Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature

Abstract

This study joins a substantial body of scholarship that considers writings of different periods and genres in the context of the material witnesses that preserve them and the networks of production, transmission, and reception that have influenced their makeup and contents. At its best, the integration of close reading, book history, and other forms of historical inquiry permits a fuller understanding of individual works and broader trends in literary history than any of these approaches might yield on its own. Nevertheless, maintaining the right balance between them is a precarious business. Not only does each have a different purview and follow different protocols, but also in cases where the evidence specific to one kind of method is sparse or inconclusive, the lure of extrapolating from another set of data becomes hard to resist.Through a series of case studies devoted to works by Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, John Audelay, and Charles d'Orléans, Rory Critten explores the diverse manifestations of a model of authorship that he argues emerged in England during the fifteenth century: one that favors sustained personal engagement in the production of a single-author manuscript (or several) whose function is to rehabilitate or manipulate the author's reputation, if only by proving that she is capable of leaving a written record of her experiences despite past hardships. Of the four, Hoccleve alone was the self-publishing scribe of his own poetry; the rest collaborated closely with scribes but did not put pen to paper or parchment for various reasons—gender, disability, social rank. While Critten finds it unlikely that any of them influenced the other, the similarities he detects between their individual projects testify, he suggests, to a historically specific literary culture, however fragmented and short-lived.The Introduction defines the scope of this culture and distinguishes it from Chaucer's and Gower's attitudes to medieval technologies of book production. For the former, they were a necessary evil rather than an integral and meaningful component of his work: scribes were forever to be kept under check, as he—or someone else with a similar frame of mind—complains in “Adam Scriveyn.” The notorious “diversite” of Middle English further threatened his “Italian humanist understanding of the poetic vocation” (p. 9). Even when Chaucer “present[s] himself as the ‘lewd compilator’ both of his Treatise on the Astrolabe . . . and, by inference, of the Canterbury Tales,” the “language of bookmaking” serves “not to emphasize his proximity to his work but to distance himself from it” (p. 15). To be sure, Gower took a more active part in copying his oeuvre, albeit to a lesser extent than has previously been assumed (pp. 17–18). Yet his successive revisions of the Latin poem “Quicquid homo scribat” gradually come to represent prayer as superior to manual writing, thereby allowing him to “achiev[e] his apotheosis” through “blindness and old age” (p. 15). At the same time, both authors handed down a set of metaliterary commonplaces, such as the envoy to Troilus and Criseyde, that helped their heirs formulate new relations to bookmaking (pp. 21–25).Whereas the influence of these Ricardian luminaries on Hoccleve and Charles d'Orléans is unmistakable, their relevance to Kempe and Audelay is less certain. A broader treatment of the history of self-publication on both sides of the Channel would have provided better context for understanding the developments he identifies in fifteenth-century England, though Critten does mention the “distant predecessors Layamon and Orm” (p. 30, to which list one might add Matthew Paris) as well as the more recent examples of Thomas Usk, William Langland (pp. 25–26), Julian of Norwich (p. 19), Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart (pp. 16, 54, 156–58), and Christine de Pizan (p. 158). The discussion of Chaucer could have also benefited from attention to passages that complicate his stance of uninvolvement and nonaccountability, for instance the prologue to the Legend of Good Women and the Retraction. In any case, his untimely death leaves us in the dark as to his actual plans for shaping his poetic legacy.Chapter 1 examines Hoccleve's strategies for creating a stronger identification than one finds in the works of his predecessors between the manuscripts of his poetry and himself as their scribe. One representative case, a “dedicatory poem” originally attached to a lost “manuscript that Hoccleve produced for Edward of York” and modeled on the Troilus envoy, “anthropomorphizes” the “book” in the manner of “Chaucer and Lydgate” but “personaliz[es]” this “conceit” in such a way as to let it “figure forth the poet's writing person” (pp. 42, 45). Similarly, the autograph copy of the Series not only describes its author's struggle with dementia and