John Marenbon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691142555
- eISBN:
- 9781400866359
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691142555.003.0012
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter turns to another pair struggling with the Problem of Paganism: William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. For Langland, the Problem is an issue addressed directly, with the focus on the ...
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This chapter turns to another pair struggling with the Problem of Paganism: William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. For Langland, the Problem is an issue addressed directly, with the focus on the salvation of virtuous pagans. But, despite the explicit doctrinal discussion, Langland is not simply doing the same thing in vernacular verse as the university theologians: the complex form of his poem makes the positions he takes less clearly defined, but allows him to adumbrate daring ideas outside the range of the scholastic discussions. By contrast, Chaucer avoids the theological problems almost entirely; more perhaps than any other medieval writer, he explores the Problem of Paganism by imagining himself within a pagan world, whilst aware, as his readers too would be, that there is an external Christian perspective on it, which is only partly accessible from his viewpoint on the inside.Less
This chapter turns to another pair struggling with the Problem of Paganism: William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. For Langland, the Problem is an issue addressed directly, with the focus on the salvation of virtuous pagans. But, despite the explicit doctrinal discussion, Langland is not simply doing the same thing in vernacular verse as the university theologians: the complex form of his poem makes the positions he takes less clearly defined, but allows him to adumbrate daring ideas outside the range of the scholastic discussions. By contrast, Chaucer avoids the theological problems almost entirely; more perhaps than any other medieval writer, he explores the Problem of Paganism by imagining himself within a pagan world, whilst aware, as his readers too would be, that there is an external Christian perspective on it, which is only partly accessible from his viewpoint on the inside.
Eleanor Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226572031
- eISBN:
- 9780226572208
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226572208.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter analyzes how the rebarbative and difficult poem Piers Plowman stages participatory contemplation through poetic language. Focusing on the poetic forms of likeness that stud the ...
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This chapter analyzes how the rebarbative and difficult poem Piers Plowman stages participatory contemplation through poetic language. Focusing on the poetic forms of likeness that stud the poem—similes, alliterations, and code-switching in particular—the chapter demonstrates that the poem is designed to move readers in and out of experiences of likeness between themselves and the divine. The chapter reimagines how the macaronics or bilingualism of the text work contemplatively—that is, they work aesthetically, sensorily, and feelably. Like Julian's Revelations, Piers Plowman’s contemplative theology centers on Trinitarianism, but it also points away from the relationship between the individual soul and God to suggest how contemplation can—and indeed must—always also be a social act, a political act, and an interpersonal act. For Piers, contemplation is action, and action is contemplation; there is no divide between the soul’s relationship with God and its relationship with its own social context. This turn toward the social as an element of contemplative participation will prove fundamental to the plays studied in the second half of the book. And, indeed, the third chapter suggests a mutually constitutive relationship between Piers and Middle English drama.Less
This chapter analyzes how the rebarbative and difficult poem Piers Plowman stages participatory contemplation through poetic language. Focusing on the poetic forms of likeness that stud the poem—similes, alliterations, and code-switching in particular—the chapter demonstrates that the poem is designed to move readers in and out of experiences of likeness between themselves and the divine. The chapter reimagines how the macaronics or bilingualism of the text work contemplatively—that is, they work aesthetically, sensorily, and feelably. Like Julian's Revelations, Piers Plowman’s contemplative theology centers on Trinitarianism, but it also points away from the relationship between the individual soul and God to suggest how contemplation can—and indeed must—always also be a social act, a political act, and an interpersonal act. For Piers, contemplation is action, and action is contemplation; there is no divide between the soul’s relationship with God and its relationship with its own social context. This turn toward the social as an element of contemplative participation will prove fundamental to the plays studied in the second half of the book. And, indeed, the third chapter suggests a mutually constitutive relationship between Piers and Middle English drama.
Anne Middleton
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823243242
- eISBN:
- 9780823243280
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823243242.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This essay begins with Piers Plowman's use of the adage “Do well and have well,” a phrase that elegantly interweaves poetics and social practice. It prescribes practice within a form that reveals the ...
