be the voice of the public is also a way of claiming prophetic authority. The Gregorian Reform of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, which clarified that kings were lay rather than priestly rulers, had a profound influence on the ways in which state authority represented itself.41 In the absence of clear divine sanction, kings invoked the authority of “the people,” which was already dominant in the rhetoric of historical Roman law.42 Wherein “the people” had, to a large degree, symbolically supplanted the divinely sanctioned legal authority of the king, claiming to be the voice of the people was much like claiming to be a prophet, the voice of God. Gower’s invocation of the vox populi is similar to rhetoric used to oust Edward II and, eventually, Richard II. Thomas Walsingham reports that after the English parliament had deposed Edward II, the Archbishop of Canterbury articulated the increasing power of the Commons over the monarchy as God’s very own intention by preaching on the text Vox populi, vox Dei at Edward III’s coronation.43 Regardless of whether “the public” had actually demanded the deposition of a king, the notion of popular sovereignty could still be exploited to justify it. Henry Knighton describes how Richard II had threatened to join with the king of France in opposition to his political opponents during the Parliament of 1386 before members of the parliament asserted, “extunc licitum est eis cum communi assensu et consensu populi regni ipsum regem de regali solio abrogare, et propinquiorem aliquem de stirpe regia loco eius in regni solio sublimare.” [Then it would be lawful with common assent and agreement of the people of the realm to put down the king from his royal seat, and raise another of the royal lineage in his place.]44

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Regardless of whether anyone in parliament truly said this, Knighton was a notable Lancastrian, apt to use the language that John of Gaunt would have preferred him use to assert the limits of Richard’s powers. The vox populi was a concept that the Lancastrians used to justify Richard’s deposal, and its pervasive presence in the Vox clamantis allows Gower’s small revised portions of Book VI appear to be not only the prophetic warnings of a divinely inspired poet but the prescient clamor of the public at large. The Lancastrian emendations simplify Gower’s complex perspective on the public voice within the Vox clamantis. Gower’s usage of the vox populi was originally less overtly political and more philosophical. Despite Gower’s repeated affirmations of and appeals to the vox populi, his narrative voice is also extremely sceptical of it. In Book II, Gower begins by separating himself from the masses declaring that most people are noticing that the world is in moral decline, yet, “Se tamen inmunes cause communiter omnes / Dicunt, vt si quis non foret inde reus / Accusant etenim fortunam iam variatam” (II.i.43–5) [All men commonly say that they have nothing to do with the cause, as if no one were responsible for things. In fact they now blame fickle Fortune]. Gower, on the other hand, addresses Fortune with scepticism: “Det quamuis variam popularis vox tibi famam, / Attamen ore meo te nichil esse puto. / Quicquid agant alii, non possum credere sorti, / Saltem dumque deus sit super omne potens” (II. ii.85–8). [Whatever different reputation the voice of the people may give you, in my opinion I still reckon you as nothing. Whatever other people do, I cannot believe in fate, at least as long as God is omnipotent]. In this way, Gower places himself at odds with the people for whom he claims to speak, making his relationship to the public more complex than mere representation. As Lynn Staley has observed of Margery Kempe’s literary influences, “From sermons, pageants, and devotional writing, Kempe would have known that this crowd was typically characterized as malicious, gossipy, literal-minded, and conformist.”45 Although Gower hardly presents himself as being as much in conflict with “the crowd” as Kempe does, he does emphasize the need for individual faith. Gower continues to speak of Fortune “quod dicunt” (II.iv.gloss) [according to what people say] about her powers and then weighs in with his own contrary opinion that “Set sibi quisque suam sortem facit, et sibi casum / Ut libet incurrit, et sibit fata creat” (II.iv.203–4). [Each man fashions his own destiny and opposes chance as he pleases and creates his fate.] In this way, Gower explores the importance of personal redemption in the midst of collective degeneracy. The vox populi may be correct in diagnosing the

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ills of the world, but it neglects to diagnose the self in order to remedy them. Gower’s narrative voice, inspired by the vox populi, comes to represent the public realizing its own flaws through a process of selfdiscovery. Gower extends this fallibility to himself, asking his audience, “Rem non personam, mentem non corpus in ista sucipe materia, sum miser ipse quia” (II.Prol.13–14) [Embrace the matter, not the man, and the spirit, not the bodily form in this material, for I myself am a poor fellow]. In pointing out the public’s eagerness to embrace Fortuna, Gower demonstrates himself to be both a part of and separate from public opinion. He is capable of gleaning its truths while also tempering its misguided suppositions. Gower’s complex relationship with the vox populi becomes simplified in the revised portions of Book VI (which I argue were added at the same time as the Cronica Tripertita). His generalized advice on kingship is transformed into a dire warning when coupled with this exclamation: Talia vox populi conclamat vbique moderni In dubio positi pre grauitate mali: Sic ego condoleo super hiis que tedia cerno Quo Regi puero scripta sequenda fero. (VI.vii.577–80) [Everywhere the voice of the people of today, who are placed in doubt in the face of the enormity of evil, cries out about such things. I accordingly grieve even more than they over the disgusting things which I see, for which reason I offer the following writings for the boy king.]

In this revised version, this is a public voice, unanimously fearful of Richard’s reign. In Gower’s original passage, Gower turns his critique onto the public itself, complaining, “Ad commune vocum non est modo lingua locuta / Immo petit proprii commoda quisque lucri” (VI. vii.549–50). [No tongue now speaks for the common good, but instead each man seizes upon the opportunities for his own profit.] Gower has transformed a passage, critical of a lack of unified voices, to a passage of united voices, denouncing the king. All of the ensuing advice, standard for kingly instruction, becomes exceptionally dire when addressed to the already deposed Richard and issuing from the mouth of a prescient public. Political Prophecies Added by Scribe 4 The revisions by Gower added to the Vox clamantis by Scribe 4 are not only critical of Richard but intentionally worded to sound as if Gower

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had prophetically foretold Richard’s downfall. Gower made efforts to make himself appear to have had genuine foresight of the events of 1399–1400. These efforts are echoed in the poems also added by Scribe 4 to two of the four updated versions of the Vox clamantis, especially “H. aquile pullus.”46 The poem reads as follows: H. aquile pullus, quo nunquam gracior ullus, Hostes confregit, que tirannica colla subegit. H. aquile cepit oleum, quo regna recepit; Sic veteri iuncta stipiti nova stirps redit uncta. [H. son of the eagle, than whom no one is ever more graceful, Has broken his enemies, and subjugated tyrannical necks. H. the eagle has captured the oil, by which he has received the rule of the  realm; Thus the new stock returns, anointed and joined to the old stem.]47

Here, Gower is referring to the “Prophecy of the Eagle,” an excerpt from the Merlin prophecies in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, also cited in the Chronicon de Adae de Usk AD 1377–1421.48 Within the prophecy, “H,” the eagle, travels across the sea to depose the white king. Several circulating excerpts of Merlin’s prophecies had presented Henry as the eagle because his father was John of Gaunt, whose namesake, John the Evangelist, was traditionally represented as an eagle.49 Also, Edward III’s badge featured an eagle, and he was Henry’s grandfather.50 Furthermore, in describing “H. the eagle [who] captured the oil, by which he had received the rule of the realm,” Gower is referring to the “Holy Oil of St. Thomas.” The Virgin Mary supposedly visited Becket during his exile in France and gave him the oil that was intended to anoint the future king who would reunite England and Aquitaine. Richard had allegedly found the oil himself but not in time for his own anointing, so it passed to Henry.51 In this way, the prophecy highlights that Henry, rather than Richard, was chosen by the Virgin to be king. In declaring at the end, “The new stock returns, anointed and joined to the old stem,” Gower also invokes the “Vision of Edward the Confessor,” allegedly delivered to the king by two holy men in Normandy: If a green tree is cut in the middle and the part lopped off is moved three jugera from the stem, when the part moved away shall of its own accord and without the aid of any human hand unite itself to the trunk and begin to flourish and bear fruit, then for the first time can a respite from such great evils be hoped for.52

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Since the eleventh century, the prophecy was interpreted to apply to a variety of political situations, but Gower is using it here to imply that the House of Lancaster, temporarily cut off from the line of inheritance, has now properly rejoined itself to the royal family tree.53 All of these prophecies aided in Lancastrian efforts to legitimate Henry’s claim to his usurped throne by implying that Richard’s deposition was divinely decreed – that it could not have happened any other way. Scribe 4 also writes two psalms after “H. aquile pullus” in MS Hunterian T.2.17, and MS Harley 6291: 88:23 and 40:3.54 Psalm 88:23 reads, “The enemy shall have no advantage over him: nor the son of iniquity have power to hurt him,” while Psalm 40:3 says, “The Lord preserve him and give him life, and make him blessed upon the earth: and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.”55 Both psalms state that God’s favoured ones will have victory over their enemies, implying that God gave Henry the strength to defeat Richard. Alluding to all of these prophecies, Gower cites none of their sources, instead writing them in his own voice, as if he had predicted these events. His use of “H.” instead of “Henry” echoes the letter signifiers of the Sibyl’s prophecies, and it remains ambiguous enough to seem like a prediction. Even though the poem was almost certainly written after Henry’s coronation, when details such as the oil with which he was anointed were made public, Gower’s narrative voice makes it (probably by design) unclear when he originally composed it. Critics have always reasonably assumed that Gower wrote this poem after Henry’s accession to the throne, but they have not done so for the similarly prophetic claims added to the Vox clamantis in the same manuscripts by the same scribe. This is an inconsistent perspective that is not borne out by manuscript evidence. As a result of Gower’s all-too convincing retrospective prophecy, the bulk of Gower scholarship has upheld his revisions to the Vox clamantis as genuinely prophetic. After Macaulay dismissed Karl Meyer’s arguments for post-1400 revisions in his edition, The Complete Works of John Gower, E.W. Stockton similarly overlooked Maria Wickert’s theories in the notes of his 1962 translation of the poem, despite citing her work, Studien zu John Gower (1953), several times. Stockton maintains that Gower’s revision to Book VI was “seemingly an accurate premonition of the Great revolt [against Richard] which followed, rather than hindsight.”56 Given that Macaulay’s edition and Stockton’s translation of the Vox have remained the standard ones to this day, and given that Parkes’s otherwise exhaustive and instructive analysis of the scribal contributions repeats their suppositions, the assumption that the work was revised in 1393 remains pervasive in literary and historical criticism.57 Referring to Gower’s address to Richard as an “undisciplined

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boy,” R.F. Yeager asserts, “This sounds more like a description of a teenager who has frustrated his councilors by refusing good advice over time. Combined with other revisions to Book VI, rendered perhaps as late as 1393, these lines indicate a span of years between the first and final versions of the Vox, with the poet’s changed assessment of Richard’s rule intervening.”58 Drawing from conclusions first reached by Judith Ferster, Diane Watt refers to the insolent nature of Gower’s “1393 revisions to the Vox clamantis” and suggests that in the Confessio Amantis Gower “is more constrained by the fact that he is writing in English rather than Latin.”59 In this case, Ferster and Watt look to language, rather than an alternate revision date, to solve the problem of why Gower could be so scathing in his critique of the still-enthroned Richard in one work, the Vox clamantis, and yet so subtle in a later work, the Confessio Amantis. In his 1997 biography of Richard II, Nigel Saul writes: Gower’s major poems became steadily more critical of the king in the course of the 1390s. Gower’s early work had been relatively sympathetic to Richard. In the first version of the Vox clamantis, written before 1381, the poet had grieved at the decay of the realm, but held Richard himself free of blame. In an epistle in Book 6 he addressed the monarch in terms of affection and hope and implicitly blamed misgovernment on the lords and council. By the time he revised the Vox, in about 1386, his attitude had changed. Richard was criticized for following youthful counsel and for failing to impose self-discipline; and in a new epistle Gower warned the king that “his royal majesty would be venerated only so long as he ruled honourably.”60

If we believe that Gower revised the Vox in 1386, we are believing that the poet was able to predict Richard’s demise with a shocking amount of accuracy. Yet, this seems to have actually propelled the belief that these portions of the Vox were revised earlier. This is how powerful Gower’s prophetic reputation is, and he primarily gained this reputation from Reinhold Pauli’s dramatic interpretation of the poet’s revisions to the dedications of the Confessio Amantis. The Strategic Abundance of First Recension Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis61 Gower dedicated the Confessio Amantis to Richard II in 1390 and then famously rededicated it to Henry, Duke of Lancaster, in 1392. Most critics have assumed that this rededication signaled Gower’s growing

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frustrations with Richard and his hopes that Henry would eventually become king. If this assumption were true, Gower would indeed seem to be a prophet – predicting a political upheaval that would not occur for another seven years. Much literary criticism has been overt in lauding Gower’s prophetic powers. Peter Nicholson remarks, “There is no arguing with the belief in Gower’s prescience, though one may wonder, if the poet actually had this gift, why he ever expressed his loyalty to Richard at all.”62 In his Introduction to the most recent TEAMS edition of the Confessio amantis, Russell A. Peck explains, “In response to Richard’s heavy-handed treatment of Henry by exiling him and confiscating his estates, Gower, like many others in England, turned against Richard. The king’s irresponsible behaviour seemed to annihilate the peace and accord Gower so desired. It was as if the events of time were once again demonstrating the wisdom of Gower’s prophetic vision.”63 Yet, the assumption that Gower’s rededication of the Confessio was due to his political foresight is the result of Reinhold Pauli’s erroneous observations about the poem’s various dedications. Published in 1857, Pauli’s was the first edition of the Confessio since Thomas Berthelette’s in 1532. Pauli’s introductory essay posited a new political theory surrounding the dedications of the Confessio, arguing, “It is not possible that both dedications [one to Richard and the other to Henry] could have been written at the same time; for, if we consider the political situation in those days, only a very abject mind would have made simultaneously two such opposite declarations.”64 What is especially misguided about Pauli’s perspective is that even some of the first recension copies of the Confessio, containing a dedication to Richard, also contain a two-line dedication to Henry earl of Derby at the end of the poem, so, as Macaulay says in his 1901 edition of the Confessio, “It is not quite accurate to say that the dedication was afterwards changed, but rather that this dedication was made more prominent and introduced into the text of the poem, while at the same time the personal reference to the king [Richard II] in the Prologue was suppressed.”65 Due to his assumption that Gower’s dedications could not be written at the same time, Pauli then posits: Gower, who was a close observer of the political events of his days, saw how the young king, after attaining his majority, attempted in the years 1386 and 1387 in conjunction with his favourite the young duke of Ireland, to annihilate the opposition headed by the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel, Warwick, Nottingham, and Derby. He perceived that the king from dispositions and inclination was hurrying himself and the

Henry IV and the Post Facto Construction of John Gower  89 affairs of his realm to ultimate destruction and ruin. He therefore changed his politics early in the reign of Richard II, altered the dedication of his English work in 1392–3, received in the year next following a collar from Henry of Lancaster, and looked upon him ever afterwards as the final restorer of peace and order.66

Macaulay corrects Pauli’s erroneous assertion, pointing out, “The suggestion that the expressions of loyalty and the praises of Richard as a ruler which we find in the first epilogue are properly to be called inconsistent with a dedication of the poem to Henry of Lancaster, his cousin and counsellor, is plausible only in the light of later events, which could not be foreseen by the poet.”67 Macaulay goes on to emphasize, “It is certain that at this time the poet can have had no definite idea that his hero [Henry IV] would become a candidate for the throne.”68 Yet, just as Pauli does, Macaulay still attributes the removal of the dedication to Richard in the second recension to Gower’s growing dissatisfaction with the monarch. Knowing that the poem still contained the double dedication as late as 1390, Macaulay did not have the more famous events of 1387 to which to attribute Gower’s supposed change of heart, as Pauli once did. Therefore, Macaulay simply suggests, “something may have come to his knowledge in the course of the year 1390–91 which shook his faith.”69 Like Pauli, Macaulay attributes Gower’s foresight to his understanding of human nature but also implies that support for Henry’s kingship had been growing for some time: “Whatever feeling there may have been on the side of the earl of Derby would doubtless reflect itself in the minds of his friends and supporters, and something of this kind may have deepened into certitude the suspicions which Gower no doubt already had in his heart of the ultimate intentions of Richard II.”70 Macaulay’s assumption of Gower’s early endorsement of Henry as king is based not only on Gower’s perspicacious mind but also on Richard’s supposedly obvious tyranny. In fact, Macaulay implies that Gower could not sense Richard’s malignity before 1390 only because “Richard’s dissimulation … was deep enough to deceive all parties.”71 Macaulay amends Pauli’s theory to account for the manuscript evidence disproving it in respect to the first recension’s dual dedication, yet he repeats the rest of the logic behind Pauli’s theory about Gower’s instinct that Henry would someday be king in the distant future and that Richard’s own malevolence would do him in. Peter Nicholson has, like Macaulay, noted that the first recension of the Confessio contains a dedication to Richard in the prologue and a shorter one to Henry at the end, which suggests that there was no political inconsistency in addressing the poem to both men long before

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their conflict. Nicholson then carries this logic out to suggest that the apparent shift in patronage seen in the second and third recensions was not likely due to a turn in political allegiance, since those changes in the text took place in 1392–3, when Henry “had little prospect of succeeding to the throne.”72 Despite Nicholson’s very important clarification, Gower’s prophetic reputation persists. While Gower manipulated his own prophetic reputation in revisions to the Vox clamantis, the retrospective impression of Gower’s prophecy in the Confessio Amantis is significantly magnified by the inference of later readers, who had access to manuscripts of the work corresponding to all three recensions of the text and had assumed that Gower’s supposed rededication meant something about his political opinions. To such readers, it has been surprising that the vast majority of surviving manuscripts of the Confessio produced after Henry’s coronation in 1400 correspond to the first recension, dedicated to Richard II. Regardless of when Gower’s political opinions of Richard shifted, the poet was a notable Lancastrian apologist by the time of Richard’s deposition in 1399, composing In Praise of Peace (1400), the Cronica tripertita (1400), and Cinquante ballades (1399–1400) in celebration of the new King Henry. Yet, of the forty-eight complete surviving manuscripts of the Confessio, thirty-one are dedicated to Richard.73 Furthermore, all thirty-one of the surviving copies dedicated to Richard were produced after Henry’s coronation in 1400.74 Gower’s biographer, John Fisher, remarks that, “Just how or why so many [copies] of this early, politically embarrassing version should have been produced after Richard’s deposition remains a question.”75 Yet, keeping the original dedication to the former king Richard may have actually enhanced the work’s value to Lancastrians. Just as he does in the Mirour de l’Omme and the Vox clamantis, Gower claims prophetic authority as the conduit of the vox populi in the Confessio. Because Gower emphasizes his connection to the prophet Daniel as well, Gower’s position as the vox populi in the Confessio is especially suited to that of a kingly adviser. Gower himself was most likely aiming at a much broader audience. As James Simpson has noted, Gower takes a cue from Alan de Lille’s Anticlaudianus in representing politics as “a pivotal science for the soul’s understanding of itself.”76 Gower addresses his advice to the king as model reader in order to address the morality of his entire country. However, when the king addressed has been deposed, he cannot function as the representative of a larger audience but instead becomes a prominent cautionary tale. When the Confessio is dedicated to the deposed Richard, Gower’s persona takes on a genuinely prophetic aspect, especially in the portions of the text

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where Gower likens himself to prophets who warned kings of deposition. Hindsight encourages readers to assume that Gower was earlier warning Richard about the very flaws that would lead to his downfall. Gower’s seemingly prescient declamations vindicate Henry Bolingbroke’s usurpation by suggesting that Richard’s deposition was both deserved and fated. Wim Lindeboom and Joel Fredell have seen the version of the Confessio dedicated to Richard as such a rebuke that each has proposed that Gower actually wrote it last, after Richard had already been deposed.77 Critiquing Macaulay’s idea of three recensions of the Confessio, Lindeboom suggests that Gower’s “second recension” replacement of praise of Richard with a lamentation on the state of England would have seemed like “little less than a public slap in the royal countenance.”78 Yet, this is said from the perspective of someone who has read all of the versions of the Confessio, knows that Richard would be deposed, and knows that Gower would go on to support Henry. Furthermore, this is said from the perspective of someone who has read Gower criticism that speaks of Gower as having foretold Richard’s downfall. Had Gower himself revised the Confessio to be more damning of Richard, one might expect the kind of sharp criticism found in Book VI of the Vox rather than an expression of general concern for England. Gower did not need to revise the Confessio for it to appear to be prophetic or a condemnation of Richard, just as Langland did not have to revise prophecies in Piers Plowman for future audiences to see it as a prophetic condemnation of the Catholic Church. Later scribes merely had to copy the first recension – the one that took a very different tenor after Richard’s deposition. Peter Nicholson has suggested that the large number of first recension copies of the Confessio illustrates that, even before Gower’s death in 1408, production of the Confessio “was already in the hands of the booksellers” who might not have been obliged or able to copy a version dedicated to Henry.79 Building on this supposition, Kate Harris has concluded that “it has to be assumed that the first recension text was most readily available to professional copyists.”80 Nicholson’s and Harris’s explanations, however, do not take into account the “standard” manuscript format of the Confessio noticed by Derek Pearsall. Pearsall has pointed out that nearly all of the twenty-eight Confessio manuscripts produced before 1430 contain the same number of parchment leaves, the same number of columns and lines, and the same two miniatures, along with similar decorations.81 They are also mostly manuscripts containing only the Confessio. Pearsall has concluded that these fairly uniform manuscripts were produced by a “close-knit” circle of London

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scribes.82 The scribes appear to have had access to all three versions of the text even as they reproduced a much larger number of first recension manuscripts. Pearsall explains that twelve of these manuscripts correspond most closely to one another and “form the nucleus” of the twenty-eight manuscripts in the “standard” layout.83 Of these twelve manuscripts, produced at the same time (between 1415 and 1430), six contain the first recension text, four contain the second recension text, and two contain the third.84 The earliest of these manuscripts, MS Huntington/Stafford and MS Fairfax 3, are second- and third-recension versions of the text, respectively, and Pearsall observes that they were “both copied from exemplars prepared probably under Gower’s direct supervision … providing excellent texts of the poem and excellent models of the manner in which it was to be set out.”85 Despite the fact that these eleven similar manuscripts appear to have been based on the layout of second- and third-recension versions of the poem, the scribes produced several more first-recension copies. This phenomenon is exacerbated in the other “standard” or “classic” Confessio manuscripts produced in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Out of all twenty-eight, twenty of them are first-recension manuscripts. It is possible, as Harris suggested, that first-recension versions were easier to come by than third-recession versions at some point, but if so, it appears to have been by the design of those initially responsible for having many more of the first-recension manuscripts made. Furthermore, scribes making several of the first-recension manuscripts had steady access to the second-recension version of the poem. For instance, Scribe D of Cambridge Trinity R.3.2 prepared seven “standard” manuscripts of the Confessio in the early fifteenth century. Four of them are first-recension manuscripts (Egerton 1991, Columbia Plimpton 265, Christ Church 148, Corpus Christi College 67), and three of them are second-recension manuscripts (Bodley 294, Princeton Taylor 5, and Cambridge Trinity R.3.2).86 Pearsall proposes that these early, uniform manuscripts of the Confessio were likely part of “a production programme or even campaign.”87 Considering the prominence given to dedications to Henry in the three third-recension versions produced in this manner, Pearsall speculates that this may have been a politically motivated campaign, spearheaded by Lancastrians. If there was a centralized political campaign to copy the Confessio in large numbers, as Pearsall compellingly posits, the much-larger number of first-recension copies produced by such an effort needs explanation. A hitherto unexplored explanation is that this was the version of the poem that the royal family wished to be in circulation after 1400.88 It was certainly the version that the Lancasters

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favoured in their personal collections. Three of Henry IV’s sons and his sister, Phillipa, owned manuscripts of the Confessio. One of these sons, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, owned a second-recension version that was dedicated to both Richard and Henry, but Thomas, Duke of Clarence; John, Duke of Bedford; and Queen Phillipa all owned firstrecension versions that were dedicated to Richard II alone.89 Furthermore, when the Confessio was translated into Portuguese and Castilian, it was translated from first-recension versions addressed to Richard. The translator of the Portuguese version was Robert Payne, a member of Queen Phillipa’s court.90 As R. Wayne Hamm has observed, “The coincidence of the Confessio‘s being rendered into both Portuguese and Castilian at the very time that the thrones of Portugal and Castile were occupied by Lancastrian relatives is too remarkable to be ignored.”91 Phillipa married King Joāo I of Portugal in 1387, and his other sister, Catherine, married Henry III of Castille in 1388. Perplexed by the question of why translations almost certainly commissioned by Henry’s immediate family would be based on the version of the poem dedicated to Richard II, P.E. Russell speculates that the Confessio was translated either before Henry’s usurpation in 1399 or after Phillipa’s death in 1415. This is unlikely since Payne, the translator, was a member of Phillipa’s court around 1402, making that the probable date of translation.92 We must conclude that the Lancastrians preferred to translate the version of the Confessio addressed to Richard II for political reasons. Promoting a version of the Confessio that retrospectively looks as if it was prophetically warning Richard would be in line with Lancastrian efforts to mitigate Henry’s usurpation. Pearsall has noted that in the Confessio there is “no sense that Gower is acting as a hired man, a Lancastrian propagandist,” yet Gower’s intentions may have had little to do with the way in which the work came to be used by the Lancastrians.93 After 1399, the first recension of the Confessio appeared to be the genuine version of what the Lancastrians had been attempting to fabricate: a prediction of Richard’s self-inflicted demise. Furthermore, it was written by a highly regarded poet nearly a decade before Henry rose to power. Lancastrians could promote such a work for its literary merits while also subtly defending Henry’s accession. When read as a warning addressed to the now-deposed Richard, portions of the Confessio had the potential to function as the Record and Process or trumpedup Lancastrian prophecies did – as proof of Richard’s degeneracy and Henry’s legitimacy. In the Confessio, Gower likens himself to Daniel of the Old Testament, who prophetically warns kings while also warning England of apocalyptic times to come. As Russell Peck has observed, several