social ostracism but also proves, by the sheer fact of its existence, that its maker is well again. Though dedicated to Joan Beaufort, Countless of Westmorland, the manuscript was really meant for Hoccleve's coterie of fellow Privy Seal clerks, “the adumbration of an irate female readership in the Dialogue and the overt anti-feminism of the Jonathas translation . . . facilitat[ing]” his “readmission to the all-male circles that had excluded him by means of a shared joke at the expense of women” (p. 62). The last section of this chapter examines two partial copies of the Series, whose “commissioners and owners” imitate Hoccleve's “style of book production” by “constructing and publicizing particular aspects of their identities” (p. 74).One of the strong points of this study is Critten's careful reconstruction of the culture of misogynistic banter that Hoccleve shared with his colleagues and probable readers. However, the extent to which this work endorses such toxic attitudes remains insufficiently demonstrated. Closer scrutiny of contrary evidence is called for, such as the Tale of Jereslaus's Wife (only a stanza of which is discussed at length on pp. 63–66), and the penitential framework of the Series. Likewise in need of further proof is the idea that its non-holograph copies were produced for readers who knowingly availed themselves of his technique of self-positioning by means of bookmaking. Commissioned manuscripts are often tailored to their owners’ interests. Had they recognized Hoccleve's unique achievement, they would have perhaps taken more care to preserve the integrity of this experimental sequence or shown greater ingenuity in dismantling it.Chapter 2 tackles the vexed question of Kempe's relationship with her scribes and their participation in shaping her life story. In view of the often skeptical attitude of temporal and religious authorities to her behavior, achieving “social reintegration” and finishing her Book were “mutually complementary aims” for Kempe as well as for the people of “Lynn and Norwich who supported her” (pp. 82, 88). Moreover, the “miracles associated with [its] completion” manifest God's “special grace” (pp. 82–83) and secures its legitimacy. Having “sharpened her second copyist's vision through her prayers,” Kempe “create[s] an impression not only of collegiality but also of . . . physical proximity” to this document (pp. 83–84). Hence, “any attempt to dissociate” her “voice” from that of her “scribe[s]” is “at best futile, at worst misrepresentative of the intentions” of both parties to showcase “their co-operative labour . . . as a straightforward, harmonious affair” (p. 86). Seeking an explanation for the ambiguities that nevertheless pervade the Book, Critten turns to Kempe's spiritual and narrative role model Mary Magdalene, herself a multifaceted figure whose very “inconsistency” is “a hallmark of the . . . identity” that Kempe and her “collaborators . . . were attempting to replicate” in “their . . . method of publication” (pp. 101–102). Finally, in a move that parallels his conclusion to chapter 1, Critten looks for evidence of the conscious reproduction of this dynamic in marks left on the surviving manuscript of the Book and the excerpts from it that Wynkyn de Worde published around 1501.Critten's comparative analysis of Kempe and Mary Magdalene works well as literary criticism and intellectual history. He also makes a convincing argument that she and her scribes were selective in their use of the saint's vita, glossing over episodes that did not suit Kempe's trajectory such as the saint's decision to spend thirty years in hermetic seclusion (pp. 97, 100–101). However, the evidence he puts forward does not suffice to prove they recognized or even celebrated the contradictory nature of Mary Magdalene, Kempe herself, and her life story, let alone parlayed its tensions into a publication strategy rather than, say, attempting unsuccessfully to resolve them.The next two chapters likewise address issues of scribal collaboration, the manipulation of public image by means of book production, and, in Audelay's case, the securing of divine approval. A brief afterword traces the fortunes of the “self-publishing pose” in the works of George Ashby and others (p. 189). With the advent of print, its “currency waned, and the mode of narrowly localized self-promotion” in “manuscripts of typically middling quality” that it “supported became invalid” (p. 191). In the present era, self-publication bears a stigma that even presses that cater to this market both acknowledge and strive to dispel by highlighting the quality of the service they offer (p. 191). More detailed examination of the manuscript circulation of Early Modern lyric poetry, or of the history of samizdat and similar underground publications whose unpolished production gives them a cachet of authenticity, might have uncovered continuities between the fifteenth century and later periods.