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This essay begins with Piers Plowman's use of the adage “Do well and have well,” a phrase that elegantly interweaves poetics and social practice. It prescribes practice within a form that reveals the relationship of Langland's poetics to other figural and didactic realms. In “Dowel, the Proverbial and the Vernacular: Some Versions of Pastoralia,” Anne Middleton argues that by looking at other occurrences of the phrase “do well and have well,” we discern how the register of the proverbial and popular provides Langland with a way to think about pastoral didacticism in relation to his own work. Middleton surveys different occurrences of this phrase, focusing, for instance, on its appearance in the Similitudinarium of William de Montibus (d. 1213). This work provided an important source for the summae confessorum that influenced Piers Plowman. Rather than simply pinpointing in William's text another possible origin for a Langlandian formulation, however, Middleton suggests instead that we read such texts as “illuminating commentary avant la lettre on the poet's pivotal deployment” of the “Dowel” dictum. Investigating the implications of the proverbial, Middleton shows how “ordinary and extraordinary language declare their interdependence in the ‘arts’ of both pastors and poets.”Less
This essay begins with Piers Plowman's use of the adage “Do well and have well,” a phrase that elegantly interweaves poetics and social practice. It prescribes practice within a form that reveals the relationship of Langland's poetics to other figural and didactic realms. In “Dowel, the Proverbial and the Vernacular: Some Versions of Pastoralia,” Anne Middleton argues that by looking at other occurrences of the phrase “do well and have well,” we discern how the register of the proverbial and popular provides Langland with a way to think about pastoral didacticism in relation to his own work. Middleton surveys different occurrences of this phrase, focusing, for instance, on its appearance in the Similitudinarium of William de Montibus (d. 1213). This work provided an important source for the summae confessorum that influenced Piers Plowman. Rather than simply pinpointing in William's text another possible origin for a Langlandian formulation, however, Middleton suggests instead that we read such texts as “illuminating commentary avant la lettre on the poet's pivotal deployment” of the “Dowel” dictum. Investigating the implications of the proverbial, Middleton shows how “ordinary and extraordinary language declare their interdependence in the ‘arts’ of both pastors and poets.”
Rebecca Davis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778400
- eISBN:
- 9780191823831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778400.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter reads Kynde as the consequence of Langland’s conception of the Christian deity as a “ful God” (B.17.168). Complicating the poem’s frequent association of kynde and need, it draws ...
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This chapter reads Kynde as the consequence of Langland’s conception of the Christian deity as a “ful God” (B.17.168). Complicating the poem’s frequent association of kynde and need, it draws attention instead to Kynde’s representation of God’s plenitude, a fullness from which the created world issues—and to which human beings have access in creation. Langland’s analysis of the Trinitarian basis of divine creativity recuperates the traditional mediatory and generative functions of the goddess Natura and her sister theophanies. Moreover, looking to contextual discourses beyond the Natura tradition, this chapter suggests that Langland’s representation of God’s immanence in creation shares a particular affinity with Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century poem Le Château d’amour, which describes God in scholastic terminology as natura naturans. Through a multidimensionality that recasts the theophanies populating earlier creation allegories, in Piers Plowman God’s triune constitution provides the instruments of divine experiment and impact in the material world.Less
This chapter reads Kynde as the consequence of Langland’s conception of the Christian deity as a “ful God” (B.17.168). Complicating the poem’s frequent association of kynde and need, it draws attention instead to Kynde’s representation of God’s plenitude, a fullness from which the created world issues—and to which human beings have access in creation. Langland’s analysis of the Trinitarian basis of divine creativity recuperates the traditional mediatory and generative functions of the goddess Natura and her sister theophanies. Moreover, looking to contextual discourses beyond the Natura tradition, this chapter suggests that Langland’s representation of God’s immanence in creation shares a particular affinity with Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century poem Le Château d’amour, which describes God in scholastic terminology as natura naturans. Through a multidimensionality that recasts the theophanies populating earlier creation allegories, in Piers Plowman God’s triune constitution provides the instruments of divine experiment and impact in the material world.
Seeta Chaganti
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823243242
- eISBN:
- 9780823243280
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823243242.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language uniquely reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious ...
