Paston Letters Research Articles

General Patterns of Punctuation in the Paston Letters

The late Middle Ages saw a proliferation in the number of marks of punctuation as a result of the development of cursive hands and scripts. While the punctus had been the principal mark used in the Anglo-Saxon period, other marks like the paragraphus, the virgule, the perioslash and the hyphen were progressively incorporated into the repertoire of punctuation. The inventory of marks and their functions settled over time, but it was not until the seventeenth century when we find the early symptoms of normalization (Calle-Martín forthcoming). Even though some recent studies have focused on the analysis of the punctuation system deployed in different text types–literary, scientific and legal material in particular–, letters have, however, not been the focus of these studies. This paper therefore analyses what marks are present in the Paston Letters and what their functions are. Particular attention is paid to the punctus and the virgule as marks with overlapping uses in the period.

The Paston Letters: The Increasing Prominence of the Paston Women in the Medieval Household

Yirmi birinci yüzyılın gelişmiş iletişim araçları düşünüldüğünde, Orta Çağ’da kültürel, sosyal ve edebi bir aktivite olarak dönemin değişen dinamiklerine ışık tutan mektup yazımına atfedilen öneme şahit olmak tuhaf bir vazife gibi görülebilir. Beklendiği üzere, Orta Çağ’a özgü mektuplara uygulanan ölçütler bu mektupların modern benzerlerinden oldukça farklıdır, çünkü mektup üslubuna özgü samimiyet ve mahremiyet hissinin aksine, Orta Çağ’da mektuplar birden fazla kişi tarafından okunması muhtemel olan toplumsal bir belge niteliği taşımaktadır. Ayrıca şunu da belirtmek gerekir ki, mektup yazımını tek başına yapılan bir eylem olarak görmeye yatkın genel görüşe karşılık, Orta Çağ’da mektuplar genellikle kâtiplere dikte edildiği ve de yüksek sesle okunduğu için aynı zamanda sözlü geleneğin de birer parçasını oluşturmaktadır. Dahası, yazılı belgelerin daha da önem kazanması ile hemen hemen her varlıklı aile bu dönemde kendi özel arşivlerini tutmaya başlamıştır. Ancak, bu belgelerden sadece bazıları on beşinci yüzyıldan günümüze ulaşmayı başarabilmiştir ve bunlar arasında en çok bilineni Paston mektuplarıdır. Dolayısıyla, bu makalenin amacı öncelikle Paston kadınlarına odaklanarak on beşinci yüzyılda ortak dille yazılan mektupların gelişim sürecini analiz etmek ve aile üyeleri arasındaki bilgi dolaşımını kapsamlı bir şekilde incelemektir. Mektupların çeşitliliği onları yazan kadınların – tarihte yaşamış figürler olarak – günümüzde bizim de hissedebileceğimiz endişe, korku, istek ve umutlarını ifade etmekteki kendilerine has üsluplarından kaynaklanmaktadır. Bu açıdan, Paston ailesindeki kadınların artan otoritesi ve daha görünür hale gelmeleri, pasif ve uysal olarak temsil edilen Orta Çağ kadınları ile ilişkilendirilmiş ideal imgelerin çözülüşünün ilk evresini oluşturmaktadır. Tüm bunlardan hareketle, ideal olanı gerçek olanla değiş tokuş eden Paston kadınlarının mektupları, Orta Çağ kadınlarının kendilerine has bir ses ve mekân bulma çabasını temsil etmektedir.

The Paston Women and Chaucer: Reading Women and Canon Formation in the Fifteenth Century

