The Wheel of Language : Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry 1377-1422 9780815651673, 9780815632733

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The Wheel of Lang age

Medieval Studies Mary A. Maleski, Series Editor

O t h e r t i t l e s i n M e di e va l St u di e s

Aislinge Meic Conglinne: The Vision of Mac Conglinne L a h n e y P r e s t on-M at t o, ed.

Brueghel’s Heavy Dancers: Transgressive Clothing, Class, and Culture in the Late Middle Ages Joh n Bl o c k Fr i e dm a n

From Plato to Lancelot: A Preface to Chrétien de Troyes K . Sa r a h-Ja n e Mu r r ay

King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance of 1279 C u rt L e v i a n t, ed. and trans.

The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought Joh n Bl o c k Fr i e dm a n

Orpheus in the Middle Ages Joh n Bl o c k Fr i e dm a n

Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies Through “The Name of the Rose” A l i s on G a n z e , ed.

Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades M ic h a e l G e rv e r s and Ja m e s M . Pow e l l , eds.

Words, Stones, and Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England L ou i s e M . B i shop

The Wheel of

anguage Representing Speech in Middle English Poet , 1377–1422

David K. Coley

Sy r acuse Un i v e r si t y P r e s s

Copyright © 2012 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2012 12 13 14 15 16 17

6 5 4 3 2 1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN: 978-0-8156-3273-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coley, David K. The wheel of language : representing speech in Middle English poetry, 1377–1422 / David K. Coley. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Medieval studies) Thesis (Ph.D.)—University of Maryland, College Park, 2008. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8156-3273-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Discourse analysis, Literary. 2. English language—Middle English, 1100–1500—Spoken English. 3. English poetry—Middle English, 1100–1500. 4. Oral interpretation of poetry. 5. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—To 1500. I. Title. P302.5.C65 2012 821'.109—dc23 2012006680 Manufactured in the United States of America

• For Kimberly, Johanna, and Alison

David K. Coley is assistant professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Contents Ac k now l e d gm e n t s

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ix

1. Introduction

“That whel wol cause another whel”

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2. Nominalism, Speech, and Power in “The Manciple’s Tale”

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3. Saint Erkenwald

The Sacrament of the Altar and the Persistence of the Past

4. Economies of Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve

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5. Speech, Rhetoric, and Politics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis

6. Conclusion

The Plowman’s Two Voices

No t e s

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Bi bl io gr a ph y I n de x

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249

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Acknowledgments

I

have accrued many debts, both academic and personal, while writing this book, and I am pleased to start paying them off here. To Theresa Coletti, whose inspiring teaching, profound critical engagement, and genuine enthusiasm for her field have taught me the difference between being a student and being a scholar, I offer my most heartfelt thanks. I can only repay the debt I owe you word by word, which means I will be writing for a very long time. I am also grateful for the mentorship and steady encouragement of Thomas Moser, as well as the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Maryland: Verlyn Flieger, Marshall Grossman, and Robert Gaines. Thanks, too, to Kent Cartwright and Michael Israel, who helped give this project direction at its very early stages, and to Christine Maffuccio, who has been one of my most valued interlocutors throughout its development. To my colleagues at Simon Fraser University, particularly to Ronda Arab, Anne Higgins, Matthew Hussey, Christine Kim, Diana Solomon, and Tiffany Werth, thank you for your advice, your thoughtful responses to my writing, and your welcome good humor. And to the many people with whom I’ve discussed this work at conferences, seminars, cocktail receptions, and even on train rides, I offer my sincere gratitude. Among them, I want to single out Jennifer Summit, David Wallace, Frank Grady, Lynn Staley, Paul Strohm, Rita Copeland, and Christine Chism. Finally, I would not be studying the Middle Ages if not for Kenneth Bleeth, who introduced me to Chaucer as an undergraduate after I got bumped from a Shakespeare class. All scheduling mishaps should end in such satisfying careers and such enduring friendships. Thank you, Ken. It has been a genuine pleasure working with the editors and staff at Syracuse University Press. Mary Maleski encouraged this book long before

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Acknowledg ents

it was a book, and I am humbled by her early confidence in me. Thanks, also, to Mary Selden Evans, who has sometimes nudged and sometimes shoved this book forward through the editorial process. Lastly, I am indebted to the anonymous readers for Syracuse University Press, whose encouragement and suggestions nudged this manuscript into its final shape. A portion of chapter 3 appeared as “Baptism as Eucharist: Orthodoxy, Wycliffism, and the Sacramental Utterance in Saint Erkenwald” in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 107.3 (2008). It appears here by permission of the University of Illinois Press. In addition, I am grateful for the support of a publication grant from Simon Fraser University to assist in the production of this book. I am fortunate to have parents and stepparents who have encouraged my decision to pursue an academic career. To my mother, Joan Develin Coley, and to my father, Robert Coley: both of you have inspired me to teach, to write, and always to continue learning. For that, and for much more, I cannot thank you enough. To my stepmother, Janet Carsetti, and to my stepfather, Lee Rice: I am truly thankful that each of you is a part of my family. Collectively, the four of you have helped make Christmas unconscionably hectic, but that’s a small price to pay for such a magnificent group. My love and unending friendship also go to my cousin Julie Develin, who is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sister; and to Michael Wooden and Darcy Daniels, who are also my siblings, even if not by blood. My wife, Kimberly, is my first reader and my best editor. It is with all my love and gratitude that I dedicate this book to her and to our two daughters, Johanna and Alison.

The Wheel of Lang age

Introduction “That whel wol cause another whel”

J

ust before it crashes to its premature and inconclusive end, the alliterative Wars of Alexander relates how its eponymous hero, having pressed his army well past the boundaries of the known world, reaches the shore of a vast ocean. There, standing on the ragged edge of the earth itself, the fated conqueror hears the sound of his own language lapped back at him by cold, monster-infested waves: All þire he closis in þat cliffe & cairis on forthire To þe Occyan at þe erthes ende, & þare in an ilee he heres A grete glauir & a glaam of Grekin tongis. Þan bad he kniȝtis þaim vnclethe & to þat kithe swym, Bot all at come into þat cole, crabbis has þaim drenchid. Þan sewis furth þat souerayn, ay by þa salt strandis Toward þe settynge of þe son in seson of wintir; Sexti dais with his sowme sadly he ridis, Raȝt on to þe Reede See & rerid þare his tentis.1

The potent blend of alterity and familiarity in this passage—the terrible crabs that drown Alexander’s men and the accustomed speech of “Grekin tongis”—is enigmatic. The scene evokes nothing so much as the siren songs that beckoned Ulysses on his journey home from Troy. But Alexander’s own odyssey, driven not by the desire for homecoming but by the centrifugal pull of the world’s margins, is markedly different from the odyssey of Ulysses. The voices that call out from the island at the end of the world seem to mock the Macedonian king rather than to entice him, to confront

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him with the futility of escape from his ignoble bloodline, the inevitability of his death, the senselessness of his often violent conquests, and the utter impossibility of his martial aspirations.2 Does Alexander order his men into the ocean to investigate the familiar speech from across the waves, or does he send them out, as he has done so many times before, to conquer what confronts him, to subdue the words that echo from the edge of the earth? Whatever the reason, the attempt is finally futile. As his men drown horribly, Alexander can only turn the remains of his tattered army westward, toward the failing sun and a Macedonia that he will not live to see. Alexander was not the only doomed king preoccupied with spoken language. On another island near the edge of the known world, Richard II, the last in a long line of Angevin kings, struggled to maintain control of the English Crown in the face of an aggressive cabal of disaffected nobles. These included Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester; the earls of Arundel and Warwick; and, to a lesser degree, Henry Bolingbroke, Richard’s cousin and the future Henry IV. The first three of these lords—Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick—were senior members of the Lords Appellant in the Merciless Parliament of 1388, a violent purging of the royal household that severely, if temporarily, circumscribed Richard’s authority and diminished his role in the political life of his nation. Indeed, in the skirmishes leading up to the Merciless Parliament, the king seems to have been deposed for several days, regaining his crown only because the appellants failed to determine who among them should wear it.3 Nine years later, however, Richard himself was on the ascendant. Presumably to secure his position and to exact revenge for the Merciless Parliament, he moved against the three senior appellants in the summer of 1397, personally arresting his own uncle, the duke of Gloucester, at his estate in Pleshy. Gloucester, already suffering from ill health, was removed to the English territory of Calais and coerced into admitting wrongdoing.4 He issued a full verbal confession, pleading to several treasonous “matieres and pointz,” including speaking slanderously against the king. Also, in that I sclaundred my Loord, I knowleche that I dede evyll and wykkedly, in that I spake it unto hym in sclaunderouse wyse in audience of other folk. . . . Also, in that I was in place ther it was communed and

Int oduction

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spoken in manere of deposal of my liege Loord, trewly I knowlech wele, that we were assented therto for two dayes or three, And than we for to have done our homage and our oothes, and putt hym as heyly in his estate as ever he was.5

Gloucester died in Calais, reportedly of natural causes, shortly after uttering his confession; however, the admission that he “spake sclaunderouse wyse” and “in manere of deposal of [his] liege Loord” proved damning even after his death. His words were read aloud to Parliament, and the duke was posthumously convicted by the Crown. The two other senior appellants met similar fates. Arundel, persuaded to turn himself in by his brother the archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded for treason; the earl of Warwick, captured by Richard’s forces and also found guilty of treason, was stripped of his lands and title and exiled to the Isle of Man. Henry Bolingbroke, a junior appellant in 1388, eventually found himself banned from England as well. Though not condemned by the Revenge Parliament, he was exiled to France the following year as punishment for a quarrel with the duke of Norfolk. Like Alexander at the far end of the world, King Richard seemed to have reached the outer limits of his power, conquering those who would constrain him and establishing the reach and scope of his authority. Like Alexander’s attempt to return to Macedonia, however, the continuation of Richard’s journey would prove tragically ill-starred after such a zenith. Richard waited nine years to avenge the Merciless Parliament of 1388. By contrast, the remaining appellants’ retribution for the Revenge Parliament of 1397 was stunningly swift. In July of 1399, following the death of his father John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke returned to England to reclaim his Lancastrian inheritance. By September of that year, he had succeeded in imprisoning Richard himself in the Tower of London, where he exacted from the king a verbal confession of his own. Richard publicly declared his “inability and insufficiency” to rule, and although he insisted that he retained the “marks set upon his soul by sacred unction,” he gave his assent for Bolingbroke to succeed him on the throne. Like Gloucester’s confession of 1397, Richard’s statement was read aloud to Parliament. Indeed, according to the Parliamentary Rolls, “the king himself willingly, as it appeared, and with a happy face” read the document in its entirety.6

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With Richard’s spoken assent, then, Henry of Lancaster became Henry IV. At the same time, Richard himself—whose aspirations to semidivine status had once led him to demand extravagant forms of address from his subjects and even to boast that the laws of the realm existed “in his own mouth”—became “Sir Richard of Bordeaux,” a prisoner knight in Pontefract Castle.7 In a matter of months he would die there. In bringing together these examples—one literary and two historical—I do not wish simply to draw point-to-point comparisons among the Wars of Alexander, the tyranny of Richard II, and the rise of the Lancastrian dynasty. Instead, I want to highlight the role of the spoken word in each and, more broadly, to suggest the vital importance of speech in both the literature and the history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. In the Wars of Alexander, the rumble of spoken Greek from beyond the rim of the earth compels Alexander to send his soldiers naked into the sea. In 1397, the speech of Gloucester—first slanderous and then confessional—seals his fate as a traitor to the Crown and establishes the extent of Richard II’s royal power. In 1399, Richard’s spoken affirmation of Henry IV’s kingship publicly justifies the Lancastrian claim to kingship and helps bring an end to the Angevin dynasty. The key position of speech in each of these cases is not coincidental. Rather, it gestures toward the ongoing argument I propose in this book: speech itself was central to many of the most fundamental cultural and social movements of the Ricardian and Lancastrian periods. Questions about what speech could do, how it signified, who was authorized to deploy it, and in what circumstances it was efficacious were closely linked to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century crises of sacramentalism, theology, ontology, and dynastic authority. The spoken word, both in its symbolic potential and in its performative efficacy, became a contested locus in late medieval England, a site alternately occupied and coveted by philosophers, ecclesiasts, kings, bureaucrats, magnates, courtiers, and commoners alike, a site that was perceived as crucial to understanding and shaping a nation destabilized by years of plague, international war, civil conflict, and socioeconomic turmoil. As the inclusion of the Wars of Alexander in these opening examples implies, the spoken word—or at least its poetic representation—was

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also a site occupied by Ricardian and Lancastrian poets, many of whom believed, as Anne Middleton demonstrates, “that poetry [justified] itself within society, or ought to, as a moral force, in essentially public terms.”8 The didactic, activist ethos that Middleton identifies in works like the Confessio Amantis and Piers Plowman is important for considering Middle English poetry’s role “as a peacemaker, and as an interpreter of the common world.”9 It is equally important for revealing as inevitable the intrusion of poetry into late-medieval religious, political, and social discourse. Because speech played such a crucial role in this discourse, representing the spoken word within a poetic text was always an act charged with political potential. By analyzing the work that medieval English poets imagined speech to perform—or, alternately, by examining how speech acts functioned (and failed to function) within medieval poetic discourse—I will show speech to be a defining link between the Middle English poetic text and the political, philosophical, religious, and economic upheavals that wracked England between the reigns of Richard II and Henry V. More specifically, I will reveal how poetic representations of speech define, respond to, comment on, and are sometimes contingent on important cultural issues, including the rise of the Lollard heresy, the dissident philosophies of thinkers like William of Ockham, the deposition of Richard II, and the seismic economic and political shifts that occurred during the early Lancastrian dynasty. The Spoken Word in the Middle Ages: Some Contexts The social and intellectual forces that propelled the spoken word to the center of England’s major cultural debates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are legion, and enumerating them fully is a task outside the parameters of this investigation. The ongoing cataclysm of the Black Death and the social, vocational, and hierarchical displacements it precipitated; the demands of the laity for more intimate and responsive forms of devotion; the new social and political relevance accorded to the vernacular are just some of the period-defining cultural and linguistic locators that are fundamentally important to the role of speech in late medieval poetry and culture, and these will be explored where they are

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relevant throughout this book.10 Nonetheless, the forty-five-year period from the accession of Richard II to the death of Henry V was subject to a more local confluence of events and influences that, taken together, were instrumental in granting the spoken word the unusual power it attained between 1377 and 1422. Among the most arcane of these influences, but important nonetheless to the theoretical understanding of speech in the later Middle Ages, was the linguistic and epistemological intervention of the fourteenthcentury philosopher William of Ockham. Best known in modern times for his so-called razor, Ockham’s chief contribution to the philosophical milieu of his own age was his argument against the existence of universals, transcendent constructs that realist scholastic philosophy held were the absolute and incontrovertible forms on which all individual forms were predicated. Ockham posited, radically, that universals were not transcendent and divinely ordained structures. Rather, they were human structures developed by observation and knowledge of individual forms, existing only as “thought-object[s] in the mind.”11 This ontological shift—a de facto reversal of centuries of scholastic theory—had an enormous impact on late medieval understandings of speech and the functions that speech could perform. In traditional scholastic thought, the spoken word was inert and representational, wholly subordinated to the universal through a stable, preordained hierarchy. By obviating the universal, Ockham destabilized that hierarchy and opened the possibility for speech to function creatively as well as representationally. To put it simply, under Ockham’s nominalist philosophy, speech became immensely powerful, capable not only of communicating understandings of reality but also of altering perceptions of reality itself, even of creating individual realities, by interfering with the “thought-objects” on which knowledge was predicated. For Ockham and his followers, the world was contingent on speech rather than speech being contingent on the world. If Ockham’s nominalist philosophy affected fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury understandings of speech within an overarching ontological system, another Oxford theologian, John Wyclif, was particularly interested in those speech acts associated with the sacraments. Taking aim most vehemently at the sacrament of the Eucharist, Wyclif, who was as wedded

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to realist principles as Ockham was dismissive of them, argued that the orthodox explanation of transubstantiation was a logical impossibility. Even after the sacramental words of consecration were uttered, he asserted, the body of Christ could not entirely replace the substance of bread and still leave behind bread’s sensual trappings, or accidents. The accidents of bread, in other words, could not stand alone without their substance; as Wyclif writes, the “power þat prestis han standeþ not in transsubstansinge of þe oste, ne in makyng of accidentis for to stonde bi hemsilf.”12 Wyclif proposed instead that priests could, by uttering the appropriate sacramental words, add Christ’s essence to the substance of bread, but under no circumstances did he allow for the wholesale substitution of former for the latter. Thus, at the very heart of Wyclif’s attack on the Eucharist, was a question about the efficacy of speech: can a priest’s spoken utterance make the accidents of bread stand miraculously alone without their substance (the orthodox position) or can that utterance merely add the essence of Christ to the substance of bread? Wyclif’s theological break from the orthodox medieval Church and the anticlerical stance that the theologian frequently assumed were foundational to England’s first native heretical group, the Lollards. Emerging in the mid-1370s and declining precipitously after the Oldcastle rebellion of 1414, Lollardy (or Wycliffism) was perceived as a serious threat to the social fabric of England in the Ricardian and Lancastrian periods. In 1395, that threat prompted Roger Dymmok to present Richard II with an anti-Lollard book reiterating the full and exclusive presence of Christ in the consecrated host. Dymmok also warned that failure to affirm “the sacramental sign of bread and wine currently maintained by the Church [would] destroy civil society” and lead to an anarchic “destruction of the community, whether this [community] is a city or a kingdom.”13 Coming to power just as the fifteenth century began, the usurping Lancastrian kings seized on such anti-Lollard sentiment. The sacrament of the Eucharist itself—and particularly the belief that spoken priestly consecration enacted an orthodox transubstantiation—became what one critic has called a “litmus test of orthodoxy,” while denial of transubstantiation and of efficacious, priestly speech became the very root and definition of heresy.14 In such a political and religious climate, the fundamental question of

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what the spoken word could and could not do became the central issue of the central rite of the central organizing body in England. In the early years of Lancastrian kingship, the threat posed by Wycliffism collided uneasily with the exigencies of William of Ockham’s ideal of the potentially transformative speech act. In his struggle to legitimize the crown he usurped from Richard II, Henry IV positioned himself as a champion of orthodoxy and scourge of the Lollards, effecting the 1401 passage of the statute known as De Haeretico Comburendo (which advocated the punishment of heretics by burning) and, several years later, quelling heterodox writing through Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions. Paul Strohm argues that such resistance to Lollardy was important to the upstart Lancastrian dynasty for several reasons. First, by fashioning themselves as staunch upholders of the traditional orthodox Church, Henry IV and his supporters hoped to gain broad public support for Henry’s claim to the Crown. But Lancastrian resistance to Lollardy also had a second and equally important intrinsic rationale: the very transformation of the host that Lollards denied also served as the theological and metaphorical basis for the project of Lancastrian kingship. Just as the sacramental words of the Eucharist transformed bread into body, so too did the sacral coronation oath transform Henry, duke of Lancaster, into Henry IV, king of England. As Strohm suggests, the Lancastrian commitment to ideas of transformation, so intense that it may be considered obsessional, is justified and defended by a strategy of doubling or division. Good transformation—that is sacral transformation, elevation of inward properties without outward of apparent change—is reserved to the king. . . . The Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs: more efficacious, more numerous, more motile and transferable. Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spiritual encourages respect for matter’s stubborn resistance) . . . [threaten] the Lancastrian symbolic.15

In this respect, the efficacy of the speech act that turns bread into body was of critical importance to the Lancastrian dynasty. The invisible but substantive change that sacramental speech effected in the consecrated host was closely analogous to the coronation oath taken by Henry in 1399,

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an oath that had the power to “transform a claimant into a king” despite the absence of visible, physical change.16 Anathema to Wyclif and the Lollards, the transformative potential of sacramental language was necessary to Henry IV and Henry V in the wake of Richard II’s deposition. So too, it seems, were the less miraculous transformations that Ockham’s nominalism suggested could be enacted by speech—the manipulation of those mental “thought-objects” on which human knowledge of reality is predicated. Following the deposition, the first two Lancastrian kings embarked on a project of propaganda, manipulating written chronicles and prophesy, legal writings, and even gossip in order to bolster their claim to the throne. The Lancastrian attempt to secure power by controlling language—and particularly by controlling the explicitly spoken language of gossip—resonates strongly with the precepts of nominalist thought, where spoken language had the power to affect a seemingly objective reality. Indeed, by controlling the speech that helped create public understanding of the political realities of Lancastrian usurpation, the new dynasty clearly attempted to control the contours of reality itself, restructuring that reality in its own favor. Individually, these cultural and political contexts suggest how questions about the efficacy of the spoken word may have become central to the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods. Taken together as a cultural narrative, however, they show how such seemingly disparate issues as Ockham’s theories on the signifying and creative functions of speech; Wyclif’s denial that priestly, sacramental speech could effect the miracle of transubstantiation; and Lancastrian manipulation of rumor, gossip, and other forms of linguistic expression were connected by the shared understanding that the spoken word could perform work, that speech contained the potential to affect, even to effect, its specific cultural environment. The understanding that speech contained such efficacy also makes logical the public role that so much poetry assumed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As a form of writing that articulated “a ‘common voice’ to serve the ‘common good,’” poetry itself became an instrument not only of social comment but also of social intervention, a medium whose “role and effects [were] potentially mediating and meliorative” rather than simply expressive and reflective.17 Poetry, in its “public” capacity as social

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mediator, was not inert in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but functional, active, engaged, alive. In this respect, it is telling that Middleton’s influential discussion of public poetry emphasizes the metaphorical poetic “voice” over written words: “public poetry generally, speaks ‘as if’ to the entire community—as a whole, and all at once rather than severally— rather than ‘as if’ to a coterie or patron.”18 Both as speech and as a vehicle for representing speech, the verse produced in the forty-five years from the accession of Richard II to the death of Henry V simultaneously drew from and promoted an understanding of the spoken word as politically, theologically, and even physically efficacious. It was at once a creative force and a mode of meaningful social engagement.

• By identifying the importance of speech within the leading philosophical, theological, and sociopolitical issues of the later Middle Ages, this study will reveal an England deeply and consciously invested in the potential of the spoken word to effect change. However, the role of the spoken word in late medieval England must also be regarded in the context of the increasing prominence of the English vernacular during that time. Although England was still a trilingual nation between 1377 and 1422, the prominence and importance of written English, particularly in relation to the traditional power languages of French and Latin, ballooned at the beginning of the fourteenth century and continued to grow until well into the fifteenth. Within this period, as Nicholas Watson notes, English texts appeared “in far greater quantities than previously, gathering to themselves a new sense of their importance and undergoing a degree of standardization, as writers tried both to articulate their growing consciousness of the distinctiveness and coherence of English language and culture and to give the language a closer status to that of French or Latin.”19 The heightened consciousness of writing in English—as well as the concomitantly increased production of English texts—is a signal development in the literature of the fourteenth century, one rife with implications for England’s burgeoning “national [and] cultural identity” and for “the spread of literacy and learning both down the social scale and across the gender divide.”20

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The development of the English vernacular in the fourteenth century is itself closely linked to medieval practices of translation. Indeed, the vast majority of Middle English texts have their germ in Latin originals or works written in other European vernaculars such as French or Italian. Geoffrey Chaucer provides examples of all three: his “Manciple’s Tale” is a close redaction of the story of Phoebus and the crow from Ovid’s Latin Metamorphoses, his “Knight’s Tale” is based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Italian Teseida, and his early dream visions have their root in French models such as the Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose. Recent studies have shown vernacular translation to involve much more than simply the transmission of narrative from language to language. Rather, translation has been increasingly and accurately understood as an act of interpretation and criticism, “a site where cultural relations of dominance and subservience might be played out.”21 Rita Copeland has demonstrated that vernacular translation serves to transfer not only specific texts into English but also the cultural and social cachet those texts carried with them. “Translation,” Copeland posits, was “a primary vehicle for vernacular participation in, and ultimately appropriation of, the cultural privilege of Latin academic discourse.”22 In this respect, works like Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale,” the two translations of the Gesta Romanorum in Hoccleve’s Series, and the many Ovidian translations in Gower’s Confessio Amantis were engaged in bringing Latin texts into the vernacular and in bringing the prestige of Latin into English, in translating the rank and status of Latin into the mother tongue. Thus, translation becomes a deeply political project, and written translations themselves contained the potential for becoming highly charged political texts. The fraught political and cultural dimensions of translation were nowhere more strongly felt than in the “Englishing” of that most central and authoritative of written texts, the Bible. Indeed, if translation can be considered “the means by which cultural value and authority was transmitted from one period to another,” the translation of the Bible not only promised to accord an incommensurate prestige to the vernacular, it also posed a genuine threat to the medieval Church, whose claim to authority rested largely on its exclusive access to and interpretation of the Latin scriptures.23 In the period that this study covers, the issue of biblical

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translation centered around the Wycliffite Bible, which appeared in at least two versions in the last decade of the fourteenth century.24 The responses engendered by the appearance of the Wycliffite Bible— namely the Oxford Translation Debates that began in 1401 and the eventual promulgation of Arundel’s Constitutions in 1409—underscore the threat that biblical translation posed to the ecclesiastical establishment. Of the barbed attacks on translation that the Oxford debates generated, one particularly dire prediction of the consequences of an English Bible is worth repeating at length: Translation into the mother tongue . . . will bring about a world in which the laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women (mulierculae) talk philosophy and dare to instruct men—in which a country bumpkin (rusticus) will presume to teach. Translation will also deprive good priests of their prestige. If everything is translated, learning, the liturgy, and all the sacraments will be abhorred; clerics and theology itself will be seen as useless by the laity; the clergy will wither; and an infinity of heresies will erupt. Even the laity will not benefit, since their devotion is actually improved by their lack of understanding of the psalms and prayers they say.25

The fears expressed in this admittedly alarmist response to Wycliffite biblical translation are, to a certain degree, fears over the corrupting influence of the vernacular itself, a “barbarous tongue . . . grammatically and rhetorically inadequate as a vehicle for truth.”26 But, on balance, they are less about scriptural purity or dilution of theological truth than they are about the threat that biblical translation posed to the established ecclesiastical hierarchies—to the relative positions of teacher and student assumed by the clergy and the laity, to the “prestige” enjoyed by “good priests” over women and “country bumpkins,” to the “usefulness” of clerics to lay people, and to the security of orthodox teaching against an “infinity of heresies.” As David Lawton shrewdly observes, the contests over English biblical translation had far more to say about “authority and who [had] access to it” than they did about spiritual and theological issues.27 Most critical investigations of the vernacular in the late Middle Ages, like those by Nicholas Watson, Rita Copeland, and David Lawton, have

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highlighted the high degree of social and political work that written English performed, particularly in the culturally dynamic reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V. However, while such scholarship has importantly recognized that the vernacular “bore a close resemblance to the spoken word,” it has seldom engaged with the parallel work performed by speech in the later Middle Ages, preferring instead to focus on text and writing.28 This critical elision of the role of the spoken word in the late medieval society and literature is slowly changing, and a number of recent studies reveal a growing sensitivity to how speech was constituted and represented in medieval cultural production. Notable among these are Edwin Craun’s Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Narrative, which demonstrates how authors like Langland and Chaucer were strongly influenced by discussions of “sins of the tongue” in vernacular pastoral manuals; Sandy Bardsley’s Venomous Tongues, which investigates the gender valences of “deviant” speech as represented in literary, legal, and visual texts; and Susan Phillips’s Transforming Talk, which sees gossip as a mode of speech that “influences and structures orthodox and literary practices.”29 But on the whole, the focus of the medieval scholarly community remains on writing as writing rather than writing as a representation of speech. On the one hand, that focus makes perfect sense: scholars do not have the same direct access to the spoken word as they do to the written text since medieval vernacular speech acts (like all speech acts) disappeared as soon as they were uttered. On the other hand, the literature of the later Middle Ages goes a long way toward recuperating the lost utterance for us, offering texts that are explicitly, centrally, and mimetically focused on the spoken word—texts like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which chronicles a fictional storytelling contest performed by a group of pilgrims, and the alliterative Saint Erkenwald, which details a confessional dialogue between a reanimated pre-Christian corpse and a seventh-century London bishop. Moreover, many of these texts were themselves written for oral presentation. Joyce Coleman shows that Chaucer and his near contemporaries produced carefully nuanced, written verse for an audience that would often hear rather than see their words: “Aurality—i.e., the reading aloud of written literature to one or a group of listeners—was in fact the modality of choice for highly literate and sophisticated audiences .  .  . among

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the nobility of England, Scotland, France, and Burgundy from (at least) the fourteenth through the late fifteenth century.”30 Such “aurality” is evidenced in the text that I used to begin this book, the Wars of Alexander. In its opening lines, “When folk ere festid & fed, fayn wald þai here / Sum farand þinge eftir food to fayne þare hertis,” the poem serves to remind modern readers that medieval engagement with literary texts frequently took place not when a reader saw the inky words of a scribe but when a listener heard the performed utterances of an orator.31 While no degree of scholarship can recapture medieval speech acts themselves, the texts that we call literature (from the Latin littera, meaning letter) may themselves be seen as records of speech, and the speech acts represented therein may be understood as akin to verbal utterances. Though I will be focusing specifically on the representations of speech within these literary texts, it is useful to recognize that those representations were often, in their context as performed poetry, articulated speech acts in their own right. Without exception, the works examined in this book have been previously analyzed in terms of their engagement with language and with writing. “The Manciple’s Tale” has been approached “as an exploration of the nature of court poetry,” and the Manciple’s ventriloquizing crow has himself been described as a figure of the court poet.32 As a hagiography, Saint Erkenwald has frequently been understood as a translation of the Latin Trajan legend, a work to be read in the context of poems like John Lydgate’s Augustine at Compton and the Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi.33 John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, with its innumerable Ovidian tales, has become a cornerstone for studies investigating medieval practices of translation.34 Even Thomas Hoccleve’s Marian lyrics, when they have been analyzed at all, have most frequently been understood in the terms of their relationship to other written Marian poetry or to the written petitions that dominated Hoccleve’s service as Clerk of the Privy Seal.35 This focus on writing is surely justified. When we consider the “bryȝt golde lettres” that encrust the heathen’s sarcophagus in Saint Erkenwald, the relationship between prayer and written petition in Hoccleve’s Marian verse, Gower’s concern with a past in which “wrytinge was beloved evere,” and the Manciple’s repeated exhortations to “reed Salomon . . . , reed David . . . , reed

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Senekke,” we see details that underscore a self-conscious engagement with emerging paradigms of writing, translation, and textuality.36 But analyzing these works only in terms of those textual and written paradigms provides an incomplete picture. Along with the bright gold letters that we see in Saint Erkenwald, we hear the baptismal words that Erkenwald speaks over the corpse. Hoccleve’s Monk is asked by the Virgin Mary to utter prayers aloud “after hir doctryne and enformynge.”37 Gower’s Amans enters into an explicitly spoken confession with Genius. Chaucer’s Manciple reminds his fellow pilgrims ad nauseam that “God of his endelees goodnesse / Walled a tonge with teeth and lippes eke, / For man sholde hym avyse what he speeke” (IX 322–24). These details demonstrate that while the Erkenwald-poet, Hoccleve, Gower, Chaucer, and others wrote with an eye fi xed on an emerging written, literary, vernacular tradition, they also wrote with an ear attuned to the resonances of the spoken word. They were acutely aware of the importance of speech to the political, social, and religious conflicts of their day. This study recognizes the “spoken-ness” of literature in the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods—the centrality of the spoken word for many medieval writers— and in that recognition it presents a revised picture of the political and cultural work that poetry was able to perform in the later Middle Ages.

• Individually, the chapters of this book proceed in a roughly (though not entirely) chronological order. More important, they chart a centripetal movement from the broadly philosophical to the narrowly personal, even as the work that they show speech to perform moves further and further off the poetic page and into the public sphere. Chapter two, “Nominalism, Speech, and Power in ‘The Manciple’s Tale,’” investigates Chaucer’s engagement with the nominalist philosophy of William of Ockham, an engagement that reaches its apogee in the tale of Chaucer’s Manciple. In this final poetic tale of the Canterbury pilgrimage—a poem readily invested in the ability of speech alternately to mimic, transform, destroy, and create—Chaucer interrogates both the epistemological ramifications of nominalism and its more unsettling ontological

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ones, exploring the potential for the spoken word, at its most extreme, to alter or even fashion anew the contours of the physical world. In chapter three, “Saint Erkenwald: the Sacrament of the Altar and the Persistence of the Past,” Chaucer’s imagined transformative utterances find a concrete, culturally specific form in the speech acts associated with the Christian sacraments. I argue that by dramatizing the posthumous baptism and subsequent salvation of a righteous heathen, the alliterative Saint Erkenwald attempts to reassert the transformative potential of baptismal and Eucharistic speech alike, to champion the role of the Church in authorizing such speech, and to resist the emerging Wycliffite heresy of the late fourteenth century. In performing such public work, however, the poem also raises larger, more theologically pregnant issues. Its unwavering insistence on the orthodox form of the Eucharist forces Saint Erkenwald to confront looming questions of English Christian identity, while the unresolved collision it stages between the Christian present and the pre-Christian past engages with issues arising from medieval Christianity’s relationship with Judaism. The fourth chapter, “Economies of Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve,” pushes into the Lancastrian period. Building on recent studies that consider Hoccleve’s conflicting roles as Privy Seal bureaucrat and would-be court poet, this chapter examines patterns of utterance that Hoccleve develops in several overlooked Marian lyrics, revealing an economy of speech present throughout his devotional works. This specific economy, in which supplicant and intercessor are locked in a system of mutual dependence predicated on the efficacy of the spoken word, becomes paradigmatic not only for Hoccleve’s devotional poems but also for the systems of economic and interpersonal exchange that the poet creates in his better known works, La Male Regle, The Regement of Princes, and The Series. The close relationship that I demonstrate between Hoccleve’s Marian and autobiographical works underscores the tension between England’s traditional devotional culture and the emergent bureaucratic systems of the fifteenth century, a tension that informed the cultural and poetic production of the Lancastrian dynasty. The last chapter, “Speech, Rhetoric, and Politics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” moves backward in time to straddle the chronological and

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regnal divide between the Angevin and Lancastrian dynasties. So too does the poem on which the chapter focuses, a work dedicated first to Richard II and subsequently to his usurper. By examining the political work that speech performs in the Confessio Amantis as well as the propaganda promulgated by both the Ricardian and Lancastrian affinities, I show how the moral valences that attended the spoken word and the explicit gendering of speech itself are instrumental to the support Gower offers his royal patrons. More broadly, this chapter explores poetic speech at its most brazenly political, demonstrating how the performative potential of the spoken word was harnessed by poets and princes alike in an attempt to shape the social and political consciousness of the English nation. I have selected the central works for this analysis using several criteria. First, and most fundamentally, I have chosen poems that deploy focused and deliberate representations of speech to engage critically with key fields within their textual environments.38 Admittedly, this criterion has the whiff of subjectivity about it; the poems that I have selected are far from the only possible exemplars of such critical engagement, nor are they always the most immediately obvious. Moreover, the four fields on which I focus in this book—philosophy, religion, economics, and dynastic politics—are not isolated from one another but overlap in complex ways: religion and philosophy can no more be extricated from one another than can religion and politics or politics and economics. Nonetheless, both the fields and the works themselves provide useful points of departure for analysis, and together they suggest the wide range of cultural and poetic loci in which the spoken word was understood to be efficacious. Second, I have selected these poems because they resonate not only with specific aspects of their cultural milieux but also with one another and with wider poetic affinities. Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale,” for example, invites a discussion of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, links to the House of Fame and to several courtly lyrics, and compares with the work of John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve. For its part, Gower’s Confessio Amantis provides energy to a brief analysis of Richard Maidstone’s Concordia, while Hoccleve’s devotional lyrics weigh heavily on the Privy Seal clerk’s secular work and gesture backward toward Chaucer. Finally, the sacramentally inflected speech depicted in Saint Erkenwald is informed

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by representations of speech in other Middle English alliterative poems, works whose poetic “worlds,” as Christine Chism writes, often “resonate with each other.”39 I have tried throughout this book to capitalize on such connections, always conscious that the generic and period-specific tags used to categorize the works—alliterative, Chaucerian, Ricardian, Lancastrian, devotional, secular, and so forth—are fluid and porous, impinging on one another in ways that we are still working to understand. Taken as a whole, these poems, as well as the matrix of connections among them, present a concise cross section of late-fourteenth- and early-fi fteenthcentury Middle English poetry. Finally, I have limited this study to poetry, a criterion that excludes several important texts. Chief among them are The Book of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, two prose texts that offer tantalizing corollaries to the central arguments of this book. Indeed, both works interrogate how direct speech—to God, to archbishop, to husband, to neighbor—alternately circumvents and generates durable structures of authority, and both reveal how the spoken word preserves, performs, and even creates its speaker. As Lynn Staley has persuasively argued, “The Book of Margery Kempe does not report a world. Margery Kempe, its author, makes a world. Margery Kempe, like Chaucer, . . . used the literary traditions to which she was heir as well as the world around her to compose fiction.”40 That Margery Kempe’s “fiction” has so often been approached as straightforward autobiography—that until relatively recently The Book of Margery Kempe was regarded simply as a unrefined if eccentric account of fifteenth-century life—powerfully attests to the performative efficacy of Kempe’s words.41 Similarly, Julian of Norwich’s ecstatic spoken discourse with the Godhead attests to the performative efficacy of speech insofar as it allows Julian to transcend established channels of patriarchal authority and to create herself as both vernacular author and influential theologian. Despite these similarities, however, there are also crucial differences between the texts I focus on in this study and those that I exclude, differences that stem largely from the constraints and expectations of their respective genres. Consider, for example, the prose of Margery Kempe’s Book and the verse of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or of Gower’s Confessio

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Amantis. While Chaucer, Gower, and Kempe all create themselves as characters in their own works—Chaucer appears as the Pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales, Gower as Amans in the Confessio, and Margery in her eponymous Book—the conversational prose of The Book of Margery Kempe moves always to collapse the distinction between author and character, allowing Kempe to efface the distance between herself and her narrative subject.42 In The Canterbury Tales, however, as well as in the Confessio Amantis, the artificiality of the verse itself allows Chaucer and Gower to preserve, often with a wink and a nod, a constant distance between themselves and their respective literary personae. Our apprehension of all three of these works then, and by extension our apprehension of the speech acts depicted within them, is strongly determined by genre. By delimiting my analysis to poetry, I do not refute the aesthetic and literary craft of Margery Kempe’s Book or Julian of Norwich’s Revelations. Nor do I deny that the two works, along with other prose treatises such as the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing and Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, have much to reveal about the roles and perceptions of speech in the later Middle Ages.43 Simply, I exclude these works in the interest of focusing my own, optimistic that the analysis of poetry I provide here will spur further inquiry into the representation of speech in other genres. Performative Speech, Modern and Medieval While this study takes a broadly historicist approach to the poems that it discusses, it also draws from the vocabulary and insights of contemporary speech-act theory, particularly from critical work surrounding the performative utterance. As first proposed by J. L. Austin, performative utterances are speech acts that “(a) do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, (b) are not ‘true’ or ‘false’ . . .” and in which “(c) the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action.” By this definition, statements such as “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” or “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” qualify as performatives.44 Austin distinguishes performatives from constatives, utterances that describe or report something and can ideally be declared true or false, such as “that ship happens to be called the Queen Elizabeth” or “there are six pence in my pocket.”

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As Austin develops his ideas, he blurs the distinctions between performatives and constatives, eventually settling on a unified theory of speech acts organized around the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of all utterances, constative and performative. The locutionary aspect refers to the “utterance of certain words in a certain construction, and the utterance of them with a certain ‘meaning’”; the illocutionary force of a speech act roughly corresponds to the way in which a speaker “means” his or her utterance to be understood; and the perlocutionary force is the actual effect that an utterance has, a force not necessarily connected to the utterance’s illocutionary intent.45 Thus, one locutionary act—let’s say a dirty joke—with one illocutionary force can have multiple perlocutionary aspects: it can make someone laugh; it can make a second person angry; it can offend a third person; and it can put a fourth at ease.46 In the more precise vocabulary of Austin’s general theory of speech acts then, a successful performative is one in which the perlocutionary force of an utterance is its illocutionary force, in which the effect generated by speech act is identical to its intent. Austin’s early work on performatives has been extended by John Searle, who focuses specifically on the notion that spoken words have the potential to do work. Searle distinguishes performatives from constatives by what he calls “the direction of fit” between the word and the world.47 In a constative, or descriptive, statement, the words uttered by the speaker fit the world; the speaker’s words reflect the world as the speaker perceives it. A performative utterance, on the other hand, is one in which the world fits the words uttered by a particular speaker, an utterance that does not simply describe the world but that actually alters it. By this definition, the phrase “you are married” can be both constative and performative, depending on the circumstances in which it is uttered. If I happen to see a couple I know to be married and remark, “You are married,” I have uttered a constative: my words fit the world that I perceive. If I am a justice of the peace authorized to marry two individuals, I may say those same words in a performative capacity, thus changing the world (specifically the marital status of the two people) to fit my words.48 Here, of course, the change that the performative utterance enacts is an institutional fact: marriage is

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not a physical state but a status mutually agreed on by various social and religious authorities. There are, however, circumstances in which Searle’s definition of a performative as speech that causes the world to fit the word even extends to brute facts. “When God says, ‘Let there be light!’” Searle argues, “[he] makes the case by fiat that light exists”: his word brings about the very existence of light itself. Indeed, the unfailingly efficacious speech of God is in many respects the very model of a performative utterance, one highly relevant to medieval conceptions of the nature of the divine.49 As Augustine of Hippo writes in the City of God, “The sublime speech of God in advance of his action is the immutable reason of the action itself.”50 The Word of God does not merely describe; it creates. There have been a number of productive disagreements with the theories propounded by Austin and Searle, none more influential than Jacques Derrida’s attack on the logical foundations of Austin’s performative category itself. Specifically, Derrida takes issue with Austin’s exemption of literary and artistic speech—the words “said by an actor on the stage, or . . . introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy”—from his theory of performativity. Austin states that artistic speech is “in a peculiar way hollow or void”; it cannot be performative because it is “not used seriously, but in ways parasitic on its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language.”51 Because it is predicated secondarily on “normal” speech, Austin reasons, the force of such derivative or “citational” speech is necessarily diluted. Derrida, however, shows that by excluding literary language as “anomaly, exception, non-serious, citation,” Austin effectively excludes the very thing that makes all utterances possible in the first place, the “general citationality—or rather general iterability—without which there would not even be a ‘successful’ performative.”52 Because all speech acts function precisely by virtue of their adherence or deviation from conventional constructs—because speech acts are necessarily “repetitions of an established procedure or formula”—it is logically inconsistent for Austin to cordon off literary or dramatic speech acts from “serious” ones.53 Thus, Derrida determines that there is no difference between the “normal” performative

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and the “parasitic” performative: all performatives are similarly parasitic, all putatively substantial speech acts are similarly hollow. Derrida’s discussion of iterability and Austin’s exclusion of citational speech from normal speech have proven useful for recent work on the Middle Ages. Claire Waters finds that the logical inconsistencies concerning artistic and citational speech that Derrida seizes on in Austin’s work are analogous to Church concerns over the role of unlicensed preaching in the Middle Ages. Waters demonstrates that authorized, licensed preaching in medieval England was itself based on citation, specifically on a “lineage of . . . priests and preachers whose words derived from the words of Christ, who were supposed to follow and imitate him, and who were authorized both by that point of origin and by the ongoing tradition of priestly office in which they stood.”54 The power of the licensed preacher, then, was derived directly from the citational relationship of his words to the words of Christ, a clear inversion of Austin’s contention that the power of citational speech is circumscribed by its “parasitic” relationship to “normal” speech. Unlicensed lay preachers and self-proclaimed prophets, who drew their authority as preachers from “a charismatic, personal authority .  .  . that [was] much more difficult to regulate,” menaced these official “chains of citation” precisely because they worked outside of the church hierarchy.55 Absent the citational authority claimed by licensed preachers, the preponderance of unregulated, lay preaching in the later Middle Ages threatened to create ecclesiastical contexts that lacked a controlling locus of authority. Such a decentering of priestly authority was itself “anathema to medieval preaching theorists,” and the fears that it promoted drove ecclesiastical efforts to regulate preaching.56 Unlike Derrida, who dismantles the fundamental logic of Austin’s theory, Pierre Bourdieu attacks the idea of performative speech by arguing that Austin and Searle egregiously misconstrue the source of speech’s efficacy. It is not the power of speech itself, argues Bourdieu, but the power of the speaker that dictates the performativity of an utterance: By trying to understand the power of linguistic manifestations linguistically, by looking in language for the principle underlying the logic

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and effectiveness of language as an institution, one forgets that authority comes to language from outside.  .  .  . In fact, the use of language, the manner as much as the substance of the discourse, depends on the social position of the speaker, which governs the access he can have to the institution, that is, to the official, orthodox, and legitimate speech.57

Rather than inhering structurally to a speech act itself, the power that speech seems to contain—its ability to do work—should more accurately be understood as a reflection of the social status of the speaker. Only a registered justice of the peace or other “authorized” figure is able to effect a marriage through the phrase “you are married,” just as only God can effect light by saying, “Let there be light.” Bourdieu insists that social power dynamics are always inseparable from the effective deployment of performative speech. The degree to which the speaker has access to the necessary channels of authority determines the potential for that speaker to manifest the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of his or her speech. Like Derrida’s, Bourdieu’s revision of Austin and Searle bears particular relevance for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly for the English court itself, a locus in which courtiers employed various kinds of spoken discourse in an ongoing struggle for authority, patronage, and royal favor. Lynn Staley explores this issue, revealing that literary and documentary texts of the late 1300s are engaged in “an actual search for a language of power during the reign of Richard II.”58 Staley articulates a series of rhetorical strategies by which individuals within and around the royal court attempted to maintain (or enhance) their own positions of power: courtiers used a hierarchically coded “language of love” to describe not only romantic but also political relationships, while rivals to Richard’s power (often from the House of Lancaster) struggled to find a language that would circumscribe the king’s royal prerogative while enhancing their own.59 King Richard himself deployed a continentally inflected language of sacral kingship in order “to produce a royal image as magically endowed as that of the French kings,” and he sought an appropriate and “meaningful .  .  . language of princely address” to secure his monarchal authority.60 Paul Strohm and Jenni Nuttall embark on similar projects in their examinations of the fifteenth-century royal court. Like

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Staley, Strohm shows that the manipulation of language and the manipulation of power were, in the Lancastrian court, coterminous and mutually informing acts.61 Nuttall, drawing on both Strohm’s work and the political theory of J. G. A. Pocock, reveals how Lancastrian partisans attempted to use poetry “to reconfigure the linguistic and political environment” of the post-deposition nation, a project that slipped frequently out of their grasp as Lancastrian power waned and waxed during the early 1400s.62 The relationship that these critics identify between the creation of power in the late medieval court and the deployment of successful strategies of discourse suggests that Bourdieu’s link between efficacious utterance and powerful speaker is pertinent to both speech and its literary representations in Ricardian and Lancastrian England. There can finally be little doubt that Bourdieu’s statement, “the power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson,” is relevant to many of the historical and cultural contexts that I will raise during the course of the book.63 Even the sacrament of the Eucharist, arguably the most compelling example of the idea that words effected real and essential change, was important in the Middle Ages not only for the relationship that it proposed between word and world but also for the social, political, and economic power that it both granted to and confirmed for the institutional Church. Similarly, the Lancastrian propaganda that followed in the wake of Richard II’s deposition stands as a testament to the potential efficacy of speech and to the power of Lancastrian affinity in promulgating speech efficaciously. Nonetheless, my own analysis of the speech acts represented in Middle English narrative draws less from Bourdieu and from Derrida than do the recent works I discuss in this chapter. Where I invoke modern speech act theory, I more frequently use the interpretive vocabulary of Searle and Austin than the interventions of their poststructuralist critics. Indeed, despite Derrida’s argument to the contrary, the distinction that Austin and Searle draw between speech acts that shape their world and speech acts that reflect their world’s shape provides a useful interpretive framework for engaging with the literature of the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods. In one respect, however, Derrida’s intervention is central to the heuristic link this study draws between poetic representations of speech and

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the necessarily unreclaimable vocal utterances of the later Middle Ages. The objection might be raised that we do not now—nor can we ever— have access to speech, that the spoken words represented in poetry (as well as the work that authors imagined those words to do) are somehow inauthentic and irrelevant to understanding “actual” speech in the later Middle Ages. Artistic representations of speech, such an argument would suggest, are necessarily pale imitations of “real” speech and can suggest neither the functions that it was understood to perform nor the power it was thought to contain. But this line of reasoning is little more than a variation of Austin’s exclusion of the etiolated, citational language of artistic expression from his theory of performativity. If Derrida’s attacks on Austin and Searle show anything, it is that such citational speech is no more etiolated than any other kind of speech. Rather, poetic speech should be regarded as structurally and functionally analogous to the speech that Chaucer and Gower heard spoken, to the speech that Hoccleve ventriloquizes in his Series, even to the baptismal utterance that the Erkenwaldpoet writes into his poem. Understanding speech in this capacity allows us to engage with representations of speech, be they spoken words recorded in the Rolls of Parliament or speech uttered by a fictional poetic narrator, in much the same way that we might engage with vocalized speech. The potential of one is the same as the potential of the other. The Wheel of Language: Speech in The House of Fame Its suggestive affinities to the calls of Homer’s Sirens notwithstanding, the “grete glauir & [the] glamm of Grekin tongis” that Alexander hears at the edge of the world is also reminiscent of another fourteenth-century English poem, a comic rather than an epic quest that likens the indistinct rumble of human “speche and chidynges” (HF 1028) to the “betynge of the see . . . ayen the roches holowe” (1034–35). Referred to by one critic as “the most bookish of Chaucer’s books,” The House of Fame is an unapologetically perplexing work, an often frustratingly multivalent dream vision that plunges its dreamer/narrator through outlandish glass temples and wicker labyrinths even as it confronts its reader with a bewildering array of self-abnegating images, auctores, and textual references.64 The poem has

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invited interpretation from any number of angles—as a rumination on the vagaries of fame and literary production, an inquiry into the nature of written auctorite, a genre-unraveling assault on the traditional medieval dream vision, and an assertion of the English vernacular as a poetic medium. It is as a primer on medieval theories of sound and speech that I want to discuss it here. At the close of The House of Fame’s first book, the dreamer, Geffrey, is seized by a garrulous, telepathic eagle who whisks him into the air and promises to deliver him to the House of Fame where he will hear “tydynges / Of loves folk” (644–45). As the two travel toward the distant temple, the eagle gives his terrified cargo a lesson in acoustics, explaining (in embarrassingly flatulent terms) that “soun ys noght but eyr ybroken” (765), arising when “the air ys twyst with violence / and rent” (775–76) as by the playing of a pipe or by the plucking of a harp string. “Spech,” too, the eagle tells Geffrey, “is soun . . . / And every speche that ys spoken, / Lowd or pryvee, foul or fair, / In his substance ys but air” (762–68). Like the sounds of the pipe and the harp, the human voice is made manifest by the “violence” that it does to the air. The lesson reaches its climax when the eagle “proves” to Geffrey how “every speche, or noyse, or soun” (783) arrives at the House of Fame through a process of “multiplicacioun” (784): “I preve hyt thus—take hede now— Be experience; for yf that thow Throwe on water now a stoon, Wel wost thou hyt wol make anoon A litel roundell as a sercle, Paraunter brod as a covercle; And ryght anoon thow shalt see wel That whel wol cause another whel, And that the thridde, and so forth, brother, Every sercle causynge other Wydder than hymselve was.” (787–97)65

Despite Chaucer’s decision to put this passage in the beak of an enormous talking eagle—a bird renowned more for its keen eyesight than its aural

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acuity—the process that it describes is not simply a fanciful authorial invention. Rather, the eagle’s discourse on sound and speech, including its central metaphor of the stone dropped into the pool, closely redacts the physics of sound proposed in Boethius’s De Musica: “The same thing happens in sounds that happens when a stone, thrown from above, falls into a puddle or into quiet water. First it causes a wave in a very small circle; then it disperses clusters of waves into larger circles, and so on until the motion, exhausted by the spreading out of waves, dies away.”66 No mere poetic device, Boethius’s concentric rings of sound—which emerge in the House of Fame as wheels of spoken language expanding “from roundel to compas” (798)—constitute the scientific basis of acoustic theory in the Middle Ages. The eagle’s insistence that each spoken “whel wol cause another whel” (794) thus becomes an expression of how speech functions on the most basic, physical level. There is, however, a significant difference between the eagle’s description of speech and the scientific account provided by Boethius. The sixth-century philosopher describes a physics in which sound becomes increasingly attenuated as it travels outward from its source, in which “the latter, wider wave is always diff used by a weaker impulse.”67 Chaucer’s fourteenth-century raptor, however, proposes a physics in which speech “up bereth . . . through multiplicacioun” (818–20), amplifying in effect and force as it pushes away from its source. Indeed, when those concentric rings of air reach the House of Fame they cease to be air at all. Instead, they become physical incarnations of the very speakers who fi rst uttered them: Whan any speche ycomen ys Up to the paleys, anon-ryght Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight Which that the word in erthe spak, Be hyt clothed red or blak; And hath so verray hys lyknesse That speke the word, that thou wilt gesse That it the same body be, Man or woman, he or she. (1074–82)

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Contrary to Boethius, who describes the wheels of sound withering away as they expand from their source, Chaucer describes sound that, at its furthest distance from its origin, manifests itself most robustly. The spoken word that leaves a person’s mouth on the terrestrial plane is reconstituted in the form of its speaker in the House of Fame itself. Those reconstituted utterances, in turn, become active, even creative in their own right: they “stonden” (1214) and “tellen tales” (1198); they “pleyen on an harpe” (1201) and make “lowde mynstralcies” (1217); they “doon her ententes / To make . . . ymages” (1267–69). In the terms of Austin and Searle, the perlocutionary force of the speech acts described by the eagle is the embodiment of their own speakers, the reconstitution of their origins and the reification of their generative potential. In terms more historically consonant with the Middle Ages, the relationship Chaucer proposes between speech and incarnation recalls the Gospel of John: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”—a perlocutionary act sui generis.68 Whether philosophically or scripturally, Chaucer (through his narrative proxy Geffrey) clearly imagines a paradigm of speech in the House of Fame in which the spoken word, efficacious and powerful, not only re-presents the world but re-creates it. Within the poem’s Labyrinth of Rumor—a “Domus Dedaly .  .  . ful of rounynges and of jangles” (1920, 1960)—the physics of speech that the eagle describes on the way to the Temple of Fame are reenacted on the level of spoken narrative, on the level of gossip and rumor and story. Within the whirling maze, utterances that have taken the forms of their speakers tell their tales (do they tell themselves?) to other embodied utterances. Those utterances in turn change and enlarge the tales they have heard, passing them to still more embodied utterances, circulating those tales throughout the shuddering building until, like the rings in the pool of water, they reach the edge of their wicker cage. When oon had herd a thing, ywis, He com forth ryght to another wight, And gan him tellen anon-ryght The same that to him was told, Or hyt a forlong way was old,

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But gan somewhat for to eche To this tydynge in this speeche More than it ever was . . . And evermo with more encres Than yt was erst. (2060–68, 2074–75)

As with the circles of sound described by the eagle, the process of narrative within the labyrinth is itself a process of “encres” and amplification, a process through which voices perpetually reproduce themselves, beget their own duplicates, and even create new hybrid narratives of “fals and soth compounded” (2108). The embodied speech acts here are exposed as not only reflections of their speakers but also as active, generative agents. They are walking, talking performatives—spoken words that, in the most literal sense, work creatively and demonstrably on the world around them. What the eagle’s account of the motion of sound toward the House of Fame demonstrates—both in the capacity of the human voice to break and rend the air with violence as well as in the more fanciful notion that speech “wexeth lyk the same wight” who spoke it on earth—and what the chattering voices in the Domus Dedaly suggest for narrative is the idea that the spoken word does powerful work. Speech not only repeats and reflects the world in a mimetic fashion, it amplifies the world, changes the world, and sometimes, as the half-truths slipping out of their wicker cage imply, creates new worlds and realities to coexist (or possibly to supplant) older ones. While I do not want to suggest that Chaucer intended for his fantastic dream vision to be taken literally, I do propose that the vision of speech that he develops in The House of Fame arises from a broad perception in the Middle Ages that the spoken word was uniquely powerful, that speech both represented and created in equal measure. The concentric wheels of language that Chaucer’s eagle describes become an apt metaphor for the kind of speech that this study investigates within late medieval poetry, speech whose power lies not only in its ability to travel and to communicate but also in its ability to “twyst” and to “break,” to affect, effect, and engender. It is wholly appropriate that Chaucer provide a guiding example for this investigation of late medieval representations of speech. Certainly

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Chaucer is not alone in regarding the spoken word as an efficacious, performative medium; as this study will show, the Erkenwald-poet, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and others similarly recognize speech as containing a potential that transcends the constative and the communicative. But as his body of work shows, Chaucer is intensely aware of the preeminence of speech both as a representative medium and as a performative one, a poet of efficacious speech par excellence. The power of the spoken word is an issue that Chaucer deals with across his poetic oeuvre, from the self-generating speech of The House of Fame, to the oaths made and broken in Troilus and Criseyde, to the dialectical birdsong that pervades The Parliament of Fowls, and even to the bitter curse, “thou most have the scalle” (Adam 3), that he issues to his hapless scribe, Adam. But it is, of course, The Canterbury Tales that seals Chaucer’s reputation as a poet of speech, as a writer who understands and capitalizes on the idea that individuals both make the words they speak and are made by them. Marshall Leicester writes that The Canterbury Tales “concentrate not on the way preexisting persons create language but on the way language creates people. They detail how a fictional teller’s text impersonates him or her by creating a personality, that is, a textual subject that acts like, rather than is, a person.”69 Thus, just as the expanding wheels of language in The House of Fame give form to “shipmen and pilgrimes, . . . pardoners, / Currours, and eke messagers” (2122–28), so too do the utterances of The Canterbury Tales’s Shipman, Pardoner, Canon’s Yeoman, Wife of Bath, and Manciple—as ventriloquized through Chaucer’s pilgrim narrator—create the Canterbury pilgrims themselves and the world they inhabit. In this respect, the “congregacioun of folk” (HF 2034) in The House of Fame’s Domus Dedaly becomes the poetic forerunner of the “sondry folk” that wend from Southwark to Canterbury. The creative speech of Chacuer’s early, unfinished dream vision adumbrates the generative words of the poet’s final, unfinished collection of narratives. And it is to the final poetic tale of that collection that we now turn, from the talking eagle of The House of Fame to the talking crow of “The Manciple’s Tale.”

