Avant la lettre: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

Abstract

“Medievalism,” in the words of Tom Shippey, is “the study of responses to the Middle Ages at all periods since a sense of the mediaeval began to develop.”1 Although a relatively recent area of study, it nevertheless has long roots, and over time many practitioners, some better known than others. Philip Mark Perry (d. 1774), the subject of this essay, came early to the field, only to leave it before his efforts could see print. Nevertheless, his exploration of medieval writings and writers deserves greater recognition. Here we hope to establish that Perry's largely unedited manuscripts, now in Spain and Scotland, offer evidence of an exceptional contribution to the early narrative of medievalism. Perry's endeavor was twofold. His zeal to recover the wealth of medieval letters through a meticulous examination of primary historiographical materials was genuine; no less so was his desire to reclaim a written heritage lost and concealed by the established Anglican literary canon. Our main focus will be on one of his unfinished manuscripts, The Schools of Medieval British Authors, currently in the archives of the Royal English College of St. Alban, in Valladolid, Spain, where Perry served as the first secular—that is to say, non-Jesuit—rector between 1767 and his death seven years later.2 The manuscript, as yet unedited, contains some eight hundred fifty-odd entries, of which this on Langland—to which we shall return—is representative: John Malvern, a benedictine monk of worcester, or according to others, Robert Langland, a saecular priest of mortimers Cleobury in Shropshire, a. 1369, showed himself an enemy to the clergy in a Satyr called the Vision of Pierce Plowman, alias, the Vision of William of Piers Plowman, composed in English rhythms, and beginning thus: “in a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne”; it consists of 20 steps, or strides, passus 20: the 13 step mentions the mayorality of John Chichester Lord mayor of London in 1369: this book was published at London in 1550, 4to by Robert Crowley, who attributes it to Langland; it was published again at London in 1561; at the end of some is a piece called Pierce the Plowmans crede beginning “Gross [sic], and Curteis Christe the beginning”; the MS wherof, in Trin. Coll. Cambridge C: iii: 8, hath on the front leaf two old men, one holding the plough, the other with a goad (pertica) pricking two oxen with this inscription in red letters:God spede the plougAnd sende us korne ynou. Under K. Henry, when the 6 article act was established there appeared an octavo edition of a prose work, called Pierce plowman, with these verses however on the title page:I playne Pierce which cannot flatter,a plowman men me callmy speche is fowl, yet mark the matterhow things may hap to fall.the beginning of the book is: “I Piers Plowman followynge plough on felde” and at the ende with these verses:God save the King and spede the ploughAnd sende the prelates care enoughInough; inough; inough: — but this work seems ratheran imitation of the Vision of Pierce Plowman; tho both are written by the same Evil & detracting spirit of Lollardism whose grand virtue consisted in lampooning & speaking evil of dignities; the author of Pierce's Vision was living in 1376.3Perry's presentation of Langland is notable in several ways. Its recognition of literary aspects, from the genre to verse-type, is both perceptive and erudite; its biographical detail, including the identification of the author in his historical context, no less so. Perry's editorial history of Piers Plowman pays special attention to bibliographical detail, and cites passages by way of identifying manuscripts, adopting practices pioneered by foremost antiquarians and literary biographers of the time, such as the Anglican Thomas Tanner. At the same time, his vilification of Piers the Plowman as a poem connected to Lollardy—a position altogether at odds with Tanner's, George Ballard's, or Thomas Warton's—echoes the views of Catholic interpreters generally. These two poles distinguish Perry's contribution to the rediscovery of medieval English literature: while on one level his enlightened view of the history of letters allowed him to acknowledge Langland's place among the canon of important medieval writers, on another his committed Catholicism very often angled his substantial learning toward confessional ends.The quality of Perry's medievalism, evident in this treatment of Langland and his work (which we scrutinize more closely below), can be helpfully approached first against a backdrop of St. Alban's College history. Founded by the recusant English Jesuit Robert Persons in 1589, St. Alban's was the earliest and ultimately the most successful of Person's three collegiate foundations.4 Along with Colleges at Seville (1592) and Madrid (1610), St. Alban's in Valladolid was an integral part of the English “mission,” a multifaceted endeavor to reconvert England to Catholic