Social Chaucer (Paul Strohm)

Unlike Patterson's Chaucer and the Subject of History, Strohm's Social Chaucer is more interested in anchoring Chaucer within his social milieu. However, the complexities and ambiguities of social order in the late 14th century permitted Chaucer to observe many levels of his culture closely, while remaining flexible in his associations with any one level. His main points:

The 14th century saw an eroding of the strict permanent hierarchy of feudal vassalage (the classic "Three Estates"). The peerage, whom Strohm terms "aristocrats", became distanced from the knights, the lowest level of the "gentle" class; that lowest level also became accessible to those born common through government and contractual (indentured and non-indentured) service for salary, not just military service for land (fiefdom). Meanwhile, merchants, burghers, and citizens grew in importance, creating a more distinct upper level to the common class. These low-level gentles and upper-level commons formed a growing middle class, engaged in the business of the kingdom and aristocracy, which permitted greater freedom of upward and lateral social mobility. While the three estates remained an accepted concept in social discourse, the day-to-day business of the kingdom was increasingly shaped by horizontal relationships within the "middle strata", instead of the vertical hierarchy of feudalism. Within this context, Strohm characterizes Chaucer's status as a royal squire (though born a vintner's son) as gentility, albeit non-aristocratic; given that Chaucer was an armiger, I wonder whether he would have accepted this distinction.

Chaucer was a member of the tightly-knit court faction Strohm dubs the king's affinity. The affinity is a "series of concentric circles" with Richard II at the center, surrounded by officers of state (such as the chamber knights), salaried servants (chancery officials, sergeants-at-arms), and the general retinue (knights and esquires). Chaucer had close ties with knights of the first ring, while serving (at different points) in both the second and third rings. Within this broader circle of affinity, Chaucer enjoyed a certain freedom of place, not by being apolitical, but by cannily judging the political climate: connected to John of Gaunt through his wife, Chaucer maintained ties with the Lancastrian faction, and when things looked bad for Richard, resigned his post as customs official to distance himself from the king. (This is Strohm's characterization. But doesn't the purse lament come in around here?)

While Strohm concedes that Chaucer did not write with a single audience in mind, his literary audience is, in fact, largely to be found among his actual social circle(s), many of them in the king's affinity, even if only "tacitly". The Book of the Duchess dramatizes Chaucer's relational possibilities with John of Gaunt through the interchange between the solicitous yet deferential dreamer and the courteous, condescending king; yet while this drama is tacitly performed before John of Gaunt, it is overtly directed at a gentle audience, presumably of Chaucer's equals -- those sympathetic of both characters' situations and appreciative of Chaucer's skillful negotiation of a sensitive interaction. Troilus and Criseyde has as many implied audiences as it has implied narrative voices (Derek Brewer!); however, the address to "moral Gower" and "philosophical Strode" in the conclusion indicates Chaucer's interest in engaging a particular and real audience in the work. ("Moral Gower" is presumably interested in the depiction of love's fleeting nature, while "Philosophical Strode" is meant to notice Troilus's incomplete citation of Boethius, which leaves out free will: Strode contended on the subject with Wyclif.) The (presumed) inception of the Canterbury Tales during Chaucer's time away from London (1386-1389), severing him from direct ties with his close London circle of poets and readers, would seem to be a problem for Strohm's theory; however, he posits that the Canterbury pilgrims were devised as an imagined audience with whom the stories' narrators interact, in the absence of real, extra-narrative listeners. This seems tenuous.

There's more stuff too, particularly a discussion of the pilgrims' differing values systems (selflessness/feudal loyalty vs. selfishness/middle class pragmatism), but they seem less central than the previous stuff.

My Renaissance Non-Drama Exam List

At long last, my Renaissance non-drama list -- in fact settled for some time, but only now published! (Note the formatting necessary for the list below, and you'll see why I kept putting this off.)

On the whole, it's a broad and (IMHO) not terribly surprising list, composed of the big, widely anthologized names. And I've got not problem with that: I'm all about readily accessible texts. It's a deceptively long list: the naming of specific short verse selections gives it a false impression of excessive bulk. In simple page length, it's much short than the Middle English list, though it has many, many more individual items. Which is better? Not sure now, but I'll bet I'll have an opinion come the end of March!