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This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language uniquely reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious worlds. At a moment in contemporary culture when poetry finds its value increasingly challenged, Medieval Poetics and Social Practice looks to the late Middle Ages to assert the indispensability of poetry and poetics in the formation of social structures, actions, and utterances. The volume offers new readings of canonical late-medieval English poetic texts, such as Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls. In addition, it explores texts that have hitherto not held a central place in critical attention but that make important contributions to the literary culture of the period. These include The Prick of Conscience (1340–50), John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes (1449), and the carols of James Ryman (1492). Examining the relationship between medieval poetics and social practice, the essays show how form and figure might define the structure of a power dynamic, elucidate didactic practices, and enable readers to think through the ethics of pedagogy. In this volume, considering poetics also means considering practices of teaching, learning, and social negotiation.Less
This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language uniquely reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious worlds. At a moment in contemporary culture when poetry finds its value increasingly challenged, Medieval Poetics and Social Practice looks to the late Middle Ages to assert the indispensability of poetry and poetics in the formation of social structures, actions, and utterances. The volume offers new readings of canonical late-medieval English poetic texts, such as Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls. In addition, it explores texts that have hitherto not held a central place in critical attention but that make important contributions to the literary culture of the period. These include The Prick of Conscience (1340–50), John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes (1449), and the carols of James Ryman (1492). Examining the relationship between medieval poetics and social practice, the essays show how form and figure might define the structure of a power dynamic, elucidate didactic practices, and enable readers to think through the ethics of pedagogy. In this volume, considering poetics also means considering practices of teaching, learning, and social negotiation.
Rebecca Davis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778400
- eISBN:
- 9780191823831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778400.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Early and Medieval Literature
Chapter 4 argues that Langland associates kynde with the tradition of natural law described by Alan of Lille as the innate desire to love God and neighbor and codified by Gratian’s Decretum in terms ...
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Chapter 4 argues that Langland associates kynde with the tradition of natural law described by Alan of Lille as the innate desire to love God and neighbor and codified by Gratian’s Decretum in terms equivalent to the “golden rule” of Matthew 7: 12, which solicits a personal response from judges and law-givers, stipulating that they do unto others as they would have others do unto them. In the speeches of Hunger and Trajan, Langland envisions the “lawe of kynde,” and its related formulation as the “lawe of loue,” as an improvisational jurisprudence that resembles the emerging concept of equity. Like the biblical golden rule, Langland’s “lawe of kynde” appropriates the structure of justice as reciprocity—a balanced exchange of outcome for action—to turn judgment on its head by bringing the claims of the one to be judged to bear upon the decision of the one who judges.Less
Chapter 4 argues that Langland associates kynde with the tradition of natural law described by Alan of Lille as the innate desire to love God and neighbor and codified by Gratian’s Decretum in terms equivalent to the “golden rule” of Matthew 7: 12, which solicits a personal response from judges and law-givers, stipulating that they do unto others as they would have others do unto them. In the speeches of Hunger and Trajan, Langland envisions the “lawe of kynde,” and its related formulation as the “lawe of loue,” as an improvisational jurisprudence that resembles the emerging concept of equity. Like the biblical golden rule, Langland’s “lawe of kynde” appropriates the structure of justice as reciprocity—a balanced exchange of outcome for action—to turn judgment on its head by bringing the claims of the one to be judged to bear upon the decision of the one who judges.
Christopher Cannon
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198779438
- eISBN:
- 9780191824562
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779438.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, World Literature
Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at ...
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Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at times–which was at times–a sequence of translation exercises joined together by an overarching grammatical metaphor. The movement from Latin to English verse in Piers Plowman also makes clear how these basic exercises trained the schoolboy to write his own English poetry. Although we often describe the “birth of Middle English poetry” as the function of some large-scale development in language or cultural history, that birth necessarily occurred again and again, in the exercises of an individual schoolboy who responded to a Latin prompt with English verse of his own. The frequent translation of English into Latin in Piers Plowman also makes clear that many of the “quotations” in this poem previously impossible to source were written by Langland himself.Less
Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at times–which was at times–a sequence of translation exercises joined together by an overarching grammatical metaphor. The movement from Latin to English verse in Piers Plowman also makes clear how these basic exercises trained the schoolboy to write his own English poetry. Although we often describe the “birth of Middle English poetry” as the function of some large-scale development in language or cultural history, that birth necessarily occurred again and again, in the exercises of an individual schoolboy who responded to a Latin prompt with English verse of his own. The frequent translation of English into Latin in Piers Plowman also makes clear that many of the “quotations” in this poem previously impossible to source were written by Langland himself.
Rebecca Davis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778400
- eISBN:
- 9780191823831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778400.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter reads the narrator’s quest for “kynde knowynge” in the context of contemporary discourses on the value of the natural world as a site for knowledge. In his efforts to discover truth ...