worship, and until that time provide covert ministry to the spiritual needs of English recusants forced to hide their faith during the oppressive reign of Elizabeth I.5 Barred from study at domestic universities, English Catholics desiring ordination were forced to go abroad for their necessary education. Prior to 1589, seminary colleges at Rome and in France at Douai, modeled on Oxford and Cambridge, strove to supply the “mission” with priests, a great many of whom upon their return were eventually arrested, tortured, and executed by the Protestant state. The three Spanish Colleges were intended to augment the number of “missioners” active in England, and thereby hasten the much-anticipated restoration of the true, pre-Reformation faith—a confessional “medievalizing” project in and of itself. These Colleges differed from Douai, however, in that, as instituted by Persons, their administrations and faculties at first were drawn almost exclusively from the Jesuit order. This reliance on Jesuit agency became a liability in 1767 when King Carlos III expelled the Company of Jesus from Spain. Initially seized by the crown, after several months of intense negotiation the Colleges at Valladolid, Seville, and Madrid were placed under the control of the English Vicars Apostolic, who were then faced with the question of what to do with them.6The matter was not a simple one. Whether to keep the Colleges open, or to liquidate their assets and apply the proceeds to succor the poor at home, was an issue of significant pertinence. It had been, in fact, a question facing the English bishops for some time which the Jesuits’ institutional presence had allowed them to put off. At its heart was the continued relevance of a “mission,” founded to address conditions under Elizabeth, to Catholics in later Hanoverian England, when their circumstances were in important ways much improved. In the event, with the support of the Spanish monarch Carlos, the Vicars Apostolic determined to close the Madrid and Seville Colleges and to consolidate their assets at Valladolid, in the hope of revitalizing education there and of augmenting the contribution of its missionary graduates in England. The fraught question of whether the required new rector and teaching staff would be secular or regular was ultimately answered, not without some contention, in favor of the former. The English bishops turned to Philip Perry to fill the position of rector. It is in this context, then, that he stands out as a significant if unrecognized example of a specifically literary medievalism which emerged in the eighteenth century. As we will argue here, his analysis proceeds partly in reaction to Protestant co-option of the historical literary canon, but more importantly as a result of his uniquely critical approach to the textual categorization of authors and writers, including the prominent women of the literary-devotional tradition of late medieval England.Who, then, was Philip Perry? Born in 1720 into a humble line of Catholics long resident in Staffordshire, by 1740 Perry was a student first at the English College at Douai, then advancing in 1742 to study theology at the Sorbonne.7 Apart from two years’ convalescence in England between 1744 and 1746 to recover his health, Perry was a student in Paris, receiving his MA in 1748, ordination in 1751, and his doctorate in theology in 1754.8 He had thus been at least twelve years in France, intellectually formative years spent for the most part in the French capital which was, in the mid-eighteenth century, the intellectual center of the European Enlightenment. No less importantly, Paris was also home to a nascent movement of French medievalists led by Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye. Perry's subsequent endeavors strongly suggest his engagement with the contemporary Parisian milieu, which fundamentally influenced the nature and quality of his subsequent medievalism and his selection for the Valladolid rectorship. It is therefore helpful to sketch out a likely profile of Perry's thought when he returned to England from France in 1754.Easiest, perhaps, is to consider at first what he was not. He was not a “Douai man,” although his two years spent there provided the essential gateway to his doctoral study and connected him to a network responsible for all his eventual posts, including to the English College in Valladolid. But apart from his evident religious zeal, Perry seems not to have shared the most prominent characteristic of Douai alumni of the preceding generation: a sense that the “mission,” if no longer requiring martyrdom of a corporeal kind, should instead be carried out in self-sacrificial service to the sick and the poor.What does seem to have inspired Perry was the medieval past. Here it is essential to be precise about where he acquired his interest and what “the past” meant for him. Again, it is helpful to consider what he was not: neither an antiquarian moved by “curiosity” (in the sense that the term was understood