I. PRIMARY WORKS

Marvell, Andrew:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

"The Coronet"
"Bermudas"
"A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body"
"The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn"
"To His Coy Mistress"
"The Definition of Love"
"The Picture of LIttle T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers"
"The Mower Against Gardens"
"Damon the Mower"
"The Mower to the Glowworms"
"The Mower's Song"
"The Garden"
"An Horatian Ode"

Ascham, Roger:
* The Schoolmaster (excerpts from Norton and Longman)

Jonson, Ben:
* Epigrams

“On Something, That Walks Somewhere”
“On My First Daughter”
“To John Donne”
“On My First Son”
“Inviting a Friend to Supper”

* The Forest

“To Penshurst”
“Song to Celia”
“To Heaven”

* Underwood

“A Sonnet to the Noble Lady, the Lady Mary Wroth”
“Queen and Huntress”
“Still to Be Neat”
“To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us”
“Ode to Himself”

* Timber, or Discoveries (excerpts on poesy)

Marlowe, Christopher:
* Hero and Leander
* "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"

Spenser, Edmund:
* The Faerie Queene
* Amoretti
* Epithalamion
* The Shepheardes Calender
* Prothalamion
* View of the Present State of Ireland

Elizabeth I, Queen:
* Miscellaneous verse selections:

"The Doubt of Future Foes"
"On Monsieur's Departure"

* "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury"
* Translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy

Elyot, Sir Thomas:
* The Book Named the Governor

Foxe, John:
* Acts and Monuments (Book Three)

Bacon, Francis:
* Essays

“Of Truth”
“Of Marriage and Single Life”
“Of Great Place”
“Of Superstition”
“Of Plantations”
“Of Negotiating”
“Of Masques and Triumphs”
“Of Studies”

* The Advancement of Learning

“The Abuses of Language”
“Divisions of Learning: History, Philosophy, and Poesy”
“Division of Poesy”

* The Great Instauration
* Novum Organum (Preface and Book One)
* The New Atlantis
* The Wisdom of the Ancients

“Orpheus, or Philosophy”
“Daedalus, or Mechanic”
“Sphynx, or Science”

Herbert, George:
* A Priest to the Temple
* The Temple

“The Altar”
“Redemption”
“Easter”
“Easter Wings”
“Affliction 1”
“Prayer 1”
“Jordan 1”
“Church Monuments”
“The Windows”
“Denial”
“Virtue”
“Man”
“Jordan 2”
“Time”
“The Bunch of Grapes”
“The Pilgrimage”
“The Holdfast”
“The Collar”
“The Pulley”
“The Flower”
“The Forerunners”
“Discipline”
“Death”
“Love 3”

Vaughan, Henry:
* Silex Scintillans

“Regeneration”
“The Retreat”
“Silence, and Stealth of Days”
“Corruption”
“Unprofitableness”
“The World”
“They Are All Gone into the World of Light!”
“Cock-Crowing”
“The Night”
“The Waterfall”

Hoby, Sir Thomas:
* Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (Book One)

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey:
* Miscellaneous verse selections:

"Love that Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought"
"The Soote Season"
"Alas! So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace"
"Epitaph on Sir Thomas Wyatt"

Bunyan, John:
* Pilgrim's Progress
* Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

John Donne:
* Miscellaneous verse selections:

“The Good Morrow”
“Song”
“The Undertaking”
“The Sun Rising”
“The Indifferent”
“Air and Angels”
“Break of Day”
“A Valediction: Of Weeping”
“Love's Alchemy”
“The Flea”
“The Bait”
“The Apparition”
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
“The Ecstasy”
“The Funeral”
“The Relic”
“Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed”
“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”
“A Hymn to God the Father”

* Holy Sonnets
* Devotions on Emergent Occasions

“Meditation 4”
“Meditation 17”

* “Death's Duel” (sermon)

Lyly, John:
* Euphues

“Eupheus Introduced” (excerpt in Norton)

Milton, John:
* Paradise Lost
* Paradise Regained
* Samson Agonistes
* Areopagitica
* De Doctrina Christiana (selections)
* Of Education
* Miscellaneous verse selections

“L'Allegro”
“Il Pensoroso”
“Lycidas”
“How Soon Hath Time”
“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”
“When I Consider How My Light is Spent”
“Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint”

Wroth, Lady Mary:
* Urania (excerpts from Norton)

Drayton, Michael:
* Harmony of the Church
* Idea
* Nimphidia
* Ballad of Agincourt

More, Sir Thomas:
* Utopia
* Miscellaneous verse selections

"Pageant Verses"
"A Rueful Lamentation"

Cranshaw, Richard:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

"Shepherd's Hymn"
"On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord"
"Saint Mary Magdalene or the Weeper"
“The Flaming Heart”
“To the Infant Martyrs”
“I Am the Door”

