Literature and Complaint in England 1272–1553 by Wendy Scase

Abstract

MLR, 104.3, 2009 833 Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski in new contexts, adding many fresh insights of her own. University of St Andrews Neil Rhodes Literature and Complaint inEngland 1272-1553. ByWendy Scase. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. xii+2i5.?50. ISBN 948-0-19-927085-9. 'Clamour of the people' is the stuffthatmight turn up today on celebrity blogs or gossip websites: the libel campaign against John ofGaunt; the petitions against the notorious Nicholas Brembre; the bill campaigns attacking Cardinal Wolsey. Some of it ismuch nastier than today: the 1450s' verse libels against theDuke of York were posted in themouths of dead dogs. Wendy Scase's clearly written and carefully argued book is in the 'literature and law' genre but is not a study of the formal qualities of legal plaints, nor of how plaints are represented in latemedieval literature.Rather it argues that judicial complaint in the period under discussion had a considerable impact on literarypractice. Aimed at advanced scholars of late medieval literature in England, the book's temporal boundaries are defined on the one hand by the emergence of judicial complaint as a result of reforms instituted in the reign of Edward I and on the other by the so-called ploughman texts of the sixteenth century: from the little-known Poem on Disputed Villein Services (c. 1272) to The Decaye ofEngland (1553). The bulk of the book traces the rise and development of the 'literatureof clamour' thatbegan with the 1381 rising and which continued beyond theReformation. The final chapter argues that the production of clamour texts stimulates vernacular (English) letterand document composition as well as literaryproduction. Though not exhaustive, the book covers a great deal of ground, both legal and literary,from libels,petitions, and bills to poems, chronicles, and letters.Besides the usual suspects (the poems ofHarley 2253; the Twelve Conclusions of theLollards), Scase analyses plenty of lesswell-known texts inAnglo-Norman, Latin, and English. The book's strengths are itsclose readings of thevarious types of judicial complaint and its revision of the literary culture that it shaped. Scase is not interested, for example, in recovering the 'voices' ofmedieval peasants; rather, she analyses 'the ways inwhich peasant plaint registers the impact of the new judicial structures, processes, and procedures' (p. 11). Throughout she demonstrates how closely the idea of thevernacular isbound up with the production of legal complaints, arguing, for example, that the new institutions of plaint allowed vernacular poets the oppor tunity 'to imagine how English composition could become a legitimized literature' (p. 3) and speculating thatEnglish, excluded as amedium for legal literature,may well have been used in courts (p. 40). Each legal term (e.g. bill, trailbaston, indictment, oyer and terminer, libellus, eyre) isglossed when itappears, but thebook would have benefited from a glossary listing them together. Scase does not really consider the use, value, and possible audiences of the literary texts.Nor does she advance an argument about the Reformation, 834 Reviews although she provides invaluable resources for such an argument and other scholars will productively mine her book. Though she briefly touches on Christine de Pisan and Hoccleve, there isnothing on 'female complaint': nothing, for example, on The Assembly ofLadies. Scase is scrupulously attentive to the codicological contexts and physical features of the textsbut does not give sufficient weight to the effectof their various media (rolls,manuscript codices, print) on readers and textualmeanings. Although her history traces the emergence ofEnglish as a legal and literary language, what is striking is that the book incidentally demonstrates, in its extensive analysis ofAnglo-Norman, Latin, and macaronic texts,what is now becoming increasingly clear, namely that an account of literary culture in England in this period can no longer confine itselftomaterial written inEnglish. University of Stirling Ruth Evans George Gascoigne. By Gillian Austen. (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 24) Cambridge: Brewer. 2008. xviii+236 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-1-84384-157-9. Gillian Austen's much-awaited monograph, the first to include Gascoigne's illustra tions, tackles thevarious methods forpresenting himself, especially thefigure of the Reformed Prodigal thatGascoigne employed while hewas seeking patronage. In this comprehensive new addition toGascoigne studies Austen highlights the importance ofGascoigne's works and how his fashioning of...