Nominalism, Speech, and Power in “The Manciple’s Tale”

I

n the opening lines of his short, brutal tale, Chaucer’s Manciple draws a telling comparison between Phoebus, “lusty bachiler” (IX 107) and god of poetry, and Amphion, mythical founder of Thebes. Phoebus could syngen that it was a melodie To heeren of his cleere voys the soun. Certes the kyng of Thebes, Amphioun, That with his syngyng walled that citee, Koude nevere syngen half so wel as hee. (IX 114–18)

Ostensibly made to highlight the beauty of Phoebus’s “cleere voys” (IX 115), the Manciple’s comparison is important not only for what it includes but also for what it neglects to mention, namely that in most iterations of the Theban myth, Amphion builds the walls of Thebes with his lyre as well as his voice. The tradition that Amphion built the walls of Thebes by playing his lyre was readily available to Chaucer and his contemporaries and was one that the poet knew well. A number of Chaucer’s sources, including Boccaccio’s Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia, call attention to the power of Amphion’s “skillfully played lyre,” and Chaucer himself alludes to Amphion’s prowess as a harpist in “The Merchant’s Tale,” when he describes “instrumentz of swich soun / That Orpheus, ne of Thebes Amphioun, / Ne maden nevere swich a melodye” (IV 1715–17).1 Several critics have rightly suggested that the description of Amphion’s singing alerts Chaucer’s readers to the general importance of “speech, poetry, and song” in “The Manciple’s Tale”; however, such a reading does not account for the

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conspicuous absence of Amphion’s lyre in the pilgrim’s description.2 I propose that the Manciple’s invocation of Amphion walling Thebes with only his voice suggests the potential of the spoken word—and the spoken word alone—to perform work, to effect change within the physical world rather than simply to reflect and represent it. Insofar as it causes the stones of Thebes to form themselves into strong city walls, Amphion’s song represents speech at its most performative: clearly, the words that the king of Thebes sings aloud are coterminous with, as J. L. Austin writes, “the doing of an action.”3 Integrated into “The Manciple’s Tale” itself, the performative efficacy of Amphion’s song is only a preamble to the Manciple’s thorough anatomization of speech acts, both efficacious and inert. Like the House of Fame, “The Manciple’s Tale” is self-evidently invested in the functions of spoken language. A wry recasting of Ovid’s story of “Apollo and the Crow,” the tale centers on Phoebus and a snow-white crow that he has taught to “countrefete the speche of every man” (IX 134). After witnessing Phoebus’s wife and her lover as they “wroghten al hir lust volage” (IX 239), the crow exposes the wife’s adultery to Phoebus, first in bird speech and then using the very human speech that Phoebus has taught him. The situation ends tragically for all involved, particularly for Phoebus’s wife, who is murdered by the furious god before she can utter a word in her defense. For his part, Phoebus repents of his violence, but too late. He breaks his bow in grief, destroys “his mynstralcie,” and—in an act of either wishful thinking or utter self-delusion—proclaims his wife to be “ful giltelees” (IX 277) of her adultery. The crow, too, falls victim to Phoebus’s final orgy of destruction. Pronouncing the report of adultery a “fals tale” (IX 293), Phoebus plucks out the bird’s snowy feathers. He then declares that the crow and all his descendants will be black and, in a final insult, strips him of the ability to speak. Introduced by a prologue in which Chaucer’s drunken Cook loses his own ability to speak, punctuated by the Manciple’s sardonic observations on the relationship between the “word” and the “dede” (IX 208), and concluded by a paradoxically verbose call to silence, “The Manciple’s Tale” offers a de facto exploration of the potentia of spoken language, an interrogation into the range of work that a verbal utterance might perform. And

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that work, as the Manciple seems keen to demonstrate, is as dangerous as it is significant. The spoken word can build a city, can expose a betrayal, can turn a white crow black, can enrage a god. The spoken word can lead to murder. For Chaucer—and certainly for his proxy the Manciple—speech transcends the constative to become performative, to become an engine of both creation and destruction.4 While Austin and his followers may provide an effective vocabulary for discussing speech in Chaucer’s work, they were hardly the first to consider the fraught relationship between words and things. The fourteenth century was witness to a seismic shift in philosophical inquiry, precipitated in part by the teachings of nominalist philosopher William of Ockham, that complicated late medieval understandings of that very relationship. At the heart of this philosophical shift was Ockham’s argument that “a universal is not something real that exists in a subject . . . [but] has a being only as a thought-object in the mind,” a doctrine at odds with dominant strains of medieval realism—exemplified by the writings of Augustine, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas—which held that universals existed outside the mind as the essential basis for all individual things.5 Ockham’s rejection of universals and attendant emphasis on the ontological primacy of the individual had important consequences for at least two strains of late medieval thought, the theological and the linguistic. Theologically, Ockham’s philosophy called for a revised understanding of the exact nature of God’s power and his relationship with mankind. Ockham reasoned that because the will of God was not fettered by a system of absolute universals, his ordained power (potentia ordinata) was superseded by a still more robust and erratic absolute power (potentia absoluta). Linguistically, Ockham’s intervention also demanded a reappraisal of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, because the signified itself could no longer be understood as being predicated on a larger, transcendent universal. Chaucer’s views on Ockham’s philosophy are, as the self-contradictory critical record shows, notoriously difficult to discern. It is impossible to say with certainty if (or to what degree) Chaucer himself had nominalist leanings. What is certain, however, is that Ockham’s writings profoundly influenced many of the leading philosophical and intellectual figures of the fourteenth century, including Robert Holcot, John Wyclif, and Ralph

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Strode (likely the “philosophical Strode” [TC 5.1857] to whom Chaucer dedicated his Troilus and Criseyde). We can reasonably assume, therefore, that Chaucer knew of and engaged with the difficult questions raised by nominalism.6 I intend to show that “The Manciple’s Tale”—a poem often overlooked in discussions of Chaucer and nominalism—stands as the apogee of this engagement. The aspects of performativity that mark Phoebus’s speech, as well as the linguistic and ontological systems that Chaucer develops in his version of Ovid’s story, are themselves logical extensions of the philosophy propounded by Ockham. “The Manciple’s Tale” is certainly not alone in demonstrating Chaucer’s engagement with the realistnominalist debate, nor does it offer the last word on the poet’s opinion on it. Rather, what the tale provides, with its array of alternately efficacious and inert speech acts, is an entrée into the philosophical cross currents of Chaucer’s wider body of work, a vantage from which we can see how Chaucer’s poetry—and Chaucer himself—engaged with one of the central philosophical debates of the later English Middle Ages. Ockham, Chaucer, and the Via Antiqua Ockham’s intervention in medieval philosophy is significant in what it proposed and also in what it threatened to overturn, the synthesis of patristic writings, Neoplatonic thought, and Aristotelianism commonly known as the via antiqua. The metaphysics of this school of thought were anchored in the existence of universals, transcendent and exemplary “forms” from which all individual things were thought to derive.7 The reality of universals, as well their hierarchical relationship to subordinate individual forms, made up the core of what is now known as scholastic realism or, more simply, realism. In the words of Augustine of Hippo, we can call the ideas either “forms” (formae), or “species” (species) . . . for in fact the ideas are certain original and principal forms of things, i.e., reasons, fi xed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine Intelligence. And though they themselves neither come into being nor pass away, nevertheless, everything which can come into

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being and pass away and everything which does come into being and pass away is said to be formed in accord with these ideas.8

The Platonism implicit in such thinking is clear: Augustine posited the existence of a stratum of perfect and unattainable ideals, divine models that existed beyond the senses but on which all known individual things were necessarily based. To know something, Augustine reasoned, was to know the universal, not the individuals derived from it. And since these universals were beyond the sensory apprehension of humans, such knowledge was ultimately gained through a process akin to divine illumination, when the “inner and intelligible . . . eye” was “imbued in some way and illuminated by [God] with light.”9 In such an ontology, knowledge comes from God. He illuminates the universal, which in turn allows for human understanding of the individual. The ontological system articulated by Augustine was collocated with an analogous epistemology of language, one in which the sign and the signified existed in the same relative hierarchy as the individual and the universal: the sign was always predicated on the signified. Within this hierarchy, the function of speech was, quite simply, to signify—to state and to communicate the knowledge granted by God’s illumination. “Things signified are of greater importance than their signs,” Augustine proposed, and “knowledge is superior to the sign simply because it is the end toward which the latter is the means.”10 Thus, the spoken word is dependent on the thing that it describes in much the same way that the individual is dependent on the universal, gathering its validity and its relative truthstatus from its relationship to a stable and unchanging referent. The subordination of the “word” to the “werkyng” (CT IX 210), for Augustine, recapitulates the subordination of the individual form to the unchanging and transcendent universal. A century after Augustine, Boethius’s translations of Aristotle precipitated a similar (though not identical) theory of universals and a similar linguistic epistemology, one that would eventually be espoused by later thinkers, most influentially Aquinas. Central to Boethius’s approach was the idea that “spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds,” a formulation originally

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propounded in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione that posited the existence of mental, spoken, and written signs.11 Boethius maintained that mental signs (also called conceptual signs) bore a natural and intrinsic relationship to the things they signified. Spoken language, by contrast, consisted of a system of conventional signs that correlated with these stable mental signs. Speech, in other words, was a man-made and derivative construct, subordinated first to natural mental signs and then to their transcendent universals.12 The written word, itself related by convention to speech, held a tertiary position in Boethius’s linguistic hierarchy—a conventional sign of a conventional sign (spoken) of a natural sign (mental), all descending from a transcendent universal. Boethius’s tripartite hierarchy accorded with the crucial Augustinian notion that universals both existed and formed the ontological basis for human knowledge. More important, it reinforced the hierarchical relationships between sign and signified implicit in Augustine’s discussion of speech and language. But the frameworks proposed by Augustine and Boethius did not mesh perfectly, and questions arose at their points of disjuncture: was a spoken word a sign of the universal essence or was it the signifier for the individual derivation of the signified? Was language itself, as many Aristotelian thinkers proposed, important to the human ability to apprehend universal knowledge, or could such knowledge only be obtained by the illumination of God? Did spoken signs hold a natural relationship to the things they signified or a conventional one (a position advocated by neither Boethius nor Augustine but articulated in Plato’s Cratylus)?13 Later thinkers struggled to align the Augustinian and Boethian frameworks. Chief among them, Aquinas rejected Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination in favor of knowledge gained through sense experience and empirical observation, further articulating that “words relate to the meaning of things signified through the medium of the intellectual conception.”14 Such an assertion maintained Augustine’s orderly relationship between utterance and signified but suggested, with Boethius, that language itself played a pivotal role in promoting and organizing knowledge. What is critical, however, is that even as they corrected the “small misfits” between Augustine’s Platonism and Boethius’s Aristotleianism, realists like Aquinas never denied the real existence of

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universals.15 For them, “the intelligible species is that which is understood secondarily; but that which is primarily understood is the object, of which the species is the likeness.”16 The knowledge of the derivative individual (Aquinas’s “species”) was always subordinated to knowledge of the universal (“the object”). Geoffrey Chaucer entered into this linguistic and ontological framework not as a philosopher or as theologian but as a civil servant and poet writing at the end of the fourteenth century. Comparatively few critics have proposed outright that Chaucer’s work actively evinces a realist philosophy. Because the realism of the via antiqua was, broadly speaking, the prevailing philosophical stance in the fourteenth century, however, most have silently, even unconsciously, accepted the poet as a realist without explicitly defending that assumption. That is certainly not to say that there have been no critical agruments for Chaucer’s realism. To the contrary, one reader suggests, for example, that the portraits in the General Prologue function as universal exemplars by which Chaucer measures the individual Canterbury pilgrims, a critical position that effectively reads The Canterbuty Tales as, on one level, an extended realist allegory.17 Robert Myles is more strident in his assertion of Chaucer’s realism, stating flatly, “Chaucer’s works reveal a foundational . . . and linguistic realist,” for whom “signs, including . . . language in particular, are, to some degree, a reliable means of knowing [an] extramental reality.”18 The unwavering certainty that Myles ascribes to the poet’s philosophical position makes it tempting to counter with a postmodern Chaucer (or as Myles sneeringly puts it, a “schizophrenic” Chaucer), an author whose very hallmark is the willful inconsistency of his narrative voice. At a minimum, we should acknowledge what the vast majority of critics since E. Talbot Donaldson have recognized and what Myles seems to overlook: that by cloaking himself in personae and alternately donning the masks of satirist, translator, and courtly apologist, Chaucer makes it extremely difficult for his readers to separate the “real Chaucer” from the many pseudoChaucers projected by his works. Or, to put such an argument into terms that resonate with realism itself, Chaucer’s narrative machinery makes it difficult to distinguish the universal Chaucer from which spring so many individual Chaucers. Even without access to a “universal Chaucer”

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however, elements of realism do percolate through The Canterbury Tales. “The Knight’s Tale,” for example, extols an essentially realist philosophy, expressed most eloquently in Theseus’s Boethian “Firste Movere” speech: “Wel may men knowe, but it be a fool, That every part dirryveth from his hool, For nature hat nat taken his bigynnyng Of no partie or cantel of a thyng, But of a thyng that parfit is and stable.” (I 3005–9)19

Here, Chaucer redacts a realist paradigm in which individual parts “dirryveth from his hool,” and in which the whole in turn has “his bigynnyng” in a “thyng that parfit is and stable.” Such an ontology receives a more overtly Aristotelian treatment in “The Tale of Melibee,” in which Melibee’s own knowledge of the transcendent universals ordained by God is attained not through the sudden illumination of the “Firste Mover” but by means of a rigorous scholastic dialectic with his wife, Prudence. Evidence of realism also surfaces in the linguistic hierarchy that Chaucer develops in The Canterbury Tales, a hierarchy thrown into particularly sharp relief by the fates of those who attempt to violate it. In several of the Tales, individual characters either fail to abide by or refuse to recognize the coherences between spoken sign, mental sign, and universal that defines realism—a failure for which they are invariably punished. David Williams sees just such evidence of Chaucer’s realism in “The Friar’s Tale,” reasoning that the failure of the Friar’s summoner to perceive the universal intent behind an individual curse (and his subsequent damnation for that failure) reveals “a world in which the signified escapes false signs and reasserts an ontology of realism.”20 The dangers of a world in which “signs have no necessary relation to their signified” are equally present to the Pardoner’s “riotoures thre” (VI 661), who seek out the “privee theef men clepeth Deeth” (VI 675) in order to slay him.21 Like the Friar’s misguided summoner, the three “riotoures” fail to recognize that the death they seek is not an individual called Death but an immutable universal. Their failure—or unwillingness—to apprehend the connection between a single speech act (the word “death” uttered

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in the tavern) and the universal transcendent concept that it necessarily signifies ultimately leads the three men to murder one another, literally leads them to death. Finally, we might consider the fate of the Apius, the corrupt judge of “The Physician’s Tale,” who attempts to subvert a realist linguistic hierarchy by verbally declaring Virginia to be not Virginius’s daughter but Claudius’s servant. By attempting to predicate the mental sign of Virginia’s identity upon his own speech act rather than vice versa, Apius threatens to upend the relationship between speech and mental sign, even to trouble the relationship between spoken language and the transcendent universal upon which it is constituted. Virginia’s very name, after all, not only links her to the universal concept of virginity but reinforces her intrinsic relationship to her father, Virginius. Ultimately, Apius’s transgression leads to Virginia’s death, Claudius’s exile, and Apius’s own suicide, placing “The Physician’s Tale” among Chaucer’s bloodiest offerings. In fact, the only character to emerge unscathed from this tale is Virginius himself, a figure whose faith in an inflexible universal order is apparently so profound that he beheads his own daughter rather than submit to Apius’s attack on the linguistic and hierarchical tenets of realism.

• If the philosophy articulated by William of Ockham constituted a radical break from the realist philosophy of the via antiqua, it nonetheless shared with that older philosophy an acknowledgement of the distinctions among mental, spoken, and written signs articulated by Boethius. Like most of his contemporaries, Ockham maintained that speech held a secondary relationship to the mental sign and, moreover, that it signified mental signs by conventional correspondence. Ockham also accepted that mental signs—what Boethius would call “impressions of the soul”— signified the concepts upon which they were predicated naturally rather than conventionally: “[mental signs] reside in the intellect alone and are incapable of being uttered aloud, although the spoken words which are subordinated to them as signs are uttered aloud.”22 Where Ockham diverged sharply from his contemporaries was on the question of what mental signs were based on. Realists insisted that mental

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signs were natural signifiers of universals, divine forms upon which all individual things were based. By contrast, Ockham argued “that every universal is one particular thing and that it is not a universal except in its signification, in its signifying many things.”23 In other words, the mental sign did not signify a divine, inviolate signified. Rather, according to Ockham, the mental sign signified yet another kind of individual sign, an “object of thought” that only seemed to be a universal. By this logic, Ockham effectively conflated the universal and the individual. The former, he reasoned, was another iteration of the latter, a sign rather than a thing signified. Ockham also concluded that what realists called universals existed in name only and bore no reality outside of the mind, a position that struck at the heart of the realist ontology. No universal is a substance regardless of how it is considered. On the contrary, every universal is an intention of the mind which, on the most probable account, is identical with the act of understanding. Thus, it is said that the act of understanding by which I grasp [the concept] men is a natural sign of men in the same way that weeping is a natural sign of grief. It is a natural sign such that it can stand for men in the same way that a spoken word can stand for things in spoken propositions.24

In effect, Ockham demoted the universal from a transcendent signified to an individual cognitive construct coterminous with the mental sign, a construct that was itself derived from human experience and observation. The so-called universal was just “an intention of the mind” based on individual forms outside of itself. It was not, as the realists held, the exclusive basis for the individual. As Ockham finally concluded, “no [individual] substance is ever predicated of anything.”25 Universals, those inviolate and eternal predicates of all individual things, simply did not—and could not—exist. Although a full survey of the implications of Ockham’s nominalism is outside the scope of this book, two issues arising from the philosopher’s rejection of universals become particularly important to Chaucer’s work and warrant further discussion here. The first is the effect of that rejection on medieval understandings of the relationship between epistemology and

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speech. Ockham concurred with his realist contemporaries that speech signified mental signs by conventional correspondence much as written words signified spoken utterances: “spoken words are used to signify the very things that are signified by concepts of the mind.”26 But, whereas realism held that mental signs were linked to transcendent universals, Ockham argued that those universals were themselves yet another “intention of the mind,” analogous to rather than generative of mental signs. For Ockham, the knowledge derived from mental signs—and by extension the spoken expression of those mental signs—was as variable as the individual forms that those mental signs portended to signify. To know something was not tantamount to understanding the transcendent universal behind it but merely to understanding a particular mental sign. Speech itself, therefore, did not correspond to a mental sign anchored inexorably to an immutable signified but to one attached solely to other signs, including other spoken utterances. In this way, Ockham detached knowledge and speech from a stable cohort of universals and made them radically contingent upon the mental processes of individual thinkers. Such a shift goes well beyond the assertion, made by many who discuss Chaucer’s relationship to nominalism, that Ockham’s linguistic philosophy simply overturned the argument that language bore a natural, rather than a conventional, relationship to the things that it signified, a position known as cratylic realism.27 In fact, like the vast majority of realists, including Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, Ockham rejected cratylic realism. Ockham’s intervention was not an assertion that speech signified mental signs by convention but rather that mental signs themselves were disconnected from a transcendent universal signified, a position that meant that knowledge was “not the result of generation, but of abstraction, which [was] only a kind of mental picturing.”28 Predicated on the inherent vagaries of individual “intentions of the mind,” the mental sign was based only on the individual creating it, a flimsy basis compared with the realists’ immutable universals. Speech was similarly destabilized. As one critic has pointed out, under the paradigms proposed by Ockham, “words could no longer be assumed to fit the shape of reality because of their origin in a real world of ideas beyond the mind. Language [was] no longer a shadow pattern of the real,

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but [had] become a skewed grid that may not fit the scheme of reality.”29 Within the strictures of Ockham’s epistemological model, what a person thought he knew of reality, he did know of reality. More radically, because mental signs were based not on universals but rather on other signs, including signs of speech, spoken words could fundamentally change that knowledge of reality. They could, for the individual thinker, even alter reality itself. At the extreme limit of Ockham’s nominalism, then, we see the ontological potential for performative speech, for speech that causes the world to fit the word. The same rejection of the universal that necessitated a shift in thinking about language and epistemology also had significant ramifications for nominalist understandings of God, a point underscored most emphatically by Ockham’s emphasis on God’s absolute and unmediated power— God’s potentia absoluta. Following the theological distinction popularized by Albert the Great and reinforced by Duns Scotus, Ockham held that God’s power, though essentially singular in nature, was of two species— potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta.30 Potentia dei ordinata, God’s ordered power, referred to the power that God had to act without directly contradicting his own precepts, or, as Ockham put it, to act “according to the laws that are ordered and instituted by God.”31 Potentia dei absoluta, in contrast, referred to the absolute power of God to act outside of, and even in contradiction of, his own laws. In Ockham’s nominalist ontology, God became the only real measure of such ideals as truth, right, and good— ineffable concepts that realists held to be derived from transcendent universals. By extension, physical laws, too, were dependent solely on the will and power of God. Without universals to govern his laws, God’s potentia ordinata was effectively collapsed into his potentia absoluta. There was no space between the expression of God’s will within his laws and the expression of God’s will without them: everything turned upon a deity ungoverned and unconstrained by natural, universal constraints.32 Ockham’s insistence on God’s absolute power has become a locus of Chaucerian criticism. In one of the first significant studies of Chaucer and nominalism, Robert Stepsis writes that Walter in Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale” should be understood not as “a human being, but as God, a God whose only recognizable trait is the absolute, unbounded freedom of His will.”

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Griselda, in turn, should be read as “an emblem of the patient human soul in its ideal response to the adversities visited on it by God.”33 Such a reading recasts the disturbingly sadistic “Clerk’s Tale” as an Ockhamist allegory of the inviolable and unconditional nature of potentia dei absoluta—“the freedom of the divine will and the absoluteness of God’s power.”34 But while Ockham’s concept of God’s potentia absoluta can clearly be a factor in Chaucer’s approach to nominalism, potentia absoluta is secondary to Ockham’s outright rejection of the universal and to the linguistic and epistemological differences that stem from it. Analyses like Stepsis’s that place God’s potentia absoluta at the very center of the nominalist intervention and ignore questions of language and epistemology tend to marginalize what, in my opinion, are the most fundamental aspects of Ockham’s philosophy for Chaucer. A separate and, I would argue, more fruitful line of critical inquiry has developed around those very epistemological and linguistic aspects of the nominalist intervention, aspects that assert themselves strongly in what Russell Peck calls Chaucer’s “literary world . . . filled with glossers and verbal manipulators who trick others and themselves with semantic disjunctions.” Peck writes that in Chaucer’s work, “nominalistic thought makes one aware of the limitations of human perception and the likelihood of one’s being prisoner to his own ideas.”35 This observation resonates with the core proposition of Ockham’s philosophy: those things that are held to be transcendent universals are, in fact, “mentally fashioned and abstracted from singular things previously known.”36 Similarly, Holly Boucher has suggested that Chaucer writes in full consciousness that “concepts and the words that expressed them had become relative” and that “the firm bonds between signifier and signified . . . had unraveled.” In the face of such nominalist notions, Boucher concludes, Chaucer had to concern himself with “the new power of words to create autonomous worlds.”37 Boucher’s discussion of “words” and “worlds” provides a felicitous, if anachronistic, conjunction with the work of John Searle, particularly Searle’s observation that a performative utterance differs from a constative utterance in the direction of fit between the word and the world.38 The connection between Ockham’s nominalism and the performative speech act, an utterance in which words create the world they describe, is not simply a suggestive conflation of similar ideas. Rather, it is fundamental to the full

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implications of nominalism and its resonances in Chaucer’s poetic output. Indeed, the performative efficacy of speech is implicit in the very linguistic and epistemological structures on which nominalism rests. By predicating knowledge on unverifiable and individual acts of “mental language” rather than on a set of stable and transcendent universals, Ockham lays the groundwork for an ontology in which to think something is to know it, in which to know something is not necessarily to know it as others do, and in which to speak of something can make it real. Within this radically disjointed ontology, the individual speech act becomes exceedingly powerful. Persuasive speech becomes performative speech; to have one’s mind changed by another’s words is to have those words alter the very fabric of reality. In the proper circumstances, spoken words have the potential to create discrete individual realities for separate characters—realities that readers may deem false, but that are nonetheless valid by the standards of Ockham’s nominalist philosophy. The Canterbury Tales provides no shortage of situations in which characters use spoken words to make individual realities out of otherwise objective falsehoods. In “The Miller’s Tale,” Nicholas’s description of “a reyn, and that so wilde and wood / That half so greet was nevere Noes flood” (I 3517–18) makes the coming of the second flood a reality for the carpenter John, and eventually, the single word “water” is enough to bring that same reality (quite literally) crashing down around John’s head. More darkly, a priest in “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” is convinced that base metals can be transformed into gold by the speech of an unscrupulous canon, a belief so real to him that he spends the exorbitant sum of forty pounds for the fraudulent secret. The Canterbury Tales offers countless other examples in which words perform work more generally: Chauntecleer is first trapped by the fox’s flattering words and then extricates himself by putting words into the fox’s mouth; a friar is bound by verbal contract to divide a fart evenly twelve ways; a loathly lady provides a rapist knight with the words that will both save him from death and bind him to her; Dorigen traps herself into a liaison with Aurelius through her rashly pledged troth. And finally, as a series of stories told by individual tale-tellers, the entire Canterbury project takes on the mantle of performative speech. The “reality” of the tales, after all, is solely a linguistic one. The words written on the

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page—the words spoken by the pilgrims—causally precede the reality that they create. Who is Dorigen, for example, but the creation of a particular Franklin, and who is that Franklin but the (re)creation of the pilgrim narrator, himself the creation of Chaucer? The repeated layering of author and authored, the very hallmark of The Canterbury Tales itself, becomes both an exercise in performativity and an exploration of the principles of nominalist thought, an experiment in using words to create and recreate the divergent, individual worlds of the poem’s many speakers. Cousin to the Working: The Manciple and Nominalism The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov is reputed to have said, “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” Anachronistic though it may be, the aphorism is suggestive for the structure of “The Manciple’s Tale,” and it provides a useful framework for analyzing Chaucer’s investigation of the questions raised by Ockham’s nominalism. The allusion to Amphion’s voice in the first few lines of “The Manciple’s Tale” is one of a number of passages that, as Chekhov might say, hang the gun of language on Phoebus’s wall. It is an allusion that implies the potential—even the inevitability—of speech to function performatively without demonstrating or enacting that function. The allusion to Amphion is not alone in this respect. “The Manciple’s Tale” is replete with passages suggesting the range of work that speech can perform, the kind of bullets that can be fired from the Manciple’s linguistic gun. The Manciple’s digression on the futility of restraining those things “that nature / Hath natureelly set in a creature” (IX 161–62) is another such passage, and the potential it proposes for speech is markedly different from the Manciple’s earlier allusion to the efficacy of the spoken word. Taak any bryd, and put it in a cage, And do al thyn entente and thy corage To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke Of alle deyntees that thou kanst bithynke, And keep it al so clenly as thou may, Although his cage of gold be never so gay,

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Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand foold Levere in a forest that is rude and coold Goon ete wormes and swich wrecchednesse. For evere this brid wol doon his bisynesse To escape out of his cage, yif he may. His libertee this brid desireth ay. (IX 163–74)

The source for the aside is likely Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, though similar passages also appear in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius and “The Squire’s Tale.” The Manciple amplifies these sources in his own tale to insist that “nature” is paramount in determining the caged bird’s actions, a subtle affirmation of the ontological underpinnings of realism. In his discussion of nature’s primacy over the seemingly impotent ministrations of human beings, the Manciple tacitly acknowledges that the bird is predicated on a transcendent universal, an exemplary and immutable ur-bird that governs the “lust” and “appetit” (IX 181, 182) of the individual. Derived from this stable universal, the nature of the individual bird cannot be altered by such petty contrivances as “mete and drynke” and “cage of gold” (IX 165, 168). The Manciple does not explicitly mention language in this passage, nor does he discuss speech in particular. Nonetheless, the realist ontology he presents is closely linked to the range of possibilities that his tale develops for the spoken word, a link that the Manciple makes explicit by aligning his caged bird with Phoebus’s crow. Like the hypothetical bird, Phoebus’s talking crow—whose propensity for eating “wormes and swich wrrcchednesse” (IX 171) can be extrapolated from Chaucer’s identification of crow as “worm-foul” in the Parliament of Fowls—“heng ay in a cage” (IX 240).39 So too, when Phoebus slings him out the door and unto the devil, does the crow gain the freedom that even the most pampered caged bird naturally desires. But rather than being “fostred” with “mete and drynke” like the hypothetical bird, Phoebus’s crow is fostered with speech: Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe Which in a cage he fostred many a day, and taughte it speken, as men teche a jay. (IX 130–32)

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The linguistic and structural parallels that the Manciple draws between his bird and Phoebus’s crow imply analogous parallels between the bird’s “mete and drynke” and the human speech that Phoebus feeds his crow. Thus, when the Manciple emphasizes the subordination of the meat and drink to the things nature has put in the bird (“Lo, heere hath lust his dominacioun” [IX 181]), he implies the concomitant subordination of speech. Like the cage of gold and the dainties offered the bird, the spoken language with which the crow is nurtured is finally ineffective in the face of its universally derived lusts. Speech becomes one of the tools by which one might foolishly try and “destreyne a thyng which that nature / Hath naturelly set in a creature” (IX 161–62). At best, it can only function as a secondary representation of a universal signified. At worst, it becomes a vehicle for mendacity and deception, a false signifier that attempts (but fails) to obscure what is predicated on nature. Inert and ineffective, the speech implied by the Manciple’s discussion of the bird is a far cry from Amphion’s performative, city-building utterances. Indeed, as speech that cannot effect real change in the world—that cannot, to borrow Searle’s vocabulary, cause the world to fit the word—it can function only as a constative utterance. In terms more historically appropriate to the late Middle Ages, the Manciple invokes a model of speech that accords with the linguistic hierarchy of realism: the spoken utterance is locked into a subordinate position beneath a stable, guiding universal. Speech cannot change the bird because both the bird and the word are governed by nature. Without stretching this link between realism and the Manciple’s aside too far, I also want to suggest that the “thyng[s] which that nature / Hath natureelly set in a creature” (IX 161–62) function in the Manciple’s ontology as de facto mental signs, as the natural signifiers of transcendent, universal constructs. Those things put into the bird by “nature” assume a hierarchical position analogous to that of the mental sign. Like Boethius’s “affections in the soul,” they are derived from “nature” through a process of natural correspondence. If the Manciple implies the tripartite realist hierarchy of universal / mental sign / spoken word in his digression on the caged bird, he invokes it explicitly in his analysis of the “lady” and the “lemman,” a digression that he prefaces with a dictum from Plato’s Timeaus:

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The word moot nede accorde with the dede. If men shal telle proprely a thyng, The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng.40

The relationship between word and deed articulated in this brief passage aligns neatly with the ontological distinctions that the Manciple developed earlier and shifts them firmly into the realm of the linguistic: the word is subordinate here to the deed; it is not the parent but the cousin to the working. The word, in other words, is contingent. The “deed” or the “werkyng” are signified, and the word is their sign. From this Boethian-Platonist beginning, the Manciple articulates his most explicit case for a realist linguistic hierarchy, one in which the spoken word signifies the mental sign and the mental sign in turn signifies the overarching universal: Ther nys no difference, trewely, Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degree, If of hir body dishonest she bee, And a povre wenche, other than this– If it so be they werke bothe amys– But that the gentile, in estaat above, She shall be cleped his lady, as in love; And for that oother is a povre womman, She shal be cleped his wenche or his lemman. (IX 212–20)

The rigidly hierarchical descent from universal to mental sign to spoken word implicit in the realist ontology seems clear in the Manciple’s digression. By insisting that there is no difference between the two adulterous women except for their difference in status, the Manciple allows for those relative social strata to stand in for universals, inviolate forms that define the individual iterations descending from them. From those universals derive two mental signs, “thought-objects” or “affections in the soul” that naturally signify the universal and that, like their universal signifieds, have no existence in language. The mental signs in turn act as predicates for spoken signs; the two adulterous women can be appropriately called either “lemman” or “lady,” terms that signify their mental signs through

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conventional correspondence, through cultural or social consensus.41 What makes this hierarchy function is that each successive step descends logically from the fi xed step before it, moving always back to a stable universal. Because one woman is “povre” she is called a “lemman”; because the second woman is “gentile” she is called a “lady.” But how stable are those universals? Certainly, the Manciple constructs his careful hierarchy of signs and signifieds on what appears to be firm realist ground, but within that hierarchy, his initial assertion that “ther nys no difference” (IX 212) between the two women resonates with unusual force, undercutting the very realism it purports to sustain.42 Indeed, the proposition that the two adulterous women are essentially identical is dangerous to the realist ontology the Manciple develops precisely because it suggests that “gentile” and “povre”—the universals from which the spoken signs “lady” and “lemman” are derived—may not really be universals at all, that they are not “at once distinct from the individual itself and from other universals.”43 The equivalence of the two women displaces what initially appear to be universals and shows them to be not inviolable signifieds but simply a different order of mental signs, themselves based on other signifieds. The key to this slippage lies in the nature of the relationship between the mental sign and the universal: does the mental sign signify a universal signified (the realist approach), or does it signify other individual signs that, in the aggregate, seem to be a universal (the nominalist approach)? What the Manciple reveals, even as he argues from an ostensibly realist ontology, is that the mental signs that inform speech are not as firmly grounded in the universal as realism insists. Rather, the universal itself may be subject to interference from other signs, may not even be a universal at all. Ultimately, the Manciple raises the nominalist possibility that, as Donald Howard has remarked, “the only real difference [between the two women] is a difference of language.”44 The Manciple’s description of the “lady” and the “lemman” proposes something akin to a linguistic feedback loop: the class distinctions between the two unfaithful women ensures that the noble woman is called a lady while the poor woman is called a lemman, and the speech acts “lady” and “lemman” in turn amplify and make palpable those class distinctions. The Manciple’s responses to his own speech acts underscore the notion that the

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spoken word functions in this circular, amplificatory capacity, that it simultaneously signifies and generates the distinctions upon which mental signs are based. It is, after all, the utterance of the word “lemman” that seems to bother the Manciple most—“Certes this is a knavyssh speche!” (IX 205)— not the act of adultery itself, which he discusses at length without apology (IX 187–95). In this “feedback loop,” the Manciple develops a paradigm in which speech is neither wholly performative in nature nor wholly constative, a speech that exists between the performativity and constativity on a continuum of verbal efficacy. This continuum of efficacy along which the spoken sign holds variable degrees of power over the mental sign suggests the encroaching Ockhamist thread within “The Manciple’s Tale.”

• These three passages—the allusion to Amphion walling Thebes with his voice, the Manciple’s discussion of the futility of resisting nature, and the comparatively complex discussion of the “lady” and the “lemman”—suggest a range of possibilities for speech, from the inert to the radically performative and to intermediate points in between. Taken together, they represent the Chekhovian gun on the Manciple’s wall, the range of functions accorded to the spoken utterance in “The Manciple’s Tale.” While Chekhov’s dramaturgical truism offers a modern heuristic for understanding the medieval “Manciple’s Tale,” the idea behind the playwright’s metaphor, that the second part of a literary work brings the first part to fruition, is itself nothing new. Scholars of medieval literature have long used similar metaphors to describe the narrative structure of poetry in the Middle Ages. Citing Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the alliterative Patience and Awntyrs off Arthure, A. C. Spearing argues that many medieval poems are “comparable to . . . a pictorial diptych” in that they consist of two equally sized “leaves,” which “when put together . . . incite the reader to participate in the creation of a meaning that is larger than either possesses in isolation.”45 Other critics have expanded Spearing’s list to include Saint Erkenwald, Pearl, and Chaucer’s “General Prologue.”46 “The Manciple’s Tale” also exemplifies this diptych structure: the first leaf develops the potential of speech and the second leaf shows its deployment. I choose to employ Chekhov’s metaphor rather than the image of

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the diptych because it more aptly articulates the movements of invocation and completion, of potential and kinetic energy, that undergird the structure of “The Manciple’s Tale.” And so, we pull the trigger. Just after the midpoint of “The Manciple’s Tale,” Phoebus’s crow sings, “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” Obvious punning aside, the crow’s outburst, coming just after the midpoint of “The Manciple’s Tale,” might nonetheless be understood as nonsensical birdsong, as vox rather than dictio, sound rather than sense.47 However, when Phoebus presses the crow on the meaning of his speech (“‘What, bryd?’ quod Phebus. ‘What song syngestow?’” [IX 244]), the crow eliminates all ambiguity, reporting “by sadde tokenes and by wordes bolde, / How that [Phoebus’s] wyf had doon hire lecherye” (IX 258–59). The crow’s utterance appears to be a constative one, a fulfillment of the potential presaged in the Manciple’s digression on the immutability of nature. The statement, after all, is subordinated to a stable truth (the wife’s infidelity) and accurately reflects the mental signs predicated on it (the crow’s knowledge of the wife’s infidelity). Moreover, the Manciple endorses such an interpretation by describing how the crow had stood mute witness to the very act of infidelity: “the white crowe, that heeng ay in the cage, / Biheeld hire werke, and seyde never a word” (IX 240–41). In this respect, the crow’s damning utterances evoke a realist linguistic ontology, one in which the spoken word is derived from the mental sign and, by extension, the universal on which it is based. For Phoebus, however, the crow’s utterance functions differently. Rather than conforming to a realist linguistic hierarchy in which spoken language signifies a mental sign attached to an inviolable universal, that utterance alters the terms of Phoebus’s mental signs, changes the things that the god knows to be true. Such an ontological reversal violates the strict epistemological and linguistic hierarchy on which realism rests. Rather than a stable universal, Phoebus’s mental signs are shown to be contingent on the crow’s speech: the mental sign that causes Phoebus to kill his wife is engendered by the crow’s utterance, “on thy bed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve” (IX 256). In this way, “The Manciple’s Tale” evokes a nominalist linguistic paradigm to conflict with its realist one, a paradigm in which the mental sign is not born of a transcendent universal but derived from other, more flexible signifieds.

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After the enraged Phoebus murders his wife, the Manciple develops this nominalist current still further. The words that Phoebus speaks to the crow—an unvarnished assertion of his own wife’s fidelity—functionally invert the crow’s earlier report of Phoebus’s cuckolding: “Traitour,” quod [Phoebus], “with tonge of scorpioun, Thou hast me broght to my confusioun; Allas, that I was wroght! why nere I deed? O deere wyf! o gemme of lustiheed! That were to me so sad and eek so trewe, Now listow deed, with face pale of hewe, Ful gilteless, that dorste I swere, ywys!” (IX 271–77)

Scholars have disagreed sharply on Phoebus’s motivations in this passage. Some argue that Phoebus really does believe the crow to be lying; others argue that he willfully disagrees with the crow and forces himself to believe his own rhetoric.48 The critical debate highlights how Phoebus’s reaction, or rather the motivation for Phoebus’s reaction, is necessarily mired in a subjectivity that has no clear universal predicate. In ontological and linguistic terms, Phoebus’s spoken defense of his wife offers the reader a metatextual moment in which the poem enacts the very nominalism at issue in its narrative. To put it more succinctly, Phoebus’s words—his oddly unjustifiable assertion that his wife is not, in fact, an adulteress—are all that the reader has to go on.49 By his own report, then, Phoebus believes in both his wife’s fidelity and the crow’s mendacity. More than that, he knows his “deere wyf” to be “sad,” “trewe,” and “gilteless” (IX 274–75), knows the crow to be a scorpiontongued “traitour” (IX 271). Peter Herman posits that Phoebus denies the crow’s words “in order to deny the truth and make reality subject to his will.” I want to suggest that Phoebus goes further than that, that he creates a coexisting linguistic reality by the sheer force of his utterances.50 Phoebus’s speech creates Phoebus’s world. Here, as with the crow’s initial report of Phoebus’s cuckolding, speech stems from mental signs that have no connection to an overarching universal, a paradigm that mirrors the linguistic epistemology of Ockham’s nominalism. The only predicates for

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mental signs are a host of other, less absolute signifieds, including speech itself. Without a stable universal to anchor the “affections in [his] soul,” Phoebus is able to generate a reality with his own utterances in which, if only for himself, his wife is chaste, is true, is guiltless. The objection might be raised that the reality Phoebus creates is a “bogus reality” standing in opposition to a genuine “empirical reality,” that the god’s assertions of his wife’s fidelity are little more than the disingenuous speech of a murderer trying to recuperate his wife’s lapsed virtue and mend his shattered reputation.51 Although it may be true that Phoebus’s reality is overtly constructed of speech and that the reader, like the crow, sees a broader “empirical reality,” such an empirical reality is itself constructed by the Manciple’s own authority as a speaker in Chaucer’s pilgrimage. In the literary world of The Canterbury Tales, in which “a compaignye of sondry folk” tell stories to one another as they ride toward Canterbury, the reality to which readers have access is always mediated by the fictional speech of the pilgrims. In this respect the “bogus reality” created by Phoebus’s speech may not so much be a comment on the potential of speech to deceive, but rather a comment on the power of poetic language to create worlds within the poetic text. The efficacy of Phoebus’s speech stands as an indication that Chaucer—a poet whose last great work ventriloquizes the spoken voices of “nyne and twenty” pilgrims—was acutely aware of the potential for speech to create realities, to signify and to be signified, to engender the kinds of mental signs, or “thought objects,” that nominalists argued were falsely perceived to be “universals.” In most of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer and the reader share the author’s narrative omnicience and are thus mutually complicit in their understanding of the potential and the limitations of the spoken word. Like Chaucer, we know that a second flood is not coming to sweep John away in “The Miller’s Tale” even if the deceived carpenter does not. We know that Aurelius has not removed Dorigen’s “grisly rokkes blake” (V 859), that May has not engaged in a “strugle with a man upon a tree” simply to restore January’s sight (IV 2374), and that the deceived priest of “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” will never possess the formula for multiplying base metals into gold. What separates “The Manciple’s Tale” from the

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other narratives of the Canterbury pilgrimage—what separates Phoebus’s “reality” from John’s and Dorigen’s and January’s and the priest’s—is that when Phoebus finally turns to the crow and threatens, “I wol thee quite anon thy false tale” (IX 293), the reality that he creates is not contingent on the complicity of the reader in his self-deception. That reality does not come with a wink and a nod. Rather, in Pheoebus’s final invective against the crow, the reader sees the creation of the world by the utterance of Phoebus’s word. In this way, Phoebus enacts for the reader the very engine that drives Chaucer’s poetic project. Presented earlier in the tale as a courtly fop and a deceived husband, Phoebus makes good on his threat to punish the crow with startling and unsparing efficacy, becoming not the cuckold but the quitter of tales, not the fashion-obsessed courtier but the god of poets and poetry, the author, the maker. Phoebus uses his speech not to create his individual linguistic reality but rather to change the very nature of his world: Thou songe whilom lyk a nyghtyngale; Now shaltow, false theef, thy song forgon, And eek thy white fetheres everichon, Ne nevere in al thy life ne shaltou speke. Thus shal men on a traytour been awreke; Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake, Ne nevere sweete noyse shul ye make, But evere crie agayn tempest and rayn, In tokenynge that thurgh thee my wyf is slayn. (IX 294–302)

There is a fundamental distinction between the speech that Phoebus unleashes here to punish the crow and the utterances that he uses to recuperate his wife. In the latter instance, Phoebus’s speech creates an individual reality distinct from the seemingly objective, truthful reality of the reader and the crow. We tend to believe, after all, that Phoebus is deceiving himself when he asserts to the crow that his wife had been faithful. But in the former instance, Phoebus transforms the crow to fit his own speech, creating a reality that exists not only for Phoebus himself but for the crow, the crow’s offspring, for the reader, and even for the world outside the text where black crows fly around cawing discordantly. Phoebus says that the

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crow and all his offspring will be black, and the crow and all his offspring are black; Phoebus says that the crow will lose his beautiful voice, and the crow does lose his beautiful voice; Phoebus tells the crow that his cry will stand as a harbinger of tempest and storm, and so it does.52 By turning the crow black and destroying its ability to speak, Phoebus reverses the causal relationship between the spoken sign and the mental sign, forcing the “dede”—the crow becoming black—to accord with his words rather than fitting his words to the deed. Phoebus effaces what realists might call the universal crow, revealing that putative “universal” to be predicated on his own speech. Like Amphion, who uses his voice not to describe but to construct the walls of Thebes, Phoebus speaks not to describe the crow but to create it. Here, at last, speech functions in a fully performative capacity. Here, too, is Ockham’s nominalist ontology extrapolated to its fullest extent, an ontology in which the spoken sign and the mental sign exist apart from an unseen host of transcendent universals, in which speech holds the potential not only to represent reality but to create reality in its own image.

• Phoebus’s ability to fundamentally transform the crow underscores another important nominalist idea, the primacy of God’s potentia absoluta over his potentia ordinata. Despite the Manciple’s earthbound presentation of Phoebus, he is first and foremost a god. And though I do not wish to suggest that Chaucer intends Phoebus as a simple stand-in for the Christian God, Phoebus’s creation and subsequent transformation of a speaking crow are certainly demonstrative of a God-like, even absolute power. Realist thinkers in the Middle Ages rejected the potential for God to contravene his own laws, to go against the universal constructs of His creation. Duns Scotus, for one, writes that “God can do whatever does not involve a contradiction,” maintaining that God cannot flout his established universal laws and that “absolute power does not absolutely exceed . . . ordered power, since it would be ordered according to another law.”53 The nominalist Ockham, however, saw no problems in God’s apparent self-contradictions. The potentia absoluta of God superseded all such paradoxes; his will was all, and it was boundless:

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Just as God creates every creature merely from His volition, so He can do with creatures whatever pleases Him merely from his volition. Hence, if someone should love God and perform all the works approved by God, still God could annihilate him without any offense. Likewise, after such works God could give the creature—not eternal life—but eternal punishment without offense. The explanation is that God is debtor to no one.54

This is the very potentia that the Manciple’s story of Phoebus and the crow enacts: just as easily as Phoebus creates the speaking crow by his own will, so too does he destroy the crow and subject him to eternal punishment, slinging him “out at dore . . . unto the devel” (IX 306–7). As in the nominalist interpretation of the Christian God, Phoebus becomes “the final source and guarantor of truth, just as He is the final source and guarantor of laws governing physical bodies.”55 His power, as the crow painfully learns, is not circumscribed by a set of ordained and transcendent universals but is subject only to the limitless capacity of his own absolute will.

• Phoebus’s overtly performative speech acts—evidence both of the tale’s commitment to a nominalist perspective on speech and of Phoebus’s own potentia absoluta—finally propel the Manciple into his lengthy harangue on the virtues of silence. Over the course of forty-four lines, the Manciple obsessively repeats maxims that his mother has taught him, each an admonishment to “restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge” (IX 333) and each a small contribution to the Manciple’s absurdly garrulous speech against speech. The paradox created by the Manciple’s prolixity has become something of a critical quagmire; I wade into it here by suggesting that in light of Phoebus’s final, transformative speech act, the Manciple’s warning demonstrates a nominalist understanding of the terrible potential of the “rakel tonge.”56 In repeatedly admonishing his fellow pilgrims to “kepe wel thy tongue and thenk upon the crowe” (IX 362), the Manciple not only asks them to consider the consequences of the crow’s speech but of Phoebus’s speech as well. For while it is the crow’s “jangling” that angers Phoebus and brings about the crow’s punishment, it is Phoebus’s own speech act that brings the crow to his woeful (and verifiable and

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current) state, a speech act that both threatens vengeance and enacts it in the same breath. In the Manciple’s nominalist ontology, the spoken word is dangerous not only because it can bring to light an undesirable truth but because—as the voiceless, coal-black crow demonstrates—it can create truth in its own right. The Manciple’s final speech fully bears out this suggestion, particularly given that most of the aphorisms the Manciple cribs from his mother discuss not what speech is but what speech does. The speech act—metonymically the tongue—is an active agent within the Manciple’s nominalist ontology, something that “forkutteth and forkerveth” (IX 340), that causes “muchel harm” (IX 337) and prevents “muchel reste” (IX 350), that “serveth” and “gooth” and “kutteth freendshipe al a-two” (IX 339, 355, 342). The tongue becomes the embodiment of efficacious speech, the spoken word made flesh. Is it any wonder, then, that in the midst of his diatribe the Manciple presents us with an image that clearly evokes his earlier allusion to Amphion building the walls of Thebes? Reminding his listeners that “God of his endelees goodnesse / Walled a tongue with teeth and lippes eke” (IX 322–23), the Manciple reinforces the ability of speech to perform work in the absence of universals, whether that work be constructive or, as the Manciple’s crow so aptly demonstrates, destructive. The Right Way to Rome: Toward a Realist Chaucer While the Manciple both subscribes to and understands the dangers implicit in an Ockhamist ontology, Chaucer himself expresses a frustratingly ambivalent attitude toward the Manciple, scrupulously aligning himself with his most nominalist pilgrim even as he pushes against such a connection. At crucial moments within The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer insists on his kinship with the Manciple. The poet even introduces his own narrative persona on the same line of verse that introduces the Manciple, a textual proximity that implies a similarly close discursive connection: Ther was also a Reve, and a Millere, A Somnour, and a Pardoner also, A Maunciple, and myself—ther were namo. (I 542–44)

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Like the Miller, whose squabble with the Reeve propels the linked tales of the first fragment, and the Summoner, who bears his “freend” and “compeer” the Pardoner “a stif burdoun” (I 670–73), the pilgrim Chaucer is bound to the Manciple through the very structure of the poem. And though the two figures never attain the same narrative affinity as Miller and Reeve or Summoner and Pardoner, “The Manciple’s Tale” nonetheless interrogates many of the issues explicitly addressed by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, namely the relationship between “word” and “dede,” the delicate balance between “sentence” and “solaas,” and of the structural device of “quitting” that pervades the work. Considered in these terms, the Manciple emerges as a kind of poetic doppelganger for Chaucer, a figure whose tale, as one critic suggests, “explains and reinforces . . . the poetic principles of The Canterbury Tales” and reasserts “the foundation upon which Chaucer’s poetics are built.”57 And why not? Surely the flexibility and power that the Manciple accords to the spoken word would have appealed to a writer whose poetic investigations into word and world so often hinge on the radical contingency of the verbal sign, the unfixable meaning of trouthe, of deeth, of taille, of cokkow, of water.58 But even as he pulls the Manciple into his own authorial orbit, Chaucer gives the reader every reason to distrust the pilgrim, lumping him unceremoniously into the gallery of churls at the end of the General Prologue and highlighting his penchant for bilking the lawyers at his inn of court. Chaucer continues to underscore the pilgrim’s most self-serving impulses in the prologue to “The Manciple’s Tale,” a piece of roadside drama in which the title character insults the ale-sodden Cook, denounces him to the other pilgrims, and—when Harry Bailly implies that the Cook may expose the Manciple’s dishonest “rekenynges” (IX 74) in retribution—plies him with wine until he can no longer speak. Compromised by his own duplicity and transparent self-interest, the Manciple seems an unlikely candidate to propose any meaningful philosophical ontology, finally emerging less as a mouthpiece for Chaucer than as a means for him to efface his own authority and ironically undercut the validity of his poetic voice. Such a strategy may be in keeping with the wry irony and self-effacing posture characteristic of Chaucer’s narrative presence, but it raises far more questions about Chaucer’s attitude toward nominalism than it settles.

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If there is an antidote for the narrative and authorial ambiguity that “The Manciple’s Tale” engenders, we might expect to locate it in the final tale of the Canterbury pilgrimage, the treatise on confession offered by the Parson. Indeed, by echoing the Manciple’s assertion, “I am nat textueel” (X 57, cf. IX 235) and offering a tale in which speech leads not to destruction but to salvation, the Parson promises himself to be the antitype of the Manciple, a salvific figure whose grudging entry into Harry Bailly’s tale-telling contest will provide a narrative and authorial last word as the pilgrims approach the holy city. As such, the Parson seems poised to provide a literary curative to “The Manciple’s Tale” and, more globally, a recuperation of the principles guiding the reader through Chaucer’s work. As Mark Allen writes, [“the Manciple’s Tale”] is markedly unpenitential, even antipenitential: the central transformation of the tale—the change of the crow from white to black—ironically reverses the penitential change that the Parson describes at the end of his tale. . . . As the Manciple encourages the Cook’s fall, so his tale encourages a similar fall for everyone who accepts his advice before the Parson’s exhortation to penance. We need the Parson’s speech to lead us to penance, and, as becomes increasingly clear, we need the penitential transformation that speech effects.59

The argument here is outwardly logical, and it has been adopted by the majority of the tale’s recent readers.60 The Parson’s insistence on penitential speech—his dictum that “Al moot be seyd, and no thing excused ne hyd ne forwrapped” (X 319)—stands in marked opposition to the Manciple’s stifling call to silence, and his vision of speech as a blessing from God seems anathema to the Manciple’s understanding of speech as predominantly dangerous. Most important, “The Parson’s Tale” maintains a consistently realist perspective, both philosophically and linguistically. Informed by patristic writers such as Augustine and Ambrose, it evinces supreme confidence in both the “parfit knowynge of God” (X 1079) and the ordained power of God to grant that “knowynge,” with his grace, to the penitent soul. Even Harry Bailly’s swipe at the Parson’s would-be Lollard sympathies in the epilogue to the “Man of Law’s Tale”—“O Jankin be

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ye there? / I smelle a Lollere in the wynd” (II 1173–74)—may support the Parson’s realist bona fides, for despite his flagrant heterodoxy, John Wyclif himself was an avowed realist who rejected Ockham’s nominalist ontology.61 Is “The Parson’s Tale” evidence, then, that Chaucer himself maintains a realist philosophy, that the poet rejects the nominalist leanings of the Manciple? Sadly, no. Despite their markedly different approaches to speech, the tales told by the Manciple and the Parson hardly function as antitypes. Rather, they demonstrate a fundamental similarity that transcends their more obvious oppositions, one rooted in the tales’ mutual understanding that language can do work, that speech has the potential to function performatively. Ultimately, both tales are about transformation and the ability of language to effect it, whether that transformation be triumphant, as in “The Parson’s Tale,” or tragic, as in “The Manciple’s Tale.” Even in the heat of his invective against speech, the Manciple pauses to exempt speech in the service of God, noting “thy tonge sholdestow restreyne / At alle tymes, but whan thou doost thy peyne / To speke of God, in honor and preyere” (IX 329–31). In much the same way, the Parson, though clearly an advocate of transformative sacramental speech, warns the pilgrims against “janglynge, that may not been withoute synne” (X 649) and against “idle words, that is withouten profit of hym that speketh tho wordes” (X 647). The difference between the Parson and the Manciple, then, is a difference not in kind but in emphasis. Each recognizes that speech has the ability to do work, but while the Manciple most frequently stresses the destructive potential of speech over the constructive, the Parson stresses the potential for salvation over the equally present potential for damnation. Rather than antitypes, the tales told by the Manciple and the Parson are, in fact, mirrors of one another—one threatening, one optimistic, both demonstrative of the performative efficacy of speech and the necessity of silence. The distinctions that many critics draw between the two tales become, in this regard, untenable. Despite the rival ontological and linguistic systems that each seems to represent—the Manciple’s nominalism and the Parson’s realism—the two tales are ultimately revealed to be two species of the same genus. .