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factors make the story of Daniel especially prominent in the prologue of the Confessio: Gower had used the same story in the last book of the Vox clamantis; the dream that Daniel interprets is depicted in the first of two illuminations that appear in the early manuscripts; and Gower returns to another story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams in Book I of the Confessio in a way that builds on the first.94 In featuring Daniel in the prologue, Gower nods to his status as the author of the Vox and gestures to the interpretive role that he plays within the Confessio. While most prophets such as Micaiah or Samuel hear the voice of God directly, Daniel understands God’s voice by analysing dreams. It is Nebuchadnezzar, the dreamer, who is God’s passive conduit or vessel. Daniel’s skill at interpreting the king’s visions is analogous to Gower’s skill at deriving moral truths from the various stories that he recounts in the Confessio. These are truths that Gower speaks both as a conduit for common wisdom, the vox populi, and as a learned reader and composer of stories. David R. Carlson has noted Gower’s efforts to appeal to Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV as a kind of poetic advisor and potential propagandist.95 Through his prophetic role as both Daniel and vox populi, Gower could advise Richard while also demonstrating his utility as a royal spokesperson. As a prophet who understands stories, Daniel is not too far afield from Arion, Gower’s other implied subject position in the Prologue. Elliot Kendall has reasoned that, in simultaneously likening himself to the admonishing prophet, Daniel, and the restorative poet, Arion, Gower does not merely predict a calamitous end for England but gestures to the possibility of penance and transformation.96 Yet, in Book I, Daniel himself takes on a restorative role, which is consistent with the role of Arion. Daniel warns Nebuchadnezzar that his dream of a tree hewn down means that the king will go mad. Gower describes how Daniel implored Nebuchadnezzar, “Amende thee, this wolde I rede … For so thou myth thi pes pourchace / With godd, and stoned in good acord” (I.2934, 2938–9), but Nebuchadnezzar “let it passe out of his mynde” (I.2951) until he suffered for seven years as Daniel predicted, finally returning to human form when he asked God for forgiveness.97 Peck has argued that while the story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue primarily stresses an apocalyptic message, the story of the dream of the tree stresses the possibility for the country and the individual to reform.98 While Gower likely included the story for purposes of general instruction on the importance of repentance, a fifteenth-century Lancastrian audience could read this as a veiled prediction of Richard’s imminent downfall. Just as Daniel warned King Nebuchadnezzar to “amende thee” lest God strike him down like the tree in his dreams,

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Gower appears to have been warning King Richard II to amend himself – a warning which, unlike Nebuchadnezzar, Richard did not heed. As Judith Ferster has argued, the Fürstenspiegel (a work in which a poet addresses a ruler) commonly praises the king to whom it is dedicated but also disciplines him with public reminders of his obligations.99 Although the degree to which the Confessio might qualify as Fürstenspiegel is debatable, Gower surely intended these stories at least partly as warnings to Richard. Strohm has remarked that, unlike his Lancastrian usurper, Richard was amenable to poems that admonished him, since they gave him the appearance of being well advised.100 Joel Fredell has even considered that Lancastrian audiences would have wanted to remove the Confessio’s dedications to Henry, lest they appear to be condemning the monarch.101 Yet, addressed to Richard or Henry during their reigns, Gower’s admonishments would have hardly seemed unduly chastising, especially given how well established the Fürstenspiegel had become as a genre. The intensity with which Gower’s advice condemns Richard and predicts his downfall is greatly magnified by the events of history. While Gower’s prophetic tone in the Vox may be, as Peck argues, more apocalyptic than that of the Confessio, the Confessio appears to be personally apocalyptic for Richard II when read after 1399. Portions of the Confessio in which Gower does not take on an overt prophetic persona become prophetic after 1399; they seemingly attribute Richard’s deposition to the king’s inability to heed proper advice (including Gower’s). This provides even more coherence between Gower’s prophetic authorial voice in the Prologue and Book VII (the latter being mediated through the voice of the narrator Genius, who is in turn repeating the words of Aristotle). In Book VII of the Confessio, the section dedicated to governance, Gower includes a few exempla that allude to the threat of deposition that kings face when they do not listen to the proper advisors or prophets. Calls for English monarchs to listen to proper counsel date as far back as Grosseteste’s On Tyranny (1250), which had argued that kings ought to submit themselves to council-appointed royal ministers. The Second Barons’ War of the 1260s may have been inspired by Grossetest’s rhetoric, continuing the struggle between popular and royal sovereignty that had raged since the signing of Magna Carta.102 Much of Gower’s advice about heeding proper counsel and avoiding deposition is fairly conventional. However, when the warnings are addressed to an already-deposed king, they have the potential to look eerily prescient. This is especially the case because of the stories and examples that Gower employs. Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs have suggested that while the French

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monarchs accepted collections of straightforward models for princes, like Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum (c. 1380), “the English may have preferred the lessons of mirrors put into a more palatable form by a poet: Gower’s Confessio Amantis or Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, both of which gilded the pill with extensive stories to illustrate each point.”103 While the stories may have made the advice contained in the Confessio easier for Richard to swallow, so to speak, they are also potentially more poisonous to his memory. Many of Gower’s examples, drawn from the Old Testament book of Kings, present kings whose downfalls are foretold by prophets and ordained by God. Thus, when addressed to an already-deposed king, the stories themselves seem to predict his downfall and imply that it was divinely sanctioned. A portion of Book VII describes how, after the death of Solomon, the people of Israel came to the new young king, Rehoboam, and asked that he lower their taxes. After consulting “wise knyhts olde” (VII.4067), who tell him to listen to the people, Rehoboam consults men who “yonge were and nothing wise” (VII.4077). These men tell him to threaten the people into subordination. The people desert him and choose another king. The story is suited to Richard’s reign because it involves two prominent charges leveled at him – that he raised taxes too often and that he failed to listen to the appropriate counselors. Nigel Saul reports that when Richard’s Lord Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, came to the House of Commons in 1386 to raise taxes in support of the war with France, “Instead of addressing the issues worrying the commons, he dwelt fancifully on the chimera of a royally led expedition: the king, he said, had resolved to cross the Channel in person … to do this, however, he was obliged to ask his subjects for ‘sufficient aid’ (i.e. a tax).”104 The Chancellor’s miscalculated appeal to his audience led to the “Wonderful Parliament” of 1386, in which the lords and commons demanded de la Pole’s impeachment and censured Richard both for the proposed tax increase and for his poor choice of advisors. This charge of poor advisors continued when the so-called Lords Appellant prosecuted five of Richard II’s close associates in the “Merciless Parliament” of 1387. Lancastrians used the established complaint about Richard’s unwillingness to heed proper counsel to justify the king’s deposition. When the first parliament met under the newly crowned Henry IV, Lord Cobham gave a speech denouncing Richard’s “worthless and evil counsellors,” and Archbishop Arundel gave another, pondering “in what state this same honourable realm … would have been, if it had been placed under good and just government and ruled by wise and suitable counsel.”105 The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of

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Richard II, the official Latin version of the deposition distributed by the Lancastrians, blamed Richard’s trust in “personis indignis” (unworthy persons) for his political demise.106 The Lancastrian chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, writes of friars and doctors of theology who were thrown into jail during Richard’s reign “because they went about preaching the evils of the king’s government and the wickedness of his advisers. Those who were foremost among his counsellors were, according to common opinion, the worst of men.”107 Complaints that Richard listened only to youthful advisors seem to have developed mostly after Henry’s usurpation. Richard the Redeless accuses the former king, “The chevyteyns cheef that ye chesse evere, / Weren all to yonge of yeris to yeme swyche a rewme” (88–9).108 What appear to be Gower’s later modifications to Vox clamantis also point to Richard’s folly in listening to young advisors.109 He laments, “Sic etenim puerum iuuenilis concio ducit, / Quod nichil expediens, sit nisi velle, sapit. / Que vult ille” (VI.557–8). (Indeed, youthful company so sways the boy that he has a taste for nothing practical, unless it be his whim.)110 However, as R.H. Jones has pointed out, in fact few of Richard’s advisors were truly young, and many were advanced in age.111 The charges of youthful advisors play into a larger narrative of Lancastrian writings that, as Christopher Fletcher puts it, “attacked Richard II as a boy not a man … ascribing to him the faults of youth, at his deposition at the age of 32.”112 This is the tactic of the Lancastrian chronicler Adam of Usk when he declares, “This Richard, with his youthful councilors, may well be likened to Rehoboam, son of Solomon, who lost the kingdom of Israel because he followed the advice of young men.”113 The comparison to Rehoboam reinforces two important messages: first, that Richard was responsible for his own fall from power because he had failed to listen to older, wiser advisors, and second, that a divine impulse was at work in the passing of the crown from one king to another in England, just as it was in Israel. The example of Rehoboam sends a compelling message in Adam of Usk’s Chronicle. This message is intensified in Gower’s use of the story in the Confessio because Gower had written his admonishments long before the deposition happened. Gesturing to the possibility of deposition – a possibility relevant to all royalty – was not an especially radical move on Gower’s part. Complaints of listening to the wrong advice had been used to justify the deposition of Richard’s great-grandfather, Edward II, whom the Archbishop John Stratford had compared to Rehoboam in a widely circulated letter.114 Gower may have been reminding Richard to learn from history. Ironically, Gower could not have foreseen the ways

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in which this story of youthful royal advisors would make him appear to be prescient. After the deposition, Gower’s unintentionally prophetic warning melded particularly well with Lancastrian sensibilities through the modern touches that Gower had added. Gower gave the story of Rehoboam a contemporary flavor by describing Israel as “a Parlement” (VII.4031), who “avised were of on assent” (VII.4032) and spoke to Rehoboam “with comun vois” (VII.4034) before they removed him from office. As Ferster points out, similar language of unanimity and “common voice” appears in Gower’s retelling of Livy’s stories of two Roman royals who raped innocent women (Lucrece and Virginia) and were dethroned as a result by the will of the people.115 J.H. Burns explains that in the deposition of Edward II in 1327 and Richard in 1399, barons “sought to prove that the people as a whole had co-operated in, agreed to and acclaimed the depositions.”116 This authority of the public has its origins in treatises like pseudo-Aquinas’s On Kingship (c. 1270), which claims that tyranny can only be overthrown “by public authority,” since it is the community that appoints the king and has a contract with him.117 As John Watts has demonstrated, a great number of thirteenthand fourteenth-century rebellions and depositions invoked the authority of the public because, “If government was for the populus, and if the fisc and the crown were, in a sense public property, then groups capable of speaking for the people or public could claim to represent the interests of the realm – even against the king.”118 Henry IV would have almost certainly approved of a tale of a poorly advised king deposed at the unanimous request of his own people. After all, this was the narrative of Richard’s fall from power that the Lancastrians were encouraging the public to embrace. The prophetic perspective of Gower’s voice is intensified in Book VII by several stories of prophets who warned kings. Gower did not originally include these prophetic figures to foretell the future. His goal was to inspire proper government. The prophetic advisor is a paradoxical figure. He or she warns the king, implying the king’s free will to change the situation that is leading him to ruin. Yet, after the king’s demise, the prophet’s presence raises the question of whether the king’s fall was decreed all along. Gower alters the stories of Old Testament prophets to emphasize the agency of the kings whom they advise. It is only after Richard was actually deposed that Gower’s prophets highlight the fated nature of their kings’ depositions as much as the free will that could have prevented them. For instance, Gower significantly alters the story of Micaiah so that King Ahab’s fall is due to a correctable personal failing, his love of

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flattery. Ahab asks the prophets in his kingdom if he will win the battle against Ramoth Galaad; all respond with flattering affirmations except Micaiah, who tells Ahab that he overheard the voice of God plotting with a spirit to deceive Ahab by sending false messages to his prophets. Ahab has Micaiah thrown in prison and goes on to lose the battle, in which he is slain. Ferster has argued that, given that God himself sends false prophets in this story, Gower questions the king–counselor relationship, illustrating that “the whole enterprise of getting advice from counselors seems futile.”119 Yet Gower alters the biblical story in such a way that Ahab is most at fault for his unwillingness to listen to Micaiah. In Gower’s version, Ahab always had a bad habit of supporting flatterers: “Bot who that couthe glose softe / And flatre, suche he sette alofte / In gret astat and made hem riche” (VII.2531–3). Furthermore, Gower adds the detail that Ahab taught his court to ignore the truth: “Bot thei that spieken words liche / To trouthe and wolde it noght forbere, / For hem was non astat to bere, / The court of suche tok non hiede” (VII.2534–7). Gower’s false prophets are not so much deceived by God as motivated by reward. Gower describes the primary false prophet, Sedecias, as “a flatour” (VII.2572) when detailing his assertion that Ahab would be victorious. Gower also adds the detail that Josaphat, King of Judah “was in gret doute, / And hield fantosme al that he herde” (VII.2588–9). In the original biblical passage, Josaphat hears and believes Sedecias’s prophecy as Ahab does (1 Kings 22:29), but Gower makes him a discerning foil to Ahab. Gower’s Ahab is biased against Micaiah because Ahab “liketh nevere yit to sein / A goodly word to mi pleasance” (VII.2599). Gower’s Micaiah describes how God specifically plans to send Ahab a “flaterende prophecie” (VII.2652), not just a false one. Thus, God punishes Ahab’s habit of rewarding flatterers with the precise instrument of his folly, giving him one last chance by also sending a true prophet. Because Ahab is predisposed to ignore Micaiah’s unflattering words, the king dies. The Old Testament story of Micaiah merely illustrates that God will thwart those who are not his chosen rulers. Gower creatively alters the story to convey the advice given in various models for princes about the dangers of cultivating flatterers. A love of flattery was a common charge against the deposed Richard. In 1399 in Westminster Hall, Thomas Arundel preached a sermon contrasting the boy, Richard, with the man, Henry. Christopher Fletcher describes how Arundel “argued that Richard had a taste for, or understood (sapit), only pleasing things and flattery. The child hated the one who reveals truth. This was how Richard had ruled, having no taste for wisdom. Henry, on the other hand, held like a man to truth.”120 Because Lancastrian supporters took pains to characterize

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Richard as the very sort of tyrant portrayed in models for princes, it is all too easy in retrospect to see Richard in the role of Gower’s Ahab, the king who preferred flattery. Nowhere is the implication that the fallen kings of Book VII are foreshadowing the fall of Richard more flattering to Henry IV than in Gower’s recounting of the story of the fall of Saul and rise of David, predicted by Samuel (1 Samuel 15: 24–6). Gower uses the story of Saul in a section devoted to the importance of pursuing battle when necessary. Saul refused to listen to Samuel’s warnings of God’s orders to kill Agag because “Agag made gret behest / Of rancoun which he wold give” (VII.3832–3). As a result, “Himself, both fro his regalie / He schal be put for everemo, / Noght he, bot ek his heir also, / That it schal nevere come ayein” (VII.3842–5). Gower offers the story as a warning to kings against excessive mercy to their political enemies, describing the penalty as removal from the throne and the end of the royal line.121 The secondary message of listening to the proper advisors in war is obviously present here as well, since Saul failed to listen to Samuel. Saul was deposed by God, and his divinely appointed replacement was David, whom Gower describes as an ideal king. Reading this section of kingly advice in retrospect, it is easy to see Henry as King David, father of the new house of kings, sent to replace the ruler whom God overthrew. Gower falls into the role of Samuel, who warned Saul to no avail, ultimately anointing David as king. Perhaps Gower knew all along that the role of Samuel was potentially his. Part of his warning to Richard is not to make himself yet another example of a king who was warned but did not listen. Regardless of Gower’s intentions or actual expectations of the future, his voice in Book VII became a much more prophetic one by warning Richard of the possibilities of deposition. Gower’s examples of kings’ failures to heed prophetic advice comprise only a small portion of the Confessio and even of Book VII, so what appear to be Lancastrian efforts to reproduce the poem are not solely attributable to the prophetic content of the Confessio, given the literary merit of the work. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why the version dedicated to Richard would be the version that they wanted audiences to read. The sections of the Confessio dedicated to the discussion of kingship are rather prominent. Gower’s encounter with Richard on the Thames in the first recension remains one of the most iconic scenes of the Confessio, perhaps seconded only by Daniel’s explication of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The dedication to Richard is memorable, and the portions of the text on kingship, when addressed to the former king, emphasize the very shortcomings of his reign that the Lancastrians would have wanted to underscore. Gower’s claims to prophetic

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powers come from his ability to understand public sentiment and interpret complex patterns. The idea that he could have foreseen Richard’s downfall takes on a character that is both practical and supernatural. The Ethics of Gower’s Decision After Henry’s coronation, Gower cultivated a poetic voice that was more emphatically prophetic and critical of Richard II, and this included revising the Vox clamantis. The savviness of Gower’s decision to support Henry has rarely been up for debate, but its ethicality has been a point of contention for centuries. On the one hand, editors like Pauli and Macaulay attributed Gower’s removal of the Ricardian prologue to his morally righteous distaste for Richard. On the other hand, Chaucerian scholars have a history of viewing Richard sympathetically and seeing Gower as a sort of traitorous foil to his colleague. In his introduction to the 1721 edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Urry contrasts Chaucer with Gower, arguing: But the respect [Chaucer] retained for his former Master Richard, and the Gratitude for the Favours he had received from him, kept him from trampling upon his Memory, and barely flattering the new King; as most of his Cotemporaries did, and particular Gower, who, notwithstanding the obligations he had to Rich. II. Yet when old, blind, and past any hopes of honour or advantage, unless the view of keeping what he enjoyed, basely insulted the Memory of his murdered Master, and as ignominiously flattered his Murderer.122

The early eighteenth-century antiquarian and Chaucerian biographer, Thomas Hearne, writes that Gower’s Cronica Tripertita “is very violent against that goodnatured, but very unfortunate Prince (Richard II).”123 Based on the misattribution of Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love to Chaucer, Urry and Hearne were under the impression that Chaucer was a Ricardian who had been threatened when Henry took the throne.124 To subsequent critics who have perceived Chaucer as a steadfast supporter of Richard, Gower was a not only a traitor to the former king but to his fellow poet and friend. In his nineteenth-century adaptation of Chaucer’s works for children, Charles Cowden-Clarke writes: We do not find … that [Chaucer] chuckled over the reverses and miseries of his late and generous, if weak, benefactor [Richard]; yet this execrable baseness attaches to the memory of our poet’s friend, Gower, who, with

102  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship the callous selfishness that not unfrequently accompanies a blind old age, spurned the fallen patron through whose munificence he had enjoyed a larger share of favour than had fallen to the lot of Chaucer himself. We may conceive how that generous and noble soul must have revolted at such miserable ingratitude in a brother-poet and friend.125

Because Chaucer’s early biographers have exaggerated the poet’s connections to Richard himself, they also often imagined that he was particularly distraught at the king’s deposal and perhaps even in danger in the court of the new King Henry. Within this tradition, Terry Jones has even gone so far as to suggest that the Archbishop Arundel had Chaucer murdered.126 The division in opinions of Gower’s allegiance to Henry seem to be based upon opinions of Richard’s character – a difficult thing to assess. Lancastrians clearly went out of their way to depict Henry’s predecessor as a tyrant, but the existence of this smear campaign does not mean that Richard was, in actuality, an excellent monarch. To Gower’s defenders, his prescience absolves him of any potential wrongdoing. It creates a biography of a man who did not merely turn on Richard II when he fell from power but instead boldly stood against him when it was exceptionally brave to do so. The retrospectively produced prophetic subject position makes Gower appear to be not only wise but constant. The Persistence of Gower’s Prophetic Reputation Despite the fact that no conclusive manuscript evidence supports the idea that Gower predicted Richard II’s fall from power, the poet has remained a prophet in contemporary criticism for a cluster of interrelated reasons. First, both Gower and the Lancastrians were promoting this perception of the poet. Second, Gower’s prophetic reputation has a cumulative effect. For instance, Parkes has based his perceptions of when Gower altered the Vox upon Macaulay’s interpretations of when Gower revised the Confessio. Third, there remain very few editions of Gower’s works, and the most prominent of those that do exist have been edited by people championing the perspective of a prophetic Gower. Fourth, the nature of Richard II’s rule is still debated among historians, largely because we cannot tell which parts of history have been obscured by Lancastrian propaganda. Gower is often conscribed into this debate as either a witness to Richard’s tyranny or an opportunistic traitor and foil for the supposedly loyal Ricardian poet, Chaucer. Fifth, the “red herring” recension of the Confessio that Gower happened to have originally dedicated to both Richard and Henry has served as

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a source of confusion for later scholars attempting to understand the circumstances surrounding its composition. Sixth, because Gower’s works are either not in English or prohibitively long, they are rarely granted a prominent place on the syllabi of most English courses. Those who study and teach Gower’s works cannot make the case for his importance solely from canonical relevance and often turn to the justification of his historical and political relevance. Gower is important, much criticism tells us, because he had an uncanny talent for diagnosing problems in his country’s general populace and leadership. Finally, audiences of any period rarely expect authors to be as crafty as Gower appears to have been in his prophetic self-fashioning. Gower’s efforts to depict himself as a sage authority have cemented his reputation as a keen political observer but overshadowed his other literary accomplishments. Perhaps in reconsidering Gower the prophet, literary studies will find more ways to recover Gower the poet.

4 The Legacy of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame

None of the Ricardian poets had a straightforward approach to political prophecy. Langland invoked it in parody. Gower only fully adopted it after Henry IV came to power. Chaucer avoided the discourse altogether. This may have something to do with his proximity to the royal court. As Larry D. Benson helpfully summarizes, “Chaucer was a soldier, an esquire of the king’s household, a member of diplomatic missions, a controller of customs, a justice of the peace, a member of Parliament, the clerk of the king’s works in charge of building and repair at ten royal residences, and a forest official.”1 During his time in all of these roles, Chaucer was surely aware of political prophecies as well as their potential volatility, both towards the English monarchy and those who perpetuated them. Even though Chaucer kept his distance from political prophecy, he did not completely eschew the role of the prophet. Within all of his dream visions, Chaucer worked extensively with a continental tradition that I term prophetic citation. Prophetic citation occurs when authors depict a dream or vision and, during it, draw attention to past poets who have influenced them. The “vision” of the past poet is a metaphor for artistic inspiration. Prophetic citation began in classical literature but continued in many of the French and Italian medieval works that influenced Chaucer. During his frequent travels to France and Italy, Chaucer had the opportunity to read and acquire literature that was not available in England.2 Fittingly, Chaucer uses the imported act of prophetic citation to reflect on his own role as a creative interpreter and translator of foreign literatures. In The House of Fame, Chaucer supplements his work with prophetic citation by invoking biblical prophetic roles that were more similar to those of his English peers. When Ricardian authors prominently feature a biblical prophet in their works, they usually select someone whose method of communication or moral message reflects their

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own. This is why, as the last chapter illustrated, Gower includes the interpretive and apocalyptic prophet, Daniel, within the Vox clamantis and the Confessio Amantis. Michael P. Kuczynski has observed the frequency with which Langland speaks of the prophet David and quotes from his Psalms in Piers Plowman. Kuczynski notes that in doing so, Langland stresses the importance of learning from reflection upon one’s own sins, since Will, like David, is a sinner and his book, like the Psalms, is written to encourage self-correction.3 The Gawain-poet invokes several prophets who give dire admonitions, most notably Jonah in Patience and Daniel in Cleanness, which reflects the poet’s own warnings to readers. In The House of Fame, Chaucer selects Enoch and Eli as his own prophetic proxies because, like them, he has privileged access to information that he must responsibly relay to a chaotic crowd. Chaucer uses Enoch and Eli to reinforce the persona that he has already created through his work with prophetic citation – that of a cool-headed intermediary between disparate social classes, cultures, and sources of wisdom. Chaucer’s creative work with multiple modes of prophetic selfrepresentation, especially within The House of Fame, has been underappreciated largely because it has been overshadowed by a different prophetic persona that follows Chaucer – that of a rational English hero, ahead of his own superstitious time. This reputation goes back as far as William Thynne’s The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, published in 1532. The Introduction to the Workes, originally written by Sir Brian Tuke, declares all of Chaucer’s talents in poetry before declaring: It is moch to be marvayled, howe in hys tyme, when doubtless al good letters were layde aslepe throughoute the worlde, as the thynge whyche eyther by the disposition and influence of the bodyes above, or by other ordinaunce of God, semed lyke and was in daunger to have utterly perished, suche an excellent poete in our tonge shuld as it were (nature repugnynge) sprynge and aryse.4

Here, Thynne presents Chaucer as a miraculously bright beacon in an otherwise dark time for poetry and learning. Thynne’s publishers would later famously add the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale to his second edition of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer in 1542.5 This work promoted John Wycliffe’s critiques of the monastic orders and the papacy and shaped perceptions of Chaucer as a religious trailblazer. As Kathleen Forni has observed, “Until the early nineteenth century Chaucer’s identity and reputation were, in part, based on works he did not write.”6 Apocrypha bolstered this image of a proto-Protestant Chaucer, but other

