Abstract
This essay seeks to revise our sense of late medieval allegory by examining the representation of crowds and urban space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower. I begin by looking at Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the flâneur, with a specific eye towards his sense that allegory is born in the hermeneutic challenge of making meaning out of the unknown faces in a city crowd. I then turn to readings of Hoccleve’s “La Male Regle,” Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the initial Visio in Gower’s Vox Clamantis to establish both the surprising frequency with which late medieval English allegory turned to depictions of crowds as well as the particular narrative structures generated out of the attempts to represent urban space in these three poets.
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