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These ontological and linguistic crosscurrents complicate even Chaucer’s “Retraction,” a work whose rubric—“Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve”—promises some respite from the incessant layering of narrators and subnarrators that vexes any reading of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s Pauline assertion, “al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine” (X 1083), strongly suggests the subordination of conventional linguistic expression to universal truth on which the realists insisted. Moreover, the works that Chaucer chooses not to retract, most notably his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, imply that he hews to a realist ontology. But the very act of retracting itself is at odds with realist understandings of the signifying function of language: it presupposes that Chaucer can use words to alter his canon, that he can “revoke” (from the Latin revocare, meaning to call back) works already in existence. More cynically, Chaucer’s list of retracted works can be understood to function as a none-too-subtle table of contents, one that reinforces rather than effaces the works it catalogues, that even “speaks” Chaucer’s works into existence in their absence. For the modern reader, the case of Chaucer’s lost “book of the Leoun” enacts such nominalistic performativity on an extratextual level. The reference in the “Retraction” to the book is all the evidence that exists of Chaucer’s lost work; its ongoing reality is created solely by the four words used to reject it. Thus, in the very act of “revoking” it, Chaucer simultaneously “re-vokes” the Book of the Lion for his readers, calling back into existence a work that no longer has any existence to speak of. I also want to posit that the “Retraction” cannot with any confidence be extracted from the fiction of the Canterbury frame itself. The “makere of this book” might, as many readers assume, be Chaucer, the historical author of The Canterbury Tales. However, that maker could just as easily refer to the fictional pilgrim / reporter who serves as Chaucer’s narrative alter ego.62 Chaucer never unequivocally relinquishes the narrative valences of The Canterbury Tales in his retraction. Instead, he seems to follow the advice of the Parson and the Manciple in equal measure: he follows the Parson in offering the penitent language of the “Retraction” itself, but in marshalling his own words to squelch the existence of “many a song and many a leccherous lay” (X 1087), Chaucer equally channels the Manciple and his robust call to silence.

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• As with the “Retraction” and the tales of the Parson and the Manciple, so too with the remaining tales of Canterbury. The intricate authorial and narrative layering so central to The Canterbury Tales, the strategies of ironic undercutting and authorial self-effacement that pervade the work— these formal and narrative devices are too thickly layered to allow a clear window into Chaucer’s philosophical point of view. Given its thematic proximity to the poem as a whole, the Ockhamist “Manciple’s Tale” suggests that, at the very least, Chaucer is acutely aware of the nominalist underpinnings of his performative tale-telling project. But Chaucer is a poet of many voices, not all of which are undercutting and ironic. Moving away from the self-conscious frame of The Canterbury Tales and focusing on the poet’s lyric poetry offers a glimpse of a different Chaucer, one more consistently realist than his final, unfinished work implies. This heuristic move should be taken as an implicit argument that Chaucer’s courtly lyrics are unvarnished authorial statements: the lyrics were written within an explicitly courtly setting and, as such, exist within the context of Ricardian structures of power and patronage, structures that necessarily contribute to their implicit philosophical and ontological postures. Nonetheless, Chaucer’s courtly lyrics might be considered expressions of the poet’s public voice, a voice defined not by its refraction through the fictional voices of multiple literary creations but, as Anne Middleton writes, “by a constant relation of speaker to audience within an ideally conceived worldly community.”63 As such, the public voice can contribute to a more general understanding of Chaucer’s views on nominalism. Consider, for example, the short poem “Truth.” With its biblical refrain and overt plea for divine illumination, the lyric strongly evinces the rigid epistemology of realism: That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse; The wrastling for this world axeth a fal. Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse: Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal! Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;

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Hold the heye wey and lat thy gost thee lede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. (15–21)

Masquerading as the conventional advice offered by the poet to a courtier, “Truth” insists on a deeply hierarchical and ordered paradigm, one in which the courtier “receyve[s] in buxumnesse” that which is given to him by God. In doing so, the poem also recalls the realist epistemology of revelation that Augustine develops in De Magistro, in which knowledge and wisdom comes from the illumination granted by God. Our real Teacher is he who is so listened to, who is said to dwell in the inner man, namely Christ, that is, the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God. To this wisdom every rational soul gives heed, but to each is given only so much as he is able to receive, according to his own good or evil will.64

Chaucer cements the Augustinian connection between knowledge and illumination by linking the direction, “Know thy contree”—both “know your terrestrial country” and “know that heaven is your true home”—with the command “look up, thank God of al.”65 Here, God is the source of the addressee’s knowledge, God is the figure who will illuminate the universal truth and “delievere” the penitent courtier. It is fitting, then, that “Truth” exists in one Canterbury Tales manuscript adjacent to the portrait of the Parson, a pilgrim whose faith in an orderly, hierarchical cosmos speaks to the core principles of realism.66 Chaucer’s other three Boethian lyrics—“Gentilesse,” “Fortune,” and “Lak of Stedfastnesse”—reveal a similar investment in realist linguistic and ontological paradigms. In “Gentilesse,” Chaucer traces mankind’s descent from “the firste stok, fader of gentilesse” (1) and emphasizes the necessity of adhering to “vertu” (4) and “vertuous noblesse” (17), terms that the poet treats as universals. In “Fortune” he echoes the Parson’s statement “in mannes synne is every manere of ordre or ordinaunce turned up-sodoun” (X 259) when he bewails “this wretched worldes transmutacioun . . . withouten ordre or wys discrecioun”(1–3), a lament for a world that seems

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no longer to adhere to the stable heirarchies ordained by realist thinkers. Most telling of all, however, is “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” which marries the other lyrics’ concerns with hierarchy and disorder to more specific questions of language and speech: Somtyme the world was so stedfast and stable That mannes word was obligacioun, And now it is so fals and deceivable That word and deed, as in conclusioun, Ben nothing lyk, for turned up-so-doun Is al this world for mede and wilfulnesse, That al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse. (1–7)

The plaint that the once stable world has turned “up-so-doun” restates the narrative stance of the other Boethian lyrics, but in “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” Chaucer gives the world’s inversion a specific shape by associating it with the dislocation of word from deed, of sign from signified. As “The Manciple’s Tale” makes clear, such a dislocation is implicit within Ockham’s nominalist ontology. Without universals on which to hang the mental sign, there can be no guarantee that even the most scrupulous verbal utterance correlates with a stable universal predicate: subjective reality becomes the only reality. In Chaucer’s lament, “Vertu hath . . . no dominacioun” (16) because “vertu” is merely a contingent signifier rather than an overarching universal sign; “resoun is holden fable” because neither “resoun” nor “fable” depends on a larger “trouthe” (15). Within this “mutable and debased state of language and thought,” the celestial universals on which terrestrial order is based are utterly absent, pushed aside for a disordered linguistic epistemology of radical contingencies, false signifiers, and empty words.67 In some respects, the complaint of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” is purely conventional, an iteration of the ubi sunt topos that pervades so much writing of the Middle Ages. But in its insistence on the linguistic and ontological aspects of an “up-so-down” world, it is more specifically a poem that deplores the encroachment of nominalist structures on an increasingly disordered cosmos, a creeping entropy that exhibits itself in the thoughts and actions of figures like the Manciple. To suggest that “Lak of Stedfastnesse”

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is a realist poem, then, isn’t quite right; but nether is it appropriate to say that the poem celebrates the potential that nominalism grants to the spoken word. Rather, it is a poem that seems to want to cling to a world defined by the stable framework of realism, even as it recognizes (and laments) the presence of nominalist structures within that framework. In this regard, the corrective that Chaucer suggests for the poem’s disjointed world is hauntingly reminiscent of Ockham’s own philosophy: O prince, desyre to be honourable, Cherish thy folk and hat extorcioun. Suffre nothing that may be reprevable To thyn estat don in thy regioun. Shew forth thy sword of castigacioun, Dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse, And wed thy folk agein to stedfastnesse. (22–28)

Ostensibly directed to King Richard II, Chaucer’s envoy grounds the stanzas preceding it, making terrestrial the poem’s inverted cosmic hierarchy and, crucially, investing the king rather than God with the power to right it. Clearly, it provides a recommendation that any king would be glad to hear: do whatever you need to do to ensure the well-being of your subjects.68 But in the context of the poem’s inquiry into nominalism, Chaucer’s advice that Richard “shew forth thy sword of castigacioun” and “suffre nothing that may be reprevable / To thyn estat” argues for the king’s potentia absoluta. In other words, insofar as Chaucer proposes Richard as the figure who will “wed [his] folk agein to stedfastnesse” in the absence of a stable and universally ordered world, he also proposes a king whose role as arbiter and enforcer of the terrestrial heirarchy is closely analogous to the role of Ockham’s nominalist God. Where Ockham imagined God’s potentia absoluta as the only remedy for the cosmic disorder threatened by the absence of stable universals, Chaucer seems to see the king’s potentia absoluta as the cure for the earthly disorder that prevailed at the close of the fourteenth century. The envoy to Richard is equally as suggestive for “The Manciple’s Tale” as it is for “Lak of Stedfastnesse.” Indeed, as David Wallace has pointed out, the bow-wielding Phoebus bears more than a passing resemblance

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to Richard II, whose increasingly tyrannical reign in the late 1390s was emblemized by his retinue of Cheshire archers and whose aspirations to semidivine status are revealed in such works as Wilton Diptych.69 Equally important, especially in consideration of the power Chaucer accords to Phoebus’s speech, is the power that Richard himself seemed to invest in the spoken word. Richard was, after all, a king who once proclaimed that the laws of the realm “were in his own mouth,” a king who insisted on elaborate forms of royal address in order to encourage “a lofty, almost Godlike, image of himself . . . as a distant, majestic and all-powerful figure,” a king who manipulated the legal and parliamentary proceedings of his 1397 Revenge Parliament to include the damning spoken confession of the Duke of Gloucester.70 In these actions, it is possible to see Richard attempting— like Chaucer’s Phoebus—to alter the world by altering the language used to describe it. And while it is surely absurd to imagine Richard simply taking the envoy of “Lak of Stedfastenesse” to heart and assuming the mantle of royal potentia absoluta on Chaucer’s behest, it is not absurd to imagine Chaucer perceiving Richard’s tyranny as the only possible response to an England sliding increasingly toward dystopia. Nor is it difficult to imagine Chaucer composing his “Manciple’s Tale” as a response to such civic entropy and to the increasing royal tyranny he may have associated with it. In the absence of the narrative and meta-narrative complexities of The Canterbury Tales, the Boethian lyrics demonstrate that despite the visable affinities between Chaucer and the Manciple, the world described in “The Manciple’s Tale”—in which realist ontological and linguistic hierarchies are upended and the spoken word can function performatively, unconstrained by universal predicate—is not only a world that Chaucer decries; it is a world that he sees manifest in the political and social landscape around him. Thus if Chaucer is a nominalist, he is the most reluctant of nominalists, simultaneously aware and wary of the possibilities arising from the “up-so-doun” philosophy.71 Inasmuch as Chaucer believes that speech and the mental signs that precede it are—and should be—subordinated to universal truths, however, he is a realist. And yet, as a poet and a creator of fiction, Chaucer is also acutely aware of, and fundamentally invested in, the creative power that nominalists like Ockham ascribed to spoken and written signs. The world that Chaucer inhabited, which

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frequently throbbed with the sturm und drang of social discord, must have invited comparison to the upended hierarchies and arbitrary expressions of power manifest in nominalism. The worlds that Chaucer created were utterly dependent on them.

• Chaucer’s most unguarded embrace of realism comes in the most unlikely of literary endeavors. Written for the poet’s ten-year-old son Lowys, who had apparently demonstrated an unusual aptitude for mathematics, the Treatise on the Astrolabe purports to provide in English the “reules and . . . trewe conclusions” (26–29) of its eponymous astronomical instrument. It also provides, in its brief introduction, a remarkable articulation of the linguistic principles that define realism: This tretis, divided in 5 parties, wol I shewe the under full light reules and naked wordes in Englissh, for Latyn canst thou yit but small, my litel sone. But natheles suffise to the these trewe conclusions in Englissh as wel as sufficith to these noble clerkes Grekes these same conclusions in Grek; and to Arabiens in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to Latyn folk in Latyn. . . . And God woot that in alle these langages and in many moo han these conclusions ben suffisantly lerned and taught, and yit by diverse reules; right as diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome. . . . And Lowys, yf so be that I shewe the in my lighte Englissh as trewe conclusions touching this mater, and not oonly as trewe but as many and as subtile conclusiouns, as ben shewid in Latyn in eny commune tretys of the Astrelabie, konne me the more thank. (25–55)

Chaucer’s argument that English suffices for Lowys just as Greek suffices for Greeks and Latin for “Latyn folk” is clearly part of the poet’s ongoing inquiry into the role and potential of the English vernacular. However, the argument also depends on the objective reality of what Chaucer refers to as “trewe conclusions,” concepts that exist outside the conventional signifiers of spoken language—“Arabik,” “Ebrew,” and “Grek”—and from which those signifiers derive their truth value. Consistent from tongue to tongue and from person to person, the “trewe conclusions” that the astrolabe illuminates do not exist as “thought object[s] in the mind”; rather,

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they are universals, transcendent constants on which mental signs and then spoken signs are predicated.72 Even the astrolabe itself, an instrument whose function is to glean “trewe conclusions” from the machinery of the heavens, depends on the orderly descent of sign from signified, of observable phenomena from universal truth. As Chaucer writes to his son, “truste wel that alle the conclusions that han be founde in so noble an instrument as is an Astrelabie ben unknowe parfitly to eny mortal man in this regioun, as I suppose” (15–19).73 Here, finally, is the philosophical worldview that Chaucer wants to pass onto his son, the same ontology that informs his own thinking about the world he inhabits. “Diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome” (39–40), Chaucer writes. Diverse speech from a diversity of individuals can reflect a single “righte way,” a universal constant guiding word and world alike.74 But the world we desire to give our sons and daughters and the world that we fear they will inherit are two different things. When we consider the repeated cultural and personal upheavals that Chaucer witnessed in his sixty years—the plague outbreak of his childhood, an endless foreign war, a murderous mob passing by his Aldgate house in 1381, one parliament that violently checked the power of the king and another that deposed him—we must also recognize that the orderly universe the poet describes to his young, mathematically inclined son was never the universe he knew. The same tumult that punctuated Chaucer’s life necessarily informed his relationship with realism, creating an active tension between Chaucer’s realist philosophy and the increasingly disordered world that seemed ever to deny it. This is the tension that Chaucer enmeshes into his Boethian lyrics and that simmers menacingly beneath the surface of his “Manciple’s Tale,” the tension implicit within the narrative structure of The Canterbury Tales itself, and the tension that explodes to the surface in Phoebus’s startlingly efficacious and destructive speech acts. Perhaps what we finally witness in Chaucer’s poetry, then, is a cry against the discord and entropy of the fourteenth century, a poetic call for the restoration of order amidst social and cultural chaos. Perhaps “The Manciple’s Tale” itself—in its depiction of an upside-down, unhinged world—is nothing less than a speculum mundi, a mirror reflecting both Chaucer’s own disjointed world and the poet’s pleas for it to be set right again.

3 Saint Erkenwald The Sacrament of the Altar and the Persistence of the Past But any things concerning creatures that are considered in common by the philosopher and the believer are conveyed through different principles in each case. For the philosopher takes his argument from the proper causes of things; the believer, from the first cause. . . . Hence again, the two kinds of teaching do not follow the same order. For in the teaching of philosophy, which considers creatures in themselves and leads us from them to the knowledge of God, the first consideration is about creatures; the last of God. But in the teaching of faith, which considers creatures only in their relationship to God, the consideration of God comes first, that of creatures afterward. —Thom a s Aqu i na s , Summa Contra Gentiles

T

he boundary between philosophy and theology in the later Middle Ages was paper thin and exceedingly porous. Even as Thomas Aquinas struggles to distinguish between the two in his Summa Contra Gentiles, citing their “different principles” and alluding to their “two kinds of teaching,” he cannot help but reveal philosophy and theology to be mutually informing and interpenetrating bodies of thought. In this respect, the nominalism proposed by Ockham and explored by Chaucer was more than simply a thought experiment or a fanciful hypothesis on how the world worked; it was also an inquiry with significant implications for the relationship between the human and the divine. Indeed, Ockham’s interventions into via antiqua thought threatened to change cultural perceptions of the ways in which individuals could know and conceive of God, as well as the ways that God engaged with the world of his creation. Nonetheless, in moving

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from The Canterbury Tales to the alliterative Saint Erkenwald—and also from the philosophy of William of Ockham to the dissident theology of John Wyclif—we move from a poem that interrogates the relationship between word and world to one more narrowly focused on the relationship between word and Word, a poem deeply invested in sacramental speech and in the precise nature of the changes that such speech effects. This is not to suggest that Chaucer’s narrative about a group of pilgrims on their way to England’s holiest shrine does not actively engage with issues pertaining to the Church. Rather, it is to suggest that Saint Erkenwald, with its northern “rum, ram, ruf ” (CT X 43) and its outlandish climax of a newly christened body crumbling to ashes and dust, engages with those issues more robustly, more monolithically, and more urgently than its southern contemporary. An English recasting of the legend of Saint Gregory and the Emperor Trajan, Saint Erkenwald focuses on the discovery, during the construction of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, of a magnificent sarcophagus containing an inexplicably preserved corpse. Unable to read the engravings on the sarcophagus or to determine the identity or even the vintage of the body, London’s increasingly agitated citizens summon their bishop, Erkenwald, from clerical duties in Essex to solve the mystery and quell the growing civic unrest it has created. Erkenwald addresses the corpse, commanding it in the name of God to reveal its secrets; like some Celtic Frankenstein’s monster, it blinks its eyes and begins to tell its story. The corpse, it turns out, was a judge who lived five hundred years before Christ. Strict, honest, and unswervingly fair, he was buried as a king for his flawless adherence to law. As a heathen, however, his soul was “dampnyd dulfully into þe depe lake” (302), and he was unable to join in the great feast of Heaven. Deeply moved by the mournful tale, Erkenwald cannot help but weep, and he wishes aloud that God could grant the virtuous pagan life once more, just long enough to receive the sacrament of baptism. If only such a thing were possible, the bishop exclaims, he would speak these words: “I folwe þe in þe Fader nome and His fre Childes, / And of þe gracious Holy Goste” (318–19). Despite the oddly conditional mode of his baptismal prayer, the words have their effect, and as Erkenwald utters them, one of his tears falls on the judge’s face to complete the sacrament. The new Christian soul flies to heaven; the body falls to ash. Bells ring in London. Order is restored.

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Saint Erkenwald’s overt focus on the sacrament of baptism and its role in the salvation of a single righteous heathen has encouraged two overarching critical responses. The first, that the heathen judge achieves salvation by virtue of his good works and worthy life, is a position that closely echoes William Langland’s treatment of the Trajan story in Piers Plowman.1 Implicit in such a response is the argument that “the poet’s main concern is to affirm the efficacy of individual merit and good works in the achievement of salvation,” that the actions of the heathen judge alone are sufficient to engender the mercy of God.2 In an influential essay, Gordon Whatley offers a contrary analysis, suggesting that the poem demonstrates how salvation requires not only the sacrament of baptism but also the authority of the Church to administer it. Readers following Whatley have tended to affirm his analysis, even as they have worked to refine it. Frank Grady, for example, finds that Saint Erkenwald occupies a kind of middle ground between Langland’s heterodox treatment of the Trajan story and a strict orthodox one, while Christine Chism sees the poem as profoundly orthodox and, to be more specific, profoundly anti-Wycliffite.3 As they have struggled to untangle the poem’s central interpretive knot, however, very few critics have examined the nature of sacramental speech itself in Saint Erkenwald, surprising in view of the poem’s investment in—even obsession with—the speech-centered sacrament of baptism.4 In this chapter I will remedy that lack of critical attention by regarding baptism as the means of salvation for the pagan judge and, more important, as a sacrament whose reliance on the spoken word raises fundamental issues about the efficacy of sacramental language in general and about the priest’s role in administering it. More specifically, I intend to show that Saint Erkenwald uses baptism as a stalking horse for a still more central orthodox rite, the sacrament of the Eucharist. Invested, like baptism, in the transformative power of the priest’s words, the Sacrament of the Altar attained immense cultural importance in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, even as it came under increasing scrutiny by heterodox Wycliffite Christians. By denying the orthodox view of transubstantiation, Wyclif and his followers mounted an attack on the Church that, taken to its extreme, seemed poised to “destroy Christianity and unravel the very fabric of human community.”5 While never explicitly

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referring to the Eucharist or the doctrine of transubstantiation, Saint Erkenwald nevertheless demonstrates its allegiance to orthodox Eucharistic theology in its account of the judge’s conversion. In some respects, this reading comports with earlier criticism showing how the orthodoxy of the poem is constructed through its explicitly baptismal aspects, and yet my interpretation departs from this earlier criticism in two fundamental ways. First, it proposes that the key indicator of orthodoxy in the poem is not the judge’s baptism per se but the efficacy of Erkenwald’s words in both the performance of the baptism and the reanimation of the heathen corpse. Second, it argues that Saint Erkenwald focuses on the efficacy of spoken language in order to bind the salvation of the heathen judge to the defining sacrament of the Eucharist. But, if the connection that Saint Erkenwald draws between baptism and the Eucharist shows the poem to offer a far more comprehensive response to Wycliffite heresies (as well as a more forceful affirmation of orthodoxy) than previous studies have acknowledged, it also reveals how the Erkenwald-poet embedded his anti-Wycliffite sentiments within the context of the Church’s fraught relationship with its non-Christian forebears. Saint Erkenwald develops its polemic against Lollardy within a semantic and linguistic register that evokes several fundamental theological issues for the medieval Church, including the nature of orthodox eschatology, the foundational Christian precepts of Old Law and New Law, and the typological model by which medieval Christianity defined itself against paganism and Judaism. By again focusing on the efficacy— and sometimes the stubborn inertness—of the spoken word within these theological contexts, I establish Saint Erkenwald’s views on Wyclif’s dissident theology, while also discussing how the poem spoke to widespread cultural anxieties over the Jewish origins of English Christianity and over the Church’s perceived susceptibility to a range of heterodox and heretical threats. The Words of the Priest, the Body of Christ The conditional mode of Bishop Erkenwald’s baptismal prayer remains one of Saint Erkenwald’s most critically vexing details. Moved to tears by

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the corpse’s story, the bishop laments the pagan judge’s pitiable condition aloud and wishes he had the power to perform a baptism: “Our Lord lene,” quoþ þat lede [Erkenwald], “þat þou lyfe hades, By Goddes leue, as longe as I myȝt lacche water And cast vpon þi faire cors and carpe þes wordes, ‘I folwe þe in þe Fader nome and His fre Childes, And of þe gracious Holy Goste’ and not one grue lenger; Þen þof þou droppyd doun ded hit daungerde me lasse.” Wyt þat worde þat he warpyd þe wete of eghen And teres trillyd adoun and on þe toumbe lighten, And one felle on his face and þe freke syked. (315–23)6

The majority of the poem’s recent readers have understood this passage to affirm the unconditional necessity of orthodox baptism for salvation. While accurate, such an assessment does little to account for the fact that the baptism itself is an accident—the tear is shed without what can only be called baptismal intent. Even more remarkably, the baptismal prayer is uttered only as a demonstration of what Erkenwald would say if he thought it would do any good. The conditional mode of the bishop’s prayer may simply offer a route around a sticky theological detail that vexed the Trajan legend, namely the ecclesiast asking God to change his mind about the heathen’s salvation.7 It may also reinforce the saintliness of Erkenwald himself by calling attention to the almost unconscious holiness that marks the bishop’s behavior. In fact, insofar as the tear—and the divine intervention that it precipitates—stems first from the well of Erkenwald’s Christian compassion, the poem seems here to gesture toward the elements of Donatism prevalent in much Lollard thought, specifically Wyclif’s belief that the efficacy and legitimacy of a priest resides not in his ordination in the institutional ecclesiastical hierarchy but in his Christ-like character, his “mekeness & oþere dedis of charite.”8 I propose, however, that the conditional bracketing of the baptismal words—“I myȝt lacche water / And cast vpon þi faire cors and carpe þes wordes”—also, even primarily, serves a metadiscursive function: it draws attention to the words of the spoken baptismal prayer as words, utterances divorced from their specific sacramental context. And crucially,

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those words are efficacious. Erkenwald’s baptismal prayer does perform its appointed work, whether it is uttered conditionally or with genuine intent to baptize. In this respect, the poem shows the sacramental utterance to bear a potential that supersedes the intent with which it is uttered. Indeed, when the newly christened judge feels his soul enter heaven, he places the responsibility for his salvation squarely on “þe wordes þat þou [Erkenwald] werpe and þe water þat þou sheddes” (329), the words—as well as the water—of baptism. In a study of baptism in the Middle Ages, Peter Cramer argues that “the power of language, and especially of liturgical language, to ‘make’ those who speak it, to invigorate the natural motion of the soul, is more than a philosopher’s idea. It is one of the fundamental reasons why sacrament works, throughout the Middle Ages and no doubt beyond them too.”9 Cramer’s diagnosis of liturgical speech as language that “makes” those who speak it is reminiscent of the work of Austin and Searle, whose identification of the performative utterance provides a useful framework for looking at sacramental speech. Almost by definition, the prescribed words of baptism fall into the category of the performative: uttered in the proper social circumstances, the words, “I folowe the, or elles I crystene þe, in the nome of / the fader & þe sone and the holy gost,” effect the fundamental change of christening the individual being baptized.10 Moreover, the Word of God itself, from which the baptismal prayer derives its efficacy, demonstrates speech at its most explicitly performative. After all, “the sublime speech of God in advance of his action is,” as Augustine of Hippo writes, “the immutable reason of the action itself.”11 Saint Erkenwald emphasizes the power of sacramental language by highlighting the efficacy of sacramental utterances and by emphasizing the linguistic specificity that they demand. The ambiguous phrase following Erkenwald’s recitation of the baptismal formula, “and not one grue lenger” (319), should be most properly understood as “with no more words,” an affirmation of the precise baptismal formula endorsed by the Church and promulgated in vernacular pastoral manuals such as John Mirk’s instructions for parish priests.12 Saint Erkenwald’s concern for the precise form of sacramental speech in baptism is also supported by more doctrinal sources. Aquinas argues that “Baptism receives its consecration from its

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form. . . . Consequently the cause of Baptism needs to be expressed in the baptismal form.” He further ties the sacramental utterance to the Word of God itself: “The words which are uttered in the sacramental forms, are said not merely for the purpose of signification, but also for the purpose of efficiency, inasmuch as they derive efficiency from that Word, by Whom all things were made.”13 Tellingly, Aquinas is far less stringent when it comes to the physical procedures of baptism and even to the persons authorized to perform the sacrament.14 The work of baptism, he seems to recognize, is performed less by water than by a specific and powerful sacramental formula, a formula that might be diluted, corrupted, or even invalidated by the addition to or alteration of its language. The poem’s insistence on orthodox baptism and affirmation of the baptismal utterance not only champion the role of the orthodox church in the life of the Christian community but also offer rebuttal to Lollard arguments against the necessity of baptism, arguments that threatened the Church by challenging its role in mediating salvation. Lollards in general denied the absolute necessity of baptism and also of the baptismal formula itself, two significant breaks from orthodox theology. Some believed that children of Christians were christened in utero through the faith of their parents and that a formal baptism would have been redundant.15 Wyclif himself opines that the act of baptism does not necessarily destroy the taint of original sin, and in “Speculum de Antichristo,” he attacks ecclesiastics who focus on baptizing the masses rather than preaching to them, arguing that since “god sent [the Apostle Paul] for to preche þe gospel & not to cristene men,” ordinary priests should follow suit.16 In these instances, both the necessity and the efficacy of the priest’s baptismal prayer—in Austin’s terms, the prayer’s performativity—are explicitly called into question. If God’s grace alone is enough to christen the soul, the words of the baptismal prayer become, at best, an outward sign of christening and, at worst, an impediment to the true nature of the sacrament, a distracting sideshow to what Lollards considered the real work of the Church. But if Saint Erkenwald is to be a poetic bulwark against the encroaching threat of Lollardy, it must do more than simply reinforce the need for orthodox baptism. Certainly an affirmation of baptism could have been understood as an anti-Wycliffite gesture, yet the most sustained and

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coherent Wycliffite attack on the institutional Church was directed not at baptism but at the sacrament of the Eucharist.17 Because the Eucharistic sacrament invested the clergy with so much authority, Wycliffite “reevaluation of the doctrine of transubstantiation [was] . . . an attack on the central mediating role of the priesthood, an attack on its rights to be the exclusive handlers of Christ’s Body.”18 In other words, the Lollard assault on the Eucharist was also an assault on the Church in general, on its exclusive ability to mediate between the celestial and the mundane, and, perhaps most crucially, on its sole authority to effect salvation in the laity. The comprehensive nature of such an attack was not lost on Wyclif’s virulently anticlerical followers, nor was it lost on the orthodox Church itself. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Eucharist had become the spiritual focus of the Mass. In addition, an individual’s view on transubstantiation had become a “litmus test of orthodoxy” while refuting the orthodox view had become a central tenet of Lollard heterodoxy.19 To mount an effective defense against the Wycliffite threat, Saint Erkenwald needed not only to assert the requirement of orthodox baptism but also to affirm the orthodox view of the Eucharist. Using Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale” as a test case, Fiona Somerset has recently demonstrated that in the “atmosphere of heightened concern over the division and multiplication of Christ’s body and over lay interpretation of the doctrine of the Eucharist,” poetry of the late fourteenth century was able to comment on the debate over the Eucharist without actually mentioning the sacrament by name.20 A rough contemporary of “The Summoner’s Tale,” Saint Erkenwald is positioned to indulge in similar double meanings. The poem, I suggest, uses its discussion of baptism to engage in a tacit, though no less important, argument for the Eucharist, a sacrament whose connection to baptism has explicit scriptural precedent. The Gospel of John turns to the Crucifi xion itself to show the common origin of the water of baptism and the salvific blood of Christ: “But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water.”21 Moreover, a number of alliterative works often associated with Saint Erkenwald interrogate this scriptural moment and collectively reinforce the intimate connection between sacramental water and sacramental body and blood. In Piers Plowman, the mortar of mercy in

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Piers’s barn, Unity, is made of Christ’s “baptisme and blood þat he bledde on rode”; in Pearl, the Pearl Maiden tells the Dreamer, “Ryche blod ran on rode so roghe, / And wynne water; þen, at þat plyt, / Þe grace of God wex gret innoughe.”22 Beyond their common association with the Crucifixion, it is also suggestive that baptism and the Eucharist are alone among the sacraments in tracing their theological legitimacy directly to the Gospels, the former to John the Baptist’s baptism of Christ and the latter to Christ’s words at the Last Supper.23 But there is another, still more pivotal reason that Saint Erkenwald is able to enact a thematic shift from baptism to the Eucharist: both sacraments are thoroughly marked by the presence—even by the necessity—of sacramental language. Just as orthodox baptism requires the attending priest to utter a precise sacramental form, so too does the sacrament of the Eucharist require the priest to intone specific, biblical words—hoc est corpus meum—in order to transubstantiate bread into the body of Christ. As is the case with the words of baptism, the form of the sacramental words used to change bread to body is important to the work that those words do. Once again, John Mirk’s instructions provide a clear example of the precision demanded of those priests who uttered the Eucharistic formula, in terms of the words themselves and even in terms of vocal inflection: Sey þe wordes of þat seruyse Deuowtely wyth gode a-vyse; Cotte þow not þe wordes tayle, But sey hem oute wyþowte fayle; Sey hem so wyþ mowþe & thoght, Þat oþer þynge þow þenke noght But al þyn herte and þyn entent Be fully on that sacrament.24

The precision with which the priest must recite the Eucharistic formula is a testament to the inherent power of the sacramental words and a tacit acknowledgement that they contain the potential to effect substantive change in the world around them. Such an emphasis also demonstrates a reverence for the specific nature of the change taking place, a change

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in which the subject of the host is entirely replaced by the very body of Christ even as the accidents of the host—the physical signs that bread is bread—remain. Informed as they are by the Word of God, the words of the priest are not to be uttered carelessly. As the Erkenwald-poet himself might suggest, the sacramental words of consecration should be uttered, “and not one grue lenger” (319). Recent historical and theological scholarship has confirmed the fundamental importance of the words of consecration to the Eucharist. David Aers emphasizes the roles of both priest and priestly language when he describes the doctrine of transubstantiation: “At the words of consecration, spoken by a duly ordained priest, the body of Jesus . . . became present under what had become the appearance of bread and wine lacking their proper substance.”25 Similarly, Eamon Duff y calls the Eucharist a rite in which “only a priest might utter the words which transformed bread and wine into the flesh and blood of God incarnate,” and Miri Rubin, in her exhaustive study of the sacrament, describes how “Christ’s body was sacramentally made present though the words of a priest.”26 Rubin also enumerates many treatises, such as Mirk’s instructions, that were written to assist clergy in performing the sacrament correctly. The existence of such treatises strongly suggests the danger perceived in misspeaking the sacramental words. Finally, in a formulation that brings together the Word of God, the words of the priest, and the incarnate body itself, Herbert McCabe argues that “the Eucharist is the creative language of God, his eternal word made flesh.”27 The sacrament of the Eucharist was central to the late medieval Church, and at the center of that sacrament were the words of consecration themselves. Thus, it should not be surprising that as Wyclif and his followers leveled a general critique of the “sacerdotal-sacramental efficacy” of the Eucharistic sacrament, they also questioned more specifically the ability of the priest’s words to effect transubstantiation.28 Wycliffite positions on the Eucharist have been particularly well documented, but it is important to note that Wyclif himself held a far more nuanced position on the matter than is generally recognized. In brief, he argued that after the priest’s sacramental utterance, the bread remained unchanged in both subject and accident but that the spiritual essence of the body of Christ was added to it.29

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Such an argument stood in stark opposition to Church teachings, which stated that the sacramental words hoc est corpus meum did not affect the accidents—the outward, sensual appearances—of bread; rather, they caused the body of Christ to replace the subject of bread altogether, leaving the bread’s accidents intact. One critical difference between the Church’s view and Wyclif’s, then, lay in the exact work that the sacramental utterance performed: whereas the Church maintained that the priest’s words caused the miracle of transubstantiation, Wyclif—who considered it logically impossible for an accident to exist without its subject—argued that those same words merely effected a process of spiritual addition. In the face of this immensely important difference, Wyclif’s arguments against orthodox transubstantiation nonetheless grant considerable power to the words of consecration. In Wyclif’s view the sacramental words spoken by the priest do perform an action; it is simply not the action the Church claimed that they perform. Wyclif writes: “crist haþ ȝyue power I-nowe to his prestis to teche his churche; & enioyned hem siche office þat ȝyueþ hem not occasioun to synne. & þus power þat prestis han standeþ not in transsubstansinge of þe oste, ne in makyng of accidentis for to stonde bi hemsilf.”30 Rather than denying the power of the priest’s words, Wyclif dilutes their efficacy both in kind (because they perform an act of addition rather than one of substitution) and in degree (because they ultimately lack the ability to make accidents stand alone without their subject). The question suggested by Wyclif’s formulation of the Eucharist, then, is not, “are the words uttered by the priest effective?” but rather, “what specific effect do those sacramental words have?” In his assault on the Eucharist, Wyclif calls into question the ability of the priest’s words to make accidents stand alone without their subjects. Similarly, in his attacks on orthodox baptism, the dissident theologian obviates the necessity of the baptismal prayer in the act of christening. As I have argued above, the ability of language to enact transubstantiation and christening is a key point of contact between the two sacraments. Eucharist and baptism share yet another relationship—one particularly germane to Saint Erkenwald—that enables the latter to operate as an especially effective metaphor for the former: both are a means of conversion.31 The very term

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“conversion” implicitly proposes both spiritual conversion (heathen to Christian) and substantial conversion (bread to body). This association of conversion with transubstantiation also finds support in religious texts roughly contemporary with Saint Erkenwald. A fifteenth-century English translation of Thomas à Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi, for example, describes the act of conversion in Pauline terms that suggest nothing so much as the process of transubstantiation: “A man conuertyng him holy to god, is exute [stripped, divested] & taken fro þe body & chaunged into a newe man.”32 Here, conversion is not only analogous to transubstantiation, it is mimetic of transubstantiation: the convert is metaphorically taken from his own body—we might say his subject is removed from his accidents—and “chaunged” into a new, Christian man. One scholar has argued that “sacraments are sacramental by their relationship to the Eucharist” and that the Eucharist becomes a kind of arch-sacrament through which other sacraments gain their efficacy.33 Such arch-sacramentality is evident in De Imitatione Christi. It is no accident that the baptismal conversion described in the work assumes a distinctly Eucharistic shape: the transformative model of the Eucharist underlies the act of conversion itself. Crucially, Saint Erkenwald begins with an act of conversion sui generis, the Christianization of England and its Saxon inhabitants by Saint Augustine of Canterbury: Þen wos this reame renaide mony ronke ȝeres Til Saynt Austyn into Sandewiche was sende fro þe pope; Þen prechyd he here þe pure faythe and plantyd þe trouthe And conuertyd alle þe communnates to Cristendame newe. He turnyd temples þat tyme þat temyd to þe deuelle And clansyd hom in Cristes nome and kyrkes hom callid; He hurlyd owt hor ydols and hade hym in sayntes And chaungit cheuely hor nomes and chargit hom better: Þat ere was of Appolyn is now of Saynt Petre, Mahoun to Saynt Margrete oþir to Maudelayne; Þe synagoge of þe Sonne was sett to oure Lady, Jubiter and Jono to Jhesus oþer to James. So he hom dedifiet and dyght alle to dere halowes Þat ere wos sett of Sathanas in Saxones tyme. (11–24)34

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The sheer swiftness of Augustine’s barnstorming conversion of England, suggested by the frenetic pace of the passage itself, practically begs us to ask how genuine and effective such a conversion could have been, a question that the poem’s modern readers have been particularly keen to ask. Christine Chism, for one, argues that “the past is transformed by a cosmetic reversal more gestural and linguistic than essential; the temples are ‘turned’ but not fundamentally altered, ‘clansyd’ but not reconstructed.”35 The poem’s description of Augustine’s conversion, however, hews closely to the account given in Bede’s eighth-century Historia Ecclesiastica, a text that treats the same event without the skepticism and anxious uncertainty that Chism locates in the alliterative poem. Most provocative is Bede’s report of a message from Pope Gregory to Augustine and his fellow ecclesiastics in which the pope advises that the pagan temples be left standing. The temples of the idols in that nation [England] ought not be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God.36

Later in the same message, Gregory argues that preserving the external form of the pagan temples will make the conversion of the Saxons more rather than less effective: The nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.37

Such advice is followed to the letter by Saint Erkenwald’s Augustine, who quickly renames temples churches, cleanses them in Christ’s name, and replaces their idols with saints. The linguistic changes that Augustine makes, though swift and largely invisible, nonetheless simultaneously signify and allow for the deeper spiritual changes taking place within. Although Saint Erkenwald never mentions transubstantiation directly, the mechanism behind the conversions effected by Augustine finds a clear

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parallel in the mechanism of the orthodox Eucharist, a sacrament in which the subject of the body of Christ entirely replaces the subject of bread even as the accidents of bread, those physical signs that tell our eyes and mouths that bread is bread, remain. For its part, Augustine’s conversion “asserts a radical change from paganism to Christianity” even as it simultaneously “asserts material continuity from one state to the other”; it is a conversion that promises both total spiritual rupture and total physical stability.38 And like the priest performing the ritual of transubstantiation, the work that Augustine performs is mainly the work of sacramental speech. That the pagan temples are, externally, still pagan temples after Augustine has dubbed them churches is precisely the point; the consecrated pagan edifices become temples in accident only, buildings that contain the subject of churches within. The poem reinforces this subject/accident binary when it relates how Augustine “hurlyd owt hor ydols and hade hym in sayntes” (17). Here, the saint within the temple becomes the holy subject within the profane accident, the body within the bread, the physical sign of the otherwise invisible change that the speech act has engendered. The mechanism of change described in both Bede’s Historia and in the alliterative Saint Erkenwald clearly echoes the act of transubstantiation. While explicitly invoking baptismal conversion, the poem also evokes the language used to describe the Eucharist in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. When Saint Erkenwald relates how Augustine “turnyd temples þat tyme þat temyd to þe deuelle / And clansyd hom in Cristes nome and kyrkes hom callid” (15–16, emphasis mine), the poem employs a word frequently connected to orthodox descriptions of transubstantiation in Middle English treatises: turnyd. Moreover, by including that word in a hyperalliterative line—aaa/ax rather than the usual aa/ax—the poet actively uses the form of the poem to call this key term to the reader’s attention. As early as 1303, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne refers to the Eucharist as a sacrament in which the words of consecration cause “þe lykënes of bred and wyne, / Yn flesshe and blode to turne hit ynne.”39 Later, a mid-fifteenth-century translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis glosses the word “transsubstanciate” as “turned fro o kinde of substaunce to anothere.”40 Both of these instances suggest that “turned” was a common synonym for the more technical ecclesiastical term, but

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they are not alone in doing so. In his explicitly anti-Lollard Reule of Crysten Religioun, dated 1443, Reginald Pecock describes the sacrament of the Eucharist as “þe taking of breed and wijn .  .  . and þe blessing and halewing and turnyng of hem into cristis verry body and blood.”41 Similarly, in the early to mid-fourteenth-century translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the allegorical figure of Reason “turned . . . bred into quik flesh” and “wyn . . . into red blood”; a free translation of Grosseteste’s Chateau d’Amour from the same period explains that “Thurgh the vertue of cristes wordes of the sacrament / That the prest reherces at his messe with gode entent, / Brede in to cristes flescħ, & wyne in to his blode, / Sudanly is turned.”42 Most compellingly, an antiWycliffite sermon, probably delivered to a lay audience in London near the end of the fourteenth century, extols “þe vertew of þe wordes þat þe preest seis at þe masse, þat þe bred turneþ in-to Goddes [fleshe] and his blode.”43 The Erkenwald-poet also employs sacramental language in the phrase that emphasizes the primacy of Augustine’s speech act in the conversion of the pagan temples: “And chaungit cheuely hor nomes” (18). A sermon on the Lord’s Prayer dating to either the late fourteenth century or early fifteenth century relates how “ate þe bord, / þare changede bred to god alone, / þorw prestes wordes on þe auter stone,” while a manuscript of Peraldus’s Summa of Vice from the same period remarks, “þouȝ it seme wonderful and aȝeynes kynde þat brede turne into flesche and wynne into blode . . . , þat blessynge is above kynde, and of more myȝt, and chaungeþ þinge out of o kynde into anoþer.”44 Even as Saint Erkenwald narrates Augustine’s mass conversions of the sixth and seventh centuries, the poem’s linguistic register echoes contemporary language concerning the Eucharist.45 In “turnyng” the temples and “chaunging” the idols that dwell within them, Augustine performs much more than a simple “linguistic sleight of hand.”46 His conversion of those temples—his conversion of England itself—adumbrates the very sacrament that would, by the end of the fourteenth century, become the central and defining feature of the liturgy in England. Against this semantic and intertextual backdrop, the issue raised by the opening lines of Saint Erkenwald involves not just the validity of Augustine’s harried conversion of England but, more important, the very nature of the priest’s words in the sacrament of the Eucharist. More specifically,

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the poem seeks in its opening salvo to answer the two questions most crucial to the debate over the Eucharist, namely, (1) are the sacramental words effective, and (2), if so, do they do what the Church says they do: create the subject of Christ’s body within the accidents—and only the accidents—of bread? As I have already suggested, the Eucharistic terminology in the passage should allay doubt about the efficacy of Augustine’s mass conversion; to emphasize its point further, however, the poem moves from Augustine of Canterbury to his ecclesiastical successor and heir apparent, Bishop Erkenwald. This important line of descent asks us to understand Erkenwald as a kind of Anglo-Saxon Augustine, a figure whose confrontation and conversion of an individual pagan is foreshadowed by Augustine’s mass conversions centuries earlier. In fact, such a lineal relationship finds ample support outside the poem. The twelfth-century Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi— which, along with Bede’s Historia, provides much of our knowledge of the historical Bishop Erkenwald—opens with the conversion of England and the spread of Christianity throughout the nation: Like a radiant beam of sunlight was this Augustine, and the first to teach the true way of life in the see of the church of Canterbury. From Kent he in turn dispatched Mellitus, his comrade in the sacred struggle, to the country of the East Saxons, whose capital city, London, was situated on the river Thames. There King Ethelbert built a church in honor of Paul, the preacher to the Gentiles, and there the aforesaid Mellitus performed the office of bishop. And thus it came to pass that a certain small boy named Erkenwald, young in years but mature in mind, would hasten to hear the teaching of Bishop Mellitus.47

Like the alliterative poem, in which Erkenwald is described as the bishop “of þis Augustynes art” (33), the Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi posits a direct line of descent from Augustine to Erkenwald. While most editors of Saint Erkenwald gloss the phrase “þis Augustynes art” as “this Augustine’s district,” I propose that the phrase has the additional sense of “this Augustine’s art,” the techniques and principles of Augustine’s position, the tools of his salvific trade.48 Thus, Erkenwald’s confrontation and interrogation of the pagan corpse, lying so perfectly preserved in his splendid sarcophagus

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that he appears to have “sodanly slippide opon slepe” (92), becomes a more intimate reiteration of the work already performed by his spiritual predecessor. The poem’s readers are invited to judge the validity of Augustine’s earlier conversions by observing, in almost microscopic detail, the success of Erkenwald’s later one. The poem quickly establishes the efficacy of Bishop Erkenwald’s speech, as well as the role of the institutional church in authorizing it. Upon returning to London from Essex, Erkenwald “synge[s] þe heghe masse” (129) and prays for divine guidance in untangling the mystery presented by the corpse. Then, surrounding himself with the symbols of his ecclesiastical office, he approaches the open sarcophagus with “mony maȝti men and macers before hym” (143), “riche reuestid” (139) in priestly finery. Clearly, Bourdieu’s observation that “the use of language . . . depends on the social position of the speaker, which governs the access he can have to the institution, that is, to the official, orthodox, and legitimate speech” offers one interpretive entrée into the text here, at the very least revealing how the Erkenwald-poet preempts any imputations of Wycliffite Donatism that might be raised through the bishop’s inadvertant baptism of the pagan corpse.49 Indeed, it is only with the full weight of his institutionally sanctioned authority quite literally upon his shoulders that Erkenwald finally addresses the preserved pagan judge: Then he turnes to þe toumbe and talkes to þe corce, Lyftande vp his eghe-lyddes he loused suche wordes: “Now lykhame þat þer lies, layne þou no lenger; Sythen Jhesus has iuggit to-day His ioy to be schewyde, Be þou bone to His bode, I bydde in His behalue.” (177–81)

Though the passage notes that Erkenwald physically opens the corpse’s eyelids, the emphasis in these lines is most explicitly on the force of his language, on the words “loused” on behalf of Christ himself, the Word of God made flesh. The corpse confirms as much when he says, “þi bode is me dere. / I may not bot boghe to þi bone for bothe myn eghen” (193–94). It is Bishop Erkenwald’s words that have enabled the pagan judge to speak, his words that are, in the parlance of modern linguistics, “ontologically

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and causally prior” to the action.50 And while the utterance that reanimated the corpse is not connected to a specific sacrament per se, it is closely analogous to sacramental speech in that it is “bydde [bidden] in His behalue,” (181) filled with the authority of God’s Word itself. Erkenwald’s command to the pagan operates in much the same manner as the sacramental formulae we have already observed. Like the utterances “I folowe the, or elles I crystene þe, in the nome of / the fader & þe sone and the holy gost” and “hoc est corpus meum,” it effects change in the world into which it is uttered. Following the reanimation of the corpse, the poem recounts Erkenwald’s interrogation of the judge and the judge’s own self-revelation. Although this chapter focuses predominantly on the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, it is worth pausing to consider other sacramental aspects of this scene, specifically its confessional connotations. Like baptism and the Eucharist, auricular confession is a sacrament marked by the presence of necessary speech, both on the part of the sinner (who verbally enumerates sins) and, more especially, on the part of the confessor (who grants verbal absolution). Donning his liturgical, clerical vestments, Erkenwald attends to the judge’s story much as he might attend to the confession of a penitent; when the bishop at last does press the judge to speak about the state of his soul, the judge reveals that, righteous as he might have been on earth, he is nonetheless guilty of that Original Sin of “Adam oure alder þat ete of þat appulle / Þat mony a plyȝtles pepul has poysned for euer” (295–96). No matter that the noble judge, born many years before Christ, was never in the position to achieve Christian grace in his lifetime; like all sinners, he could not receive God’s mercy without “shrift of mouþ / to make to prest [his] synnis couþ / opinli ham to knaw.”51 Such is the hard line that Saint Erkenwald takes: in order for the judge to attain salvation, the spoken words of confession must precede the cleansing of his soul. As a response to Wycliffite arguments privileging the internal state of contrition over the externally directed practice of oral confession, Saint Erkenwald’s unwavering insistence on confession is yet another affirmation of orthodoxy. The judge’s de facto confession brings us back to the climactic scene itself: Erkenwald’s conditionally sacramental, tearfully orthodox,

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accidentally baptismal utterance. The efficacy of Erkenwald’s sacramental speech, established by the reanimation of the corpse and, to a lesser degree, Erkenwald’s role as confessor, is reconfirmed at the moment of christening. But to the challenges raised by Wyclif and the Lollards concerning the Eucharist, the orthodox baptism and the efficacious words of baptism themselves can only provide a partial response. As I have noted, Wyclif concedes that the sacramental words uttered by the priest during his performance of the Eucharist create the body of Christ within the host, that they create “veri goddis bodi in forme of breed.”52 What Wyclif denies is that the accidents of bread can exist in that same host if their subject has been wholly replaced by Corpus Christi. With this in mind, I want to suggest that the poem’s final gesture toward orthodoxy—its thematic and linguistic masterstroke—is that the baptismal process through which the pagan judge passes becomes a metaphor for the sacrament of the Eucharist itself, a formulation that allows the poem to strike at the heart of the Wycliffite attack on orthodox doctrine. The groundwork for this metaphor is laid with the event that precipitates the bulk of the narrative, the discovery of the sarcophagus in the foundation of Saint Paul’s. Initially, the poem lavishes a great deal of attention on the tomb’s materiality, on its “thykke ston thryuandly hewen” (47), its “gargeles . . . of gray marbre” (48), and the inscrutable “bryȝt golde lettres” (51) with which it is encrusted. When the lid is lifted, however, attention shifts to the body within, and the tomb is largely forgotten. Erkenwald is summoned, and, speaking in his capacity as bishop, he invests the ancient pagan with a kind of half-life, a state between the morbidity of the preserved corpse and the animated vivacity of Erkenwald himself.53 But in the end, it is only in the moment of the baptism—when Erkenwald laments to God the pagan’s lifelessness, speaks the baptismal formula, and baptizes the pagan’s face with his tears—that the judge lives, that he joins the bodies politic and ecclesiastic that Erkenwald oversees. It is at this moment too, “as sone as þe soul was sesyd in blisse” (345), that the body disintegrates. Just as in the process of transubstantiation, one subject has replaced the other: the subject of bread is annihilated and replaced with the life-giving body of Christ; the corpse of the heathen is annihilated and replaced with the newly christened and eternally living soul. It is significant, therefore,

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that the pagan should describe the experience of salvation in terms reminiscent of the Eucharist and even of the Last Supper itself: once “Hungrie in-wyt helle-hole” (307) and unable to join in the communion of heaven, the newly christened judge now reports, “Ryȝt now to soper my soule is sette at þe table” (338). What remains unchanged through all of this is the physical artifact of the tomb, the sarcophagus that contained the body of the judge and in which his miraculous transformation took place. Covered with inscrutable messages and golden, “roynyshe” (52) letters, the sarcophagus becomes a hollow signifier, the physical vessel that remains after the corpse within has been fundamentally and subjectively altered. Here, remaining behind after the transformation and, more crucially, the physical obliteration of its contents, is the accident without its subject, the logical impossibility that Wyclif and his followers sought so fervently to deny. If the moment of the judge’s conversion—the moment of the judge’s transubstantiation—is both an answer to the most dangerous of Lollard arguments and an affirmation of the Eucharist itself, the closing four lines of Saint Erkenwald stand as a testament to the communal power of that sacrament: Þen wos louynge oure Lorde wyt loves vp-halden, Meche mournynge and myrthe was mellyd to-geder; Þai passyd forthe in processioun and alle þe pepulle folowid And alle þe belles in þe burghe beryd at ones. (349–52)

The Eucharist performed critical social work in the later Middle Ages. It was, as Sarah Beckwith articulates, “the medium though which social conflict [was] often worked out in social rite, ritual and drama,” and it provided “a language through which the relationship of self to society [was] articulated on an individualized basis.”54 Interrogations into the sacrament, like those precipitated by Wyclif and his followers, thus threatened to undermine the Eucharist’s social and spiritual functions, to “[dissolve] the union of the faithful in the mystical body of Christ, the Church, and consequently the order of the earthly city.”55 Understood in these terms, the Eucharist becomes more than a sacrament that effects the salvation of the individual or even of the congregation; it becomes a sacrament that

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ensures the continuity and renewal of the church itself and that, in turn, allows for the existence of an orderly, civil society.56 In the conversion of the pagan judge, we witness the transformative potential of the sacrament for the individual, but in the conversion of the London citizenry from a “grete prece” (141) of agitated, nearly riotous citizens to the orderly “processioun” moving away from the site of the miracle, we see that potential writ large: Body from bread; Christian from pagan; Church from rabble; society from mob.57 Finally, in the very presence of the miraculous, Saint Erkenwald reveals the concordant civic body so menaced by the encroachment of Wycliffism. In so doing, the poem offers a glimpse, under the tolling bells of London, of the potential of Eucharistic community and the promise of sacramental orthodoxy fulfilled. Right and Truth, Law and Mercy By drawing on contemporary debates over efficacious language in the orthodox sacraments, Saint Erkenwald positions itself as a thoroughly anti-Wycliffite work, a poem with an aggressive, even polemical, orthodox agenda. It is in this capacity that the empty sarcophagus and the translated judge become the metaphorical embodiment of accidentia sine subjecto and operate in direct refutation of the Wycliffites’ most pernicious argument. But the sarcophagus and the pagan judge are also, quite literally, a sarcophagus and a pagan judge, two trespassers from the pre-Christian past suddenly and insistently brought into contact with a decidedly Christian present. Pulled from the earth into the living stream of history, they conspicuously recall the mytho-historical foundations of English nationhood and of English Christianity, thus transcending the poem’s immediate stance contra Lollardy and interrogating the fraught relationship between present and past and, more urgently, between Christianity and its pre-Christian antecedents.58 This hermeneutic and interpretive shift within the poem again centers on the efficacy and function of speech. Saint Erkenwald, as I will show, operates within a linguistic register that highlights fundamental disjunctions between the heathen judge and the seventh-century bishop, as well as between the judge’s New Troy and Erkenwald’s London. Those disjunctions

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in turn evoke the theologically loaded concepts of law and truth, concepts that not only undergird the medieval debate over righteous heathens but also inform medieval Christianity’s relationship to its closest relative, Judaism. By linking Lollardy, heathenism, and Judaism through the vehicle of the spoken word, Saint Erkenwald refutes new and threatening Wycliffite heresies. It works to assimilate those heresies into the familiar typological schema by which medieval Christianity defined itself. Richard Firth Green’s influential discussion of the word truth in late medieval England provides a point of departure for this analysis. Green argues that “in late fourteenth-century England trowthe was, in Raymond Williams’s sense of the term, a keyword,” a term that “had acquired a considerable range of meanings, that some of these meanings were felt to be new and difficult, and that the overlaps between them were complex and potentially ambiguous.” In fact, Green suggests that by the Ricardian period, truth had become “the archetypal keyword in English,” a profoundly multivalent term that found currency in four separate semantic fields—legal, ethical, theological, and intellectual—and whose meaning was both complicated and enhanced by these fields’ mutual interpenetration.59 Discussing the word truth in Piers Plowman, Frank Grady points to the sentence “Ne wolde neuere trewe god bote trewe treuthe were alloued” as evidence that Langland is “aware, and ready to exploit . . . the word’s overlapping senses and the permeability of the boundaries between them.”60 Similarly, the black knight in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess promises “trewly for to speke of trouthe” (999), and Genius tells Amans in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, “Som man, whan he most trewe appiereth, / Thanne is he forthest fro the trowthe” (1.1198–99), two more passages from fourteenth-century literature in which the semantic possibilities of truth are fully developed. In Saint Erkenwald, however, the word trouthe appears only three times and its cognate trew once. More important than the word’s sporadic appearance, the Erkenwald-poet consciously denies the semantic density of truth that Grady describes in Langland’s work and that we find in other late medieval poetry. In light of works like Piers Plowman and Confessio Amantis that so enthusiastically exploit the slipperiness of the word’s

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multiple semantic registers, the most notable feature of truth in Saint Erkenwald is its stability and utter directness: truth in Saint Erkenwald always signifies theological truth—the truth of the Word of God. The word truth first appears in the poem when Saint Augustine “prechyd . . . þe pure faythe and plantyd the trouthe / And conuertyd alle þe communnates to Cristendame newe” (13–14). Here, the word clearly operates in the theological sense: the “trouthe” that Augustine plants is the truth of Christianity, the truth of the gospels. The word next appears when the as-yet-unbaptized heathen judge explains to Erkenwald how his body was preserved by God, who “loues al þe lawes lely þat longen to trouthe” (268).61 Here, trouthe is more ambiguously associated with ideas of right and law. Insofar as it is still linked with God’s Word and his capacity for Christian mercy, however, trouthe in this passage is still grounded in the theological semantic field, still associated with the trouthe planted by Augustine. The theological sense of the word is further developed when the judge, now saved by Erkenwald’s baptismal tears, tells the bishop that his spirit has entered “into þe cenacle solemply þer soupen alle trew” (336). Particularly when we consider the baptismal and Eucharistic scene that we have just witnessed—as well as the de facto Corpus Christi procession that follows it—those “trew” to which the judge refers are clearly the christened faithful, the true followers of Christ.62 In fact, only when Bishop Erkenwald asks the corpse to speak and to “councele [conceal] no trouthe” (184) about his identity and his past does the word function primarily in an ethical rather than a strictly theological sense. But even in this instance, where trouthe seems to pertain to human veracity rather than to divine truth (e.g., “tell the truth!”), the word carries theological overtones: only in the context of his larger, Christian invocation does the bishop ask the corpse to be truthful—“Be þou bone to His bode, I bydde in His behalue. / As He was bende on a beme quen He His blode schedde” (181–82).63 By arguing that truth carries a relatively limited range of meaning in Saint Erkenwald, I contend that the semantic consistency of the word is in keeping with the unflagging orthodoxy of the work itself and with its profound investment in salvation. Just as the “trouthe” planted by Augustine of Canterbury allows for the process of conversion we see in the poem’s opening lines, the unconcealed “trouthe” of the judge’s confession and

