4 results
18 - Writing and reading
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- By Paul Strohm, Columbia University
- Edited by Rosemary Horrox, University of Cambridge, W. Mark Ormrod, University of York
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- Book:
- A Social History of England, 1200–1500
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 10 August 2006, pp 454-472
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Summary
Various narratives of ‘emergence’ and ‘growth’ have both advanced and hindered knowledge about writing and reading in the medieval period. Such narratives – all of which possess some truth but also require some modification – include the movement from a multi-lingual culture to the primacy of English as a spoken and written language; a broad increase in literacy, and especially vernacular literacy; the continued encroachment of writing upon the domain of orality; and the emergence of printing and the appearance of the printed book.
No-one looking at the beginning of our period and then at its end could fail to notice enormous changes in all these areas. Between 1200 and 1500, English had routed Latin and French in the rolls of parliament and at least in the oral side of legal pleading; had long since prevailed in the literary arena; and (despite determined resistance) had already sporadically been and was about to become the premier language even of religious controversy. Especially when one considers the full range of literacies – including the more pragmatic forms of literacy specific to commerce and trade – the number of literate citizens had vastly multiplied. An optimistic judgement from Sir Thomas More (though negatively expressed) was that in 1533, just after the end of our period, ‘far more than four parts of all the whole divided into ten could never read English yet’ – that is, that practically 60 per cent of the people could read English at some level.
1 - The social and literary scene in England
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- By Paul Strohm
- Edited by Piero Boitani, Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza', Italy, Jill Mann, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 12 January 2004, pp 1-19
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Summary
Social structure
Ideas of medieval social organization have much to contribute to the study of Chaucer. Socially and politically inflected topics are manifest within his writings, and socially grounded issues of literary taste and reception are thematically important as well. But, looking beyond particular matters of content, generally held notions about the structure of society also exert a tacit but persistent influence on the structure of his literary works.
Medieval social descriptions are very conscious of degree, and tend to emphasize the relatively small number of people at the top of the social hierarchy. The thirteenth-century legal commentator Bracton is representative when he divides society into those high in the ecclesiastical hierarchy (the pope, archbishops, bishops, and lesser prelates), those high in the civil hierarchy (emperors, kings, dukes, counts, barons, magnates, and knights), and those remaining (a general category of 'freepersons and bondpersons' or liberi et villani).
24 - Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian court
- from V - BEFORE THE REFORMATION
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- By Paul Strohm
- Edited by David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 21 January 1999, pp 640-661
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Summary
Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate staged their lives and careers in complex relation to the Lancastrian court, and were consciously and deliberately Lancastrian in their sympathies and proclivities. Each temporarily enjoyed what might be considered an official or ‘laureate’ status as publicist or celebrator of Lancastrian values and activities – Hoccleve for several years before and after the 1413 accession of Henry V and Lydgate during the 1420s and 1430s. Yet neither was a court-poet, in the sense either of continued residence within a court’s precincts or of consistent financial reward for specifically literary activities. If terms like ‘court-poet’ or ‘patronage’ are to be applied to their situations, considerable redefinition is demanded, with respect to the complex filiations of expectation, attachment and belief which may operate between a poet, a prince, and that prince’s programme.
Neither poet actually lived within the court’s physical ambit, although each conducted his career at its margins. Hoccleve was a clerk and stipendary in the office of the Privy Seal and commuted to his Westminster post from residences in the Strand. Despite occasional sojourns in the households of the Duke of Bedford and others, Lydgate retained his connections with the monastery of St Edmund at Bury and he began and ended his career there. Although each wrote certain works in the hope of pleasing the royal heir or sovereign, each also sought more varied patronage and undertook some works with no certain patronage at all. Hoccleve wrote as often to impress his superiors in Chancery and other well-placed royal servants as the king or the nobility of the realm. Lydgate addressed works to a host of potential patrons, including his Troy Book to Henry V and Fall of Princes to the Duke of Gloucester, as well as translations for the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, occasional pieces for a gentlewoman of Norfolk, pageants for the clerk of London, mummings for London gilds, and many other sponsors. Yet both poets also composed major works on speculation, as when Hoccleve started his ‘Series’ in the hope but not the certainty of interesting the Duke of Gloucester. Although Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes was implicitly patriotic with regard to English ambitions in France, he wrote it without apparent patronage.
Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Janus Imperial
- Paul Strohm
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- Journal:
- Journal of British Studies / Volume 35 / Issue 1 / January 1996
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 January 2014, pp. 1-23
- Print publication:
- January 1996
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The written record begins with the discovery of a body and the supposition of an unsolved crime. “It happened,” in the laconic words of the coroner's inquest, “that a certain Janus Imperial of Genoa lay slain.” The murder had occurred the night before, on August 26, 1379, in St. Nicholas Acton Lane, before Imperial's London residence. Arriving to view the body, the coroner and sheriffs gathered a jury from among men of Langbourne and adjacent wards and set about to determine how and in what way this foreign merchant met his death.
The jury's inquest was only the first step in an inquiry that would ultimately involve the mayor of London, the court of the king's bench, a second jury, the king and his council, and Parliament itself. So, too, did questions of motive and interest spool out from this seemingly random act to embrace the ambitions of London's mercantile elite, vicissitudes of royal finance, and the future and locus of the international wool trade. Starting with an apparent insufficiency of evidence, this investigation eventually found itself knee-deep in pertinent information, plausible motives, and likely suspects. Although it finally stumbled to a sort of stopping point, it never really achieved a satisfactory end.
The original investigation offers suggestive analogies to the task of historical reconstruction. The would-be historian is, like the crime's contemporaries, challenged to arrange known details into a coherent narration—and, as new elements emerge, into revised renarrations. The historian's location outside the crime's own participatory pattern is one of weakness and strength.