Lovelace, Richard:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

“To Lucasta, Going to Wars”
“The Grasshopper”
“To Althea, from Prison”
“Love Made in the First Age: To Chloris”

Herrick, Robert:
* Hesperides

“The Argument of His Book”
“Upon the Loss of His Mistresses”
“The Vine”
“Dreams”
“Delight in Disorder”
“His Farewell to Sack”
“Corinna's Going A-Maying”
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
“The Hock-Cart”
“How Roses Came Red”
“Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast”
“Upon Jack and Jill. Epigram”
“To Marygolds”
“His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
“The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad”
“The Night-Piece, to Julia”
“Upon His Verses”
“His Return to London”
“Upon Julia's Clothes”
“Upon Prue, His Maid”
“To His Book's End”
“Upon His Spaniel Tracie”
“To the Sour Reader”
“When He Would Have His Verses Read”
“The Vision”
“The Vine”
“To His Tomb-Maker”
“Upon Himself Being Buried”
“The Pillar of Fame”

* Noble Numbers

“To His Conscience”
“Another Grace for a Child”
“His Prayer for Absolution”
“To His Sweet Savior”
“To God, on His Sickness”

Southwell, Robert:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

“The Burning Babe”
“Upon the Image of Death”
“Look Home”

Sackville, Thomas, Earl of Dorset:
* A Mirror for Magistrates

“Induction”

Suckling, Sir John:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

“Loving and Beloved”
“Sonnet 1”
“Sonnet 2”
“Sonnet 3”
“Against Fruition 1”
“A Ballad upon a Wedding”

* An Account of Religion by Reason

Sidney, Sir Philip:
*Astrophil and Stella
*Arcadia
* An Apology for Poetry

Raleigh, Sir Walter:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
"Sir Walter Raleigh to the Queen"
"A Poem of Sir Walter Raleighs"
"The Lie"
"Even Such is the Time Which Takes in Trust"
"Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk"

* The History of the World

Book 1, Chapter 9 “Of the Beginning and Establishing of Government”

Skelton, John:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

"Uppon a deedmans hed"
"Manerly Margery Mylk and Ale"

* Colyn Cloute
* The Tunning of Elinour Rumming

Campion, Thomas:
* Observations in the Art of English Poesie
* Miscellaneous verse selections

“My Sweet Lesbia”
“I care not for these ladies”
“When to her lute Corinna sings”
“Rose-cheeked Laura”
“Now winter nights enlarge”
“There is a garden in her face”
“Fain would I wed”

Wyatt, Sir Thomas:
* Miscellaneous verse selections

"The Longe Love, that in My Thought Doth Harbor"
"Whoso List to Hunt"
"Farewell, Love"
"My Galley"
"They Flee from Me"
"The Lover Showeth How He is Forsake"
"My Lute Awake"

Burton, Robert:
* The Anatomy of Melancholy (excerpts from Norton)

William Shakespeare
* Sonnets
* Venus and Adonis
* The Rape of Lucrece

II. SECONDARY WORKS

* Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 2005)
* Jeffery Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe (Chicago, 2002)
* Victoria Silver, Imperfect Sense (Princeton, 2001)
* Willy Maley, Nation, State, and Empire in Renaissance English Literature (New York, 2003)
* Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish experience (Oxford, 1997)
* Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 2006)
* Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago, 1992)
* Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading popular romance in early modern England (New York, 2002)
* Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 2005)

Updates to the Middle English List!

Short version: Some (longer) primary readings have been cashed in for other (shorter) primary readings, and my adviser has clarified his view of the reading list in a way that actually makes my life easier. Huzzah!

No link: just click on the "ME" button on the left!

The Book of Margery Kempe

Ah, Margery Kempe -- what a delightful crazy woman.

Anyhow, the bio rundown: Margery Kempe (c. 1378-post 1438) was born in Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn) in Norfolk, the daughter of a prominent merchant. She married John Kempe and had her first child around the age of 20. The pregnancy didn't go well, and after delivering the child, Margery was so ill she thought she would die. She summons a priest to confess in preparation for death, but his inopportune remonstrations prevent her from confessing completely. The resultant guilt and fear drive her to despair and madness, and visions of tormenting and tempting devils. Eventually, after being restrained in her room for a time, Christ appears to her in a vision, asking why she has forsaken him, since he never abandoned her. This is the first of her many visions of Christ, as well as other saintly and angelic figures.

