JENNI NUTTALL, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language, and Politics in Late Medieval England.

Abstract

THE CREATION OF LANCASTRIAN KINGSHIP is about political language; drawing heavily on the work of J. G. A. Pocock, it focuses on reconstructing ‘textual environments’ of the early fifteenth century. Jenni Nuttall suggests that political languages and paradigms can structure how people think, taking the years following the deposition of Richard II as her case study. Focusing on two aspects of the retrospective depiction of Richard’s reign, she argues that these two paradigms structured texts and discourse in the early years of Lancastrian rule. The two aspects of the portrayal of Richard (in the articles of deposition and elsewhere) in which she is interested are the idea that his household was youthful, tyrannical, and anti-truth-telling, and the claim that his finances were fraudulent and non-reciprocal. The book is divided into two sections which deal with these two aspects: ‘Household Narratives’, and ‘Credit and Love’. Nuttall’s work is deeply interdisciplinary, moving easily between the Parliament Roll, chronicles, and poetry. Texts which are given particular attention include poems such as Richard the Redeless, The Crowned King, Mum and the Sothsegger, and Hoccleve’s writings, and chronicle writing such as Adam Usk’s and the Vita Ricardi Secundi. There are some persuasive and controlled close readings, particularly of Hoccleve’s poetry. Nuttall is an accomplished literary critic and does not attempt to flatten out the differences between diverse kinds of texts. Her argument that the influence of discourses about politics is seen in personal narratives—for example that Hoccleve’s discussion of his own financial mismanagement is indebted to discussions of financial mismanagement which have their root in critiques of Richard’s fraudulent financial practices—are intriguing and well-documented, if ultimately speculative. Nuttall’s analysis tends to be both imaginative in its insights and scholarly in its use of source and context. She shows an understanding of texts in synchronic and in diachronic terms, exploring how an idea functions at its particular historical moment and how ideas develop across time. Nuttall suggests that discourses about Richard are initially used as an explanation of what happened—Henry’s usurpation—but then become narratives of expectation: what the Lancastrian kings should do instead. They thus become ways of holding Henry to account—and indeed of criticizing him, as the discourses initially harnessed by Lancastrian apologists slip out of their control. Nuttall’s understanding of discourse as fluid and ultimately resistant to totalizing tendencies is finely honed and compelling.