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God’s own love of “trouthe” lay the foundations for the redemption of the virtuous pagan. Ultimately, the poem asserts that the “trew” are the only souls for whom the great feast of heaven is available (340). In John 14:6, Christ tells Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.”64 It is this biblical truth, this divine and transcendent truth, that forms the core of Saint Erkenwald’s rigid eschatology. And it is also to this truth that the poem demands the judge submit. Whereas Piers Plowman, Book of the Duchess, and Confessio Amantis locate in the concept of truth questions that demand to be answered, Saint Erkenwald understands truth as the divine answer to all questions. Of course, Saint Erkenwald does still pose a question, the same one that lies at the heart of the righteous heathen problem itself and articulated most urgently by the preserved judge himself: “Maȝty maker of men, thi myghtes are grete— How myȝt þi mercy to me amounte any tyme? Nas I a paynym vnpreste þat neuer thi plite knewe, Ne þe mesure of þi mercy ne þi mecul vertue, Bot ay a freke faitheles þat faylid þi laghes Þat euer þou Lord wos louyd in?—Allas þe harde stoundes!” (283–88)65

Initially, the complaint that the judge registers to God is explicitly—and wrenchingly—personal: “How might Your mercy be made sufficient for me?” His indignation at being left in the “helle-hole” (291) of limbo despite his evident righteousness is couched in terms that emphasize both God’s absolute authority to grant mercy and the judge’s inability, as a virtuous, pre-Christian pagan, to receive it. But the judge soon moves beyond these strictly personal questions and widens his rhetorical focus from “I” to “we.” Noting that he was damned because “Adam oure alder . . . ete of þat appulle / Þat mony a plyȝtles pepul has poysned for euer” (295–96), the heathen asks, Quat wan we wyt oure wele-dede þat wroghtyn ay riȝt, Quen we are dampnyd dulfully into þe depe lake And exilid fro þat soper so, þat solempne fest Þer richely hit arne refetyd þat after right hungride? (301–4)66

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Speaking now for all those unsaved souls who lived before “Crist suffride on crosse and Cristendome stablyde” (2), the judge proffers his central question: why wasn’t “wele-dede þat wroghtyn ay riȝt” sufficient to engender the mercy of God? Because the judge “suggests the possibility of a whole cohort left behind at the Harrowing,” he necessarily questions the very nature of salvation and the inherent justice of God’s authority.67 Riȝt [right] is an important term here, both in the passage quoted above and in Saint Erkenwald as a whole. In fact, the word right or one of its cognates is used no fewer than thirteen times over the course of the poem, twelve times by the judge and once by Bishop Erkenwald.68 These frequent appearances become even more startling when we consider that all of them fall within only one hundred lines—approximately one third of the poem. And if such a concentration alone does not make right a keyword in the sense suggested by Green and Williams, that concentration nonetheless helps to render right “a strong, difficult and persuasive word” and shows it to be one that the Erkenwald-poet wishes to interrogate. Moreover, within the poem itself, the word right acquires “a considerable range of meanings” that are “complex and potentially ambiguous.”69 Just as the Erkenwaldpoet consciously underdevelops the semantic potential of truth in order to emphasize the poem’s absolutist theology, he similarly overdevelops the word right and to the same ends. Right rather than truth is Saint Erkenwald’s keyword. By probing the foundations of the word right, the poem articulates the questions that its absolutist understanding of truth answers. The nine primary meanings that the Middle English Dictionary (MED) delineates for the word right can be linked heuristically to the four categories that Green identifies in his analysis of truth: legal, ethical, intellectual, and theological.70 The largest of these semantic groups is the legal category, in which right signifies a rule of conduct or law (MED, def. 3). Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibee” illustrates this sense when Prudence counsels Melibee to “venge you after the order of right; that is to seyn, by the lawe and noght by excesse ne by outrage” (VII 1529). In the legal sense, right can also be a judgment or sentence (4), a legal claim or entitlement (5 and 6), or a duty or obligation (7). Chaucer’s monk, for example, relates how Darius occupied the throne of Belshazzar even though he “hadde neither right ne lawe” (VII 2238). In the second semantic category—the

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ethical—right refers to that which is morally right (1). It also signifies the abstract notions of justice and equity (2) and, in doing so, overlaps somewhat with its legal uses. Chaucer’s judge Apius, presiding over a fraudulent case to determine the paternity of Virginius’s daughter, darkly exploits this ambiguity when he tells Virginius, “Thou shalt have al right, and no wrong heere” (VI 174). The third category of meaning falls within what Green would call the intellectual semantic field (8). In Cleanness, Balthazar promises Daniel great reward if he “redes . . . by ryȝt”—if he reads correctly—the words written by a monstrous hand.71 The fourth category of meaning—the theological sense of the word— is the category that the MED develops least, a fact that becomes important when we consider the uses of the word in Saint Erkenwald. In the theological category, the MED notes only that right is an orthographic variant of the modern word rite: “er ye have youre right of hooly chirche, / Ye may repente of wedded mannes lyf, / In which ye seyn ther is no wo ne stryf” (IV 1662–64). But even where the overt meaning of right falls into the legal, ethical, or intellectual semantic categories, the word often suggests a broader theological meaning. In Pearl, for example, the ghostly maiden tells the Dreamer, “Al is trawþe þat He con dresse / And He may do noþynk bot ryȝt,” a pairing of terms that suggests both right and truth to be firmly within God’s purview.72 Similar theological overtones are at play in Cursor Mundi, in which God strives to “Brynge mon into state of riȝt.”73 Here, a “state of riȝt” seems to refer to both a state of high human morality and a divinely imparted state of grace, a near synonym for what Saint Erkenwald signifies with “trew.” In these passages, right, to be sure, may not function as a denotative synonym for theological truth, but the theological connotations of the word simmer beneath its overt legal, ethical, and intellectual meanings. Both as a word and as a concept, right implies and even invokes, but is not equal to, theological truth. Indeed, it has a markedly different relationship to the divine than does truth: in Saint Erkenwald, God’s truth is necessarily and unimpeachably right, but right—legally, ethically, and intellectually—is not always God’s truth. In its attempt to query the relationship between Christianity and its pre-Christian forebears, Saint Erkenwald continues its thematic exploration of right and truth by engaging both concepts on a semantic level. As I

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have already suggested, the poem quickly establishes truth as a theological absolute, a concept aligned strongly with both Augustine and Erkenwald and analogous to the Word of God itself. Saint Erkenwald aligns right, however, with the reanimated heathen thereby rendering it a far more fraught concept within the poem. The word first appears in the poem when the heathen provides an account of his judicial career: Þe folke was felonse and fals and frowarde to reule, I hent harmes ful ofte to holde hom to riȝt. Bot for wothe ne wele ne wrathe ne drede Ne for maystrie ne for mede ne for no monnes aghe, I remewit neuer fro þe riȝt by reson myn awen For to dresse a wrange dome, no day of my lyue. Declynet neuer my consciens for couetise on erthe, In no gynful iugement no iapes to make Were a renke neuer so riche for reuerens sake. Ne for no monnes manas ne meschefe ne routhe Non gete me fro þe heghe gate to glent out of riȝt, Als ferforthe as my faithe confourmyd my hert. (231–42)74

All three of these uses of right adhere to what I have previously described as the legal sense of the word, reasonable since the judge has built his reputation on his ability to adhere to the dictates of “reson” and to a specific legal code. Thus, we can understand riȝt in this passage to signify law, the law to which the judge attempts to hold his people and from which he never deviates. The judge’s speech also shows the Erkenwald-poet developing the ethical dimension of right. Not only does the heathen adhere to and enforce the law, he also holds himself and his community to an ethical and morally correct standard. I suggest, in fact, that the judge conflates the ethical and legal senses of right in these lines. For him the law is a moral certainty, an ethically derived code for managing a “felonse and fals and frowarde” people. Remember, it is because of his unswerving adherence to that legal and moral certainty—because the judge was “ryȝtwis and reken and redy of þe laghe” (245) and “rewardid euer riȝt” (256)—that the citizens of New Troy bury him as a king after his death.

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When the judge mentions that faith always “confourmyd [his] hert” (242) to adhere to right, he adds theological connotations to the legal and ethical semantic fields that dominate in his speech. As his dialogue with Bishop Erkenwald continues, the judge evokes such theological overtones more emphatically. For example, when Erkenwald asks if he was embalmed, the judge replies, “Nay bisshop . . . enbawmyd wos I neuer Ne no monnes counselle my clothe has kepyd vnwemmyd Bot þe riche kynge of reson þat riȝt euer alowes And loues al þe lawes lely þat longen to trouthe.” (265–68)

This explanation, which implies that human laws are associated with [“longen to”] God’s truth, implies a connection between right and God, between human law and divine truth. The judge reinforces that connection by explaining that God granted his miraculous preservation for his adherence to right: “if renkes for riȝt þus me arayed has / He has lant me to last þat loues ryȝt best” (271–72). In both passages the judge suggests that his legal righteousness equates not only to a moral or ethical right but also to a fulfillment of divine truth, that the laws he enforced in his lifetime were sanctioned by—even predicated on—the very will of God. Just as the poet’s use of right conflated the legal and ethical sense, the judge’s use of the word in these passages conflates legal right with theological truth. In the judge’s own formulations, right is law is morality is truth. Even Bishop Erkenwald himself seems momentarily to entertain this idea. When he finally commands the judge to speak of his soul—“sayes þou of þi saule” (273)—he uses the word right for the first and only time, apparently mindful of its troubling ambiguity and its full semantic multiplicity: Quere is ho [your soul] stablid and stadde if þou so streȝt wroghtes? He þat rewardes vche a renke as he has riȝt seruyd Myȝt euel forgo the to gyfe of His grace summe brawnche, For as He says in His sothe psalmyde writtes: “Þe skilfulle and þe vnskathely skelton ay to me.” (274–78)75

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As he interrogates the reanimated corpse, Erkenwald invokes at once the full range of meanings that the poem accords to right. In this context, for a “renke” to serve right seems to indicate that he serves the law, that he follows the moral and ethical dictates of his own conscience, and (particularly given Erkenwald’s apparent assumption of the heathen’s salvation) that he serves truth itself. Thus, in asking the pagan judge about the state of his soul, Erkenwald simultaneously questions the very meanings of right that he has just posited. Could right really mean all that it seems to mean? Is the earthly pursuit of law and morality tantamount to the pursuit of divine truth? Can it—does it—merit the same rewards? The answer, resoundingly, is “no”: in the confines of the poem’s eschatological straitjacket—where salvation must be granted by the institutional church and even the most virtuous of heathens molder “dulfully [in] þe depe lake”—law is not truth. But the semantic dilation of the word right itself—the implication that right is truth on both a linguistic and conceptual level—makes logical the incredulity of the judge at being left in limbo even though he “after right hungride” (304) throughout his life. The possibility that right could replace truth as a means of salvation underscores the threat that the righteous heathen poses to Erkenwald’s ecclesiastical authority, a threat that, in Chism’s words, “[afflicts] the bishop with an ambiguous torment” and causes him “misgivings about the necessity of his office.”76 However, the poem demonstrates—first by expanding the semantic possibilities of the word and then by circumscribing them— that right is a fluid and human construct, a watery reflection of divinely ordained truth. This is not to say that right is without its own palpable rewards: just as England’s pre-Christian inhabitants grant their “ryȝtwis” judge a scepter and inter him as a king, so too does God—“He . . . þat loues ryȝt best” (272)—preserve his physical body. But right lacks the absolute authority that characterizes truth in the poem. Unlike the “trouthe” planted by Augustine, right alone cannot lead to salvation. Right proves to be a kind of half-measure, perhaps even a half-truth; it is capable of leading to the judge’s corporeal preservation but not to spiritual salvation, capable of providing a legal and even moral structure for a pre-Christian English society

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but not the transformative sacramental community that we see in the poem’s closing lines. Significantly, when the heathen judge finally ascends to heaven and sups with the “trew,” he never once uses the word right to describe his soul or his actions.77 In moving from damned to saved—from limbo to paradise—the newly minted Christian learns that the authority of the Church and the sacraments themselves, those very things that have precipitated his belated salvation, are predicated not on right, not on law, not even on justice, but on a divine and explicitly Christian truth.

• I belabor the semantic implications of right and truth in Saint Erkenwald because the opposition that the poem presents between the two terms is indicative of the more overt collisions it dramatizes between judge and bishop and between England’s pre-Christian past and Christian present. Indeed, one of the poem’s most notable stylistic features is the careful series of parallels that it develops between Erkenwald and the heathen judge, parallels that extend in turn to Erkenwald’s London and the judge’s New Troy. When we first encounter Erkenwald in the poem, he is not only the bishop of Augustine’s “art” but the teacher of “the laghe” in “London toun” (34), a position adumbrated by the heathen’s career as judge of New Troy. Similarly, both figures are expected to maintain civic order within their communities: the judge presides with perfect jurisprudence over a “felonse and fals and frowarde” populace, while Erkenwald returns from a progress in Essex to quiet the “troubulle in þe pepul” precipitated by the heathen’s exhumation. These thematic correspondences between the two men also find more concrete expressions: the judge’s “rialle wedes” (77) hemmed with “glisnande gold” (78) and “mony a precious perle” (79) are quietly doubled as Erkenwald walks to the tomb “riche reuestid” (139) in splendid clerical finery, while the “semely septure” (84) that the judge holds in his coffin is repeated in Erkenwald’s procession of “maȝti men and macers” (143). This striking doubling extends even beyond the poem itself. The fictional judge’s “ferly faire toumbe” (45), whose discovery in the foundations of the city’s “New Werke” precipitates the actions of the poem, will ultimately find its successor in St. Erkenwald’s own shrine, located in a place of architectural and spiritual focus in the real Saint Paul’s

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Cathedral.78 In fact, many critics believe that the increased veneration of Erkenwald’s shrine in the late fourteenth century provided the occasion for the poem’s composition.79 As Saint Erkenwald sets up these overt, even ham-fisted, parallels, it also frustrates them at critical points in the text. Given the questions of linguistic efficacy that the poem raises, many of those critical moments, not surprisingly, involve the speech acts of the two men. I have already discussed, in the context of the poem’s immediate response to the Lollard threat, the unquestionable efficacy of Erkenwald’s spoken utterances. By intoning a command “in His [God’s] behalue” (181), Erkenwald reinvests the preserved heathen with life and compels him to reveal his history; by uttering the divinely sanctioned baptismal formula “and not one grue lenger” (319), the bishop effects not only the salvation of the reanimated judge but also a miracle tantamount to that of transubstantiation. Such powerful performative speech acts reflect Erkenwald’s position as a representative of the orthodox church. The authority of his words is predicated on the authority of the Word of God and the Christian faith. In other words, the efficacy of his speech is a linguistic manifestation of Bishop Erkenwald’s relationship to truth. By comparison, the speech acts of the pagan judge, a figure whose affinities lie with right rather than truth, are marked not by their inherent performativity but rather by their inability to effect the kinds of change brought about by Bishop Erkenwald. Compare, for example, the heathen judge’s attempts to bring about civic order to the Corpus Christi tableau that concludes the poem. In spite of a long career in which he was never known to “dresse a wrange dome” (236), the righteous heathen proved unable to control his “felonse and false and frowarde” (231) subjects. As the judge himself reports, the citizens of New Troy were largely unaffected by his unfailingly right “domes,” responding to them with “mede” (234), “meschefe” (240), and “manas [menace]” (240). Unlike Bishop Erkenwald, who engenders civic order in London with a single prayer, the judge cannot bring about such an ideal society in his own time, even over the course of “more þen fourty wynter[s]” (230) of justly executed verdicts. His final plea for salvation similarly illustrates the judge’s verbal impotence. Despite his well-founded and emotionally

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persuasive complaint, the heathen cannot speak himself into heaven. Bishop Erkenwald, however, delivers the judge from limbo with a baptismal speech act uttered in the conditional, a performative that is not even intended to be performative. Such comparisons reinforce the fact that within Saint Erkenwald, the efficacy of spoken language—the ability to utter a successful performative—is defined by the speaker’s relationship to the Church, by submission to Christian truth rather than adherence to right and law. It is, then, their relative relationships to right and truth that separate the judge’s unproductive speech acts from the bishop’s efficacious ones. But those speech acts in themselves are also emblematic of a larger division within the poem, similarly suggested by the poem’s discourse of right and truth: the division between Old Law and New Law, between Mosaic justice and Christian mercy. This point has been articulated by a few of the poem’s earlier readers. Arnold Davidson posits that Saint Erkenwald presents competing visions of “God’s power and God’s justice” and of “God’s mercy, which is proved most by Christ’s crucifixion,” while Lester Faigley reads the heathen primarily “as a representative of the Old Law” and regards Bishop Erkenwald “as a stand-in for Christ, sharing in Christ’s unique priesthood and continuing Christ’s priestly ministry in linear time.”80 More recently, this typological reading has fallen somewhat out of favor. William Kamowski, for one, claims that “the attempt to identify one or another virtue of character with either the Old or New Law distracts from the more intricate relationship the poem illustrates between justice and mercy.”81 I would argue, however, that the tangible means by which the Erkenwald-poet connects right to the pagan judge and truth to Bishop Erkenwald, particularly through the relative efficacy of their respective speech acts, makes Kamowski’s claim difficult to sustain. The poem insists upon the heathen’s identity as a man of law, an archetypal figure whose strict adherence to justice consistently overrules his sense of mercy, even “to [his] fader, þaghe felle hym be hongyt” (244). Saint Erkenwald goes to equal lengths to show its eponymous bishop, weeping with pity for the judge’s tortured soul, as a figure of mercy whose inadvertent baptism both fulfills and supersedes the hard-line legalistic precepts to which the judge is subject.

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The intricacy that Kamowski locates in the poem’s treatment of right and truth resides not in the respective identification of the characters with Old and New Law but in the vexing fate of the judge, in his thousand years of suffering and his belated salvation. On the one hand, the heathen is subject to the same strict adherence to rote legal dogma that he himself displayed in New Troy as a judge of the Old Mosaic Law. His fate, even in the time of Christ, is clearly predicated on a heightened idea of justice rather than mercy. Erkenwald, too, must submit to the legalistic exigencies of the judge’s damnation, and the unflagging necessity of his Christian baptism is predicated on a hard-line orthodoxy that, in its lack of Christian mercy, is as suggestive of an Old Testament ethos as it is of a New Testament one. On the other hand, the fate of the judge is not just; rather, it seems to transcend any reasonable ideal of human justice. In this respect, the judge’s fate is exemplary of the New Law. Indeed, the mercy of the Christian God—which, as the poem reminds us, is most fully evinced in the suffering of Christ on the cross—must be understood apart from both justice and right. As unjust as it might seem to those assembled in wonder before the sarcophagus—as unjust as it seems to the tearful Bishop Erkenwald himself—the mercy of the Christian God is not subject to human understandings of justice. It functions beyond the justice and morality that informs human law. I have used the term Mosaic to describe the heathen’s Old Law, suggesting that the heathen judge is, in some sense, a Jew. Saint Erkenwald is emphatically vague about England’s pre-Christian faith, alluding to “Þe synagoge of þe Sonne” (21) in the same polytheistic breath with which it refers to “appolyn” (19), “Mahon” (20), “Jubiter and Jono” (22), and even “Sathanas” (24). Nonetheless, the poem is so self-evidently invested in the opposition of right and truth as Old and New Law respectively that it all but forces us to consider the relationship between Christianity and its most immediate antecedent. With this in mind, it is important to note that those references to “appolyn” and “Sathanas” that might seem to discourage readers from identifying the judge as a Jew could also serve to suggest it. In an influential monograph, R. I. Moore discusses the belief, common in medieval Christian thought, that “a special association [existed] between the Devil and the Jews” and details the widespread belief that Jews were skilled

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in sorcery and other pagan rites.82 Other critics have demonstrated that many medieval Christians believed there to be an affinity between Jews and Muslims “in matters of law and ideology,” a belief that might explain the reference to “Mahoun” in Saint Erkenwald’s account of Augustine’s conversions.83 Finally, simply by rededicating “Þe synagoge of þe Sonne . . . to oure Lady” (21) and enacting a Eucharistic transformation of heathen judge into saved Christian, the poem necessarily invokes the theory of supersession that defined for medieval Christians the position of Judaism vis-à-vis Christianity. Thus, in addition to its baptismal and Eucharistic concerns, Saint Erkenwald also displays a distinctively typological strain of thought, a conviction that “persons, events or institutions of the past prefigure and connect with persons, events or institutions of a later period, the second encompassing or fulfilling the first.”84 In fact, the poem presents us with countless (and sometimes anachronistic) layers of typology: Apollo to Adam to “Mahon” to Christ; Temple to Synagogue to Church; Pagan to Jew to Lollard to Christian; Brutus to Hengist to Gregory to Augustine; Bretons to Saxons to New Trojans to Londoners; pagan judge to Christian bishop. In these typological eddies of half-imagined history, Saint Erkenwald finds some of its most thematically fertile ground. Recent scholarship on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the Middle Ages has much to tell us about the pagan judge in Saint Erkenwald and his relationship to the Christian tradition that he confronts. This is particularly true of critical considerations of Augustine of Hippo’s doctrine of Jewish witness, a doctrine that was still current in the fourteenth century and that remained important to Christian identity well beyond the Middle Ages. As Jeremy Cohen writes, Augustine’s doctrine was a key feature in the development of medieval and early modern anti-Judaism: Augustine argued that God preserved them [the Jews] for the sake of the Church, so that in adhering to the Old Testament they might witness the truth of and historical basis for christological prophesy, and so that they might ultimately accept the implications of this prophesy by converting to Christianity at the end of days. . . . The dispersion and derision of the Jews, if insured by the regnant Church, would both alleviate the

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problem of the Jewish encroachments upon Christianity and enhance the value of their survival—by emphasizing the deplorable wretchedness of their error.85

The purpose that Augustine prescribes for Jews is closely analogous to the purpose that Saint Erkenwald prescribes for the reanimated judge. Consigned by God to limbo and, as Peter the Venerable might suggest, “preserved in a life worse than death,” the pagan judge has seen the Harrowing of Hell and the promise of humankind’s redemption.86 He recalls with vivid detail the “þe blode of [Christ’s] body vpon þe blo rode” (290), and he relates to those still living the unending hunger of damnation. Brought forth from the past and set among the living, the ancient judge stands witness to the miracles of Christ’s sacrifice and the truth of Christian doctrine. To the Christians gathered nervously at the mouth of the tomb, he also reifies the urgency and necessity of their own faith: his life-in-death suffering becomes a testament to his adherence to the Old Law; his eventual salvation speaks of his acceptance of the New. The judge embodies “Christianity’s claim to validity,” a validity that “hinged on the cessation of the ceremonial laws of Moses and their replacement by—or more precisely, their symbolic fulfi llment in—the provisions of the New Testament.”87 Whatever the presumed identity of his shadowy “paynym” faith, the reanimated judge fills the appointed typological position determined for Jews in the Middle Ages. Saint Erkenwald is not alone among Middle English alliterative verse in interrogating the doctrine of Jewish witness. Prophetic Jews feature as guardians of Jerusalem in the Wars of Alexander, and Langland’s Piers Plowman shows Jews functioning both as precursors of Christianity and as living testaments to its truth.88 Among the alliterative poems of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, questions of Jewish witness are most forcefully considered in the Siege of Jerusalem, a work that considers the fraught relationship between Christianity and Judaism through the manifestly brutal lens of Titus and Vespasian’s first-century assault on the city. Just as the pagan judge stands witness to the truth of Christian doctrine in Saint Erkenwald, so too do the citizens of Jerusalem in Siege stand witness to the destruction that Christ foretold in the Gospel of Luke:

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“For the days shall come upon thee, and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and straiten thee on every side, and beat thee flat to the ground, and thy children who are in thee: and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone: because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.”89 It is this very Christological prophesy that the poem so energetically and so horrifically enacts, revealing its terrible ramifications both for the city (“no ston in the stede stondande alofte, / Morter ne mude-walle bot alle to mulle fallen”) and all the more so for its inhabitants (“Myght no man stande on the stret for stynke of ded corses. / The peple in the pavymeny was pité to byholde / That were enfamyned and defeted whan hem fode wanted”).90 The Siege of Jerusalem, among other late medieval texts, draws upon an Augustinian tradition in which Jews exist within the semiimaginary space of “Christendom” only as the debased symbols of Christ’s sacrifice, as reminders of the unquestionable truth of the Christian faith.91 If the doctrine of Jewish witness suggests parallels between Saint Erkenwald’s pagan judge and the typologically imagined Jew of the Christian Middle Ages, the emphasis that the poem itself places on Erkenwald’s successful performative speech acts and the judge’s unsuccessful ones both confirms and extends these parallels.92 We have seen how Erkenwald’s highly efficacious speech links the bishop to an explicitly Christian ideal of truth and to the institutional Church itself. As a pre-Christian “lede of þe laghe” (200), the judge is similarly linked to a cultural tradition that understood Jews to be “the living letters of biblical law,” repositories of the foundational Mosaic precepts that Christ’s New Law both fulfilled and superseded.93 Like the pagan judge, “the Jews preserve the literal sense, they represent it, and they actually embody it—as book bearers, librarians, living signposts, and desks, who validate a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament.”94 Unwavering in his adherence to “þe riȝt” and “Enioynyd in gentil lawe” (216), the reanimated heathen is himself the Old Law reanimated, both a manifestation of it and a slave to its “literal sense.” And though the invocations of Bishop Erkenwald allow him to speak, the judge is finally identified with the inscribed letter rather than the spoken word, an identity that is underscored by the inefficacious nature of his spoken utterances.

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The connection between the pagan judge and the written word returns us once again to the image of the sarcophagus, specifically to the “bryht golde lettres” (51) that embellish its border. In the Middle Ages, Jews were frequently considered to have a broad knowledge of languages, and a recent study of medieval Jewish communities confirms that “many Jewish boys, and some girls as well, learned to read, whereas among Christians . . . reading was the province of an elite class.”95 Moreover, in the minds of many medieval Christians, their continued adherence to the precepts of Mosaic law increasingly bound Jews to the written word.96 Abrogard of Lyon, a ninth-century bishop who excoriated the Jews for their supposed belief “that the letters of their alphabet exist eternally and that . . . the law of Moses was written many eons before the world came into being,” adumbrates fourteenth-century criticism of Jews, who were believed to “holden the bible after the lettre.”97 The close association of Jews and the written word is also suggested in alliterative poems contemporary with Saint Erkenwald. In the Wars of Alexander, for example, the prophesies of the Jews are tied directly to their written texts. And Iaudus of Ierusalem, þe Iewis [fadir], Bringis out a brade buke & to þe berne reches, Was plant full of prophasys playnely all ouire, Of þe doctrine of Daniell & of his dere sawis. Þe lord lokis on [a lefe] & [i]n a l[yne] fyndis How þe gomes out of Grece suld with þaire grete miȝtis Þe pupill out of Persye purely distroy; And þat he hopis sall be he, & hertly he ioyes.98

In the context of the poem, the prophesy itself—both in its content and its accuracy—is unsurprising; such prophesies are ubiquitous in Wars and help to propel Alexander’s relentless march East. But the prophesy of the Jews is unique in that it is written in a “broad book,” not simply spoken by a prophetic figure. Even in the vast and heterogeneously populated world of the Wars of Alexander, Jews are marked by their adherence to the written word. A far more threatening perspective on Jewish language contemporary with Saint Erkenwald can be seen in Mandeville’s Travels, a work that

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circulated throughout the late Middle Ages in a bewildering number of languages and redactions. In a jarring exception to his generally tolerant approach to non-Christian peoples, Mandeville describes the Jews who inhabit Gog and Magog as murderous comrades of the Antichrist, noting with anxious repetition that they “conen no langage but only hire owne þat noman knoweth but þei” and that “þei conen no maner of langage but Ebrew.” He hypothesizes that Jews learn their enigmatic language “in hope þat whan the oþer Iewes achull gon out, þat þei may vnderstonden hire speche & to leden hem in to cristendom for to destroye the cristene peple,” a supposition that renders the Jews’ mysterious alphabet “a tool of threat and conspiracy against Christians.”99 And while it might be objected that Mandeville discusses the “lettres þat the Iewes vsen” without waxing virulently anti-Semitic in an earlier portion of his book, his repeated injunctions against Jews for their role in the Passion and their resistance to Christian teachings underscore the menace with which he regards Jews and, by extension, their written language.100 As one recent critic has suggested, Jews are represented by Mandeville “with a paradoxically matterof-fact hostility that borders on paranoia.”101 Mandeville’s discussion of the Jews’ conspiratorial language and its use as a tool of the Antichrist represent the apex of Mandeville’s anti-Judaic attitude. The Jews of Gog and Magog are not themselves recreated in Saint Erkenwald’s fair-minded heathen judge, but Mandeville’s “Ebrew” is closely analogous to the writing on that judge’s sarcophagus: Bot roynyshe were þe resones þat þer on row stoden. Fulle verray were þe vigures þer auisyde hom mony, But alle muset hit to mouthe and quat hit mene shulde: Mony clerkes in þat clos wyt crownes ful brode Þer besiet hom a-boute noȝt to brynge hom in wordes. (52–56)102

Inscrutable, unpronounceable and incomprehensible, the figures on the casket echo Mandeville’s “Ebrew” as well as the mystery presented by the corpse himself. But unlike that corpse, whose story is ultimately revealed by Erkenwald himself, the words on the casket remain untranslated. They are literally unspeakable, words that cannot be brought to mouth. The

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unrest that those radically unknowable and unspeakable words foment within Erkenwald’s London hints at the more threatening forms of destruction threatened in Mandeville’s account. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas posits that “all the differences assigned between the Old and New Laws”—between the laws of the Jews and the laws of the Christians—“are gathered from their relative perfection and imperfection”: Now the end of every law is to make men righteous and virtuous . . . and consequently the end of the Old Law was the justification of men. The Law, however, could not accomplish this; but it foreshadowed it by certain ceremonial actions and promised it in words. And in this respect, the New Law fulfi ls the Old by justifying men through the power of Christ’s Passion. . . . And in this respect, the New Law gives us what the Old Law promised.103

In the context of Saint Erkenwald’s typological sensibility, the reanimated heathen judge exemplifies this Thomistic vision of the Old Law, of the written commandments ultimately fulfilled and superseded by the New Law of Christ. The relative impotence of the Old Law—its inability to accomplish “the justification of men” that Aquinas describes—finds an analogue in the judge’s own verbal inefficacy, in his failure to exact his salvation or to bring about the harmonious social order in New Troy through performative utterance.104 It is left for Erkenwald himself, a figure aligned with the New Law of Christian truth, to do both of these things. Invested with the authority of Christ’s word and the sacramental power of his own voice, Erkenwald promises to complete and surpass the unfulfilled promise of the heathen.

• As a symbol of Old Law and a half-living vestige of England’s pre-Christian past, the exhumed judge fills the Augustinian function of the Jew in the medieval Christian imagination, a figure who has both suffered and witnessed, who can attest to the truth of the Christian prophesy, and who offers a dire warning against ignoring the true Church. That implicit warning is

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one way in which the typological dimensions of Saint Erkenwald circle back around to the more specifically anti-Lollard tropes that I discussed in the first part of this chapter. Indeed, the very premise of Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness—that the Jews’ “biblical tradition offers cogent proof of Christian doctrine, enabling the Church to respond effectively to its enemies”—is no less applicable to Saint Erkenwald’s pagan judge than to Jews themselves.105 The suffering of the pagan judge suggests not only the fate of those, like him, who sadly could not be Christians but also (and a fortiori) the fate of those born after Christ who would choose not to be Christians. In this way, the poem’s virtuous heathen cum Jew is aligned with the fourteenth-century Lollard; the typological discourse of the poem allows us to see both Jews and Lollards as taking the same counterproductive position in regard to the true Christian faith, as regressing from the spiritual fulfillment promised by the Church. On a fundamental level, however, the connections drawn between Lollards and Jews in the later Middle Ages are also grounded in the distinctions I have examined above between the literal (read “written”) word of the Old Testament—understood to be dead and inert—and the word of the New Testament—alive, efficacious and transformative, spoken and present. Despite their propensity for preaching and for glossing the scriptures, Lollards were frequently excoriated for their strict adherence to the literal text of the Bible and for their efforts to make it widely available through a program of translation. Ruth Nissé discusses how the early fifteenthcentury Dominican Thomas Palmer “associated the Lollard translators, in their insufficient understanding of Scripture, with the ‘carnal’ and stubbornly literal understanding of the Jews and the disciples who ‘went back’ from spirit to flesh.”106 Similarly, the virulently anti-Lollard bishop Reginald Pecock derided Lollards as “Bible men” and argued that the very root of their heresy was in “over myche leenyng to scripture, and in such maner wise as it longith not to holi scripture for to receyve.”107 More generally, the emphasis that Lollards placed on the primacy of written scripture suggests the damning adherence to the literal sense that also characterized popular medieval conceptions of Jews. The heathen judge’s acceptance of the living word of God—his salvation through the efficacious speech of baptism and his recognition of the truth of the orthodox church—provides more than

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just proof of his righteousness; it also provides a pointed rebuke to Lollards and other heretics who, unlike the pre-Christian judge, have the ability to accept this truth before their death but actively choose to oppose it. Saint Erkenwald’s typological and anti-Lollard discourses, suggested by the distinctions between the bishop’s efficacious spoken words and the dead letters on the pagan judge’s sarcophagus, finally coalesce around the central miracle of the poem, the sacrament of the Eucharist itself. The Eucharist frequently found its way into the discourse surrounding Jews in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a discourse which often assumed a decidedly anti-Judaic cast. Jews on the continent were regularly accused of abusing the consecrated host in both mockery and reenactment of the Passion, and many more were murdered in the wake of such accusations by overzealous Christians. Even in England, where Jews had been officially expelled since 1290, stories of host desecration were commonplace, their increasing prevalence highlighting “a central strand within the culture, that which placed the Eucharist at the heart of a system which made the supernatural efficacious.”108 The “frontal attacks” launched against the Eucharist by Wyclif actually made such host desecration narratives more important to the institutional Church because they both “permitted [Christians] to project on to Jews their doubts about transubstantiation” and “served to bolster popular belief in the miracle of transubstantiation.”109 Thus, the resurgence of host desecration stories that we see in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can be at least partially attributed to a cultural perception connecting Lollards and Jews, a perception that was itself reinforced by Lollard denials of the Eucharistic miracle. Such connections are fully manifest in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, an idiosyncratic host desecration drama from the mid-fi fteenth century that ends not with the death of the Jewish desecrators—the typical outcome of such narratives—but with their conversion. Its “humane” ending notwithstanding, the play is still an exceptionally bloody spectacle. On purchasing a consecrated wafer from a corrupt Christian, a group of Jews led by the wealthy merchant Jonathas reenact the passion upon the host— by stabbing it, nailing it to a pillar, plunging it into boiling oil, and baking it in an oven—in order to determine if it really is “God, þat ys full mytheti, in a cake.”110 At every turn, the host reveals itself to be divine, bleeding

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copiously in response to the Jews’ abuse and causing Jonathas to “renneth wood, with þe Ost in hys hond.”111 In the play’s climactic moment, the oven in which Jonathas and his cronies bake the host begins to “ryve asunder and blede owt at þe cranys,” at which point the image of the risen Christ appears and speaks to the Jews, engendering their conversion.112 Because of the Jews’ fervent denial of the Eucharistic miracle in the Play of the Sacrament, a number of critics have suggested that Jonathas and his co-conspirators function as stand-ins for Lollards, arguing that the play “is a careful, polemical answer to Lollard heresy, staunchly if somewhat ingeniously affirming the miracle of the Real Presence and the importance of the sacraments and defending the efficacy of the priesthood.”113 Ann Eljenholm Nichols has even shown the prevalence within the play of a “Lollard vocabulary to characterize the non-believing Jews,” particularly in the words used to refer to the Eucharist such as “cake” and “bread.” Eamon Duff y draws a direct comparison between the bloody spectacle of the Play of the Sacrament and the Legend of the Blood of Hailes, in which a chalice boils over with the blood of Christ when a Lollard priest enacts a heretical mass over it. Both works, Duff y argues, present “an aspect of the Eucharistic reality which was only presented to sin and unbelief, to those outside the household of faith”—to Jews as well as to Lollards.114 My point here is not that the Jews in the Play of the Sacrament should be read primarily as Lollards; the Jews are clearly meant to represent Jews and are repeatedly reinscribed as Jews by the play. However, the particular type of disbelief that the Play of the Sacrament ascribes to its Jews—their denial of the Eucharist and of the priest’s ability to engender “God, þat ys full mytheti” within the accidents of a wafer—is essentially identical to the patterns of disbelief ascribed to Lollards. And if the spectacularly bloody Play of the Sacrament seems a strange bedfellow for the ostensibly kinder and gentler Saint Erkenwald, the play’s strident defense of orthodox Eucharistic sacramentalism, its effort to absorb non-Christian others into the political and social fabric of a Christian society, and, most tellingly, its implicit anti-Lollard positions can also be understood as holding a dark mirror to the alliterative poem. The similarities between Saint Erkenwald and the Play of the Sacrament reveal how those anti-Lollard concerns are embedded within medieval understandings of the development

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of Christianity itself—within the model of supersession that defined Christian identity and history, and within archetypal divisions between Old and New Law. As typologically imagined forebear, as living embodiment of the written letter, and as long-suffering witness, Saint Erkenwald’s reanimated judge might finally be understood as a “virtual Jew.” I borrow the phrase from Sylvia Tomasch, who articulates how the figure of “‘the Jew’ was central not only to medieval English Christian devotion but to the construction of Englishness itself,” a national identity at least partially defi ned by the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290.115 The ensuing paradox—that “the Jew” was necessarily and centrally present in England even as Jews themselves were almost wholly absent—“perpetuated the presence of the ‘virtual Jew,’” a culturally constructed figure that performed the typological and cultural functions necessary to English Christian identity.116 Cultural production in fourteenth-century England was replete with the literary descendants of the virtual Jew: the host-desecrating Jews in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; the murderous Jews in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale”; the debased and victimized Jews of Siege of Jerusalem. The judge in Saint Erkenwald, of course, bears one important difference from all of these figures: he is never overtly inscribed as a Jew. Rather, he is a heathen, a Celt, a New Trojan, a pagan, a Briton. Perhaps, then, Saint Erkenwald’s British pagan is not a virtual Jew but virtually a Jew. This distinction, I think, is more than a glib bit of wordplay. Both Jewish absence and Jewish presence were problematic to fourteenth-century England, the former because “the Jew” was necessary to the construction of English Christian identity and the latter because Jews themselves were seen as anathema to English nationhood. Saint Erkenwald’s heathen can thus be understood as representing a way around the paradox created by the mutual necessity of Jewish absence and presence. The pagan, after all, fills the role of the Jew but resists concrete identification as a Jew. He supplies witness that supplants the witness of the absent Jew; he exemplifies, like the Jew, the inert letter of the law; he offers a native pagan forebear to English Christianity that renders the Jewish forebear unnecessary. In these respects, what the pagan judge offers Saint Erkenwald’s fourteenth-century readers is nothing less than an alternative

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to the typologically imagined Jew of the Middle Ages, the promise of an English Christianity that has always already superseded Judaism. A virtual Jew, virtually a Jew: the heathen judge becomes more than simply a reaffirmation of orthodoxy in the face of Wycliffism, more even than an attempt to assimilate novel Wycliffite heresies into a traditional and broadly understood typological structure. Rather, Saint Erkenwald’s righteous heathen becomes the literary extension of the expulsion of 1290, a poetic attempt to efface the Jewish past inherent in England’s fourteenthcentury Christian present.

4 Economies of Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve

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he perceived threat of Wyclifism, addressed during the Ricardian period by Saint Erkenwald, reached a new apex in the years following the Lancastrian ascension. Stoked by an insecure dynasty anxious to secure its place on the throne, fears that Lollardy would erode the sacramental community of the orthodox Church enabled the swift passage of De Haeretico Comburendo in 1401 and led to the promulgation of Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions in 1409. As convincingly documented by Nicholas Watson, the Constitutions not only quelled original theological thought but also encouraged the production of bland, religious texts that hewed to mainstream dogma, often consisting “of translations from Latin, AngloFrench, or Continental vernacular texts or else of compilations from earlier English material that deal cautiously with a narrow range of topics.”1 At first blush, Thomas Hoccleve’s fifteenth-century “The Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria” fits this bill perfectly. A loose redaction of poem now preserved in the Auchinleck manuscript, the work focuses on a French monk—the son of “a ryche man and a worthy” (23)—who recites the Ave Maria fift y times every day to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary.2 At the conclusion of one of his devotions, the Virgin appears to the Monk clad in a robe without sleeves. When the Monk asks the significance of her odd garment, Mary replies that he has made the robe for her himself: his incomplete prayers, it turns out, have generated her incomplete clothes. For Mary to have a full robe, the Monk must speak Our Lady’s Psalter in its entirety—one hundred and fift y Ave Marias punctuated at intervals of ten by a single Pater Noster. The Monk follows the

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extended prayer regimen, and the Virgin soon reappears “fresshly arraied and wel” (90) in a garment with full sleeves. She thanks the Monk for his improved devotion and, what’s more, promises to reward him “in this lyf present, / And in þat othir” (97–98). First, says the Virgin, the Monk will be chosen abbot of his monastery, where he will teach Our Lady’s Psalter and save many souls; later, at his death, he will ascend to eternal bliss at her side. Hoccleve himself provides the tale’s pat moral: all of us should “serueth our lady . . . [who] souffissantly qwytith euery deede” (122–23). The scant critical discourse surrounding Hoccleve’s “Monk Who Clad the Virgin” has tended to regard the poem as a straightforward paean to orthodox Christian devotion. Jerome Mitchell, for instance, sees it as a “characteristic expression of piety of the times,” while John Bowers argues more pointedly that the narrative is “implicitly anti-Lollard, since Wycliffites had insisted that it was better to say the prayer ‘Our Father’ in English without Mary’s mediation.”3 Both of these readings, however, overstate the orthodoxy of Hoccleve’s poem and of the devotional practice it describes. A forerunner of the modern rosary, the prayer cycle known as Our Lady’s Psalter was a radically abbreviated, spoken iteration of the Book of Psalms, one in which a simple series of Pater Nosters and Ave Marias substituted for the psalms themselves.4 Insofar as it provided a framework for lay devotion that reinforced the role of Mary as mediatrix, the regimen advocated by Hoccleve’s Monk adhered to the religious orthodoxy cited by Mitchell and Bowers. However, Our Lady’s Psalter also “shaped, and was shaped by, the demands of the laity for new, more individual and private forms of religious observance,” the same demands that promoted the spread of Lollardy in late medieval England and that engendered similar forms of heterodoxy on the continent.5 Thus, even if Our Lady’s Psalter could be linked to orthodox devotional practices, Hoccleve’s allusion to the prayer cycle raises a more complex range of associations than most readers have recognized. The critical oversimplification of the “Monk Who Clad the Virgin” is compounded by its relative marginalization within Hoccleve’s corpus. Anxious to cement Hoccleve’s beleaguered reputation as England’s first autobiographer, critics have naturally focused on the Privy Seal clerk’s

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putatively autobiographical works, either bracketing off the poet’s devotional lyrics from works such as La Male Regle and The Series or (more frequently) ignoring those lyrics altogether. Such a critical stance, I suggest, has led to a skewed vision of Hoccleve’s canon, one that fails to account for the idiosyncrasies of the religious lyrics or for the ways those lyrics adumbrate similar idiosyncrasies in Hoccleve’s secular works. With his influential monograph on Hoccleve’s work, Ethan Knapp is the exception that proves both of these critical rules. Knapp identifies an unusually “self-reflexive arrangement” between the Virgin Mary and the French monk; and while he asserts that “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” is essentially orthodox in substance, he acknowledges that Hoccleve’s poem moves “beyond most orthodox meditative exercises in its suggestion that the deeds of a man like the Monk might have a concrete significance in the reality of the Virgin’s life.”6 Moreover, Knapp observes that Hoccleve’s depiction of the Virgin as mediatrix resonates with the poet’s secular and autobiographical poetry, which conspicuously interrogates the practice of financial, rather than spiritual, intercession. I want to push Knapp’s observation of a “self-reflexive arrangement” in a different direction by redefining it specifically as an economy of speech.7 Hoccleve’s “Monk Who Clad the Virgin” develops a complex dynamic of exchange in which both supplicant and intercessor are locked into a mutually dependent relationship predicated on the causative potential of the spoken prayer, an economy that the Privy Seal clerk reiterates and redevelops throughout his devotional lyrics. Those lyrics in turn help to define similar patterns of reciprocity that permeate the secular poems, suggesting a discursive integrity that has not yet been recognized in Hoccleve’s poetic output, a common vision of verbal exchange that transcends the claustrophobia of the poet’s private turmoil and gestures toward the public work ascribed to the spoken word in the early fifteenth century. This connection is particularly strong in the five-poem cycle known as The Series, where the economic paradigms of speech that Hoccleve develops in his devotional lyrics prove instrumental both in defining his “wilde infirmite” (Series 1.40) and in understanding the means to social and psychological recovery that the poet proposes.

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Spoken Prayer, Philanthropic Giving, and Our Lady of Economic Increase Two thematic impulses—memory and self-reflexivity—coalesce in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” around the Ave Maria itself. Indeed, the poem is “founded on an act of memory, as the Monk . . . must learn the proper way to sing the Ave Maria.”8 That this learning takes place through repetition is significant in view of medieval models of memory: the repetition of the prayer becomes part of a process by which the Monk inscribes a particular set of mental images onto his mind, by which he creates for himself the “meticulous mental imaging . . . [that] is a feature of trained recollection.”9 In this respect, the Virgin’s appearance can even be understood as the physical manifestation of memory, the incarnation of the Monk’s own mental picture as created through disciplined, repetitive prayer. But beyond its mnemonic function, the spoken devotional is also at the center of the circular economic relationship between the Monk and Mary, a relationship in which the Monk’s performance demonstrably affects the Virgin’s physical condition even as the Virgin’s mediation demonstrably affects the Monk’s heavenly and earthly circumstances. Here is the self-reflexive arrangement that Knapp alludes to, “in which the agency of the intercessor and supplicant are curiously mixed”: the Monk needs the Virgin to provide him with guidance and intercession; the Virgin needs the monk to provide her with the prayers that will clothe her.10 Such an exchange dynamic asks the reader to consider not only the Monk’s status absent the intercession of the Virgin but also the Virgin’s status absent the intercession of the Monk. Would Mary be dressed in rags without the initial fift y Ave Marias uttered by the Monk? Would she be humiliatingly naked? Would she still exist as spiritual intercessor without constant spoken homage? In the most general terms, such an arrangement calls into question the very nature of Marian intercession by showing the Virgin’s identity to be, in Knapp’s formulation, linked to the “supplemental action of worshippers.”11 More specifically, it shows the Virgin’s identity to be expressly and fundamentally predicated on the act of speaking, on the utterance of a specific regimen of prayers. On this point the poem is emphatic: the

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Virgin demands not only that specific prayers be recited but that they be recited in acceptable numbers and in a prescribed pattern, demands that recall Saint Erkenwald’s insistence that Bishop Erkenwald utter the exact baptismal formula over the preserved heathen and “not one grue lenger” (319). Moreover, Hoccleve’s poem makes the creation of the Virgin’s garment causally dependent on the physical recitation of the prayers. As Mary tells the Monk, “This clothynge / Thow has me youen, for thow euery day / L [50] sythe Aue Maria seyying, / Honoured hast me” (57–60). The dependency of garment on word here shows that the spoken prayers of the Monk—not solely his memory—are responsible for the clothes of the Virgin. In this way, the uttered Ave Marias of Hoccleve’s “Monk Who Clad the Virgin” assume the properties of overtly performative speech acts. Like the powerful sacramental utterances that permeate Saint Erkenwald and like Phoebus’s punitive outbursts in the Manciple’s Tale, the Monk’s spoken prayers perform demonstrable work on the world around them. It is easy to imagine that the Monk’s performative prayers serve the same purpose as Bishop Erkenwald’s baptismal utterances, namely that they provide implicit support to the orthodox church by simultaneously demonstrating the authority of an ordained ecclesiast and evoking a nexus of anti-Lollard associations. Such a reading would shore up the critical consensus that “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” exemplifies orthodox devotion and add to claims, often based on Hoccleve’s public rebuke of Lollardy in the “Address to Sir John Oldcastle,” that Hoccleve was himself a strident anti-Wycliffite crusader.12 But the relationship between performativity and orthodoxy that I detailed in my discussion of Saint Erkenwald does not fully account for the complex economy of exchange into which Hoccleve’s Monk enters his one hundred fift y Ave Marias, an economy that more strongly recalls the philanthropic exchanges of wellheeled late medieval English families than it does the exchange of subject for subject in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Joel Rosenthal describes upper-class philanthropy as being particularly pervasive among (but not limited to) the nobility during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Individuals and families of means “were expected to give to the church and to the poor . . . both to justify their inequitable status in the social hierarchy and to buy prayers for their own

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souls.”13 In “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” Hoccleve specifically identifies the Monk as the son of “a ryche man and a worthy” (23), marking him as—if not necessarily a member of the nobility—an individual with the ability to participate in such charitable practices. Furthermore, the poem stipulates that the central exchange between Mary and the Monk takes place not within the abbey but in a devotional chapel on the Monk’s family estate, a locus more appropriate to the self-interested philanthropy of the upper classes. While such details alone may not go so far as to render Mary the object of the Monk’s noblesse oblige, they nonetheless lay the groundwork for a model of Marian devotion predicated on structures of charitable giving by the landed and the affluent. It follows that the language of the philanthropic gift is precisely the language Mary uses to describe her two exchanges with the Monk. When she first appears in her sleeveless garment the Virgin tells him, “This clothynge / Thow has me youen” (57–58); later, when the Monk has completed his longer set of prayers, she says, “Beholde now / How good clothing and how fressh apparaille / That this wyke to me youen hast thow” (92–94). But the “fressh apparaille” is not given for nothing. In short order the Virgin reveals that she will “qwit” (97) the Monk’s generosity by making him “abbot of þat abbeye . . . as þat tolde him our lady” and by granting him “heuene .  .  . vnto his meede” (115–16, 121). Like the Monk’s affluence and the poem’s seigneurial setting, this quid pro quo arrangement conforms to expectations of late medieval philanthropic giving, a practice that “was primarily aimed at the spiritual welfare of the donor rather than at improving the worldly condition of the recipient.”14 Indeed, such an economic model—in which personal, spiritual reward is implicit in the act of giving—helps to explain the unusual, even paradoxical, degree of reciprocity that marks Mary’s relationship with the Monk. Conforming to the hierarchic structure of philanthropy, in which the donor was always of a higher social station than the recipient, as well as to traditional structures of Marian devotion, in which the devotee was but a beggar before the “queene of heuene” (78), Hoccleve’s monk both gives to and humbles himself before a Virgin marked at once by need and by noblesse. The institution of philanthropy among England’s upper classes was deeply rooted in the strict hierarchy and gross economic inequities of the

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fast-decaying feudal system, and in many respects it was dependent on those very inequities for its preservation. Arguably, the philanthropic gift functioned less to improve the lot of its recipient than it did “to contribute to the affirmation of the lord [of a household] and his establishment” and to reify the seigneurial relationships that necessitated it in the first place.15 As a result, it is tempting to see the philanthropy of the upper classes as an essentially conservative economic practice, one that provided spiritual succor for donors in the form of prayers, chantries, and other such soteriological considerations, while at the same time enhancing “the social status of the givers” and “apply[ing] social control by the benefactor upon the beneficiaries.”16 But conservative as it was, philanthropic giving also simmered just beneath the surface of England’s newly burgeoning money economy in the later Middle Ages, existing not only as a fossilized vestige of an outmoded economic system but also as “part of a larger exchange, that of services and obligations in return for money and goods, which we recognize as the specialization of labor.”17 In fact, the institutionalized giving of gifts (or at least the pretense of such giving) often stood in for the regular payment of wages, and it facilitated the beginnings of modern practices of lending and borrowing. The language of gift giving even allowed lenders to charge (and borrowers to remit) exorbitant interest payments, practices that would have been considered usury had they not been expressed in the semantic register of the gift.18 Thus, even as philanthropic giving outwardly reinforced traditional hierarchies of exchange, it simultaneously enabled the more horizontally aligned (and sometimes suspect) market transactions that, by the later Middle Ages, were radically dismantling those hierarchies. The necessary but awkward overlap of philanthropy and wage capitalism was a defining feature of Hoccleve’s tenure as clerk of the Privy Seal. During his lifetime of service, Hoccleve was witness to a seemingly regressive shift in the remuneration of the Privy Seal clerks in which daily wages were replaced by the awarding of gift-like annuities.19 Such a change meant that by 1399, the entire remunerative system for the Privy Seal clerks “was theoretically grounded on the independent largesse of the king” and was supplemented only occasionally by miscellaneous grants, bequests, and tips from other patrons.20 Over the course of his many years

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at the Privy Seal (from c. 1387 to c. 1424), Hoccleve would no doubt have become increasingly familiar with the Janus-like countenance that the philanthropic gift assumed. Indeed, with his only steady source of income technically defined as an annual bequest, Hoccleve found himself in the awkward position of expecting a gift—requiring a gift—in order to remain financially solvent. In “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” Hoccleve develops the tension between the seigneurial and mercantile structures of exchange through the persistent use of economic language. At moments, this language resonates with the social and economic forms associated with noble philanthropy: Hoccleve describes the Monk’s dutiful “worsship and honour / Of Goddes modir” (34–35), notes that the Monk’s prayers were uttered in a devotional chapel “maad and edified . . . at our ladyes reurerence” (43–44), and proposes that in order to stay in the Virgin’s good graces individuals must perform “seruice, honour and plesance” (20). At other times, the language displays a shift toward a more mercantile sensibility, as when Hoccleve writes “Betwixt God and man is [Mary] mediatrice / For our offenses mercy to purchace” (8–9). Most frequently, however, the economic terminology that Hoccleve employs evokes both of these economic paradigms at once, an indication that like the economic paradigms themselves, the linguistic registers that defined them were, by the early fifteenth century, so thoroughly intermingled as to be mutually inextricable. Consider, for example, Hoccleve’s use of the word “meede” (121) to describe the reward Mary will provide for the Monk’s spoken devotionals. Certainly “meed” was a term that resonated with the traditional hierarchies of exchange that had enabled (even necessitated) practices of philanthropic giving for centuries. In the fifteenth-century Romance of Guy of Warwick, a text roughly contemporary with Hoccleve’s “Monk who Clad the Virgin,” Sir Roholde is described as an Earl ““who helde Warwick in hys honde” and who “gave gyft ys and grete medys” to his grateful villeins.21 In Piers Plowman, however, Langland personifies “meed” as a figure of abject duplicity, a lady capable of co-opting the appurtenances of a traditional economic hierarchy (“Seruauntȝ for hire servyce, we seeþ wel þe soþe, / Taken Mede of hire maistres as þei mowe acorde”) even as she enables the most fundamental aspects of mercantile exchange (“Mede

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and Marchaundiȝe mote nede go togideres; / No wiȝt, as I wene, wiþouten Mede may libbe”).22 In much the same way, Hoccleve’s use of the word “quit” exists in an ambiguous position between the poem’s two prevailing structures of exchange. In the poem’s authorial moralitas, Hoccleve invokes the sworn bonds of fealty implicit in the practice of Christian worship and seigneurial vassalage when he writes, “Who serueth our lady, leesith right naght. / Shee souffissantly qwytith euery deede” (122–23). Despite this context, however, the term “quit” itself, which also appears when the Virgin promises to “qwit” (97) the Monk for his labor, necessarily recalls the freewheeling, hierarchy-violating economic structure that organizes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.23 While Hoccleve’s moralitas may imply that the spiritual quittings of “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” do not compare with the secular quittings of Chaucer’s capitalist hurly-burly, we can also see in those quittings echoes of the Summoner promising to “quiten [the Friar] every grot” (III 1292), the “false chanon” asking a priest “Leene me a marc . . . / And at my day I wol it quiten thee” (VIII 1026–27), or even Palamon and Arcite, locked in a tower where “ther may no gold hem quite” (I 1032). The Virgin’s promise to “quit” the devoted Monk invokes both of these exchange models simultaneously. The mechanics of the final transaction between Monk and Virgin extend these linguistic and thematic complexities, for despite Hoccleve’s insistence on maintaining the language and ethos of seigneurial hierarchy throughout the exchange, a number of fundamentally mercantile elements still lurk behind its shift y language: And euery day Aue Maria he [the Monk] Seide aftir hir doctryne and enformynge. And, the nexte haliday aft ir suynge, Our lady fresshly arraied and wel To the Monk cam, beynge in þat chapel, And vnto him seide, “Beholde now How good clothyng and how fressh apparaille That this wyke to me youen hast thow. Sleeues to me clothynge now nat faille, Thee thanke I, and ful wel for thy trauaille

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Shalt thow be qwit heer, in this lyf present, And in þat othir whan thow hens art went. (87–98)

The single fact that Mary promises to “qwit” the Monk for his “trauaille” (96) rather than for the garment she claims to have been given suggests the tension between England’s two concurrent economic systems. Indeed, the very notion of the Virgin repaying the Monk for his ad hoc work is far more reminiscent of an economy based on contracts and specialized labor than it is of one based on fealty and institutionalized noblesse oblige, particularly since Mary herself requested (would it be too tendentious to say “contracted”?) the additional prayers. But it is equally important to note that the gift the Monk gives and the gift the Virgin receives are not the same thing. The Monk gives to Mary a regimen of prayers; Mary thanks the Monk for “good clothyng and fressh apparaille” (93). This disjuncture between commodity given and commodity received is reminiscent of the three-part circuit described by Marx in the first book of Capital: “commodity-form [C], stripping off of this form [M], and return to the commodity-form [C].”24 In Hoccleve’s poem, the first commodity form is the prayer itself; the second commodity form is the clothes. The middle step in the three-part circuit—the gap between two different commodity forms that Marx fills with money [M]—can be filled in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” with speech itself, with the utterance of the prayer. It is in this capacity, I argue, that the Monk’s spoken prayers become nothing less than a linguistic currency. It is also in this capacity that speech functions most performatively in Hoccleve’s poem: The words are the means by which Mary gets her garment; they are valuable for what they do rather than for what they are. The constant emphasis on increase that the exchange between Mary and the Monk evinces supports this economic reading. The Monk’s recitation of Our Lady’s Psalter provides good clothing for the virgin, and in return the Virgin installs the Monk as abbot of his order and assures him of “eternel blisse” (111). Later, as the Virgin stipulates, the Monk will teach his “couent . . . to seye / My psalter as byforn taght haue I thee” (101–2), and that “conuent” will teach it to “the peple .  .  . in generaltee” (103). Because of all of this work, the Virgin announces finally, “shal ther be

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many oon / Saued” (110–11). The exponential degree of increase that the poem imagines—in both souls saved and prayers spoken—is not unusual in narratives of spiritual redemption (another term with strong economic valences). The Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14–30) provides a scriptural precedent for considering the work of salvation in economic terms, while the conversionary increase of Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Tale,” as well as the secular and economically grounded flood of forgiveness that concludes “The Franklin’s Tale,” offer literary precedents. But in a poem where spoken prayers become currency and where contracted “trauaille” is “qwit” with not just spiritual but temporal reward, such eschatological increase begins to smack uncomfortably of economic increase, even of compounding interest. Indeed, the terms of the Virgin’s arrangement with the Monk—the Monk teaches Our Lady’s Psalter to his fellow monks, who in turn teach it to the members of local community, who in turn teach it to others, and so on—are akin to a salvific pyramid scheme, one that recalls the dubious financial exchanges of “The Shipman’s Tale” and the alchemical “multiplicacioun” (VIII 849) of “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” as readily as it recalls the Second Nun’s conversionary arithmetic. Michel Foucault’s observation, “when goods can circulate (and this thanks to money), they multiply, and wealth increases,” is instructive here. So, too, is its corollary, “when coinage becomes more plentiful, as a result of good circulation and favorable balance, one can attract fresh merchandise.”25 Both of these statements (which themselves refer obliquely to Marx’s theory of circulation of commodities) speak to the exponential increase that the Virgin’s instructions to the Monk engender. As it pertains to Christian redemption, such increase clearly would have been understood as a net positive by Hoccleve’s readers. The economic model that Hoccleve proposes for such eschatological increase, however, is more ambiguous in its moral implications because it echoes a number of the abuses that prevailed in the developing marketplace of the fifteenth century, chief among them, the sin of usury. The discourse surrounding usury in the Middle Ages is complex and self-contradictory. The practice is defined at some points by the simple charging of interest and at others only by the charging of excessive interest, and it is always complicated by questions of intent on the part of both

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lender and borrower.26 William of Auxerre emphasizes the question of intent when he defines usury as “the will to acquire something above the principal of a loan,” and John Gower, more colloquially, recognizes it as the action of a man who “wol ageinward take a bene, / Ther he hath lent the smale pese” (5.4408–9).27 Such ambiguous definitions make it difficult to say outright that Hoccleve’s Monk and Virgin are engaged in usurious practices; however, the economic model of increase on which their salvific program is based hews dangerously close to what would have been understood in the Middle Ages as the more dangerous practices of the mercantile system. The slippery language deployed by Hoccleve’s poem is the same language by which annuities were able to stand in for the salaries of the Privy Seal clerks, the same language by which the giving of “gifts” facilitated usurious lending without the appearance of excessive interest. Finally, the economic language of Hoccleve’s poem must be understood as the same language that helped facilitate (under the cover of the gift) the more dubious practices of market capitalism in the later Middle Ages.

