Medieval Autographies

A. C. Spearing

Description

In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the “I” as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography.” He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality.

Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham’s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and Criseyde and Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Edad Media
• English literature
• Troilus and Criseyde
• The Wife of Bath's Tale
• Middle Ages
• Irish
• English
• The Canterbury Tales
• European
• Welsh
• French
• Scottish
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268092801
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies
2008
The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and publications resulting from it.
PREVIOUS TITLES IN THIS SERIES:
Paul Strohm
Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (2005)
Ulrich Horst, O. P.
The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006)
Rosamond McKitterick
Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006)
Jonathan Riley-Smith
Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2009)
A . C . S PEARING
M EDIEVAL A UTOGRAPHIES
The “I” of the Text

U NIVERSITY OF N OTRE D AME P RESS
N OTRE D AME, I NDIANA
Copyright © 2012 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 Spearing, A. C. Medieval autographies : the “I” of the text / A. C. Spearing. p. cm. — (The Conway lectures in medieval studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. -->
E ISBN 978-0-268-09280-1 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2. First person narrative. 3. Autobiography in literature. I. Title. PR275.F57S64 2012 820.9'35—dc23 2012030897 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. -->
This eBook was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
Preface
ONE: The Textual First Person
TWO: Autography: Prologues and Dits
THREE: Chaucerian Prologues and the Wife of Bath
FOUR: Why Autography?
FIVE: Hoccleve and the Prologue
SIX: Hoccleve’s Series
SEVEN: Bokenham’s Autographies
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author Index -->
PREFACE
This book originated as the Robert M. Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies given at the University of Notre Dame in October 2007. I was honored to be invited to give these lectures, and I am most grateful to Tom Noble, then director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame, to his wife, and to his colleagues for their generous hospitality during my stay there. I am also grateful to those who heard the lectures for their searching questions and valuable suggestions, which have helped to make the book less inadequate than it would otherwise be. I owe special debts of thanks to Roberta Baranowski, associate director of the Medieval Institute, for much good-natured practical help and many entertaining e-mail messages, and to Barbara Hanrahan, then director of the University of Notre Dame Press, for her warm encouragement and shrewd guidance when I was struggling to plan the book.
The tortuous process of converting and enlarging three lectures into a book that often bears little resemblance to its original form has been eased, and the book itself much improved, by the kind colleagues and friends who have read drafts and discussed problems with me. My obligations are too many to be recorded in detail, but I should like to thank Peter Baker, Cristina Cervone, Deborah McGrady, Gary Saul Morson, and especially Elizabeth Fowler. I am most grateful to Elizabeth Spearing, who stepped forward at a crucial moment, read the whole, and made invaluable suggestions for improvement. Some more specific debts are recorded in notes to the text. It goes without saying that the book’s faults are my responsibility alone.
Some parts of the book’s argument and occasional ideas and sentences have previously appeared in the following: “The Poetic Subject from Chaucer to Spenser” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance , ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 13–37; “Textual Performance: Chaucerian Prologues and the French Dit ,” in Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages , ed. Marianne B ø rch (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), 21–45; and “Was Chaucer a Poet?” Poetica 73 (2010): 41–54. I am grateful respectively to Associated University Presses, to Professor Marianne B ø rch, and to Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya for permission to reuse this material here. Some material also derives from A. C. Spearing, “Dream Poems,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches , ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, 159–78 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); copyright © 2010 by the Pennsylvania State University Press; reprinted by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.
In quoting from medieval texts I have silently modified editorial spelling and punctuation where I thought that would aid understanding; this goes against the grain of medieval scholarship, and with good reason, but I persist in hoping that some nonspecialists might be willing to learn more about premodern literature. Further, in the hope that the book might find a few nonmedievalist readers who are interested in the theoretical issues I discuss—issues that I believe ought to be the concern of others besides medievalists—I have added modern translations (my own unless otherwise specified) of all medieval texts quoted in the original, except those, generally very brief, whose meaning seemed obvious.
CHAPTER 1
THE TEXTUAL FIRST PERSON
In this book I attempt to bring into focus a category of medieval English writing that has not previously been recognized as such. I call it “autography,” and, put simply, it consists of extended, nonlyrical, fictional writings in and of the first person. A more precise sense of what this involves and why it matters will, I hope, emerge from studies of specific texts in the following chapters, but it may be helpful to begin by indicating how my recognition of this category—perhaps better called a “supergenre” than simply a genre—relates to work I did in an earlier book entitled Textual Subjectivity. Its subtitle was The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics , and in it I investigated some of the linguistic and formal features by means of which subjectivity is built into texts in the two “supergenres” of narrative and lyric, and I tried to show how attention to these features might affect literary interpretation. Much of the argument of Textual Subjectivity was negative, illustrating how, as it seemed to me, failures of attention to the way language works in specific medieval texts had led to widespread misinterpretations. Dissatisfaction with accepted readings of major works such as Troilus and Criseyde , The Man of Law’s Tale , and Pearl , and a growing conviction that they were indeed bad readings—and often perhaps worse than bad, because they seemed contemptuous of the actual achievements of great poets—led me to question the assumptions on which I came to see they were based. Underlying my argument was a distinction between the representation of subjectivity and its encoding in the written form in which all the medieval literature we know has come down to us.
To explain this as briefly as possible: An assumption of long standing is that writing is a representation of speech, with the consequence that, as one medievalist sweepingly puts it, “no tale can be interpreted except as the product of a human speaker.” 1 This axiom goes back to Plato but has been increasingly taken for granted over the last century and more, and, because unquestioned, has often remained unmentioned. Thus the assumption has been that in principle every word of a written fictional narrative is to be interpreted as representing the utterance of a fictional speaker distinguishable from the author—and this is no less true of lyrics and indeed of imaginative writing of almost every kind. As a typical statement of this assumption puts it, “The writer creates a fiction when he attributes what he writes to another speaker; . . . he attributes the performance of his speech acts to a speaker he creates.” 2
Reading aloud to listeners was a common practice in the Middle Ages, as in the famous scene in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in which Pandarus visits Criseyde in her palace,

And fond two othere ladys sete and she,
Withinne a paved parlour, and they thre
Herden a mayden reden hem the geste
Of the siege of Thebes, while hem leste. (II 81–84) 3
——

[And found her and two other ladies seated in a paved parlor, and these three were listening to a maiden reading the story of the siege of Thebes to them for as long as they pleased.]
But what is being read aloud is a book, and it is important to grasp that in medieval linguistic theory it was not assumed that writing must be a representation of speech; on the contrary, as Martin Irvine and David Thomson put it,

In medieval grammatical theory, language is unthinkable outside writing, and even the theory of speech was modelled on the properties of writing.
The model for articulate speech is writing, not spoken utterances. The vocal utterance considered the materia of the grammatical art was written, and, conversely, articulate speech was understood to bear the marks of writing. . . .
Speech bears the imprint of writing; indeed, speech is considered meaningful only as it manifests the distinctive features of writing. . . . In grammatical discourse, the Platonic sense of the secondariness of writing has been erased; speech and writin