There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead. For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxications was it that he drew from books? In her essay, “The Pastons and Chaucer” in The Common Reader, which was first published in 1925, Virginia Woolf imagines a row of manuscripts lining a wall in the family’s house in the Norfolk village of Paston, and a mother’s annoyance at finding her son, Sir John Paston, often referred to as John Paston II, with his head deep in a book rather than attending to the business of maintaining his estates. Woolf’s essay was written in response to reading James Gairdner’s monumental edition of The Paston Letters, published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Pastons were a fifteenth-century gentry family from Norfolk and their correspondence represents the largest surviving archive of private letters from medieval England. In thinking about women’s literary culture in medieval England, the Paston letters must not be overlooked, if for no other reason than that around one-fifth of the letters were written by women, and that the most prolific of the writers was a woman: Margaret Paston, the mother whose perspective Woolf adopts in the above quotation. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) would come to play a central role in the tracing of feminist literary histories from the early modern period through to the twentieth century. Yet, Woolf’s own reading of the letters results in her characterising Margaret Paston as an individual for whom the distinctive, seductive, visceral smell of medieval manuscripts is dismissed as “a strange air”, and for whom poetry and literature are distractions from the real business of tending to the souls of the dead and to the property of the living. This idea that Margaret Paston was, if not hostile to books, then at any rate “not a reader” is one that continues to dominate her critical reception, and it is tied to wider generalizations about the limited engagement of middle-class laywomen with the literary culture in the later Middle Ages. But how valid are such assumptions about Margaret Paston or about late medieval women more generally?

Tracing Patterns of Intra-Speaker Variation in Early English Correspondence: A Change from Above in thePaston Letters

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to explore the impact of social and context factors on the diffusion of a linguistic change from above, namely the deployment of the spelling innovation <th> in fifteenth-century English, and especially in some letters from the well-known Paston collection of correspondence. We particularly focus on the socio-stylistic route of this change from above, observing the sociolinguistic behaviour of some letter writers (members of the Paston family) in connection with the social-professional status of their recipients, the interpersonal relationship with them, as well as the contexts and styles of the letters. In this way, different dimensions of this change from above in progress in fifteenth-century English can be reconstructed.

Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840. Aileen Douglas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+229.

<i>Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840</i>. Aileen Douglas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+229.

Spatio-temporal Systems in Paston Letters

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the spatio-temporal systems in the genre of letters along the lines of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. The corpus consists of letters selected from the Paston Letters edited by Davis. The present paper first carries out a statistical analysis of how frequently the elements of space and time are employed. An examination of the discourse then shows how these elements are related with each other in the integrated spatio-temporal domain, and how these relationships change in discourse. This research shows how the Pastons interacted with the systems of space and time, making a notable contribution to the pragmatic study of letters in Middle English.

The Paston Letters: Documentary Culture and the Public Space in Fifteenth-Century England

The Paston Letters: Documentary Culture and the Public Space in Fifteenth-Century England

Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture ed. by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa

Reviewed by: Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture ed. by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa Alexandra Barratt Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, ed. Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. xv + 293 pp. $99.00 (978-1-84384-401-3). This volume of eleven essays sets out to investigate “the interaction of medieval medicine and religion in the Middle Ages” (p. 2), a milieu in which sin and sickness were closely related. The editor’s introduction includes a useful literature review as well as introducing the subsequent material. Then follow two essays on Mary the Physician. Diane Watt argues that in medieval England the idea of Maria medica helped validate women’s healing role. Unfortunately, the textual evidence adduced for the figure of Mary as a medical doctor is debatable (“matronam” [p. 34] is an unusual term for the Virgin), while the presence of women as nurses and herbalists in the Paston letters is unsurprising. Roberta Magnani turns to Chaucer, arguing that his Marian theology is unorthodox as he gives the Virgin an [End Page 547] authoritative and more than “assistive” role in redemption. In The Physician’s Tale she is aligned with the goddess Natura, although, as the author admits, evidence of their identification is “hard to come by” (p. 57). Undeterred by the explicitly pagan context of this tale, Magnani associates its heroine Virginia with the Virgin and sees its narrator, the physician, as exploring ideas of authority. Part II, on women’s mysticism and metaphors of sickness, contains three essays. Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa usefully discusses medical imagery in The Book of Ghostly Grace, the Middle English translation of Mechtild of Hackeborn’s Latin text. She argues that Mechtild had medical knowledge and believed in the therapeutic value of sensory experiences, especially music, delightful scents, and sweet ointments. Liz Herbert McAvoy writes on confession as spiritual medicine and female blood-sheddings in anchoritic and other texts that she sees as united by “a maternally-focused ideology of blood-based rebirth and salvation” (p. 100). With splendid clarity and a refreshing lack of jargon Juliette Vuille argues that mental illness is a social construct and it is therefore unwise to diagnose it retrospectively in medieval women mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, especially as their behavior was considered “sane” by contemporaries. Part III contains two essays on fifteenth-century poetry and theological prose. Takami Matsuda writes on the blind poet John Audelay. Possibly influenced by Saint Bridget of Sweden, he saw bodily illness as an infallible means of healing spiritual sickness that could extend into purgatory, or alternatively mitigate its pains. Louise Bishop writes on the medieval understanding of the physiological nature and function of the heart, which is very different from our own, and its relevance to Reginald Pecock, an unorthodox fifteenth-century English bishop. Parts I to III are predominantly contributed by specialists in literary texts, especially those written in English. Part IV, on disfigurement and disability, is more the preserve of historians of medicine. Irina Metzler writes on medieval attempts to explain the etiology of birth defects: blame was usually laid on the parents, particularly some moral or physical failing of the mother, and deformity was commonly seen as stemming from aberrant sexual practices. Patricia Skinner writes on actual or threatened self-mutilation of the face in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century lives of Margaret of Hungary, Margaret of Cortona, and Oda of Brabant, and possible connections with judicial punishment. Joy Hawkins writes on medieval attitudes toward blindness, which was sometimes seen both as a spiritual privilege and as an opportunity for others to exercise compassion. Elma Brenner examines the often long-term pastoral and palliative care offered people with leprosy (especially women) in French and English leprosaria: these were essentially religious communities, as the cause of the disease was considered to be sexual overindulgence. Denis Renevey provides a sane afterword that largely summarizes the preceding contributions. He also highlights the “gender” aspect of this collection, otherwise only intermittently present in spite of the title, and draws out other connections between the individual essays. The volume might have benefited from more attention to medieval attitudes toward suffering in general (as found...

