Acts of Recognition

Lee Patterson

Description

This volume brings together Lee Patterson’s essays published in various venues over the past twenty-seven years. As he observes in his preface, “The one persistent recognition that emerged from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that whatever the text . . . and whoever the people . . ., the values at issue remain central to contemporary life.”

Two dialectics are at work in this book: that between the past and the present and that between the individual and the social, and both have moral significance. The first two chapters are methodological; the first is on the historical understanding of medieval literature and the second on how to manage the inseparability of fact and value in the classroom. The next three chapters take up three "less-read" late medieval writers: Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Each is used to illuminate a social phenomenon: the nature of court culture, the experience of the city, and Henry V's act of self-making. The following chapter explicitly links past and present by arguing that the bearing of the English aristocrat comes from a tradition beginning with Beowulf and later reinvoked in response to nineteenth-century imperialism. The next three chapters are the most literary, dealing with Chaucer and with literary conventions in relation to a number of texts. The final chapter is on the man Patterson considers one of the most important of our medieval ancestors, Francis of Assisi.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Essays
• Medieval
• Idioma inglés
• Enrique V (teatro)
• Idioma galés
• Edad Media
• John Clanvowe
• Thomas Hoccleve
• John Lydgate
• Middle Ages
• Irish
• Francis of Assisi
• English
• Henry V
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Musique irlandaise
• Beowulf
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268089795
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Patterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page i
acts of recognitionPatterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page iiPatterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page iii
lee patterson
acts of recognition
essays on medieval culture
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IndianaPatterson-000FM:Layout 1 10/8/09 9:46 AM Page iv
Copyright © 2010 Lee Patterson
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, Lee.
Acts of recognition : essays on medieval culture / Lee Patterson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-268-03837-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-268-03837-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism—
Theory, etc. 2. Literature and society—England—History—To 1500.
3. England—Civilization—1066–1485. 4. Historical criticism (Literature)
I. Title.
pr255.p33 2010
820'.9'001—dc22
2009038115
This book is printed on recycled paper.Patterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page v
contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
chapter one
Historical Criticism and the Development of Chaucer Studies i
chapter two
The Disenchanted Classroom 31
chapter three
Court Poetry and the Invention of Literature:
The Example of Sir John Clanvowe 56
chapter four
“What Is Me?”: Hoccleve and the Trials of the Urban Self 84
appendix to chapter 4
Beinecke MS 493 and the Survival of Hoccleve’s Series 110Patterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page vi
vi Contents
chapter five
Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England:
Henry V and John Lydgate 120
chapter six
The Heroic Laconic Style: Reticence and Meaning
from Beowulf to the Edwardians 155
chapter seven
Writing Amorous Wrongs:
Chaucer and the Order of Complaint 181
chapter eight
Genre and Source in Troilus and Criseyde 198
chapter nine
“Rapt with Pleasaunce”:
The Gaze from Virgil to Milton 215
chapter ten
Brother Fire and St. Francis’s Drawers:
Human Nature and the Natural World 234
Notes 252
Index 341Patterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page vii
preface
In preparing this collection of essays, two quotations have frequently
been in my mind. One is Faulkner’s well-known line from Requiem for a
Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The other, more recent
and less well known, is from a newspaper interview with Harold Pinter:
“It’s as if it never happened. It’s all in the past and who cares? But let
me put it this way—the dead are still looking at us, waiting for us to
ac1knowledge our part in their murder.” The first passage is about the grip
of the past on the present, the second about the responsibility of the
present to the past. Faulkner refers to the way an individual’s past
distorts the sense of social responsibility (in this case Temple Drake’s legal
obligations); Pinter refers to the way the erasure of a social past (in this
case the bloodshed caused by the invasion of Iraq) enables an evasion
of individual responsibility (who cares?). Two dialectics are at work:
between the past and the present, and between the individual and the
social. These are dialectics familiar to every medievalist. What Faulkner and
Pinter provide is the recognition that they bear a significance that must
be defined as moral.
Whatever moral meaning the essays in this collection bear is, I hope,
implicit—although not to the point of invisibility. I cannot pretend that
even the most resolutely specific of them does not carry some sense that
viiPatterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page viii
viii Preface
central human values are always involved, however local, even
technical, the work. The dead are always looking at us, and our complicity in
their murder is to forget them. The past is still present, no matter how
rapid the rate of innovation. There is a deep continuity in human
history. Were there not—if the past really were a foreign country where
