Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text

358 Pages·2012·1.48 MB·English

by  A. C. Spearing

A. C. S P E A R I N G
M E D I E VA L
A U T O G R A P H I E S
The “I” of the Text
M E D I E VA L
AU T O G R A P H I E S
MEDIEVAL
INSTITUTE
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies
2008
The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity
of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and
publications resulting from it.
PREVIOUS TITLES IN THIS SERIES:
Paul Strohm
Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (2005)
Ulrich Horst, O.P.
The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval
and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006)
Rosamond McKitterick
Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006)
Jonathan Riley-Smith
Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2009)
A. C. S P E A R I N G
M E D I E VA L
A U T O G R A P H I E S
The “I” of the Text
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
Copyright © 2012 by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spearing, A. C.
Medieval autographies : the “I” of the text / A. C. Spearing.
p. cm. — (The Conway lectures in medieval studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-268-01782-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-01782-4
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-268-09280-1 (ebook)
1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and
criticism. 2. First person narrative. 3. Autobiography in literature.
I. Title.
PR275.F57S64 2012
820.9'35—dc23
2012030897
(cid:39) The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
ONE The Textual First Person 1
TWO Autography: Prologues and Dits 33
THREE Chaucerian Prologues and the Wife of Bath 65
FOUR Why Autography? 99
FIVE Hoccleve and the Prologue 129
SIX Hoccleve’s Series 171
SEVEN Bokenham’s Autographies 209
Afterword 257
Notes 269
Bibliography 307
Index 333

PREFACE
This book originated as the Robert M. Conway Lectures in Medi-
eval Studies given at the University of Notre Dame in October
2007. I was honored to be invited to give these lectures, and I am
most grateful to Tom Noble, then director of the Medieval Institute
at Notre Dame, to his wife, and to his colleagues for their gener-
ous hospitality during my stay there. I am also grateful to those
who heard the lectures for their searching questions and valuable
suggestions, which have helped to make the book less inadequate
than it would otherwise be. I owe special debts of thanks to Roberta
Baranowski, associate director of the Medieval Institute, for much
good- natured practical help and many entertaining e-m ail mes-
sages, and to Barbara Hanrahan, then director of the University of
Notre Dame Press, for her warm encouragement and shrewd guid-
ance when I was struggling to plan the book.
The tortuous process of converting and enlarging three lectures
into a book that often bears little resemblance to its original form
has been eased, and the book itself much improved, by the kind
colleagues and friends who have read drafts and discussed prob-
lems with me. My obligations are too many to be recorded in detail,
but I should like to thank Peter Baker, Cristina Cervone, Deborah
McGrady, Gary Saul Morson, and especially Elizabeth Fowler. I am
most grateful to Elizabeth Spearing, who stepped forward at a cru-
cial moment, read the whole, and made invaluable suggestions for
improvement. Some more specific debts are recorded in notes to the
text. It goes without saying that the book’s faults are my responsi-
bility alone.
Some parts of the book’s argument and occasional ideas and
sentences have previously appeared in the following: “The Poetic
vii
viii Preface
Subject from Chaucer to Spenser” in Subjects on the World’s Stage:
Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renais-
sance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University
of Delaware Press, 1995), 13–37; “Textual Performance: Chaucerian
Prologues and the French Dit,” in Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of
Authority in the Middle Ages, ed. Marianne Børch (Odense: Uni-
versity Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), 21–45; and “Was Chau-
cer a Poet?” Poetica 73 (2010): 41–54. I am grateful respectively to
Associated University Presses, to Professor Marianne Børch, and to
Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya for permission to reuse this mate-
rial here. Some material also derives from A. C. Spearing, “Dream
Poems,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein
and David Raybin, 159–78 (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2010); copyright © 2010 by the Pennsylvania
State University Press; reprinted by permission of the Pennsylva-
nia State University Press.
In quoting from medieval texts I have silently modified edito-
rial spelling and punctuation where I thought that would aid under-
standing; this goes against the grain of medieval scholarship, and
with good reason, but I persist in hoping that some nonspecialists
might be willing to learn more about premodern literature. Further,
in the hope that the book might find a few nonmedievalist readers
who are interested in the theoretical issues I discuss—issues that I
believe ought to be the concern of others besides medievalists—I
have added modern translations (my own unless otherwise speci-
fied) of all medieval texts quoted in the original, except those, gen-
erally very brief, whose meaning seemed obvious.
CHAPTER 1
T H E T E X T UA L F I R S T P E R S O N
In this book I attempt to bring into focus a category of medieval
English writing that has not previously been recognized as such. I
call it “autography,” and, put simply, it consists of extended, non-
lyrical, fictional writings in and of the first person. A more pre-
cise sense of what this involves and why it matters will, I hope,
emerge from studies of specific texts in the following chapters, but
it may be helpful to begin by indicating how my recognition of
this category—perhaps better called a “supergenre” than simply a
genre—relates to work I did in an earlier book entitled Textual Sub-
jectivity. Its subtitle was The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval
Narratives and Lyrics, and in it I investigated some of the linguistic
and formal features by means of which subjectivity is built into
texts in the two “supergenres” of narrative and lyric, and I tried to
show how attention to these features might affect literary inter-
pretation. Much of the argument of Textual Subjectivity was nega-
tive, illustrating how, as it seemed to me, failures of attention to
the way language works in specific medieval texts had led to wide-
spread misinterpretations. Dissatisfaction with accepted readings
of major works such as Troilus and Criseyde, The Man of Law’s
Tale, and Pearl, and a growing conviction that they were indeed bad
readings—and often perhaps worse than bad, because they seemed
contemptuous of the actual achievements of great poets—led me to
1