Some high points:

* She's got a thing about sex: it tempts her and disgusts her. She loathes to have sex with her husband, wishing to remain chaste; her 14 children indicate that John Kempe wasn't sympathetic with that wish for some time. Eventually, through canny (and divinely-guided) negotiations, John agrees to a mutual chastity pact. However, at one point she is tempted by the possibility of adultery with a man in her town, who first propositions her, then rejects her: she understand this as a test of her chastity by the man himself. Later in life, after the chastity pact, Margery undergoes a time of temptation, in which she has visions of men displaying their bits for her, arousing both lust and repulsion. Nobody read her the Song of Solomon!

* She's Jesus's favorite, apparently. The recurring theme of her visions is that Jesus loves her very much, and that He will do anything on her behalf. She wears a ring with the inscription "Jesus est amor meus" -- "Jesus is my love". In one vision, she actually marries God, with the Father reciting vows and everything. One creepy thing: she seems quite smitten with Jesus's humanity, resisting marriage to the Godhead out of loyalty to the incarnate Son. Does this have anything to do with the previous observations re: sex and male bodies?

* She relishes suffering, whether physical pain and deprivation or social abuse. For years she wore a hair shirt under her shift (including during sex) until Jesus told her to get rid of it: instead, He gives her a "hair shirt in her heart", the gift of true contrition and repentance. She fasts regularly, and in several periods refuses meat and wine. Whenever she is insulted, she rejoices, since she is suffering for the love of Christ.

* She can't stop crying. In mass, she cries. Hearing sermons or scripture, she cries. Visiting shrines, she cries. Having visions, seeing babies or young men, or just for no good reason at all, she sobs like a stricken child. Often she lies on the ground and thrashes about in her grief. She says God gave her the gift of tears; everyone else thinks she's possessed.

* She craves the approval of religious authorities, seeking out famous priests, anchorites, and abbots to tell them of her visions. For the most part, those who give her a hearing seem to accept the authenticity of her experiences. At the same time, many clerics and most of the common people view her as a dangerous heretic (Lollard) and threaten to imprison or burn her. She undergoes multiple hearings before various clerical authorities who test her doctrinal orthodoxy; she always passes with flying colors.

* The parable of the pear tree and the bear reminds me of some of Piers Plowman's comments about hypocritical clergy who aren't mindful of their duties, mouthing the rituals but not sincerely believing or practicing. This parable is also generically closer to PP than Margery's visions, in my opinion.

Some advice on comps reading, via Francis Bacon

This comes from Francis Bacon's essay "Of Studies":

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously [i.e. carefully]; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

I've adopted this as my rule for getting through the rest of my comps. It's helped.

Reformation and Cultural Revolution (James Simpson)

Simpson’s book is an extensive treatment (560+ pages) of a sizeable period of literary history (nearly 200 years), but the heart of his argument is elegantly simple. Simpson seeks to complicate and historicize our notions of “medieval” and “renaissance”, which he accomplishes by playing the late “Middle Ages” of Lancastrian England against the early Tudor period, highlighting their characteristic tendencies. These he encapsulates in the following formula, explained in the introduction and reiterated repeatedly throughout the text:

[T]he institutional simplifications and centralizations of the sixteenth century provoked correlative simplifications and narrowings in literature. If literary history and criticism is, as I believe it should be, ancillary to the complex history of freedoms, then this is a narrative of diminishing liberties. (1; italics mine)

[C]oncentrations of power that simplify institutional structures also simplify and centralize cultural practice, by stressing central control, historical novelty, and unity produced from the top down. […] In the field of literary history, the main features of ‘medieval’ cultural practice turn out to be as follows: a sense of long and continuous histories; an accretive reception of texts, where the historicity of the reader receiving the old text is not at all suppressed; clearly demarcated and unresolved generic, stylistic, and/or discursive divisions within texts; and, above all, an affirmation of the possibility of human initiative, whether in politics of theology. Later medieval English, no less than European, society was characterized by a complex set of adjacent, overlapping institutions, each with its own history, and each often competing for cultural power. Such institutional complexity in England developed, in part at least, within the period of this history: fraternities, guilds, and parliament all, for example, became culturally active and articulate after 1350. I have called this culture ‘reformist’ by way of accentuating its inherently self-regulating energies.