“The details of life and the pulsings of affect”: Virginia Woolf's Middle English Texts

Abstract For Virginia Woolf, medieval literary culture is part of the fabric of “Englishness,” a space that can be contested for writers and ideas that are not part of the masculinist tradition she criticizes so strongly. By focusing on The Paston Letters and the Canterbury Tales, and in creating the character Joan Martyn, Woolf explores how the ordinary, the everyday, and the unexceptional become extraordinary and exceptional. For her, Middle English texts are full of what Ben Highmore calls “the details of life and the pulsings of affect.” In registering the importance of the everyday in these early texts, Woolf connects Middle English texts to life in the early twentieth century. In her reading of them and writing about them, she seeks to rebuild the concept of English literature, and she also manages to convey a new understanding of Chaucer's role in literary culture.

Doing History, by Colin Richmond

Colin Richmond is best known to historians of fifteenth-century England. Undergraduate at Leicester, graduate student of K.B. McFarlane at Oxford, he spent his entire teaching career at Keele, rising eventually to become a most unprofessorial professor; it is more natural to refer to him as Colin. Essentially a teacher, he has an impressive record of publications, distinguished above all by their particularity; most notably, his three-volume companion to the Paston Letters, teasing out the minutest details of the legal cases and personal interrelationships which are the framework for that intriguing but opaque collection. Much of his output has taken the form of essays, typically examining an incident or a person; one such, a study of an obscure Suffolk gentleman, John Hopton, extended to book length. A variant has been a number of spoof academic papers, typically delivered after dinner at conferences, collected as The Penket Papers (1986), one of which famously took in The Times. Microscopic in focus, none of these (even the spoof ones) have been trivial. Colin uses the specific to explore, allusively, fundamental questions about the responsibilities of the historian, of agency in individuals and social groups. That sense is tested against, indeed controlled by, his secondary interest in twentieth-century history, especially in the triangular German-Jewish-Polish relationship.

Margaret’s Choice: Negotiating Space, Class Identity, and Gender Ideologies in The Paston Letters

This article offers a reader response to the trope of the woman ensconced in her tower through the life and writings of Margaret Paston. The Pastons were avid consumers of romance, so the trope is one that Margaret would have known well. During her lifetime, the Pastons came to possess Caister Castle, and Margaret spent some time there. She found that with the increase in social status of owning a castle came the more restrictive movement necessitated by castle life. While living in her manor houses, Margaret made herself accessible to all manner of people, and manor house architecture itself expressed a gender ideology of equality. I argue that through her move from castle to manor house, Margaret was actively rejecting the higher status position of the upper aristocracy and the restrictive gender ideologies laid out by castle architecture and chose instead to remain part of the lower aristocracy, its gender ideology of greater female freedom witnessed by both the more equal accessibility of spaces within the manor house, and by Margaret’s relative ease of movement and accessibility there.