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pseudo-Chaucerian works like “Chaucer’s Prophecy” (introduced by William Caxton but brought to prominence by Thynne) contributed to the related but much broader and more enduring image of Chaucer as a man ahead of his time. As Linda Georgianna has noted, because Chaucer’s proto-Protestant reputation depended upon the foil of supposedly superstitious Catholicism, it was a natural predecessor for Chaucer’s later reputation as a secular Humanist and natural sceptic – a reputation that endures to this day.7 Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critics and biographers have characterized Chaucer as an author whose secularity set him apart from his medieval peers, making him more of a Renaissance author than a medieval one.8 A few critics have pushed back against Chaucer’s secular reputation by reconsidering the prominence of religion within his works.9 One less discussed consequence of Chaucer’s reputation as an early Protestant or secular Renaissance man has been the mischaracterization of his prophetic persona. Critics have long deemed Chaucer’s work with prophetic citation in The House of Fame a “parody” of the Commedia in general and Dante’s prophetic narrative persona in particular. The notion that Chaucer must be correcting and scorning the Italian tradition that he finds in the Commedia is a product of the nationalist, secular reputation that surrounds Chaucer. Recognizing that Chaucer’s work with prophecy extends beyond sceptically mocking it requires us to look at Chaucer as a man within his time rather than ahead of it. The following chapter examines Chaucer’s inventive work with prophetic citation in his dream visions before turning to his most amplified prophetic role in The House of Fame. Finally, to disentangle Chaucer’s self-imposed prophetic role from those that have been attributed to him, this chapter will examine the multifaceted history of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” – an apocryphal prediction that functioned as a “threshold work” in most print editions of Chaucer’s poems from the fifteenth through the late nineteenth centuries.10 Prophetic Citation in Chaucer’s Dream Visions When engaging in prophetic citation, a poet refers to another earlier poet during a literary dream or vision. The other poet may be depicted as the inspiration for the dream but could also be the guide, someone encountered, mentioned, or even alluded to during the vision. In all cases, the citation draws attention to the author’s own inspiration for the literary work at hand. Prophetic citation often occurs in chains, honoring several different generations of influence. For instance, in his introduction to the Aetia, the third-century BCE Greek poet, Callimachus,

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describes a dream of having met the Muses at the River Helicon and learning the cause of things. This is an imitation of the eighth-century BCE Greek poet, Hesiod’s description of a similar moment of inspiration in the Theogony. Virgil later imitates this episode from Callimachus in his sixth Eclogue. Prophecy is inherently a borrowed authority, and yet the prophet is also a special, divinely elected figure. In this sense, prophecy incisively represents the paradox of literary authority that is at once imitated and unique. It lends itself well to moments in which authors wish to acknowledge the derived nature of their work but also to announce themselves as singularly important in their own times. Prophetic citation persists in medieval works that draw from the classics. At the beginning of his Latin epic, the Africa, Petrarch includes the story of the dream of Scipio. This story is inspired by the Somnium Scipionis, a portion of Cicero’s longer work, De re publica (54–51 BC). In Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, the Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus, dreams that he meets his grandfather, Scipio Africanis. Africanis takes his grandson into the sky and shows him Carthage, prophesying that Aemilianus will conquer it in two years and will be transported to the firmament of the stars after he dies. From the sky, however, Aemilianus sees how small Rome is in comparison to the vast universe and humbly understands that his future accomplishments are relatively insignificant. Petrarch takes the story back another two generations. The Africa’s hero is Scipio Africanis, the deceased Roman general who traditionally appears to his grandson, Aemilianus, in Cicero’s telling of the story. In his dream, Petrarch’s Scipio Africanis encounters his father, who prophesies to his son about the future of Rome. Both Cicero and Petrarch use the Dream of Scipio to depict an elder, deceased military hero advising the younger descendant seeking military fame. Yet, by reworking of the dream, its characters, and its timeframe, Petrarch places his wisdom before that of the elder author. Cicero wrote the wisdom of Scipio Africanis, but Petrarch writes the wisdom that inspired Scipio Africanis. In this way, Petrarch approaches prophetic citation in a way that acknowledges influence but also undercuts it, suggesting early roots of Harold Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence.11 Nevertheless, in this epic famous for its numerous allusions, Petrarch still uses prophecy as a metaphor for his literary inspiration. Petrarch places himself more traditionally at the end of a chain of prophetic citation in Book 9, when a fictionalized version of the poet Ennius, who famously wrote of Scipio Africanus’s fame after serving in his army, has his own dream. In this dream, the Greek poet, Homer, guides Ennius. Here, Petrarch is imitating the prologue of Ennius’s Annales, wherein Ennius dreams that he meets Homer, who informs

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Ennius that he is actually the reincarnation of Homer’s soul. Petrarch’s version of the dream in the Africa does not include Homer’s claim to share a spirit with Ennius. Instead, Homer prophesies to Ennius the coming of Petrarch himself: Hic ego nam longe clausa sub valle sedentem Aspexi juvenem: dux o carissime, quisnam est Quem video teneras inter consistere lauros, Et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo? Nescio quid, nisi fallor enim, sub pectore versat Egregiumque altumque nimis. (9.216–21) [There in the distance I could see a youth seated within a valley closed by hills. I asked: “O cherished guide, disclose, I pray, who is it I behold taking his rest under the tender laurel? Lo, he seems about to bind his locks with those green fronds, I know not what he ponders in his heart, but surely it must be, unless I err, some high and noble purpose.”]12

The fact that Homer is predicting the coming of Petrarch becomes more and more apparent as Homer describes the youth as hailing from Florence and predicts that “titulusque poematis illi Africa” (9.235–6) [he will call his poem Africa]. In this way, Petrarch depicts Homer as anticipating the existence of the very poem within which he appears. Petrarch may have been inspired by the twelfth-century French author, Jean de Meun, who had the character the God of Love prognosticate his own authorship in a section of Le Roman de la Rose that is already ripe with prophetic citation. The God of Love laments that the Roman love poets Tibullus, Gallus, Catullus, or Ovid cannot be there to write his story before predicting that Jean de Meun will be born and that he, the God of Love, will visit him to inspire his work.13 In having the author Homer prophesy his coming, Petrarch folds Jean’s practice of self-announcement through prognostication into the tradition of prophetic citation. Homer foretells that “Iste senescenti tantum illo in tempore Romae / Carior annosae quantum contingere matri / Filius ille solet, quem post lacrymosa sepulcra / Natorum viduae sterilis tandem attulit alvus” (9.246–9) [he by aging Rome shall be more cherished than a late-born son, fruit of a womb long barren of a mother by death bereft of earlier progeny]. Here, Homer presents Petrarch as a figure akin to John the Baptist – a prophet whose birth to an older mother was itself prophesied despite being unexpected by many. Exploiting a chain of prophetic citation, Petrarch clarifies the authorial identity that he would like to promote – that of the restorer of classical Roman

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literature. By making himself the culmination of a prophecy passed from a Greek bard to a Roman one, Petrarch makes the case that his poetic status, like those of his predecessors, was divinely inspired and affirmed. Petrarch also implies that Rome’s military and literary legacies were preordained by God. This is a prophetic tradition that Chaucer engages with in his dream visions, but rather than advancing a national narrative, Chaucer emphasizes the diversity of his sources and his power to transform them. For instance, Chaucer begins The Parliament of Fowls by depicting himself, the narrator, reading Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis). This is not only a nod to Cicero but also to the beginning of Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of Le Roman de La Rose, wherein Guillaume begins by citing The Dream of Scipio. Upon falling asleep, Chaucer encounters the character of Affricans from The Dream of Scipio, who will serve as his guide to the enclosed garden or hortus conclusus, also borrowed from Le Roman de La Rose. Furthermore, Affricans mirrors Dante’s depiction of Virgil – a guide taken from literary history who explains the structure of the universe and God’s place in it. This is even more pronounced when Chaucer reads the inscription on the gate to the garden, which begins with the repeated phrase, “Thorgh me men gon,” repeating Dante’s language from the gate to the Inferno, “Per me si va” (III.1). Chaucer uses dreams as a space to draw attention to his written inspiration but also to play with that inspiration in the way that only a dreamer can. The dream is Chaucer’s oft repeated metaphor for poetic creativity – something that pulls its content from various disjointed aspects of life and knits it into a new reality in the mind of the inspired individual. Chaucer is explicit about the influence implied by prophetic citation when he associates the act of reading with visionary experience in his dream visions. Both The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls begin with Chaucer reading before falling asleep, only to dream of characters and images present in the material that he has just read. In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer awakens within a chamber whose windows are decorated with images from books on Troy and classical romances. Lisa J. Kiser has read this scene, noting that, “Roman art is inextricably linked with the light that fills the ‘room of dreams,’ the place where all of a poet’s work begins.”14 Yet, it is not simply Roman art. The walls contain the content of The Romance of the Rose (Le Roman de la Rose), which Chaucer had already translated at the earliest stages of his literary career. Often configuring classical and influential continental works within the ekphrasis of his dream imagery, Chaucer gestures to his inspiration while ultimately placing it under the jurisdiction of his own subconscious, free to bend the facts and details of these works

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of art, newly imagined.15 Within the dream, Chaucer’s influences are literally the walls, supporting the structures that surround him but standing in the background. The dream vision was a well-established poetic genre, but Chaucer is remarkable in the degree to which he is willing to conflate multiple spaces within one scene, mimicking the kinds of spatial slippage that occur in actual dreams. Prophetic Citation in The House of Fame’s Ekphrasis In The House of Fame, Chaucer not only incorporates his classical literary sources into the ekphrasis in his dream but also imitates Dante’s use of prophetic citation. Both authors identify the first-person speakers of their poems as reflections of their authorial personae. Beatrice refers to the narrator of the Commedia as “Dante,” and the eagle in Book II of The House of Fame refers to the narrator as “Geffrey.” In Book I, Chaucer describes falling asleep and finding himself in a temple of glass that is dedicated to Venus. A brass tablet on the wall recounts the story of Aeneas. This is at once a prophetic citation of Dante and Virgil. Like Dante, Chaucer adopts a role originally inhabited by Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. Whereas Dante mimics Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld, Chaucer puts himself in the position of Aeneas in the Temple of Juno (although in The House of Fame, it is Venus’s temple), looking at pictures that recount the Trojan War. Within the Commedia, Dante imitates and inhabits a much more obviously prophetic moment of the Aeneid. Being a privileged witness to the conditions of the afterlife and returning home with news of it is obviously prophetic. Chaucer’s imitation of Aeneas’s trip to Juno’s Temple in Dido’s Carthage is prophetic insofar as it requires Chaucer to receive and interpret information as an intermediary. Chaucer is joining in a chain of classical prophetic citation by focusing on Aeneas’s time in the temple. As Steven Lowenstam has observed, Aeneas’s moment in the temple is prophetic because, “All six reliefs on Dido’s temple depict events of the Trojan War that will be echoed by incidents occurring in the Italian War as described especially in Books 9–12 of the Aeneid.”16 Virgil took his inspiration for this ekphrasis in the temple from Demodocus’s songs in the eighth book of Homer’s Odyssey.17 The songs tell of Odysseus’s past suffering in the war, eliciting sadness from the main character. In this way, Virgil takes part in the tradition of melding prophecy with allusion. In making the pictures portray the past while revealing the future to Aeneas, Virgil imitates Homer but crafts an entirely new story about an Italian war. The prognosticating element of the pictures carved in the temple is self-

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referential, drawing attention to Virgil’s own role in reshaping past tropes into his new epic. Chaucer, in turn, alters the prophetic component of the moment. Rather than an episode that predicts and foreshadows the future of the narrative to a character, Chaucer portrays this time in the temple as a revelation, seen by the author himself in a dream sent by the gods. Like Virgil before him, Chaucer contributes to the chain of prophetic citation, in which each new author in the chain links himself to and distinguishes himself from his predecessor. Chaucer repurposes Virgil’s moment of ekphrasis, which already reflects on the cruelties of fame, to ponder the responsibilities of authorship. As Deborah Beck has pointed out, Virgil’s Dido views the Trojans as gens inimica and presumably commissioned carvings of the Trojan defeat to bring her joy.18 Yet Virgil’s Aeneas sees these carvings and, while weeping at them, says to his friend, Achates, “solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem” [Forget your fears; this fame will bring you some deliverance] (I.463). The carvings move Aeneas, leading him to assume that, despite the sorrow that they bring him, they reflect a redeeming fame that will honor him for his sacrifices in war. He never considers that the carvings could elicit rejoicing from others and that his fame could bring him something other than honor. Chaucer, however, does consider this. In another work, The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer’s Aeneas sees the carvings on the temple and laments, “Allas, that I was born! … Thourghout the world oure shame is kid so wyde, / Now it is peynted upon every syde. / Been now desclandred, and in swich degree” (1027–31).19 Chaucer’s Aeneas can see the dark edge of fame, but Virgil’s Aeneas naively assumes it to be a comfort. While Virgil never comments upon this naivety himself, the ironic sting of mistrusted fame is easily observable (certainly to Chaucer) in Aeneas’s hopeful reaction. This potential for misinterpretation extends to all art, including the Aeneid itself, and this episode in the Aeneid highlights Aeneas’s and Virgil’s precarious positions at the whims of fame. In a moment of dramatic irony, Aeneas observes both his past and future battles on a wall and fails to recognize what either truly means. Aeneas’s ignorance is a nod to Virgil’s self-awareness as he looks upon the past work of the Odyssey and the future legacy of the Aeneid. By situating himself in the position of Aeneas as the character observing these carvings and stories, Chaucer pushes Virgil’s self-reflection a step further, making it the central subject of his poem. In this moment usually demonstrating multiple layers of vulnerability, Chaucer reflects intensely upon his own power to shape and even correct fame. The temple that Chaucer sees not only shows Aeneas’s defeat but also Dido’s part in Aeneas’s story, which Chaucer has taken from both Virgil’s

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Aeneid and Ovid’s Heroides. Chaucer directs his audience to his sources, telling us to “Rede Virgile in Eneydos / Or the Epistle of Ovyde” (I.378–9) to know more about what Dido said and did in the story. Putting himself in this role of passive, dreaming observer does not erase Chaucer’s role in the production of the text but draws attention to it. Whereas Aeneas merely had to see the temple walls and accept that his story had been told by others, the slumbering author Chaucer is also the mind creating his temple and carving the stories contained therein. Within the framework of a vision, Chaucer smooths together two narratives, one by Ovid and one by Virgil, without the need to articulate where and how he borrowed each aspect of the story. Although Chaucer’s words acknowledge Virgil and Ovid as the authorities on Dido’s story, his presentation of their influence as a vision boldly accentuates his poetic license with the tale. He even claims to speak Dido’s actual words: In suche words gan to pleyne Dydo of hir grete peyne, As me mette redely – Non other auctour alegge I. (I.311–14)

His claim to access her words directly, without even the intermediary of an auctor – a source informing him – playfully displays his creative position within the work and his authority to fabricate detail. Chaucer’s “dreamed” version of the story retains portions of Virgil’s account, which are more sympathetic to Aeneas, along with portions of Ovid’s version, which are more sympathetic to Dido. Chaucer plays the role of a rational adjudicator of fame, hearing both sides out. He defends Dido, citing, “How he [Aeneas] betrayed hir, allas, / And lefte hir ful unkyndely” (294–5) and comparing her to Demophon and Phillis, who were similarly betrayed. Nevertheless, he also defends Aeneas, reminding us: But to excuse Eneas Fullyche of al his grete trespass, The book seyth Mercurie, sauns fayle, Bad hym goo into Itayle, And leve Auffrikes regioun, And Dido and hir faire toun. (I.427–32)

While Ovid’s Dido continuously harps on Aeneas’s wrongdoings, Chaucer’s Dido reserves her greatest disdain for Fame:

“Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame 113 O wel-awey that I was born! For thorgh yow is my name lorn, And alle myn actes red and songe Over al thys lond, on every tonge. O wikke Fame! – for ther nys Nothing so swift, lo, as she is! (I.345–50)

Dido points to literature and song but also to spoken gossip, fearing, “And that I shal thus juged be: ‘Loo, right as she hath don, now she / Wol doo eft-sones, hardely” (I357–8). Chaucer represents spoken and written words as equally capable of destroying a reputation, collapsing the two meanings of “fame” as renown and rumor. Yet in giving Dido a voice to lament this cruelty, much as he will later give Criseyde a voice to do the same in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer presents an alternative mode of storytelling – one that reports rumor but also presents it with dignity. Chaucer speaks back to Virgil and Ovid not only with his own voice but also with that of the English public. He conspicuously inserts a number of sententious or proverbial sayings, explicitly moralizing the tale. For instance, he reminds us, “Hyt is not al gold that glareth” (I.272) when describing how Dido was too easily won over by Aeneas’s fine appearance. Likewise, he declares, “He that fully knoweth th’erbe / May saufly leye hyt to his yë – / Withoute drede, this ys no lye” (I.290–3), using Dido’s rash acceptance of the stranger, Aeneas, almost as an exemplum in the manner of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Yet, rather than overt Christian moralizing, or even classical sententiae attributed to an authority, Chaucer turns to public conventional wisdom for his exegesis. Gower’s own telling of Dido and Aeneas’s story places the blame on Aeneas, in Genius’s lesson on sloth. Chaucer’s retelling is a measured parsing out of multiple wrongdoings and human errors, rendered universal by the inclusion of common sayings. Sheila Delany has referred to Chaucer’s use of these proverbs as a form of “obvious narrative incompetence” in the manner of his “Tale of Sir Thopas” in The Canterbury Tales, signaling “a parodic intention.”20 Yet, the folk sayings insightfully illuminate the story, mitigating each character’s guilt while also providing a clear lesson. As Teresa Tinkle observes, in this context, these proverbs serve “as a wryly sufficient commentary on pagan literature.”21 Chaucer answers the damaging wounds inflicted by idle gossip with the salubrious balm of public wisdom. Inhabiting Aeneas’s position within a prophetic dream world, Chaucer presents himself as a mediator between the worlds of chatter and literature, using each to correct and comment upon the other.

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If this were indeed a poem written to announce an occasion or speak of a recent controversy, as several early critics have suggested, Chaucer’s performance of the role of a wise but reasonable judge and presenter of human behaviour would have been noteworthy to his audience.22 Much of the text serves as a reassurance that Chaucer sees no sense in dragging anyone’s reputation through the mud as well as a demonstration of his ability to present an objective and fair perspective on personal affairs, salacious as they may be.23 This is, of course, in sharp contrast to Dante, who maligns the fictional and real subjects inhabiting the Inferno. While Dante was already exiled as he wrote the Commedia, Chaucer was working and living well within the circles of the English royal court, inspiring a much more diplomatic prophetic persona. In The House of Fame, Chaucer observes judgment in the scope of history rather than judgment in the afterlife. While Dante consults the dead, Chaucer consults art. Yet, both return to their respective worlds to convey their messages. In this way, Chaucer presents the act of translation as a form of prophecy. As a witness to a dream that he obviously created, Chaucer is distinct from Dante, who puts himself into a Christian prophetic scenario that makes him a kind of poet-theologian. Authors engaging in prophetic citation always simultaneously acknowledge and distance themselves from the poets from whom they draw inspiration. However, critics have tended to overemphasize Chaucer’s intentions to distance his prophetic persona from Dante’s, going so far as to claim that The House of Fame mocks the Commedia. The Satirical Reading of The House of Fame In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several continental critics theorized that The House of Fame was a kind of comedic reworking of the Commedia, and this opinion found its way into Skeat’s edition of Chaucer’s Works.24 By the 1960s, the suggestion that The House of Fame was an extended adaptation of the Commedia had temporarily fallen out of favour. B.G. Koonce acknowledged similarities between the works but argued that they “reflect a common body of Christian doctrine connecting Chaucer’s imagery with the spiritual meanings of Dante’s pilgrimage.”25 In light of this, Paul G. Ruggiers commented in a 1968 essay on “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” “We have come a long way, it is clear, from the assumptions of a hundred years ago that Chaucer was writing a parodic version of Dante’s great poem in a parodic vein.”26 Nevertheless, this perspective returned in the 1970s, with the advent of nominalist and postmodern readings of the poem, which deemed

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The House of Fame, as Sheila Delany put it, “a literary statement about the unreliability of literary statements.”27 Because prophetic authority implies access to categorical truth, those who have viewed Chaucer as a nominalist have assumed his perspective on prophetic authorial subject positions to be cynical. For instance, John M. Fyler has influentially argued that The House of Fame is “a sustained inversion of Dante’s vatic pretensions.”28 Paul Strohm has even more boldly referred to the work as “a poem of his midcareer written, among other motive, to twit his illustrious predecessor Dante as a fame-seeking windbag.”29 Although not the only reading of the poem, Chaucer’s supposed correction of Dante, especially his grandiose prophetic position, has remained a popular contemporary interpretation of The House of Fame.30 Chaucer distinguishes his authorial voice from that of Dante, but his respective invocations of Hypnose, Venus, and Apollo at the beginning of each book of The House of Fame do not constitute a parody of Dante’s engagement with the prophetic authorial role. Rather, as Jamie C. Fumo has argued in her discussion of Chaucer’s invocation of Apollo, “Chaucer was in fact more fascinated by the vatic ideal of inspired prophetic truth – a model of poetry specifically associated with Apollo, god of the vates – than he has been given credit for.”31 The House of Fame is not an outright rejection of classical or Dantean modes of authorship so much as it is Chaucer’s opportunity to articulate his own position in relation to his predecessors and his readers. Knowledge of Dante in Fourteenth-Century England The notion of a “parody” or “mock version” of the Commedia is especially suspect when considering that Chaucer could never have expected his original audience to be familiar with Dante’s work. The first record of sale of Dante’s Commedia in England does not appear until 1451, and the text was not translated into English until the nineteenth century.32 Chaucer’s fourteenth-century English audience would have primarily known of Dante by reputation – a reputation to which Chaucer refers in The House of Fame when he says, And every torment eke in helle Saugh he, which is longe to telle; Which whoso willeth for to knowe, He moste rede many a rowe On Virgile or on Claudian, Or Daunte, that hit tell kan.

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Winthrop Wetherbee has argued that “for Chaucer Dante is not only a model but a standard by which the quality and seriousness of his own future work may be measured.”33 Chaucer was intimately familiar with Dante’s work. Yet, at no point does he appear to be writing for an audience that knew Dante by more than his reputation or would understand an extended critique of his magnum opus. Paul Strohm has posited Chaucer’s awareness “both of an immediate audience for his oral presentations and an audience of posterity for his written texts.”34 It would not be preposterous to assume that Chaucer imagined that later readers might look at The House of Fame alongside the Commedia, given the stature that Dante had already achieved. Nevertheless, it would be misguided to assume that Chaucer wrote The House of Fame primarily with this future audience in mind. Rather, it is more accurate to say that, like his classical antecedents and Dante himself, Chaucer uses prophecy to simultaneously situate himself within and distinguish himself from existing authorial paradigms. Chaucer borrows a number of prophetic images and phrases from Dante that aid him in articulating the nature of his authorial persona. While Chaucer alters those images and phrases in a manner that makes it clear that he is developing a different literary subject position from that of his Italian predecessor, he does not do so in a way that eschews the prophetic tradition. Chaucer’s role as a witness within The House of Fame thoughtfully reflects the degree to which his authorial role involves reception of and access to famed literature. The parodic view of The House of Fame ignores this aspect of Chaucer’s persona. William Franke has argued that, in The House of Fame, when Chaucer “ostensibly addresses himself to transcendent subjects, he resorts to parodic mode, spoofing the solemn, spiritually serious treatment of Dante.”35 While Dante is certainly more “spiritually serious” than Chaucer is, one can still read Chaucer’s prophetic role as a genuine self-representation. Privileged in real life to edify himself of classical and contemporary works through foreign travels and to know various members of the English royal court, Chaucer presents this unusual artistic access as a sort of visionary experience. In this way, prophecy is a useful metaphor for developing Chaucer’s authorial persona rather than a joke aimed at spiritual authors. Eli and Enoch: Prophets of the Public The House of Fame is one of the rare works in which Chaucer expands on the persona that he develops via prophetic citation by including biblical prophets as proxies of self-representation. This is a prophetic mode

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that Chaucer would have been familiar with both through his reading of his English contemporaries and Dante. Building on his persona as an author careful with reputations and slander, Chaucer depicts his voice as one intended to quell and inform a group or crowd by associating himself with the biblical Eli and Enoch at the moment when the eagle appears to transport Chaucer at the end of Book I of The House of Fame. This is an imitation of the moment when an eagle swoops into the Purgatorio after Dante has fallen asleep at the gates of Purgatory and places him at the base of the mountain that ultimately leads to Paradiso. The sleeping Dante remarks the he seemed to be in the very spot where the Trojans were “abbandonati i suoi da Ganimede, / quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro” [abandoned by Ganymede, when he was carried off to the highest consistory] (Purg.IX.23–4).36 In this way, Dante parses out one of the many classical allusions that he is making in using the image of the eagle. Chaucer expands upon this by borrowing from other lines of the Commedia. After speaking with the eagle for some time, Chaucer’s narrative persona, Geoffrey, says, I neyther am Ennok, ne Elye, Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede, That was ybore up, as men rede, To hevene with daun Jupiter, And mad the goodys botiller. (587–92)

Chaucer uses Dante’s reference to Ganymede to accompany the image of the eagle but also borrows the syntax of these lines from the second book of the Inferno, wherein Dante protests that he is unworthy to see the realms of the afterworld. Dante declares, “Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono,” [I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul] (Inferno.II.32). Dante’s reference to Aeneas appears at this moment because he is going to visit the Inferno, and Aeneas visits the Underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid. Dante mentions Paul because Augustine, Aquinas, and others believed Paul’s reference in 2 Corinthians 12.2–4 to a man who was taken to heaven to be a reference to the biblical author himself. Thus, Dante alludes to one man who has been to hell and another who has been to heaven to reflect his own experience within the Commedia. In drawing the comparison while denying it, he likens himself to a classical figure and a Christian one, classifying his work as intricately connected to both traditions. Dante’s reference to Paul in particular draws to mind Paul’s role as God’s messenger to highlight Dante’s own position as a divine emissary or Christian vates to his audience. Chaucer adapts this aspect of the Inferno to frame his own prophetic persona.