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This chapter reads the narrator’s quest for “kynde knowynge” in the context of contemporary discourses on the value of the natural world as a site for knowledge. In his efforts to discover truth through accumulated experiences and observations, the poem’s narrator represents an encyclopedic impulse, the desire to collect, compile, and anatomize observations of the phenomenal world. While Langland’s characterization of God as Kynde seems to suggest confidence in the created world as a place where human beings might successfully discover divine truths, the Vision of Kynde in B.11 and both Imaginatif’s and Anima’s ensuing commentaries cast doubt upon the value of the narrator’s encyclopedic ambitions and, more generally, the exemplarist or symbolic view of nature as a site for spiritually useful knowledge. Langland not only borrows and sometimes reshapes encyclopedic lore, but also actively, and skeptically, engages the mode of thought that produced encyclopedic texts.Less
This chapter reads the narrator’s quest for “kynde knowynge” in the context of contemporary discourses on the value of the natural world as a site for knowledge. In his efforts to discover truth through accumulated experiences and observations, the poem’s narrator represents an encyclopedic impulse, the desire to collect, compile, and anatomize observations of the phenomenal world. While Langland’s characterization of God as Kynde seems to suggest confidence in the created world as a place where human beings might successfully discover divine truths, the Vision of Kynde in B.11 and both Imaginatif’s and Anima’s ensuing commentaries cast doubt upon the value of the narrator’s encyclopedic ambitions and, more generally, the exemplarist or symbolic view of nature as a site for spiritually useful knowledge. Langland not only borrows and sometimes reshapes encyclopedic lore, but also actively, and skeptically, engages the mode of thought that produced encyclopedic texts.
Rebecca Davis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778400
- eISBN:
- 9780191823831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778400.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Early and Medieval Literature
Developing the previous chapter’s concerns with judgment and burden-bearing, Chapter 5 examines the poem’s associations of evangelism and the obligations of kynde. In B.15 Anima contends that ...
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Developing the previous chapter’s concerns with judgment and burden-bearing, Chapter 5 examines the poem’s associations of evangelism and the obligations of kynde. In B.15 Anima contends that Christians must distribute not only physical necessities to the materially poor, but also spiritual goods to those who lack knowledge of Christ. Anima portrays non-Christians as figures of undeveloped nature, comparing them to rough cloth and barren fields. Accordingly, he enjoins the Christian clergy to teach or “cultivate” non-Christians so that the bareness of their natures might be clothed with grace and brought to salvation. This chapter concludes by examining an important episode in which Langland uses the versatile notion of kynde to negotiate nature’s gaps and deficiencies: because nature alone does not suffice to salvation Langland presents his most forceful argument for the necessity of human action—and here especially clerical action—to fulfill the created order established by God.Less
Developing the previous chapter’s concerns with judgment and burden-bearing, Chapter 5 examines the poem’s associations of evangelism and the obligations of kynde. In B.15 Anima contends that Christians must distribute not only physical necessities to the materially poor, but also spiritual goods to those who lack knowledge of Christ. Anima portrays non-Christians as figures of undeveloped nature, comparing them to rough cloth and barren fields. Accordingly, he enjoins the Christian clergy to teach or “cultivate” non-Christians so that the bareness of their natures might be clothed with grace and brought to salvation. This chapter concludes by examining an important episode in which Langland uses the versatile notion of kynde to negotiate nature’s gaps and deficiencies: because nature alone does not suffice to salvation Langland presents his most forceful argument for the necessity of human action—and here especially clerical action—to fulfill the created order established by God.
Rebecca Davis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778400
- eISBN:
- 9780191823831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778400.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Early and Medieval Literature
By tracing Natura’s appearances in Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus, and in the vernacular contributions of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, ...
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By tracing Natura’s appearances in Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus, and in the vernacular contributions of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, this chapter reveals how traditional allegories of nature lay the groundwork for Langland’s simultaneously innovative and recuperative model of kynde. Natura’s once cosmic influence is steadily circumscribed in these narratives as she becomes increasingly confined to an earthly realm, her powers often implicated in human carnality and moral failure. This chapter argues that Langland’s poetics of kynde attempts to revalue the terrestrial and the contingent by closing the gap between God and creation that the Natura tradition had opened.Less
By tracing Natura’s appearances in Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus, and in the vernacular contributions of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, this chapter reveals how traditional allegories of nature lay the groundwork for Langland’s simultaneously innovative and recuperative model of kynde. Natura’s once cosmic influence is steadily circumscribed in these narratives as she becomes increasingly confined to an earthly realm, her powers often implicated in human carnality and moral failure. This chapter argues that Langland’s poetics of kynde attempts to revalue the terrestrial and the contingent by closing the gap between God and creation that the Natura tradition had opened.
