In the century before Chaucer a new language of political critique emerged. In political verse of the period, composed in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, poets write as if addressing the king himself, drawing on their sense of the rights granted by Magna Carta. These apparent appeals to the sovereign increase with the development of parliament in the late thirteenth century and the emergence of the common petition, and become prominent, in an increasingly sophisticated literature, during the political crises of the early fourteenth century. However, very little of this writing was truly directed to the king. As David Matthews shows in this 2010 book, the form of address was a rhetorical stance revealing much about the position from which writers were composing, the audiences they wished to reach, and their construction of political and national subjects.
• Shows how the rhetorical stance of petitioning the monarch was a striking feature of political poetry in medieval England • Examines works in all three of the written languages of medieval England, providing a view across the spectrum of English literature • Sets political poetry into wider arguments of rhetoric and political critique in medieval England
Contents
Preface; Introduction: writing to the King; 1. Defending Anglia; 2. Attacking Scotland: Edward I and the 1290s; 3. Regime change; 4. The destruction of England: crisis and complaint c.1300–41; 5. Love letters to Edward III; Envoy.
Review
'… this book is to be welcomed for its ambitious contribution to the history of political writing in the century before the great Ricardian poets.' The Review of English Studies
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