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In claiming that he is not Enoch or Eli, Chaucer takes advantage of another allusion inherent to Dante’s image of the eagle – that of carrying a mortal upward to the heavens. Enoch and Eli are the only two people in the Old Testament who are taken to heaven without dying first. Genesis 5:24 says that Enoch “walked with God and was seen no more because God took him,” which early exegetes interpreted as meaning that Enoch was taken into the heavens.37 Several apocryphal Books of Enoch have existed, recounting Enoch’s journey.38 Although none of these books were in circulation in England in the fourteenth century, Enoch’s reputation as a prophet who had been taken into heaven finds its way into a great deal of English biblical literature such as the Trinity Poem on Biblical History, English translations of the Polychronicon, Genesis and Exodus, Old Testament History, Caxton’s Golden Legend, The Harrowing of Hell and the Destruction of Jerusalem, Stanzaic Life of Christ, and the Ormulum.39 Eli’s ascent into the heavens is mentioned directly and dramatically in the Fourth Book of Kings 2:11: “And as they went on, walking and talking together, behold a fiery chariot, and fiery horses parted them both asunder: and Elias went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Based on interpretations of the “two witnesses” mentioned in the Book of Revelation (11:3–12) as being Enoch and Eli, the two prophets appear together in numerous late medieval English sermons, poems, and plays relating the coming of the Antichrist.40 For instance, the fifth part of the popular English mystical poem, The Pricke of Conscience, makes predictions about Doomsday, describing the coming of the Antichrist and the role of Enoch and Eli in returning to combat him: He shal come fyrste in myldenesse And preche ageyne ryghtwysnesse, By hym suche wondres shul be don That resseyve hym shul Jewes sone And to hym turnen alle hooly. Ennok shal come then and Ely To preche ageyne Antycryste ful harde As ye moun heren afturwarde.41

In this role, it seems that Enoch and Eli were assumed into heaven in order to return someday, as still living prophets, in order to combat the most dangerous disseminator of misinformation, the Antichrist. The Pricke of Conscience characterizes the Antichrist’s followers as Jewish, making Enoch and Eli’s role as one of “correcting” their fellow Jews who have yet to accept Christ. While there was a wide swathe of anti-Semitic Antichrist literature, it was just one of many traditions

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associated with the Antichrist. Most late medieval Christians believed that the Antichrist would be a person who would act as an agent for Satan during the last days, converting people with his teachings.42 Chaucer’s allusion to Enoch and Eli refers to his ascent to higher realms but also to his role on the ground, speaking carefully to his audience, even during chaotic times of dangerous rumor. While Ganymede and Romulus are classical figures who were chosen by the gods to enter the heavens as privileged individuals, Enoch and Eli are parallel figures who also return to the public to guide them. Chaucer borrows Dante’s method of comparison to otherworldly travelers but selects prophets more known for directing a crowd. This is a role that we have already seen Chaucer fulfil in Book I, where he carefully informs his audience of the love affair of Aeneas and Dido, despite the fact that Dido fears how her acts will be “red and songe” (I.347). While Dido fears infamy, a concern echoed by Aeneas’s own position in the temple walls scene that Chaucer borrows from Virgil, Chaucer demonstrates that he can use fame responsibly, even harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to tame harmful rumors. It is, perhaps, why Jupiter rewards him as a love poet in Book II. If this poem were finished, we might even see Chaucer fulfil this role again. The Eagle’s Access to Heights and Depths Although Chaucer borrows Dante’s image of the prophetically chosen individual selected to travel upwards into the heavens, Chaucer also takes advantage of the eagle’s reputation within bestiaries as one who can fly both high and low to represent his own position as a prophetic mediator between famed literature and the gossiping crowd. Book I demonstrates how Chaucer handles the fame of his subjects, but Books II and III extrapolate on how and why he gains access to those subjects. Prophetic subject positions allow authors to articulate the sources of their inspiration. As Chaucer’s vehicle to the House of Fame, the eagle is a personification of the author’s own literary and social education. As John M. Steadman and John Leyerle have both noted, the medieval bestiary tradition surrounding the eagle focused on its acute eyesight, its closeness to the sun, and its propensity for testing its offspring.43 Medieval exegesis often allegorized these characteristics of the eagle to represent contemplative thought. Pope Gregory repeatedly referred to the eagle approaching the sun when describing one whose mind ascends to approach the divine.44 Alexander Neckham and Berchorius further argued that the eagle’s keen eyesight made it a symbol of philosophy and intellectual pursuits.45 Chaucer’s eagle is therefore

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demonstrably learned. William S. Wilson has noted that the eagle pays particular attention to the art of rhetoric, organizing his own speech into exordium, narration, proof, and epilogue.46 The eagle is also preoccupied with his own rhetorical skill as he asks Geoffrey: Tell me this now feythfully, Have y not preved thus simply, Withoute any subtilite Of speche, or gret prolixite Of termes of philosophie, Of figures of poetrie, Or colours of rethorike? For hard langage and hard matere Ys encombrous for to here Attones; wost thou not wel this? (II.853–63)

Like any of the Canterbury pilgrims, the eagle is a proxy of selfrepresentation for Chaucer but also a distinct character, not necessarily reflective of its creator. In this moment, Chaucer plays with the notion of reception and creation, drawing attention to both. The selfcongratulatory eagle brags, “So I can / Lewedly to a lewed man / Speke, and shewe hym swyche skiles / That he may shake hem be the biles” (II.865–8). Of course, the “lewed man” is Chaucer – the one who crafted these words. The eagle, for all his attention to avoiding cumbersome prolixity is, as many critics have noted, rather long-winded. Yet the erudition of his speeches speaks to his role as the embodiment of Chaucer’s education and learnedness. The eagle, like Chaucer, is at once a translator and bold inventor of new truths, patched together. The eagle tells Chaucer that the journey “is for thy lore and for thy prow” (II.579). He vaguely refers to “thyn oune bok” (II.712) as his source for information about the House of Fame, but like Chaucer, who has knit together two narratives about Aeneas and Dido into his own version of the story, the eagle pieces together portions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses related to Fame with ideas of “kyndely enclynyng” from Aristotle and Augustine’s writings, along with theories of sound from Boethius and Vincent de Beauvais. As he ascends to the realms of learning, the eagle alludes to a series of classical antecedents for the journey like Icarus and Phaethon, as well as sources on astrology like Boethius and Alan de Lille. While the eagle knows a great deal from books, he is aware of another important source of literary inspiration that Chaucer has been missing, that of “tydynges” (II.645, 648). The eagle scolds Chaucer:

“Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame 121 That is, that thou hast no tydynges Of Loves folk yf they be glade, Ne of noght elles that God made; And noght oonly fro fer contree That ther no tydynge cometh to thee, But of thy verray neyghebores, That duellen almost at thy dores, Thou herist neyther that ne this; For when thy labour doon al ys, And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, In stede of rest and new thynges Thou goost hom to they hous anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully dsewed ys thy look; And lyvest thus as an heremyte, Although thyn abstinence ys lyte. (II.644–60)

The erudite eagle is in no place to critique Chaucer for the act of reading itself, but he seems to be chastising Chaucer for not knowing when to put books away and engage with the world. In addition to associating the eagle with learning, the bestiary tradition highlights the eagle’s ability to approach nearest the sun but also to see fish within the waters below. Steadman summarizes Berchorius’s allegorical reading about the eagle’s ability to ascend and descend in this way: Just as the sea-eagle possesses such clear sight that even in its loftiest flight it can discern fishes in the sea, so the prelate should be able to remain on the height of contemplation and yet behold with the clear sight of discretion whatever exists in the sea of this world. Again, just as the eagle perceives its prey from on high and immediately returns to the skies after seizing it, so the prelate needs clear discretion and knowledge in order to discern from afar whatever occurs among his subordinates.47

Although Steadman includes this in his helpful explanation of the bestiary tradition surrounding the eagle, he summarizes Chaucer’s engagement with the eagle as a “contemplative symbol,” overlooking the ways in which the eagle’s mobility exemplifies Chaucer’s flexible mediating narrative persona. Chaucer implies that, like the eagle of bestiary traditions, he can soar between worlds. He is not merely privy to divine knowledge but to worldly knowledge as well. His ability to travel between these worlds is necessary for the thriving of his art, just

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as it is necessary for the eagle’s survival. The eagle will reinforce this message later in the poem when he raises Geoffrey up to the House of Fame and then lowers him carefully into the House of Rumor. Chaucer gestures to the eagle’s allegorical meaning as the embodiment of Philosophy as he recalls Boethius’s words: And thoo thought y upon Boece, That write, “A thought may flee so hye Wyth fetheres of Philosophye, To passen everych element, And whan he hath so fer ywent, Than may be seen behynde hys bak Cloude” – and al that y of spak. (II.972–8)

Philosophy is useful for gaining a better perspective on the world. High above the earth, Chaucer can see its various features from a distance and remarks at all that he can behold before observing all of the features of space that he can also behold. Chaucer’s eagle is the physical embodiment of these “fetheres of Philosophye.” The higher he flies, the more Chaucer can see, and the more both Chaucer and the eagle recall the works of various auctores. The eagle reminds Geoffrey that he is flying higher than Alexander of Macedonia, Daun Scipio, or Dedalus. Chaucer’s moment of recalling Boethius demonstrates exactly what it declares: philosophy, particularly studying its greatest practitioners, elevates the mind to higher realms. Chaucer finds himself on the threshold of a vision, alluding to Paul by saying, “Y wot wel y am here, / But wher in body or in gost / I not, ywys, but God, thou wost” (II.980–2). Here, Chaucer alludes to the passage of 2 Corinthians 12:2, wherein Paul hears the “secret words” that he may not repeat and ascends to the third heaven. Yet, for Chaucer, this vision involves recalling great works on space: “And than thought y on Marcian, / And eke on Anteclaudian” (II.985–6). Chaucer’s prophetic ascent and his ecstatic vision are both learning, specifically reading. His literal perspective on the world and its place in the universe are gained through his reading, embodied by the eagle who takes him into the air. Yet the eagle is also there to place Chaucer within crowds, and to await him so that he is not lost. The eagle allows Chaucer to enter and exit his sources of inspiration, reminding him, “And here I wol abyden the” (II.1086). Lady Fame and the Apocalyptic The eagle, both Chaucer’s access to and escape from the House of Fame, is a symbol of the gospel author, John. In Book III, Chaucer portrays

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himself as a literary version of the Apostle John, prophet of the Book of Revelation, looking forward to the defeat of the Antichrist signaled by Lady Fame. Lady Fame is a monstrous embodiment of literary auctoritas, hosting her own perverse version of the Last Judgment. Chaucer’s earlier mention of Enoch and Eli together is evocative of beliefs surrounding the Apocalypse, and Chaucer continues to allude to the events of the Book of Revelation in Book III, when Geoffrey arrives at the House of Fame. He lists the various minstrels and magicians that he sees therein, and declares, “What shuld I make lenger tale / Of alle the pepil y ther say, / Fro hennes into domes day?” (III.1282–4). Chaucer uses “domes day” to describe the exaggerated amount of time that it would take him to list the people in the House of Fame. Yet, his choice of words also foreshadows the entrance of Lady Fame, whom he describes with imagery of Doomsday: But certyn y hem never tolde, For as feele eyen hadde she As fetheres upon foules be, Or weren on the bestes foure That Goddis trone gunne honoure, As John write in th’Apocalips. (III.1381–5)

Chaucer’s description of Fame’s appearance is taken from Virgil’s description of Fama in the Aeneid (IV.173–90), wherein she has eyes beneath each of her many feathers. Yet Chaucer pulls in a Christian comparison alongside his classical allusion, mentioning the beasts of the Apocalypse who “had each of them six wings; and round about and within they are full of eyes” (Revelation 4:8). The beasts to which Chaucer alludes are traditionally associated with the four Evangelists. Revelation catalogues the beasts: “The first living creature was like a lion: and the second living creature like a calf: and the third living creature, having the face, as it were, of a man: and the fourth living creature was like an eagle flying” (Revelation 4:7). Within medieval art, the lion is Mark, the calf (or ox) is Luke, the man is Matthew, and the eagle is John. They are frequently represented as one single entity or tetramorph, which Lady Fame seems to embody through Chaucer’s comparison. At the same time, she is a pagan figure, taken from Ovid’s description of the House of Fame in chapter 12 of the Metamorphoses and Virgil’s physical description of Fama’s appearance in the Aeneid. Compiled from the scraps of antiquity and modified into a Christian authority in the form of the Evangelistic tetramorph, Lady Fame personifies literary auctoritas. Within medieval universities, literary theory revolved around the study of auctores, authors who were considered

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authoritative enough to be studied and quoted at length. As Alistair Minnis has noted, only authors of the classical and scriptural traditions were considered literary auctores.48 Lady Fame embodies the most revered literary traditions and the dangerous powers they wield. Of the first group of people that approach Lady Fame, Chaucer attests, “For of this folk ful wel y wiste / They hadde good fame ech deserved, / Although they were dyversly served” (III.1544–6). Chaucer watches as Lady Fame capriciously doles out her rewards to some of this worthy group and not to others, and he declares her to be as impulsive as her sister, Dame Fortune (III.1547). Lady Fame’s presence within the story draws attention to the fact that there is, in actuality, no person in charge of discerning who attains fame, rightfully or not, within the literary world. Fame, especially as it is passed down through the centuries, is left up to a great deal of chance. Chaucer breaks with traditional portrayals of Lady Fame’s house by describing its pillars as topped with famed historians and poets: Josephus, Statius, Homer, Dares and Dictys, Guido delle Colonne, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. These are auctores of the classical tradition, providing the support for Lady Fame’s pronouncements within her house. Yet, as Chaucer notes, the sources are not infallible or impartial: Betwex hem was a litil envye. Oon seyde that Omer made lyes, Feynynge in hys poetries, And was to Grekes favorable; Therfor held he hyt but fable. (III.1476–80)

Here, Chaucer refers to the attacks on Homer’s pro-Greek perspective made by authors sympathetic to the Trojans such as Dares Phrygius and Guido delle Colone. This disagreement among auctores represents a portion of Lady Fame’s inconstant disposition. However, Lady Fame’s injustice also derives from her willingness to pronounce the reputation of those whom she encounters. As the piecemeal of both classical and biblical auctoritas, Lady Fame is a monster who engages in a perverse form of the Last Judgment. B.G. Koonce has observed, Chaucer’s ‘wynged words,’ rising in the likeness of their earthly speakers and petitioning Fame before her throne have a doctrinal basis in the words of prayer or devotion which fly to God. In the Apocalypse the prayers themselves are presented to God by one of the angels (Christ, the High

“Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame 125 Priest), who offers them with incense upon the altar before the throne. The implicit personification of these prayers, which are said to be ‘seen’ as well as ‘heard’ by God, is applicable to all speech – ‘foul or fair,’ ‘privy or apert’ – which, together with one’s works ascends to God to be recorded in the books of judgement and to be manifested before Christ the Judge at the end of the world.49

Lady Fame is not Christ but a strange manner of beast, and her judgment is not everlasting but worldly. Nevertheless, she conducts her court with the same ceremony and importance. Steve Ellis and Karla Taylor have drawn attention to this facet of The House of Fame as Chaucer’s critique of Dante’s Inferno, since Dante engages in the sentencing of literary and living figures alike while Chaucer problematizes this literary conduct through the character of Lady Fame.50 Nevertheless, Lady Fame appears to cast aspersions on a far wider body of literature than Dante’s Commedia. This includes moralistic works like Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which uses classical tales to preach moral lessons, in the process condemning many of its characters to Christian judgment. Lady Fame is, more broadly, the embodiment of capricious reputation, as it is passed down through time, but specifically, she is also the personification of the tradition spawned by texts like the Ovide Moralisé, literally damning the subjects of its stories. It is significant that, although Lady Fame uses only her whims to determine the outcome of her devotees, the narrator, Geoffrey, seems able to assess whether or not she is correct in her estimations. For instance, when Lady Fame sentences the second group appealing to her with slander, the narrator laments: “Allas,” thoughte I, “what aventures Han these sory creatures! For they, amonges al the pres, Shul thus be shamed gilteles.” (III.367)

Nominalist readings of the poem have emphasized Chaucer’s message of the impossibility of access to categorical truth, and yet within the world of Chaucer’s dream, from the vantage point of Fame’s house, the narrator, Geoffrey, has this access. Chaucer’s engagement with the story of Dido and Aeneas in Book I draws our attention to the fact that his works raise questions about appropriate conduct and make suggestions about the flaws of others, but rarely does he condemn a character, particularly a historical one, with overt moralization. As Helen Cooper has noted, “Chaucer’s Ovid is curiously modern in comparison

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with the moralized Ovids so prevalent in his century.”51 While Chaucer was acquainted with the Ovide moralisé and perhaps even worked from it as a source, he borrows from Ovid throughout his works purely as a narrative source, not drawing from any popular moralizations of his tales.52 Chaucer, like most medieval authors, combines pagan and Christian traditions, but he seems keen to be careful with how he wields classical and Christian auctoritas. Most notably, Chaucer presents the oft slandered Criseyde in a sympathetic light. Joseph S. Graydon once characterized “the writer’s determination to defend the lady’s reputation; to assault, if I may say so, the entrenched line of century-old slander.”53 Just as Chaucer as the narrator frets over the reception of his book throughout Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde laments the fragility of her own reputation. Chaucer not only sympathetically links the precariousness of his position with Crisyede’s but he also refuses to slander her, declaring, “That al be that Criseyde was untrewe, / That for the gilt she be nat wroth with me. / Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se,” (V.1774–6). Chaucer very prominently declares his narrative persona to be one that responsibly reserves extreme judgment, and his numerous efforts to articulate the practicality and desperation of Criseyde’s compromised position in Troy buttress this perspective. The Legend of Good Women is the one work in which Chaucer very notably moralizes classical tales and pronounces extreme judgment upon the male characters who abandon the suffering heroines of each of the ten tales. Yet, Lisa J. Kiser has argued that the poem can be read as a parodic rejection of irresponsibly reductive Christian interpretations of classical literature. In the Prologue of The Legend of Good Women, the God of Love condemns Chaucer’s translation of Le Roman de la Rose as well as his retelling of the story of Troilus and Criseyde because, presumably, “people have actually been changing their behaviour as a result of reading Chaucer’s poems.”54 People no longer want to serve Love because of The Romance of the Rose, and men no longer trust women because of Troilus and Criseyde. In his complaints, the God of Love is speaking for a crowd of bad readers, who “are finding in Chaucer’s works simplified morals along the lines of ‘Love is folly’ and ‘Women are untrue,’ … Instead of viewing these texts as vehicles for philosophical truth, they are seeing them as exempla.”55 Kiser reads The Legend of Good Women as an extended parody of the kind of moralizing literature that trains readers to read in this reductive manner. In satirically using classical sources as exempla in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer illustrates how this type of reading ultimately results in the unsettling celebration of “martyrs” who flagrantly sinned in committing suicide. Lady Fame embodies this kind of disturbing judgment. As his measured response to the story of Dido and Aeneas within Book I of The

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House of Fame makes clear, Chaucer combines classical and Christian authority in a way that is antithetical to the whimsical and unsympathetic Lady Fame. Lady Fame’s appearance harks back to Chaucer’s parallels to Aeneas. When Aeneas visits the blissful groves of Elysium within the sixth book of the Aeneid, he sees the poets and prophets dwelling in one place, including Orpheus, whom Chaucer spots first in Fame’s house. Rather than being in the company of priests, however, the bards of the House of Fame are in the company of conjurers, sorcerers, witches, and magicians, including Simon Magus, who, according to medieval traditions, deceived the early church by challenging Peter and imitating Christ’s miracles. Early exegetes recognized Simon Magus as being akin to the Antichrist, whom Enoch and Eli would decry and banish with their preaching.56 In placing bards alongside sorcerers (rather than prophets) at the entrance to the Lady Fame’s house, Chaucer implies a deeply flawed foundation within her literary background as well as the dangerous messages that he mediates as a privileged visitor to this less accessible world of famed literature. Likewise, the literal foundation of her house is built upon the “feble fundament” (III.1132) of ice – a detail that Chaucer adds to Ovid’s description of Fame’s dwelling. While only a few names etched into the sides of her dwelling have faded, eventually the foundation will melt enough to turn the house asunder. In this way, Chaucer presents Lady Fame and the tradition of literature that she represents as a parody of Jesus’s return for the Last Judgment rather than the genuine event. Her authority veers dangerously towards that of the Antichrist or the Whore of Babylon as a false authority worshipped by the masses. Yet, Chaucer most directly compares her to the more benign beasts of the Apocalypse, who merely presage the return of Christ. Lady Fame’s judgment is not the true or final word, but the authority that it temporarily wields is troublesome to many. If she is not indeed the Antichrist, she certainly paves the way for him – perhaps the figure who enters at the end of the unfinished poem, who seems to be “a man of gret auctorite” (III.2158). Especially because the poem is unfinished (some have argued intentionally so), the Apocryphal identities of Lady Fame and Chaucer are flexible. Nevertheless, Chaucer has loosely aligned Lady Fame with the Antichrist and himself with Enoch and Eli, the prophets who return to earth to reason with the crowd and resist her influence. Chaucer as Vates Chaucer presents his own voice as an alternate kind of authority, separate from the literary auctoritas and moralization represented in the

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House of Fame. Essentially, he is the Eli and Enoch to the Antichrist of The House of Fame. To call Chaucer’s authority detached from or disdainful of Dante’s vatic authority is to ignore the inherently privileged position in which Chaucer places himself as narrator of this dream vision. Chaucer also likens himself to the prophet John when saying that Lady Fame resembled the four beasts “as John writ in th’Apocalips” (III.1385). As John wrote of the beasts, Chaucer writes of these quasiApocalyptic events. Chaucer’s main distinction from the auctoritas of the House of Fame comes in his ability to escape it to face yet another source of authority, the House of Rumor. Playing on the double-meaning of the word “fame,” which can mean both “renown” and “rumor,” Chaucer depicts two different dwellings of fame. When asked by a stranger whether he came to the first house, presided over by the Lady Fame, for fame himself, Chaucer declares, “Nay, for sothe, frend … I cam noght hyder, fraunt mercy, / For no such cause, by me hed!” (III.1875). He then clarifies that he only came for “Somme newe tydynges for to lere” (III.1886), seeming to take advice from the eagle’s earlier chastisement that he only pays attention to books. At this point, Geoffrey accepts the aid of this “frend,” who brings him to the House of Rumor. If the eagle represents Chaucer’s education, bringing him to the high realms of literary auctoritas, the anonymous friend represents the social circles to which Chaucer’s learning have indirectly exposed him. Yet the eagle is still there to warn him, “That but I bringe the therinne, / Ne shalt thou never kunne gynne / To come into hyt, out of doute / So faste hit whirleth, lo about” (III.2003–6). Chaucer is clearly in the House of Rumor as a visitor – not one who plans to get swept away. The eagle, who ties Chaucer to elevated learning, is both his means of access to and his escape from this world of rumors. As Susan E. Phillips has noted, “At first glance, the House of Fame appears to be an exemplum on the dangers of idle talk,” particularly in reference to Dido’s reputation in Book I. 57 Yet, she points out, “The House of Fame voraciously pursues gossip, dwelling not on how destructive it is but on how productive it might be both socially and narratively … Chaucer does not exclude idle talk from the domain of poetry; rather he embraces it as fundamental.”58 Chaucer willingly escapes the orderly but unjust House of Fame for the chaotic yet lively House of Rumor. Interestingly, Chaucer characterizes the manner of gossip that he hears without specifying any of it: And over alle the houses angels Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles Of werres, of pes, of mariages,

“Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame 129 Of reste, of labour, of viages, Of abood, of deeth, of lyf, Of love, of hate accord, of stryf, Of loos, of lore, and of wynnynges, Of hele, of seknesse, of bildynges. (III.1960–6)

Chaucer continues on and on without giving any particular detail, never himself engaging in the gossip at hand, either for those around him or for his reader. Rather, he acknowledges it as a source of literary inspiration. In this House of Rumor, Geoffrey demonstrates himself to be capable of digesting the chaos of the crowd without being drawn in. As an Eli or Enoch figure, he is potentially able to address the “congregacioun of folk” (III.2035) which he finds in the House of Rumor but also capable of distilling their own wisdom, much as he did in Book I. In his retelling of Dido’s story, Chaucer quelled her ruinous, gossiping detractors while also speaking to her situation with sage words of folk wisdom. Sowing the seeds of his later persona in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer presents himself as proficient at extracting the wisdom of a wide range of people for a wide range of people. Despite being among the people, Geoffrey is always a separate, prophetic figure within The House of Fame, with unique access to and perspective upon all of the areas that his dream shows him. Critics have long asserted the essential difference between Chaucer, the poet creating the work at hand, and Geoffrey, the dreamer, adrift in the work. However, in this work about access to stories and their retelling, wherein the eagle acknowledges Geoffrey’s literary occupation, this distinction is not so clear. Geoffrey’s ascent into the heavens and his ability to mingle with the crowd speak to Chaucer’s own writing talents. His invocations of the Muses at the beginning of each book reinforce his prophetic stance as a mediator between the classics and the public, using one to correct the other when necessary. Yet, the tendency to read Chaucer in contrast to Dante has led to a near dismissal and denial of Chaucer’s assumption of the vatic subject position within his dream visions. The prophet is not a role that Chaucer inhabits in every work. For instance, as Lee Patterson has pointed out, prophets like Cassandra and Calchas, who are associated with the tradition of Troilus and Criseyde as told by Boccaccio and Guido delle Colonne, are hapless witnesses to history who, much like the audience reading retrospectively, stand powerless to change the story that they know will unfold.59 In this context, the prophetic subject position is less natural and useful to Chaucer as a means of developing his authorial persona. However, it is not a role that he neglects and certainly not one that he mocks. Much like his