• Economic language has a long history in Christian devotional writing, and Hoccleve is not alone in describing salvation in terms of compounding interest. His contemporary, Margery Kempe, relates a vision in which Christ describes salvation in similar terms of economic increase: “Dowtyr, I schal be a trew executor to the and fulfyllyn all thi wylle, and for thi gret charyté that thow hast to comfortyn thin even cristen thu schalt have dubbyl reward in hevyn.”28 But even if, as Theresa Coletti notes, “the intersection of religious and economic themes and tropes . . . was a recognized commonplace in medieval discourses of redemption,” the uneasy tension that “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” develops between seigneurial and mercantile structures of exchange is uniquely Hoccleve’s own, that of a lifetime bureaucrat and would-be court poet caught up in what Knapp calls “the long and uneven transition from household government to salaried administration.”29 At the center of this economic tension stands the Ave Maria itself. It is a prayer that, when spoken, becomes important as a charitable donation to the virgin and as a monetary investment in the Monk’s soul, as the exercise

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of sacral fealty and as the completion of a contracted remembrance, as meed in return for devotion and as interest paid on a soteriological debt. But the prayer is first a distinct and specific spoken utterance, one that attains these layers of importance only by virtue of its ability to function meaningfully as money in a spiritual marketplace. Moving within the mingled economies of Hoccleve’s Marian lyric, the Ave Maria becomes a speech act whose importance is predicated on its ability to circulate and to perform work: to serve as a charitable gift, to create a garment, to provide remembrance, to secure a position in a religious order, to purchase mercy, to redeem a single soul, to save a whole community. Stripped of its form as commodity and uttered into currency, the prayer is central to the spiritual economy of Hoccleve’s poem because it can buy and because it engenders increase. This efficaciousness—this performativity—is what makes the spoken Ave Maria so valuable a coin. My argument about spoken prayer and economic exchange, namely that prayer functions as currency in the spiritual economy of Hoccleve’s poem, is anticipated by a number of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers. Ferdinand de Saussure draws a direct parallel between the coin and the spoken word, one predicated on the idea that each has value because each “can be exchanged for a certain quantity of something different” (he cites “bread” for money and “an idea” for words) and also “can be compared to something of like nature” (e.g., another coin or another word). Like money, “the content of a word is determined . . . not by what it contains but by what exists outside of it. As an element in a system, the word has not only a meaning but also—above all—a value.”30 Jacques Derrida builds on Saussure’s observation, insisting that both language and money are always and inevitably metaphorical in nature. He notes that any object that “plays a role in the process of axiological and semantic exchange . . . does not completely escape the general law of metaphorical value.”31 Foucault puts a still finer point on the connection between language and money. Because money and language are grounded in homologous systems of representation and signification, he asserts, “theories of money or trade have the same conditions of possibility as language itself.” In other words, as the de facto signifier in a system of commercial exchange, “money—if it is well regulated— . . . function[s] in the same way as language.”32

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These modern perspectives on money and speech are surprisingly evocative of similar (and similarly influential) medieval ones. Nicholas Perkins describes the presence of a “verbal economy” in late medieval England in which “the coinage . . . was the vocabulary of loyal advice, of instruction and of complaint.” In such an economy, “words could themselves be exchanged for money and influence,” an observation that calls to mind Foucault’s link between circulation and value as well as the idiosyncratic exchange economy of Hoccleve’s own work.33 R. A. Shoaf also describes the metaphorical interdependence of speech and currency, stating broadly that “the analogy between language and money is . . . seriously medieval” and would have been available to fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury writers “not only through ‘experience’ but also through impeccable ‘authority.’”34 Shoaf quotes Boethius to show how such an analogy might have been understood in the late Middle Ages: For sound is a kind of universal; names and words, on the other hand, are parts. Every part, however, is in the whole. . . . Thus just as a coin is copper impressed with a certain figure not only in order that it might be called a coin but also in order that it might be the price of some specific thing, so, in the same way, words and names, are not only sounds, but are imposed to a certain signification of thoughts. . . . And thus, in this way, a sound—that is, a significant sound—is not sound only, but is called a verb or name, just as a coin is not called copper, but is called, by its proper name, a coin, by means of what distinguishes it from other copper.35

Like Derrida and Foucault some fifteen hundred years later, Boethius understood that spoken words and money are both to some degree defined by “relativity and differentiation which are elements of exchange.”36 The potential of both words and coins stems from their inclusion within a group (call that group “sounds” or “metals”), but they attain their value through their specificity and distinctness within that group. It is their individuality, their circulation, and finally their metaphorical nature—the ability of the specific word to stand in for an idea within verbal discourse or the ability of the specific coin to stand in for a commodity within economic discourse—that metaphorically unites words and coins.

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From his position at the Privy Seal, where an appropriately worded petition could produce significant financial returns for both clerk and petitioner, Hoccleve would have understood these Boethian precepts. He would have been acutely aware of the fluctuating, metaphorical exchange relationship that existed between coin and word and commodity, and he would have seen, each time a petition produced a monetary return, the effective literalization of the value of the word. Similarly, the economy of “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” can itself be understood as literalizing the metaphorical value of the spoken word—as aggressively commodifying the Monk’s verbal utterances by forcing an exchange value onto them (50 spoken Ave Marias + 5 spoken Pater Nosters = 1 sleeve). Thus, I submit, it is reasonable for us to understand Hoccleve’s Monk trading in Ave Marias and spending them like so many groats. So too is it reasonable to assume that Hoccleve himself regarded some spoken utterances, such as prayers, to operate as money within a manifestly economic soteriological system.

• “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” is not alone among Hoccleve’s devotional lyrics in figuring the spoken word as money in a multivalent eschatological economy. In fact, the sheer number of his works that do so suggests that Hoccleve regarded the Virgin Mary—the première intercessor between man and God—as a useful figure through which to explore the hierarchical and economic tensions of the early fifteenth century. In one Marian lyric editorially titled “Ad Beatam Virginem” (Furnivall VII), Hoccleve describes the Virgin as “cause of al our welthe” (1), and he expresses his concern that she will neither “accepte [his] preyeere” (21) nor “purchase . . . pardoun” (80) for his sins. In such a system of exchange, prayer becomes the currency with which the penitent buys pardon. Similarly, in his “Ballade for Robert Chichele,” Hoccleve attempts to attain “a purueance” (“Ballade,” 24) from his divine intermediary in exchange for “[his] speeche and . . . [his] sawe” (21). The word “purueance” is a particularly rich one in this context, referring in equal measure to both material provision and spiritual provision.37 Does Hoccleve propose to buy his salvation with his “speeche,” or is his mind set on more material treasure? Finally, in “Item de Beata Virgine” (Gollancz V), Hoccleve proposes a

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seigneurial relationship between the Virgin Mary and her “seruantȝ” (84), but he undercuts the verticality of that relationship by deploying language highly suggestive of market exchange. Mary’s “purchase of .  .  . foryeunesse” becomes a “bysynesse .  .  . Þat vn-to man-kynde is so profitable” (118–21), and her son becomes a merchant who “hath boght our soules at swich prys / þat derrere might no thyng han be boght” (106–7). As the comingling of economic systems emerges in “Item de Beata Virgine,” so, too, do the economic overtones of the spoken word. “What wight is þat that with angwissh and wo / Tormented is if he preye vn-to thee / Him to deliuere and to putte him there-fro” (8–10), Hoccleve asks, a question that assumes the successful circulation of spoken prayer in the economy of salvation. The poet also marvels at how “acceptable” (79) Mary’s prayers are to Christ, and he ponders the plight of people who cannot speak, reasoning that “thogh þat preye may [their] tonge noght, / Yit holpe [are they] thurgh cry of hertes thoght” (13–14). By reimagining the usually silent act of repentance as the de facto spoken utterance of a mute penitent, Hoccleve implies that salvation must ultimately be bought with some kind of speech act, even if that speech act is the unheard utterance of the heart. Aside from “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” the Marian work that most strongly situates the spoken utterance as money within a salvific economy is the “Complaint of the Virgin.” A work written in the voice of Mary as she mourns Christ’s crucifi xion, Hoccleve’s planctus Mariae finds Mary lamenting her son’s death not in the broad terms of Christian redemptive theology but in the excruciating and increasingly intimate terms of a human mother witnessing the death of her human son. Her first apostrophe, to “fader God” (“Conpleynte” 1), encapsulates the poem’s personal approach: I had ioye entuere and also gladnesse Whan þu betook him me to clothe and wrappe In mannes flesche. I wend, in soothfastnesss, Have had for euere joye be the lappe. But hath sorwe caught me with his trappe. My ioye hath made a permutacioun With wepynge and eek lamentacioun. (8–14)38

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After making her complaint to God, Mary addresses several more devotional figures in succession: the Holy Ghost, the Archangel Gabriel, Saint Elizabeth, Holy Simeon, Saint Joachim, and finally Christ himself. Each of these figures she implicates in the most explicitly personal aspects of her loss. As the poem nears its conclusion, Mary begins to extend her lament beyond her immediate coterie, addressing the earth, the angels, and ultimately all of humankind. With this final apostrophe, however, Mary’s rhetorical stance shifts, and she moves abruptly from the claustrophobia of her own personal suffering to the universality of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. Where she had once complained alone of her personal “torment and . . . greef” (113), the Virgin now asks all the “sones of Adam” (227) to lament with her, to “bymeneth [Christ] in herte and cheere and vois” (231) and to recognize that “for [our] gilt makith he correcioun / And amendes right by his owne deeth” (236–37). No longer speaking only as the inwardlooking and disconsolate mother of a human son, Mary sublimates her personal sorrows to the redemptive aspects of Christ’s sacrifice. Trapped within the entropic spiral of her personal loss, Mary struggles to reaffirm the public and soteriological functions of her son’s death and to take up her traditional mantle of intercessor. As one critic suggests, “the Virgin is made to represent the private relationships that must be sacrificed for the sake of public duty.”39 But the cycle of loss to which the Virgin is subject is itself predicated on a fundamental collapse of the spoken word, a colossal failure of traditional frameworks of devotional speech to prevent or even ease Mary’s suffering. In her apostrophe to the Holy Ghost, Mary provides an early glimpse of that collapse, asking “Why hast thu me not in thi remembraunce / Now at this tyme right as thu had tho?” (22–23). Here, as in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” the “remembraunce” of an external figure (the Holy Ghost) is critical to the Virgin’s physical and emotional condition. And as the Monk’s “memorie” (65) of Mary ultimately gives way to a series of spoken prayers, so too does the Holy Ghost’s failure to remember the Virgin give way to similar failures in devotional speech. Appropriately, the first such failure is that of the Archangel Gabriel, whose address to the Virgin at the Annunciation, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” becomes the foundation of the Ave Maria itself.40

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O Gaubriel, whan þat thou come aplace And madest vnto me thi salewyng And seidest thus, “Heil Mary, ful of grace”, Whi ne had thu gove me warnyng Of þat grace that veyn is and faylyng, As thu now seest, and sey it weel beforne? Sith my ioye is me rafte, my grace is lorne. (29–35)

Where the Holy Ghost’s failure was one of memory, the Archangel’s failure is explicitly a failure of speech. More precisely, Gabriel fails to speak enough, fails to give the Virgin “warnyng” of Christ’s Crucifi xion or of the “veyn and faylyng” nature of grace. The insufficiency of Gabriel’s speech again resonates with the Monk’s incomplete prayer regimen in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” but with an important difference. Whereas the central failure of the Monk’s prayers was the number of Ave Marias uttered, the central failure of Gabriel’s Ave Maria is the insufficient content of the Marian address itself, a failure of kind rather than a failure of degree. Thus, the Ave Maria, which in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” functions as a type of salvific currency, only serves in the “Complaint of the Virgin” to redouble Mary’s grief. It is, at best, a flawed coin in the poem, money that cannot circluate. It engenders not the increase in salvation that Hoccleve imagines in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” but rather a poverty of suffering and human loss. Similar failures of speech follow in quick succession. Mary laments to Saint Elizabeth that her speech was not only insufficient but also inaccurate: “The word[es] þat thu spak in the mowntain / Be ended al in another maner / Than thu had wened” (37–39). Significantly, Elizabeth’s words to Mary, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” are also integral to the Ave Maria itself, providing the second of its three parts.41 The Virgin then tells Holy Simeon that his speech to her was too accurate, bearing bad news instead of omitting it: “O Simeon, thow seidest me ful sooth, / The strook that perce shal my sones herte / My soule thirle it shal, and so it dooth” (50–52). Finally, Mary upbraids her father, Saint Joachim, for his utter lack of speech, here imagined in the form of

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song and minstrelsy: “instrument / Han ye noon left wherwith me make light / And me to conforte in my woful torment” (65–67). With startling compression, then, the Virgin of Hoccleve’s planctus Mariae ascribes to the spoken utterance—starting with the Ave Maria itself—a litany of grievances and painful elisions, endemic failings that essentially undo the spiritual economy Hoccleve represents in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” and that call into question the efficaciousness of devotional speech as a whole. Within this unstable economic framework, prayer seems unlikely to buy a petitioner’s redemption; rather, the spoken word in the “Complaint of the Virgin” seems only to engender loss upon excruciating loss. The nadir of the poem’s verbal economy comes when Mary speaks to Christ himself, still suffering on the cross. In Hoccleve’s poem, as in the Gospel of John, Christ calls his mother “womman” (176) rather than “mother,” as though Mary to him “straunge were and vnknowe” (177).42 In response to the impersonal nature of her son’s address, the Virgin begins aggressively to rupture her own name, suggesting that “men clepe and calle [her] Mara” (a pun on amara or “bitterness”) rather than Maria since the letter “I,” which is “Ihesus” (183,186) has been taken from her.43 The Virgin similarly debases her name three stanzas later, removing the “i” from “Marie” and calling herelf “marred” (218); and finally, she renounces the name “modir” (225) altogether, again locating the semantic rupture in the loss of the letter “i.” On one level, Mary’s dislocation of her own name reflects a rejection of “I” as a self-referential pronoun, an act that dramatizes within the Virgin “a dissolution of identity, of subjectivity itself.”44 But because Mary dissolves her identity exclusively within language, the dislocation of her name speaks equally strongly to the failure of the speech that the poem insists on. In this regard, it is especially significant that Mary specifically attacks the vocative function of her name. “Wel may men clepe and calle me Mara” (183); “How sholde I lenger clept be Maria” (185); “Marie? Nay, but ‘marred’ I thee calle” (218); “No more maist thow clept be by thy name” (226)—each of these linguistic disjunctures deals with the Virgin’s name as it is “calle[d]” or “clept.” What is threatened, Mary suggests, is not only her identity but

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the very form of address by which she is invoked. In other words, by negating her name, the Virgin implicitly negates her connection to Ave Maria itself and dissociates herself from the forms of remembrance on which Marian devotion (and human salvation) so conspicuously depend. Critics discussing the gender and power dynamics implicit in late medieval complaints of the Virgin have located within the highly emotional reaction to Christ’s Passion a space in which Mary’s agency, both as divine mediator and as woman, is simultaneously constrained and amplified.45 Within the economy of speech that Hoccleve proposes in the “Complaint of the Virgin,” however, the systematic failure of the spoken word that precipitates Mary’s self-effacement is downright threatening: it pointedly undermines the salvific work performed by Virgin’s intercession, and it obviates our ability to invoke Mary through her eponymous prayer. The poem must, therefore, recuperate the efficaciousness of speech—both as prayer and a Marian invocation—and affirm its role in an economy of salvation. That recuperation comes in the final three stanzas of the work, in which Mary “at last . . . performs her ordained role, mediating between sinful humanity and crucified Christ.”46 Turning to address the “sones of Adam,” the Virgin refocuses her personal lament outward, asking the reader to “see how my sone for your gilt and blame / Hangith heer all bybled vpon the crois” (299–300). She also refers to herself as “a modir” (239), a term that she had repudiated only a few lines before and that reassures us that she has resumed her traditional identity as “Goddes modir, of vertu the flour” (“Monk” 35). Finally, the Virgin exhorts all of humanity to mourn Christ “in herte and cheere and vois” (231), thus emphasizing the role of prayer in remembrance and reasserting the efficacy of traditional forms of spoken devotional. But “vois” is not the only thing rehabilitated in the conclusion of the poem. Along with an affirmation of spoken piety, “The Complaint of the Virgin” also reasserts the reciprocal structures that were so central to the salvific economy of Hoccleve’s miracle of the Virgin. In her final apostrophe, Mary addresses the reader: If yee to [Christ] han any affeccioun Now for his wo your hertes oghten colde.

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Shewith your loue and your dileccioun. For your gilt makith he correccioun And amendes right by his owne deeth. That ye nat reewe on him, myn herte it sleeth. (233–38)

The spiral of loss dramatized in the first part of the poem—the very failure of prayer to purchase redemption—is replaced here by an economy in which the interdependent relationship between Christ and mankind is paramount. Speaking now in her capacity as heavenly intercessor, the Virgin claims that any failure to honor and mourn Christ appropriately will “[her] herte .  .  . sleeth” (238), a statement that implies structures of reciprocity analogous to those of “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.” Moreover, Mary grieves not for the death of her son but for the prospect of humankind’s failure to recognize and reciprocate the blood “despent in greet foyson . . . for [our] redemption” (244–45). Once again, the faithful reciprocate the “correccioun” of his martyrdom when they “[s]hewith [their] loue and [their] dileccioun” (235). Once again, the prayer of the penitent—the “vois” of the penitent—enables salvation. Once again, within the poem’s concluding eschatological framework, the spoken word becomes the money with which the penitent purchases “redempcoiun” (245), not the debased currency of suffering and loss. Economies of Madness and Recovery in Hoccleve’s Series As it develops a devotional economy predicated simultaneously on the hierarchical precepts of noble gift giving and the more flexible market transactions that had become increasingly central to life in fifteenthcentury London, Hoccleve’s Marian poetry posits spoken prayer as a de facto currency whose ability to perform necessary salvific work is related to its ability to circulate freely.47 Most evidently within “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” and the “Complaint of the Virgin,” Hoccleve offers his readers a soteriology that depends on these economic and linguistic paradigms, one in which the real threat to salvation comes when the economy of speech breaks down—when spoken prayers are flawed, when too few are spoken, or when the intercessor is unavailable to the supplicant.

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Putting aside the overtly soteriological aspects of Hoccleve’s devotional works, however, the Marian lyrics have much in common with Hoccleve’s putatively autobiographical works. Indeed, the mingled economic and linguistic systems that Hoccleve represents in his Marian lyrics also assume a central position in his secular poems, particularly in his final group of works, The Series. While the nature of the spoken currency in Hoccleve’s secular poems shifts from the efficacious prayer to the efficacious petition, its monetary value in a marketplace of redemption remains unchanged. Such an important poetic link posits a unity among Hoccleve’s works that has not yet been explored, a unity that not only attests to the centrality of efficacious speech in the Privy Seal clerk’s poetry but also to the spoken word’s currency in the fraught economic, spiritual, and political realms of the early Lancastrian dynasty. The five linked poems known as The Series have received increasing critical attention over the past fifteen years, a period in which a critical tradition that simply “took Thomas Hoccleve at his word” about his “wilde infirmite” (Series 1.40) has given way to a more nuanced analysis of the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of the poet’s autobiographical stance.48 Rather than focusing on the medical and psychological “facts” that Hoccleve details in The Series, readers like Lee Patterson, Ethan Knapp, and Nicholas Perkins have posited an increasingly diverse range of critical assessments, showing Hoccleve’s final major work to reflect “the workings of a consciousness for which self-knowledge and social acceptance are at once goals to be achieved and conclusions to be avoided,” to meditate on “the irresolvable fragmentation of the self and the intricate connections between [Hoccleve’s] poetic project and the specific cultural milieu of the Privy Seal,” and to explore “the relationship between language and governance.”49 What these readings have in common is an understanding that Hoccleve’s response to his madness, whether autobiographical or invented, is purposefully mediated through a variety of cultural, literary, and authorial filters, a mediation that is ultimately more significant than whether Hoccleve really did experience exactly what he describes. Though Hoccleve insists on positioning himself at the very center of his work by referring to his “felawis of the Priue Seel” (1.296) and inscribing his own name in the friend’s address in the “Dialogue” (2.3, 2.20), the poetic “I” that he develops,

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like the poetic “I” of his putative mentor Chaucer, is a narrative persona whose autobiographical function does not eclipse its rhetorical one. In the secular Series—particularly in the “Complaint,” the “Dialogue with a Friend,” and the framing passages for the work’s three narrative exempla—the narrative persona that Hoccleve develops is fundamentally important to the economy of speech that motivates the poem. As in the Marian lyrics, that economy proposes a path to redemption in which circulation of speech brings wealth and health and the inability to spend brings loneliness, despair, and even madness. The salvation that Hoccleve’s narrative persona seeks, of course, is not the spiritual redemption of the Christian penitent but the psychological and social redemption of a man struggling to come to grips with a “þouȝtful maladie” (1.21). In The Series’s first poem, the “Complaint,” Hoccleve ruminates on his madness in solitude, engaged only in the private actions of reading and thought. Aftir þat heruest inned had hise sheues, And that the broun sesoun of Mihelmesse Was come, and gan the trees robbe of her leues, That grene had ben and in lusty freisshenesse, And hem into colour of ȝelownesse Had died and doun throwen vndirfoote, That chaunge sanke into myn herte roote. (1.1–7)

A dark inversion of the well-known opening of The Canterbury Tales, whose organizing conceit of a springtime pilgrimage to Canterbury emphasizes the importance of “felaweshipe” and “compaignye,” the rhymeroyal stanza with which the Privy Seal clerk begins his own final work emphasizes little more than the lifelessness of the approaching winter and Hoccleve’s equally lifeless isolation. While Chaucer describes himself joining the “felawshipe” of twenty-nine pilgrims “on a day” (CT I 26, 19), Hoccleve mopes “vppon a niȝt .  .  . in [his] bed” (1.17–18), quietly pondering his “siknesse” (1.22) and its miserable consequences. And unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, who travel to Canterbury in order to thank “the hooly blisful martir . . . that hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke” (CT I

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17–18), Hoccleve hunkers alone into the “dirke shour” (1.25) of his room, letting his friends embark on pilgrimages for him (1.46–49) while the “greef aboute [his] herte so sore swal / And bolned euere to and to so sore / that nedis oute [he] muste therwithal” (1.29–31). By emphasizing Hoccleve’s self-imposed confinement, the opening lines of The Series liken Hoccleve’s isolation to a physical ailment, a “bodily sikenesse” (1.38) that “drives Hoccleve in upon himself in solitary meditation.”50 As Hoccleve continues his Complaint, however, the terms of that isolation shift, and the stifling, physical solitude of the opening stanzas moves toward a decidedly linguistic solitude. Hoccleve is alone even “among the prees” (1.73) by virtue of his exclusion from spoken discourse. The physical and the spoken are not mutually exclusive, of course: Hoccleve’s exasperation with friends “þat weren wonte me for to calle” (1.75) but who now “her heed . . . caste awry, / Whanne I hem mette, as they not me sy” (1.76–77) extends the physical isolation of the poem’s prologue, highlights the poet’s physical dissociation from his former acquaintances, and invokes “a sense of simultaneous isolation and claustrophobia.”51 As the “Complaint” progresses, however, the physical isolation that Hoccleve initially describes fades away, and his loneliness and solitude begin to manifest themselves in terms of remembrance and forgetting. Indeed, when Hoccleve writes, “Forȝeten I was al oute of mynde awey, / As he þat deed was from hertis cherte” (1.80–81), it is hard not to hear echoes of the tropes of remembrance in many of the Marian lyrics—the Monk’s remembrance of the Virgin and the Holy Ghost’s failure of remembrance that define their respective poems. As in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” Hoccleve’s emphasis on remembrance translates into a dynamic of spoken exchange, an economy necessary to the physical (or, in this case, emotional) well-being of its participants. For Hoccleve, however, alone in his madness, the redemption offered by spoken commerce—by the very act of conversation itself—is nowhere to be found. Even when they are with him, friends and Privy Seal colleagues speak around Hoccleve rather than speaking to him: “Thus spake manie oone and seide by me” (1.85 [emphasis mine]). Hoccleve overhears conversations about his condition but is unable to respond,

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noting how his friends’ words, “hem vnwwar, cam to myn eere” (1.91). Bereft of speech, he is soon regarded by friends “as a wilde steer” (1.120) with a “full bukkissh . . . brayn” (1.123), a man whose inability to engage in meaningful speech debases him to the subhuman level of the animal. Exiled from such spoken commerce, Hoccleve finally allows himself to descend entirely into silence, losing his “tunges keie” (1.144), refusing to answer against the “suffring wronge” (1.179) of his friends’ slander, and keeping “scilence / Leste þat men of me deme wolde” (1.180–81). Finally, rather than propelling him into conversation, Hoccleve allows the words of others to force him deeper into his own thoughts: I leide an eere ay to as I by wente, And herde al, and þus in myn herte I caste: “Of longe abidinge here I may me repente. Lest that of hastinesse I at the laste Answere amys, best in hens his faste. For in in þis prees amys me gye, To harme wole it me turne and to folie.” (1.134–40)

So terrified of misspeaking, Hoccleve flees from the physical and verbal company of the “prees” and sequesters himself into silence, listening to his friends diagnose him from afar and suffering alone the indignity of his bestial condition. At the very best, Hoccleve exists here on the attenuated periphery of spoken discourse; at worst, he is resolutely and utterly silent, an exile from the poem’s economy of the speech. One reader argues that by “[approaching] him through a diagnostic vocabulary” the people who speak about Hoccleve “imprison him—and themselves—in their discourse.”52 It is important to recognize, however, that those same speakers also seal Hoccleve off from their discourse, enclosing him in a hermetic third-person silence and precluding him from participating in a productive verbal economy. Hoccleve, in other words, is prevented from circulating his speech within the community of his peers, a linguistic isolation that, significantly, he expresses in explicitly economic terms:

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I may but smal seie but if men deme I raue. Sithen oþer þing þan woo may I noon gripe, Vnto my sepulcre amd I nowe ripe My wele, adieu, farwel, my good fortune. Oute of ȝoure tables me planed han ȝe. Sithen welny eny wiȝt for to commvne With me loth is, farwel prosperite. I am no lenger of ȝoure liuere. Ȝe haue me putte oute of ȝoure retenaunce Adieu, my good auenture and good chaunce. (1.264–73)

“When goods can circulate,” Foucault tells us, “they multiply, and wealth increases.” In an uncanny premodern echo of Foucault’s statement, Hoccleve equates his own failure to function within the systems of exchange described in his poetry—economies in which speech and specie are, quite literally, two sides of the same coin—with his failure to “commvne” with his friends. As an individual who “may but smal seie” (1.264), Hoccleve cannot produce wealth, cannot produce either linguistic or fiscal increase, within an economy of speech. In the Marian lyrics a breakdown in the spoken word threatens humankind’s opportunity for spiritual redemption; so too in The Series an economic breakdown threatens to imperil Hoccleve’s chance at psychological redemption. Without the spoken word, there is no hope of a cure for the lonely Privy Seal clerk.

• Hoccleve locates his “þouȝtful maladie” squarely in his verbal isolation. It is, therefore, appropriate that he locates a modicum of relief from that malady in something resembling a dialogue, a borrowed volume of Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma.53 Clearly, reading this Boethian consolation, in which Reason advises a man bemoaning his suffering to accept God’s will and to think on the sorrows of others, does not constitute for Hoccleve a triumphant reentry into those economies of speech from which he has been excluded. Nonetheless, Hoccleve does describe the Synonyma as a book that feeds him well “with the speche of Resoun” (1.315), a phrase

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that suggests the recuperative power of even this pale imitation of speech for the addled poet. Indeed, Hoccleve engages with Reason’s speech as he has failed to engage with more immediate forms of spoken discourse, craving more “of the doctrine by Resoun tauȝt” (1.376) where he had once fled from the isolating speech of his peers. In the absence of immediate spoken dialogue then, the pseudo-speech that Hoccleve has “cauȝt” (1.375) allows him a degree of redemption; he casts his sorrows “to the cok” (1.386) and understands his madness as coming “of Goddis visitacioun” (1.382). The reassertion of a relationship with the divine is important to the “Complaint,” and its outlines strongly evoke the relationship that the Monk develops with Mary in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.” The link between the secular narrative and the Marian devotional becomes particularly clear when Hoccleve relates how God first afflicted him and then healed him of his madness. In welthe I took of [God] noon hede or ȝeme, Him for to plese and him honoure and queme, And he me ȝaf a boon on for to gnawe, Me to correcte and of him to have awe. He ȝaf me wit and he tooke it away Whanne that he sy that I it mis dispente, And ȝaf aȝein whan it was to his pay. He grauntide me my giltis to repente, And hensforwarde to sette myn entente Vnto his deitee to do plesaunce, And to amende my sinful gouernaunce. (1.396–406)

As in his Marian lyric, Hoccleve establishes in these stanzas a supplicant/ intercessor relationship, one reminiscent of strictly hierarchical relationships between vassals and lords. And once again, the language of charity and philanthropic giving, so prevalent in the Marian lyrics, is also important to the redemptive economy of the “Complaint.” Indeed, the seigneurial relationship that the “Complaint” develops is marked not

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only by God’s seemingly limitless authority but also by Hoccleve’s need to offer him the remembrance that he demands. It is, after all, when Hoccleve fails to “please and . . . honor and queme” his Lord, when he “mis dispente” what “was to [God’s] pay,” that God sends him “a boon on for to gnawe.” Similarly, when Hoccleve finally does “amende [his] sinful gouernaunce,” offers to “do plesaunce,” and promises to “Laude and honour and þanke” (1.407) him, God restores the Privy Seal clerk’s wits and “welthe” (1.409), sending “ȝift is and benefices” (1.412) that cannot help but recall the gifts given by both Mary and the Monk in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” and also the benefices sporadically offered to Hoccleve himself at the Privy Seal.54 The same economy that allowed spiritual redemption in the devotional lyrics now enables psychological redemption in the secular “Complaint.” The Series’s second poem, the “Dialogue,” develops in a social setting the same redemptive linguistic economy that the “Complaint” developed in a solitary one. Like the two halves of Saint Erkenwald, these two poems form a poetic diptych in which the “Dialogue” fulfills the promise of redemptive discourse hinted at by the “Complaint.” Specifically, the second poem’s eponymous dialogue supersedes the Boethian exchange presented by Isidore’s Synonyma. To be sure, the parallel between the Synonyma and Hoccleve’s dialogue with his friend is inexact; the highly stylized language of the formal Boethian consolation belongs to, in the words of one critic, “an entirely different discursive universe” than the colloquial exchange of the “Dialogue.”55 Despite these differences, however, both Isidore’s work and Hoccleve’s “Dialogue” offer a dynamic of spoken exchange geared toward enabling the Privy Seal clerk’s social rehabilitation, a dynamic that gives Hoccleve access to the economy of speech from which he has been exiled. Indeed, it is the spoken aspect of the “Dialogue” (as opposed to the textual aspect of the “Complaint”) that Hoccleve most prominently emphasizes in the poem, marshalling an array of stylistic and rhetorical devices “to efface any sense of barrier between the reader and the scene he or she witnesses” and thus imparting to the “Dialogue” the appearance of reality. It is that very sense of spoken-ness, the immediacy and seeming transparency of the rhetorical lens through which Hoccleve presents his “Dialogue,” that most strongly suggests that the poet’s “actual

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means to sanity . . . lies in dialogue.”56 It is as a poem of speech that the “Dialogue” offers the Privy Seal clerk a degree of social redemption to match the psycho-spiritual redemption he seems to locate at the end of the “Complaint.” As he extends into the “Dialogue” the emphasis on verbal exchange that he started in the “Complaint,” Hoccleve also extends his metaphorical and semantic investment in economics, the obsession with “pay,” “welthe,” “ȝiftis,” and “benefices” that mark both the “Complaint” and the Marian lyrics. In the dialogue itself, those economic metaphors become most pronounced in Hoccleve’s seemingly arbitrary screed against coin clippers and counterfeiters. Readers have long struggled to integrate the anomalous invective into the poem’s more overt social and political concerns. Recent critics have suggested that the diatribe implicitly supports the dynastic aims of the early Lancastrian kings and that it refers to current events; earlier critics more frequently declared it to be an aesthetic and thematic mistake, “the main blemish” on an otherwise unified poetic whole.57 But given the strong economic language that marks descriptions of spoken exchange in both the “Complaint” and the “Dialogue,” Hoccleve’s description of the “cursid vice” (2.164) should hardly be dismissed so blithely. Rather than regarding it as a poetic glitch, we can more fruitfully examine the coin-clipping passage through the lens of exchange, both monetary and verbal. As Hoccleve describes the economic implications of coin clipping to his friend, he focuses not simply on the physical act of clipping itself— the practice of shaving small amounts of gold off coins and thus making them “narowe and smal” (2.123)—but the potential for clipped coins to be refused by merchants and kept out of circulation, for their “eschaunge [to be] eschewen.” What makes the coins that Hoccleve describes worthless is not that they have been clipped per se; rather, it is because they are unable to circulate and can no longer function effectively in an economy of exchange. “Howe shal þe pore do in his holde No more moneie he ne haue at al Par cas but a noble or halpenie of golde,

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And it so thynne is and so narowe and smal That men the eschaunge eschewen oueral? Not wil it goo but miche he theronne leese. He moot do so, he may noon other chese.” (2.120–26)

Coin clipping was perceived as a genuine threat in the early fifteenth century, and Hoccleve refers in the “Dialogue” (lines 2.136–40) to a series of statutes introduced by Parliament in 1421 standardizing the weight of English coinage and increasing punishments for counterfeiters and coin clippers. But the poet’s deeply personal indignation at the practice of clipping coins—his insistence that coin clipping “hath hurt me sore” (2.101) and that it is the moral equal of murder, theft, extortion, and heresy—does not simply reflect a keen eye for current events or a desire to ingratiate himself to potential Lancastrian patrons. Rather, it reflects the struggle that Hoccleve describes so poignantly in the “Complaint,” his struggle to reaffirm his social and psychological solvency among his colleagues and friends by circulating his own speech among them; to spend the coin rendered suspect by his “wilde infirmite” in the marketplace of socially redemptive verbal exchange.58 Hoccleve reinforces this connection between coin and utterance through a series of careful linguistic echoes. His concern that he “may but smal seie but if men deme I rave” (1.264) finds a numismatic counterpart in his “narowe and smal” (2.123) coins, while his fear that the words of his fellow Privy Seal clerks are of so little value that “thei miȝten as wel haue holden her pees” (1.301) is repeated in the “Dialogue” when he wonders how a coin “may . . . holde his peis whanne it is wasshe [clipped]” (2.106). He even associates coin clipping with his madness itself: the former he calls “that venym [which] ouere wide and brood spredith” (2.170); the latter he refers to as “the greuous venim / That has enfected and wildid my brain” (1.234–35). More concisely, Hoccleve’s “feble wit” (1.277) becomes the coin clipper’s “feble moneie” (2.102). It is also telling of the connection between word and coin that, as Hoccleve describes them, the solutions to both coin clipping and madness are effectively identical. Just as Hoccleve’s “means to sanity . . . lies in dialogue,” so too does the remedy for the problem of clipped

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coins lie in economic circulation, a process of exchange through which, Hoccleve insists, “Vnwaisshen gold shal waisshe awey þat vice” (2.182).59 Dismissed or marginalized by many critics, Hoccleve’s discussion of coin clipping should, therefore, more accurately be understood as the central conceit of the “Dialogue.” It is the metaphorical framework for the poem’s socially redemptive economy, an economy whose respective failures and successes alternately prevent and propel the poet’s fraught recovery. In this respect, the “Dialogue” fundamentally reproduces the networks of linguistic and economic exchange developed in Hoccleve’s Marian lyrics. The coin itself—be it clipped or unclipped—becomes a literal embodiment of the linguistic currency imagined in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” while both the destabilization and proposed redemption of that coin echo the analogous destabilization and redemption of speech in “The Complaint of the Virgin.” Moreover, insofar as they ask us to recall the metaphorical links between the spoken word and the minted coin, Hoccleve’s coins, both clipped and whole, become a concrete manifestation of the metaphorical value the poet ascribes to the spoken word.60 They are emblematic of the properties of circulation that make the spoken word so valuable a commodity—such redemptive money—and they further remind us of the corruption and subsequent devaluation to which speech, like coinage, is necessarily vulnerable.

• Hoccleve’s screed against coin clipping—or more specifically, Hoccleve’s screed against those “shrewis” (2.141) who would prevent coins from circulating—stems directly from his inability to circulate his own damaged verbal coin within an economy of speech. As one of the central exchanges in Hoccleve’s conversation with a friend—and thus, part of the explicit, social discourse that supersedes the implicit and solitary speech of Isidore’s Synonyma—the coin-clipping passage is also integral to extending the recuperative work hinted at in the “Complaint.” But the “Dialogue” extends the patterns of redemptive speech hinted at in the “Complaint” and recasts that economy more firmly in the mold of the Marian lyrics, insisting simultaneously on the hierarchical modes of exchange implicit

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in charitable giving and on the ad hoc, horizontally inflected arrangements of the urban marketplace. Hoccleve alludes most clearly to the former when he invokes the Lancastrian “patronage nexus” into which he hopes to enter his work.61 Indeed, by not only seeking patronage from “My lord of Gloucestre” (2.534) but also insisting that Gloucester is second in generosity only to “our lord lige, our king victorious” (2.554), Hoccleve reinforces his own dual role as vassal and grateful recipient of seigneurial charity. Hoccleve suggests a similar hierarchical arrangement when he urges the poet to atone for the misogyny of his translation of Christine de Pizan’s L’epistre de Cupide, by writing “sumwhat now . . . in honour and preysynge of [women]” (2.673–74). By buxum herte and by submissioun To hir graces, yildinge thee coupable, Thow pardon maist haue and remissioun, And do vnto hem plesance greable. (2.687–90)

The posture that the friend advises Hoccleve to assume is one of abject submission, suggestive of the devotional stance that Hoccleve assumes in the “Complaint” when he does “plesaunce . . . Vnto his deitee” (1.396) as well as the stance that the Monk assumes in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” when he does “plesance” (“Monk” 20) for Mary. That posture also draws, of course, from the exaggerated positions of fealty and devotion that informed the discourse (if not the practice) of gender relations within the court. It is in the spirit of such supplication that the friend advises Hoccleve to “humble [his] goost” (2.692), “yilde” himself (2.698) to the will of women, and make “greet repentance / for [his] giltes” (2.717) so that he might find redemption from his previous literary sin. In the face of such abject submission, however, Hoccleve depends—like his Monk— on the self-interested philanthropy of his putative mistresses. Indeed, the friend makes clear to Hoccleve that his supplication will help him not only to avoid a courtly hell of his own making but also to gain “pardon . . . and remissioun” (2.689) from the women of the court. The quid pro quo nature of such an arrangement underscores the bald self-interest of Hoccleve’s outward humility, a self-interest reinforced by

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the poet’s final declaration of subservience, “I lowly me submitte / To your bontees” (2.813–14). Both a reification of the seigneurial hierarchy that Hoccleve proposes and none-too-subtle reminder of the “bontee” he hopes to receive for such submission, the phrase also pointedly recalls Hoccleve’s description of the Virgin in one of his devotional lyrics: “Modir of pitee, / Of al bountee thow verray cofre and cheste” (Gollancz V 127–29). Such a connection invites us to see the narrative persona Hoccleve adopts in The Series as the secular doppelganger for the persona of the devotional poetry, wracked with the same paroxysms of guilty, sinful abjection and resolved to receive the same bountiful rewards. And again, as with the Marian poetry, the hierarchy-putrefying marketplace lurks within the overtly hierarchical modes of exchanges that Hoccleve describes. Even as he reminds the Privy Seal clerk to entirely submit to the women he has angered, Hoccleve’s friend also suggests that Hoccleve “purchase” (2.678) their love with his “greet craft and art” (2.682), and he warns Hoccleve that without such purchase he will be unpleasantly “qwyt” (2.668) for his perceived misogyny. Both of these sentiments—purchasing and quitting—resonate strongly with the vocabulary of market exchange. Moreover, Hoccleve explicitly invokes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as an “auctrice” (2.694), a rhetorical strategy by which he draws attention to The Canterbury Tales’s most hierarchy-violating (and mercantilistic) pilgrim and reverses traditional assumptions of “auctoritee” by authorizing a figure recognized for her reliance on “experience.” Such passages thus undercut the strict hierarchy of intercessor and supplicant, reifying the tensions between the uneasily coexisting models of noble giving and market transaction that exist in Hoccleve’s Marian works. Despite their manifest similarities, however, the redemptive economies shared by the Marian lyrics and the “Dialogue” differently construe the specific nature of the linguistic currency on which each economy relies. The primary medium of exchange—arguably the sole efficacious medium of exchange—in Hoccleve’s Marian lyrics is spoken prayer. Similarly, The Series’s first poem, the “Complaint,” shows speech to be a unique currency of redemption for the suffering poet. While it too is clearly invested in the redemptive exchange of speech, the “Dialogue” nonetheless moves toward a system of exchange driven not only by the spoken word but by the

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written work, toward an economy whose currency seems to be the poetic text itself. When the friend encourages Hoccleve to “purchace” (2.668) the love of women, for example, he also encourages the poet to “wryte in honour and preysynge” (2.673) of women rather than to speak. Moreover, when Hoccleve finally does “submitte / to [the] bountees” (2.813–14) of his female readers, he promises not to verbalize their praises but to “translate” (2.825) a tale that he recently “sy [saw]” (2.821). Why at the end of The Series’s second poem does Hoccleve suddenly add the written, poetic text to the range of coins capable of buying his redemption? The question, I think, has two answers. The first is that the two forms of linguistic currency that Hoccleve proposes are by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed, by creating an illusion of dialogic immediacy within the “Dialogue,” Hoccleve not only accentuates the role that speech plays in his economic and psychological redemption; he also effaces, as much as possible, the distinction between spoken word and the poetic text. In other words, Hoccleve renders the “Dialogue” into a de facto spoken utterance even as he simultaneously acknowledges its written, textual identity. The elision that Hoccleve performs between spoken word and written text in the poem hints at the second answer: by investing written poetry the same redemptive purchase initially reserved for speech, Hoccleve allows his own written work to do extra-poetically what the speech of his narrative persona performed within the poem, to generate a path to social and economic redemption in the isolating aftermath of madness. It is in this context that The Series’s envoy becomes crucially important. Inscribed with Hoccleve’s own name and written from the position of a “humble seruant” (5.741), the envoy to “my lady of Westmerland” (5.735) establishes a recuperative economy beyond the hermetic confines of the poem itself, one focused not on Hoccleve’s narrative persona but on Hoccleve himself:62 Go, smal book, to the noble excellence Of my lady of Westmerland, and seye Hir humble seruant with all reuerence Him recommandith vnto hir nobleye

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And byseeche hir on my behalue and preye Thee to receyue for hir owne right, And looke thow in al manere weye To plese hir wommanhede do thy might. (5.733–40)

Notwithstanding its nod to Chaucer’s Troilus, Hoccleve’s envoy is nothing if not conventional. In the specific context of The Series, however, it holds for Hoccleve the genuine prospect of redemption from his madness. Particularly if the autobiographical frame elements of the poem are, as many readers have suggested, reflective of the poet’s own struggle for social redemption after a period of mental illness, the Envoy may be seen as a final step in the Hoccleve’s rehabilitation, a short verse that denotes the establishment of a redemptive relationship of exchange outside of the confines of the text. The rhetorical move that Hoccleve performs in the “Dialogue,” in which the written poem is able to stand in for the spoken word, allows The Series itself to becomes the medium of exchange within its own envoy, the redemptive currency that Hoccleve attempts to circulate within Lady Westmoreland’s courtly milieu. Like the prayers in the Marian lyrics, The Series functions to “byseeche” the lady on the poet’s behalf, “to plese hir wommanhede,” and to “preye” for her patronage. It recapitulates hierarchical structures of philanthropic giving by positioning Hoccleve as a “humble seruant” dazzled by his lady’s “reuerence” and “noble excellence,” but it also insists on the reciprocity implicit in such a hierarchy, something made apparent by Hoccleve’s very real expectations of patronage, monetary support, and the fruits of his lady’s “gracious noblesse” (5.741). In presenting his poem to a patron through the same structures emphasized in both his Marian lyrics and The Series, Hoccleve assumes at once the position of the Monk in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” of the grieving Mary in “The Complaint of the Virgin,” and of the suffering narrative persona in the “Dialogue” and the “Complaint.” Offering both his fealty and his labor—both his vassalage and his hire—Hoccleve the poet hopes for the same varieties of redemption experienced by so many of his poetic personae. His envoy becomes the apotheosis of the redemptive work that Hoccleve imagines the spoken word (and now the poetic text) to perform.

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Clothing the Virgin and Clothing the King The economy of speech that connects The Series and the Marian lyrics is also a feature of Hoccleve’s remaining autobiographical works, La Male Regle and The Regement of Princes. In the concluding portion of this chapter, I turn briefly to those two poems in order to consider what the presence of that verbal economy suggests for Hoccleve’s body of work and how it positions that work in relation to the Lancastrian affi nity and the aims of the emergent dynasty. Written in the first six or seven years of that new dynasty, La Male Regle is a first-person account of Hoccleve’s misspent youth, a penitential lyric to the god of health masquerading as confessional autobiography.63 Like the Marian lyrics and The Series, the poem reconstructs an overtly hierarchical but reciprocal devotional framework, one whose chief redemptive specie is the spoken word, here figured as the narrator’s own confessional speech. Hoccleve solidly and quickly establishes the economic terms of his supplicatory relationship to the god of health, referring to him as the “grounde and roote of prosperitee” (Male 2). The poet also laments that “the venym of faueles [the flatterer’s] tonge / Hath mortified . . . prosperitee” (211–12), and he conflates money and auricular confession by drawing an explicit link between the coin of the realm and his own redemptive speech: “By coyn, I gete may swich medecyne / As may myn hurtes all, þat me greeue, / Exyle cleene, and voide me of pyne” (446–48).64 La Male Regle’s verbal devotional economy is most pronounced, however, in the poem’s final four stanzas, where Hoccleve refigures his confession to “Helthe” into begging prayer to Lord Furnivall, a “noble lord þat now is a tresoreer” (418). Having already asked Furnivall for his yearly ten pounds, Hoccleve apologizes for appearing “inportune” (425) and explains how speech is, for him, necessary to financial solvency. The prouerbe is, the doumb man no lond getith. Whoso nat spekith and with neede is bete, And thurgh arghnesse [cowardice] his owne self forgetith, No wondir, thogh anothir him forgete. (433–36)

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As in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” Hoccleve insists on a system of reflexivity and mutual exchange predicated on both rigid hierarchy and memoria. The poet’s speech serves on one level as a mnemonic for Furnivall, guaranteeing that the treasurer will not “forgete” the pecuniary needs of his humble supplicant. On another level, it becomes literary memorial, ensuring that Furnivall himself will be remembered for his “largesse” (415) and his “magnificence” (441). Indeed, the intimate relationship between money and language in La Male Regle, in which speech promises to alleviate financial need while silence promises to exacerbate it, is tethered to that reflexivity and, as in “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” to the mutual memory of the central figures in the exchange. In La Male Regle, the “doumb man no lond getith” and the “shamelees crauour” (429) will be rewarded with “estaat real” (430). In this economy, the man who does not use speech to “axe [for what] is due” (440) is likely to “sterue yit or eeue” (444). Like La Male Regle, Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes also develops a heirarchical and reciprocal economy of speech, in which, as Nicholas Perkins writes, “Hoccleve must negotiate an exchange between his words and [a] hoped-for reward from Prince Henry.”65 The stakes in the Regement’s verbal economy are, as in La Male Regle, financially rather than socially or spiritual redemptive. However, the exchange of word for coin that the poem enacts, as well as the surprising flexibility in the respective roles of supplicant and intercessor, once again mirror analogous structures in the Marian poems and The Series. The precise terms of the economy Hoccleve proposes in The Regement of Princes find their most compelling expression when the poet laments his increasing poetic dullness. More othir þing, wolde I fayne speke & touche Heere in þis booke; but such is my dulnesse– ffor þat al voyde and empty is my pouche,– Þat al my lust is queynt with heuynesse, And heuy spirit comaundith stilnesse.66

For a poet “whose words are coins, proffered in hope of some return,” the conflation of the monetary and the poetic is cemented by Hoccleve’s

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“voyde and empty . . . pouche,” a polyvalent conceit that evokes for Hoccleve the spent vitality of the ailing body (among other things, “pouche” clearly connotes “testicles” in this passage), the spent coin of the empty purse, and the spent speech of the depleted word hoard.67 But within the context of the poem’s address to the future Henry V, the empty pouch also recalls the reflexivity and verbal circulation that punctuates so much of Hoccleve’s work. Just as the Monk is granted “meede” (“Monk” 120) for his speech to the Virgin and just as Hoccleve is given psychological and social redemption for his “Dialogue,” so too will the poet who offers verbal currency from his “pouche” be given coin to put back into it. Once again, the inter-circulation and mutual exchange of coin and utterance give both things their value. For his ability to “speke” in the poetic form of his “booke,” Hoccleve gains the patronage and coin of the prince.68 For his patronage and coin, Prince Henry gains the speech of the poet. Like the mutually beneficial exchange of Mary and her monk, the circularity of the Regement’s verbal-pecuniary economy operates within but also transcends the hierarchy of lord and subject. Insofar as they insist on the value that the word accrues through circulation, the economies of speech developed in Hoccleve’s poetry are reflective of a wide cultural understanding in the later Middle Ages that words could do work, that speech—whether vocalized or poetic—was itself a powerfully efficacious tool. In “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” spoken prayers clothe the Virgin and effect countless salvations. In the “Complaint of the Virgin,” the failure of speech brings sorrow to Mary, while its recuperation allows for the promise of Christian redemption. Among the secular poems, Hoccleve’s Series shows verbal and poetic speech to be the means by which the Privy Seal clerk recovers not only his sanity but also his social position, whereas both La Male Regle and The Regement of Princes propose economies in which words bring health and wealth to the poet. By developing analogous economic models for the spoken word in his autobiographical and his political works, Hoccleve implies, more strongly than any other poet examined in this book, that ideals of performative speech are equally applicable to contexts both sacred and secular, both fiscal and soteriological. Words, Hoccleve insists, have the ability to perform work for the church and for the Crown, for the Virgin and for the prince.

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For no one is that idea more important than for Henry IV and Henry V, whose struggle to legitimate their usurping dynasty occupied nearly two decades of their collective rule. By manipulating chronicles, prophesies, legal documents, public spectacle, and even gossip to strengthen their tenuous grip on the Crown, and by stoking public fears over the encroachment of Lollardy on orthodox Christian devotion, the Lancastrian kings attempted simultaneously to cement their reputation as paragons of orthodox Christianity and to secure their place as the rightful heirs to Richard II’s “vacated” throne.69 As the continuing uncertainty over Gower’s position on the Lancastrian cause attests, the Lancastrians also enlisted poetic texts in their efforts to shore up their rule and to dramatize their late transformation from nobles into kings. Paul Strohm writes, “Fully implicated in the Lancastrian task of legitimating self-transformation was the Lancastrian poet. Long recognized as practitioners and exemplars of poetry as ‘symbolic legitimation,’ Lancastrian poets like Lydgate and Hoccleve moved well beyond the frontiers of simple integration and into a zone of complex complicity.”70 The question of Hoccleve’s “complicity” in the Lancastrian project is not as settled as Strohm suggests, and his argument that Hoccleve was “a royalist stooge” has met with increasing resistance by those who see trenchant criticism and genuine advice simmering beneath the poet’s apparent support of the Lancastrian cause.71 I contend, however, that the question of Hoccleve’s complicity, with all of the moral and ethical implications that encumber it, is the wrong one to be asking. Whether Hoccleve was actively complicit, politically self-interested, manipulated into collusion, or even subtly critical of Lancastrian dynastic ambitions, what was important to the Lancastrians and their supporters was the work that words could do in helping to secure the throne; the ability of the utterance, prayer, prophesy, or poem to make legitimate their royal claim. Authorial intent aside, Hoccleve’s poetry, with its idiosyncratic exchange economies of speech, supports the idea that the word harbors a genuine performative efficacy, that the spoken utterance can beget reward, can precipitate increase, can engage in almost physical ways with the world around it. And beyond the economic and fi nancial metaphors that lace his poetry, we can even see Hoccleve groping toward a poetics that

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transcends economics, a poetics in which, as Lois Ebin writes, “the poet’s words become a form of service to the state, a potent source of political illusion making, rewarded and . . . feared by monarchs.” 72 As such, Hoccleve’s verse fleetingly imagines a space where poetic speech not only clothes the Virgin, it crowns the king.