Chaucer and the Culture of Love and Marriage by Cathy Hume (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Culture of Love and Marriage by Cathy Hume Gillian Adler Cathy Hume, Chaucer and the Culture of Love and Marriage (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2012) 240 pp. Beginning at least with G.L. Kittredge’s discussion of the so-called Marriage Group, a variety of historicist readings have explored Chaucer’s representations of lovers and married men and women against the background of medieval canon law, theology and the liturgy, contemporary writings, patristic literature, and the institutional and ideological phenomena of late medieval England. These frameworks have posited the relevance of social, cultural, and political events to contemporary expectations of male and female behavior in love and marriage, and moreover, to expectations of Chaucer’s literary figures. In Chaucer and the Culture of Love and Marriage, Cathy Hume similarly situates Chaucer’s stories about courtship and marriage in the historical milieu in which they were written. However, Hume suggests that prior studies have “less than fully contextualized” Chaucer’s works (4). Looking beyond “the writings of the Church Fathers, twelfth-century theology and legal codes ... sermons, wills and records of legal cases,” Hume addresses two understudied sources, advice literature and a body of letter collections, in which to locate [End Page 280] evidence of fourteenth-century ideals and practices of love and marriage (5). This material, according to Hume, becomes a new framework for appreciating the “horizons of expectation” with which Chaucer’s contemporary readers would have approached his work. Within this context, modern readers can learn how fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readers might have responded to his lustful, loyal, and lovelorn characters. Thus, while the introductory survey of recent historical-literary scholarship on the history of love and marriage in late medieval England provides a foundation for the eight chapters that explore Chaucer’s preoccupation with these subjects, Hume’s most original contribution is her assessment of advice literature for women, a set of texts concerned with the virtuous living of a wife, courtly and marital behavior, as well as the more practical rules of marriage; and English letter collections dated from the fifteenth century, composed by gentry and merchant families, including the Pastons, revealing the negotiations of marriage, illicit flirtations, and other transactional activities of real medieval marriages and amorous relationships. Hume works under the assumption that, although some of her sources were written after the death of Chaucer, ideals in relation to love and marriage were preserved up until the late fifteenth century. Using advice literature and letter collections, Hume convincingly reconstructs the expectations of audiences who received Chaucer’s poetry, offering modern scholars a fresh approach to late medieval reception history. The first four chapters of this study concentrate on married life and the roles constructed for husbands and wives in the Franklin’s Tale, Clerk’s Tale, Ship-man’s Tale, and Merchant’s Tale. Hume reads Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale in the context of the Paston Letters to remind us that Chaucer’s wives share many more experiences with real medieval wives than with literary predecessors, and in particular, that they share the concern for upholding their honor in marriage and their reputation. The advice literature which surrounds the Griselda story that Chaucer rewrites in the Clerk’s Tale portrays the obedience ideal ambiguously, rather than as unequivocally necessary, and ultimately supports Chaucer’s endeavor to show that limits must be placed on the testing of the wife and to highlight the ethical problems of a wife’s docility and submission. Walter’s own disobedience, furthermore, points to Chaucer’s more serious interrogation of the hierarchies of marriage. In the Shipman’s Tale, the wife manipulates her domestic, wifely roles as hostess, social networker, housekeeper, and business assistant, and reflects medieval wives’ behavioral roles, which were sometimes at odds with the principles of coverture in late medieval England. Hume’s study of the Merchant’s Tale argues for May’s similar subversion of wifely roles to suit her own ends. The final treatment of the Canterbury Tales include readings of aristocratic marriages in the Man of Law’s Tale and the Knight’s Tale. The chapter on the former suggests the familiarity of the Constance of Anglo...

Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage by Cathy Hume (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage by Cathy Hume Emma Lipton Cathy Hume. Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. 244. £50.00; $95.00. Cathy Hume’s book is the first study of love and marriage in Chaucer’s works to draw substantially on published letter collections and advice literature. She focuses on the fifteenth-century Paston letters, but also includes material from the Plumpton, Stonor, and Cely letters; and “advice literature for women” (26) from both England and France, such as Le menagier de Paris, Christine de Pizan’s Livre des trois vertus, Philippe de Mézières’s Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, and Caxton’s translation of The Book of the Knight of the Tower. For Hume, advice literature and letters are “a proxy for those ‘horizons of expectations’ that Chaucer’s contemporary readers would have brought to his texts” (208) and can be used to argue for whether we should see individual “characters’ behavior as either shocking or conventional” (208). Throughout the book, Hume carefully analyzes the ways Chaucer revises his sources to correspond more closely to the depictions of love and marriage in letters and advice literature. After an introduction providing a “brief survey of current historical scholarship on love and marriage in England” (5), Chapter 1 argues [End Page 410] that The Franklin’s Tale should be seen as a “story of a loving marriage struggling to survive in a world of changing social relations” (33), and as an exploration of how “an egalitarian marriage ideal would be tested by real-world circumstances” (33). Hume argues that the division of public and private in the Tale is best seen as “part of a complex late medieval social world where personal and business relationships are intertwined and need careful negotiation if both public and private virtue are to be maintained” (35). Chapter 2 draws on the conventional depiction of wifely obedience in advice literature to argue that The Clerk’s Tale reveals this “ideal” of obedience “with real contemporary currency” is “not only cruel but . . . completely at variance with other conventions in late medieval England” (50). Chapter 3 argues that the comedy of The Shipman’s Tale is “created by the wife’s clever manipulation of roles of hostess, social networker, housekeeper, business assistant, and status symbol. These roles appear to reflect late medieval expectations of wives and wives’ real behavioral practices” (79). In Chapter 4, Hume places January and May’s marriage in The Merchant’s Tale in the “context of contemporary ideals and practices in gentry marriages, showing how few of the conventional wife’s roles January expects May to perform” (90). This chapter includes the brief but fascinating argument that May’s withdrawal to the privy to read her letter conflicted with contemporary norms in which women were more easily granted privacy for letter writing and reading (100). The next chapter argues that Custance’s arranged marriage in The Man of Law’s Tale corresponds to the unhappy experiences of late medieval gentlewomen in letter collections and advice literature. In contrast to much recent criticism, Hume sees The Knight’s Tale as an endorsement rather than critique of arranged marriages, reading Emily’s prayer to Diana as a “conventional stance of willing acquiescence in her relatives’ plans for her marriage” (135). The last two chapters shift from marriage to “the courtly cultures of love.” Hume situates Troilus and Criseyde in the context of The Book of the Knight and Christine’s Livre des trois vertus, which “describes the risks for women that love entails, and gives practical suggestions for avoiding its pitfalls” (144). The heroines of The Legend of Good Women “fly in the face of contemporary standards of behaviour,” showing “their recklessness, indecorousness and the ease with which they foolishly allow themselves to be manipulated by the tricks the advice literature warns against” (180). [End Page 411] The strength of the book, in my view, lies in the close readings and the careful connections Hume draws between the letters and advice texts she studies and the situations described in Chaucer’s texts. In many cases, Hume...