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predecessors, including Dante, Chaucer uses the role of the prophet to articulate his own perspective on his approach to authorship. Caxton’s Ending When printing the House of Fame in 1483 (STC 17015), William Caxton provided his own ending to the presumably unfinished work, and in doing so, he took care to gesture back to Chaucer’s prophetic role: And therwithal I abrayde Out of my slepe half a frayed Remembring wel what I had seen And how hye and ferre I had been In my ghoost and had gret wonder Of that the god of thunder Had lete me knowen and began to wryte Lyke as ye have herd me endyte Whefore to study and rede always I purpose to doo day by day Thus in dremyng and in game Endeth thys lytyl book of Fame.60

Caxton returns to the notion that “the god of thonder” has allowed Chaucer privileged access to this vision. He also reinforces the quintessentially authorial image of Chaucer beginning “to wryte” and emphasizes Chaucer quest “to study and rede always” as an essential part of his authorial identity. Caxton’s decision to add an ending to the poem, while brazen, was not necessarily the violation of The House of Fame’s message that contemporary critics have portrayed it to be. Rather, it is a summary of the poem’s major themes of Chaucer’s role as a conduit between the written words of the past and his readers. Despite having added his own ending, Caxton then takes the opportunity to explain to readers that Chaucer left the work unfinished: I fynde nomore of this werke to fore sayd For as far as I can vnderstŌde This noble man Gefferey Chaucer fynysshyd at the sayd conclusion of the metyng of lesyng and sothsawe where as yet they ben chekked and maye not departe whyche werke as me semeth is craftyly made and dygne to be wreton & knowen For he towchyth in it ryght grete wysedom & subtyll vnderston|dynge.61

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In doing so, Caxton grants himself the opportunity to draw attention to Chaucer’s authorial craft. He ends the volume with this continued praise:  nd so in alle hys werkys he excellyth in myn oppyny|on alle other A wryters in our Englyssh For he wrytteth no voy|de wordes but alle hys mater is ful of hye and quycke senten¦ce to whom ought to be gyuen laude and preysynge for hys no|ble makyng and wrytyng For of hym alle other haue borowed syth and taken in alle theyr wel sayeng and wrytyng And I humbly beseche & praye yow emonge your prayers to remem|bre hys soule on whyche and on alle crysten souls I beseche al|myghty god to haue mercy Amen.62

Caxton valued the work so much that he printed it in a larger folio format, and it stood alongside The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde as one of Chaucer’s most famous independently circulating works throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Early print scholars have drawn attention to the irony of Caxton’s choice to emphasize Chaucer’s authorial prestige in a work that supposedly decries the continued endorsement of authorial fame.63 Yet, it is not so strange that Caxton and other early editors like Richard Pynson should focus on The House of Fame as Chaucer’s third major work, as it is the one work in which he comments on his own position as an author and marries the dream vision genre to related discourses of the authorial vatic tradition. Caxton developed his view of Chaucer’s prophetic persona in The House of Fame without knowledge of the reputation of proto-Protestant and sceptical Humanist that would later come to characterize Chaucer. Yet, he ironically contributed to this reputation through his accidental inclusion of “When feythe failleth…” in the Chaucerian canon. The Inadvertent Introduction of “When feythe failleth…” into the Chaucerian Canon Before being known as “Chaucer’s Prophecy,” “When fethe failleth…” (IMEV 3943) circulated as an anonymous saying.64 It typically read as follows: When fethe failleth in prestes sawes And lordes hestes ar holden for lawes,

132  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship And robberie is holden purchas, And lecherie is holden solas Then shal the londe of Albion Be brought to grete confusion.

The poem laments the supposedly decaying state of morality in England – something that nearly anyone might agree with, regardless of political or religious opinions. However, like most prophecies, depending upon its context, it could easily be politicized to imply that a particular person or group is or will be responsible for this world turned upside down. Its construction is similar to that of Thomas of Erceldoune’s riddling response to the Countess of Dunbar’s question of when England and Scotland will cease to battle – the same prophecy that Piers Plowman’s Will mimics when predicting the return of Hunger: When man is mad a kyng of a capped man; When mon is levere oþermones þyng þan is owen; When Londyon ys forest, ant forest ys felde When hares kendles oþe herston When Wyt and Wille werres togedere. (1–5)65

Thomas of Erceldoune’s prediction describes a series of undesirable or seemingly impossible things. Man loving other men’s things more than his own is a commonplace violation of the tenth commandment, but London becoming a forest is something that one can hardly imagine. “When fethe failleth…” uses similar syntax to present a world that is so amoral as to seem contrary to logic. However, its more realistic predictions of people failing to listen to priests and stealing rather than buying could lead an audience to believe that it is about the present day rather than the future. Its use of the antiquated word “Albion” implies that the prophecy was composed in an earlier, more moral time, possibly by Merlin (to whom it was sometimes attributed).66 For those who read the prophecy and see it applying to the present, its prophetic format conveys that a voice from the past has predicted and mourned the sad state of contemporary conduct. In an early 1476 quarto pamphlet (STC 5090), William Caxton first printed “When fethe failleth…” after Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite and “The Complaint of Chaucer unto His Empty Purse” in an attempt to present Chaucer as a figure of national importance. Because Anelida and Arcite is a poem detailing the complaint of one lover to another, Caxton’s decision to follow it with a complaint from Chaucer to his

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purse as if it were his “lady dere” illustrates his editorial commitment to artistic unity.67 Adding “When fethe failleth…” to the pamphlet has the effect of broadening the scope of complaints to an overall warning of the degradation of morality within England. The prophecy mentions both “lechery” and “robbery” – related to the subjects of the preceding complaints. Both “The Complaint of Chaucer unto His Empty Purse” and “When fethe failleth…” refer to England using the older name, “Albion.” The last stanza of “The Complaint…” shifts from addressing the purse to addressing Henry IV: O conquerour of Brutes Albyon, Which that by lyne and free eleccion Been verray kyng, this song to yow I sende; And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende, Have mynde upon my supplicacion!

The mention of Albion allows Caxton to find a transition between the two poems, turning from a complaint addressing the leader of the nation to a prophetic complaint about the nation at large. In adding the poem to the end of the pamphlet, Caxton is mimicking the popular fifteenth-century practice of appending “When fethe failleth…” (and prophecies in general) to the final pages or flyleaves of manuscripts. Before Caxton’s use of it, the poem was sometimes included within collections of gnomic sayings and prophecies.68 However, it was also informally copied into the extra space at the ends of manuscripts – usually manuscripts like the prose Brut whose contents spoke of the fate of the English nation.69 Writing anonymous prognostications at the beginnings and ends of manuscripts was a common practice in the fifteenth century.70 Caxton’s addition of the prophecy participates in this tradition, and it seems that Caxton intended “When fethe failleth…” to go at the end of collections. The poem not only appears at the end of the pamphlet but also at the ends of Sammelbändes containing it.71 Caxton’s pamphlets are presenting Geoffrey Chaucer as a poet of national importance, and Caxton is marking that through the citation of this prophecy about Albion.72 Caxton adds a resolution to the prophecy. The version of “When fethe failleth…” that Caxton prints is followed by an extra stanza, taken from two different verses, “Hit falleth for every gentilman” (IMEV 1618) and “Hit cometh by kynde of gentil blode” (IMEV 1619): Hit falleth for every gentilman To saye the best that he can

134  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship In [every] mannes absence, And the soth in his presence. Hit cometh by kynde of gentil blode, To cast away al heuynes. And gadre to gidre wordes good. The werk of wisedom herith witnes.

The poem charges readers to prepare for the prophesied catastrophe by refraining from slander – which is arguably the extreme form of a complaint. Printed with this altered prophecy, Anelida’s and Chaucer’s complaints seem to represent the limits of the frustration that one should express, even when the world is at its worst. In this way, the addition of the prophecy and second stanza of verse turns the issues of the text to the audience and leaves them with an instructive message. There is no indication that Caxton was attempting to convince anyone that Chaucer composed the verses. The lack of an attribution of “When fethe faileth…” was not out of the ordinary in the fifteenth century.73 Caxton may have assumed that readers would recognize the popular prophecy and the verses of advice that followed it. Yet, a final poem, added in print by the editor himself, rather than one added by a reader’s hand, has an air of authenticity most likely unanticipated by Caxton in the earliest years of English printing. Gérard Genette has defined paratext as “other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations” and argues that they “surround [the text] and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.”74 Philippe Lejeune has similarly referred to threshold works within a book as “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”75 Genette argues that “what the pre-Gutenberg period did not know anything of – precisely because of the handwritten (and oral) circulation of its texts – is the publisher’s implementation of this peritext, which is essentially typographical and bibliographical in nature.”76 Yet the delineation between threshold works in manuscripts and printed books may not be as clear as Genette implies. Works copied into the flyleaves of manuscripts almost certainly affected their reception, and by mimicking a common addition to flyleaves, Caxton demonstrates a transitional period between the reader-supplied annotations of manuscripts and the publisher’s peritext.

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William Thynne and Prophetic Relevance Within his 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed, William Thynne also utilizes “When fethe failleth…” as a threshold piece but moves it to the space after his preface. In this space, Thynne uses the poem to characterize Chaucer as a past author from an ignorant and backwards time, whose work nevertheless speaks to the present day. He situates the prophecy after two other poems – the anonymous “Eyght goodly questions, with theyr aunsweres” and John Hoccleve’s “To the kynges most noble grace, and to the lordes and knyghtes of the garter.” All of them appear immediately after the preface to the collection. The preface to Thynne’s Workes (originally written by Sir Brian Tuke) compliments Chaucer’s literary style and implies that it must have been inspired by planetary influences or divine decree because it so excels that of his period.77 Tuke presents Chaucer as a national literary savior, elected by God. The prophecy following this preface reinforces this message, implying that God not only blessed England with Chaucer’s language but also with teachings and warnings relevant to the present day. Caxton’s use of the poem surely influenced Thynne’s decision to include it, but there is no evidence that Thynne was motivated by a belief that Chaucer composed the poem.78 Instead, it seems that Thynne was implying that the poem might be Chaucer’s in an effort to emphasize the author’s relevance. Greg Walker has argued that both “Eyght goodly questions,” and “To the kynges most noble grace” contain lines that are applicable to Henry VIII’s divorce and his struggles with Rome.79 Walker contends that Hoccleve’s poem in particular advocates for the cessation of religious debate when read in the context of the religious discord of 1532.80 By grouping these two poems with a prophecy of Albion “brought to great confusion” – a prophecy that begins, “When faith faileth in preestes sawes” – the poem seems to warn of chaos within the nation of England, incited by religious debate. This initial phrase of the prophecy could be interpreted in multiple ways. People could be losing their faith in priests’ teachings (sawes) because they are justifiably suspicious of the corrupt priests, or individuals could be failing to lend their faith to sermons because of their attraction to sin. In this sense, the prophecy speaks to the general discord of the time rather than pointing a finger at one side. By associating the prophecy with Chaucer, Thynne makes the author and his work appear to be relevant to readers of his own time. Thynne appears to have been inspired by Caxton’s ambiguous attribution of the poem.81 He surely knew that the poem was not Chaucer’s, since he situates it next to two poems that Chaucer also did not

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write and lists none of them in the table of contents. Thynne places the prophecy in such a way that does not falsely attribute it to Chaucer but could cause a reader to mistakenly do so. It is not a stretch to imagine that he did this by design, as he was wont to include texts in the edition that may have been Chaucer’s (based on little evidence other than the date of their composition), in order to shape an image of the poet. “When fethe failleth…” is politically relevant without making a bold statement. Thynne’s aim in including the prophecy may have been less motivated by a desire to inspire peace, as Walker has suggested, than by an aim to present Chaucer as an author whose works still have importance (without taking any political risks to do so).82 Given Tuke’s preface’s disdainful attitude towards the Middle Ages, Thynne could have expected his audience to question whether a medieval author might be worth reading at all. The prophecy builds upon the preface’s image of Chaucer as a beacon, shining within his own supposedly dark time into the present day. This is where the persisting yet evolving idea of Chaucer as a man ahead of his time begins. Adding “When Faith Faileth” to Chaucerian Manuscripts Thynne’s editorial decision led to the common attribution of the poem to Chaucer, and records attest to the title “Chaucer’s Prophecy” being popularly given to the poem. In a letter to Lord Burghley, dated 7 July 1586, someone called “A.B.” writes: Wm. White, a merchant of these West parts, informed the writer that being at St. Malo last month, he heard that 16 of their ships and barks had been rifled or taken by English men-of-war, and that their hatred of the English was such that our merchants dare not walk about in public … Surely Chawcer’s provysey never toke so deepe effect yn yngland & specyally yn the west parts as now, for theaft ys made good purchace.83

This allusion to the prophecy, made in a casual work letter, indicates that it was an aphorism, spoken by many – probably many who had never read Chaucer’s work. London, British Library, MS Additional 24663, a collection of prophecies about England produced in the sixteenth century, begins with “When faythe fayleth…” on the first folio and includes a bracket on the right hand side of the poem, with a note, “Wrytten by Jefferae Chauser.” The unusual spelling of Chaucer’s name, combined with the fact that “It falleth to every gentleman…” is not included, indicates that the copyist did not use the Thynne edition to copy the poem. It appears that the poem continued its broader, more

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popular tradition of oral and written citation but with the added association with Chaucer. Sixteenth-century readers continued the fifteenth-century practice of adding “When faithe failleth…” to manuscripts, except that they now added it to manuscripts of Chaucer’s works. For instance, a sixteenth-century hand added the first stanza of “When faithe failleth…” to the margin of the Canon Yoeman’s tale in Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.26, f. 161v. The spelling of the prophecy does not follow Thynne’s edition, so it seems to have been copied by memory as a saying about thievery. The line “robberie is holden purchas” directly comments upon the alchemist’s behaviour in the Canon Yoeman’s tale, described on f. 161v. The reader likely remembered the prophecy upon reading that portion of the text and added it, thinking it to be Chaucer’s own maxim. A reader of Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 likewise added the poem to the beginning of the early fifteenth-century manuscript dedicated to the works of Chaucer.84 This is a case of readers noting their presumed prior knowledge of Chaucer as they encounter his works. Although readers would casually insert the poem into Chaucerian manuscripts, Archbishop Matthew Parker’s library formally added it to an early fifteenth-century manuscript in an effort to cultivate a lengthy history of English Protestantism. In the late sixteenth century, a scribe with the initials T.W., who worked in Parker’s library, copied the three poems that appear after the preface of Thynne’s Workes into the beginning pages of the late fifteenth-century manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15, which had originally only included The Canterbury Tales.85 At the same time, T.W. also added an eight hundred fifty-line poem called Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede to the end of the manuscript. Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede, composed sometime between 1393 and 1401, is essentially antimendicant fanfiction of William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman.86 The poem extensively critiques all four orders of friars for being greedy, lecherous, and backbiting. As Lawrence Warner has demonstrated, Parker most likely believed Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede to be Chaucer’s own work.87 He had this rare manuscript revised under the impression that he was reinstating a formerly suppressed religious satire to its rightful place. Yet, this was also a case of Parker and his employees seeing what they wanted to see. Matthew Parker was notable for his “quest for documentary evidence of the unbroken continuity of the English Church from the earliest times,” and he collected early English chronicles such as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and Nennius’s Historia Brittanum to that end.88 Copying a work wherein Chaucer appeared to anticipate the English Reformation

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presented a special kind of continuity within the English Church. Little attention has been given to the fact that Parker’s library’s decision to add the three poems from Thynne’s edition before the Canterbury Tales was also one that bolstered this vision of continuity.89 T.W. took the liberty to name “When faith faileth…” “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in the table of contents. The title was likely chosen because of its already popular usage but also because it emphasized Chaucer’s status as an English prophet of the Reformation. Every line of the prophecy – from complaints of lechery to robbery – could be read as an indictment of the fraternal orders and a warning that their continued dominance would ultimately throw England into “confusion.” While Thynne’s printing of the poems was only broadly political, Parker copied them as propaganda in support of a specific cause, implying that faith was justifiably failing “in prestes sawes” because of the abuses within religious orders. “Chaucer’s Prophecy” Endures Like Parker’s library, editor John Urry most likely included the title “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1721) due to its popular usage and a desire to present Chaucer as a prophet of the Reformation. His footnote justifies his use of the title by noting, “So this Stanza is entitled in a Book in the Ashmolean Museum, No. 6986.781. P. 162.”90 The manuscript to which Urry refers, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 781 (SC 8113), is a miscellany that was compiled between 1620 and 1630. It contains several verses attributed to famous English figures such as Sir Walter Raleigh and William Perkins, and it is among these verses that “Chaucer’s Prophecy” appears. Urry’s citation of this manuscript is fairly sly. He does not explain that the manuscript was made less than a century ago and could hardly be the basis upon which to add a title or affirm Chaucer’s authorship of the piece (a fact that Urry would have known simply by looking at the other contents of the manuscript). Urry upholds less-than-rigorous scholarly standards because it is convenient to his religious perspective. The choice to include the title “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in his edition of the author’s works suits the image of Chaucer that Urry paints in his “Life of Chaucer.” Urry imagines a Geoffrey Chaucer who encountered the teachings of John Wycliffe while studying in Oxford. He portrays Chaucer writing poems such as Jack Upland and The Plowman’s Tale to win the public over to Wycliffe’s cause. These misattributed works provide Urry with exciting biographical details. Urry claims that Chaucer “was a Favourer of the Lollards (as were likewise most of his friends, particularly Occleve),” citing the many places in his works (most of them misattributed) in which he “inveighs against the Priests and Fryers.”91

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Urry also notes that Chaucer was respected by Gower despite the fact that Gower was “a perpetual exclaimer against Wickliffe and his Followers.”92 Urry’s Chaucer is a man ahead of his time who stands out even among peers like Gower. John Bell’s 1783 edition of the Poetical Works of Geoff. Chaucer similarly titles “Chaucer’s Prophecy” and cites the Ashmolean manuscript as the source of the title.93 Likewise, Bell portrays Chaucer as a bold and outspoken Lollard: “His patron the Duke of Lancaster having spoused the couse of Wickliffe, whom the clergy considered as a heretick, Chaucer inclined the same way, and turned the edge of his satire against lazy monks, ignorant priests, and the insolence of such as belonged to ecclesiastical courts with extraordinary success.”94 Much in the way that the addition of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” gave coherence to Parker’s manuscript containing Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede, the inclusion of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” under this title gives coherence to Chaucer’s persona within Urry’s and Bell’s collections. Part of why the prophecy continued to have credibility as Chaucer’s poem was due to Parker’s library’s careful alteration of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.15. In Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer Collected from Authentick Documents, published in 1810, Henry J. Todd writes of the Trinity manuscript: “It is one of those, which Mr. Tyrwhitt describes as having been collated or consulted for the purpose of his publication of The Canterbury Tales, but of which he has given no particular account. It is certainly deserving of further notice. It seems to have been written in the fifteenth century.”95 Todd makes note of Urry’s use of the Ashmolean manuscript but looks to the Trinity manuscript as a potentially more legitimate source for the poem, especially because Tyrwhitt had consulted its other contents. Yet, editors would turn to virtually any manuscript to affirm the poem and promote the proto-Protestant Chaucer that they wanted to represent. In the 1822 Chiswick series on British poets, “Chaucer’s Prophecy” is the penultimate poem in its five volumes on Chaucer, edited by Samuel Weller Singer. Singer’s biography of Chaucer begins by characterizing him as a “Morning Star” shining in “the shade of night” and ends by likening him to “a genial day in an English spring, after the gloom of a tedious winter.”96 The extended version of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” that he includes, copied from a fifteenth-century note in the flyleaf of what was most likely Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 356 (a), affirms this perspective on Chaucer. 97 It reads as follows: Qwan prestis faylin in her sawes And Lordis tirnin Goddis lawes Ageynis ryt.

140  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship And lecherie is holdin as privy solas And robberie as fre purchas Bewar thanne of ille Than schall the Lond of Albion Turnin to confusion As sumtyme it befelle Ora pro Anglia Sancta Maria, quod Thomas Cantuarie. Sweete Jhesu heven-king Ffayr and beste of alle thing You bringe us owt of morning To come to the at owre ending.98

A note after the poem in the Chiswick series refers back to the manuscript, saying, “Then follow some Monkish Latin rhymes.”99 The Latin prayer to Mary and the “Monkish Latin Rhymes” combine to place Chaucer within a Catholic English past, but the prayer to Jesus that follows in English, calling him “beste,” expresses a rather Protestant sentiment. When the poem refers to Jesus bringing “us owt of morning” and refers to “owre ending,” it is as if Chaucer is predicting an English future better guided by Christ, through the Reformation and beyond. Like the editions that precede his, Singer describes Chaucer as a follower of Wycliffe and argues, based on the misattributed Testament of Love, that Chaucer was imprisoned for these beliefs. Furnival finally called “Chaucer’s Prophecy” apocryphal in the preface to his 1868 edition of The Canterbury Tales. Furnivall cites Henry Bradshaw’s study of rhyme to exclude the poem from the Chaucerian canon, but there was never quite the unmasking moment for “Chaucer’s Prophecy” that there was for something like A Testament of Love, revealed by Skeat to be the work of Thomas Usk.100 Editors continued to put it in collections. In 1891, Richard Morris included “Chaucer’s Prophecy” (using the expanded version edited by Singer) as a minor poem within the Aldine edition of the British Poets, offering no caveats.101 Skeat, in his 1888 The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, says of the verses, “Those who think them genuine may thank me for giving them Caxton’s spelling instead of Speght’s.”102 Skeat notes that the prophecy seems to have been a popular saying, evidenced by Shakespeare’s use of it (attributed to Merlin).103 His instinct to include the poem despite this acknowledgment speaks to its following. To this day, one can find “Chaucer’s Prophecy” online, still ascribed to Chaucer, in various contexts. One webpage includes it in a catalogue of poems about robbery.104 YouTube, Dailymotion, and other video websites host a video that features actress Ghizela Rowe doing a dramatic

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reading of “Chaucer’s Prophecy.”105 Ostensibly learning-focused sites like CosmoLearning and AllPoetry feature the poem, calling it “Chaucer’s Prophecy” and attributing it to Chaucer. Misattributed prophecies circulate today much in the way that they did in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Many people turn to famous authors not to read their work in depth but to find a quotable sententious statement relevant to a political or personal issue at hand. Such temporary and casual readers tend to pay little attention to provenance or authenticity. Yet, the idea of a prophetic Chaucer endures within more scholarly circles as well, and it is difficult for any of us to say with real objectivity the degree to which we are forcing relatively contemporary ideas like feminism, Marxism, or postmodernism onto Chaucer because we, like Chaucer’s early print editors, would like to see him as a man ahead of his time, exceptionally relevant to the present day. Although Chaucer the Protestant ahead of his time has disappeared, the image of Chaucer the secular, sceptical Humanist looms larger than is warranted, sometimes obscuring our view of Chaucer as a man of his own fascinating time. The evolution of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” raises a number of questions about how readers want to relate to the past. Thynne seems to have included it in The Workes of Geffray Chaucer to reassure his audience that a medieval author could still have relevant things to say to the present day. Other editors like Urry seem to have turned to “Chaucer’s Prophecy” for the seemingly opposite reason – to affirm religious beliefs of the present by claiming that they were predicted by a great thinker of the past. Reading and writing literature is a form of communication, and those of us who study historical literature surely do so to find meaningful connections to the past. However, we must remember that we are the ones making the biggest leaps for those cross-temporal connections, not the authors themselves. Chaucer used prophetic citation to represent his own authorial subject position metaphorically. Subconsciously, editors and readers may be ascribing prophetic powers to authors as a metaphor for the timeless connection to them that they want to feel.

