From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 by Christopher Cannon

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 by Christopher Cannon Michael Calabrese Christopher Cannon. From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xv, 297. $55.00. In this handsome volume from Oxford, Christopher Cannon works into book form material from six of his previous publications in such journals as The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, New Medieval Literature, and ELH: English Literary History, now molded together with new material and a new rhetorical framework appropriate to a monograph, convenient for those wanting a "greatest hits" compilation of Cannon's engaging work (with bonus tracks) in the field of grammar and learning. Unifying the current volume, Cannon shows throughout how the various exercises learned at school equipped the major Ricardian poets for poetic creation in English. The book will mainly appeal to scholars and advanced graduate students, but the chapters that offer concrete examples from the major poets (Chaucer, Langland, and Gower) may be useful for classroom teaching, as they illustrate how poets cleverly transformed school exercises into some of the most famous, beloved, and intriguing moments of Middle English literature in texts such as the Wife of Bath's and Pardoner's prologues, The Tale of Melibee, the Monk's portrait, the Troilus, endless episodes in Piers Plowman, and many other examples that Cannon marshals in detailed comparisons of the school texts and the poets' verses. For the schoolboys, we learn, were inherently poets in training; as Cannon writes, "if poetry is usually the culmination of literacy training, it is almost always that training's first step" (2). In reading all these chapters collectively, one certainly does get a sense of what it was like to be a medieval schoolboy, and the monograph as it now stands makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval grammar schools and their role in educating some of the major canonical poets in English medieval literature. Chapter 1's section "Fiant Latina!" (Let there be Latin!), argues that students were (despite what medieval chroniclers have said) trained in "a fundamentally Latin pedagogy" (37). And the poets later wrote major works in English because of their growing awareness that English too has a grammar that can be understood and put to use creatively. Cannon's coinage "grammaticalization" may not be elegant, but it encapsulates the processes of learning and creativity at work in the schoolboys turned poets, as Cannon takes us beyond the traditional understanding of education as training in ethics to reveal it also as "a primer in literary [End Page 316] possibility" (14). "There is a remarkably straight line," Cannon argues, from the schoolbooks that survive … through the agile understandings of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, to the techniques that made the literature these three writers produced distinctive" (15). Chapter 2, "The Ad Hoc School," reconsiders the texts and even the physical structures of the schools, arguing that the notion of a standardized curriculum and mode of instruction have been overstated, for education was much more improvisatory than previously thought, as a collection called "Cato" might not even include Cato. Cannon continues: "Whenever a medieval person had occasion to write about how he learned to read and write, in fact, he almost always described a local tutelary relationship rather than an institution" (59). In "Schoolboy Improvisation" Cannon argues that certain classic texts about writing that we usually associate with Chaucer such as the Poetria nova are works Chaucer would have studied later in life, for he would have already acquired instruction in the making of poetry in grammar school. Cannon then follows with a series of examples of school verses made in English where it's hard to tell the difference between an exercise and a poem, displaying the birth of poetic invention arising out of exercises in learning Latin. In fact many of the free-standing poems we "now value as literature" were produced in the mode of a schoolroom translation exercise, so learning Latin and creating verses in English were taught and practiced simultaneously. For this reason "the idea that he might write English verse of his own was almost impossible for such a schoolboy...