Speech, Rhetoric, and Politics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis

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he aspirations to kingmaking that shadow Hoccleve’s decidedly twitchy oeuvre are central to John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a poem whose ambition, scope, and self-assurance eclipse even Hoccleve’s most stentorian works. In fact, the very narrative behind the Confessio’s composition and subsequent revisions—a narrative that appeared blessedly straightforward until only recently—is bound to the linked fates of two English kings, Richard II and Henry IV. In 1386, John Gower—poet, moralist, friend of Chaucer, and literary polyglot—chanced upon King Richard II while both men were boating on the Thames. Recognizing Gower as an important poet, the king invited him onto the royal barge and charged him to write “som newe thing . . . / That he himself it mighte looke / After the forme of [Gower’s] writyng” (*Pro. 51–53).1 The result of this royal commission was, of course, the eight-book Confessio Amantis. Initially dedicated to “Richard by name the Secounde, / In whom hath evere yit be founde / Justice medled with pité” (*8.2987–89), the poem followed Gower’s French Mirour de l’Omme and Latin Vox Clamantis to become the last of the poet’s three major works and the first written primarily in English. What critics now refer to as the first recension of the Confessio was completed around 1390, but as the closing decade of the fourteenth century wore on, Gower continued to tinker with the poem, eventually producing two additional recensions. By 1393, the poet had apparently grown disenchanted with Richard’s rule. He removed both the effusive praise of the king from the final book and the account of the meeting on the Thames, replacing the former with a meditation on the three estates and

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the latter with a generic complaint about the world’s plight. No longer could the poem rightly be called “A book for King Richardes sake” (*Pro. 24); it had become instead “A bok for Engelondes sake” (Pro. 24). More important still, Gower rededicated the Confessio to Richard’s cousin and eventual usurper, Henry Bolingbroke, referring portentously to the count of Derby as “myn oghne lord, / Which of Lancastre is Henry named” (Pro. 86–87). Gower also excised a reference to Chaucer in the later two recensions, perhaps deeming his fellow poet too closely aligned with the king he now disdained. By the mid-1390s, then, Gower had apparently become the first public figure to repudiate the increasingly tyrannical Richard II and to embrace the man who would, by decade’s end, be England’s new king. Such acute political prescience, such uncompromising commitment to right rule—clearly (clearly!) the recensions of the Confessio show the poet living up to his most lasting sobriquet, “moral Gower.”2 The persistence of this chronology, proposed in its earliest form by G. C. Macaulay and affirmed by later generations of scholars, stands as a testament to the profound influence of Macaulay’s 1901 edition of Gower’s works.3 It also speaks to the power of authorized language to affect our perceptions of text and history. As one critic has recently remarked, following Macaulay’s textual distinctions is today “a matter of convention and convenience rather than conviction, as the assumptions on which they are based . . . have worn increasingly thin.”4 The political and literary interpretations of Gower’s three distinct recensions—the very idea of three recensions, in fact—owe as much to the authoritative narratives in which Macaulay and others have wrapped the Confessio as they do to the poem itself. But having lately been challenged on paleographical, textual, historical, and even visual grounds, Gower’s once unimpeachable recensions and their related literary-historical assumptions are ripe for reevaluation.5 Even the truism that Gower was responsible for personally overseeing revision and textual production of his poem, a crucial assumption for reading successive iterations of the Confessio as increasingly refined drafts, now seems nearly as dated as the Victorian-era criticism impugning Gower as “deficient in that living genius which bring [sic] man and nature before us as if alive again.”6

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Curiously, in the critical melee over Gower’s Ricardian and Lancastrian recensions, the divergent passages themselves—the versions’ respective dedications and conclusions, as well as their associated Latin apparatus—have most frequently been examined apart from the rest of the Confessio Amantis. Scrutinized in isolation for evidence of literary retrofitting, scribal interference, and political sycophancy, these passages have been effectively divorced from the 33,000-plus lines of socially and linguistically engaged verse that both versions share. What makes this artificial separation all the more unfortunate is that it obscures, or at least deemphasizes, one of the signal differences between the two versions. In a poem resolutely invested in the ability of the tongue—Gower’s “boneless one that breaks bones with speeches [Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis]” (Pro. i)—to effect quantifiable and sometimes physical change, those passages unique to the Lancastrian version are surprisingly mum about the spoken word, emphasizing the bookishness and textuality of Gower’s project rather than the potentia of speech. Such an elision is especially pronounced in relation to the Ricardian passages, which emphasize speech at every turn. In his address to the king in the Ricardian prologue, for example, Gower remarks on how the “gentil herte his tunge stilleth” and asks to be shielded from “jangling,” while in a similarly inflected passage from the Ricardian conclusion, Gower denies that “rethoriqe” (*8.3064) has colored his speech: “But I have do my trewe peyne / With rude wordes and with pleyne / To speke of thing which I have toold” (*8.3067–69). In the Lancastrian prologue, however, the jangling tongue is gone, replaced by a reverie for a halcyon past in which “wrytinge was beloved evere” (Pro. 38) and where “bokes schewen hiere and there, / Wherof the world ensampled is” (Pro. 46–47). The concluding lines of the Lancastrian version make similarly little mention of speech. Gower reflects, for instance, on his decision “to make a book . . . in Englesch” (8.3108) rather than discussing the “songs” that he undertook [carmina cepta] (*8.iv). Individually, Gower’s allusions to writing, hearing, reading, and speaking can be understood as conventional points in what Joyce Coleman calls an “aural-narrative constellation,” a system of oral, aural, and textual

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references that, like the stars in a celestial constellation, “are equally valuable but necessarily understood only in relation to each other.”7 In light of the Lancastrian version’s palpable shift from aural/oral to visual/literary, the constellations formed by the Confessio’s two sets of points must be understood as markedly different. Whereas the Ricardian version balances its references to speech and writing in a manner consonant with the remainder of the poem, the Lancastrian version emphasizes the written word to the exclusion of spoken language, suggesting a conscious and rather startling deemphasis of speech in the midst of a work whose opening Latin verse praises “Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti [the tongue of Hengist in which the island of Brutus sang]” (1.i). In this chapter I seek to explain the poem’s divergent Ricardian and Lancastrian passages not as poetic outliers of the Confessio Amantis but rather as material deriving from (and adhering to) the rhetorical and poetic logic of the work as a whole. The poem’s engagement with the spoken word and Gower’s concomitant emphasis on the efficacious and moral dimensions of speech show that the energy driving the two distinct versions of the Confessio comes not solely from external loci of patronage and poetic dedication but also from models of speech developed within the poem itself. I will look closely at Gower’s discussion of rhetoric in book 7, the poem’s speculum principis, as well as at several tales explicitly concerned with efficacious language, to show how the Confessio Amantis engages with late medieval discourses of speech and text. Furthermore, I will use that analysis to expose critical and politically significant disjunctions between the contested passages of the prologue and the concluding book. While such a reading may bring us no closer to the reliable timeline or textual stemma that many Gower critics seek, it will nonetheless illuminate the real political work that the Confessio Amantis performed for its dedicatees while revealing the linked concerns of two competing dynasties at a moment of profound historical transition for England. It will also show how ideas of efficacious speech in the Middle Ages impinged not only on philosophical and theological questions, such as those interrogated by The Canterbury Tales and Saint Erkenwald, but also on the explicitly—and dangerously—political questions raised by the Lancastrian ascension.

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The Force from the Weight of a Word Gower introduces his discussion of “rethorique” in book 7 of the Confessio with a Latin verse that asserts the powerful efficacy of the spoken word even as it distinguishes between “true” and “crafted” speech. Compositi pulcra sermonis verba placere Principio poterunt, veraque fine placent. Herba, lapis, sermo, tria sunt virtute repleta, Vis tamen ex verbi pondere plura facit. [Lovely words of crafted speech can please at the beginning, but true ones please at the end. Herb, stone, speech are all three full of power; but the force from the weight of a word does more] (7.v)

Slotted between “theorique” and “practique” in Gower’s tripartite anatomization of philosophy, the brief treatise on rhetoric exists at the intersection of the immutable laws of God on the one hand (theology, physics, mathematics, creation, and astronomy) and the slippery exercise of human virtue on the other (truth, largess, justice, pity, and chastity). And while Gower’s Genius, like Chaucer’s Manciple, emphasizes the almost physical potentia of the spoken word by placing it above herba and lapis in its efficacy, Gower’s discussion of rhetoric differs from the digressions of Chaucer’s pilgrim in that it highlights both the raw power of speech and the individual’s responsibility to deploy the spoken word in a manner concordant with the will of God. Thus, it is not lovely or pleasing speech [pulcra sermonis] alone that contains this transformative power but true [veraque] speech. The Manciple’s blithe indifference to (or utter failure to recognize) this distinction is among the most important features of Chaucer’s engagement with late medieval nominalist thought. Truth in “The Manciple’s Tale” is ultimately not reflected by speech; rather—as shown by Phoebus’s verbal recuperation of his slain wife and his subsequent destruction/creation of the black crow—truth is molded by speech. Gower’s equally stubborn insistence on the distinction between true and crafted speech is critical to the model of rhetoric developed in the Confessio Amantis. Gower wrestles not

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only with questions of what spoken words can do but also with questions of what they should do, combining a discussion of the power of speech with an overt acknowledgement of the speaker’s responsibility to use it properly. In terms of the former issue—what speech can do—Gower’s understanding of the potential of the spoken word is very similar to the Manciple’s. Genius, acting here as no less than “the author’s exegetical voice,” describes speech in terms of its efficacy to influence and shape the world around it:8 Word hath beguiled many a man; With word the wilde beste is daunted, With word the serpent is enchaunted, Of word among the men of armes Ben woundes heeled with the charmes, Wher lacketh other medicine; Word hath under his discipline Of sorcerie the karectes. (7.1564–71)

As in Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale,” where the tongue “right as a swerd forkutteth and forkerveth” (CT IX 340), the spoken word in Gower’s poem exists as an active agent: it beguiles, enchants, charms, and heals; it is a force “of evele and eke of goode” that can make “frend of fo, / And fo of friend” (7.1573–75). Genius insists to Amans that the spoken word “is vertuous [powerful] in his doinges” (7.1548) and that the word operates above “ston and gras,” surpassing them both in its efficacy and “vertu” (7.1545). Here, it would seem, is a description of speech with the power to turn the feathers of a white crow black or to raise the walls of an ancient city, a description of a word that holds power “above alle erthli thinges” (7.1547).9 Genius exemplifies such performative efficacy in his discussion of Ulysses’s role in Antenor’s betrayal of Troy. One of only two exempla in Gower’s discussion of “rethorique,” the account is significant for the seductive, almost hypnotic power it ascribes to Ulysses’s speech: For of Uluxes thus I rede, As in the bok of Troie is founde, His eloquence and his facounde

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Of goodly wordes whiche he tolde, Hath mad that Anthenor him solde The toun, which he with tresoun wan. (7.1558–63)

This passage does not mark the first time Ulysses appears in the Confessio Amantis, nor is it the first time he is lauded for his peerless talk. In book 5, Genius refers to Ulysses as “he which hath facounde [eloquence]” (5.3126), and in book 6 the Ithacan king is “a gret rethorien” (6.1399), whose vast knowledge of astronomy, philosophy, dream lore, herbal remedy, physics, surgery, and sorcery adumbrates the very subjects Genius himself expounds on in the treatises on “theorique” and “practique.”10 Combining his several appearances into a single teleological episode, one critic casts Ulysses as a mythopoetic metaphor for the penitent soul, a figure whose journey parallels Amans’s confession and allegorizes the pilgrimage of the Christian life. This reading binds the implicitly Christian aspects of Ulysses to his explicit prowess as a speaker by interpreting his final utterance to Telegonus— “Sone, whil I live, / This infortune I thee forgive” (6.1747–48)—as a soultransforming imitatio Christi that prepares Ulysses for the grace of God.11 The argument that Ulysses both embodies and demonstrates the efficacy of the spoken word—that, “in short, rhetoric can do all of the things Ulysses does in the Confessio”12—is a convincing one. Nonetheless, in his final appearance (which follows Gower’s narrative of his paternal and Christ-like act of forgiveness) Ulysses is more Satan than Redeemer. He uses “his eloquence and his facounde” to seduce Antenor into giving Troy to the Greeks just as the Serpent convinced Eve to take the apple. What Gower emphasizes by recounting such deceptive speech is not Ulysses’s putative Christian ethos, then, but the potential destructiveness of the words themselves, the fact that through speech alone, Ulysses can beguile Antenor and can engender, in the words of a much later poet, “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.”13 Gower writes, “The wordes ben of sondri sectes, / Of evele and eke of goode also” (7.1572–73). Insofar as his words cause Antenor to betray Troy, the Ulysses of book 7 embodies “evele” speech, the danger of the eloquent tongue. Unlike Chaucer’s Manciple, however, who ends his own exemplum for dangerous speech with a panicky injunction to silence, Gower allows

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the possibility that readers of his speculum principis will reject the “evele” speech represented by Ulysses and speak “goode” words that “doth plesance wel the more” (7.1587). In fact, even in the face of the spoken word’s capacious and terrifying potential, Gower insists that considerations of what speech should do always circumscribe its use. Indeed, Genius argues to Amans that the faculty of speech renders humans superior to beasts not primarily because it enables them to harness the potential of speech to effect change but because it allows for communication and self-revelation. The spoken word enables humans to reveal the knowledge and sentiment that they already possess: Above alle erthli creatures The hihe makere of natures The word to man hath gove alone, So that the speche of his persone, Or for to lese or for to winne, The hertes thoght which is withinne Mai schewe, what it wolde mene; And that is noghwhere elles sene Of kinde with non other beste. (7.1507–15)

A divinely ordained gift, the speech that Genius celebrates was designed by God to externalize the thoughts of the human heart; its efficacy and transformative ability thus coexist with its ordained capacity to reveal learning and transmit truth. Or, in the parlance of modern speech-act theory, the performative ability of speech in Gower’s Confessio must be understood as coterminous with, even as constrained by, its constative functions. The spoken word is at its most powerful where it does not contravene an objective, universal truth, where it “mai the pleine trouthe enforme / And the soubtil cautele [deceit] abate” (7.1638–39). It is, then, wholly appropriate that Gower positions his discussion of rhetoric between his essays on unchanging universal laws and the variable human practice of virtue. Immensely powerful and yet subject to unwavering divine strictures, speech functions as a hinge between God’s truths and humankind’s imperfect application of them. It elevates humans above

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beasts, but it simultaneously saddles them with the burden of deploying the spoken word to please God. Unlike Chaucer’s amoral and ostensibly nominalist Manciple, Gower’s realist Genius yokes the power of spoken words to the choices individuals make in using them. Those with the power to speak are responsible for using “wordes that ben resonable” (7.1525), for speaking “pleine wordes” (7.1534) that will “make amendes for the wrong” (7.1585), and for avoiding speech that would “don fulofte gret deceipte” (7.1553). Edwin Craun, who suggests that Gower’s stance on speech is heavily influenced by discussions of “sins of the tongue” in vernacular pastoral manuals, suggests that Genius emphasizes the “magnitude of such a unique gift to drive home the enormity of using words for evil purposes.”14 Genius, thus, becomes a figure who underscores the moral and ethical prerogatives of speech while highlighting the social imperative of choosing appropriately “betwen the trouth and the falshode” (7.1533). These are, I argue, the very same moral impulses that lie behind the second exemplum in Gower’s discussion of rhetoric, an account of Catiline’s trial for treason. In the exemplum, the Roman consul Silanus is the first to condemn Catiline for his crimes: Cillenus ferst his tale tolde, To trouthe and as he was beholde, The comun profit for to save, He seide hou tresoun scholde have A cruel deth. (7.1607–11)

Later, Genius will underscore what the straightforward account of Silanus’s accusation already implies: Silanus, beholden to “trouthe” and the common profit, speaks “plein after the law” (7.1623). Like Gower himself, who highlights his own “rude wordis and . . . playne” (8.3122), Silanis eschews the “compositi pulcra sermonis verba [lovely words of crafted speech]” described in the opening Latin verse and instead deploys true ones. By contrast, Julius Caesar, who speaks to save Catiline from the execution that he so justly deserves, “coloureth” (7.1625) his words with ornament and “frounce” (7.1594):

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Julius with wordes wise His tale tolde al otherwise, As he which wolde her deth respite, And fondeth hou he mihte excite The jugges thurgh his eloquence Fro deth to torne the sentence And sette here hertes to pité. (7.1615–21)

It is not difficult to discern the author’s own judgment of Caesar through the thin veil of the exemplum: the emphasis Gower places on straightforward speech in his own text—his assertion that he does not “peinte and pike” (8.3118) his words—both provides an implicit critique of Caesar’s craft y rhetoric and makes clear his rhetorical affinities with the plainspeaking Silanus.15 The crafted and seductive words of a soon-to-be tyrant, Caesar’s “tale” draws from a dubious palette of rhetorical colors, appealing to pathos rather than reason and derailing the wheels of Roman justice in the process. As he does in his account of Ulysses’s seduction of Antenor, Gower provides an exemplum where efficacious speech proves damaging to the social order, leading to the undue pardoning of a proven traitor. The outcome of Catiline’s trial might thus be understood as reinforcing the threat implicit in the spoken word, even as undercutting Gower’s own suggestion that the true word is more powerful than the deceptive one. But where in Gower’s text is the outcome of Catiline’s trial described? Indeed, despite its implicit condemnation of Caesar’s duplicitous speech and its rich description of Silanus’s oratory, the exemplum fails to report what might seem its most pivotal fact, that Caesar’s speech alone is responsible for the senate’s decision to pardon Catiline. I want to suggest that by downplaying, even eliding, the efficacy of Caesar’s speech and leaving unsettled the issue of Catiline’s pardon, Gower shifts the emphasis of his exemplum away from the potentia of deceptive speech and toward the moral and ethical dimensions of speaking itself, away from the issue of what the spoken word is capable of doing and toward the issue of how it should be used. As an instrument of tremendous power, “rethorique” must be wielded with a full understanding of “theoretique” and “practique,” the two treatises that sandwich it in book 7. Speech may function “above alle

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erthli thinges” (7.1547), but it is the individual speaker who must “schifte / Hise wordes to no wicked us” (7.1518–19), the individual speaker who must be taught when to restrain the tongue and when to loosen it. Gower sets the “plein” speech of Silanus in opposition to the dubious “eloquence” of Caesar not to show that one is more powerful than the other but to highlight their mutual potentia and, consequently, to imply the necessity of harnessing that potentia for “goode” rather than “evele” (7.1573).

• It is also important that the model of speech that Gower proposes in both exempla, which recognizes the efficacy of the spoken word and the necessity of controlling it, would have been strongly gendered in fourteenth-century England. Uncontrolled speech, embodied here in the corrosive words of Ulysses and the dubious but persuasive talk of Caesar, has much in common with gossip as it was understood in the later Middle Ages, both in terms of the danger it presented and in its transformative potential. Characterized by its “openness . . . , surplicity . . . , [and] excess,” gossip is invariably gendered feminine in late medieval writing, where it typically features as a “feminine appropriation of masculine language . . . [and] a threat to masculine culture.”16 And if such unconstrained gossip was, as Karma Lochrie writes, “generally elevated . . . as a female vice of extraordinary power,” then the careful control of speech, which Gower advocates throughout his treatise on rhetoric, was concomitantly lauded as a masculine virtue.17 Several critics have noted the implicit gendering of speech in Gower’s Confessio. Diane Watt speculates that for the poet, “proper speech is perhaps bestowed specifically on mankind, as opposed to mankind and womankind,” and she locates a number of medieval literary and historiographical references that impugn Gower’s most dangerous talkers, Ulysses and Caesar, as effeminate, emasculated, and even sodomitic.18 More recently, Sandy Bardsley has articulated the natural corollary to Watt’s assertion: “appropriate masculine speech in late medieval England . . . occupied a middle ground between silence and garrulity; at either margin, men risked being seen as effeminate.”19 Such observations show clearly that the paradigm for speech advocated by Gower in the Confessio Amantis draws deeply from medieval understandings of proper, restrained, masculine speech—speech

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that avoids the dangerous and slippery excesses of free-flowing, feminine gossip. Genius, in other words, not only wants to teach Amans how to talk; he wants to teach Amans how to talk like a man. Or, more accurately, how to talk like a king. The two readers Gower proposes for the Confessio are, after all, Richard II and Henry IV. The poem is thus a speculum principis in the tradition of the Secreta Secretorum—the apocryphal teachings of Aristotle to Alexander the Great—and as such imbricates the morality and ethics of speech into the politics of speech.20 Rita Copeland notes, “Gower’s Confessio amantis is overwhelmingly a political text, tracing a thematic move from the ‘singular profit’ of fin’amor to the ‘common profit’ of political caritas. . . . For Gower, rhetoric is defined in almost entirely political terms.”21 That politicization extends easily into the exempla we have already discussed. Uttered within the manifestly political arena of the Roman Senate, the efficacious (and possibly effeminate) words of Caesar become corruptors of public policy and statecraft. They are performative not because they fundamentally alter the natural world as in “The Manciple’s Tale,” or because they enact a miracle of transubstantiation as in Saint Erkenwald, but because they affect the decisions of the body politic. Similarly, the words that Ulysses utters do not raze the walls of Troy in the same physical manner that Amphion’s song builds the walls of Thebes. Rather, they seduce Priam’s political emissary into betraying the city to the Greeks, effectively destroying Troy without disturbing a single brick. The efficacy of speech in both of these cases is comparatively subtle, especially in comparison to the physically transformative speech of “The Manciple’s Tale” and the miraculous speech of Saint Erkenwald, but such subtlety should not be taken as evidence that speech lacks for Gower the robust performative capacity so apparent in those other works. Rather, Gower provides us exempla in which the efficacy of the utterance is at its most pronounced within the sphere of human relations, particularly where those relations intersect with the work of the state. Within this political sphere, the words of kings—like the words of Greek generals and Roman senators—are charged with immense potential and are commensurately weighted with responsibility. The model of speech that emerges from book 7 shows that the powerful words of a sovereign must always be tempered by similarly powerful restraint.

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The overtly political dimensions of “rethorique” found in book 7 have tempted many critics to locate specific parallels between the literary text and contemporary political events. Ann Astell, for one, finds that Gower’s disapproval of Caesar’s eloquence and approbation of Silanus’s “pleine trouthe” (7.1638) reflects on Richard’s second coronation oath, taken after the Merciless Parliament in 1388 and before the king declared his majority in 1389.22 Astell is persuasive, and the precarious moment she highlights in Richard’s reign is a critical one; however, I think her argument is most important not for its specifics but for suggesting the sheer political potential of Gower’s narratives and the allegorical valences that individual speech acts can assume in the Confessio Amantis. Copeland insists that the poem’s explicitly political seventh book “serves as an interpretive model for the structure of the whole poem. In this way the poem contains its own hermeneutical key: it implants within itself a guide to its own structural system.”23 Like the circular wavelets in Chaucer’s House of Fame, the reverberations from Gower’s discussion of “rethorique” in book 7 travel outward from their source and sweep across the exempla that populate the greater part of the Confessio. So too does the politically charged paradigm of speech that Gower develops in his treatise on rhetoric—the male-gendered model of the powerful speech act and the speaker who deploys it responsibly for the common good—eventually color the entire poem. Such a hermeneutic textual strategy ensures that the political and allegorical dimensions of speech developed in the poem’s penultimate book nonetheless inform the Confessio Amantis from beginning to end, including the respective dedications that Gower offers to the last of the Angevin kings and, later, to the first of his Lancastrian successors. “He wol hiere a mannes speche”: Richard and the Rhetoric of Kingship The gendered and politically inflected paradigms that Gower develops in his “rethorique” merge naturally with the advice Genius provides in the treatise on “practique,” particularly in his discussion of the vice of flattery.24 Genius’s admontion that “the covoitouse flaterie . . . many a worthi king deceiveth” (7.2168–69) carries the implied lessons of Ulysses’s deceptive

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rhetoric decidedly into the arena of royal policy; similarly, Genius’s warning against “feigned words” (7.2187) that convince the king “that blak is whyt and blew is grene” (7.2188) remind the Confessio’s readers to beware the Caesar-like flatterer, a figure whose speech might subvert not only the aggregate judgment of the Roman senate but also the individual judgment of the English monarch. The exempla that immediately follow Genius’s discussion of flattery only strengthen these links: the story of the flatterer Aristippus is deployed to show that the king should “hiereth wordes pleine” (7.2343) and “noght himself deceive” (7.2342), while the biblical tale of Ahab and Micaiah—which recounts how King Ahab was killed in an ill-planned military campaign after succumbing to the flattery of his advisors—shows why “isti circa Principem adulatores pocius a Curia expelli, quam ad regie maiestatis munera acceptari, Policia suadente deberent [flatterers around a ruler ought, by the argument of Policy, to be expelled from the court rather than accepted as adornments of a king’s majesty]” (7.2491 margin). But crucially, the paradigms of speech developed in book 7 do not remain hermetically sealed within that book; rather, they influence the anatomization of sin that occupies the majority of Gower’s poem. Within those sins that deal explicitly with the spoken word itself, particularly the sins of cowardice and quarreling, the poem is equally emphatic about the relationship between speech and action and about the gender assumptions that adhere to it. Gower presents cowardice, or “pusillamité” (4.314), as a species of the cardinal sin sloth. Described by Genius in book 4, it is manifestly a sin of speech, one in which the sinner fails to pluck up the courage to make any utterance whatsoever: Qui nichil attemptat, nichil expedit, oreque muto Munus Amicicie vir sibi raro capit. Est modus in verbis, set ei qui parcit amori Verba referre sua, non fauet vllus amor. [He who tries nothing accomplishes nothing, and a man rarely collects the reward of Friendship with a silent mouth. There is moderation in words; but love does not favor the man who is stingy in uttering words to his love.] (4.ii)

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Cowardice is a sin to which Amans readily admits. He is, it turns out, one of those “truantz” who “wexen doumb” (4.342, 45) in the presence of their ladies, a figure “so ferful, that [he] dar noght speke . . . when [he] toward [his] ladi come” (4.360–62). Of greater critical importance than Amans’s identity as a coward, however, is the implicit link that both Genius and Amans suggest between speaking and the performance of an action. In the Latin verse, Gower binds speech and action together by formal means, grafting the image of the silent mouth (“oreque muto”) onto the proverb “nothing ventured, nothing gained” (“nichil attemptat, nichil expedit”). Similarly, when Amans declares that failure to address his love has made him “slowe [slothful]” (4.356), he predicates his state of physical slothfulness on his fear of speaking. As in book 7, where Genius insists on the the inherent “vertu” of the spoken word, the passages in the discussion of cowardice portray silence as pusillanimous inaction. Genius’s first exemplum for “pusillamité,” a redaction of Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion, highlights the efficacy and the necessity of speech. In Gower’s rendering of the tale, Pygmalion’s statue is transformed into a woman neither by Pygmalion’s great love nor by Venus’s uninvited mercy but by the spoken prayers of Pygmalion himself. Indeed, as Genius insists, “if [Pygmalion] wolde have holde him stille / and nothing spoken, he scholde have failed” (4.426–27). The sculptor, then, engenders his statue’s transformation through his spoken utterances, and he illustrates in the process that speech can supersede even the laws of nature, that “word mai worche above kinde” (4.438). While some readers have expressed incredulity that the spoken utterance becomes so central to Gower’s retelling—J. Allen Mitchell writes, “Who would have thought Pygmaleon’s word would become the moral crux of the tale?”—the fundamental importance of speech in the exemplum is hardly surprising when we consider how Gower relates his tale to the seventh book’s treatise on rhetoric.25 Indeed, the phrase “word mai worche above kinde” echoes Genius’s assertion that “word above alle erthli thinges / Is vertuous in his doinges” (7.1547–48), while the efficacy that Genius accords to Pygmalion’s spoken prayers recalls how “the word under the coupe of hevene / Set everything or odde or even” (7.1581–82). And though it is in book 7 that Genius describes how “the word fulfilleth” (7.1584) through its transformative and revelatory power, the sentiment

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could just as easily accord to the exemplum of Pygmalion, whose efficacious speech fulfi lls his own desires and brings life to his beloved statue. Without question, gendered understandings of speech are also at play in Gower’s “Tale of Pygmalion.” A “lusti man of yowthe” (4.373), Pygmalion is initially presented in the poem as “forwept” and “forwakid” (4.404) with “desese of loves peine” (4.414), an emotionally unconstrained figure not unlike the love-lorn Amans himself. Pygmalion’s speech, too, demonstrates the excess and superfluity often associated with the garrulous female tongue. Genius relates how “ofte [Pygmalion] rouneth in [the statue’s] ear” (4.407) and “evere among . . . axeth grace” (4.410) of the mute object. If anything, the statue itself hews more closely to the masculine ideal of restrained speech, responding with “no word ageinward” (4.394) Pygmalion’s excessive speech. But at the moment of the statue’s metamorphosis—the moment at which Pygmalion’s speech attains its fullest efficacy—a more traditional set of gender roles assert themselves on the tale’s central figures. The statue, now transformed into “a lusti wife” (4.424) becomes “obiessant .  .  . at [Pygmalion’s] wille” (4.425), and Pygmalion, whose words have finally proven their appropriate potentia, now asserts his masculinity sexually (“his love he spedde, / And hadde al that he wolde abedde” [4.429–30]) and, perhaps more significant, reproductively (“A knave child betwen hem two /Thei gete” [4.432–3]). Thus Gower’s exemplum about the importance of hazarding speech in love becomes, more pointedly, an exemplum about the relationship between efficacious speech and the assumption of masculine gender roles, an exemplum about the power of talking like a man. Similar linguistic and gender considerations percolate through the second exemplum for cowardice, also drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The “Tale of Iphis” focuses on a young girl, Iphis, raised as a boy to prevent her father from killing her. On the night of her wedding to a beautiful woman named Iante, Iphis is transformed from female to male, an act of divine intervention that, as Genius insists, is “agein the lore / Of that nature in kinde hath sett” (4.494–95). As in the “Tale of Pygmalion,” the transformation itself is preceded—and precipitated—by a series of meaningful utterances, the most significant of which, the name Iphis itself, is a mark of masculinity attached to the young girl at the very moment of her

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birth. Iphis is also “clothed and arraied . . . as a kinges sone” (4.472–73) and betrothed to a duke’s daughter to perpetuate the belief that she is male. In these respects, the “Tale of Iphis” moves beyond even the “Tale of Pygmailon” in examining the notion that the signifier is responsible for the signified, that the word can be “sett [above] kinde” (4.490).26 Indeed, the young girl is repeatedly signified as male before Cupid transforms her into a man and, thus, becomes a metaphor for both the performative utterance and the object of its transformative efficacy. Both surrounded by signifiers that show her to be male and complicit in the deployment of those signifiers, Iphis becomes the signified that is altered to match its linguistic and physical sign. She is also, like Pygmalion, fundamentally made male at the moment of that signifier’s greatest transformative efficacy, asserting a newfound masculinity by winning “lusti young Iante [as] his wif” (4.503). Cowardice is not the only sin of speech anatomized in the Confessio Amantis. A species of the cardinal sin wrath, “cheste” (quarreling) occurs when the “tongue’s reins [lingue frena]” are loosened and “wrath stirs up conflict [ira mouet litem]” (3.ii). Like its counterpart in cowardice, quarreling is resolutely a sin of the tongue, one that Gower links explicitly to the “boneless one that breaks bones with speeches” of the Confessio’s prologue: For with the wyndes whiche he bloweth Fulofte sythe he overthroweth The cites and the policie, That I have herd the poeple crie, And echon seide in his degré, “Ha wicke tunge, wo thee be!” For men sein that the harde bon, Althogh himselven have non, A tunge brekth it al to pieces. (3.457–65 [emphasis mine])

The sin of quarreling, then, arises not from a cowardly failure to speak but from speaking excessively and wrathfully, from the inability to “hold thou thi tunge stille” (3.608). It is appropriate, then, that in Gower’s hands, the “Tale of Phoebus and Cornide” (the same story that Chaucer would assign to his Manciple) is offered as an exemplum for “cheste,” an antidote for “hem whiche usen wicke speche” (3.805).

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Even more than cowardice, however, the sin of “cheste” is associated with speaking, and more particularly with the female tongue. In the Middle Ages, women are often constructed “as potentially disruptive speakers, who ought to limit both the quantity and tone of their words,” and the stock figure of the quarrelsome, garrulous woman is a familiar one in the literature of late medieval England.27 In fact, Genius’s suggestion that the sin “cheste” develops when the “tongue’s reins” are loosened is uncomfortably suggestive of the image of the “scold’s bridle,” a device introduced in the early modern period that literally clamped shut the mouth of a woman accused of scolding.28 Just as do those for cowardice, the exempla that Genius uses to illustrate “cheste” also speak to the implicit gendering of the sin. In an inversion of the garrulous man and mute female paradigm from the “Tale of Pygmalion,” the “Tale of Socrates and His Wife” shows how masculine wisdom and restraint overcome the “wode rage” (3.662) of the philosopher’s emotionally unbalanced wife. Similarly, in the “Tale of Jupiter and Laar,” a gossiping nymph, constitutionally unable to keep from blabbing Jupiter’s “priveté” (3.820) to Juno, is punished for her uncontrolled speech by having her tongue cut out. The gendering of quarrelsome speech is most pronounced in the “Tale of Jupiter, Juno, and Tiresias,” in which Tiresias, who has lived both as a man and a woman, is punished with blindness for having taken Jupiter’s side in a quarrel with Juno over which sex is “more amorous” (3.745). The only remedy for such quarrelsomeness, Genius inists, is the taciturno . . . ore (3.ii)—the silent mouth. Keeping his mind always on Socrates’s shrewish wife, the chattering nymph, and the gender-shifting Tiresias, Amans is expected to exercise his “mannes wit” (3.617) and to speak with masculine restraint. Their gender connotations firmly in tow, the exempla for quarreling seem to present a moral similar to the one offered by Chaucer’s Manciple: “Beth war, and taketh kep what that ye seye” (IX 300). Because they insist that Amans refrain from speaking, however, the tales also overtly contradict Gower’s exempla for cowardice, which portray efficacious speech as a necessary remedy against sloth and an important part of Amans’s recuperation. Such inconsistencies, of course, are inevitable given the number of individual narratives comprising the Confessio Amantis, and, according to at least one prominent critic, they are also central to the moral

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and philosophical program of Gower’s poem. James Simpson writes that through such “deeply planted structural incongruences . . . Gower constructs a literary structure in which there is no reliable authority figure from within the text. Far from being coherently, consistently and persuasively didactic, the poem involves its reader as an active participant in the construction of its meaning.”29 I agree with Simpson that the Confessio strives to engage its reader in the construction of meaning and that the sometimes discordant voices of the poem invite the reader to actively manipulate the text in search of solutions. Nonetheless, I suggest that the specific disjuncture presented by the speech-centered sins of cowardice and quarreling should be reconciled under the umbrella of the seventh book’s rhetoric. The model for speech (and for speaking) that Gower proposes in his “rethorique” emphasizes both the performativity of speech evinced in the exempla for cowardice and the need for responsible speech suggested in Genius’s discussion of quarreling. Taken together, such outwardly incongruous statements as “Forthi hold thi tunge stille / And let thi witt thi wille areste” (3.608–9) and “Forthi, my sone, if that thou spare / To speke, lost is al thi fare” (4.439–40), represent the two loci of performative speech and responsible speaking that Gower expects his reader to navigate. They also reconstruct the model for masculine, kingly speech that Gower develops throughout his poem. These loci mark two points on a crucial line of continuity within the Confessio Amantis, a discursive thread that runs from Gower’s reference to the “Engisti lingua” (Pro. i) in the poem’s prologue to the spoken revelation of Amans’s name in book 8 (8.2321). Informed by the treatise on rhetoric in book 7, the Confessio’s repeated references to speech and speaking operate above the “fundamental incongruences” that Simpson recognizes in the poem and show speech to be among the dominant moral concerns in Gower’s final major work.30

• The model of speech that Gower articulates in book 7 and that finds its way into the Confessio Amantis’s wider narrative structure is also at play in the portions of the poem unique to the Ricardian version. Here, amidst the paeans and dedications to Richard II that Gower would eventually replace in the Lancastrian versions of the poem, the model of speech that

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the poet develops becomes political not simply because it promises general advice to England’s ruler but also because it engages directly and specifically with contemporary dynastic rhetoric. In the late 1380s and into 1390, Richard II was at a particularly transitional moment in his reign. I have already noted Ann Astell’s discussion of the second coronation oath required of Richard in the aftermath of the Merciless Parliament, but the moment is worth considering again in greater detail. As Capgrave reports in his chronicle: In this Parlement the lordes desired of the Kyng to make his sacramental oth byfore the puple, be cause the oth whech he had mad before was in his childhod. And so ded the Kyng, and all the lordis and states of the Parlement mad here new othis to be trewe ligemen to her Kyng.31

This second oath was, for Richard, only one of the countless humiliations heaped upon him during February and March of 1388, months that saw no fewer than ten members of his inner circle put to death, several others permanently exiled to Ireland, and his own royal power seriously circumscribed. Nor was the Merciless Parliament the first significant challenge to Richard’s authority in the late 1380s. The Wonderful Parliament of 1386 represented a similar, if far less violent, attack on the king’s affinity, one that, like the Merciless Parliament, effectively eroded Richard’s popular and consular support.32 Furthermore, in the two years that followed the Merciless Parliament, Richard’s position within England’s affairs of state continued to shift considerably. In the months after the second coronation oath, the king seems to have played almost no role in the political life of his nation; however, on May 3, 1389, less than a year after the last execution prescribed by the appellants, Richard declared himself “of sufficient age to governe [his] lordis, and [his] puple.” By 1390 he had already taken steps to strengthen his royal prerogative, including the production of a volume of statutes that would, at least implicitly, allow him to support and extend his personal authority.33 While the exact chronology of the various iterations of the Confessio Amantis remains uncertain, we can be relatively confident that these events coincide with the years over which Gower wrote the vast majority

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of his poem, including the passages praising Richard.34 These events also coincide with—and are, I would argue, closely associated with—the early appearance of rhetoric that would eventually become important to later Lancastrian accounts of Richard’s misrule, specifically the allegations of excessive youthfulness and effeminacy implied in the “Record and Process” and promulgated in such texts as Arundel’s sermon on Henry IV’s ascension, the Lancastrian-friendly Chronicle of Adam Usk, and the alliterative Richard the Redeless.35 Thomas Walsingham’s now-famous chronicle account of Richard’s household circa 1387 stands as a representative example of such rhetoric, though it is certainly far from a unique one: It is no wonder [Richard’s] favourites were jealous, for several of them were more soldiers of Venus than of Bellona, more valorous in the bedchamber than on the field of battle, and more likely to defend themselves with their tongues than their spears, for although they slept on when the trumpet sounded for deeds of war, they were always wide awake to make speeches.36

Similarly, the Westminster Chronicle refers to Richard’s youth in its account of the prosecution of Simon Burley, relating how “Simon was chamberlain of our lord the king in his tender age and bound to counsel him for the best to the profit of himself and of his realm.”37 In fact, the entire modus operandi of the Merciless Parliament, which attacked Richard by attacking the advisors and members of his familia putatively responsible for his misrule, was calculated to underscore Richard’s youthful irresponsibility. By contrast, Richard’s assertion of his majority a year later was devised to emphasize the king’s maturity and readiness to rule as a grown man, to accept the mature counsel of civic-minded advisors. In a recent analysis of the reign of Richard II, Christopher Fletcher describes a king in a constant struggle to assert his masculinity and to rebut imputations of both effeminacy and boyishness. Rather than accepting such deposition-era accounts as simply ad hoc attacks designed to humiliate the deposed king and justify the Lancastrian ascension, Fletcher argues that the mingled rhetoric of masculinity, femininity, and youthfulness “had been important in multiple distinct but overlapping ways in every period of

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[Richard’s] reign, both on account of the king’s own attempts to be recognized in the status of a man, and his opponents’ attempts to resist them.”38 Moreover, the rhetoric that Richard’s opponents mobilized against the king frequently reveals itself to be grounded in the same gendered assumptions of speech we see in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Allegations that Richard was “inconstant in speaking, easily promising with a word, [and] easily forgetting what had been promised,” as well as accusations that he had a “taste for nothing but pleasing things and flatteries,” drew their considerable energy from a cultural tradition that understood the unconstrained, gossiping tongue to be firmly in the realm of the feminine.39 Walsingham’s criticism of Richard’s Venusian knights as “more likely to defend themselves with their tongues than their spears,” as well as the Westminster Chronicler’s account of the king’s susceptibility to misleading flatterers like Simon Burley, imply Richard’s feminine relationship to the loose tongue. In the terms proposed by Gower, they suggest Richard’s failure to adopt the masculine modes of speech that Genius urges for Amans and to resist the “crafted speech” of duplicitous advisors. Just as Gower brings gendered medieval understandings of speech to bear on his treatment of rhetoric, he is also deeply aware of the mingled discourses of masculinity, femininity, and youth that pervaded Richard’s reign, especially in the late 1380s. As a text initially dedicated to Richard, the Confessio consciously redeploys such discourses both to distance the king from the effeminizing and infantilizing attacks of his critics and to promote his status as a mature, masculine ruler. Gower’s plea to be shielded from the jangling tongue functions in just this way. A gentil herte his tunge stilleth, That it malice noon distilleth, But preyseth that is to be preised; But he that hath his word unpeysed And handeleth onwrong every thing, I pray unto the heven king Fro suche tunges He me schilde. And natheles this world is wilde Of such jangling, and what bifalle,

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My kinges heste schal nought falle, That I, in hope to deserve His thonk, ne schal his wil observe; And elles were I nought excused, For that thing may nought be refused Which that a king himselve byt. (*Pro. 61–75)

The image presented in these lines of the poet striving to fulfill his king’s “heste” despite the chattering tongues of would-be detractors performs important work for both poet and king. For Gower, the struggle to fulfi ll Richard’s commission is part of a strategy of self-representation familiar from late-medieval advice literature, that of the truth-telling counselor/poet who fills the self-contradictory positions of royal subject and royal advisor. As becomes abundantly clear in book 7, Gower places himself in the position of Aristotle to Richard’s Alexander the Great, the respective roles allotted to advisor and ruler by the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum. In such a position, as Judith Ferster points out, Gower “consequently humbles himself, flatters the ruler, and promotes the appropriate hierarchical view of society in which rulers exercise power and subjects obey.” Paradoxically, he also assumes a kind of dominance over the king by freely dispensing the advice that Richard needs to rule his kingdom effectively.40 For Richard, the work that the passage performs is more complicated, but much of it turns on the representations of speech that Gower provides, particularly his representation of Richard’s “heste.” Loosely translated as “behest,” the term clearly signifies an oral command: in struggling to fulfill the “kinges heste,” Gower attempts—against a sea of malicious, chattering tongues—to respond to Richard’s royal commission. The contrast between “suche tunges” and Richard’s firm command is highlighted here, and it becomes particularly significant in light of the gendered representations of speech we have already discussed. In their garrulous excess and unnumbered plurality, the jangling tongues of the prologue are related, by definition, to the array of verbal sins associated with the unconstrained feminine tongue in the Middle Ages.41 Such discourses of unmanly speech were among those mobilized against Richard in the late 1380s. Like the

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children and women to whom he was compared, Richard was criticized by his detractors for his youthful “tendency to instability in speech” and his propensity for speaking “without reason and without measure.”42 In Gower’s Ricardian prologue, however, Richard’s speech stands in direct opposition to such gossipy language. His “heste” is not the distracting and inconstant chatter that menaces Gowers’s poetic production but the product of a singular and directed “wil” (*Pro. 72) that “may nought be refused” (*Pro. 74). Furthermore, Gower’s choice of the word “heste” to describe the king’s commission joins earlier references in the Confessio to Richard’s masculine “comaundyng” (*Pro. 54), at the same time imparting biblical and even divine overtones to the king’s speech, associating it with “heighe Goddes heestes honurable,” “þe ten hestis,” and “Godis est and His bidyng.”43 In this respect, Gower aligns England’s king with “the heven king” himself, a figure who will “schilde” the poet from the feminine tongues of critics and gossips. Richard, then, becomes a bulwark against unconstrained, womanly jangling, a strong monarch whose controlled, directed, and masculine speech is tantamount in its efficacy to the word of God. The Richard portrayed here is not the little boy (puer) that Arundel would later describe in his sermon upon Henry IV’s ascension; he is a man, and his speech, both in its control and its efficacy, reflects that manhood and refutes the allegations of youth and effeminacy to which Richard was subject.44 The passages directed to Gower’s “worthi prince” (*8.3014) in the Confessio’s closing lines similarly insist on Richard’s robust and masculine rule, and they further distance the king from suggestions of inconstancy while attesting to his mature kingship. In book 8, the king is lauded for the balance he strikes between justice and pity, largesse and charity, mercy and stern rebuke. He becomes the very model of kingly behavior: “In his persone it mai be schewed / What is a king to be wel therew” (*8.2991–92). Gower similarly underscores Richard’s constancy, comparing the king “to the sonne in his degree” (*8.3006) and promising to help “maake his regne stable,” rhetoric in keeping with contemporary attempts, such as Richard’s assertion of majority in 1389, to foster a sense of mature, steady rule and to show how the king heeded advisors who operated in the best interest of the commonwealth. Finally, when Gower presents his book to Richard

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near the end of the poem, he makes a point of eschewing the “crafted speech” that he derided in book 7: I no rethoriqe have used Upon the forme of eloquence, For that is not of mi science; But I have do my trewe peyne With rude wordes and with pleyne To speke of thing which I have toold. (*8.3064–69)

The speech that Gower describes here is not Richard’s; however, the “rude wordes” that the poet presents “to the worschipe of [his] king” (*8.3071) are described in much the same terms as the words of Silanus, the Roman consul who spoke against Catiline and for the “comun profit” (7.1609). Among the accusations that Richard II strove to resist in the period surrounding the Merciless Parliament was the charge that he was easily swayed by the words of flatterers and poor advisors, another mark of his supposed youth and inconstant rule. By publicly offering his own “rude” treatise to the king, Gower positions himself as a truth-teller while simultaneously demonstrating Richard’s readiness to accept rhetorically sound (and, by extension, ethically and politically sound) counsel.45 It is worthy of note that the most celebrated reference to spoken language in the Confessio Amantis does not deal explicitly with Richard at all. In a passage excised from Lancastrian versions of the poem, Venus asks Amans to “gret wel Chaucer when ye mete / as [her] disciple and [her] poet” (*8.2941–42), and she reports how England is fi lled with “ditees and of songes glade, / the which he for [her] sake made” (*8.2945–46). The inclusion of Chaucer in the Ricardian version of the poem and Gower’s removal of him in the Lancastrian versions has often been taken, along with Chaucer’s mention of Gower in the prologue to “The Man of Law’s Tale,” as evidence of a quarrel between the two writers.46 It is impossible to say with certainty, of course, that Chaucer’s disappearance from the Lancastrian Confessio Amantis really does mark Gower’s rejection of his rival poet; however, it is nearly as difficult to tell whether Chaucer’s portrait in the Ricardian Confessio Amantis is such a flattering one in the first

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place. I suggest that, at best, Gower’s references to the “ditees” and “songes glade” that Chaucer composed in “the floures of his youthe” offer ambiguous praise. At worst, they function in a similar way to the jangling tongues that pervade the Ricardian prologue, serving as a youthful counterpoint against which the relative maturity of Gower’s own words to Richard can be measured and, by extension, against which the reader gauges Richard’s mature acceptance of sound counsel. In fact, the faint praise of Chaucer’s “songes glade” serves in the poem as prelude to Venus’s request that the poet “upon his latere age . . . do make his testament of love / As [Gower] hast do thi schrifte above” (*8.2952–56). While the poetic reference to Chaucer’s “testament of love” remains unclear, the implication that Chaucer should abandon the “frounce” (7.1594) of his juvenilia and embark on the more meaningful poetry of “latere age” is a suggestive one in light of Richard’s ongoing assertions of maturity. The last point I want to make before turning to the Lancastrian passages of the Confessio Amantis is that the representations of speech and speaking in the Ricardian dedications are concordant with the political aims of their dedicatee in the late 1380s and early 1390s. They provide implicit resistance to Richard’s detractors and offer explicit support to the king himself by highlighting his mature, masculine, and efficacious “heste”; his palpable separation from the dangerously feminine tongue; and his willingness to abandon youthful flattery for the “rude” but truthful counsel of adult rule. I would go still further to suggest that we see in the Confessio an adumbration of the same rhetoric—visual, literary, and auricular—that would eventually come to define Richard’s rule, even to the moment of deposition. Consider the following: in 1393 Richard Maidstone penned the Concordia Facta Inter Regem et Cives Londonie, a highly stylized celebration of the 1392 procession that formally ended King Richard’s quarrel with the city of London. Purported by Maidstone to be an eyewitness report of the event, the Concordia is, to put it bluntly, 546 lines of royalist propaganda. And while it is difficult to ascertain whether the work was commissioned by Richard or someone else in his circle, it is clearly a poem designed to forward the aims of the king’s faction. The central metaphors of the work are introduced as Maidstone addresses the city itself:

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Mensis ut Augusti ter septima fulsit in orbem Lux, tibi, Londonie, rumor amenus adest; Namque tuum regem, sponsum dominumque tuumque, Quem tibi sustulerat Perfida Lingua, capis. Invidiosa cohors regem tibi vertit in iram, Desereret thalamum sponsus ut ipse suum; Sed quia totus amor tuus est—et amantis ymago Formosior Paride—nescit odisse diu. [When three times seven August dawns had lit the world, A pleasant rumor, London, spread throughout your bounds; For now you get your king again, your spouse, your lord, Whom Wicked Tongue had taken from you by deceit. Its grudging troop had roused the king to wrath at you, So that the groom gave up and left his marriage bed; But since your love is whole—your lover’s face more fair Than even that of Paris—he cannot hate for long.] (Con. 19–26)47

The praise of Richard builds throughout the Latin work. Honored above even King Arthur, Richard plays the lord and husband to London’s subservient wife, the pater populi (Con. 393) to London’s needy citizens. His people fall prostrate (prostrata ruit [Con. 539]) to beg the king’s forgiveness while Queen Anne herself lauds Richard as “michi vir, michi vis, michi vita [my man, my strength, my life]” (Con. 467). And when the king speaks, the citizens of London are appropriately awestruck: “Rege loquente; duces, plebs quoque, tota silet [The king began; the nobles and the folk fell still]” (Con. 499). As one critic has noted, Richard speaks in “language often bordering on a command,” a form far from the corrosive and uncontrolled chatter characterizing medieval ideas of feminine speech.48 In highly exaggerated form, Maidstone’s poem recycles the praise already familiar from Gower’s earlier work. The Confessio’s jangling tongues become the Concordia’s Perfida Lingua (Con. 22); the “heste” (*Pro. 70) that drove Gower to complete his work becomes the royal utterance that silences the city; Gower’s loyal obedience to his king becomes the Londoners’ prostration and pleas for forgiveness. Here, exploded into a near parody of itself, is the

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mature king suggested by the Confessio Amantis, the masculine face that Richard strove to project to his subjects. And project it he would. If Gower’s image of Richard adumbrates Maidstone’s heroic caricature, the outlines of Maidstone’s image are themselves clearly reflected in the regal figure of the Westminster Abbey Portrait, the divine iconography of the Wilton Diptych, and the increasingly elaborate modes of address that Richard demanded of his subjects during the final decade of his reign. The model king that Gower proposes in his “book for King Richardes sake,” a figure developed in relation to the Confessio’s discussion of rhetoric and medieval ideas of speech, thus contributes to this project of monarchical self-representation and operates along a continuum of Ricardian propaganda bent on shoring up the king’s all too tenuous grip on the Crown. Regardless of his later complicity in the emergence of the Lancastrian dynasty, the Ricardian Confessio Amantis shows Gower to be a writer receptive to the dynastic aims of his patron, sensitive to the regnal needs of his king, and fully aware of the political implications of his own work. The Wrytinge of Here Werk: The Lancastrian Gower If the kingship of Richard II was witness to an ongoing crisis of royal masculinity, the reign of Richard’s usurper, Henry IV, labored under a pall of dynastic illegitimacy that even the orderly lineal succession of his son thirteen years later could not wholly efface. In the weeks preceding his coronation (and the months and years following it), Henry IV engaged in a concerted effort to establish and promote his claim to England’s throne by almost any available means. The anxious tenor of the Lancastrian claim is aptly encapsulated in Henry’s challenge to the throne on September 30, 1399: In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; I, Henry of Lancaster challenge this Realm of England, and the Crown with all its members and appurtenances, inasmuch as I am descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry the third, and through that right that God of his grace has sent me, with the help of my kin and

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my friends, to recover it; which realm was on the point of being undone by default of governance and the undoing of the good laws.49

Unable to make a claim based solely on descent—for, strictly speaking, the eight-year-old earl of March maintained an equal or greater claim by lineage—Henry emphasizes not only his royal blood but also his role in resisting the tyranny of Richard, the military and political might of his “kin and .  .  . friends,” and even the will of God in leading him to the cusp of kingship. Other documentary sources show Lancastrian apologists employing similar strategies: promoting the nascent dynasty based on Henry’s easy conquest of Richard’s armies during the summer of 1399; perpetuating the narrative of Richard’s renunciation of the throne and personal support of Henry’s succession; and even attempting to reconfigure the well-established birth order of Henry III’s sons—Edward I and Edmund, earl of Lancaster—in order to validate Henry IV’s shaky claim through distant ancestry. Orchestrated by the Lancastrian affinity, these strategies of legitimation were part of an all-out propaganda blitz surrounding Henry’s coronation, a focused attempt to rally support for the new king in his most insecure hour and to short-circuit the inevitable accusations of illegitimacy that would follow him onto the throne. Permeating all levels of English society, the efforts of Lancastrian partisans to legitimize their usurper king also spun off a disparate web of narrative and documentary detritus which fundamentally informed “the symbolic and discursive environment” in which literary texts were produced.50 Poets anxious to curry favor with the new king took advantage of the diverse justifications offered for his ascension. The envoy to “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” for example, written in the months following the coronation, famously addresses Henry IV as “conqueror of Brutes Albyon, / Which that by lyne and free eleccion / Been verray kyng” (“Purse” 22–24), a configuration that explicitly supports at least three aspects of the Lancastrian claim.51 Gower, too, employs these discourses in his unabashedly proLancastrian Cronica Tripartita, lauding Henry as king by conquest (conquestat), lineage (succedit heres), and the will of the people (eligitur a plebe). He also engages with the Lancastrian claim in his English “In

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Praise of Peace,” referering both to Henry’s royal “ancestrie” and popular affirmation by “the londes folk.”52 These poems, all overtly informed by the events of 1399, both employ and respond to the prevailing rhetoric of the deposition and Lancastrian ascension. But Gower’s Confessio Amantis is significantly different from these three works. Largely completed in the late 1380s and early 1390s, the Confessio can hardly be included with the group of poems generated by the events of the deposition, what Frank Grady has called the “generation of 1399.”53 Even if we opt to follow a chronology like the one proposed by Terry Jones, in which Gower wrote the Lancastrian portions of his poem after the deposition and slotted them ex post facto into the Confessio, we are left with a long work whose engagement with postdeposition Lancastrian rhetoric is necessarily circumscribed by the thousands of lines of Ricardian verse already in place, including the speculum principis of book 7.54 In other words, even if Gower did recontour the Confessio’s introduction and conclusion after the deposition, the question of how “a book for King Richardes sake” (*Pro. 24) could, with just a few alterations, become a book for “myn oghne lord, / Which of Lancastre is Henry named” (Pro. 86–87) remains a problem. One solution is suggested by Jenni Nuttall’s recent analysis of literature and Lancastrian kingship. Using the political writings of J. G. A. Pocock as her theoretical cornerstone, Nuttall demonstrates how preexisting languages and idioms were exploited and politicized in the wake of the Lancastrian usurpation. “As well as paying due attention to the longer diachronic history of these idioms,” she writes, “we can also thus take account of synchronic moments in which such idioms become temporarily associated with particular events or speakers or political actions.”55 Nuttall applies this theory specifically to certain literary tropes, such as the de casibus narrative or the figure of the excessively fashionable young man, and demonstrates how they were used by Lancastrian propagandists to retroactively criticize Richard in the months and years following the deposition. But the model she presents is equally pertinent for the Confessio Amantis itself, a work that, as its lengthy and convoluted textual history attests, was not relevant merely to a single historical moment but to a larger historical period. Unlike the jingoistic Chronica Tripartita or even Chaucer’s less polemical (but no less political) “Purse,” the Confessio

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was a work composed, revised, and refigured over the span of almost a decade. I suggest that the comparatively stable portions of the Confessio Amantis—the vast majority of the poem, in fact—can thus be regarded as a “preexisting language,” a text that moves diachronically across the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This is the text from which Gower ultimately drew the paradigms that informed his two dedications. The changes that Gower made to the text when he prepared the poem for Henry, then, are traces of the synchronic moments in which the Confessio was redirected to the political ends of the Lancastrian affinity, the moments where Gower employed the preexisting discourses of his Confessio to suit the needs of Henry’s emerging dynasty. As I have already indicated, several key distinctions between the Ricardian and Lancastrian sections of the Confessio hinge on their treatment of the spoken word. The references to “heste” and “comaundyng” that punctuate the Ricardian prologue are greatly diminished in the Lancastrian prologue, and the discussions of Chaucer’s “songes glade” and Gower’s “eloquence . . . to speke of thing which I have toold” (*8.3065–69) are nowhere to be found in the Lancastrian conclusion. In their place, Gower provides an encomium to a lost past in which “wrytinge was beloved evere / Of hem that weren vertuous” (Pro. 38–39), promises to “wryte a bok / After the world that whilom tok / Long tyme in olde daies passed” (Pro. 53–55), and emphasizes the position of his “book . . . betwene ernest and game” (8.3108–9). Like the references to speech deleted from later versions of the poem, the passages on bookishness and writing unique to the Lancastrian Confessio are necessarily informed by the context of Gower’s poem as a whole (e.g., from the context of the diachronic text). However, the Lancastrian passages can also be seen as representing the synchronic textual moments in which Gower attempts to meet the immediate political needs of his new patron. Thus, as the speech-heavy Ricardian passages find their most fertile context in the Confessio’s treatise on rhetoric, so do the bookish Lancastrian passages engage with the references to books and writing already found in the poem, drawing from and politicizing the preexisting idioms that populate Gower’s work. In the context of Gower’s address to Henry of Lancaster, such “neutral elements” of the poem become, in Nuttall’s words, “temporarily politicized and partisan.”56 They

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become preexisting languages drafted post hoc into service of the Lancastrian cause. How then does Gower characterize the book in the Confessio Amantis? References to books and written texts are ubiquitous in the poem: so frequently does Genius remind us that his tales come from “olde bokes” (2.2140) and “olde gestes” (7.4313) that the textual authorities he cites come to exist collectively as a kind of white noise behind the individual exempla he presents. Nonetheless, within that white noise we can clearly discern one critical role Gower ascribes to the book. Consider the following three passages: This noble king of whom I tolde Of Spaine be tho daies olde The kingdom hadde in governance, And as the bok makth remembrance. (1.3389–92) And as the bok makth remembrance, It telleth of Medee also. (3.2558–59) And for to drawe into memoire Here names bothe and here histoire, Upon the vertu of her dede In sondri bokes thou miht rede. (4.2359–62)

Respectively, these quotations are from the conclusion to the “Tale of Three Questions,” Genius’s discussion of homicide, and the conclusion to the tales on sluggishness; however, similar references to books exist throughout the poem. What I want to highlight here is the relationship they imply between books and memory, as well as between memory and history. As Mary Carruthers reminds us, models for memory in the Middle Ages were closely related to the acts of reading and writing: “Writing itself, the storing of information in symbolic ‘representations,’ is understood to be critical for knowing. . . . And the corollary assumption is that what one writes on the memory can be at least as orderly and accessible to thought as what it written upon a surface such as wax or parchment.”57 As such,

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the process that Genius and Amans repeatedly enact—in which Genius reproduces for Amans tales from “sondri bokes thou miht rede”—is suggestively close to the process of memory as understood in the fourteenth century. It becomes closer still when we consider, with James Simpson, that Genius and Amans are not discrete individuals but two “faculties of the same soul.”58 Rather than a pedagogue who teaches Amans by reciting from old books, Genius is that critical faculty within Amans that spurs him to memory. The book itself, then, becomes not the repository of new knowledge but a vehicle of recovery, the means through which Amans reclaims old knowledge from a temporarily forgotten past. Despite Genius’s repeated references to texts from the past, books do not occupy the pivotal position that speech does in the Confessio’s individual tales. In the few exempla where they do occupy a central role, however, they serve as vehicles of personal and cultural recovery. In the “Tale of Apollonius of Tyre,” for example, Genius refers to Apollonius’s daughter Thaisis as “wel boked, / So wel . . . that sche of every wisdom couthe” (8.1328–30). Early in the tale, this bookish wisdom promises to be Thaisis’s undoing, both engendering the “fals envie” (8.1334) of her rival, Philotenna, and leading to a host of misadventures including Thaisis’s abduction and imprisonment in a bordello. At the tale’s conclusion, however, the “sondri bordes [tales]” (8.1676) and “demandes [riddles] strange” (8.1677) that Thaisis once learned from her books work to rekindle the paternal love of Apollonius (“sche made his herte change” [8.1678]) and provide the grounds for their happy reconciliation. Crucially, when Thaisis finally does reveal her identity to her father, she mentions not only her name but also the degree to which she was “set to bokes lore” (8.1300) as a child: My name is Thaise, That was som time wel at aise. In Tharse I was forthdrawe and fed; Ther lerned I til I was sped Of that I can. (8.1717–21)

Linked with her very identity and implicated in the restoration of her paternity, Thaisis’s “bokes lore” becomes not only a source of new knowledge

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but also a means by which old knowledge is recovered, a vehicle by which a truth already present is revealed. Similarly, in the “Tale of Constance,” the murderer knight who falsely accuses Constance is compelled by God to “beknow the sothe” after falsely swearing on “a bok.” (2.868) Gower’s choice of the verb beknouen is particularly significant here. While “beknow the sothe” is usually translated as “acknowledge or confess the truth,” the word beknow can also mean “realize,” “be aware of,” or “recognize.”59 Reading the phrase as “recognize the truth” reinforces the role of the book in the revelation of the knight’s crime to Constance and in the knight’s own recognition of a crime already committed, the recovery of an act already performed. The fundamental relationship between books, memory, and recovery that Gower implies in these tales and in his many references to “olde bokes” extends into the dedicatory material of the Lancastrian prologue. Indeed, Gower insists on the relationship between books and memory, offering the mnemonic potential of “bokes”—not the spoken “heste” of King Richard— as his primary impetus for writing the long poem: For hier in erthe amonges ous, If no man write hou that it stode, The pris of hem that weren goode Scholde, as who seith, a gret partie Be lost; so for to magnifie The worthi princes that tho were, The bokes schewen hiere and there, Wherof the world ensampled is. (Pro. 40–47)

The sentiment here is commonplace if genuinely felt: without books, Gower suggests, the past virtues of “worthi princes” will be forgotten, along with the “pris” of other worthy individuals. But even as they draw their authority from proverb and cliché, these eight lines also foreground the role of the book as a preservative for the “goode” in history, a hedge against the personal loss of reputation and the collective loss of cultural memory. Later, Gower goes even further, portraying the prologue to his book not only as an antidote for loss but also as a mechanism by which the previously unknown (and unknowable) might be remembered.