Afterword

Prophetic authorial reputations do not always persist in the same manner that they began. Although we now know that Langland was not a Wycliffite and that Chaucer never wrote “Chaucer’s Prophecy,” their prophetic authorial personae, crafted in light of these earlier misconceptions, still influence interpretations of their works in indirect ways. For Langland, the lingering Reformation-based interpretations of Clergy’s prognostication have presented impediments to understanding the satirical nature of Piers Plowman’s prophecies. Chaucer’s reputation as a prophet of the Protestant Reformation subtly influences comparative readings of his works alongside Dante’s. Modern audiences may not be fooled by Gower’s presentation of the Viso of the Vox clamantis or the Cronica Tripertita as having been composed in advance, but they continue to be convinced that Gower foretold Richard’s deposition. Authorial prophetic reputations endure in subtler ways in literary criticism, but they often come to the forefront in pedagogy. When the introductory guide to Piers Plowman on the British Library’s webpage asks, “Was Langland a prophet, foreshadowing Henry VIII’s spearheading of the English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41)?” it is trying to draw students into the text in an exciting way.1 Because the value of medieval literature is often subject to scrutiny by contemporary audiences (perhaps especially by students who are more comfortable reading more-contemporary works), those of us who teach the works of past authors may be most apt to jump to authorial prescience to defend its relevance and vitality. The danger in fixating on prophecies within canonical literature is that we almost inevitably appropriate them to fit into our preferred narrative of history. Longstanding traditions of viewing authors as prophets are often tied to an underlying conviction that God has been guiding the fate of England – a fate that was witnessed by the authors of “great works” who could

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see its inevitable future. Scholars who stress the prescience of Langland, Gower, or Chaucer to argue for the merits of studying them have unintentionally latched onto this belief, irrespective of their own investments in its nationalist agenda. An instructor highlighting Gower’s uncanny ability to predict Richard II’s downfall may be completely unconcerned with promoting the reign of Henry IV or the notion of a teleological, providential model of English history. Nevertheless, that vestigial ideology is still present in this approach to Gower. Ideally, this is an ideology that we should be challenging rather than replicating within the classroom. One can acknowledge that Langland has been considered a prophet, but one should also acknowledge the political and religious investments that have motivated that reading of Langland. Because it is a second-hand authority, prophecy is an easily appropriated discourse. Those of us who study medieval literature are poised to teach students about the history of literary criticism – especially how authors and texts have been manipulated to support a variety of agendas. Literary critics and instructors should approach medieval authorial prophetic personae with caution and scepticism, even when the authors themselves adopted prophetic roles and speculated about future events. The predictions that medieval authors “got right” deserve careful discussion. For instance, within the Mirour de l’Omme, thought by G.C. Macaulay to have been written between 1376 and 1379, Gower complains: Mais certes c’est un grant errour Veoir l’estat superiour El danger d’un vilein estant Me semble que la litargie Ad endormi la seignourie, Si qu’ils de la commune gent Ne pernont garde a la folie, Ainz souffront croistre celle urtie Quelle est du soy trop violent. Cil qui pourvoit le temps present Se puet doubter procheinement, Si dieus n’en face son aïe, Qe celle urtie inpacient Nous poindra trop soudainement, Avant ce q’om la justefie. Trois choses sont d’une covyne Qui sanz mercy font la ravine

144  Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship En cas qu’ils soient au dessus: L’un est de l’eaue la cretine, L’autre est du flamme la ravine, Et la tierce est des gens menuz La multitude q’est commuz: Car ja ne serront arrestuz Par resoun ne par discipline. (26482–505) [But truly it is a great wrong to see the upper class in the power of the peasant class. It seems to me that lethargy has made the nobles go to sleep, so that they take no heed of the folly of the common people but rather allow the nettle to grow, which in itself is very dangerous. He who reflects on the present time may soon fear, unless God sends aid, that this impatient nettle will very suddenly sting us before it is brought to justice. There are three things with a single behaviour that ravage mercilessly when they get the mastery. One is flood waters. Another is wild fire. The third is the multitude of little people when they are stirred up, for they will not be stopped by reason or by discipline.2

Of this prophecy, John Fisher has observed, “The startling clarity with which [Gower] foresaw the Peasant’s Revolt was sober fact.”3 G.C. Macaulay similarly calls the passage “a rather striking prophecy of the evil to be feared.”4 In his historical account of the Rising, R.B. Dobson remarks, “After 1381 a large number of English writers were prepared to generalize, with benefit of hindsight, about the causes of the Peasants’ Revolt. The poet John Gower is apparently unique in actually foreseeing the probability of a major social cataclysm several years before it occurred.”5 Macaulay’s dating of the Mirour encourages this reading because it seems that Gower was anticipating the possibility of a public revolt just before it occurred. However, more recently, R.F. Yeager has convincingly argued that the work was produced as early as 1360.6 Placing the composition of the work a decade earlier means considering that Gower may have simply noticed that the peasant class was capable of revolting, which is potentially true at any time. Furthermore, even if Gower added this observation to the text in the late 1370s, his prediction is wrapped up in highly subjective class politics. He is arguing that the upper class should be more vigilant in correcting the follies of the peasants. Any assertion that this passage accurately predicts the Rising of 1381 must be tempered with caveats that Gower’s fears of insurrection, although well founded, were not necessarily based on an accurate assessment of the class politics at stake. Although the violence of the Rising was appalling,

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the rebels were reacting to deeply unfair economic systems like serfdom. Had the nobility attempted to bring the peasant class more firmly under their power, as Gower suggests, this may not have prevented a rebellion but incited an earlier one. Somewhat unavoidably, the medieval English literary canon is largely limited to the writings of upper-class men. To credit their works with genuine prophecy is to (often unwittingly) embrace ideologies related to the stations of those authors. Even these moments of seemingly real prescience warrant healthy scepticism. Although Chaucer adopts a moral prophetic stance in The House of Fame and engages in prophetic citation, he avoids this kind of discussion of the future. Chaucer’s implied criticisms of monks, friars, and clergy have been read as an anticipation of the Reformation, but no specific passages appear to prognosticate politically. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer anticipates the future, considering: And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So pretty I God that non miswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or ells songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (V.1793–8)

Like a prophet, Chaucer considers the future, but unlike one, Chaucer sees himself as relatively powerless in the face of its whims. Like Troilus or Criseyde, his own works and his own reputation will be subject to future scrutiny that he cannot control. Rather than powerfully asserting what is to come, Chaucer humbly admits his own powerlessness. It is in this sense that we may see some foresight in Chaucer, although one can hardly imagine his apprehensions to be uncanny or shockingly prescient. Chaucer anticipated the danger of misinterpretation by future audiences, and due to this, he seems to have tried to avoid any semblance of political prophecies. Ultimately, Chaucer could not protect his reputation from being intermingled with political prophecies, but it was a fate that he had attempted to avoid. Medieval political prophecies were and are enticing to readers. They enact a communication between the past and present that is innately compelling, especially when the subjects are topical, the language is cryptic, or the speaker is renowned. The convergence of the fame of a canonical author with the magnetism of political prophecy is especially powerful. There is no need to abandon considerations of the politically prophetic author when writing or teaching about medieval literature. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge the extent to which scribes,

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publishers, readers, critics, and the authors themselves (via proleptic alterations) have been complicit in retrospectively transforming medieval English authors into prophets.

Notes

Introduction 1 STC 20519, 50. 2 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 495n2. 3 See Kathleen Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2001), 12; 79; 88–105. 4 Stephen Yandell presents an alternate view of Adam of Usk’s use of prophecies by arguing that Usk was most concerned with career advancement and self-authorization. See Stephen Yandell, “Prophetic Authority in Adam of Usk’s Chronicle,” in Prophet Margins: the Medieval Vatic Impulse and Social Stability, ed. E.L Risden, Karen Moranski, and Stephen Yandell (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 79–100. 5 See Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell Press, 2000), 6. 6 Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 1. 7 Ibid., 3–4. 8 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 35. 9 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 7; Campbell, The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translatio (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), 1–7. 10 Eusebii Cæsariensis, “Vita Constantini,” in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.P. Migne, vol. 20, col. 939 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–86). 11 See John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 9. 12 Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 11.

148  Notes to pages 9–12 13 Ibid., 16. 14 The first version in print is Syr Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance Poems, ed. Sir Frederic Madden (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1839). 15 At least one article has claimed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight anticipated the Protestant Reformation, largely based on the assumption that Piers Plowman did the same. See S.L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, “The Passing Seasons and the Apocalyptic in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’” South Central Review 3, no. 1 (Spring, 1986), 15. 16 Lynn Nottage, Sweat (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017). 17 David Cote, “Sweat,” Time Out, 3 November, 2016. https://www.timeout. com/newyork/theater/sweat-1. 18 Susan Saccoccio, “Sweat a Riveting Study of a Factory Community Wrenched Apart,” Bay State Banner, 13 February, 2020. 19 Alexis Soloski, “The Writer Who Foresaw the Trump Era,” 28 October, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/culture/ article/20201020-the-play-that-predicted-trumps-victory. 20 Sarah Crompton: “Interview: Playwright Lynn Nottage: ‘We are a country that has lost our narrative,’” The Guardian, 2 December, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/dec/02/ lynn-nottage-interview-play-sweat-america. 21 Exit poll data indicates that “the median Trump voter [made] some $17,000 more than the median American.” See Jeff Manza and Ned Crowley, “Working Class Hero: Interrogating the Social Bases of the Rise of Donald Trump,” Forum 15, no. 1 (May 2017) 14. 22 Pew Research Center polls indicate that Trump only earned 6 per cent of Black Americans’ votes and 28 per cent of votes from Hispanic Americans. “An Examination of the 2016 Electorate, Based on Validated Voters,” Pew Research Center, August 9, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/ an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/. 23 See Victor Fiorillo, “Can a Play Make Sense of Trump Voters?” Philadelphia Magazine, 6 October, 2018; David Finkle, “Sweat on Broadway: Setting the Stage for Trump,” The Clyde Fitch Report, 26 March, 2017, https://www. clydefitchreport.com/2017/03/sweat-broadway-lynn-nottage-trump/; Michael Schulman, “The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era,” The New Yorker, 20 March, 2017. 1.  The Sybil and Merlin 1 J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 1.

Notes to pages 12–15  149 2 Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience,” Yearbook of English Studies 7, (1 January, 1977), 69; V.J. Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), 29–43. 3 Joyce Coleman, “The Flower, the Leaf, and Phillipa of Lancaster,” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), 33–58. 4 Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 3. 5 See H.W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1988), 23–5. 6 Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, The Fathers of the Church, trans. Sister Mary Francis McDonald (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 32–5. 7  Ibid., 33. 8  Frederico Santangelo, Divination, Prediction, and the End of the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 141. 9  See Rieuwerd Buitenwerf, Book Three of the Sibylline Oracles and its Social Setting (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 104–6. 10 Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy, 1. 11 Erich S. Gruen, “Sibylline Oracles,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://doi. org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8134. 12 J.R. Lightfoot, “The Sibyl,” in The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (Oxford University Press, 2007), 5; Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy, 7. 13 See The Sibylline Oracles: Translated from the Greek Into English Blank Verse, ed. and trans. Milton S. Terry (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1899), 56; J.L Lightfoot, “The Judaeo-Christian Background: Use of the Bible,” in The Sibylline Oracles (Oxford University Press, 2007), 219–53. 14 See Buitenwerf, Book Three of the Sibylline Oracles, 79–91. 15 See Paul J. Alexander, The Oracle of Baalbek: the Tiburtine Sibyl in Greek Dress (Washington D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Harvard University, 1967), 10; 23. This sixth-century Greek version of the prophecy may be based on an earlier fourth-century version, but no conclusive evidence of the existence of such a text exists. 16 Alexander, The Oracle of Baalbek, 1–30. All subsequent lines are quoted from this edition. 17 Ernst Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1898), 181–5. The Last Emperor is not present in the Oracle of Baalbek, and Christopher Bonura has convincingly argued that this element of the

150  Notes to pages 16–17

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26

27 28

prophecy originated in the seventh-century Syriac Apocalypse of PseudoMethodius and was only added to the Tiburtine Sibyl in the eleventh century. See Christopher Bonura, “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate? A New Look at the Textual Relationship Between The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the Tiburtine Sibyl,” Viator 47, no. 3 (2016), 47. See Bonura, “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate?” 66–7. See Anke Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 11; Bernard McGinn, “Oracular Transformations: The Sibylla Tiburtina in the Middle Ages,” in Sibille e linguaggi oracolari: mito, storia, tradizione, ed. Ileana Chirassi Colombo and Tullio Seppilli (Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998), 613–14. For the book’s popularity as a history more than a prophecy, see Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes, xix; 53–67. See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 302. Also see Marjorie Reeves, “Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor,” Traditio 17 (1961), 323–70. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 324. See Eustache Deschamps, Ouvres Complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. le Marquis de Saint-Hilaire, 11 vols. (Paris: SATFL, 1878), Ballades 192 (vol 2, pg. 9); 1046 (vol 5, pg. 329); 1212 (vol 6, pg. 204). All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. For an extended discussion of Deschamps’s other Sibyllic prophecies, see Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet, “L’accomplissement des prophéties,” in Eustache Deschamps en son temps, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), 133–43. See Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, “The Feminist Voice of the Misogynist Poet: Deschamps’s Poems in Women’s Voices,” in Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier-Poet: His Work and World, ed. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 123–30. For Bede’s Sibyllinorum, see Robin Raybould, The Sibyl Series of the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 33. For attributions of the Tiburtine Sybil to Bede, see Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes, 8. Eric Weiskott, “The Idea of Bede in English Political Prophecy,” in Remembering the Medieval Present, ed. Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 273; 277. Oeuvres completes d’Eustache Deschamps vol 1, 164–5. See Christian de Mérindol, “De l’emblématique de Charles VI et de Jean de Berry: à propos d’un plafond peint et armorié récemment publié,” in Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France: Bureau de la Société Pour l’Année 2006, ed. M. Florian Meunier (Paris: Librarie de la Société), 120–35.

Notes to pages 18–23  151 29 See Boudet and Millet, Eustache Deschamps en son temps, 122. 30 For Richard as the Donkey in French prophetic writing, see Glynnis M. Cropp and Alison Hanham, “Richard II from Donkey to Royal Martyr: Perceptions of Eustache Deschamps and Contemporary French Writers,” Parergon 24, no. 1 (January 2007), 101–36. 31 Boudet and Millet, Eustache Deschamps en son temps, 122. 32 Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie has not yet appeared in an edited volume. This quotation was taken from Christine Moneera Laennec, “Christine antygrafe: Authorship and Self in the Prose Works of Christine de Pizan with an edition of B.N. MS. 603 “Le Livre de Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie,” vol. 2 (PhD diss., Yale University, 1988), 22. Translation taken from Christine de Pizan, The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, ed. Charity Cannon Willard, trans. Summer Willard (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 12. 33 For a discussion of Merlin, the Sibyl, and Bede’s citation in French prophecy related to Joan, see Debeorah Fraioli, “The Literary Image of Joan of Arc: Prior Influences,” Speculum 54, no. 4 (October 1981), 811–30. 34 Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford:The Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977), 34; 45. All further quotations of the French text and translations are from this edition, hereafter cited in the text. 35 Kevin Brownlee, “Structures of Authority in Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc,” in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 140. 36 Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker, “The Political Poetics of the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 177–94. 37 See Bonura, “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate?” 66. 38 See Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 1–17. 39 See Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1–42. 40 See Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 18–65. 41 The prophecies may have been circulating in an incomplete version as early as the 1120s. See Bernard Meehan, “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecies of Merlin: New Manuscript Evidence,” The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 28, no. 1 (November 1978), 37–46. 42 Marjorie Chibnall, ed. and trans., The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–80) VI, xii: 380–8.

152  Notes to pages 24–8 43 See Jean Blacker, “Where Wace Feared to Tread,” Arthuriana 6, no. 1 (1996), 39–40. 44 Laȝamon describes Wace’s presentation of the Brut to the queen. See Laȝamon, Brut, eds. G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie (London: Early English Text Society, 1978) ll.20–3. 45 Blacker, “Where Wace Feared to Tread,” 40. 46 John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Dipolmacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 90. 47 Wace, Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss University of Exeter Press, 2002), 190–1. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Although Wace chose to exclude the extended prophecy, scribes have added it to at least two manuscripts of the Brut. See ibid., 190n2. 48 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: an Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 252–3. 49 Virgil, Aeneid, ed. Jefferey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library 64 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), VII.41. Translation is my own. 50 See Randall J. Pogorzelski, Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperialism in the Aeneid and Ulysses (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 122–4; Don Fowler, “Virgilian Narrative: Story-Telling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 269. 51 For an overview of scholarship on ambiguity in the Aeneid, see Richard F. Thomas, “A Trope by Any Other Name: ‘Polysemy,’ Ambiguity, and Significatio in Virgil,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), 381–407. 52 Layamon, “Layamon’s Brut,” in Arthurian Chronicles, trans. Eugene Mason (Tornonto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 264. 53 See T.M. Smallwood, “The Prophecy of the Six Kings,” Speculum 60, no. 3 (July 1985), 571–92 and Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place in Medieval England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 87–101. 54 Victoria Flood has argued that the prophecy is a reworking of Merlin’s prophecy of a goat from the camp of Venus within the Prophetiae Merlini. See Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place, 89–91. 55 MS British Library Harley 746, fol. 2r. Translation is my own. 56 Ibid., fol. 3r. 57 Julia Marvin, The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: the Manuscript Culture of Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 2017), 7. 58 Lister M. Matheson, The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 180 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University Press, 1998), 4.

Notes to pages 28–31  153 59 Matheson, The Prose Brut, 34. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., ix. 62 For Edward and Arthur, see Marc Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 299–307. 63 See Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 13; Smallwood, “Prophecy of the Six Kings” 571. 64 See Michael J. Curley, “The Cloak of Anonymity and The Prophecy of John of Bridington,” Modern Philology 77, no. 4 (May 1980), 361; A.G. Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look,” Speculum 63, no. 3 (July 1988), 597. Lesley Coote has found evidence of some verses of the prophecy written as early as 1330. See Prophecy and Public Affairs, 118. 65 Ibid., 366. Also see Sister Helen M. Peck, “The Prophecy of John Bridlington” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1930), 22–6; Aubrey Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 129–37. 66 Michael J. Curley has suggested that, since the prophecy was already associated with the Bridlington area (and may have originated there), people recopying it attributed the work to the renowned friar John Thwenge, prior of Bridlington, in an effort to attach the predictions to “an appropriately sanctified author.” See “The Cloak of Anonymity,” 363. 67 M.R. James, “The Catalogue of the Library of the Augustinian Friars at York,” in Fasciculus J.W. Clark dicatus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 2–96; Paul Meyvaert, “John Erghome and the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington” Speculum 41, no. 4 (October 1966), 656–64; Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy,” 596–613. 68 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 36. 69 “John of Bridlington,” Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1859–1861), 181. 70 Ibid., 202–4. 71 See Wright, “Introduction,” in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1859– 1861), xxviii–iv; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 142. 72 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 144. 73 See Eulogium Historiarum sive Temporis, ed. Frank Scott Haydon, Vol. 3 (London: Longman, 1863), 390–3. 74 Thomas Walsingham, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti, regum Angliae” in Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1866), 237. 75 Saul, Richard II, 99. 76 For more information on these prophecies in the manuscript, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 152–4.

154  Notes to pages 31–3 77 J.J.N. Palmer, England, France, and Christendom: 1377–99 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 47–8. 78 For an overview of transmission as a fundamental component of medieval authorship, see Ian R. Johnson and others, “Vernacular literary consciousness c.1100-c.1500: French, German and English evidence,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 422–71. 79 See David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4. 80 For discussion of the rise of the first-person narrative voice, see A.C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 1–32. Spearing notes that the trend begins with French dits in the thirteenth century but does not reach England until the fourteenth century. Although Spearing’s book primarily focuses on English works told in the first person without a named author, the first-person narrative voice lent itself to exploitation by authors who wanted to call attention to their literary craft. For authorial self-naming and self-description, see Burt Kimmelman, “The Machaut Map,” in Machaut’s Legacy, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2017) 89–138; Erik Kwakkel, “Late Medieval Text Collections: A Codicological Typology Based on Single-Author Manuscripts,” in Author, Reader, Book, eds. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 56–79; Stephen Partridge, “The Makere of this Boke’: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler,” in Author, Reader, Book, eds. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) 106–53; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Written Work: Langland, Labour, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 67–143; Lawrence De Looze, “Signing Off in the Middle Ages” in Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 162–78; Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 38; 189. 81 See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1–20. 82 Michael C. Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 189–215. 83 Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 168–90.

Notes to pages 33–7  155 84 Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel” in John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–88, Studies in Medieval Culture 26 (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989), 159–87. 85 The 1561 edition was The vision of Pierce Plowman, newlye imprynted after the authours olde copy, with a brefe summary of the principall matters set before every part called Passus. Whereunto is also annexed the Crede of Pierce Plowman, never imprinted with the booke before (London: Owen Rogers, 1561), and the 1813 was Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. Or the Vision of William Concerning Piers Plouhman, and the visions of the Same Concerning the Origin, Progress, and Perfection of the Christian Life, ed. Thomas Whitaker (London: John Murray, 1813). 2.  William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies 1 William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (Medieval Institute Publications: Western Michigan University, 2011), B.X.316–26. All quotations will be taken from this edition. I cite the B-text here because this is the version of the prophecy that Crowley published (in more modernized spelling). 2 Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter, “William Langland,” The Longman Anthology: British Literature, 4th ed., vol. 1A, ed. Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: Pearson, 2010), 443. 3 Lawrence Warner, “Piers Plowman: An Introduction,” Discovering Literature: Medieval, The British Library, January 31, 2018, https://www.bl.uk/ medieval-literature/articles/piers-plowman-an-introduction. 4  See Morton Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 65–98; and KerbyFulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 276. 5  See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1–15; Bernard McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform: 1100–1500,” The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, ed. Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2003), 276–8. 6  Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 28–36. 7  Bernard McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 284. 8  Ibid., 284–9. 9  Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse, 120–1; Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 168. 10 See David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 62–79; Robert Adams, “Some Versions of

156  Notes to pages 37–40 Apocalypse: Learned and Popular Eschatology in Piers Plowman,” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 194–236; and Richard K. Emmerson, “‘Yernen to Rede Redels?’ Piers Plowman and Prophecy,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 7 (August 1993), 27–76. 11 See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 10; 56–7. 12 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 12. 13 An earlier version of this argument appears in Kimberly Fonzo, “William Langland’s Uncertain Apocalyptic Prophecy of the Davidic King,” in Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Robert E. Bjork. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 53–66. 14 “An Invective Against France,” in Political Poems and Songs, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Longman, 1859), 26–39; 30. Translation is my own. 15 For the political context of “An Invective Against France,” see Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 80. 16 “John of Bridlington,” in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1859–61), 166. 17 Ibid., 167. 18 See Josef Funkenstein, “Samuel and Saul in Medieval Political Thought,” Hebraic Political Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2007), 149–63. 19 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 96. 20 Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg. iv. 25, fol. 61v. Quotation and translation taken from Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 95. This prophecy exists in at least twenty manuscripts, all nearly identical. The first dates from roughly 1340, although it was later exploited by Lancastrian propagandists who sought to legitimize Henry IV’s usurpation. See T.A. Sandquist, “The Holy Oil of St. Thomas of Canterbury,” in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T.A. Sandquist and M.R. Powicke (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 130–44. 21 F.J. Furnivall, ed., Adam Davy’s Dreams about Edward the Second, Early English Text Society (London: Trübner and Company, 1878), 13. Although originally about Edward II, this poem circulated into the fifteenth century. For information about the manuscript, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 8. 22 For a list of manuscripts in which the prophecy, titled “Anglia transmittet,” by Coote appears, see Coote, “Handlist of Manuscripts,” Prophecy and Public Affairs, 239–80.

Notes to pages 40–5  157 23 Eulogium Historiarum sive temporis, vol. 1, ed. Frank Scott Haydon (London: Longman, 1858–65), 419–20. 24 Ibid., 420. Translation is my own. 25 For the power struggle between church and state after the Gregorian Reform, see Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy With Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) and Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology 1957 Reprint (1957; reis., Princeton University Press, 2016), 42–86. For the papacy’s favouring of France in the conflict with England, see John Barnie, War in Medieval English Society: Social Values in the Hundred Years War 1337–99 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 12. 26 See Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 98. 27 See Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to Piers Plowman (Chippenham, Wilts: Four Courts Press, 2013), 11–28. 28 See Andrew Galloway, “Parallel Lives: William Rokele and the Satirical Literacies of Piers Plowman,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018), 43–111; 46. 29 See Ralph Hannah, William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 2–3; Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family, 22. 30 Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family, 24. 31 See Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 333–40. 32 See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 99. 33 See Lesley Coote, “The Crusading Bishop: Henry Despenser and His Manuscript” in Prophecy, Apocalypse, and the Day of Doom, ed. Nigel Morgan, Harlatxon Medieval Studies VII (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2004), 39–51. 34 See Barnie, War in Medieval English Society, 13–14. 35 Ibid., 14. 36 Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. Vivian Hunter Galbraith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), 49. John Ergome is also critical of the treaty in the prophetic verses ascribed to John of Bridlington. See Wright, Political Poems and Songs, 123–215. 37 Denise N. Baker, “Meed and the Economics of Chivalry in Piers Plowman,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), 56. 38 K.B. MacFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures For 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 38. 39 Sir John Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain &c., trans. Thomas Johnes (London: Bohn, 1852), 284. 40 See Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse,” 222.

158  Notes to pages 46–56 41 Textus biblie cum Glosa ordinaria, Nicolai de lyra postilla, Moralitatibus eiusdem Pauli Burgensis additionibus Matthie Thoring replicis: Repertorium alphabeticum, 7 vols. (Basel: Johannes Petri and Johannes Frobenus, 1506–8), vol. 4, fol. 263r. 42 See Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 332. 43 See Andrew Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70, no. 1 (January 1995), 68–105. 44 Curtis A. Gruenler, Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 121–2. 45 See Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling,” 84–5. 46 Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 10. 47 See Marjorie Reeves, “Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor,” Traditio 17 (1961) 323–70; McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 286–8. 48 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 332–3. 49 Michael P. Kuczynski, Prophetic Song, 205. 50 Langland removed this line following the shorter version that he includes in Passus V of the C-text, which he attributes instead to Reason. Thus, it would appear to be less essential to the meaning of the passage that Langland otherwise chose to retain. 51 Haydon, Eulogium Historiarum, 417. Translation is my own. For an analysis the prophecies of the Sextus Leopard, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 114–15. 52 McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 276. 53 See Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 21; 34–5; 106. 54 McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 277. 55 Ibid., 289. 56 Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-clericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97–8; Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, 4. Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 153. 57 See Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-clericalism, 97–8. 58 McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 285. 59 Kuczynski, Prophetic Song, 189. 60 A.V.C. Schmidt, “Literary and Historical,” in 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: J.M. Dent, 1995), 446. 61 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: an Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 158–9. 62 Qtd. in Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place, 89.

