3 results
14 - A Poet at Work: John Gower’s Revisions to the “Tale of Rosiphilee”
- Edited by Susannah Mary Chewning
-
- Book:
- Studies in the Age of Gower
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 April 2020
- Print publication:
- 17 April 2020, pp 217-226
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
WHILE MUCH SCHOLARLY ATTENTION has been devoted to John Gower's revisions in Confessio Amantis, most of it has had to do with the political conditions under which he was working. One prominent exception involves his rewriting of what Peter Nicholson has called, “the two most famous lines in the entire poem” – a process that C.S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love characterized as purely aesthetic:
The famous line
The beaute faye upon her face
attained its present form only by successive revisions – revisions which demonstrate, so far as such things can be demonstrated, the working of a fine, and finely self-critical, poetic impulse. The first version –
The beaute of hire face schon
Wel bryhtere than the Cristall ston,
– is just what would have contented the ordinary ‘unconscious’ spinner of yarns in rhyme; but it did not content Gower.
Gower, Lewis goes on to suggest, excelled at what Dryden was to call “the fairy way of writing” (220), and his careful revision of this passage from “The Tale of Rosiphilee” offers one instance of his responding to its appeal.
John Lawlor, in an oddly disputatious piece intended for a volume published in Lewis’ memory, takes issue with this reading. It betrays, he suggests, an overly romanticized view of Gower – Lewis had gone so far as to claim that Gower was “‘romantic’ in the nineteenth-century sense of the word” (220) – because it fails to appreciate that the word faye represents “a possible mode of being.” “The apparatus of past belief,” he writes, in an interesting anticipation of Todorov's distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous, “can become the vehicle of ‘romantic’ treatment only when it is freed from every touch of objective likelihood” (126). In other words, in a world where people might still believe in their existence, fairies could not possibly function as the vehicles of romantic fantasy. I agree with Lawlor's criticism here – though in general it seems to me far more appropriate to the Lewis of the Allegory of Love (written in 1936) than to the one of The Discarded Image (published posthumously thirty years later) – but I suspect that there are even more cogent objections to be raised to Lewis’ argument.
The Early History of the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and its So-Called ‘Oaths’
- Edited by Simon Horobin, Linne R. Mooney
-
- Book:
- Middle English Texts in Transition
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 17 July 2014, pp 1-20
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In an article that has received a considerable amount of attention, Linne Mooney links the professional legal scrivener Adam Pinkhurst, whose autograph appears in the earliest official record of the London Scriveners’ Guild, with the scribe memorably pilloried by Geoffrey Chaucer in an acerbic little verse:
Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.
This paper will attempt to answer two simple questions: when did Adam Pinkhurst subscribe his name to the Scriveners’ official record, and why was he required to do so? It will have nothing substantive to say on the question of whether Adam Pinkhurst is to be identified with the Adam Scriveyn of Chaucer’s squib, though it may help to fill in some of the historical background on that issue. The wider aim of the paper is to provide a fuller history of the early years of the Scriveners’ Company (properly, at this date, called the Craft of Writers of Court Letter) than has been available hitherto.
Two obstacles stand in the way of anyone seeking to write a history of the origins of the Scriveners’ guild. The first is the extremely shabby state of the official guild record book, the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper. For a profession that made its living by its pen, the scriveners were remarkably inept at keeping their own records in order. The Common Paper has been re-bound more than once and, according to a note tipped into the back by Sir Hilary Jenkinson at the time of its repair by the Public Record Office in 1924/5, its original first gathering included not simply its opening pages (pp. 1–8), but pp. 53–66 as well; other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century entries are scattered throughout the volume (for instance, on pp. 67–91, 222, 281–2 and 296). The PRO did a thoroughly professional job and the volume is now solid, if very far from elegant. The second obstacle is Francis W. Steer’s calendar and partial translation (I use the word advisedly) of this Common Paper, undertaken for the London Record Society in 1968.
2 - Textual production and textual communities
- from Part I - Contexts, genres, and traditions
- Edited by Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University, New Jersey
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500
- Published online:
- 28 November 2009
- Print publication:
- 18 June 2009, pp 25-36
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Some years ago, when I was teaching in eastern Canada, I attended a lecture, liberally illustrated with slides, given by a local sculptor on his recent visit to Japan. Unsurprisingly, in view of his vocation, he tended to dwell on monumental and architectural subjects rather than landscapes or human figures and for the best part of an hour we were invited to reflect upon the elegant simplicity of Japanese stone-carving and woodworking. At the end of the talk a slide of weathered wooden shingles silhouetted against a slate-gray sky appeared on the screen; it seemed to us a natural complement to the roof trusses and door jambs of the Shinto shrine we had just been contemplating, and we duly gazed at it with reverential awe. Just before the lecturer snapped the lights back on, he informed us that we were looking at the side of a cattle barn on Nova Scotia's Tantramar Marshes, not ten miles away from where we were sitting. All of us, I believe, experienced the same shock to our unreflective compartmentalization of the exotic and the familiar. It was, of course, a cheap trick, but it provided a vivid illustration of how readily we see what we expect to see, of how easily our eyes can be conditioned, or trained, or fooled into seeing only one aspect of a polysemous image.
In many ways it is the same with reading. One reader reads Bleak House because it's a good story, another because she enjoys the eccentric characters, a third because he is inspired by its social criticism - are all three, then, reading the same text? The answer of course must depend on how one defines “text,” but from the point of view of the reader-response theorist they would appear to be reading three closely related but nonetheless distinguishable Bleak Houses . What is of most interest to the reader-response theorist, however, is less the potentially limitless variety of such atomistic readings, but the common ground shared by larger groups of readers – what such readers will generally look to find in Dickens’s novel (their so-called “horizon of expectation”).