Authorship

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter considers a particular conception of authorship emergent in the fifteenth century in relation to its significance for English literary history. By way of recalling the late twentieth-century critique of person-centered literary histories that led to an alternative emphasis on institutions, and the alignment of that emphasis with broad medieval conceptions of authorship, the chapter casts into relief what was unprecedented in many instances of fifteenth-century authorial representations: an idea of the author as the specific living human agent from whom a work proceeds. With this idea, fifteenth-century poets bring to English literature the very person-centered notion of literary history that would predominate until recent times. As an initial example, the chapter considers the passage in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes accompanying the famous Chaucer portrait and, for purposes of contrast, some of the poems in BodL MS Digby 102. It surveys possible sources for this innovation and then describes some of the more typical or striking forms that this idea of authorship takes, pointing out their distinguishing features, reviewing their institutional circumstances, and noting their means of transmission. In particular, it provides examples of laureate author (e.g., John Lydgate, George Ashby), sacerdotal author (e.g., John Audelay, Henry Bradshaw), and author as narrative protagonist (e.g., Hoccleve, King James I, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton). These illustrations confirm that an author’s textualization as flesh-and-blood person is not inevitable but rather a strategic discursive construct that organizes the meaning of a text toward some end, however lofty or pragmatic.