Notes to pages 56–62  159 63 Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, 118. 64 London, British Library MS Harley 2253 fol. 127r. 65 See William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7. 66 Ibid., 18. 67 Jansen Jaeck, “British Library MS Sloane 2578,” 36. 68 Jaeck, “Politics, Protest,” 93. 69 Ff.107v-108r; transcription taken from Jaeck, “Politics, Protest,” 94. 70 Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 72. For an overview of the six manuscripts, see Eric Weiskott, “Prophetic Piers Plowman: New Sixteenth-Century Excerpts,” The Review of English Studies 67, no. 278 (February 2016), 21–41. 71 See Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman, 72–8. 72 Ibid., 76–7. Warner suggests that John Brynstan owned the manuscript and wrote the passage. Brynstan famously endorsed the king as head of the Church but decried the Protestant followers of “new books.” Warner notes the similarity between Brynstan’s perspective and the prophecy that combines Will’s and Clergy’s predictions. However, the manuscript does not contain that version of the prophecy. 73 For an extended analysis of this annotator’s prophetically inclined readings of Piers Plowman, see Sarah A. Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 34. 74 See Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Routledge, 1977; 2003), 178. 75 Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’” in Literary Pracitce and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–82; 18; Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 93–105; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” Written Work: Langland, Labour, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 121. 76 See Kane, “Piers Plowman”: The Evidence for Authorship (London: The Athlone Press, 1965), 69–70. 77 Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction,” The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland done into Modern English by the Rev. Professor Skeat (London: Alexander Morning, 1905), x. 78 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 581 (S.C. 987), Oxford, Oriel College, MS 79, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38, respectively. 79 sig. *iir. 80 STC 19907a.

160  Notes to pages 62–8 81 Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82–4; Weiskott, “Prophetic Piers Plowman,” 27–8. 82 “‘This is no prophecy’: Robert Crowley, ‘Piers Plowman,’ and Kett’s Rebellion,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 42.1 (2011), 37–55, 47. 83 Ibid., 46–7. 84 Robert Crowley, Philargyrie of great Britayne, in The Fable of Philargyrie the Great Gigant, Reprinted from the only known copy, intro. W. A. Marsden (London: Emery Walker, 1931). 85 STC 19907a. 86 Drbo.org 87 Sarah A. Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 34–7. 88 John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae posterior pars (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1559), 474. Translation is my own. 89 Excerpts of the poem did appear in anthologies, but Kelen notes that “in shortening the poem for its readers, those editors also obscured the complex and often contradictory experience of reading the poem, an experience that is itself part of Langland’s meaning.” Langland’s Early Modern Identities, 100. 90 STC 20519, 50. 91 George Hickes, Linguarum Vett[arum] septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et archaeologicus, vol. 1 (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1703–5), 107. 92 Thomas Dunham Whitaker, “Introductory Discourse,” in Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. Or the Vision of William Concerning Piers Plouhman, and the visions of the Same Concerning the Origin, Progress, and Perfection of the Christian Life, ed. Thomas Dunham Whitaker (London: John Murray, 1813), xxxvii. 93 Ibid., xxxviii. 94 Thomas Wright, “Introduction,” The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman (London: William Pickering, 1842), x. Also see Thomas Wright, “Introduction,” The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, ed. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Reeves and Turner, 1887), xxi. 95 P.H. Ditchfield and William Page, “Houses of Benedictine monks: The abbey of Abingdon,” in A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 2, ed. P.H. Ditchfield and William Page (London: Victoria County History, 1907), 51–62. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/ berks/vol2/pp51–62. 96 Ibid., xvii. 97 Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction,” The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869), xxx. 98  Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, 127. 99 Ibid.

Notes to pages 68–73  161 100 Richard K. Emmerson “‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?,’” 40. 101 See Pamela Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980), 71–102; David Lawton, “Lollardy and the Piers Plowman Tradition,” Modern Humanities Research Association 76, no. 4 (October 1981), 780–93; Christina von Nolcken, “Piers Plowman, the Wycliffites, and the Piece the Plowman’s Creede,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988), 71–120; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 398–408; John M. Bowers, “Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes Toward the History of a Wycliffite Langland,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 61 (1992), 1–50. 102 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-06/sacred-inwardness. 103 https://lawandreligionforum.org/2019/07/15/ the-law-in-piers-plowman/. 3.  Henry IV and the Post Facto Construction of John Gower 1 Wim Lindeboom and Joel Fredell have proposed that Gower did add glosses to the margins of the Confessio Amantis to make it appear as if he had prophetically predicted certain aspects of the Papal Schism and Richard’s deposition. I take issue with some of their conclusions later. See Wim Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis,” Viator 40.2 (2009), 319–49; Joel Fredell, “The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths,” Viator 41.1 (2010), 231–50. 2 Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France and the Adjoining Countries, trans. Thomas Johnes (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1857), 611. 3 See Chris Given Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (Hambledon: Bloomsbury Academic: 2007), 44. 4 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 239. 5 Adam of Usk, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; 2008), 50–3. 6 See Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (London: Yale University Press, 2016), 138; Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7–8. 7 For lost prophecies, see Chronique de la Traïson et Mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre, ed. B. Williams (London: J & S Bentley, Wilson, and Fley, 1846), 180–7. 8 John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899-1902). Translation taken from The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. and ed. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 232–3. All subsequent quotations of the Vox clamantis are taken from these editions.

162  Notes to pages 73–8 9 Stockton, “Introduction,” The Major Latin Works of John Gower, (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1962), 13; G.B. Stowe, “Richard II in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives,” Mediaevalia 16.1 (1993), 3–31. 10 Macaulay, “Introduction,” vol. iv, lxxiii. 11 Nigel Saul, “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?” in John Gower: Trilingual Poet, ed. Elizabeth Dutton with John Hines and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer), 88. 12 George R. Coffman, “John Gower: Mentor for Royalty, Richard II,” PMLA 69, no. 4 (September 1954), 953–64. 13 Stockton, “Introduction,” 13. 14 Maria Wickert, Studies in John Gower, trans. Robert J. Meindl, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 486 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2016), 10. 15 David R. Carlson, “Introduction,” in John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events, ed. David R. Carlson, British Writers of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period 2 (Toronto: PIMS, 2011), 1–18, 6. 16 See Karl Meyer, John Gower’s Beziehungen zu Chaucer und König Richard II, (PhD diss., University of Bonn, 1889), 29–32. 17 Macaulay, “Introduction,” vol. IV, lxxiii. 18 M.B. Parkes, “Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower,” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A.I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and A.J. Piper (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1995), 81–121, 98. 19 Ibid., 83. 20 Ibid., 83. 21 Ibid., 83–4. 22 Ibid., 84. 23 Parkes says that what he calls the second stage of revisions to the Vox “reflects a hardening of Gower’s attitude to the King,” and he cites the supposed rededication of the Confessio between 1392 and 1393 as his basis for the conclusion that the second stage of revisions took place shortly after that time. See Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 83. 24 Peter Nicholson, “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 10.1 (1988), 159–80. 25 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 87; 89. 26 In addition to Macaulay’s explanations, Parkes argues that the revisions were rolling due to additions made by the scribe that appear to be referring to Gower’s death. Yet, Gower could have wished to include passages that ask for prayers for the soul of John Gower before he died, particularly because he was going blind in the early years of Henry’s kingship, leading him to retire from writing. It is also possible that Scribe 4 made this revision later without the others having been temporally spaced apart in the

Notes to pages 79–82  163 manner that Macaulay and Parkes have suggested. See Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 86–90. 27 Ibid., 90. 28 Ibid., 90. 29 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7–8. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 7. 32 David R. Carlson, Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2012), 153–96. 33 Wickert, Studies in John Gower, 8. 34 Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377–99 (Oxford University Press, 2008), xxvi. 35 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 92–3. R.F. Yeager has postulated that the ­Arundel dedication was made nearer to 1408. See “Gower’s ‘Epistle to Archbishop Arundel’: The Evidence of Oxford All Souls College, MS 98,” in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey, ed. Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2019), 13–34. 36 See Carlson, John Gower, 124–5. 37 Ibid., 125. 38 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 177. 39 Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53, no. 1 (January 1978), 95. 40 Ibid., 99. 41 See Richard W. Kaueper, War, justice, and public order: England and France in the later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 272. Also see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Kingship and Scientific Jurisprudence,” in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, ed. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post, and Robert Reynolds (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 95. 42 France’s monarchy was a unique exception. It was able to promote a sacral kingship in ways that England was not. See Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). See Richard W. Kaueper, War, justice, and public order: England and France in the later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 272. Also see Kantorowicz, “Kingship and Scientific Jurisprudence,” 95. 43 Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Thomas Riley vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1864), 186. 44 Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. by G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 360, 361.

164  Notes to pages 83–7 45 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 66. 46 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 87. This poem appears in G and H, added by Scribe 4 immediately after the Chronica Tripertita. 47 John Gower, “H. Aquile Pullus,” in John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R.F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), 46. 48 For more on Usk’s use of the prophecy, see Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 13. 49 See “H. Aquile Pullus,” 46n1. 50 R.F. Yeager has quipped, “Little notice was given to Edward’s status as Richard’s grandfather also.” See “H. Aquile Pullus,” 46n1. 51 See Nigel Saul, Richard II, 423–4. 52 Quoted in Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 8. 53 For the various permutations of this prophecy, see Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, Yale English Monarchs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 247–8. 54 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 88. 55 Drbo.org 56 Stockton, The Major Latin Works, 445n11. 57 The edition of the Visio Anglie and Cronica tripertita that was edited by David R. Carlson and translated by A.G. Rigg has now superseded Macaulay’s, but Macaulay’s edition remains the standard one for the rest of the Vox Clamantis, including the Book VI revisions. 58 R.F. Yeager, “Politics and the French Language in England,” Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise Nowakowsi Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 127–57; 139. 59 Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics, Medieval Cultures 38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 125. Also see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), 112. 60 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 436–7. Saul seems to have arrived at the revision date of 1386 because this is when the reforms of the “Wonderful Parliament” were enacted, addressing Richard’s choice of “youthful counsel” in such as Robert de Vere and Michael de la Pole. Yet, the fact that several versions of Gower’s colophon include a description of the older version of the Vox clamantis, which exonerates Richard at the same time that they list the Confessio Amantis, illustrates that the changes were probably not made until at least after 1390, when the Confessio was written. Furthermore, this version of the colophon appears in many manuscripts containing the Confessio Amantis.

Notes to pages 87–92  165 61 An earlier version of this argument appears in Kimberly Fonzo, “Richard II’s Publicly Prophesied Deposition in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Modern Philology 14, no. 1 (August 2016), 1–17. 62 Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2006), 416n9. 63 Peck, Russell A, “Introduction,” in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), 36. 64 Reinhold Pauli, “Introductory Essay,” in The Confessio Amantis of John Gower, ed. Reinhold Pauli (London: Bell and Daldy Fleet Street, 1857), xxxi. 65 G.C. Macaulay, “Date and Circumstances” The Complete Works of John Gower vol 1, ed. G.C. Macaulay (London: Henry Frowde, 1901), xxi. 66 Pauli, “Introductory Essay,” xxxi. 67 Macaulay, “Date and Circumstances,” vol. 1, xxiv. 68 Ibid., xxiv. 69 Ibid., xxv. 70 Ibid., xxv. 71 Ibid., xxv. 72 Peter Nicholson, “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 10.1 (1988), 159–80, 170. 73 See Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siận Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 73–98, 74–6. John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York University Press, 1964), 124. 74 John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, EETS (London: Kegan Paul, 1900–1), 1: cxxxviii-cli; Fisher, John Gower, 116. The earliest extant copies of the work are those dedicated to Henry when he was not yet king. 75 Fisher, John Gower, 116. 76 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), 135. 77 Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions,” 345–6; Fredell, “The Gower Manuscripts,” 231–50. 78 Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions,” 331. 79 Peter Nicholson, “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis,” The Chaucer Review 19.2 (Fall 1984), 123–43, 137. 80 Kate Harris, “Ownership and Readership: Studies in the Provenance of the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Unpublished Dissertation, University of York, 1993, 151n150. 81 Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 80. 82 Ibid., 81.

166  Notes to pages 92–4 83 Derek Pearsall, “The Wollaton Hall Gower Manuscript (WLC/LM/8) Considered in the Context of Other Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” in The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners, and Readers, ed. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 57–67; 59. 84 Ibid., 59. 85 Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 80. It is worth noting that Fairfax 3 had been revised by Scribe 4, who made the changes to all four of the manuscripts of the Vox clamantis that made the text critical of Richard. 86 See Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 81 and A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the early fifteenth century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker, ed. M.B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 163–212; 176. 87 Ibid., 80. 88 Joel Fredell has, however, examined a related explanation. He has argued that later fifteenth-century audiences would have preferred the version dedicated to Richard II because it conformed to the popular de casibus tradition further advanced by authors like Hoccleve. See Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995), 61–93. 89 Humphrey owned Bodley 294; Thomas owned Oxford Christ Church 148; John owned Cambridge Pembroke 307. See Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 95–7. 90 P.E. Russell, “Robert Payn and Juan de Cuenca, translators of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Medium Aevum 30 (1961), 26–32. 91 R. Wayne Hamm, “An Analysis of the Confisyon del Amante, the Castilian Translation of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Unpublished Dissertation, 1975, 19. 92 Russell, “Robert Payn,” 28. See Davis, “Ownership and Readership,” 154. 93 Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, The Routledge History of English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1977) 1: 209. 94 Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” in John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–88, ed. R.F. Yeager, Studies in Medieval Culture 26 (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989), 159–87. 95 Carlson, John Gower, 214–15. 96 Elliot Kendall, “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elizabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2010), 46–58.

Notes to pages 94–7  167 97 John Gower, The Confessio Amantis, ed. in vol. 2 of G.C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower (1899–1902). All subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically. 98 Ibid., 177. 99  Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 40. 100 Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 174–5. 101 Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,”: 61–93. 102 See Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131–61. 103 Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books: Ideals and Reality in the Life and Library of a Medieval Prince (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997), 120. 104 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 157. 105 Thomas Walsingham, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti” in Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 204, 173. 106 The Deposition of Richard II: “The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II” (1399), ed. David R. Carlson, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 29 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2007), 30. 107 Thomas Walsingham, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti,” in Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 75. 108 Richard the Redeless: and Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. James M. Dean, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). 109 See Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 17n83. 110 John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899–1902) 4: 246. Translation taken from The Major Latin Works of John Gower, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 323. 111 R.H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middles Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 93. 112 Fletcher, Richard II, 2. 113 Adam of Usk, The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 77. 114 See R.M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford: Political Revolutionary and Champion of the Liberties of the English Church ca. 1275/80–1348 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 278–327.

168  Notes to pages 98–105 115 Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 132–4. 116 J.H. Burns, Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 517. 117 See Black, “Kingship,” 150. 118 John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 85. 119 Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 118. 120 Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. 121 The proper balance between mercy and punishment was of central concern in Gower’s political works, particularly the Mirrour de l’Omme. See Yoshiko Kobayashi, “Principis Umbra: Kingship, Justice, and Pity in John Gower’s Poetry,” in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R.F. Yeager, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 71–103. 122 John Urry, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Compared with the Former Editions, and many valuable MSS. Out of which, Three Tales are added which were never before Printed (London: Bernard Lintot, 1721), sig. br. 123 Qtd. in Fisher, John Gower, 23. 124 Ibid., 22. 125 Charles Cowden-Clarke, Tales from Chaucer (London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.), 43. 126 See Terry Jones, Who Murdered Chaucer: A Medieval Mystery (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 293–5. 4.  “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame 1 Larry D. Benson, “Introduction,” The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), xv. 2 For Chaucer’s travels and literary exposure, see Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 3 See Kuczynski, Prophetic Song, 208–9. 4 “The Preface,” The workes of Geffray Chaucer newlye printed, wyth dyuers workes whych were neuer in print before: as in the table more playnly doth appere. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, A2v. 5 Robert Costomiris has proposed that its inclusion was not Thynne’s decision at all but that of his publishers, William Bonham and John Reynes. See Robert Costomiris, “The Influence of Printed Editions and Manuscripts on the Canon of William Thynne’s Canterbury Tales,” in Rewriting Chaucer, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 247. 6 Kathleen Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2001), 12.

Notes to pages 106–11  169 7 See Linda Georgianna, “The Protestant Chaucer,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 55–69. 8 For claims of Chaucer’s secularity, see Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, 8; John Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Dante, Chaucer, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 53–4, 69; Robert Hanning, “‘And countrefete the speche of every man / He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale’: Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for the Canterbury Tales,” SAC 21 (1999), 27–58; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 182–4; Donald Howard, The Idea of the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 381–7. 9 See Megan Murton, “Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complain of Mars,” SAC 38 (2016); 75–107; Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010). 10 I borrow the term “threshold” from Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. 11 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5. 12 Francesco Petrarch, Africa, ed. Léonce Pingaud (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1872). Translation taken from Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch’s Africa, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 230. All subsequent quotations are taken from these editions. 13 Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1968) 3 vols., 2: 10478; 10535–650. 14 Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 17. 15 Although the term “subconscious” is an invention of Sigmund Freud’s, the concept had been forged by Plato and St. Augustine long before him and would not have been unfamiliar to Chaucer. See Guy Claxton, The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious (London: Little Brown, 2005), 15; 25–6. 16 Steven Lowenstam, “The Pictures on Juno’s Temple in The Aeneid,” The Classical World 87, no. 2 (December 1993), 37–49, 42. 17 See M.C.J. Putnam, “Dido’s Murals and Virgil’s Ekphrasis,” HSCP 98 (1998) 243–75. 18 Deborah Beck, “Ecphrasis, Interpretation, and Audience in ‘Aeneid 1’ and ‘Odyssey 8,’” The American Journal of Philology 128, no. 4 (Winter 2007), 533–49. 19 Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) 587–631. All subsequent quotations of Chaucer’s work are taken from this edition.

170  Notes to pages 113–15 20 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1972, 1994), 53. 21 Teresa Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 118. 22 See Frederick Carl Riedel, “The Meaning of Chaucer’s House of Fame,” JEGP 27, no. 4 (October 1928), 441–69; John Koch, “Nochmals: Die Bedeutung Von Chaucers Hous of Fame,” Englische Studien 50, no. 3 (March 1917), 359–82; Rudolf Imelmann, “Chaucer’s Haus Der Fama,” Englische Studien 45, no. 3 (November 1912), 397–431. 23 This is a principle to which Chaucer adheres throughout his career. Although he launches broader social critiques within The Canterbury Tales, he does not personally excoriate living or historical individuals. The one exception to this is The Legend of Good Women, which I discuss later. 24 See Aldof Rambeau, “Chaucer’s House of Fame in seinem Verhältniss zur Divina Commedia,” in Englische Studien 3.3 (1880), 209–68 and Cino Chiarini, Di una imitazione inglese della Divina commedia: la casa della fama di Chaucer (Gius: Laterza e figli, 1902), 5. Also see Bernhard Egidius Konrad ten Brink, Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwickelung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (Münster: Adolph Russell, 1870), 88–124; Etienne Gustave Sandras, Étude sur G. Chaucer: considéré comme imitateur des trouvères (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1859), 120–5; Walter William Skeat, “House of Fame Introduction,” The Complete Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), vii-viii. 25 B.G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in the House of Fame, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 81. 26 Paul G. Ruggiers, “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 160–84; 167. 27 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism, 108. 28 John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 27, 43. 29 Paul Strohm, The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales (London: Profile Books, 2014), 206. 30 See Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, 7–8; William Franke, “Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared with Dante,” The Chaucer Review 34, no. 1 (1999), 87–106; Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 20–49. Katherine McKinley has creatively argued for a parodic reading of Dante via Boccaccio. See Katherine McKinley, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016).

Notes to pages 115–21  171 31 Jamie C. Fumo, “Chaucer as Vates?: Reading Ovid through Dante in the House of Fame, Book 3,” in Writers Reading Writers: Intertextual Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of Robert Hollander, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 89–108, 93. 32 There appears to have been some early interest in Dante among the English clergy. In 1416, Bishop Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle completed a Latin translation of the Commedia, which he dedicated to two English bishops, Nicholas Bubwith and Robert Hallum. The work only survives in three manuscripts, though, and seems to have made little impact. See N.R. Havely, Dante’s British Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15. 33 Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 21. 34 Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience(s), Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual,” The Chaucer Review 18.2 (Fall 1983), 137–45, 138. 35 Franke, “Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,” 91. 36 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling, vol 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 142–3. 37 Drbo.org. 38 The three traditions are Ethopic, Aramaic, and Greek. See Robert Henry Charles, “Introduction,” in The Book of Enoch, ed. and trans. Robert Henry Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), ix-cx. 39 See Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 402. 40 For a list of Middle English Homilies on the subject, see Hans Kurath, “Antichrist,” in Middle English Dictionary, ed. Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 300. 41 Prik of Conscience: Part Five: Of the Day of Doom and of the Tokens that Before Shall Come, ed. James H. Morey, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), 446–53. 42 See Richard K. Emmerson, “Antichrist on Page and Stage in the Later Middle Ages,” in Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert E. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–2. 43 See John M. Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle: A Contemplative Symbol,” PMLA 75, no. 3 (June 1960), 153–9 and John Lyerle, “Chaucer’s Windy Eagle,” University of Toronto Quarterly 40, no. 3 (April 1971), 247–65. 44 See Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Job, Book ix, Chap. 32 (P.L., lxxv, cols. 884–5), Book ix, Chap. 33 (P.L., lxxv, col. 886), Book xix, Chap. 27 (P.L., lxxvi, col. 131). 45 See Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle,” 155. 46 See William S. Wilson, “The Eagle’s Speech in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50, no. 2 (April 1964), 153–8. 47 Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle,” 155.

172  Notes to pages 124–33 48 See Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 9–15. 49 B.G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 172–3. 50 See Steve Ellis, “Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation,” The Chaucer Review 22, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 282–94; Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 20–49. 51 Helen Cooper, “Chaucer and Ovid: A Question of Authority” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian influences on literature and art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71–82; 74. 52 Ibid., 75. 53 Joseph S. Graydon, “Defense of Criseyde,” PMLA 44, no. 1 (March 1929), 141–77; 145. 54 Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 78. 55 Ibid., 78. 56 See Richard Kenneth Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, “Antichrist, Simon Magus, and Dante’s Inferno XIX,” Traditio 36 (1980), 373–98; 380. 57 Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 70. 58 Ibid., 71. 59 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 117. 60 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of Fame Made by Gefferey Chaucer (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483), d3r. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 See Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63. 64 I will henceforth refer to this poem as “When fethe failleth…,” although the spelling changes from version to version. 65 London, British Library MS Harley 2253 fol. 127r. 66 See James M. Dean, “Poems of Political Prophecy: Introduction,” Middle English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1996), 1–5. 67 It is worth noting that Caxton does not explicitly attribute Anelida and Arcite to Chaucer within the pamphlet. However, it was made to be bound along with other works in a Sammelbände, and existing Sammelbändes group it with other works by Chaucer such as The Parliament of Fowls. Therefore, one would imagine that Caxton was selling the pamphlet as a work of Chaucer’s. See Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Oxford University Press, 2006), 45; 67–77.

Notes to pages 133–4  173 68 See Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 1236, f. 91r; Oxford, Bodleian Lat. MS Misc. c.66, f. 104. 69 For instance, London, British Library, MS Royal 17.A.XVI is an ornate fifteenth-century manuscript of astronomical charts and diagrams, many of which are related to planetary influence over English history and kings. The last page includes a diagram, made up of three rotating disks. On the verso side of the page (27v) a different fifteenth-century hand has added the unattributed poem, “When faith failleth…” The person who copied the poem into the manuscript seems to have chosen it because it easily fits on the back of the page, underneath the affixing string for the diagram and because its prophetic message, aimed at England, suits the manuscript’s theme. The London, British Library, MS Harley 1337 is dedicated to the prose Brut, which contains Merlin’s prophecies about England’s future. Later hands added several small items to the verso side of the final page, including three prophecies: “When fethe failleth…”, “Nomina illius Regis qui Sanctam Crucem venerabitur” (The King Who Will Find the Holy Cross), and a fragment of the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington. 70 See Robert E. Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 6–7. 71 For instance, George Ferrers’ Sammelbände ends with it. See Gillespie, “Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quaros: Miscellanies from Manuscript to Print,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12 (2000), 1–25; 6n17. 72 While usually copied onto the final page or flyleaf, the poem occasionally appears in the beginning flyleaf of a manuscript, as it does in Oxford, Bodleian, MS Rawlinson poet 32, a fifteenth-century collection containing several poems related to English nationalist themes (f. 4r). 73 It was sometimes attributed to Merlin. For instance, Bodleian MS Ashmole 59, produced in the fifteenth century, includes a variation of the poem, calling it “Prophecia Merlini doctoris perfecti” (f. 78r). It differs slightly in form in this version, beginning with, “Whane lordes wol leese þeire olde lawes / And preestis beon varyinge in theire sawes.” This version also ends with predictions specific to Arthur: “And whan the moon is on David stall, / And the kynge passe Arthures hall, / Than is the lande of Albyoun / Nexst to his confusyoun.” The poem is also sometimes attributed to John of Bridlington, as it is in the sixteenth-century London, British Library, MS Ashmole 1835, f. 47r and London, British Library, MS Sloane 2578, f. 106r. 74 Paratexts, 1. 75 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1975), 45. Translation qtd. in Genette, Paratexts, 2. 76 Genette, Paratext, 16–17.