at the time) nor a Lumière, he nonetheless appears to have been influenced by concerns common to both.9 In respect to the latter, Perry's medievalism seems a product partially of Enlightenment positions as passed through the filter of the groundbreaking paleographical medievalism of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, some of whose early efforts he could have encountered in Paris during his doctoral studies.10 In Perry's own work the influence is discernible of “those who, at the Académie des Inscriptions and elsewhere, put forward the case for the study of the Middle Ages, [and] used the language and the arguments of the early Enlighteners.”11 Thus, Perry's interests developed in synchrony with those of better-known English medievalists of his generation, the likes of Thomas Percy, the younger Thomas Warton, and Richard Hurd.12 All three freely acknowledged debts to Sainte-Palaye and the Académie des Inscriptions.Strictly speaking, Perry's medieval studies bear closer resemblance to the work of these men than to the traditions of antiquarianism as they were generally practiced in France and England through the first half of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, for him as for Percy, Warton, and Hurd, much was owed to the collectors of coins and medals, and to the compilers of county histories. In contrast to contemporary historians of grand narrative such as Gibbon, Hume, and, to an extent, Voltaire, Perry drew upon what might be termed “antiquarian theory,” the belief of its practitioners in what Ruth Mack has deemed “the availability of the past”: that it could be “unearthed” and recovered, ultimately to the benefit of everyday contemporary lives.13 In Perry's case, as a doctor of theology and a recusant Catholic, it was spiritual lives in particular that focused his work. Thus, while he borrowed methodology from antiquarian practice—its accuracy of observation, the rationality of established order, and the “fidelity to the original” characteristic of a Thomas Hearne—Perry had no materialist interests.14 Old ruins were not for him. His digging site, like that of Sainte-Palaye, was books and manuscripts.On his return to England in 1754, Perry's scholarly curiosity about the literary Middle Ages seems to have guided his steps. He became chaplain to the family of Rowland Eyre of Hassop Hall in Derbyshire, a position he held for eight years. Here he found time and occasion to pursue multiple projects, including an ambitious biography of Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), and very likely began his Schools of Medieval British Authors. Nevertheless, for a scholar of Perry's commitment, accustomed to the resources available in France, rural Derbyshire could only have left something to be desired. Thus, when in 1762 Perry left the Eyres to accept the chaplaincy in the household of George Talbot, fourteenth earl of Shrewsbury, at Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire, its proximity to libraries in Oxford and London may have been a strong influence underlying this decision.15 He stayed only for three years, leaving in 1765 to join Bishop John Hornyold, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, at his residence at Longbirch, in Staffordshire. His parting from Shrewsbury was fraught, Perry having informed the earl that “Your Lordship is master of your own house, but not of my understanding.”16 While such disagreements between aristocratic families and their chaplains seem to have been common occurrences in the period, Perry's expressed reason—a wish to have and pursue his own intellectual interests—was unusual.17Longbirch may have been a refuge for Perry to continue his medieval research and writing undistracted. He seems to have had no specific position at Longbirch, neither as chaplain nor as secretary to the Bishop. Rather, over his two-plus years in residence he apparently read and wrote in earnest. An annotated list of the books and papers Perry compiled ahead of his departure for Valladolid permits a glimpse of both his working conditions at Longbirch, and of the scope of his efforts.18 On what he called “the open shelves” (numbering eight) were 426 volumes, comprising 283 separate titles; also “in the case with the glass windows . . . fill[ing] all the shelves but the uppermost, which belongs to the room,” were ninety-two volumes (seventy-three titles) of Church history, 140 others on miscellaneous subjects, thirty-nine bound collections of controversialist pamphlets, and forty-nine others still unbound. He also lists manuscripts of his own, in progress, among them “English schools, collective and distributive”—undoubtedly our text.19Also among Perry's papers in 1767 was the manuscript of an “Essay on the Life and Manners of the Venerable Robert Grossetête, [sic] Bishop of Lincoln.” This biography of Grosseteste is a good instance of the critical approach to medieval history and his fidelity to the literary record that characterize his writings. Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, on receiving a copy of Perry's manuscript, was appreciative, albeit with strong reservations, concerned that English Catholics would be “shocked” by Perry's frank presentation of “his [Grosseteste's] contentions with the Pope” and his “notions of the Pope's power in temporals.”20 In what seems to be a second preface to the copy of the “Life of Grossetête” now in the English College archives at Valladolid, Perry asserts the integrity of his methods, the validity of his medievalist enterprise, and the compelling moral responsibility of the honest historian to reveal abuses.21This observation seems relevant in light of Challoner's subsequent appointment of Perry to the Valladolid rectorship less than two years later, in November 1767. By then Perry had been at Longbirch nearly three years with neither an official position with Bishop Hornyold nor a parish assignment. His research continued on medieval topics, however, as did his writing. It must have been clear to Hornyold no less than to Challoner by this time that Perry was not a “missioner,” as they themselves were, but a “compleat scholar” by inclination, and unsuited to ordinary ministry in England. A needful appointment, then, out of the country in Spain, where Perry could fulfill his “missioner's oath” taken at Douai and also pursue his research at a safe distance from events in England could have seemed serendipitous to the two Vicars Apostolic.22Perry, however, did not immediately agree to accept the Spanish post. What apparently convinced him finally to go to Spain is also telling: a recognition that he might unearth archival material important to his medievalist projects—in particular, documents related to Catherine of Aragon for a life of Bishop John Fisher he was writing.23 In essence, then, it may be said that Perry owed his rectorship of the English College at Valladolid to his medievalist interests. His scholarly zeal is evident from correspondence now in the English College library showing that, almost immediately after arriving in Valladolid, he sought access to royal and private collections to continue his research.24This portrait of Perry, and the related investigation of how he came to Valladolid, have been necessary the better to measure his written work, most of which remained incomplete when he died, while in Madrid on College business in 1774. Clearly, Perry's ambitious expectations to research and write in Spain were forced aside by the overwhelming demands of institutional revivification he encountered upon arrival at the English College. What advancement he made with his projects in Valladolid seems to have been primarily revision, and certain isolated additions. Nonetheless, viewing his body of work as a whole, it is our contention that Perry's contributions to English letters—and to the conceptual narrative of eighteenth-century literary medievalism—would have been impactful, had they seen print. The disagreement with Bishop Challoner over Perry's biography of Robert Grosseteste suggests why.25 For Challoner, the stakes affecting publication were not literary but entirely religious and political: Perry's work, in the bishop's eyes, might result in greater persecution of resident English Catholics. Perry, however, understood his work's purpose and its influence very differently. As his revised preface shows, for him, accurately fixing Grosseteste in the context of his times was no less important than establishing the bishop's presence in the world of letters. Perry also clearly wanted to defend the methodology he followed to achieve both—a significant historiographical issue, from the viewpoint of early medievalism. He read chronicle accounts and he read—and interpreted—Grosseteste's letters.26 In short, Perry's approach to biography is at once historical in a modern sense (dig the facts out of original sources) and otherwise entirely literary: taking letters as texts, he subjected them to verbal analysis to draw conclusions about character and motive.His treatment of Grosseteste's last and most famous letter to Pope Innocent IV in 1253 is a case in point. The letter, number 128 in Luard's edition, objects violently to papal insistence that Grosseteste appoint Innocent's nephew to a lucrative benefice in his diocese, despite his lack of English or intention to leave Rome, an example of gross nepotism that Grosseteste found morally corrupt.27 The letter had wide independent circulation and was often cited by Lollards and later by Protestants as irrefutable proof of their claims of papal corruption.28 Where Challoner saw only risk in opening an old wound, Perry found an aperture through which to perceive more accurately Grosseteste's umbrage, and thence—reading through the letter-text—a lens to assess the man: To comply with duty where there are no obsticles [sic] is a degree of virtue commendable indeed, yet nothing wonderfull [sic]. But to pursue the narrow and difficult track of duty in the midst of continual opposition, and