&lt;i&gt;Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern&lt;/i&gt;, and: &lt;i&gt;Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, and: Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology Martha W. Driver Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern. Edited by Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 286; 39 illustrations. $65. Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology. By Thomas H. Ohlgren. With an Appendix: “The Dialects and Language of Selected Robin Hood Poems,” by Lister M. Matheson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 278; 12 illustrations. $55. Robin Hood has been the subject of poetry, ballad, prose fiction (most recently the novel Hodd by Adam Thorpe, published by Cape), illustration, film, and opera, among other media. The leader of the Sherwood Forest band of Merry Men continues to fascinate scholars as well, as the Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies held in fall 2009 at the University of Rochester attests. The first of these two volumes is a close study of the early Robin Hood poems from manuscript to print. The second is a collection of essays on wide-ranging themes drawn from presentations at the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the International Association of Robin Hood Studies. Both illustrated volumes include copious notes along with helpful and detailed bibliographies. In his monograph, based on his reading and teaching of Robin Hood texts over fifteen years, Thomas Ohlgren brings together essays he has published elsewhere since 2000, and elaborates and develops them more fully. It is good to have these essays all in one place. This volume addresses the complete poems that date from the 1460s in manuscripts and from about 1495 to 1610 in printed editions. Among many new findings is a reference to a royal wedding in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.4.35 that has been perhaps misidentified, placing the date of the manuscript and of its Robin Hood poem, Robin Hood and the Potter, thirty-five years earlier than previously thought. Ohlgren makes a good case for the identification of the scribe-owner of Cambridge University Library Ff.5.48, a manuscript that contains Robin Hood and the Monk. While this is usually said to be the first extant full poem about Robin Hood, Ohlgren argues here that Robin Hood and the Potter is in fact the earlier surviving poem (p. 137). Ohlgren locates the owner-copyist of CUL Ff.5.48, one Gilbert Pylkyngton who was ordained as a subdeacon, deacon, and priest from 1463 to 1465, in Lichfield and presents a reasonable argument for the use of Robin Hood and the Monk as a preaching text, despite its overt anticlericalism. The other Cambridge manuscript, CUL Ee.4.35, contains Robin Hood and the Potter, which is one of many texts in a household miscellany that belonged for many generations to the same middle-class family. A merchant’s mark and a signature appear on the final folio, the latter the name of an early owner, Richard Call. The mark belonged to Henry Bacon, a prominent Norwich grocer and guildsman, who married into the Call family. Richard Call was the bailiff for John Paston I during the last half of the fifteenth century who secretly married Margery Paston, and some 120 references to him survive in the Paston letters. A list of foods served at a royal wedding in this manuscript has caused scholars to conjecture this refers to the marriage of Margaret Tudor in 1503. Ohlgren, however, argues that the wedding in question was that between Margaret, youngest sister of Edward IV, and Charles, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468, placing the date of the manuscript in or around that year (possibly). A related text is a dramatic fragment of 1475 (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.2.64) that may originally have been among the Paston letters and may represent a version of a play performed in the Paston household in the 1470s. [End Page 416] In a subsequent chapter, Ohlgren turns his attention to A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode, which was printed in London, Antwerp, and York in seven editions between ca. 1495 and ca. 1610. No manuscript copy of this poem survives. Ohlgren provides...

DOUGLAS GRAY, Later Medieval English Literature.

DOUGLAS GRAY’s latest book covers the period from the death of Chaucer to the earlier sixteenth century, quite like James Simpson’s 2002 volume in the Oxford English Literary History; but the two books are very different. Whereas Simpson’s has an overall historical argument, as its title Reform and Cultural Revolution declares, Gray’s sets out to do no more, and no less, than to persuade readers of the riches and variety to be found in the English and Scottish writings of the period. The author himself is one of those ‘literary students with antiquarian tastes’ to whom he alludes; and his voracious reading extends beyond the literary to include, not only the Paston Letters, but also such other practical texts as the ‘Vulgaria’—collections of passages in English for schoolboys to translate into Latin, of whose ‘vivid colloquial English’ Gray gives an appreciative account (pp. 88–90). This very big, wide-ranging book is divided, after a long Introduction to the period as a whole, into four sections devoted respectively to English prose, English verse, Scottish writings, and drama. The text is entirely without footnotes and there is no general bibliography, but each chapter ends with a selective list of References and Further Reading, arranged in accordance with the order followed in the preceding text. This arrangement produces a pleasingly uncluttered page, but it will make it difficult for readers to follow up many of Gray’s references: where, for instance, are they to find Dante’s account of his mother’s death (p. 62)?

ALEXANDER BERGS, Social networks and historical sociolinguistics: Studies in morphosyntactic variation in the Paston letters (1421–1503)

ALEXANDER BERGS, Social networks and historical sociolinguistics: Studies in morphosyntactic variation in the Paston letters (1421–1503)

Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century (Part III)

Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century (Part III)

Overt and covert prestige in Late Middle English: A case study in East Anglia

The preservation of some collections of late fifteenth-century private correspondence – like the Paston letters, the Cely letters, or the Stonor letters– offers a very useful corpus to carry out quantitative sociolinguistic analysis, as they involve writers of different sex, age, social extraction, and geographical location. The historical and philological interest of these documents is outstanding, not only because they offer data on the political and domestic history of fifteenth-century England, but also because they were composed at a crucial period in the development of the English language (during the expansion of the Chancery English variety). In the Paston Letters , William Paston II represents the social manifestation of the development of the awareness of a well-established standard with his ‘Memorandum on French Grammar’ (Letter 82), written between 1450 and 1454. This is an exceptional document that provides us with a description of the English language of the late Middle English period by a non-standard user, which highlights the covert versus overt prestige motivations in his contradictory sociolinguistic behaviour and in the social psychology of that late Middle English speech community and society. The aim of this paper is to illustrate this contradictory sociolinguistic practice and the awareness of prestige patterns in the late Middle English period with quantitative and qualitative analyses of his use of past be forms, as part of a larger project on medieval and contemporary was/were -levelling in East Anglian English.

Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur (review)

Reviewed by: Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur Cheryl Taylor Cherewatuk, Karen , Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur (Arthurian Studies, 67), Rochester, D. S. Brewer, 2006; hardback; pp. xxvii, 149 ; R.R.P. £45.00; ISBN 1843840898. This study of selected interesting aspects of the Morte Darthur ultimately offers readers a deeper understanding of Malory as a social conservative and man of his time. Karen Cherewatuk shows how the 'Tale of Sir Gareth', which Malory may have invented, and his adaptations of sources in other Tales uphold the marital and gender values of his gentry and aristocratic readers. She shows further the extent to which these values diverged from the Church's ideal of virginity and from the consensual, companionate form of marriage enshrined in canon law. Instead the secular ruling classes enforced a pragmatic moral code over sexual behaviour and inheritance, with a view to preserving civic order and building prosperity across generations. While continuing to venerate kings and lords like Arthur and Lancelot, who through inadvertence, passion or conflicted loyalties violated this code, the Morte Darthur centrally demonstrates the tragic consequences that such violation entails. Cherewatuk's surveys of the gentry's views on virginity, marriage, infertility, adultery, illegitimacy, incest and dowry encourage the reader to make comparisons with the present-day attitudes that they helped to form. However she warns against the modern reading habit, derived from the realistic novel, of imagining a background of romantic motivation for the sexual and familial relationships depicted in the Morte. For this she substitutes 'the dominant ideas and behaviours' of Malory's contemporary audience, as revealed 'in their letters and practices' (p. xv). These prove to be the Paston letters, with minor allusions to the Cely family letters; the disruptive, tragic history of English royal dynasties from the dethronement of Richard II to the accession of Henry Tudor; and the marriage and inheritance provisions of canon and secular law. In defiance of New Historicist strictures, Cherewatuk's methodology validates textual interpretation within a historical context. While her findings may indeed be provisional, the reader is empowered to accept or reject them on the basis of the evidence presented. Moreover, by approaching the Morte through painstaking research, Cherewatuk allows the patriarchal attitudes of fifteenth-century elite society to emerge more powerfully than they might have done if she had begun to argue from a declared feminist position. The chosen approaches produce findings that ring true; in fact they [End Page 198] illuminate the Morte. For example, Cherewatuk outlines Malory's construction of a Guildford family of baronet status for the Maid of Ascolat on the basis of a few summary references in his sources. She elucidates an added incident, in which Sir Bernard forbids his daughter to accompany Gawain to her chamber, as reflecting the commodification of marriageable daughters' virginity in English ruling families. The enlarged perspective allows the reader to appreciate the Maid's initiative, and the enormity of her actions, when in her family's presence she offers herself to Lancelot as his wife and, failing that, his lover. Given her value to her family as an asset in the marriage market, Lancelot's use of the Maid to disguise his affair with Guenevere emerges, according to Cherewatuk, as self-centred and insensitive. Conversely, an awareness of the text's commercial assumptions makes his counter-offer, of a yearly thousand-pound dowry to be paid when the Maid marries someone else, seem admirable. To past 'romantic' readers, by contrast, Lancelot's counter-offer has often appeared as unforgivably crass. Cherewatuk proceeds to explicate the tensions produced by Malory's 'class-based moral conservatism' (p. xviii) in most of the Morte's significant episodes. These include Lancelot's encounters with other ladies, notably Guenevere and Elaine of Corbin; the stages of Gareth and Lyonesse's courtship; Arthur and Guenevere's marriage; and knightly fathers' relationships with their illegitimate sons, including Pellynor with Torre, Bors with Elyne, Lancelot with Galahad, and finally Arthur with Mordred. Interspersed with judicious references to earlier critics, the discussion features a close reading of formulaic words and phrases in the Morte as an analytic tool appropriate to Malory's narrative...

Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory's 'Morte Darthur' by Karen Cherewatuk

MLR, 103.2, 2oo8 507 theevolution of the Tales. The drawback is that the 'Testament' isnot independently extant: it was only ever 'effectuated inone ormore reading performances' (p. 222) and detective work is required to recover its lineaments now.Accordingly, Lindeboom's book revels inmind-boggling archaeological sleuthdom. On the tiny foundations of the famous Confessio allusion toChaucer and of the Man ofLaw's alleged insinuations about Gower's subject-matter, amassive superstructure of speculation is erected. Parts of the superstructure involve reversion to obsolescent critical positions. In what is called the 'Gowerization' (p. 46) of the tales, the Parson's Tale emerges as the 'eschatological key', converting what had begun as amiscellany into a focused spiritual and confessional work addressing the sins and virtues (pp. IO-12). Linde boom maintains that 'the Wife, Pardoner and Parson, the only threepilgrims whose speeches are sermons constructed out of confession joined to an exposition of the Deadly Sins', are complementary figureswho constitute the core of the 'Testament' (P. I07). The Wife ofBath's Prologue and Tale especially are 'a sparklingminiature Confessio amantis intended to outdo Gower at every turn' (p. I48). Gower is defi nitely 'outdone' if,as Lindeboom supposes, the Wife simultaneously mimics Gower's Amans (making her confession of sins), Genius (the Pardoner calls her a 'prechour'), and Venus (as debauched seductress). Above all, the Wife's performance isalleged to be a systematic self-indictment of sins specifically found in theParson's catalogue and the Pardoner's performance is a self-indictment of any that are leftover. This manages to ignore altogether what ismost demonstrable about the Wife ofBath and Pardoner: that their 'confessional' stimulus comes fromChaucer's fascination with theRoman de laRose, not from theParson's Tale. Lindeboom surrounds his major premiss with multiple ancillary speculations. In order to reconstruct the 'Testament', tales and portions of them are radically filleted, reassigned todifferentspeakers, and recontextualized. The Envoy to theClerk's Tale, for example, is found to have been originally a comment on theWife of Bath, fol lowing her original participation in the relic-kissing scene at the conclusion of the Pardoner's Tale, which in turnwas originally aimed against her. The last portion of the book is devoted to proving that theWife of Bath's and Pardoner's performances are sermons at the same time as they are confessions; and that the sermons include furthermini-sermons. This is as confusing as it sounds, and it is further complicated by the author's adherence to 'exegetical' readings of these 'sermons' whereby anythingwritten can signify many other things. The unfinished state of theCanterbury Tales will always be an enticement to those who like to solve puzzles. Lindeboom marshals the pieces to fithis particular jigsaw with extraordinary tenacity.Even so, he has to introduce many of his headier spe culations with the formula 'What if . . .?'. One can only respond: what if the reader does not accept thehypothesis thatGower provoked Chaucer into a literarysparring match? A book of 477 pages is an enormous risk in thatcontext. GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ALCUIN BLAMIRES Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory's 'MorteDarthur'. By KAREN CHERE WATUK. (Arthurian Studies, 67) Cambridge: Brewer. 2006. ii+ I53 PP- ?45; $8o. ISBN 978-I-84384-089-3. This book is a series of short studies on a single theme, although it involves the investigation of a variety of extremely interesting 'subthemes'. Karen Cherewatuk establishes and accepts the idea of an aspiring gentry audience for Malory. She notes also that the storieswere read and owned by those inhigher levels of the elite. Cherewatuk examines the idea of companionate and political/societal marriage, and the interaction between the two,by comparing literaryevidence from the Morte 508 Reviews Darthur with historical evidence from the contemporary Paston Letters. She draws comparisons between Gareth and Lancelot, noting the attitudes tomarriage this reveals for Malory, and (by implication) forhis audience. The Church's ideas ofmar riage are then compared with those of the contemporary English nobility and gentry. Gareth's story foregrounds, and deals with, the tensions which existed (as, again, demonstrated in the Pastons' letters) between companionate relationships and the gentry's need for social stability.We cannot escape, Cherewatuk maintains, the fact that love...