Books and Bodies: Ethics, Exemplarity, and the ‘Boistous’ in Medieval English Writings

Abstract

‘Boistous’, along with ‘rude’, is a common descriptor for Middle English writings, and has often been understood to point to writers’ anxieties over the inferiority of English as a literary medium. However, ‘boistous’ can also refer to the exemplary, the natural, and the bodily, and so simultaneously points to writers’ understandings of the didactic and rhetorical potency of English. By looking to John Trevisa’s translations of De regimine principum and De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the writings of Thomas Usk and Nicholas Love, this essay contends that ‘boistous’ demarcates a form of vernacular writing that claims a mode of reading for the lay and unlearned that is predicated on the senses of taste and touch, and that is understood to be fundamentally good-for thinking with, for ethical life in the world, and for salvation.