those from the highest powers upon Earth. . . . This was the true character of the Bishop of Lincoln and this God demonstrated his approving [of] him by miracles after death.”29No less confessionally committed than Challoner, Perry notwithstanding pursued broader questions; the answers he offered anticipate goals and methodologies of a truly critical nascent medievalism.Perry's Schools of Medieval British Authors presents a rich example of this critical and historical orientation, and it is to this main text we can now turn. Reconstructed from quires scattered among three boxes of his loose papers in the archive of the College of St. Alban in Valladolid, the Schools was apparently in progress in England between 1765 and 1767, and transported to Spain.30 Had he finished it, its publication likely would have preceded Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774–81), usually considered the first literary history of England, to which the Schools bears some resemblance.31 In its present form, the Schools consists of two parts: first, a “schema”—a group of eight tables, each with four columns identifying the authors in each “school,” or class of knowledge, by author's name, “dignity” (e.g., “Bishop of Rochester”), works or “compositions,” and date of death [fig. 1];32 second, brief prose biographies in two versions of British “authors,” the term being understood broadly, to include writers’ work of many sorts [fig. 2].33 There are eight “schools,” arranged in what Perry states was an ascending order of sublimity: Grammar (including what might be called Linguistics), Poetry, Rhetoric, History, Philosophy, Law, “Physic” (i.e., Medicine), and Theology. For these divisions, Perry would seem to have looked backward rather than toward contemporary Enlightenment models, to the classification of subjects in medieval and Early Modern libraries, expanded to include mathematics, philosophy, and poetry.34 Pointedly, his organization has less in common with the three-branched structure of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert (“memory-history,” “reason-philosophy,” “imagination-poetry”), whose first volume appeared in 1751 while Perry was still in Paris, than with Sidney's divisions in the Defense of Poesy, viz.: The natural Philosopher thereon hath his name, and the moral Philosopher standeth upon the natural virtues, vices, or passions of man: “and follow nature saith he therein, and thou shalt not erre.” The Lawyer saith what men have determined, the Historian, what men have done. The Grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech, and the Rhetorician and Logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove, and persuade thereon, give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The Physician weighteth the nature of man's body, and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. And the Metaphysic . . . doth he indeed build upon the depth of nature.35While Perry's direct engagement with the Defense is difficult to establish (it does not appear in any known list of his books), the similarity is nonetheless suggestive. Like Sidney's categories, those of the Schools are essentially medieval in inspiration. Perry's endeavor, however, eschews Sidney's prominently humanist tweaks to focus more concentratedly on the medieval period: the chronological span of the Schools authors ranges from the seventh century to 1535, the successional year to the Act of Supremacy.36Although they are clear enough in large purpose, plotting the exact relationship of the biographies to the “schema” nonetheless poses certain textual challenges, given the overall state of the manuscript. Various attempts through the years to reorganize the holdings in Valladolid have resulted in the biographies’ separation from the “schema” and their redistribution in separate boxes, with the apparent loss of some text. Despite this, two series of biographies are discernible. One follows the arrangement of the “schema”—that is, short lives arranged chronologically and according to discipline within each “school” group; the other combines all the biographies chronologically, with the appropriate “school” cited in the margin, beginning at AD 1120 and ending in 1535 [fig. 2]. Missing from this second series are biographies prior to 1120 and those between 1190–1209, 1244–1343, and 1418–36.37 However, it is obvious amidst the disarray that the “schema” and the biographies mirror each other, and that they were conceived as integral parts of an extensive history of medieval British belles lettres to which the “schema” may have been intended as an index. Any history of such literature, of course, could only underscore the Catholic argument of unbroken, continuous presence in the British Isles, and to that extent it would have served Perry's missionary purpose. Thus, for all its literariness, the Schools would also have seemed a partisan stake in the sand—something the individual biographies make clear.The biography of Langland with which we began readily