By contrast, ‘cultural revolution’ had been used to imply the wide range of cultural practices characteristic of those moments, sometimes actual, sometimes imagined, in which power is suddenly centralized. Legitimization of such newly centralized power demands both repudiation of the old order and a vigorous affirmation of novelty. Because accretive reception of texts implies historical continuity, a revolutionary order must repudiate such reception; it must institute in its place the possibility of complete textual recovery of a founding text in its original purity, whether that text be the Aeneid or the Bible. A revolutionary order must also stress its own unity, a unity that flows from a central, organizing source. In literary practice the effects of this will be disciplined observation of stylistic and discursive coherence. Above all, revolutionary texts tend to stress central intelligence and initiative: whether in politics or in theology, the first half of the sixteenth century witnessed a newly conceived transcendence of power. (558-9)

Simpson proceeds to work this theme of reformist/medieval vs. revolutionary/renaissance in relation to the prominent genres and themes of literature. I will not trace each of these paths, but only touch on such as intersect with my own interests.

The first chapter is an account of 'John Leland’s (and, later, John Bale’s) attempt to preserve and refashion the literary heritage of England during the reign of Henry VIII. The resulting work depicted Henry VIII’s Protestant England as the new era of light and knowledge, in contrast with the darkness and ignorance of the Middle Ages. Such medieval authors as were mentioned were treated as luminaries in an age of barbarism for either preserving classical wisdom (Leland’s interest) or anticipating the dogmatic purity of Protestantism (Bale’s interest). This view of England’s (then recent) past was, and continues to be, widespread.

The second chapter discusses later critics’ (Renaissance and following) characterization of John Lydgate of the boring, typical medieval, whose only virtue was his uninspired attempt to imitate Chaucer, the true medieval genius. Lydgate becomes a foil for Chaucer, whose uniqueness is emphasized by Lydgate’s pathetically conformist medievalism. Simpson contests this view, and suggests that Lydgate is underappreciated—just like medieval England itself.

The third chapter deals with a succession of Middle English war narratives, which Simpson dubs “tragic”. His larger thesis is still at work, but here is specified further: “the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples of such narrative marked out their opposition to militarist, imperial pretensions in a variety of ways. Translation of Virgilian epic in the early sixteenth century, by contrast, revived ideals of imperial conquest” (68). His examples of the former are Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Malory’s own Arthurian epic. Lydgate’s works are seen as especially anti-imperialist because (1) they make little of the Troy-Brutus-Britain connection so important to the Galfridian chronicle tradition, and (2) they depict “history [as] the story of societies imploding under the pressure of poor decisions and the cumulative weight of events”, as opposed to the foundation of empire. These “poor decisions” are often pointed out by “clerical” voices within the texts, who speak in opposition to the martial and aristocratic voices. The AMA and Malory’s anti-martial/ imperialist bent is, in Simpson’s view, more subtle: the AMA slides in the “clerical” perspective in the Wheel of Fortune scene, while Malory subverts the importance of Arthur’s European wars by treating them as a diversion from the really interesting stuff, the internal collapse of the Round Table. I detract from Simpson re: the AMA, however: he seems to view it as largely uncritical of war and empire-building until the Wheel scene. Instead, I believe that the AMA undercuts both Arthur’s chivalry and imperial ambitions pretty much constantly throughout the entire text.

The Production of Copies, etc. (Doyle & Parkes)

Though tedious at points, Doyle and Parkes’s article explores some of the practical aspects of the late medieval (late 14^th-early 15^th century) book manufacture. They approach this large subject through the window of a single item of material evidence: one manuscript of Gower’s Confessio Amantis copied by five distinct scribes.* While the discussion of these scribes (and their other labors) delves into paleographic intricacies beyond my own training**, the details settle into a larger (and more interesting) image of the book trade: that books were often produced not in factory-like scriptoria under rigid oversight, but instead by ad hoc groups of independent scribes, often without immediate knowledge of each others’ efforts. The result was a manuscript with characteristic inconsistencies in the sections where one scribe’s stint ends and another begins, and variants in script and lines-per-page. Doyle and Parkes see this image as supporting the contention that the medieval book trade “was essentially a bespoke trade—that new copies of books were produced to specific orders—and relied on the cooperation of independent members of the several crafts.”

Some individuals, either whilst practicing one of these crafts, or whilst engaged in some other commercial enterprise, accepted commissions from patrons for the completed books, or commissioned the occasional copy themselves in anticipation of a purchase: they assumed the financial responsibility in this trade for coordinating the different stages of production. Such individuals, who often dealt in second-hand books as well, were described as stationers. (197-8)

In sum, this article focuses on the material production of books—a topic which, as a literary scholar, I often fail to consider. Of course, Ralph Hanna helped me see the error of my ways...

* Fun fact: Thomas Hoccleve is Scribe E!

** And beyond interest. As I read segments of this learned discussion, my wife promised to read comps books for me if I would stop reading her this article. Fact.