2they do things differently—then we could not understand it at all. But
clearly we do, and we do because the past is, in a sense that we should
not allow ourselves to ignore, us. Our responsibility to the past is a
responsibility to the present; and only in understanding the dead as fully
and accurately as we can are we able to understand ourselves. The most
remarkable and yet often dismaying quality of the literature of the past
is that it reads us while we read it. The one persistent recognition that
emerged from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that
whatever the text (Beowulf, The Siege of Thebes, The Series) and whoever the
people (Henry V, John Clanvowe, Capt. Lawrence Oates), the values
at issue remain central to contemporary life. I am not blind to the fact
that this is a claim all historians —whether of literature or of the past
tout court — almost always make. But that doesn’t mean that it should
not continue to be made, if only to remind those of us who seek to
understand the past that we are simultaneously trying to understand the
present—and, even more pertinently, our own lives, both professional
and personal.
The first two chapters of this book are methodological. Chapter 1 has
previously been published as the opening chapter of Negotiating the Past:
The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature, a book that appeared
in 1987. Because that book is out of print, because the essay continues to
be cited, and because its main points are still applicable to contemporary
criticism, I have reprinted it here with a few revisions to indicate its
continued relevance. The second chapter deals with pedagogy, and—with
the help of the great sociologist Max Weber—the always vexed issue of
how to manage in the classroom the inseparability of fact and value. The
next three chapters deal with three of the less read English authors of
the late Middle Ages, Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John
Lydgate. In all three cases the texts in question are used to illuminate a
contemporary social phenomenon: the nature of court culture, the
experience of the city, and the extraordinary act of self-making accomplished
by King Henry V. Chapter 6—on what I have called “the heroic laconicPatterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page ix
Preface ix
style,” a manner more familiarly known as the stiff upper lip—is most
explicit in linking past to present, arguing that the bearing of the English
aristocrat derives from a tradition that began in the early medieval world
described in Beowulf and was quite deliberately reinvoked in response
to the demands of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Chapters 7
and 8 deal with two Chaucerian texts, the little read Complaint of Mars
and the widely read Troilus and Criseyde. Chapter 9 traces the topos of the
gaze, and its companion the ecphrasis, from Virgil to Milton, with pauses
along the way for discussions of Chrétien de Troyes and Dante. These
three chapters are the most purely literary in the book. Oddly enough, the
essay on the gaze is the oldest of the essays here reprinted, while the essay
on the Troilus was just written. The final chapter is on the man whom
I consider to be not merely one of the most influential of our medieval
ancestors but one of the most important—Francis of Assisi. Here the
issues of historical contextualization and psychological complexity, a
complexity that is too often taken to be quintessentially modern, meet in a
single figure. For this reason I have let this chapter stand as the book’s
final word.
The essays have been lightly revised throughout, largely to correct
errors of fact and grammar and to rewrite passages that were poorly
composed the first time. Whatever errors and uglinesses still remain are
illfavored things but, alas, mine own.
To thank those who have contributed to the making of this book would
require me to list virtually everyone whom I have known and worked
with over the past forty years. I shall therefore confine myself to a
general expression of gratitude to professional colleagues who have been
remarkably generous and to the students, both graduate and undergraduate,
whom it has been my privilege and great good fortune to teach. I
remember more of you than you think (even if I am an appalling
correspondent) and always —well, almost always —with affection. In the spring of
2008, at Kalamazoo, a group of former graduate students, now colleagues,
honored me with several special sessions. At the end I read to them lines
from Yeats’s “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” that I continue to believe
characterize my experience as a member of the profession I entered many
years ago:Patterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page x
x Preface
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.Patterson-000FM 9/17/09 4:02 PM Page xi
acknowledgments
Chapter 1, “Historical Criticism and the Development of Chaucer
Studies,” originally appeared in Negotiating the Past: The Historical
Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),
pp. 3–39; chapter 2, “The Disenchanted Classroom,” originally appeared
in Exemplaria 8 (1996): 513–545; chapter 3, “Court Politics and the
Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe,
in David Aers, ed., Culture and History,1350–1600 (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1992), pp. 7–41; chapter 4, “‘What Is Me?’: Hoccleve
and the Trials of the Urban Self,” originally appeared in Studies in the Age of
Chaucer 23 (2001): 435– 68; the appendix to chapter 4, “Beinecke MS 493
and the Survival of Hoccleve’s Series,” originally appeared in Old Books,
New Learning: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Books at Yale, The Yale
University Library Gazette, Occasional Supplement 4 (January 2001):
92–103; chapter 5, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century Eng