illustrates both the literary and controversialist elements of Perry's medievalism in the Schools. He relies for much of his basic information about Langland on Tanner's Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, supplemented infrequently by Anthony Wood's History and antiquities of the University of Oxford, John Pits’ Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis, and his own observations.38 Perry does not copy, however, but borrows selectively, modifying as he goes. These sources include more material than he chooses to use. Manuscripts (and their locations) always interested him, as did the printing history of early editions; he will follow such leads assiduously. He sought firm dates—for authors’ lives, their compositions, posthumous publications—going beyond Tanner and Woods to cite manuscripts and printed sources, and printed accounts of both. He recognized the value of identifying medieval works by their first lines, subsequent printed editions by their printers, and by visual devices in both. The Langland biography is particularly illustrative because it shows Perry struggling, first to give a proper name to the author of the “Vision of Pierce Plowman,” and second, to sort out the interrelations and authorship of the several works incorporating versions of “Pierce Plowman.” When he differs from Tanner, Wood, and Pits, he does so in revealing ways. Always shadowing Perry's approach to the authorial Langland and to the other writers is his reconversionist “mission.” Piers Plowman appears in the Schools because Perry appreciated its poetic qualities (he recognizes it formally as a “Satyr”) but also, no less importantly, because that satire critiqued the Church. Important as well was Langland's centrality to what Perry has shrewdly perceived to be a group of Lollard-inspired texts: “Pierce the Plowmans crede” and “an octavo edition of a prose work, called Pierce Plowman—i.e., I Playne Piers which can not flatter; A godly dialogue and dysputacion between Pyers plowman and a popish preest.”39 The significant effort he applies sorting through Tanner's tangle of “Pierce” titles is expended to ascertain which of them truly proceeded from Langland's hand—a significant writer who in Perry's view had nonetheless “showed himself an enemy to the [Catholic] clergy.” From a literary-historical perspective, however, what may be of greater interest is Perry's acuity in, first, associating Langland's poem with I Playne Piers—the latter being, as he says, “an imitation of the ‘Vision of Pierce Plowman’”—and second, in suspecting a connection between the Act of Six Articles (1539) and the later Lollard tract. Hence he asserts that both I Playne Piers and the Vision “are written by the same Evil & detracting spirit of Lollardism whose grand virtue consisted in lampooning and speaking evil of dignities.”40Blending his intellectual and religious commitments to the Middle Ages and to his “mission” in this way allowed Perry to pursue both simultaneously while shorting neither. Often the fulcrum of this balance is Lollardy. As in the case of Langland, however, Perry's medievalism notably seems sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between later Lollard positions and those of Wyclif himself. Thus, only rarely does he appear to use “Lollard” and “Wycliffite” interchangeably. His care in this regard is evident in his judgment that the “Vision of Pierce Plowman” is “a Satyr [satire],” however much it may share the “spirit of Lollardism” with the later I Playne Piers, a work Perry clearly recognized as a heretical text. What the example of Langland points toward, then, is a feel on his part for the palpable “literariness” of medieval texts—for their unique importance as literature qua literature—notwithstanding in whatever different ways they might also engage with religious controversy.Perry's biography of Chaucer is equally illustrative. He defends Chaucer and Langland on similar grounds—that is, as fellow satirists—noting that Chaucer's “freedom in lashing church men and religious hath made some look on him as half a Wycliffite, but scarce doth he spare the abuses, from the Cook to the Knight, neither Sheriff, Squire, Lawyer, Doctor, merchant, husband or wife?”41 Notably implicit here are, first, Perry's thoughtful reading of the Canterbury Tales, and second, his understanding of how the mechanisms of literary fictiveness set Chaucer's writing apart from religiosocial topicality and circumstantiality. Nevertheless, both Lollardy and “Wyclifism” furnish Perry with important sorting points when winnowing his sources for material to incorporate into the biographies. Consider his treatment of Strode: Ralph Strode, sometimes called Nicholas Strode, fellow of merton College, Oxford, who had travelled into france & Italy, united two Sciences, which seldom take up their residence in one & the same breast, viz the severest rules of aristotelick [sic] reasoning, and the charms & graces of the muses; Strode so excelled in both, that Ch