174  Notes to pages 135–7 77 William Thynne, “The Preface,” The workes of Geffray Chaucer newlye printed, wyth dyuers workes whych were neuer in print before, ed. William Thynne (London: William Bonham, 1542), A2v. 78 There is a broader debate about the degree to which Thynne was intentionally attempting to attribute non-Chaucerian works to Chaucer. Arguably, Thynne never attributed these three poems to Chaucer to begin with, since they are presented before the table of contents. Critics such as R.F. Yeager have argued that Thynne truly believed the works that he attributed to Chaucer to be genuine, while Walter W. Skeat has argued that Thynne was working within the tradition of the medieval manuscript miscellany, never intending to pass off other works as Chaucer’s own. See R.F. Yeager, “Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William. Caxton and William Thynne,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984), 135–64; 148; Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon, with a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 94–116. 79 Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and Herician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76–8. 80 Ibid., 76–8. 81 He consulted Caxton’s printed version of Anelida and Arcita in putting together his work, so he certainly saw Caxton’s use of the prophecy. See James Edward Blodgett, William Thynne and his 1532 Edition of Chaucer (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1975), 110. He also used the version of the prophecy with the additional stanza, “It falleth for every gentylman,” included by Caxton. 82 Greg Walker, Writing under Tyrrany, 59. 83 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, 1580–1625, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1872), 181. Also see Gertrude H. Campbell, “Chaucer’s Prophecy in 1586,” Modern Language Notes 39, no. 6 (June 1914), 195–6. 84 This flyleaf is now missing, but records of it exist in IMEV, NIMEV, and DIMEV 3943. 85 See John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, eds., The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, vol. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 531. The manuscript was later donated to Trinity College by Sir Thomas Nevile, but as Manly and Rickert explain, the manuscript may have passed on to Parker’s son, John, and on to Nevile through him. The Tudor Rose drawn into the initial “H” on f. 247r suggests that it was produced sometime after 1485. The manuscript contains Parker’s typical red marker pagination of the recto pages, and “T.W.” appears in the same red on f. 5r. 86 The earliest complete existing version appears to be London, British Library, MS Royal 18 B XVII, which was produced in the early sixteenth

Notes to pages 137–9  175 century and appends the work as a companion piece to The Vision of Piers Plowman. See Tim William Machan, “The Visual Pragmatics of CodeSwitching in Late Middle English Literature,” in Code Switching in Early English, ed. Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 303–34; 320. In 1553, Reyner Wolfe printed a version of the Creede with The Vision of Piers Plowman (STC 19904). Skeat had argued that the Reyner Wolfe printed edition was copied from the same manuscripts as the London, British Library, MS Royal 18 B XVII and the Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 were. A.I. Doyle has since concluded that the printed version was copied from a different manuscript but that Royal and Trinity were most likely copied from the same manuscript or closely related manuscripts. See Walter W. Skeat, “Preface,” in Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, ed. Walter W. Skeat (New York: Greenwood press, 1867; 1969), iv–v; A.I. Doyle, “An Unrecognized Piece of Piers Plowman’s Crede and Other Work by its Scribe,” Speculum 34, no. 3 (July 1959), 428–36; 435. Doyle also finds a portion of the Crede in British Library MS Harley 78, ff.3r. Doyle determines that the scribe who had copied it lived during the reign of Edward IV. 87 See Lawrence Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 133. 88 Alexander Devine, “On a Case-by-Case Basis: The History Case,” Parker Library, 26 September, 2017, https://theparkerlibrary.wordpress.com/ category/matthew-parker/. 89 As Anthony Grafton has pointed out, Parker “did not start collecting manuscripts in a big way until he could mobilize the resources and power of his archbishopric,” which did not begin until 1559. The manuscript was clearly revised and rebound a few decades after Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Workes had been published, so there is no possibility that it could have been Thynne’s own source. See Grafton, “Matthew Parker: The Book as Archive,” History of Humanities 2.1 (Spring 2017), 15–50; 24. 90 John Urry, “The Preface,” The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Compared with the Former Editions, and many valuable MSS. Out of which, Three TALES, Out of which, Three TALES are added which were never before Printed, ed. John Urry (London, N.P, 1721), viii. 91 Urry, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2. 92 Ibid., 2. 93 Ibid., ccxlvii. 94 John Bell, “Life of Chaucer,” The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in Fourteen Volumes. Printed for the John Bell British Library (Edinburg: Apollo Press, 1782), xxiv–v. 95 Henry J. Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer Collected from Authentick Documents (London: R.C. and J. Rivinton, 1810), 119–20.

176  Notes to pages 139–44 96 Samuel Weller Singer, “Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 1, v; xxviii. 97 Singer says that “the flyleaf of a miscellaneous old MS, penes me, containing the Meditation of St. Anselm and other devotional pieces in Latin.” The Fitzwilliam manuscript fits this description. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. v, ed. Samuel Weller Singer (College House, Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1822), 179. 98  Ibid., 179–80. 99  Ibid., 180. 100 F.J. Furnivall, A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1868), 107–8. 101 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 6, The Aldine edition of the British Poets, ed. Richard Morris (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), 307. Morris cites a version of the poem that includes the following lines: “Ora pro anglia sancta maria quod Thomas cantuarie.” 102 Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction,” Chaucer: The Minor Poems, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888) xxxv. 103 Ibid., xxxv. 104 https://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/t/about-robbery/. 105 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg2Lq3_MEHQ. Afterword 1 “Piers Plowman: An Introduction,” Discovering Literature: Medieval, The British Library, 31 January, 2018, https://www.bl.uk/ medieval-literature/articles/piers-plowman-an-introduction. 2 John Gower, The Mirour de l’Omme or Speculum Medantis, ed. in vol. 1 of G.C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower (1899–1902). Translation taken from John Gower, Mirour de l’Omme: The Mirror Mankind, trans. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), 347–8. 3 John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University, 1964), 98. 4 G.C. Macaulay, “Introduction,” in The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), vol. 1 xlii. 5 R.B. Dobson, The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 97. 6 See R.F. Yeager, “Gower’s French Audience: The Mirour de l’Omme,” The Chaucer Review 41, no. 1 (2006), 111–37.

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Bibliography 179 Galbraith, Vivian H. ed., Anonimalle Chronicle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain: an Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum. Edited by Michael D. Reeve. Translated by Neil Wright. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis, The English Works of John Gower. Edited by G.C. Macaulay. 3 Vols. London: Kegan Paul, 1900–1. –  John Gower, The Minor Latin Works. Edited and translated by R.F. Yeager. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005. –  The Major Latin Works of John Gower. Translated by Eric W. Stockton. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la Rose. Edited by Félix Lecoy. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1968. Haydon, Frank Scott, ed. Eulogium Historiarum sive temporis. London: Longman, 1858–65. Hickes, George. Linguarum Vett[arum] septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et archaeologicus. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1703–5. James H. Morey, ed. Prik of Conscience: Part Five: Of the Day of Doom and of the Tokens that Before Shall Come. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012. James M. Dean, ed. Richard the Redeless: and Mum and the Sothsegger. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Knighton, Henry. Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396. Edited and translated by G.H. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Lactantius. The Divine Institutes. The Fathers of the Church. Translated by Sister Mary Francis McDonald. Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Langland, William. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Edited by A.V.C. Schmidt. Medieval Institute Publications: Western Michigan University, 2011. Laȝamon. Brut. Edited by G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie. London: Early English Text Society, 1978. Layamon. “Layamon’s Brut.” In Arthurian Chronicles. Translated by Eugene Mason. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Nottage, Lynn. Sweat, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017. Petrarca, Francesco. Africa. Edited by Léonce Pingaud. Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1872. –  Africa. Translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. Terry, Milton S., ed. and trans. The Sibylline Oracles: Translated from the Greek Into English Blank Verse. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1899.

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Index

Abbot of Abingdon, 36, 50, 66–7 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint “Adam Davy’s Dreams,” 40 Adam of Usk, 5, 71–2, 85, 97, 147n4 Aeneas, 24, 110–13, 117, 119–20, 125–7 Aeneid, the, 18, 24, 26, 127 Ahab (Old Testament king), 98–100 Alan de Lille, 90, 120 Alice Perrers, 30, 46 Amalec (Old Testament king), 44–5 anagrams, 61 angelic pope, 37, 51 Anne of Bohemia, 12 Anonimalle chronicle, 43 anxiety of influence, 107 Apollo, 115 Arion, 94 Aristotle, 37, 95, 120 Antichrist, the, 36, 50, 81, 118–19, 123, 127–8 apocalypse: beasts of, 123, 127–8; Last Judgment, 38, 49–50, 55, 58, 118, 122–7; national, 27, 60, 80–1; preparation for, 7, 55–8, 68, 93–5, 105; Second Coming, 15, 27, 46, 49–50; theological interpretations of 37–42 Armes Prydein (Myrddin), 23 Arthur (king of England), 9, 23, 25–9

Arundel, Thomas (archbishop of Canterbury), 71, 80, 96, 99, 102 auctor/auctoritas, 33, 112, 122–8 audience of posterity, 116 Augustine, Saint, 6, 14, 37, 117, 120 Babylon, 41, 63 Bale, John, 64, 67, 69 Bathsheba, 46 bestiary, 119, 121 Becket, St. Thomas, 31, 40, 85, 140 Bede, 16–17, 19, 22, 137 Berchorius, 119, 121 Boccaccio, 129 Boethius, 120, 122 Bridlington (town), 29–31 Brut. See Roman de Brut Calchas, 129 Callimachus, 106–7 Carolingian rulers, 40 Carthusian monks, 60 Cassandra, 129 Catullus, 108 “Catulus lincieus” (prophecy), 31, 42 Caxton, William, 106, 130–5, 140 cerf volant, 17–18, 21 Charles V (king of France), 6–7, 16

182 Index Charles VI (king of France), 6–7, 16, 17–8, 31 Charles VII (king of France), 19–22 Chaucer, Geoffrey: biography, 12, 104, 116; narrative persona, 4, 32–4, 104–5, 109–31, 141, 145; retrospective reputation, 101–2, 105–6, 114–6, 131–42 Chaucer, Geoffrey, works of: Anelida and Arcite, 132–4; apocryphal works, 105–6, 131–41; The Book of the Duchess, 109; The Canterbury Tales, 113, 120, 129, 131, 137, 139–40; “Complaint of Chaucer…,” 132–4; The House of Fame, 32, 104–6, 110–31, 145; The Legend of Good Women, 11, 126; Parliament of Fowls, 109; Troilus and Criseyde, 113, 126, 129, 131, 145 “Chaucer’s Prophecy,” 8, 106, 131–42 Childeric (king of the Franks), 40 Christine de Pizan: narrative persona, 6–7, 12, 16, 18–22, 31; Le Chemin de long estude, 18; La Cité des dames, 18; Le Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, 19–22; Le Duc des vrais amans, 18 Cicero (Somnium Scipionis), 107, 109 Clement of Alexandra, 14 collections of prophecies, 58, 68, 133, 136 Constantine, Emperor, 6, 52–3 Crécy, Battle of, 39 Criseyde, 113, 126, 145 Cromwell, Thomas, 66 Crowley, Robert, 60, 61–5, 69 Crusade, 31, 42, 47 Cumaean Sibyl, 6, 13, 15, 18 Daniel (Old Testament prophet): influence on Galfridian prophecies, 22; influence on Sibyllic prophecies, 14–15;

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, 14–15, 81, 94–5, 100; proxy for the Gawainpoet, 9, 105; proxy for Gower, 8, 33, 80–1, 90, 93–5, 105 Dante Alighieri: narrative persona, 8, 106, 128–30; Commedia, 33, 106, 109, 110, 114–19, 125 David (Old Testament prophet and king), 33, 37, 38–40, 44–50, 100, 105 Dawe þe Dykere, 56–9 Deschamps, Eustache, 6–7, 12, 16–17, 19, 22, 25, 31 Despenser family, 28, 31, 41–2, 47 Dido, 110–13, 119–20, 125–6, 128–9 Dominican monks, 36, 53 Doomsday. See under apocalypse Dream of Scipio, 107, 109 dream visions, 7, 8, 32–4, 104, 106–10, 128–9, 131 Dudley’s conspiracy, 58 eagle in The House of Fame, 32, 110, 117–22, 128–9 Edward I (king of England), 27 Edward II (king of England): deposition, 27–8, 82, 97–8; prophecies about, 27–8, 30, 40, 47; reign, 7 Edward III (king of England): patronage of Gower, 94; in Piers Plowman 38–47, 67; prophecies about, 27–8, 29–30; reign, 7, 82 Edward VI (king of England), 58–9 Edward, the Black Prince, 30 Edward the Confessor, 85 ekphrasis, 109–11 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 24 English Reformation. See Protestant Reformation Ennius, 107–8 Enoch and Eli (Old Testament prophets), 8, 33, 105, 116–19, 127–9

Index 183 Erceldoune, Thomas of, 56, 58, 132 Ergome, John, 29–30, 39, 48 Erythraean Sibyl, 13, 14, 18 Estoire des Engleis (Geffrei Gaiman), 28 Eulogium Historiarum chronicle, 40, 50–1 Eusebius, 6 explanatio somnii, 15 “Eyght goodly questions…,” 135 Ezekiel, book of, 45 false prophets, 99 Fame, Lady, 112–13, 120, 123–8 Famine, 55–60 flyleaf prophecies, 133–4, 137, 139 Fortune, Dame, 75, 83–4, 124 Fourth Lateran Counsel, 36 Franciscan monks, 36, 51, 53 Frederick I (Holy Roman Emperor), 16 friars, 52–3, 137–8, 145, 153n67 Froissart, Jean, 45, 70–1 fürstenspiegel, 95–100 Gaiman, Geffrei, 28 Gallus, 108 Ganymede, 117, 119 Gawain-poet, 9, 12, 105 Genette, Gérard, 37, 134 Geoffrey of Monmouth: citation of, 124; Historia regum Brianniae, 5, 17, 22–4, 27–30, 85; political affiliations, 23; Prophtiae Merlinii, 5, 22–3, 27 Giles of Rome (De regimine principum), 96 Glossa Ordinaria, 46 Godfrey of Viterbo, 16 gossip, 113, 119, 128–9 Gower, John: narrative persona 33, 81–6, 90, 93–5; retrospective

reputation 3–4, 34, 72–5, 86–91, 102–3, 139, 143–5 Gower, John, works of: colophon, 75–76; Carmen Super Multiplici Victorum Pestilencia, 77; Cinquante ballades, 90; Confessio amantis, 70, 77–79, 87–100, 105, 113, 125; Cronica Tripertita, 75–81, 90, 101; “H. aquile pullus,” 85–6; In Praise of Peace 90; Mirour de l’Omme, 90, 143–4; Visio Anglie, 80–1; Vox clamantis, 33, 70, 72–87, 90, 94, 97, 105 Gregorian Reform, 51, 82 Grosseteste, Robert, 95 Guido delle Colonne, 124, 129 Guillaume de Lorris (Romance of the Rose), 32, 109 Hearne, Thomas, 101 Henry I (king of England), 23 Henry II (king of England), 24 Henry III (king of Castille), 93 Henry III (king of England), 27, 28 Henry IV (king of England): Chaucer and, 101–2, 133, 139; Gower and, 3–4, 33, 70, 72–104, 143; Lancastrian political prophecies, 7, 31, 70, 79– 83, 90–3, 100–2; political prophecies about, 29, 31, 40, 71 Henry VIII (king of England), 36, 60, 63, 67, 135, 142 Hesiod, 107 Hickes, George, 65 “Hit cometh by kynde of gentil blode…,” 133–4 “Hit falleth foevery gentilman…,” 133–4 Hoccleve, Thomas, 138; Regiment of Princes, 96; “To the kynges most noble grace…,” 135 Holy Land, the, 15, 19, 21, 31, 40, 42, 48–50

184 Index “Holy Oil of St. Thomas, The,” 31, 42, 85 Holy Roman Emperor, 5, 15–16, 22 Homer, 107–8, 110–11, 124 Hortus conclusus, 109 Humanism, 4, 66, 68, 106, 131, 141 Humphrey de Bohun, 30, 39 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 93 Hundred Years War, 18, 29–30, 39–45, 47 Hypnose, 115 Icarus, 120 “Invective Against France, An” (prophecy), 39, 47 Isaiah, book of, 63 Jack Upland, 138 Jean de Meun, 32, 108 Jerome, Saint, 37 Jerusalem, 41 Jews, conversion of, 38, 47–8, 118 Joachim of Fiore/Joachimism, 36–7, 49, 51, 53 Joan of Arc, 19–21 Joa¯o (king of Portugal), 93 John II (king of France), 42, 45 John the Baptist, 108 John, Duke of Bedford, 93 John of Gaunt, 71, 79, 83, 85 John the Evangelist, 85, 122 John of Patmos, Saint, 33, 80–1, 123, 128 John of Salisbury, 6 Jonah (Old Testament prophet), 9, 105 Judgment Day. See under apocalypse Jupiter, 13, 117, 119 Kempe, Margery, 83 Kett’s Rebellion, 62 Knighton, Henry, 82–3 Lactantius, 13, 14 Lancaster, Henry (duke), 45

Lancaster, Thomas (earl), 28 Langland, William: biography, 42; narrative persona, 4, 33–8, 105; retrospective reputation, 3–4, 34–6, 38, 61–70, 91, 142–3; The Vision of Piers Plowman, 35–69, 105, 137, 142; — Clergy’s prophecy, 7, 35–8, 49–55, 58–69, 142; — Conscience’s prophecy, 35–52, 55, 67–8; — Lady Mede, 38–49, 52; — published versions of, 34, 60–7; — Will’s prophecy, 35, 55–60, 62–3, 67–8, 132 Last Emperor prophecy: in English prophecies, 27, 31, 35, 37, 40; in French prophecies, 6–7, 16–23, 25; in Piers Plowman, 41, 47, 49–53; of the Sibyl, 15. See also Second Charlemagne Last Judgment. See apocalypse libri Sibyllini, 13 “Lilium regnans” (prophecy), 31, 41, 42 Livy, 98 Lollards, 64, 69, 138–9 London, 57, 91, 132 Longman Anthology, 36 Louis, Duke of Orleans, 16 Laȝamon, 26–8 Lucrece, 98 Luke the Evangelist, 123 Macaulay, G.C.: on the Confessio Amantis, 77–8, 88–9, 91, 101; on the Mirour de l’Omme, 144; on the Vox clamantis, 74, 76–80, 86 Magna Carta, 95 Mark the Evangelist, 123 Mary Tudor, 58–60 Matthew the Evangelist, 123 Merciless Parliament, 96 Merlin: citations of, 16, 19, 132, 140, 173n73; Galfridian prophetic style, 5, 7, 13, 27, 33, 57; in Historia regum Britanniae, 5, 17, 22–4, 27–30, 55–6,

Index 185 85; literary persona, 65; in prose Brut, 5, 23, 26–8, 29, 56, 71; in Wace’s Roman de Brut, 24–6 Merovingian kings, 40 Michael de la Pole, 31, 96 Michaiah (Old Testament prophet), 94, 98–9 millenarian beliefs, 49 models for princes, 95–100 Mohammad (prophet of Islam), 18, 47 monastic reform, 50–2 monastic dissolution, 3, 36, 59, 61–70, 142 Moses (Old Testament prophet), 40, 48 Muses, 107, 129 Muslims/”Saracens,” 18, 21, 38, 47–8 Myrddin, 23 nominalism, 114, 125 Norham, Hermit William, 71 Nottage, Lynn, 10–11 Odysseus, 110–11 Oracle of Baalbek, 15, 16 Oracula Sibyllina, 14, 16 Ordericus Vitalis, 23 Otto I (Holy Roman Emperor), 5, 22 Otto II (Holy Roman Emperor), 22 Otto III (Holy Roman Emperor), 15, 22 Otto of Freising, 16 Ovid, 108, 112–13, 120, 123–7 Ovide Moralisé, 125–6 Papal Schism, 42, 47 paratext, 134 Parker, Matthew (archbishop of Canterbury), 137–8 parody: in House of Fame, 104, 106, 113–16; in Legend of Good Women, 126–7; in Piers Plowman, 37, 56–8, 62, 64, 67–9

patronage, literary, 12 Paul, Saint, 33, 117, 122 Pauli, Reinhold, 87–9, 101 Pepin (king of the Franks), 40 Petrarch, 107–9 Philip VI (king of France), 39 Phillipa (queen of England), 93 Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede, 137, 139 Piers Plowman, prophecies attributed to, 60–1 plague, 30 Plowman’s Crede, The, 64 Plowman’s Tale, The, 105, 138 postmodernism, 114, 141 precious language, 30 Pricke of Conscience, The, 118 Prophecy of the Six Kings of England, 26–31, 47, 56, 58 prophetic citation, 8, 104, 106–114, 141, 145 prophetic disguise, 5–6 Protestant Reformation: association with Chaucer, 106, 131, 137–42, 145; association with the Gawainpoet, 148n15; association with Langland, 3, 7, 35–6, 60–70; historic perspective of, 9, 11. See also monastic dissolution proverbial sayings, 113 Psalms, 33, 46, 48, 50–2, 69, 86, 105 pseudo-Aquinas, 98 public poetry, 82 Puttenham, George, 3, 65 Pynson, Richard, 131 (quin) decemuiri, 13 Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II, The, 79, 93, 97 Rehoboam (Old Testament king), 96–7 Revelation, book of, 9, 118 rhetoric, 120

186 Index Ricardian Poetry, 12, 104 Richard II (king of England): deposition, 7–8, 70–2, 74–102, 143; patronage of literature/prophecies, 12–13, 29, 31, 38; political prophecies about, 7, 18, 29, 31, 42; regnal years, 49; relationship with Chaucer, 101–2; in the Vox clamantis, 72–87, 97, 101 Richard the Redeless, 97 riddles, 47–8, 55–6, 58, 132 Rising of 1381, 61, 72, 75, 81, 144 Robinson, Marilynne, 69 Rogers, Owen, 64–5 Rokele family, 41–2 rolling revision, 77 Roman de Brut: Laȝamon’s Brut, 26, 27–8; prose Brut, 5, 23, 28–9, 41, 71, 133; Wace’s Brut, 24, 27–8 Romance of the Rose, 32, 108–9, 126 Romulus, 117, 119 rumor, 113, 119, 122, 128–9 sacral kingship, 12, 39–41 Samuel (Old Testament prophet), 22, 38–9, 44, 94, 100 Saracens. See Muslims/Saracens Satan, 119 Saul (Old Testament king), 38–9, 44–5, 47, 100 scribes: of the Confessio Amantis 91–2; of the Tiburtine Sibyl 17; of the Vox clamantis 76–9, 84, 86 Scipio Africanis, 107 Second Baron’s War, 95 Second Charlemagne, 16, 18, 20–1, 27 Second Coming. See under apocalypse Secretum philosophorum, 48 secularity, 66, 141 Sibyl, the: authorial persona, 17–22, 31, 65; citations of, 16, 19, 22; literary character, 18, 26; pseudonym, 14–16. See also

Cumaean Sibyl, Erythraean Sibyl, and Tiburtine Sibyl Sibyllic prophecies, 5, 12–13, 23, 27, 31, 33, 86 Sibyllinorum Verborum Iterpretatio, 16 Simon Magus, 127 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. See Gawain-poet Six Kings prophecy. See Prophecy of the Six Kings of England Skeat, Walter William, 61, 67, 114, 140 Solomon (Old Testament king), 96, 97 Stratford, John, Archbishop, 97 Sweat (Nottage), 10–11 Tarquinius, 13, 19 Taylor, Rupert, 5, 56, 67–8 Testament of Love (Usk), 101, 140 Theophilus, 14 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 77–8, 117 Thomas, Duke of Clarence, 93 Thomas of Erceldoune, 56, 58 threshold works, 8, 106, 134–5 Thweng, John, 30 Thynne, William, 105–6, 135–8, 141 Tibullus, 108 Tiburtine Sibyl, 15, 16–17, 22 Treaty of Brétigny, 30, 42–5 Troy, 109, 110–11, 124, 126 Tuke, Sir Brian, 105, 135–6 tyranny, 89, 95–9, 102 Urry, John, 101, 138, 141 Usk, Adam of, 5, 71–2, 85, 97, 147n4 Usk, Thomas, 101, 140 Valois court of France, 12, 16, 29. See also Charles V and Charles VI Varro, 13 vates, 26, 115, 117, 127, 131 vaticinium ex eventu, 15, 18, 21, 27–8, 30, 33

Index 187 Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington, 29–31, 39, 47, 48, 71 Venus, 110, 115 Virgil: Aeneid, the 24–6, 110–13, 117, 119, 123; in Chaucer’s House of Fame, 110–13, 115–6, 124; in Dante’s Commedia, 109, 110; fourth Eclogue, 6, 14, 26; sixth Eclogue, 107 Virgin Mary, 40, 85, 140 viri spirituales, 36, 53 Vortigern, 23, 28, 29 vox populi, 8, 33, 70, 81–4, 90, 94, 98

Wace, 24–6, 27 Walsingham, Thomas, 5, 82, 97 “When feythe failleth…” See “Chaucer’s Prophecy” Whore of Babylon, 127 Wickert, Maria, 75–6, 79 Wonderful Parliament, 96 Wyatt’s rebellion, 58 Wycliffe, John: Chaucer as follower, 105, 138–9; Gower as detractor, 139; Langland as follower, 7, 61–2, 64, 69, 142