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For this prologe is so assised That it to wisdom al belongeth. What wys man that it underfongeth, He schal drawe into remembrance The fortune of this worldes chance, The which no man in his persone Mai knowe, bot the god alone. (Pro. 66–72)

Here, the text preserves personal and cultural knowledge, allowing the wise reader to “drawe into remembrance” truths that no single individual can know, to reclaim the knowledge of “the fortune of this worldes chance” that Gower claims as the province of “god alone.” As in “Apollonius of Tyre,” the text becomes a spur for “remembrance,” for revelation, for the recovery of a cultural repository of knowledge always already present but previously inaccessible. The imbricated discourses of text and memory that pervade the Confessio are nothing if not proverbial. Shopworn and idiomatic, they constitute a seemingly neutral thread in the poem’s linguistic fabric, a recurring theme that, in Nuttall’s words, is “already available and readily understood.”60 Like any preexisting language, however, those “already available” discourses simmer with political potential, and when they are contextualized by the Confessio’s dedication to Henry of Lancaster they suddenly emerge as highly charged idioms attuned to the political and dynastic needs of Gower’s new patron. As Henry IV struggled to justify his kingship, he and his affinity regularly invoked the languages of memory and recovery. The address to parliament on September 30, in which the future king couched his challenge to the throne as an effort to “recover” a nation “undone by default of governance and the undoing of the good laws,” is but one obvious reference to Henry’s role in recalling the realm to itself and in restoring the principled governance of an unspecified past. So, too, is Henry’s return to England in the summer of 1399, a violation of exile that, as Walsingham insists, was not really a grab for national power but merely an attempt by Henry to “seek his inheritance,” to recover that which had been unjustly taken from him.61 Another partisan chronicler, Adam of Usk, goes Walsingham one better, both invoking the tortured argument

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of Henry’s birthright to the throne through Edmund, earl of Lancaster, and casting his return to England as the long-foretold fulfillment of the prophesy of Merlin.62 Even Henry’s coronation ceremony was orchestrated to show that the new king had returned to claim a throne that was already his. This becomes particularly clear in light of Henry’s anointment with a “heavenly oil, which once the blessed Mary, mother of God, entrusted to the blessed Thomas [Becket].”63 Walsingham reports that this oil, which had “lain hid” for centuries, was rediscovered by the ancestors of Richard II, passed to his father the Black Prince, and eventually hidden in the Tower of London. The coronation oil only passed to Henry when Richard himself, who had discovered the oil while rummaging about in the Tower of London, determined in the fading days of his rein that the “noble sacrament was destined for another.”64 Both the pseudo-genealogical descent of the coronation oil and Richard’s supposed recognition that it was “destined” for Henry work to elide the rupture that Henry represents, portraying the first Lancastrian king not as an agent of usurpation but rather as a preordained, divinely sanctioned figure of dynastic recovery.65 The rhetoric of recovery that would eventually become important to the Lancastrian project of legitimation is present even in Ricardian versions of the Confessio. Indeed, the tales and exempla Genius presents to Amans showing “olde bokes” as mechanisms of recovery, as well as Gower’s overt reliance on written sources and the eventual restoration of Amans’s own disjointed self through Genius’s tales, exist in both versions of the poem. However, by removing the references to speech favorable to King Richard and replacing them with a concentrated meditation on the role of the book in enabling personal, cultural, and even historical recovery, Gower reemphasizes those aspects of his poem already favorable to Lancastrian interests and shows his work to be philosophically aligned with the Lancastrian ascension. Such a shift, of course, does little to change the eight-book poem as a whole: as Joyce Coleman reminds us, “Gower labored to produce some 33,000 lines of English poetry” for Richard II and changed only “a few hundred lines” for Henry IV.66 But by explicitly foregrounding the mnemonic and restorative role of books in the prologue and conclusion, Gower rebrands the Confessio Amantis as a Lancastrian

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text as surely as he once established the poem’s Ricardian bona fides. Even the Confessio’s new designation as “A bok for Engelondes sake” (Pro. 24) directs attention away from the book’s role in supporting the individual monarch and toward its role in restoring order to a realm that “wel nyh stant al reversed” (Pro. 30), a role that Henry, too, would see himself assuming at the moment of his coronation. Positioning the poem as an object of “curiosité” for “lered [learned] men” (8.3113–14) and concluding with an emphasis not on the efficacy of straightforward speech but on the words he employed to “write” (8.3124) his manuscript, Gower delivers his “liber purus [spotless book]” (8 envoy) to the future King Henry IV, secure in its new role as a literary prelude to the Lancastrian ascension.

• Or was the book not a literary prelude to the Lancastrian ascension but a literary apology for the Lancastrian usurpation, a work presented to Henry IV only after he was already ensconced on England’s throne? I stated at the outset of this chapter that I did not intend to provide a timeline or textual stemma for the Confessio Amantis but rather to reappraise the political work that it performed based on its representation of (and, later, deemphasis of) the spoken word. Nonetheless, it is tempting to hypothesize about the dates of the Lancastrian versions of the poem based on this internal, literary evidence. A number of contradictions within the Confessio make it difficult to pin down a firm date for the Lancastrian version. Paramount among them is a passage in which Gower dates the Lancastrian prologue to “the yer sextenthe of Kyng Richard [1392]” (Pro. 25) and then refers to Henry as “of Lancaster” (Pro. 87), a title Henry wouldn’t inherit until the death of John of Gaunt in February of 1399. A number of critics, most recently Wim Lindeboom, have taken this particular contradiction as evidence that “Gower’s early crossover is a literary sham and that portions of the Confessio were rewritten after 1399 in order to accommodate both the new regime and [Gower’s] part in it,” a view that accords with our understanding of the Lancastrian propaganda machine.67 My own reading of the Confessio leads me tentatively to agree with Lindeboom, but only up to a point. The patterns of rhetoric that we see in the Lancastrian passages of the Confessio, particularly its emphasis

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on the idea of recovery, do indeed support one aspect of Henry’s claim to the throne, an aspect that rose to prominence near the period of the deposition. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of recovery so central to the Confessio’s support of Lancastrian kingship is not the rhetoric most frequently employed by Lancastrian poets, including Gower himself, in poetic works composed in the aftermath of the deposition. As Paul Strohm shows, the shorter poems that both Gower and Chaucer address to Henry after 1400 emphasize a common cluster of justifications to the throne: Henry as rightful heir, Henry as conqueror, and Henry as the choice of the people.68 Despite its clear support of the Lancastrian cause, the Confessio’s dedicatory material does none of these things, opting instead for a focus on bookish recovery to complement Henry’s own recovery of the English Crown. What I suggest we see in the distinction between the Lancastrian sections of the Confessio and other Lancastrian works such as the Cronica Tripartita and Chaucer’s “Purse” is the distinction between a work written very early in the postdeposition period, or even slightly before the deposition, and works written somewhat later, after the rhetoric surrounding the deposition had been more firmly established. Its prologue and concluding material retrofitted to emphasize issues pertinent to Henry at the moment of his coronation, the Lancastrian Confessio Amantis does not rise to the level of propaganda that we encounter in Gower’s later works. Rather, it reveals to us an avenue of Lancastrian self-justification followed only so far, a potential means of legitimation first used by Henry’s affinity and then abandoned for the more fruitful ones on display in the shorter, later works. As such, the Confessio Amantis furnishes a glimpse of the complexities of Gower’s own struggle to make the transition from the reign of Richard II to the reign of Henry IV. So too does it show evidence of Henry IV struggling to rise to the occasion of his own sudden and tenuous kingship, unsure even at the moment of his coronation how best to argue for his place on England’s throne.

Conclusion The Plowman’s Two Voices

Throwe on water now a stoon, Wel wost thou hyt wol make anoon A litel roundell as a sercle, Paraunter brod as a covercle; And ryght anoon thow shalt see wel That whel wol cause another whel, And that the thridde, and so forth, brother, Every sercle causynge other Wydder than hymselve was. –G e of f r e y C h auc e r , The House of Fame Ploughman Tylyer, drawe the nere And telle thy tale, and we wyl here. –“Geoffrey Chaucer,” Prologue to “The Plowman’s Tale”

T

homas Hoccleve’s “The Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria” has frequently been overlooked by contemporary critics anxious to dub Hoccleve England’s first autobiographical poet, a claim usually made on the basis of the Series, the Regement of Princes and La Male Regle alone. Little more, it seems, was the poem noticed in its own time. It exists only in three manuscripts, far fewer than the eleven surviving witnesses of Hoccleve’s “Complaint of the Virgin,” the ten manuscripts containing the poet’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s “L’Epistre de Cupide,” or the seven existing copies of the Series. Such scant critical and popular reception notwithstanding, “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin” did manage a dubious

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second act in the mid-fifteenth century when it was assigned to Chaucer’s most famously silent pilgrim, the Plowman. Introduced by a spurious link in which Harry Bailly invites “Ploughman Tylyer” to “telle hys tale, as lot comyth aboute,” Hoccleve’s short paean to the Virgin rests uneasily in one manuscript of The Canterbury Tales between the tales of the Squire and the Second Nun, a polemical exemplum of orthodox Marian devotion in the midst of Chaucer’s often conflicting (and seldom polemical) work.1 The reasons behind the inclusion of the Hocclevean “Plowman’s Tale” in Christ Church Oxford MS 152 are not entirely obvious. The simplest explanation, of course, is that the compilers of the Christ Church manuscript, faced with both a mute pilgrim and a few blank pages after “The Squire’s Tale,” opted to fill both textual voids with a single poetic gesture. This kind of extra-authorial interpolation was a common enough occurrence in medieval manuscript production, and there is little reason to think that it did not happen here. John Bowers, however, suggests that the assignment of the tale to the Plowman rather than another silent pilgrim—one of the Five Guildsmen, for example, or the Knight’s Yeoman— is itself a significant choice: The plowman-figure had become the focus of considerable controversy beginning in the fourteenth century, accused by some preachers of opportunism during the labor shortage in the wake of the Black Death, praised by Wycliffite writers as the image of the ideal Christian. . . . By the mid-fifteenth century, the agents responsible for organizing the Christ Church manuscript of The Canterbury Tales apparently felt that even a mute Plowman was not altogether desirable. . . . Provided with a makeshift prologue fitting the work into the pilgrimage narrative, the rhyme-royal Miracle of the Virgin originally written by Thomas Hoccleve (d. c. 1426) was placed in the mouth of the Plowman as a story of unimpeachable orthodoxy.2

Considering the approximate dates of the Christ Church Canterbury Tales (c. 1460–1470), the notion that Hoccleve’s “Monk Who Clad the Virgin” was added to Chaucer’s work as a preemptive defense against Wycliffism per se seems somewhat unlikely. While it lingered into the 1430s, Lollardy was greatly diminished by the suppression of the Oldcastle rebellion of

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1414, surviving thereafter as something of a fringe movement.3 Moreover, by the time the manuscript was compiled, the house of Lancaster was no longer an emergent dynasty using the fear of Wycliffism and the stringent enforcement of religious orthodoxy to solidify its position on the throne; rather it was a dynasty struggling to reclaim its position at the head of the English state. Indeed, by 1461, Edward of York had already deposed King Henry VI, much as Henry’s grandfather had himself deposed Richard II. While Henry would be restored briefly in 1470, the ascension of Edward IV effectively put an end to the short-lived Lancastrian dynasty, replacing it with the even shorter-lived Yorkist dynasty. Nonetheless, what Bowers calls “the subversive potential of the plowman as a spokesman for radical change” still loomed large in the charged political and civic environment of the 1460s, as evidenced by a continuous tradition of populist plowman literature extending well into the sixteenth century.4 As one critic notes, the vast majority of plowman texts, many inspired (or at least occasioned) by Langland’s Piers Plowman, “belong[ed] to a particular genre of protest literature” that drew its anticlerical and subversive power from the “plowman’s growing reputation as a voice of social dissent.”5 Fifteenth-century texts such as Pierce the Plowman’s Crede and The Upland Series co-opted the figure of the plowman—usually presented as the archetypal Christian laborer—to satirize both the excesses of the institutional Church and the opulence of the Crown. Of course the overtly orthodox “Plowman’s Tale” is, despite the conflicted economic sensibilities it inherited from Hoccleve, far from an anticlerical text. Rather, the Plowman’s voice of insistent orthodoxy works to elide any trace of social or religious dissent evinced by the otherwise mute pilgrim or by Chaucer’s work itself. Even if not specifically anti-Wycliffite, such anti-heterodox posturing would not have been unwarranted in the mid-fifteenth century; indeed, a manuscript of The Canterbury Tales was produced as evidence in the well-known 1464 heresy trial of John Baron of Amersham. By appending the comfortably orthodox “Plowman’s Tale” to Chaucer’s work, the compilers of the Christ Church manuscript may have been trying to insure themselves against similar accusations.6 Despite the fact that the Hocclevean “Plowman’s Tale” was, as one critic notes, “subsequently rewarded with oblivion,” the addition of the orthodox

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poem to Chaucer’s collection of tales is suggestive for the performative dimensions of speech in late medieval poetry.7 In the midst of the Wars of the Roses, when the houses of Lancaster and York were vying furiously for control of the English throne, the Plowman’s “story of unimpeachable orthodoxy” becomes an attempt to refigure The Canterbury Tales through poetic speech, to sanitize the unnervingly contradictory theological impulses of the work with the Plowman’s words, and to create a text concordant with the religious and political sensibilities of the late fifteenth century. But significantly, the Christ Church “Plowman’s Tale” is not the Plowman’s final word. In several Renaissance editions of The Canterbury Tales, including William Thynne’s influential second edition of 1542, Harry Bailly once again badgers the Plowman into participating in the tale-telling contest, exhorting him to “Come nere, and tell us some holy thynge.”8 This time, rather than responding with Hoccleve’s poem, the Plowman offers the Canterbury pilgrims an account of a debate between a pelican and a griffin, one with a far different theological and political outlook than “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.” As a debate poem, this second “Plowman’s Tale” is decidedly lacking. The pelican, speaking on behalf of “lollers and londlese” and simple parish priests, thoroughly decries the abuses of “Popes, cardynals, and prelates, / Parsons, monkes, and freres fell, / Priours, [and] abbottes of great estates,” while the hapless griffin offers little more than a fat target for the pelican’s scorn, periodically posing a tendentious question for the anticlerical bird to obliterate.9 As a piece of Reformation propaganda, however, the tale can only be considered a success. Through it, the Plowman ironically becomes the very ecclesiastical reformer that the Christ Church manuscript compilers had evidently feared, a figure whose words advance a clear and unequivocal anti-Papist agenda in keeping with the political and religious tenor of the Renaissance. Moreover, in the wake of Henry VIII’s 1534 break with Rome, it was politically and culturally expedient not just for the Plowman but also for the “Father of English Poesy” himself to be “an upright Wycliffian forbear” of Tudor Protestantism, something that Chaucer’s Henrician editors surely recognized.10 Responsibility for the creation of this Wycliffite Chaucer also fell to the Plowman. Positioned immediately after “The Parson’s Tale” in Thynne’s 1542 edition, the debate rehearsed by the Lollard cum Protestant

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pilgrim becomes the last poetic statement of the Canterbury project, a literary speech act that creates the character of the Plowman and, more important, figures the Plowman’s putative author as the proto-Protestant visionary that both Thynne (and his dedicatee, Henry VIII) desired.

• This pair of plowmen—or rather this single, twice-created plowman— offers an appropriate conclusion to this book for several reasons. First, the manipulation of the Plowman in The Canterbury Tales and the concomitant effect that his words perform on that work encapsulate the central argument of this book, that in the later Middle Ages the spoken word was understood and apprehended not simply as a mode of communication but also as an efficacious and active agent, one with the potential to effect substantive change, even the potential to create. Chaucer’s Plowman offers a final literary test case for such performative poetic speech. Suggestively silent in Chaucer’s great unfinished work, he is a cipher, “a trewe swynkere and a good” (CT I 531), a character largely untouched by the satirical daggers of the “General Prologue” and wholly undefined by his untold tale. In the Christ Church Canterbury Tales, however, and later in Thynne’s second edition of the works, the Plowman is given a voice, and his speech proves efficacious. When drawn directly from “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” the words of the mid-fifteenth-century Hocclevean Plowman render the pilgrim an exemplar of Marian piety, a figure who advances an orthodox mode of devotion that accorded with the aims of the fifteenthcentury Church. Later, as the teller of a broadly anticlerical (and pointedly anti-Papist) debate poem, the Renaissance Plowman is fashioned by his own speech into a Lollard fire-breather, a plow-wielding medieval forebear of the Henrician ecclesiastical reformer. Ultimately, the Plowman does not speak his words. On the contrary, the Plowman’s words speak him. But, more important, the Plowman’s words also speak The Canterbury Tales, they speak their author, and, given Chaucer’s foundational role in the nation’s canon, they speak the English literary tradition itself. This is particularly true of the anti-Papist “Plowman’s Tale” of Thynne’s 1542 edition. No less an advocate for the English Reformation than John Foxe declared Chaucer “to be a right Wicklevian,” on the authority of Chaucer’s tale of “the

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poor pelican reasoning against the greedy griffon.”11 Similarly, in a 1598 edition of Chaucer’s works, Thomas Speght lauded the proto-Protestant bona fides that Chaucer displayed in the spurious tale, suggesting that he was Wyclif ’s disciple at Oxford and a strident supporter of the Lollard movement.12 The poetic speech given to Chaucer’s Plowman can thus be seen as instrumental during the English Renaissance in recontouring the entire Canterbury project itself, in defining the religious convictions of its author, and in ensuring that the English canon would have as its cornerstone a work consonant with the political and theological direction of the nation. It is admittedly something of an overstatement, albeit an instructive one, to claim that the “Plowman’s Tale” is responsible for the shape of the English literary canon, let alone for guiding England through the uncertain political futures wrought by the dynastic turmoil of the fifteenth century and the religious controversies of the sixteenth. Nonetheless, these moments of heightened cultural tension—the Lancastrian Usurpation, the Wars of the Roses, the Protestant Reformation—are also the moments in which the voice of Chaucer’s Plowman is repeatedly called upon to do necessary political work. For the compilers of the Christ Church Manuscript, that political work may have been conceived only on a personal level: the Christ Church Plowman’s staunchly orthodox voice seems to have been enjoined to protect a few individuals, probably the manuscript compilers or owners, from accusations of heresy. Nonetheless, by giving voice to the mute Plowman, the individuals responsible for the manuscript recognized the potentia of the spoken word represented within the poetic text just as surely as Gower recognized it when he rededicated his Confessio Amantis to Henry of Lancaster, just as surely as the Erkenwald-poet recognized it when he used the poetic speech of a long-dead ecclesiast to push against the threat posed by Lollardy, and just as surely as Hoccleve recognized it when he proposed his own psychological and social recovery through the poetic utterance. At one remove, the Christ Church compilers also recognized what the soon-to-be Henry IV recognized when he coerced the spoken support of Richard II and what Richard himself had earlier recognized when he exacted a verbal confession out of the duke of Gloucester. In the Renaissance, the Plowman who speaks through the volumes of Thynne and his fellow Henrician editors performs a more wide-ranging

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political task than the Christ Church Plowman. This Plowman’s voice, amplified by the new technology of print, is a voice that Foxe celebrates for bringing the English people “to the true knowledge of religion,” a voice that furthers the nationalist and theological ambitions of Henry VIII, and a voice that attempts the politically loaded business of canon formation.13 In both cases, it is the voice of the Plowman—Orthodox or Wycliffite, Catholic or Protestant—that catalyzes, that effects, that performs these political acts. The powerful work that the Plowman’s voice enacts in these instances is, in many respects, the apotheosis of the work I have discussed throughout this book, work that has moved increasingly off the page of the poetic text itself and into the public sphere. In Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale,” the speech of a fictional god changes the form of a fictional crow, commenting upon Ockham’s nominalism by enacting it on the page. In the alliterative Saint Erkenwald, the speech of the fictional bishop engenders a Eucharistic transformation of a virtuous heathen, offering the Church a concrete affirmation of the power of the priest’s words and the orthodox sacrament. In Hoccleve’s poetry, the economy of speech developed within a group of religious lyrics offers the prospect of redemption not just for a fictional persona but for the poet himself. In the Confessio Amantis, the description that Gower provides of King Richard’s spoken “heste” lends substantive support to a beleaguered monarch, and the poet’s subsequent deemphasis of speech helps shift support to Richard’s usurper. Finally, with the two voices of the Plowman, we return full circle to Chaucer. Here, the speech represented on the poetic page performs palpable and demonstrable work off the page, not only engaging philosophically and literarily but also politically, theologically, and culturally. No longer the mute pilgrim, the Plowman is given a voice. No longer the empty cipher, the Plowman speaks; and in speaking he incarnates the generative voice of the god, the sacramental voice of the priest, the redemptive voice of the bureaucrat, the persuasive voice of the kingmaker, and finally the efficacious voice of the poet.

Notes Bibliography Index

Notes

1. Introduction: “That whel wol cause another whel” 1. “All these, he (Alexander) encloses in that cliff and carries on farther to the ocean at the Earth’s end, and there, on an island, he hears a great chatter and a din of Greek tongues. Then he bade his knights to unclothe themselves and to swim to that place, but crabs drowned all that went into the cold water. Then the sovereign proceeds forth, always by the salt strand, toward the setting of the sun in the season of winter; sixty days with his army sadly he rides, reaches the Red Sea and raised there his tents.” The Wars of Alexander, ed. Hoyt Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, Early English Text Society (EETS) s.s. 10 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 174 (5628–34). Translations of Middle English passages are mine throughout unless otherwise noted. 2. Christine Chism observes that “in teasing at the barrier between self, other, and monster, [these lines] suggest the monstrousness of Alexander’s whole endeavor, the extremity of the desires that drive him.” See Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 149. 3. See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 189–90. 4. A concise account of Richard’s actions against the Merciless Parliament appellants appears in Matthew Giancarlo, “Murder, Lies, and Storytelling: The Manipulation of Justice(s) in the Parliaments of 1397 and 1399,” Speculum 77 (2002): 76–112. 5. From the Rotuli Parliamentorum, quoted in Giancarlo, “Murder, Lies, and Storytelling,” 81. 6. Giancarlo, “Murder, Lies, and Storytelling,” 94. 7. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolute Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), 297. Nigel Saul discusses the extravagant modes of address demanded by Richard in “Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship,” English Historical Review 110 (1995): 854–77. 8. Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 104. 9. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry,” 113.

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10. The increasing prominence of Corpus Christi throughout the later Middle Ages has been explored in a number of recent critical works. See especially Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993) and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). The shift ing hierarchies of the later fourteenth century are detailed by Paul Strohm in Social Chaucer, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), especially chapter 1, “Chaucer and the Structure of Social Relations.” 11. Ordinatio, in William of Ockham, Ockham: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Philotheus Boehner (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), 41. 12. “Of Confession,” in John Wyclif, The English Works of John Wyclif, ed. F. D. Matthew, EETS o.s. 74 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1902), 345. 13. David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 9. 14. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 47. 15. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 141. 16. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 139. 17. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry,” 95, 104. 18. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry,” 98. 19. Nicholas Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn WoganBrown, et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999), 333. 20. Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in Wogan-Brown, The Idea of the Vernacular, 331. See also The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2003), especially the preface (ix–xiii) and Watson’s introduction (1–13). 21. Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, “The Notion of Vernacular Theory,” in Wogan-Brown, The Idea of the Vernacular, 317. See also Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, UK: Wildwood House, 1988). 22. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 3. 23. Ruth Evans et al., “The Notion of Vernacular Theory,” in Wogan-Brown, The Idea of the Vernacular, 317. 24. David Lawton, “Englishing the Bible, 1066–1549,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 454. Also, Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), especially chapter 5, “Lollard Biblical Scholarship,” 227–77. For c. 1390 as a date for one version of the Wycliffite Bible, see Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural

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Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 862. 25. The account is by Richard Ullerston, an orthodox cleric at Queens College, Oxford. Quoted in Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change,” 843. 26. Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change,” 842–43. 27. Lawton, “Englishing the Bible,” in Wallace, Cambridge History, 457. 28. Introduction to Wogan-Brown, The Idea of the Vernacular, xv. 29. Edwin Craun, Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Narrative (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997); Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Susan Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2007), 5–6. 30. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 1–2. 31. “When folk are feasted and fed, they enjoy hearing some foreign thing after food to make glad their hearts.” Wars of Alexander, 1 (1–2). 32. Louise (Aranye) Fradenburg, “The Manciple’s Servant’s Tongue,” English Literary History 52 (1985): 86. 33. See, for example, Gordon Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in its Legendary Context,” Speculum 61 (1986): 330. 34. Such is the approach taken in Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, as well as James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). 35. See Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2001), 129–57. 36. All quotations from Saint Erkenwald are from the edition by Clifford Peterson (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). Translations of the poem are mine unless otherwise noted. All quotations from Gower’s Confessio Amantis are from John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000, 2003, 2004). All quotations from Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). The passages quoted above are, respectively, Erkenwald 51; Confessio, Pro. 38; Canterbury Tales IX 344–45. Hereafter, all three of these works will be cited in the text by line number and, if necessary, abbreviated title. 37. Thomas Hoccleve, “My Compleinte” and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 2001), 90 (88). 38. This useful phrase is from Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), especially chapter 3, “The Textual Environment of Chaucer’s ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’” (57–74).

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39. Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 19. 40. Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1994), xii. 41. The phrase “the first autobiography in English” is, in fact, a common epithet for The Book of Margery Kempe, coined first in Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 207–34. For a brief discussion of critical responses to the Book, see Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 372. 42. The distinction between Kempe (the author of the Book) and Margery (the subject of the Book) is made most forcefully in Staley, Dissenting Fictions, 3. 43. The Book of Margery Kempe in particular has already been discussed in these terms, both in Staley, Dissenting Fictions, and Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). Similar work on Julian of Norwich has been less prominent; however the recent Companion to Julian of Norwich contains some essays discussing Julian’s relationship to the spoken word. See especially Denise Baker’s “Julian of Norwich and the Varieties of Middle English Mystical Discourse” and Vincent Gillespie’s “‘[S]he Do The Police in Different Voices’: Pastiche, Ventriloquism, and Parody in Julian of Norwich,” both in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 53–63, 192–207. 44. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 5. 45. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 94. 46. Austin lays out his tripartite distinction between the three aspects of speech acts in Lecture VIII (94–107) and therein provides the following synopsis of his rubric: “We can . . . distinguish the locutionary act ‘he said that . . . ’ from the illocutionary act ‘he argued that . . . ’ and the perlocutionary act ‘he convinced me that. . . . ’” (Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 100). 47. John Searle first discusses the fit between words and world in chapter 1 of Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). He crystallizes and refines his position in John Searle, “How Performatives Work,” Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989): 535–58. 48. The utterance “you are married” is among the classic examples of the relative functions of constative and performative speech acts. Searle discusses it in, among other places, “How Performatives Work,” 547; Austin frequently discusses words related to marriage in How to Do Things with Words (see, for example, 5, 10, 16–17). 49. Searle, “How Performatives Work,” 549. Searle explores the distinction between brute facts and institutional facts in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969). In his estimation, brute facts are facts whose existence derives primarily from the natural sciences and empirical observation:

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“The paradigms vary enormously—they range from ‘This stone is next to that stone’ to ‘Bodies attract with a force inversely proportional to the square distance between them and directly proportional to the product of their mass’ to ‘I have a pain,’ but they share certain common features.” Institutional facts, on the other hand, “are indeed facts; but their existence, unlike the existence of brute facts, presupposes the existence of certain human institutions. It is only given the institution of marriage that certain forms of behaviors constitute Mr. Smith’s marrying Miss Jones” (Searle, Speech Acts, 50, 51). 50. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. T. E. Page et al. and trans. Eva Matthews Sanford and William McAllen Green (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), vol. 5, 36–37. Augustine’s words resonate strongly with the definition of performativity proposed by Eve Sweetser: performative speech is speech in which “the words bring about the described world state, and are thus ontologically and causally prior to it.” Eve Sweetser, “Blended Spaces and Performativity,” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2000): 310. 51. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 22. 52. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988), 17. A thorough but still concise overview of Derrida’s objections to Austin is in James Loxley, Performativity (London: Routledge, 2007), especially 72–87. 53. Loxley, Performativity, 74. 54. Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 18. 55. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, 18. 56. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, 19. 57. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 109. 58. Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2005), ix. 59. Staley, Languages of Power, 57. 60. Staley, Languages of Power, 147, 165. 61. See Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 128–52. 62. Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 4. 63. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 107. 64. A. J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 183. 65. In the quoted edition (The Riverside Chaucer), this extract ends with a semicolon rather than a period. I have altered the end punctuation here to preserve the clarity of my own prose rather than to distort the Middle English. Because punctuation of Middle English texts is almost wholly editorial in nature, I occasionally alter the final punctuation mark in a quoted poetic passage to better comport with the conventions of modern scholarly prose.

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66. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, ed. Claude Palisca, trans. Calvin Bower (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 21. See also The Riverside Chaucer, 983–84nn788–821. 67. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, 21. 68. John 1:14. All biblical quotations from The Holy Bible, Douay-Rheims version, revised by Richard Challoner (1582–1609; repr., Baltimore: John Murphy, 1899). 69. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 9–10. 2. Nominalism, Speech, and Power in “The Manciple’s Tale” 1. In Boccaccio’s Teseida—Chaucer’s primary source for “The Knight’s Tale” and the Anelida—Amphion “call[s] upon the surrounding mountains to protect Thebes with the sweet song of [his] skillfully played lyre”; in Statius’s Thebaid, the Thebans tell “of stones that crept to the sound of a Tyrian lyre and Amphion animating hard rocks.” Giovanni Boccaccio, Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia (Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia), ed. and trans. Vincenzo Traversa (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002), 440; Statius, Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey for The Loeb Classics Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 21. Richard Hoff man argues that Chaucer also would have known the role of Amphion’s lyre from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Richard Hoff man, Ovid and the Canterbury Tales (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), 152. 2. Michela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina, 1996), 151. 3. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 5. 4. In “Chaucer and the Value of Language,” a paper presented at the inaugural London Chaucer conference at the University of London, April 2002, Christopher Cannon articulated how in Chaucer’s universe “language was the kind of thing which might not only describe, but could make, a world,” an observation that resonates with my own argument on speech in “The Manciple’s Tale.” I am grateful to Dr. Cannon for providing me with a copy of his paper. 5. From Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 41. See also Gordon Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1975), 104. 6. For a thorough analysis of ways in which Chaucer might have come into contact with nominalist philosophy see Russell Peck, “Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,” Speculum 53 (1978): 743–744 and John Micheal Crafton, “Emptying the Vessel: Chaucer’s Humanistic Critique of Nominalism,” Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm 1 (1995): 117–19. 7. The Via Antiqua “recognized a harmony of faith and reason in theological issues” and “conformed to the tradition and beliefs of a Christian society.” Helen Ruth Andretta,

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Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: A Poet’s Response to Ockhamism (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 21. 8. Augustine of Hippo, Eighty-three Different Questions, trans. and ed. David L. Mosher (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. Press, 1982), 79–80. A concise description of scholastic realism appears in Robert Myles, Chaucerian Realism (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 2–3. 9. Augustine, Eighty-three Different Questions, 80–81. 10. “De Magistro” in Augustine, Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), 87–88. In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine wrote that words existed exclusively in the service of such signification. As a sign, a word “is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind”; the subordinate relationship of sign to signified was a part of the “permanent and divinely instituted system of things.” Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 57, 113. 11. De Interpretatione in Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 1:25. 12. Paul Vincent Spade, “The Semantics of Terms” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 189. In his translation of Aristotle, Boethius explained that words “spoken in isolation are names and signify something. For he who speaks [them] establishes an understanding and he who hears [them] rests.” The capacity of the spoken word to function—to signify a mental concept—was therefore entirely dependent on the shared linguistic conventions of speaker and hearer. Boethius, De Interpretatione, quoted in Spade, “The Semantics of Terms,” 188. 13. See E. J. Ashworth, “Language and Logic” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. S. McGrade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 83–34; G. R. Evans, Philosophy and Theology in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1993), 36–37; Spade, “The Semantics of Terms,” in Kretzmann, Cambridge History, 188–196. The position that signs existed in a natural relationship with their signified is a position known as “cratylic realism” or “cratylistic realism” and should not be confused with scholastic realism. See Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 2–3; Gérard Genette, “Valéry and the Poetics of Language” in Josué V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 359–363; Theresa Coletti, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 19–20. 14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. and trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1947–48; repr., Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, 60 (I, q.13, a.1). See also E. J. Ashworth, “Language and Logic,” 77. 15. Evans, Philosophy and Theology, 37.

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16. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 1, 434 (I, q.85, a.2). 17. Gerald Morgan, “The Universality of the Portraits in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” English Studies 58 (1977): 481. 18. Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 1. For other explicitly realist perspectives on Chaucer’s work, see Helen Ruth Andretta, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde; John Micheal Crafton, “Emptying the Vessel”; James I. Wimsatt, “John Duns Scotus, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Canterbury Pilgrims,” Speculum 71 (1996): 633–45. 19. For the opinion that the overt realism of this passage constitutes an ironic (and therefore nominalist) statement on the arbitrary fates of Palamon and Arcite, see William A. Cozart, “Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: A Philosophical Re-appraisal of a Medieval Romance” in Medieval Epic to the “Epic Theater” of Brecht, ed. Rosario P. Armato and John M. Spalek (Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California Press, 1968), 30–36. 20. David Williams, “From Grammar’s Pan to Logic’s Fire: Intentionality in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale” in Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A. E. Malloch, ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams (Kingston: McGill—Queens Univ. Press, 1988),” 90. Williams writes, “The debate concerning supposition is, then, a debate about the signifying power of language and about the nature of the real. Scholastic logic of the fourteenth century dominated that debate but not to the complete exclusion of other discourses” (83). 21. Williams, “From Grammar’s Pan,” 85–86. 22. William of Ockham, Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa Logicae, ed. and trans. Michael J. Loux (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 49–50. See also Marilyn Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 71–75. 23. Ockham, Theory of Terms, 78; see also Adams, William Ockham, 75. 24. Ockham, Theory of Terms, 81; bracketed words are my addition. 25. Ockham, Theory of Terms, 81–82. 26. Ockham, Theory of Terms, 50. 27. See Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 2–3. 28. Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 41. 29. Holly Boucher, “Nominalism: The Difference for Chaucer and Boccaccio,” The Chaucer Review 20 (1986): 215. 30. Adams, William Ockham, 1186–87 (for Albert the Great); 1190–93 (for Duns Scotus). 31. Ockham, Quodlibeta, quoted in Adams, William Ockham, 1198. 32. William Watts and Richard Utz, “Nominalist Perspectives on Chaucer’s Poetry: A Bibliographical Essay,” Medievalia et Humanistica 20 (1993): 148. 33. Robert Stepsis, “Potentia Absoluta and the Clerk’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 10 (1975): 129, 139. For similar arguments, see David Steinmetz, “Late Medieval Nominalism and the Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 38–54; and Elizabeth Kirk, “Nominalism and the Dynamics of the Clerk’s Tale: Homo Viator as Woman,” in Chaucer’s

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Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 111–20. 34. Stepsis, “Potentia Absoluta,” 143. More recently, Roger Moore has linked nominalist concerns to Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale” for similar reasons, noting that the tale “displays little evidence that God’s will is just, merciful, or rational; it merely postulates that such a will exists, and remains silent as to its inherent character.” Roger Moore, “Nominalistic Perspectives on Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale,’” Comitatus 23 (1993): 85. 35. Russell Peck, “Nominalist Questions,” 755–57. P. B. Taylor also links Chaucer to nominalism; however, unlike Peck, who flatly declares Chaucer to be a nominalist thinker, Taylor portrays Chaucer as a frustrated realist who sees the tenets of his philosophical beliefs threatened by nominalist ideals. Taylor suggests that, while Chaucer “aspires toward a linguistic realism in which intent informs deeds through the ministry of words,” that realist aspiration is repeatedly undercut both by “the practice of the real world” and by the tales of his own pilgrims, which frequently “[mock] the idea that words should reflect intent.” P. B. Taylor, “Chaucer’s Cosyn to the Dede,” Speculum 57 (1982): 325–26. 36. Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 43. 37. Boucher, “Nominalism,” 215. 38. See chapter 1 of Searle, Expression and Meaning; also Searle, “How Performatives Work.” 39. See The Parliament of Fowls (in Riverside Chaucer), 505–9, 603–9. 40. Chaucer probably redacted Plato secondhand from Jean de Meun. See Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, ed. Charles W. Dunn, trans. Harry W. Robbins (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 319–20 (47–49); also, Boece III pr. 12 206–7 (in Riverside Chaucer). 41. From “clepen,” meaning “to speak; call, shout.” Middle English Dictionary (MED), s.v. “clepen” v., 1(a). 42. Formally and syntactically, Chaucer emphasizes the phrase “ther nys no difference” (IX 212) both by repetition (“Ther is no difference” [IX 225]) and by separating it from the restrictive phrase “oother than this” with several additional clauses. 43. Leff, William of Ockham, 104. 44. Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 302. See also A. S. G. Edwards, “Chaucer and the Poetics of Utterance,” in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 66–67. 45. A. C. Spearing, “Central and Displaced Sovereignty in Three Medieval Poems,” Review of English Studies 33 (1982): 249. 46. See Colin Wilcockson, “The Opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: A Diptych,” The Review of English Studies 50 (1999): 345–50. 47. In the terminology of classical grammarians, vox can be defined simply as “vocal sound,” something that even animals had the power to produce; dictio can be defined

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as “word.” See Giuilo Lepschy, ed., History of Linguistics. Vol. 2, Classical and Medieval Linguistics (New York: Longman, 1994), 10, 97. 48. For examples of the former, see Richard Trask, “The Manciple’s Problem,” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 114; L. A. Westervelt, “The Medieval Notion of Janglery and Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Southern Review 14 (1981): 111; Jamie Fumo, “Th inking upon the Crow,” Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 361. The latter view is most eloquently expressed by Peter Herman in “Treason in the Manciple’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 25 (1991): 324–25. 49. Brian Striar writes, “What finally emerges from all this difficulty and confusion is not truth or the location of truth but power and the location of power: the power to exploit speech and poetry to fashion one’s own truth or truths, as the crow does with Phoebus, as Phoebus does with the crow, as the Manciple’s mother does with her son, as the Manciple does with his mother, the Cook, and the audience of pilgrims, and as Chaucer, through the Manciple, does with us.” Brian Striar, “The ‘Manciple’s Tale’ and Chaucer’s Apolline Poetics,” Criticism 33 (1991): 197. 50. Herman, “Treason in the Manciple’s Tale,” 324. 51. See Britton Harwood, “Language and the Real: Chaucer’s Manciple,” Chaucer Review 6 (1972): 268. 52. It is important to note here that in addition to his curse, Phoebus does seize the crow and pull out his white feathers, an action manifestly physical and nonlinguistic (IX 303–4). Nonetheless, the change of the color of the feathers from white to black, the destruction of the crow’s voice, and the ongoing curse on all the crow’s offspring are accomplished through Phoebus’s speech alone. In short, Phoebus does physically alter the crow with his body, but the emphasis of the passage is still on his words and their effect. 53. From John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, quoted in Adams, 1193, 92. 54. William of Ockham, In Libros Sententiarum, quoted in David W. Clark, “William of Ockham on Right Reason,” Speculum 48 (1973): 23. 55. William Watts and Richard Utz, “Nominalist Perspectives on Chaucer Poetry,” 148. 56. Critics have responded with a variety of interpretations. One of the more common is that the compulsive and aggressive repetition demonstrates the Manciple’s growing anxiety that, as Harry Bailly implies, the Cook will reveal how the Manciple has “sette . . . aller cappe” (I 586) of the lawyers in his house. See Earle Birney, “Chaucer’s ‘Gentil’ Manciple and his ‘Gentil’ Tale,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 61 (1960): 257–67; Arnold Davidson, “The Logic of Confusion in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Annuale Mediaevale 19 (1979): 5–12. Quite a different interpretation is provided by Richard Trask, who sees the Manciple as a somewhat gentler, medieval Norman Bates and ascribing his repetition to a matrix of submerged “mother issues.” See Trask, “The Manciple’s Problem.” 57. Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse, 151. 58. See also Peck, “Nominalist Questions,” 760.

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59. Mark Allen, “Penitential Sermons, the Manciple, and the End of The Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 78. 60. See, for example, Lee Patterson, “The ‘Parson’s Tale’ and the Quitting of the ‘Canterbury Tales,’” Traditio 34 (1978): 331–80; Chauncey Wood, “Speech, the Principle of Contraries, and Chaucer’s Tales of the Manciple and the Parson,” Mediaevalia 6 (1980): 209–29; James Dean, “The Ending of the Canterbury Tales, 1952–1976,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979): 17–33; Michael Kensak, “The Silences of Pilgrimage: Manciple’s Tale, Paradiso, Anticlaudianus,” Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 190–206. 61. See Boucher, “Nominalism,” 215. 62. See Olive Sayce, “Chaucer’s ‘Retractions’: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition,” Medium Ævum 40 (1971): 230–48. 63. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Policy,” 95. 64. “De Magistro,” in Augustine, Augustine: Earlier Writings 95. 65. The MED defines “contree” both as “any geographic area or physiographic province” (n., 1) and as “the realm (of the air, the stars, heaven)” (n., 5). See also note 19 for “Truth” in The Riverside Chaucer, 1085. 66. See Leila Gross’s brief discussion of “Truth” in “The Short Poems” (introduction), The Riverside Chaucer, 635. 67. Liam Purdon, “Chaucer’s Lak of Stedfastnesse: a Revalorization of the Word,” in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1989), 147. 68. Paul Strohm writes, “The effect of [Chaucer’s] advice is to strengthen the king’s hand; to urge him to stiffen up and be a king” (Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 174). 69. For a discussion of Phoebus and the Cheshire archers, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 256–59. A good survey of scholarship on the Wilton Diptych, a work in which a kneeling Richard is depicted surrounded by saints and greeted by the Virgin, Christ, and a heavenly host, is in Saul, Richard II, 304–8. 70. Quoted in Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 297; Saul, “Vocabulary of Kingship,” 876. For Richard’s manipulation of the 1397 parliament, see Giancarlo, “Money, Lies, and Storytelling,” 76–112. 71. Taylor asserts that Chaucer “aspires toward a linguistic realism in which intent informs deeds through the ministry of words” but that “this aspiration is an ideal sullied by the practice of the real world” (Taylor, “Chaucer’s Cosyn,” 325). 72. Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 41. 73. Indeed, the science of astronomy in the Middle Ages was “hierarchically ordered to the supreme purpose of knowing God,” (Evans, Philosophy and Theology, 9) an Aristotelian attempt to know the universal through sense experience. John Gower’s confessor, Genius, makes a similar case for the transcendent truth of the heavens when he instructs Amans on the arts of astronomy in Confessio Amantis: “Benethe upon this erthe hiere/ Of alle thinges the matiere, / As tellen ous thei that ben

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lerned, / Of thing above it stant governed, / That is to sein of the planetes.” (7.633–37). The Latin inscription that introduces the chapter (7.iv) suggests a commensurately realist ontology: Lege planetarum magis inferiora reguntur, / Ista set interdum regula fallit opus. / Vir mediante deo sapiens dominabitur astris, / Fata nec immerito quid nouitatis agunt. [Things lower down are ruled by the law of the planets, and sometimes that governance foils endeavor. With God’s intervention the wise man will rule the stars, and the fates will not cause anything suddenly unfavorable.] 74. Seth Lerer also comments on this passage in Seth Lerer, “Chaucer’s Sons,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly 73 (2004): 906–15. The phrase “diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome” is a clear echo of the proem to book 2 of Chaucer’s overtly Boethian Troilus and Criseyde: “For every wight which that to Rome went / Halt nat o path, or alwey o manere” (Troilus 2.36–37). 3. Saint Erkenwald: The Sacrament of the Altar and the Persistence of the Past Epigraph. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. and intro. James F. Anderson (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1975), vol. 2, 35–36 (II, chap. 4, 4–5). 1. Whatley, “Heathens and Saints,” 332. Gordon Whatley offers more general background on medieval redactions of the Gregory/Trajan legend in “The Uses of Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages,” Viator 15 (1984): 25–63. In William Langland’s version of the Trajan legend, told by the figure of Trajan himself, the path to redemption seems to be neither baptism nor posthumous conversion but ethical, just, and morally outstanding behavior. This is a clear deviation not only from many earlier versions of the Trajan story but also from orthodox medieval theology itself. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 445–46 (B.11.140–157). For a more complete analysis of the Gregory/Trajan legend in Piers Plowman and Saint Erkenwald, see Frank Grady, “Piers Plowman, St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): 63–88. 2. Whatley, “Heathens and Saints,” 332. 3. Grady, “Rule of Exceptional Salvations,” 66–68; Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 41–65. Two additional essays that speak to this central issue are William Kamowski, “Saint Erkenwald and the Inadvertent Baptism: An Orthodox Response to Heterodox Ecclesiology,” Religion and Literature 27.3 (1995): 5–27; and Jennifer Sisk, “The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. Erkenwald,” ELH 74 (2007): 89–115. 4. There are few enough exceptions to this statement that they can be summarized in a single note. James Crowley discusses the poem in the context of late medieval Catholic liturgy and suggests that the spoken (or sung) spiritual “seeking” by the choir supports Erkenwald in his efforts to baptize the heathen judge. Stephen Wright suggests that Saint Erkenwald’s phrase “queme questis” (line 133), which seems to draw an anomalous

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comparison between the melodious chant of a cathedral choir (queme) and the baying of hunting dogs (queste), should be emended to “queme quethes,” a phrase meaning “beautiful words” or “lovely speech.” Finally, William Quinn posits that the phrase “and not one grue lenger” underscores the necessity for precision in uttering the baptismal formula, a point that I address in this chapter. James Crowley, “Liturgy, Sung Prayer and Quest in the Middle English Saint Erkenwald,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93 (1982): 315–23; Stephen Wright, “St. Erkenwald and Quem Quaeritis: A Reconsideration,” English Language Notes 31 no. 3 (1994): 29–35; William Quinn, “A Liturgical Detail and an Alternative Reading of St. Erkenwald, Line 319,” Review of English Studies 35 (1984): 335–41. 5. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 54. 6. “‘Our lord grant,’ said Erkenwald, ‘that you had life, by God’s leave, long enough that I might use water and cast it upon your fair corpse and speak these words: “I follow thee in the name of the father and his generous Child and of the gracious Holy Ghost,” and not one word more. Then though you dropped down into death, it would trouble me less.’ With those words his eyes became wet and tears trilled down and alighted on the tomb, and one fell on the face of the corpse and he sighed.” 7. See Annemarie Thijms, “The Sacrament of Baptism in St. Erkenwald: The Perfect Transformation of the Trajan Legend,” Neophilologus 89 (2005): 311–27. 8. “De Papa,” in Wyclif, The English Works of John Wyclif, 480. See also Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 314–21. 9. Peter Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, c. 200—c. 1150 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 109. 10. John Mirk, John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Gillis Kristensson (Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1972), 74 (127–28, 125). This passage is also quoted in Quinn, “A Liturgical Detail,” 339. 11. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, vol. 5, 36–37. 12. See Quinn, “A Liturgical Detail,” 337. 13. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 4, 2378–79 (III, q.66, a.5). 14. Aquinas enumerates a number of methods by which one can be baptized (immersion, sprinkling, pouring) and posits that in certain circumstances, baptism can be performed by lay people, women, and even Jews and pagans. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 4, 2373–92 (III, q.66–67). 15. Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 291. 16. “Speculum de Antichristo,” in Wyclif, The English Works of John Wyclif, 112. See also John Wyclif, De Ecclesia, ed. Johann Loserth (London: Trübner & Co., 1886), 467–68. 17. Anne Hudson notes that, other than the Eucharist, “sacraments apart from confession . . . attracted little consistent notice or coherent redirection” by Lollards (Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 290).

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18. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 36. For a discussion of the authority granted to priests by their ability to perform the sacrament of the altar, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 49–53. 19. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 47. 20. Fiona Somerset, “Here There and Everywhere? Wycliffite Conceptions of the Eucharist and Chaucer’s Other Lollard Joke,” in Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. Fiona Somerset, Jill Havens, and Derrick Pitard (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003), 127–38. 21. John 19:34. 22. Langland, Piers Plowman B, 650 (B.19.323); The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th ed., ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter, UK: Univ. of Exeter Press, 2007), 84 (646–48). 23. The relevant scriptural verses are (for baptism) Matt 3:11–16; Mark 1:4–8; Luke 3:–21; John 1:25–33 and (for the Eucharist) Matt 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; Luke 22:19–20. The gospel of John presents a different locus for Christ’s teaching about the Eucharistic body and blood. See John 6:48–56. 24. “Say the words of that service [the Eucharist] devoutly and with good counsel. Do not cut off the words’ tails, but say them out without fail. Say them that way with your mouth and your thoughts, and do not think of other things, but put all your heart and your intent fully on that sacrament.” Mirk, Mirk’s Instructions, 166–67 (1775–82). More doctrinally inflected support for this argument comes from Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 5, 2466 (III, q.78, a.1): “But in this sacrament the consecration of the matter consists in the miraculous change of the substance, which can only be done by God; hence the minister in performing this sacrament has no other act save the pronouncing of the words. . . . But the form of this sacrament is pronounced as if Christ were speaking in person, so that it is given to be understood that the minister does nothing in perfecting this sacrament, except to pronounce the words of Christ.” 25. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 2. 26. Eamon Duff y, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400—c. 1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 109; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 53. 27. Herbert McCabe, “The Eucharist and Language,” in Catholicism and Catholicity: Eucharistic Communities in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Sarah Beckwith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1999), 20. 28. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 328. 29. Wyclif writes, “Unde sicut Christus est simul Deus et homo, sic hec hostia est simul corpus christi et verus panis, quia est corpus Domini ad minimum in figura et verus panis in natura vel (quod in idem sonat) est verus panis naturaliter et corpus Christi figuraliter [Thus it follows that just as Christ is at once God and man, so too is the host at once the body of Christ and actual bread, because it is the body of God, at least in figure, and actual bread in its nature (that is to say) it is actual bread naturally and the body of Christ figuratively]. John Wyclif, Opus Evangelicum, ed. Johann Loserth, vols.