Rebecca Davis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778400
- eISBN:
- 9780191823831
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778400.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Early and Medieval Literature
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegory. These concerns converge in the poem’s rich ...
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Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegory. These concerns converge in the poem’s rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature’s creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem’s discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem’s place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland’s poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, this book offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem’s most perplexing interpretative problems.Less
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegory. These concerns converge in the poem’s rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature’s creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem’s discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem’s place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland’s poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, this book offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem’s most perplexing interpretative problems.
Matthew Woodcock
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199684304
- eISBN:
- 9780191764974
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684304.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter discusses Churchyard’s first publication, the contentious broadside poem Davy Dycars Dreame, which appeared in the summer of 1551. It proposes that this poem and the contention it ...
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This chapter discusses Churchyard’s first publication, the contentious broadside poem Davy Dycars Dreame, which appeared in the summer of 1551. It proposes that this poem and the contention it initiates helped establish Churchyard’s name as a published author. The chapter places the Dreame in the context of mid-Tudor commonwealth complaint literature and the textual responses to the economic crises of Somerset’s protectorate. Attention focuses on the controversy that the poem initiates following an attack in print from one Thomas Camell and traces arguments between Churchyard and William Baldwin, William Elderton, and Richard Beeard. It discusses how the contention raises questions about the role of poetry in public, political debate and proposes that Churchyard as an author becomes an object of discourse and debate, which was a significant, formative moment in his nascent literary career.Less
This chapter discusses Churchyard’s first publication, the contentious broadside poem Davy Dycars Dreame, which appeared in the summer of 1551. It proposes that this poem and the contention it initiates helped establish Churchyard’s name as a published author. The chapter places the Dreame in the context of mid-Tudor commonwealth complaint literature and the textual responses to the economic crises of Somerset’s protectorate. Attention focuses on the controversy that the poem initiates following an attack in print from one Thomas Camell and traces arguments between Churchyard and William Baldwin, William Elderton, and Richard Beeard. It discusses how the contention raises questions about the role of poetry in public, political debate and proposes that Churchyard as an author becomes an object of discourse and debate, which was a significant, formative moment in his nascent literary career.
Christopher Cannon
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198779438
- eISBN:
- 9780191824562
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779438.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, World Literature
The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only ...
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The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical. The efflorescence of Ricardian poetry was not a direct result of this change, but it was everywhere shaped by it. This book characterizes the close connection between literacy training and literature, as it is manifest in the fine and ambitious poetry by Gower, Langland, and Chaucer at this transitional moment. This is also a book about the way medieval training in grammar (or grammatica) shaped the poetic arts in the Middle Ages fully as much as rhetorical training. It answers the curious question of what language was used to teach Latin grammar to the illiterate. It reveals, for the first time, what the surviving schoolbooks from the period actually contain. It describes what form a “grammar school” took in a period from which no school buildings or detailed descriptions survive. And it scrutinizes the processes of elementary learning with sufficient care to show that, for the grown medieval schoolboy, well-learned books functioned, not only as a touchstone for wisdom, but as a knowledge so personal and familiar that it was equivalent to what we would now call “experience.”Less
The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical. The efflorescence of Ricardian poetry was not a direct result of this change, but it was everywhere shaped by it. This book characterizes the close connection between literacy training and literature, as it is manifest in the fine and ambitious poetry by Gower, Langland, and Chaucer at this transitional moment. This is also a book about the way medieval training in grammar (or grammatica) shaped the poetic arts in the Middle Ages fully as much as rhetorical training. It answers the curious question of what language was used to teach Latin grammar to the illiterate. It reveals, for the first time, what the surviving schoolbooks from the period actually contain. It describes what form a “grammar school” took in a period from which no school buildings or detailed descriptions survive. And it scrutinizes the processes of elementary learning with sufficient care to show that, for the grown medieval schoolboy, well-learned books functioned, not only as a touchstone for wisdom, but as a knowledge so personal and familiar that it was equivalent to what we would now call “experience.”
