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11 - Proverb and Satirical Time: The Digby Poems and Their Fifteenth Century
- Edited by Daniel G. Donoghue, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Sebastian Sobecki, University of Toronto, Nicholas Watson, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 05 March 2024, pp 201-222
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Summary
The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.
– Wallace StevensIn a 1990 essay that helped set the terms for a reemergent historicism in Middle English literary studies, James Simpson offers a new understanding of late-medieval satire. Speech in early fifteenth-century England was genuinely constrained by newly punitive secular and ecclesiastical legislation, he argues, but to understand the satires of the period – his case examples are Piers Plowman and Mum and the Sothsegger – critics must also “account for their formal properties as a way of negotiating the constraints which both surround and inhabit them.”3 Simpson's reading reveals the feints and dodges that alliterative poets incorporated into their modus dicendi: they place incontrovertible wisdom in the mouths of suspect speakers; they defer to the pronouncements of authoritative institutions, only to reveal their inadequacies. Such tactics authorize a satirical poetic voice but also leave space for that voice to reflect on its own limits.
This essay proceeds from Simpson's insights on the relation between context and form in fifteenth-century satire. Its subject, however, poses a special problem in understanding that relation. The twenty-four lyrics uniquely attested in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102 – sandwiched in thirty folia that fall between copies of the comparatively ubiquitous Piers Plowman C and Richard Maidstone's Penitential Psalms, all written as prose in a single hand – seem to address specific historical events, but they almost exclusively speak in commonplaces unlocatable in any specific time, place, or institution. As Helen Barr has observed, the poems are characterized by their “sparseness of specific temporality,” operating in the timeless realm of ethical guidance rather than the time-bound realm of political commentary. Unlike Simpson's case examples, which veil and displace their critiques but nevertheless make unambiguous and sometimes obviously partisan reference to historical events, the Digby poems speak almost entirely in truisms – some creatively extended, some deftly reworked, all lacking the kind of particularity that would allow us to place the poet in a specific place or party.
This essay will argue that such proverbial obliquity might be understood as another formal strategy available to the late-medieval English satirist, albeit one aimed as much against the risk of obsolescence as the constraints of censorship. It will do so in part by extending our account of the provenance of Digby 102.
6 - Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting
- Edited by Jennifer Nuttall, Exeter College, Oxford, David Watt, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- Thomas Hoccleve New Approaches
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 13 September 2022, pp 124-141
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Summary
What goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection. (Julia Kristeva)
This essay focuses on a metaphor for emotional experience that is both entirely conventional in late medieval poetry and so reflexive and widespread as to be nearly synonymous with the experience itself: the sense that a strong emotion swells, often in the chest, until it bursts out as tears, speech, or even the act of writing. Hoccleve reproduces this metaphor throughout his poetic career, but it enjoys particular pride of place in the Series: the collection begins and ends with swelling and bursting. These moments, defined as they are by their ambivalent relationship to originality – a cliché that nevertheless conveys an embodied particularity – call to mind the question past critics repeatedly posed about the Series: is it a work of fifteenth-century convention, or does it relate an account of experience locatable in the hard facts of a person’s body and brain? This question has long since been superseded, its implied binary demolished by John Burrow, who sensibly pointed out that ‘convention and autobiographical truth’ need not ‘be taken as incompatible alternatives’. In James Simpson’s reading, the singularity of the Series emerges from the agonistic play between unique personal circumstance and the well-worn tracks of literary tradition. But Hoccleve’s repertoire of swelling feelings suggests another way in which originality can emerge from the common property of convention. In the Series’s pivotal moments of swelling and bursting, the confrontation between the hard facts of autobiography and warmed-over poetic commonplace renews convention, ‘making it new’ by making it unsettling.
The first constituent poem of the Series is framed by the narrator Thomas’s effusive sorrow:
The greef aboute myn herte so sore swal,
And bolned euere to and to so sore
That nedis oute I muste therwithal.
I thouȝte I nolde kepe it cloos no more,
Ne lete it in me for to eelde and hore,
And for to preue I cam of a womman,
I braste oute on þe morwe and þus bigan. (C 29–35)
8 - The Idle Readers of Piers Plowman in Print
- Edited by David Lawton, Laura Ashe, Wendy Scase
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- Book:
- New Medieval Literatures 17
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 17 March 2017, pp 201-236
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Summary
Rules as concerning Reading.
In reading, first; Take heede what Booke thou doest read; that they be not leawd and wanton, nor needlesse and vnprofitable, not sauouring of Popish superstition. But either the holy Scriptures, or other sound and godly Authors. In reading of the Scriptures, read not heere, and there a Chapter, (except vpon some good occasion) but the Bible in order throughout […]
3 In reading of other good Bookes, read not heere a leafe of one, & a Chapter of an other (as idle Readers vse to do for nouelties sake) but make choyse of one or two sound and well pende Bookes; which reade againe and againe, for confirming of thy memorie, and directing of thy practise. 4 Before reading, pray vnto God to blesse thee in that action.
5 In reading, settle thy selfe to doe attention.
6 After reading, apply it to thy selfe for thy instruction, in thy practise and imitation.
Some rules are made to be broken. These rules from the seventeenthcentury religious handbook A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, though straightforward enough, are no exception. The idea that one should read good matter in a thorough and linear fashion, in dedicated and repeated stints, with eyes on ‘one or two’ books rather than distracted across many, has a history, of course. The emphasis on continuous attention reproduces an entire Protestant ideology of reading: unlike Catholics (especially medieval Catholics), who chopped up the Bible for liturgical and devotional convenience, Protestants read the Bible from start to finish, or so polemicists maintained. As these directions make clear, the same principle of continuous reading should be applied by extension to ‘other good Bookes’, which likewise require sustained attention for their lessons to be understood and applied in daily life.
But there are some wrinkles in these rules. Never mind that the evidence left by actual English Protestants almost always points to discontinuous Bible reading, as Peter Stallybrass has argued. Never mind that these directions themselves are borrowed, abridged, and shoehorned together with tracts by half a dozen other Elizabethan Protestant writers, ‘a leafe of one, & a Chapter of an other’ – that this call for continuous reading is transmitted in a book designed for discontinuous reading.