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3–4 (London: Trübner & Co., 1896), 160. Translation mine. See also Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 282. 30. “Of Confession,” in Wyclif, The English Works of John Wyclif, 345. 31. Discussing how religious conversion in the Middle Ages was grounded in the metaphor of Christ’s death and rebirth, Peter Cramer argues that “to be converted by baptism, or by the periodic ‘conversion’ of the Eucharist, [was] to take part in this metaphor, to pass with this metaphor from physical to spiritual being” (Cramer, Baptism and Change, 35). 32. John Ingram, ed., The Earliest English Translation of the De Imitatione Christi, EETS e.s. 63 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), 44. 33. McCabe, “The Eucharist and Language,” in Beckwith, Catholicism and Catholicity, 23. 34. “Then was this realm renegade for many rough years until Saint Augustine [of Canterbury] was sent to Sandwich by the Pope. Then he preached here the pure faith and planted the truth and converted all the communities anew to Christendom. He turned temples that at the time belonged to the devil and cleansed them in Christ’s name and called them churches. He hurled out idols and had in saints, and he chiefly changed their names and rendered them better: that once was of Apollo is now of Saint Peter, Mohammed to Saint Margaret or to Magdalene. The Synagogue of the Sun was set to Our Lady; Jupiter and Juno to either Jesus or James. So he dedicated and gave to all [the saints] the hallowed spaces that were set to Satan in Saxon times.” 35. Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 65. 36. The Venerable Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. J. A. Giles (London: George Bell & Sons, 1903), 55–56. 37. Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, 56. 38. Monica Otter, “‘Newe Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 387–414. 39. Robert of Brunne’s “Handlyng Synne,” ed. Frederick Furnivall, EETS o.s. 119 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1901), 311 (9971–72). The dates of the texts discussed in the following two paragraphs range from 1303 (Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne) to 1443 (Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun). Such a wide range of dates only reinforces the availability of this Eucharistic terminology to the Erkenwald poet, whose poem was likely written in the 1380s or 1390s. For dating, see Peterson’s introduction to Saint Erkenwald, 11–15. 40. The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. Avril Henry (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1986), 105. 41. Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. William Greet, EETS o.s. 171 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927), 263. 42. The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, ed. Avril Henry, EETS o.s. 288 and 292 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985 and 1988), 1:19; “The Myrour of Lewed Men (By a

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Sawley Monk),” in The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, Part. 1, ed. Carl Horstmann, EETS o.s. 98 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892), 428. 43. “Sermon 22,” in Middle English Sermons, ed. Woodburn O. Ross, EETS o.s. 209 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1940), 129. 44. “A Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer,” ed. Frank A. Patterson, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 16 (1916): 413–14 (357–359); “An Illustrated Fragment of Peraludus’s Summa of Vice: Harleian MS 3244,” ed. Michael Evans, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 67 (2273–79). 45. One difference between these two Eucharistic keywords as they appear in Saint Erkenwald and as they appear in most parallels cited here is that in the parallels the words are frequently found in prepositional verb phrases—“turne into” rather than simply “turne.” I maintain, however, that the similarity in the words used to describe the two sacraments is significant. An earlier citation from this essay helps make this case: “A man conuertyng him holy to god, is . . . chaunged into a newe man” (Ingrahm, Earliest English Translation, 44). In this passage, where the subject is clearly conversion, we see the same verb-preposition construction as in the Eucharistic references cited above. At the very least, the parallel vocabularies of conversion and the Eucharist allow the former to suggest the latter. It is such linguistic cross-referencing, I would argue, that helps facilitate the thematic move from baptism to the Eucharist in the poem. 46. Ruth Nissé, “‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” English Literary History 65 (1998): 277. 47. Gordon Whatley, ed. and trans., The Saint of London: The Life and Miracles of St. Erkenwald (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 87. 48. The MED defines art as “the principles and practices of such organized fields of knowledge and activity as law, medicine, theology, philosophy, literary composition, alchemy, astrology, and magic” and as “knowledge or know-how as applied to a situation or a problem, ability to apply or practice an ‘art.’” It also states that art can mean “a district or locality,” a defi nition for which it employs line 33 of Saint Erkenwald as an example. (MED, s.v. “art” n.2) The glossaries of three major modern editions of Saint Erkenwald—those of Clifford Peterson (1977), Ruth Morse (1975), and Henry Savage (1926)—uniformly follow the latter entry, defining art as “province” (Peterson) and “district” (Morse, Savage); and in his translation of Peterson’s edition, Casey Finch glosses the entire line as “Now Saint Erkenwald’s bishop of Augustine’s see.” None of these translations takes into account that Augustine was specifically archbishop of Canterbury, while Erkenwald was the bishop of London, a fact that seems at odds with the traditional translation. See Saint Erkenwald, ed. Ruth Morse (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1975); Saint Erkenwald, ed. Henry Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1926); The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, trans. Casey Finch, ed. Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 325.

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A cursory survey of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century alliterative poetry bears out the second definition of art as “knowledge” or “principles and practices.” In Piers Plowman, Anima tells the dreamer of “Astronomiens” who “alday in hir art faillen,” a phrase in which art clearly means science or craft; and in Wars of Alexander, Alexander questions Anectanabus as he practices his quasi-religious “arte” of astrology. See Langland, Piers Plowman B, 556 (B.15.359); Wars of Alexander, 19 (681). In addition, the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses the word to describe the arts and practices of chivalry and courtly love: Gawain playfully tells the Lady of Hautdesert that she “weldez more slyht / Of þat art” than even he does. Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 264 (1542–43). This issue has received some recent critical attention. In addition to an earlier version of this chapter, published in 2008, Helen Young has argued for reading “art” as “body of knowledge,” citing particularly the distinction between Augustine’s bishopric of Canterbury and Erkenwald’s bishopric of London. Young’s reading has been contested by Andrew Breeze, who sees “art” as deriving from the northern term “airt,” meaning “direction” or “compass point.” David Coley, “Baptism as Eucharist: Orthodoxy, Wycliffism, and the Sacramental Utterance in Saint Erkenwald,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008): 327–47; Helen Young, “Line 33 of St. Erkenwald,” Notes and Queries 252 (2007): 124–25; Andrew Breeze, “Art ‘Direction’ in St. Erkenwald,” Notes and Queries 253 (2008): 275. 49. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 109. 50. Sweetser, “Blended Spaces,” 310. 51. Cursor Mundi, Part 5, ed. Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 68 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1878), 1484 (Fairfax MS, 26,092–94). 52. “De Sacramento Altaris,” in Wyclif, The English Works of John Wyclif, 357. 53. For a more thorough discussion of the corpse’s life-in-death status, see William A. Quinn, “The Psychology of St. Erkenwald,” Medium Ævum 53 (1984): 180–93. 54. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 41. 55. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 9. Miri Rubin makes a similar contention about the social function of the sacrament, arguing that “power and aesthetics turned the Eucharist into the battleground where the new vision of Christian society would be won or lost” (Rubin, Corpus Christi, 22). 56. Catherine Pickstock describes the Eucharist as “an essential action within the Church which constantly reproduces the Church.” Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist,” in Beckwith, Catholicism and Catholicity, 51. 57. David Aers writes that “the late medieval Church had made the reception of the bread and wine, the body and blood, a supplementary adjunct to the Eucharist, whose essence was now defined as the act of consecration” (Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 74). Such an argument resonates with Saint Erkenwald’s image of the citizens of London watching, one can only imagine amazed, the miracle of the judge’s own transubstantiation.

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58. Christine Chism argues that “the poem spotlights the tremendous desire and fear directed toward the revenant from the pagan past and the historical risk that any genuinely new work must transact” (Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 41). My own argument, predicated as it is on representations of speech and language, is significantly different from hers, though it owes a great debt to the ground she has already broken. 59. Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 3–9. 60. Frank Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens in Later Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 31; William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C Version, eds. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 487 (C.14.212). 61. “No Bishop,” said that body, “I was never embalmed, nor has any man’s counsel kept my clothes unblemished except for the rich king of reason that ever allows reason and loves all the laws that belong wholly to the truth.” 62. MED, s.v. “treu” adj., 6(c). 63. The bishop’s order that the reanimated heathen “councele no trouthe” also resonates with contemporary treatises on confession that advise the penitent, as Chaucer’s Parson says, that “Al moot be seyd, and no thing excused ne hyd ne forwrapped, and noght avaunte thee of thy goode werkes” (CT X 319). 64. John 14:6. 65. “Mighty maker of men, your mercies are great. How might your mercy be made sufficient for me at any time—I, an unready pagan, that never knew your plight nor the measure of your mercy nor your powerful virtue, but always a faithless man that failed to worship you in the way that you were meant to be worshipped? Alas the hard times!” 66. “What did we win with our good deeds that always worked for right when we are dolefully damned into the deep lake and exiled from that supper, that solemn feast where those that hungered for right are rewarded.” 67. Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, 37. 68. See lines 232, 235, 241, 245 (ryȝtwis), 256, 267, 269, 271, 272, 275, 301, 304, and 332. 69. Green, A Crisis of Truth, 8. 70. I develop these nine senses from MED, s.v. “right” n., 1–8, 10, thus excluding place names, location indicators (right as opposed to left), and other miscellaneous uses. I focus here on the word as a noun, but the adjectival form of the word adheres to roughly the same senses. Within the text, I have cited parenthetically the applicable MED entry by number. 71. Cleanness, in Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 178 (1633). 72. “Treuthe, Reste, and Pes,” in Twenty-six Political and Other Poems, ed. J. Kail, EETS o.s. 124 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904), 9 (9–10); Pearl, in Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 77 (495–96).

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73. Cursor Mundi, Part 1, ed. Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 57 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1874), 99 (Ms. Trinity 1586). 74. “The folk were felonious and false and froward; I often faced harm to hold them to the right. But for neither risk of harm nor wealth nor dread, nor for mastery nor for reward nor for any man’s awe, would I ever stray from the right of my own reason. Nor did I ever pronounce a wrong judgment any day of my life. I never deviated from my conscience for worldly gain; I never made judgments to gain wealth, no matter how rich or revered a man was. Nor did I fail to do the law for any man’s menace or mischief or sorrow. Always my heart conformed to my faith.” 75. “Where is your soul stabled and established if you worked so straight? He that rewards each man as he has served right must not withhold the gift of a certain extension of his grace, for as He says in his true psalms: ‘the moderate and the harmless come always to me.’” 76. Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 61–62. 77. The judge does use the word ryȝt in passing, but it is only as an intensifier: “ryȝt now to soper my soule is sette at þe table” (332). 78. The shrine was located not in the physical foundations of the cathedral but amidst the spiritual foundations—immediately behind the high altar itself. See Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 49. 79. See Clifford Peterson, “Introduction,” Saint Erkenwald, 11. 80. Arnold Davidson, “Mystery, Miracle, and Meaning in Saint Erkenwald,” Papers in Language and Literature 16 (1980): 44; Lester Faigley, “Typology and Justice in Saint Erkenwald,” American Benedictine Review 29 (1978): 386. See also John Longo, “The Vision of History in St. Erkenwald,” In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English Language and Literature 8 (1987): 35–51. 81. Kamowski, “Saint Erkenwald,” 9. 82. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 35. 83. See Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 172–75; quotation from Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 219–20. Connections between Jews and Muslims are also detailed in Frederick M. Schweitzer, “Medieval Perceptions of Jews and Judaism,” Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue, ed. Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 136. 84. Faigley, “Typology and Justice,” 384. 85. Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), 20. 86. Quoted in Schweitzer, “Medieval Perceptions,” 137. Peter writes these words about Jews rather than pagans; nonetheless, they are alarmingly appropriate to the experience of Saint Erkenwald’s judge.

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87. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 378. 88. See Passus 7 of Wars of Alexander, 49–58; Langland, Piers Plowman B, 568–70 (B.15.582–613). 89. Luke 19:43–44. 90. The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), 82 and 80–81 (1289–90, 1246–48). 91. Elisa Narin van Court makes a similar point in “The Siege of Jerusalem and Augustinian Historians: Writing about Jews in Fourteenth-Century England,” Chaucer Review 29 (1995): 232. 92. Kathleen Biddick uses the phrase “typological imaginary” in order “to indicate those bundles of fantasies that bind Christian-ness to supersessionary notions.” Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 6. 93. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 3. The quotation is Cohen’s paraphrase of prominent theologian Bernard of Clairvaux. 94. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 59. 95. Theodore L. Steinberg, Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008), 75. 96. Wolfgang Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature, trans. Lee Chadeanye and Paul Gottwald (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 46. 97. Abrogard of Lyons, De Iudaicis Superstitionibus et Erroribus, quoted in Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 129; Mandeville’s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, EETS o.s. 153 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1919), 72. 98. “Judas of Jerusalem, the Jews’ father, brings out a broad book and hands it over to [Alexander]. It was full of plain prophesies all over, of the doctrine of Daniel and of his dear sayings. Alexander looks on a leaf and in a line learns how the men from Greece should with their great might utterly destroy the people of Persia. And he hopes that he shall be that man, and heartily he rejoices.” Wars of Alexander, 56 (1776–83). 99. Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels, 177–8; Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, 29. The version of the travels that I use here is Cotton Titus C.xvi, though discussions of the Jews of Gog and Magog recur in other iterations of Mandeville’s text. In the metrical version, for instance, “þe Iewes . . . weren of Goth [Gog] and Magothes [Magog’s] kynde, / And alle hir hostes.” See John Mandeville, The Metrical Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour, EETS o.s. 269 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 58 (2186–88). 100. Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels, 73. 101. Ian Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 81. 102. “But the letters that stood there in a row were runish. Fully true were the figures that were examined, but none who pondered could speak them or discern what they

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meant. In that enclosure many clerks with broad crowns busied themselves around the words for naught.” 103. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2:1109–10 (I–II, q.107, a.1, a.2). 104. John Hood describes the tension between the impotence of Mosaic law and the divinity of its progenitor in Thomistic thought, noting that Aquinas understood the law both as “a mechanism designed to inculcate virtue and true religion” even as he understood it to be “fundamentally impotent, incapable of producing righteousness.” See John Hood, Aquinas and the Jews (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 42. 105. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 20. 106. Ruth Nissé, “Reversing Discipline: The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, Lollard Exegesis, and the Failure of Representation,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 11 (1997): 181. 107. Quoted in Hudson, Premature Reformation, 228. 108. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 39. 109. Lester Little, “The Jews in Christian Europe,” in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1991), 287–88. For a contrary opinion, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England: A Review of the Evidence,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 159–60. 110. The Play of the Sacrament in Non Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, EETS s.s. 1 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 67. 111. Play of the Sacrament, 73. 112. Play of the Sacrament, 80. 113. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 35. See also Cecilia Cutts, “The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece,” Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 45–60; Victor I. Scherb, “Violence and the Social Body in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Violence in Drama (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 69–78. 114. Ann Eljenholm Nichols, “Lollard Language in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Notes and Queries 36.1 (1989): 23–24; Duff y, Stripping of the Altars, 104–6. 115. Sylvia Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeff rey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martins, 2000), 244. Tomasch refers to the virtual Jew as a concept that “does not refer to any actual Jew, nor present an accurate description of one, nor even a faulty fiction of one; instead it ‘surrounds’ Jews with a ‘reality’ that displaces and supplants their actuality. In fact . . . rather than being surprised at having to explain the continuation of English reference to Jews after the Expulsion, we might better acknowledge that Jewish absence is likely the best precondition for virtual presence” (Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer,” 254). 116. Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer,” 243.

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4. Economies of Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve 1. Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change,” 832–33. 2. All quotations from “The Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria,” as well as quotations from The Series, La Male Regle, “Complaint of the Virgin” (“Conpleynte Paramont”), and “Balade . . . pour Robert Chichele” are from Thomas Hoccleve, “My Compleinte” and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis. They will henceforth be cited parenthetically in the text by line number and by name where necessary. I also cite two poems—“Ad Beatam Virginem” and “Item de Beata Virgine”—parenthetically from Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and Israel Gollancz, EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1892 and 1925, reprinted in one volume, 1970). The citations will be differentiated by editor, poem number, and line number. The poem discussed here is titled “Item de Beata Virgine” in Ellis’s edition, but I refer to it as “The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” in order to avoid confusion with a different “Item de Beata Virgine,” printed in Furnivall and Gollancz. Despite my decision to use Furnivall and Gollancz’s title for the poem, I recognize that title to be somewhat misleading, particularly in light of my emphasis on speech throughout this study. Indeed, within “The Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria,” there is nothing to indicate that the Monk actually sings. In fact, when the poem refers to the Monk’s recitations of the prayer, it never uses the verb “sing,” opting instead for “say” or “said”: “For to seye at his excitacion” (32); “And L sythes with deuout corage / Seide Aue Maria as was his vsage” (48–49); “And euery day Aue Maria he / Seide aft ir hir doctrine” (88–89); “For to be seid aft ir þat viie yeer” (119, all italics mine). Notwithstanding its now conventional title, the poem presents the Ave Maria as a spoken prayer rather than as a sung one. The source poem in the Auchinleck Manuscript, “How Our Lady’s Sauter Was First Found,” is available online through the National Library of Scotland at www.nls.uk/ auchinleck/mss/saute.html. 3. Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1968), 35; John Bowers, Introduction to “The Ploughman’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. John Bowers (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 24. See also Beverly Boyd, The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964); and Beverly Boyd, “Hoccleve’s Miracle of the Virgin,” The University of Texas Studies in English 35 (1956): 116–22. 4. See Anne Winston, “Tracing the Origins of the Rosary: German Vernacular Texts,” Speculum 68 (1993): 621. 5. Winston, “Tracing the Origins,” 619. 6. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 153–54. 7. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 153. The phrase “economy of speech,” which I will use throughout this chapter, is reminiscent of the phrase “verbal economy,” a concept

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developed by Pierre Bourdieu and recently applied to Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes by Nicholas Perkins. Perkins describes the “verbal economy” as a system “in which the value of speech, and indeed silence, fluctuated according to the status of the speaker and the attitude of the listener.” See Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 5; Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 43–65. 8. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 147. 9. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), 75. Knapp also draws from Carruthers in The Bureaucratic Muse, 148. 10. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 153. 11. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 154. 12. For analysis of this poem as an anti-Wycliffite work, see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980), 183–86; Charity Scott Stokes, “Sir John Oldcastle, The Office of the Privy Seal, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Remonstrance Against Oldcastle of 1415,” Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 118 (2000): 556–70. 13. Joel Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307– 1485 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 8. 14. Rosenthal, Purchase of Paradise, 130. 15. Felicity Heal, “Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household,” Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 180. 16. Rosenthal, Purchase of Paradise, 129–30. 17. Rosenthal, Purchase of Paradise, 10. 18. See Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 185–88. 19. A. L. Brown, “The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century,” The Study of Medieval Records, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 266–68. Hoccleve himself discusses the inherent problems of this system, with particular regard to the practice of tipping, in his prologue to The Regement of Princes. Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works, III: The Regement of Princes and Fourteen of Hoccleve’s Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 72 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner: 1897), 55–56 (1499–533). 20. Ethan Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve’s Formulary and La Male Regle,” Speculum 74 (1999): 365. 21. The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The Second or 15th-Century Version, ed. Julius Zupitza, EETS e.s. 25–26 (London: Trübner & Co., 1875), 1, 2 (28, 40). 22. Langland, Piers Plowman B, 283–84 (B.3.217–18, 226–7).

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23. R. A. Shoaf argues that “Chaucer posits economics, ‘quiting,’ as the structure of relations in The Canterbury Tales.” R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Okla.; Pilgrim Books, 1983), 168. 24. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, 111. 25. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, ed. R. D. Laing (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 178. 26. For a concise overview of interest in the medieval period, see Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, 159–205 (chapters 8 and 9). 27. William of Auxerre, quoted in Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools (New York: E. J. Brill, 1992), 77. 28. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), lines 471–73. 29. Theresa Coletti, “Paupertas Est Donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion, and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Speculum 76 (2001): 341; Ethan Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity,” 362. 30. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 113–14. 31. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6 (1974): 17. 32. Foucault, The Order of Things, 203. 33. Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, 5–6. 34. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency, 8. 35. Boethius, De Interpretatione, quoted and translated in Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency, 10–11. 36. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency, 11. 37. MED, s.v. “purveiaunce,” n3. 38. The lyric is editorially titled “Conpleynte Paramont,” in Roger Ellis, “My Compleinte” and Other Poems, 53–63. I refer to it as “The Complaint of the Virgin” to avoid confusing inconsistencies with other recent criticism. 39. Jennifer Bryan, “Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint,” PMLA 117.5 (2002): 1175. 40. Luke 1:28. 41. Luke 1:42. 42. John 19:26: “When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he saith to his mother: Woman, behold thy son.” 43. On Hoccleve’s use of the Mara/Maria pun, see Roger Ellis, “My Compleinte” and Other Poems, 62n182ff.

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44. Bryan, “Hoccleve,” 1177. 45. See Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 113. 46. Bryan, “Hoccleve,” 1178. 47. Lee Patterson, “‘What is Me?’ Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2002): 468. 48. D. C. Greetham, “Self-referential Artifacts: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device,” Modern Philology 86 (1989): 242. 49. Patterson, “What is Me?” 444; Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 163; Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, 4. 50. John Burrow, “Hoccleve’s Series: Experience and Books,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984), 261. 51. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 169. 52. David Mills, “The Voices of Thomas Hoccleve,” in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepolis, 1996), 96. 53. Both A. G. Rigg and J. A. Burrow have identified the book Hoccleve refers to as the Synonyma, a work widely known in the Middle Ages. A. G. Rigg, “Hoccleve’s Complaint and Isidore of Seville,” Speculum 45 (1970): 564–74; J. A. Burrow “Hoccleve’s Complaint and Isidore of Seville Again,” Speculum 73 (1998): 424–28. 54. See Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity,” 365. 55. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 175; see also Patterson, “What is Me?” 444–48. 56. James Simpson, “Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series,” Chaucer and FifteenthCentury Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (Exeter, UK: Short Run Press, 1991), 20, 24. Simpson is not alone in proposing a “talking cure” for Hoccleve. John Burrow has raised the idea in “Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve,” Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 402–5; and it has reappeared more recently in Sarah Tolmie, “The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 281–309. 57. See respectively Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 142–46 (Lancastrian aims); Karen Smyth, “Reading Misreadings in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series,” English Studies 87 (2006): 16–17 (current events); Burrow, “Experience and Books,” 263 (blemish). 58. See also Robert Meyer-Lee, who persuasively argues that “Hoccleve neatly and powerfully correlates these personally experienced failures of verbal and literary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy medium of economic exchange.” Meyer-Lee’s observations, which focus not on the ways in which the performative utterance links Hoccleve’s devotional and secular discourses but rather on how Hoccleve’s work is “drenched in the problematic notion of money” (175) accord with my own in showing Hoccleve to be fundamentally invested in modes of exchange. Robert J. MeyerLee, “Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 206. 59. Simpson, “Madness and Texts,” 24.

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60. See Meyer-Lee, “Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,” 206–7. 61. The phrase “patronage nexus” is from Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 181. 62. Lee Patterson wonders about Hoccleve’s dubious decision to dedicate the Tale of Jonathas, a profoundly antifeminist, even misogynistic tale, to Joan Beaufort, Lady Westmorland: “How could Hoccleve possibly have thought it appropriate to dedicate this particular tale, which describes a woman persuading a young man to part with his inheritance and then being savagely punished, to this particular woman?” (Patterson, “What is Me?” 450). 63. For the dating of the poem, see Ellis’s notes to La Male Regle de T. Hocleve, in My Compleinte and Other Poems, 77; and Furnivall, introduction to Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, xii. 64. See also Ethan Knapp, who argues that in these lines, Hoccleve reverses “the causal sequence between coin and confession, between poverty and penance” (Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity,” 372). 65. Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, 39. 66. Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works, III, 181 (5013–17). 67. Antony Hassler, “Hoccleve’s Unregimented Body,” Paragraph, 13 (1990): 178. 68. Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works, III, 181 (5013–14). 69. See preface and chapter 1 of Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, xi–31. 70. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 141. Like Strohm, Derek Pearsall finds Hoccleve to be complicit in Lancastrian designs of dynastic legitimation and reads the Regement of Princes as “part of a larger program of kingly self-representation.” Derek Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-representation,” Speculum 69 (1994): 386. 71. The label “royalist stooge” is Sarah Tolmie’s in “Prive Scilence,” 282. Like Tolmie, both Knapp and Judith Ferster object to the view that Hoccleve unambiguously supported the Lancastrian dynastic cause. Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 137–59. Foundational for all three of these arguments is David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” English Literary History 54 (1987): 761–99. 72. Lois A. Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988), 195. 5. Speech, Rhetoric, and Politics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis 1. Line numbers with asterisks indicate passages from the putative “first recension” of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. I choose to use Russell Peck’s recent edition of the Confessio rather than Macaulay’s more standard edition because the assumptions that Macaulay makes in his edition regarding the recensions and chronology of the Confessio, and

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particularly his decision to put passages from the Ricardian version of the poem “below the line” in his text, are among the very issues under discussion in this chapter. 2. The phrase is, of course, Chaucer’s, “moral Gower” (TC 1856) and “philosophical Strode” (TC 1857) being the two dedicatees of Troilus and Criseyde. 3. The traditional assessment of the recensions of the Confessio found its first expression in G. C. Macaulay’s edition of Gower’s works and was influentially restated and codified in the 1960s by John Fisher. By the time Russell Peck wrote Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the assumptions of political expediency, resistance to Ricardian tyranny, and Gower’s early switch to the Lancastrian affi nity were so firmly established that Peck could conclude, “Gower, it appears, even as early as 1392 was wondering what the state of England might be like if Henry were King instead of Richard.” John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902), vol. 2, xxi–xxvii, cxxvii–clxvii; John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), 303–7; Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1978), 8–9. 4. Wim Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis,” Viator 40 (2009): 320. 5. For these challenges, see (paleographical) 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: Scholar Press, 1978): 163– 210; (textual) Peter Nicholson, “Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis” in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, UK; D. S. Brewer, 1987): 130–42; (historical) George B. Stow, “Richard II in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 3–31; Frank Grady, “Gower’s Boat, Richard’s Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002): 1–15; (visual) Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series 22 (1995): 61–93. 6. W. Warwick, Esq., “On Gower, the Kentish Poet, His Character and Works,” in Archæologia Cantiana, vol. 4 (London: J. E. Taylor, 1866): 106. 7. Coleman, Public Reading, 97. 8. Copeland, Rhetoric, 211. For a counteropinion on the role of Genius in the poem, see Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 148. 9. Some critics have suggested that “The Manciple’s Tale” is a parody of Gower’s Confessio, particularly in its repetition of “my son” and its somewhat ponderous moralizing. If this is the case, we might also see the Manciple’s discussion of speech in The Canterbury Tales as drawing from Gower’s discussion of rhetoric the powerful efficacy of the spoken

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word even as it leaves behind the moral and ethical constraints for which Gower is so well known. See Richard Hazelton, “The Manciple’s Tale: Parody and Critique,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963), 1–31. 10. In addition to his mention in book 7, Ulysses appears five times in the Confessio: his confrontation with the sirens (1.481–529); Penelope’s letter to him (4.147–233); Nauplus’s persuading him to fight at Troy (4.1815–900); his persuading Achilles to fight at Troy (5.2961–3201); his relationship with Circe and Calypso and his death (6.1391–1788). 11. Katharine Gittes, “Ulysses in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician,” English Language Notes 24.2 (1984): 14. 12. Gittes, “Ulysses,” 13. 13. William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 2nd ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 214–15 (10–11). 14. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, 120. 15. See Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor; Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005), 344–47; as well as Götz Schmitz, “Rhetoric and Fiction: Gower’s Comments on Eloquence and Courtly Poetry” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology, ed. Peter Nicholson (Woodbridge, UK; Boydell and Brewer, 1991), 117–42. 16. Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 58–60. 17. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 60. 18. Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex and Politics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 43 (further examples on pages 52–54). 19. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 105. 20. Judith Ferster discusses the role of the Secretum Secretorum in chapter 3 of Fictions of Advice, 39–54. See also Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 100–103. 21. Copeland, Rhetoric, 209–10. 22. Ann Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 90–91. 23. Copeland, Rhetoric, 211. 24. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, 125–29. 25. John Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower, Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 46. 26. I have changed the word order from the original “sette kinde above” to adhere to modern syntax. 27. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 47. 28. The device is described in Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 144. 29. Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 138. 30. Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 198.

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31. John Capgrave, The Chronicle of England, Rolls Series, ed. Francis Charles Hingeston (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 250; Astell, Political Allegory, 91. 32. See Saul, Richard II, 191–96 (Merciless Parliament), 157–64 (Wonderful Parliament). 33. Capgrave, Chronicle of England, 251. For Richard’s relative inactivity in the wake of the Merciless Parliament see Saul, Richard II, 196; for the book of statutes, see 237–38. 34. Lindeboom estimates conservatively that “a date between 1384 and 1389 for such an early recension would certainly be a good guess.” (Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions,” 320). 35. Jenni Nuttall provides an elegant and well-documented account of this process in Creation of Lancastrian Kingship. See also Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 1–31. 36. Thomas Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. David Preest, ed. James Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 248. 37. The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 275. 38. Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 275. 39. Fletcher, Richard II, 71. 40. Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 40. 41. Among such sins, Susan Phillips lists “excessive chatter, impudent and unproductive speech, tale-telling, news, disturbing reports, bawdy jokes, lies, and scorning one’s neighbor” (Phillips, Transforming Talk, 6). 42. Fletcher, Richard II, 70. 43. Respectively, the references are to Geoff rey Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” (VI 640); William Langland, Piers Plowman B, 445–46 (B.2.83); John Audelay, “Poem 28” in The Poems of John Audelay, ed. Ella Keats Whiting, EETS o.s. 184 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1931), 181, line 11. Whether deployed with irony or earnestness, such references suggest the textual environment into which Gower enters his own reference to Richard’s “heste.” 44. For Arundel’s reference to Richard as puer, see Fletcher, Richard II, 1. 45. The accusation that Richard either did not recognize or simply rejected advice from truth-tellers not only provided fodder for his enemies during the Merciless Parliament, it became a central feature of the rhetoric surrounding his deposition. See Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 14–16. 46. See Fisher, John Gower, 26–36. A more theoretically inflected analysis of the “quarrel” can be found in Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, Univ. of Victoria, 1991), 130–52.

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47. Richard Maidstone, Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), ed. David R. Carlson, trans. A. G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003). I cite the poem by line number in the text. 48. Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 22. 49. Chronicles of the Revolution: 1397–1400, The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester, UK; Manchester Univ. Press, 1993), 186. 50. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 75. Strohm thoroughly documents the stratagems used by the Lancastrians to justify Henry’s claim in chapter 4, “Saving the Appearances: Chaucer’s ‘Purse’ and the Fabrication of the Lancastrian Claim” (75–94). See also Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 492–93. 51. Again, see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, chapter 4. 52. John Gower, Cronica Tripartita, in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vol. 4, 338 (3.333–35): “In Praise of Peace,” vol. 3, 480 (12–13). 53. Frank Grady, “The Generation of 1399,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, N.Y.; Cornell Univ. Press, 2002), 202–29. Grady uses the phrase to describe those texts—including the Chaucer’s “Purse” and Gowers Chronica Tripertita and “In Praise of Peace”—that were generated by and respond to Richard’s deposition and Henry’s subsequent ascension. 54. Terry Jones et al. Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 102. 55. Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 27. 56. Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 27. 57. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 34–35. 58. Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 135. 59. Russell Peck, for example, glosses the word as “confess.” For the alternate meanings I propose, see MED s.v. “biknouen” v., 1(a, b). 60. Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 27. 61. Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, 307. 62. See Adam Usk, The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. Chris GivenWilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 51 (Merlin) and 65–67 (Edmund). 63. Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, 312. 64. Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, 312. 65. Paul Strohm also discusses the holy oil, regarding it as “borrowed capital” employed to legitimate the nascent Lancastrian dynasty (Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 207–8). 66. Joyce Coleman, “A Bok for King Richardes Sake: Royal Patronage, The Confessio, and the Legend of Good Women” in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007): 107.

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Index

Augustine of Hippo: on baptism, 74; City of God Against the Pagans, 21, 205n50; De Doctrina Christiana, 207n10; doctrine of Jewish witness, 102–3, 108; De Magistro, 63, 207n10; penitential speech, 59; performativity and, 21, 205n50; on universals, 34–37, 207n10 “aurality,” 13–15 “aural-narrative constellation,” 155–56 Austin, J. L., 19–25, 28, 33, 74, 75, 204n46, 204n48; “the doing of an action,” 19, 32 Ave Maria, 124–25, 130 Awntyrs off Arthure, 50

Adam of Usk, 173, 187–88 “Ad Beatam Virginem” (Hoccleve/ Furnivall VII), 127, 222n2 “Address to Sir John Oldcastle” (Hoccleve), 117 Aers, David, 78, 217n57 Albert the Great, 42 Allen, Mark, 59 Amans (character). See Confessio Amantis (Gower) Ambrose, 59 Amphion (character). See “Manciple’s Tale, The” (Chaucer) Angevin Dynasty, 2, 4, 16–17, 165. See also Lancastrian period; Ricardian period “Apollo and the Crow” (Ovid), 32 “Apollonius of Tyre” (Gower), 187 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint Aristotle, 34, 38, 164, 175; Boethius’s translation of, 35–37, 207n12 art, defined, 84, 98, 216n48 Arundel, 2, 3, 173, 176; Constitutions, 8, 12, 113 Astell, Ann, 165, 172 Augustine at Compton (Lydgate), 14 Augustine of Canterbury: conversion and, 80–85; defi nition of art, 84, 98, 216n48; “truth” and, 91–93, 95, 97

“Ballade for Robert Chichele” (Hoccleve), 127 baptism, 16, 70–80, 85–87, 99–102, 117, 212n4; Augustine of Hippo on, 74; Lollardy (Wycliffism) and, 71–72, 75–76, 87, 99, 108–9; Saint Thomas Aquinas on, 74–75, 213n14; scriptural verses for, 214n23 Bardsley, Sandy, 13, 163 Beaufort, Joan, 226n62 Beckwith, Sarah, 88 Bede, 81, 82, 84 biblical translation, 11–12

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Index

Biddick, Kathleen, 220n92 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 11, 31, 206n1 Boethius: “affections of the soul,” 47; Chaucer’s translations of, 46, 47, 61; Consolation of Philosophy, 61; Isidore of Seveille’s Synonyma, 138–39, 140; mental signs and, 36, 39, 48, 207n12; De Musica, 27–28; physics of sound, 27–28; sounds as symbols, 35–37, 39, 207n12; translation of Aristotle, 35–37, 207n12; words as currency, 126–27 Bolingbroke, Henry, 2, 3–4, 8, 154. See also Henry IV Book of Margery Kempe, The (Kempe), 18–19, 204nn41–43 Book of the Duchess, The (Chaucer), 50, 90 books, relationship to memory, 184–87 Boucher, Holly, 43–44 Bourdieu, Pierre, 22–23, 24, 85, 222n7 Bowers, John, 114, 192, 193 Breeze, Andrew, 216n48 Burley, Simon, 173, 174 Burrow, John A., 225n53, 225n56

Cannon, Christopher, 206n4 “Canon’s Yoeman’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 30, 44, 53–54, 123 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer): “aurality” of, 13–14, 15; Christ Church manuscript, 192–93, 194, 195, 196–97; economic terms of salvation, 123; as evidence in heresy trial, 193; as extended realist allegory, 37–38; linguistic hierarchy in, 38, 121, 145; narrative style, 50–51, 53–54, 57–59, 61–62, 68, 70; nominalism and, 44–45; opening of, 135–36;

realism and, 37–39, 44–45, 53–54; Thynne’s edition of, 194, 195, 196–97; Wycliffite Chaucer, 192–93, 194–96. See also specific tale Capgrave, John, 172 capitalism, 119–22, 124 Carruthers, Mary, 184–85 Chateau d’Armour (Grosseteste), 83 Chaucer, Geoff rey: Gower and, 153, 154, 177–78; Lollardy (Wycliffism) and, 192–93, 194–96; nominalism and, 33–34, 43, 44–45, 58–60, 62–63, 66–67, 209nn34–35; as “protoProtestant,” 194–96; realism and, 37–39, 46–51, 62–68; translations of Boethius, 46, 47, 61; use of “bogus” and “empirical” reality, 53–54. See also specific tale or title Chaucer, Lowys, 67–68 Chekhov, Anton, 45, 50–51 Chism, Christine, 18, 71, 81, 97, 201n2, 218n58 Christianity, 72, 100–112. See also baptism; conversion; Eucharist; transubstantiation Christine de Pizan, 144 Chronicle of Adam Usk (Adam of Usk), 173, 187–88 citational speech, 21–22, 25 City of God against the Pagans (Augustine of Hippo), 21, 205n50 class and status, 117–20 “Clerk’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 42–43 Cloud of Unknowing (anonymous), 19 Cohen, Jeremy, 102–3 coin clipping, 141–43 Coleman, Joyce, 13–14, 155–56, 188 Coletti, Theresa, 124 “Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse, The” (Chaucer), 181, 182–83, 190, 230n53

Index “Complaint of the Virgin” (Hoccleve), 128–33, 143, 147 conceptual signs. See mental signs Concordia Facta Inter Regem et Cives Londonie (Maidstone), 178–80 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 5, 16–17, 153–90, 196; “aural-narrative constellation” of, 155–56; critical responses to, 154–55, 163–65, 170–71, 189–90, 227n9; gendering of speech in, 163–71, 173–80; influences on, 11, 14, 167, 168; Lancastrian version, 155–56, 171–72, 173–74, 177–78, 180–90, 227n3, 229n34; models for memory and, 184–87; narrative style, 18–19, 153, 154, 155–56, 170–72, 182–83; potentia of speech (“rethorique”), 157–65, 171; “preexisting language” of, 183, 187; recensions, 153–55, 226n1, 227n3, 229n34; Ricardian version, 155–56, 171–80, 182–84, 188–89, 226n1, 227n3, 229n34; sin of cowardice, 166–71; sin of quarreling (“cheste”), 166, 169–71; use of “heste,” 175–76, 178, 179–80, 183, 186, 197, 229n43; use of truth, 90–91, 92 confession, 86, 148 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), 61 constatives, performatives vs., 19–21, 28, 33, 43–44, 47, 74, 204nn47–49 Constitutions (Arundel), 8, 12, 113 conversion, 79–85, 88–89, 91–92, 102–3, 109–10, 123, 212n1; defined, 79–80, 215n31, 216n45. See also Eucharist; transubstantiation Copeland, Rita, 11, 12–13, 164, 165 court poetry, 14–15, 17, 23–24, 37, 62–66, 124 cowardice, sin of, 166–71 Cramer, Peter, 74, 215n31

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“cratylic/cratylistic realism,” 41, 207n13 Cratylus (Plato), 36 Craun, Edwin, 13, 161 Cronica Tripartita (Gower), 181–82, 182–83, 190, 230n53 Crowley, James, 212n4 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 109–12 Crucifi xion, 76–77, 100, 128–30, 132 currency: coin clipping, 141–43; linguistic, 122, 125–28, 143, 145–47; prayer as, 124–28

Davidson, Arnold, 100 Derrida, Jacques, 21–23, 24–25, 125, 126 “Dialogue with a Friend” (Hoccleve). See Series, The (Hoccleve) dictio, defined, 51, 209n47 Doctrina Christiana, De (Augustine of Hippo), 207n10 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 37 Donatism, 73, 85 Duff y, Eamon, 78, 110 Duns Scotus, John, 41, 42, 55 Dymmok, Roger, 7

Ebin, Lois, 152 economics: capitalism, 119–22, 124; coin clipping, 141–43; labor, 121–22; prayer as currency, 124–28; upperclass philanthropy, 117–20; usury, 123–24 “economy of speech,” 16, 120–28, 132– 50, 197; prayer as currency, 124–28; “self-reflexive arrangement” and, 115; “verbal economy,” 126, 131, 137–38, 148, 149, 222n7 Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, 181 Edward I, 181

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Index

Edward IV, 193 Edward of York, 193 Ellis, Roger, 222n2 English language, prominence of, 10–15 Eucharist, 6–10, 16, 24, 217nn55–57; Judaism and, 109–11; Lollardy (Wyclifism) and, 6–9, 71–72, 76, 78–80, 87, 88–89, 99, 109–11; role of priests and priestly language in, 77–78, 214n24, 216n45; Saint Erkenwald and, 71–72, 76–78, 81–84, 87–89; scriptural verses for, 214n23. See also conversion; transubstantiation

Faigley, Lester, 100 Ferster, Judith, 175, 226n71 Fisher, John, 227n3 Fletcher, Christopher, 173–74 “Fortune” (Chaucer), 63–64 Foucault, Michel, 123, 125, 126, 138 Foxe, John, 195–96, 197 “Franklin’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 123 “Friar’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 38–39

gender, 17, 132; misogyny, 144, 226n62; speech and, 163–71, 173–80 “General Prologue” (Chaucer), 37, 50, 58, 195 Genius (character). See Confessio Amantis (Gower) “Gentilesse” (Chaucer), 63–64 Gesta Romanorum, 11 Gloucester, duke of, 2–3, 4, 66, 144, 196 God, 69–70; power of, 33, 42–43, 55–56, 63, 65–66 gossip/uncontrolled speech, 163–71, 173–80

Gower, John, 11, 16–17, 151; Chaucer and, 153, 154, 177–78; definition of usury, 124; meeting with Richard II, 153–54. See also specific tale or title Grady, Frank, 71, 90, 182, 230n53 Green, Richard Firth, 90, 93–94 Gregory (pope), 70, 81, 102 Grosseteste, Robert, 83 Guillaume, de Deguileville, 83 Guillaume de Lorris, 11

Haeretico Comburendo, De, 8 Handlyng Synne (Robert of Brunne), 82–83, 215n39 Henry III, 181 Henry IV, 2–4, 8–9, 13, 154, 164; Arundel and, 8, 173, 176; claim to throne, 151, 180–82, 187–90, 196, 230n53. See also Confessio Amantis (Gower) Henry V, 9, 13, 150, 151 Henry VI, 193 Henry VIII, 194, 195, 197 Herman, Peter, 52 Historia Ecclesiastica (Bede), 81, 82, 84 Hoccleve, Thomas, 11, 16, 25, 30, 196, 197; aurality of, 15; autobiographical works/persona of, 114–15, 134–35, 138, 145, 147; devotional lyrics of, 17, 115, 127; political complicity of, 151– 52; public rebuke of Lollardy, 117; role as clerk of Privy Seal, 119–20, 124, 127. See also specific title Hoff man, Richard, 206n1 Holy Communion. See Eucharist Hood, John, 221n104 House of Fame, The (Chaucer), 17, 25–30, 32, 165, 191 Howard, Donald, 49 Hudson, Anne, 213n17

Index illocutionary act, 20, 23, 204n46 Imitatione Christi, De (Kempis), 80 “In Praise of Peace” (Gower), 181–82, 230n53 Isidore of Seville, 138–39, 140, 143 “Item de Beata Virgine” (Hoccleve/Ellis), 222n2. See also “Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria, The” (Hoccleve) “Item de Beata Virgine” (Hoccleve/ Gollancz V), 127–28, 222n2 iterability, 21–22

Jean de Meun, 11, 46, 209n40 John Baron of Amersham, 193 John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests (Mirk), 74–75, 77, 78, 214n24 Jones, Terry, 182 Judaism, 16, 72, 90, 101–12, 221n115 Julian of Norwich, 18–19, 204n43

Kamowski, William, 100–101 Kempe, Margery, 18–19, 124, 204nn41–43 Kempis, à Thomas, 80 Knapp, Ethan, 115, 116–17, 124, 134, 226n64, 226n71 “Knight’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 11, 38, 206n1

labor, 121–22 “Lak of Stedfastnesse” (Chaucer), 63–66 Lancastrian period, 3–5, 7–10, 15, 16–17; poet complicity during, 151–52; War of the Roses, 194, 196. See also specific ruler

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Langland, William, 13, 71, 90–91, 120–21, 212n1. See also Piers Plowman (Langland) Last Supper, 77, 88 Law, Old and New, 72, 100–112 Lawton, David, 12–13 Legend of the Blood of Hailes, 110 Leicester, Marshall, 30 L’epistre de Cupide (Christine de Pizan), 144 Lerer, Seth, 212n74 Lindeboom, Wim, 189–90, 229n33 linguistic currency, 122, 125–28, 143, 145–47 Lochrie, Karma, 163 locutionary act, 20, 204n46 Lollardy (Wycliffism), 6–10, 85–90; baptism and, 71–72, 75–76, 87, 99, 108–9; Chaucer and, 192–93, 194–96; Donatism and, 73, 85; Eucharist and, 6–9, 71–72, 76, 78–80, 87, 88–89, 99, 109–11; Hoccleve’s public rebuke of, 117; Judaism and, 72, 108–12; spread of, 113, 114, 151; suppression of, 192–93; Wycliffite Bible, 12 Lydgate, John, 14, 151

Macaulay, G. C., 154, 226n1, 227n3 Magistro, De (Augustine of Hippo), 63, 207n10 Maidstone, Richard, 178–80 Male Regle, La (Hoccleve), 16, 115, 148–50, 191 “Manciple’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 15–16, 31–68, 197; aurality of, 15; “bogus” vs. “empirical reality” in, 53; Confessio Amantis (Gower) and, 169–70; courtly lyrics of, 14–15, 17, 62–66; critical responses to, 31–32, 37–38,

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Index

“Manciple’s Tale, The” (Chaucer) (cont.) 41–43, 50–51, 52, 58, 60, 210n56, 227n9; influences on, 11, 31–32, 34, 209n40, 227n9; “lady” and “lemman,” 47–50; narrative style, 45, 50–51, 53–54, 57–59, 66; nature’s primacy in, 45–47, 50; penitential speech in, 59–60, 61; performativity in, 31–34, 45, 55, 164; potentia of speech, 32–33, 55–56, 65–66, 157–58, 159–60; power and location of power, 52, 210n49; realist language hierarchy in, 36, 46–51; universals and, 33–49, 51–57, 61, 63–68 Mandeville, John, 105–7 Mandeville’s Travels (Mandeville), 105–7 “Man of Law’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 177, 209n34 Marx, Karl, 121–22, 123 Mason, Mary G., 204n41 McCabe, Herbert, 78 memory, models for, 184–87 mental signs: Boethius and, 36, 39, 48, 207n12; significance of, 9, 39–42, 44; “thought-objects,” 6, 9, 33, 48–49, 53, 67–68; universals and, 39–40 “Merchant’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 31 Merciless Parliament of 1388, 2–4, 165, 172, 173, 177, 229n45 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 11, 168, 206n1 Meyer-Lee, Robert, 225n58 Middle English Dictionary (MED): art, 216n48; “contree,” 63, 211n65; “right,” 93–94, 218n70 Middleton, Anne, 5, 10, 62 “Miller’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 44, 53–54 Mirk, John, 74–75, 77, 78, 214n24 Mirour de l’Omme (Gower), 153 misogyny, 144, 226n62 Mitchell, Jerome, 114

Mitchell, John Allen, 167 “Monk Who Clad the Virgin, The” (Hoccleve). See “Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria, The” (Hoccleve) Moore, Roger I., 101–2, 209n34 Morse, Ruth, 216n48 Mosaic law, 100–101, 104, 105, 221n104 Musica, De (Boethius), 27–28 “My Compleinte” (Hoccleve). See Series, The (Hoccleve) Myles, Robert, 37

Neoplatonic thought, 34. See also via antiqua Nichols, Ann Eljenholm, 110 Nissé, Ruth, 108 nominalism, 6–7, 9, 15–16, 33–45, 197; Chaucer and, 33–34, 43, 58–60, 62–63, 66–67, 209nn34–35; implications on relationship between human and divine, 69–70. See also universals Nuttall, Jenni, 23–24, 182, 183–84, 187

Ockham, William of, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 15, 33–45; realism and, 6, 33, 39–41, 65. See also nominalism Our Lady’s Psalter, 113–14, 122–23 Ovid, 11, 14, 32, 34, 167, 168, 206n1 Oxford Translation Debates, 12

paganism, 70, 72, 81–82 Palmer, Thomas, 108 Parable of the Talents, 123 Parliament of Fowls, The (Chaucer), 30, 46 “Parson’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 59–60, 61, 62, 194–95

Index Patience, 50 Patterson, Lee, 134, 226n62 Pearl, 50, 77, 94 Pearsall, Derek, 226n70 Peck, Russell, 43, 209n35, 226n1, 227n3 Pecock, Reginald, 83, 108 Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, Le (Guillaume de Deguileville), 83 penitential speech, 59–60, 61, 133, 148 Peraldus, William, 83 performative speech: constative vs., 19–21, 28, 33, 43–44, 47, 74, 204nn47– 49; defined, 20, 205n50; ontological potential for, 42, 45, 66; theory of, 19–25, 150, 160, 204–5nn46–50 Perkins, Nicholas, 126, 134, 149, 222n7 perlocutionary act, 20, 23, 28, 204n46 Peterson, Clifford, 216n48 philanthropy, upper-class, 117–20 Phillips, Susan, 13, 229n41 philosophy, 6, 17, 33–34, 69–70. See also nominalism; realism; universals; via antiqua; specific philosopher Phoebus (character). See “Manciple’s Tale, The” (Chaucer) “Physician’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 39 Pickstock, Catherine, 217n56 Piers Plowman (Langland), 5, 76–77, 90–91, 92, 103, 193; definition of “art” in, 216n48; influences on, 71, 212n1; personification of “meede,” 120–21 Plato, 34–35, 36–37, 47–48, 209n40 Play of the Sacrament, 109–12 “Plowman’s Tale, The” (Chaucer [spurious]), 191–97 Pocock, J. G. A., 24, 182 poetry: court, 14–15, 17, 23–24, 37, 62–66, 124; narrative structure of, 50–51; as peacemaker, 4–5; as social mediator, 9–10, 76, 150–52

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potentia absoluta, 32–33, 42–43, 55–56, 65–66 potentia ordinata, 32–33, 42–43, 55–56 prayer, as currency, 124–28 preaching, performative speech and, 22 “Prioress’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 111 Privy Seal, 119–20, 124, 127 Pygmalion (Ovid), 167–69

quarreling (“cheste”), sin of, 166, 169–71 Quinn, William, 212n4

realism: “bogus” reality, 53–54; Chaucer and, 37–39, 46–51, 62–68; “cratylic/ cratylistic,” 41, 207n13; defined, 34–35, 207n13; mental signs and, 39–40; Ockham and, 6, 33, 39–41, 65. See also universals; via antiqua realist language hierarchy, 36, 47–50, 51 redemption. See salvation Regement of Princes, The (Hoccleve), 148–50, 222n7, 223n19 “Retraction” (Chaucer), 61–62 Reule of Crysten Religioun (Pecock), 83 Revelations of Divine Love (Julian of Norwich), 18, 19 Revenge Parliament, 3, 66 Ricardian period, 4–5, 7–9, 15, 17, 90, 113. See also Richard II Richard II, 2–5, 7–9, 65–66, 151, 196, 197; meeting with Gower, 153–54; Merciless Parliament of 1388, 2–4, 165, 172, 173, 177, 229n45; second coronation oath, 165, 172; Wonderful Parliament of 1386, 172; youthfulness and effeminacy of, 173–80, 229n43. See also Confessio Amantis (Gower) Richard the Redeless, 173

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Rigg, A. G., 225n53 Robert of Brunne, 82–83, 215n39 Romance of Guy of Warwick, The, 120 Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun), 11, 46, 209n40 Rosenthal, Joel, 117–18 Rubin, Miri, 78, 217n55

sacramental language, 6–9, 17–18, 70–89, 107, 110, 117, 197. See also baptism; Eucharist; transubstantiation Sacrament of the Altar. See Eucharist sacraments. See baptism; confession; Eucharist Saint Erkenwald, 16, 30, 69–112, 164, 197; aurality of, 13–14, 15; critical responses to, 71–72, 99, 101–2, 110, 212n4; Eucharist and, 71–72, 76–78, 81–84, 87–89; influences on, 14, 70; Judaism, 72, 90, 101–12, 221n115; narrative style, 50–51; Old Law vs. New Law, 72, 100–112; right and truth in, 89–100, 218n70; use of turnyd, 82–83, 215n39. See also Eucharist salvation, 59–60; in economic terms, 123, 124, 127–28, 132–33, 135, 138, 145–46 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 125 Savage, Henry, 216n48 scholastic realism, 6, 207n13, 208n20. See also realism; universals; via antiqua Searle, John: Bourdieu’s revision of, 22–23; Cramer’s diagnosis and, 74; Derrida’s attacks on, 24–25; on performatives and constatives, 20–21, 28, 43–44, 47, 74, 204nn47–49 “Second Nun’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 123

Secreta Secretorum (Aristotle), 164, 175 Series, The (Hoccleve), 11, 16, 25, 133–50, 149, 150, 191–92; critical responses to, 134, 140, 141, 143; economy of speech in, 16, 115, 132–50, 197; Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma and, 138–39, 140, 143; narrative style, 134–35, 145, 147; salvation in economic terms, 135, 138, 145–47 “Shipman’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 30, 123 Shoaf, R. A., 126, 224n23 Siege of Jerusalem, 103–4, 111 Simpson, James, 171, 185, 225n56 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 216n48 Somerset, Fiona, 76 Spearing, A. C., 50 Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 82–83 speech-act theory, 19–25, 160, 204n46 speech/spoken word: “aurality” and “spoken-ness,” 13–15; justification of within society, 4–5, 9–10; vernacular translation, 11–15; written vs., 13–15. See also performative speech Speght, Thomas, 196 “Squire’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 46, 192 Staley, Lynn, 18, 23–34 Stepsis, Robert, 42–43 “Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria, The” (Hoccleve), 113–33, 144, 147, 149, 191–94; aurality of, 15; critical responses to, 114–15, 129, 132; economy of speech in, 115, 120–28, 131, 140, 143; Marx’s “commodity-form” and, 122, 123; mercantile elements of language in, 121–22; narrative style, 114, 121, 123, 134–35, 139; prayer as currency, 125–28, 143; role of Ave Maria, 124–25, 130; salvation in economic

Index terms, 123, 124, 127–28, 133; themes, 116–17, 136; title of, 222n2; upperclass philanthropy and, 117–20; use of “meede,” 118, 120–21, 150; use of “quit,” 121; usury, 123–24 Striar, Brian, 210n49 Strode, Ralph, 33–34 Strohm, Paul, 8, 23–24, 151, 190, 211n68 Summa Contra Gentiles (Thomas Aquinas), 69 Summa of Vice (Peraldus), 83 Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas), 107, 213n14, 214n24 “Summoner’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 76, 121 Sweetser, Eve, 205n50 Synonyma (Isidore of Seville), 138–39, 140, 143

“Tale of Constance, The” (Gower), 186 “Tale of Iphis, The” (Gower), 168–69 “Tale of Jonathas, The” (Hoccleve), 226n62. See also Series, The (Hoccleve) “Tale of Jupiter, Juno and Tiresias, The” (Gower), 170 “Tale of Jupiter and Laar, The” (Gower), 170 “Tale of Melibee, The” (Chaucer), 38, 93–94 “Tale of Phoebus and Cornide, The” (Gower), 169–70 “Tale of Pygmalion, The” (Gower), 168–69, 170 “Tale of Socrates and His Wife, The” (Gower), 170 “Tale of Three Questions, The” (Gower), 184 Taylor, P. B., 209n35, 211n71

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Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia (Boccaccio), 11, 31, 206n1 Testament of Love, The (Thomas Usk), 19 theology, 8, 69–70, 72. See also Christianity; Judaism; specific theologian Thomas Aquinas, Saint: on baptism, 74–75, 213n14; cratylic realism, 41, 207n13; law and, 107, 221n104; Summa Contra Gentiles, 69; Summa Theologica, 107, 213n14, 214n24; on universals, 35–37 Thomas of Woodstock. See Gloucester, duke of “thought-objects,” 6, 9, 33, 48–49, 53, 67–68. See also mental signs Thynne, William, 194, 195, 196–97 Timeaus (Plato), 47–48 Tomasch, Sylvia, 111, 221n115 Trajan legend. See Piers Plowman (Langland); Saint Erkenwald translation, vernacular, 11–15 transubstantiation, 6–9, 71–72, 76–84, 87–88, 99, 109, 217n57. See also conversion; Eucharist Trask, Richard, 210n56 Treatise on the Astrolabe (Chaucer), 67–68 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 30, 34, 147 “Truth” (Chaucer), 62–63 “typological imaginary,” 220n92

uncontrolled speech/gossip, 163–71, 173–80 universals: Augustine of Hippo on, 34–37, 207n10; defined, 6–7, 33–35; “The Manciple’s Tale” (Chaucer) and, 33–49, 51–57, 61, 63–68; mental signs and, 39–40; Ockham on, 33–34,

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universals (cont.) 39–41; Saint Thomas Aquinas on, 35–37; “thought objects” vs., 53 Upland Series, 193 upper-class philanthropy, 117–20 Usk, Adam, 173, 187–88 Usk, Thomas, 19 usury, 123–24

van Court, Elisa Narin, 220n91 “verbal economy,” 126, 131, 137–38, 148, 149, 222n7 vernacular translation, 11–15 via antiqua, 34–45, 69–70, 206n7, 211n73 Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi (Lydgate), 14, 84–85 vox, defined, 51, 209n47 Vox Clamantis (Gower), 153

wage capitalism, 119–20 Wallace, David, 65–66 Walsingham, Thomas, 173, 174, 187–88 War of the Roses, 194, 196

Wars of Alexander, 1–5, 175, 201nn1–2, 216n48, 220n98; “aurality” and, 14; Jews and, 103, 105 Waters, Claire, 22 Watson, Nicholas, 10, 12–13, 113 Watt, Diane, 163 Westminster Chronicle, 173 Whatley, Gordon, 71, 212n1 “Wife of Bath’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 30, 145 William of Auxerre, 124 William of Ockham. See Ockham, William of Williams, David, 38, 208n20 Williams, Raymond, 90, 93 Wilton Dyptych, 66, 180 Wonderful Parliament of 1386, 172 Wright, Stephen, 212n4 writing, as model for memory, 184–87 Wyclif, John, 6–10, 60, 78–80, 196. See also Lollardy (Wycliffism) Wycliffism. See Lollardy (Wycliffism) Wycliffite Bible, 12

Young, Helen, 216n48