Showing papers in "Speculum in 1995"

Censorship and cultural change in late-medieval England : vernacular theology, the Oxford translation debate and Arundel's constitutions of 1409

Abstract: L'A. s'interesse au rapport que la censure entretient avec l'echange culturel durant le Bas Moyen-Age en Angleterre. Pour ce faire, il prend le cas particulier de la theologie redigee en langue vernaculaire : il s'agit de cerner la nature du debat que l'Universite d'Oxford engagea sur les problemes de traduction, notamment en ce qui concerne les Constitutions d'Arundel datant de 1409

Academic Sermons at Oxford in the Early Fifteenth Century

Abstract: L'A. etudie les sermons academiques prononces dans les universites d'Oxford a la fin du XV e siecle. Il s'agit, a partir de la, de reconstituer la formation prodiguee en matiere d'homiletique dans le cursus theologique de ces facultes a la meme epoque. Pour ce faire, l'A. se fonde sur les textes retrouves et dont il publie quelques extraits (parfois en latin non traduit) pour illustrer son propos. Un sermon est cite integralement en latin a la fin de l'article : celui de la cathedrale de Worcester (W-22)

The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity

Abstract: Gower's longer poems, MO, VC, and CA, have frequently been studied with reference to the political events of the poet's time, especially the turbulent last decade of the reign of Richard II when VC and CA both apparently underwent substantial revision. Grady looks at a different work, the poem that Macaulay entitled "In Praise of Peace," in the context of a different era, the equally turbulent first years of the reign of Henry IV; and he finds that, rather than being an "inert, if elegant, piece of Lancastrian propaganda" as commonly thought, the poem actually betrays the "anxieties of its historical moment": that it reflects, more consciously than has ever been recognized, the incoherencies of the "legitimating discourse" that defended the rights of a conqueror and usurper to the throne, and also, in the subtlety of its strategy, the difficulties inherent in giving advice to a king. Gower opens his poem with a straightfaced echo of the rhetoric of the official Lancastrian justification of the usurpation, but his ostensible project, the advocacy of peace, is obviously difficult to reconcile with the necessity of defending Henry's use force to assert his right to the throne. The problems become evident when Gower resorts to his favorite technique of historical analogy: the exempla that he chooses must be forced to fit the context (as we can see by comparing them to the same stories in CA), and still fail to fully support his point. He begins his argument, for instance, by apparently offering a choice between Solomon's course and Alexander's. Each must be so beset by qualifications, however, that neither offers a clear model for Henry (the implications of the comparison to Alexander, in fact, seem particularly dangerous at this time), nor does either support the complex balancing of wisdom and the need for war that Gower finally advocates in lines 64-70. For the alert reader, the poet raises more questions here about Henry's rule and about the possibility of reconciling wisdom and conquest than he chooses to answer: rather than exploring the contradictions, both in the position he adopts and in his method, Gower merely plunges on. The later example of Constantine (lines 337-57) is even more contrived, for there are conflicting legends of his conversion, and Constantine thus offers no clear distinction between the "law of grace and pity" and "the law of right." But Gower selects what is necessary for his point, just as he selects, and omits a great deal, in the portrait that he chooses to paint of Henry, in order to draw the analogy between his king and Constantine. "We might atttribute this strategy to the triumph of hope over experience or, given the genre, advice over history," Brady writes. "But I would suggest that it is precisely Gower's twenty-five years' hard experience as a poet writing to kings about kingship that makes him simultaneously so conventional in his praises and so subtle in his exasperation. For that is what I take 'In Praise of Peace' to be, in the end — a poem of exasperation and a valediction to the mirror-for-princes genre, in which Gower's great fidelity to the genre's formal demands and deep grasp of its philosophical premises produce a text that is always on the verge of revealing the intractable paradoxes of that form and the incoherence (or tendentiousness) of that philosophy. 'In Praise of Peace' is a kind of fugitive art, constantly fleeing from the contradictions that it is incessantly uncovering." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1]

Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete

Abstract: According to Aristotle, the household was one of the constituent parts of the state. He defined the household in its complete form as consisting of slaves and freemen. Within the household he discerned three primary relationships: those between master and slave, husband and wife, and father and child.' Essential to Aristotle's definition of the household is the inclusion of kin and nonkin members, a circumstance that persisted well into the modern period. Yet medieval social historians have for the most part ignored nonkin members of households, and histories of the family and of households have concentrated almost exclusively on family members. Some of the sources encourage this emphasis. One example is the abundant tax records and census figures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notably in Florence but also in other Italian and Provencal towns. Historians working with those sources often use the word "household" as a synonym for "family" or "clan." When David Herlihy refers to the hearth or the household, he means the family members.2 Richard Goldthwaite's description of the family as "a small group" takes into account only those related by blood or marriage living in one household.3 F. W. Kent, in his study of three Florentine families, declares, "Here a household is understood to be a group of kinsmen living in the same house or in several houses which, in the manner of the time, were joined together to form in effect one dwelling. . ..4 The practice of defining the household as a group of coresident kin persists even when the sources offer material relevant to household members who were not related by blood or marriage.5 The best of these sources is the rich fund of late-medieval notarial records, which have yet to be exploited as they could be to develop a broader conception of people's intimate, domestic space. House-

Popular Revolt, Dynastic Politics, and Aristocratic Factionalism in the Early Middle Ages: The Saxon Stellinga Reconsidered

Abstract: Peter Blickle, the great scholar of the German Peasants' War of 1525, has asserted that "in the late Middle Ages Europe saw itself confronted with a phenomenon which had been unknown in the previous history of the west-the peasant rebellion."' Is it indeed true that there are no reports of peasant revolts before the fourteenth century and in the early Middle Ages in particular? If one were to answer this question based on the Western scholarship of popular uprisings that has flourished over the last few decades, one might concur with Blickle, since this research has focused almost exclusively on the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.2 Yet there are a few recorded examples of peasant rebellions from the early Middle Ages, although dramatically fewer than in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The early-medieval revolt about which we have the most information is the Saxon Stellinga uprising of 841-42. Gerward, the author of the Annals of Xanten, described this revolt with the following words: "That same year throughout all of Saxony the power of the slaves rose up violently against their lords. They usurped for themselves the name Stellinga [apparently Old Saxon for 'companions' or 'comrades'], and they perpetrated much madness. And the nobles of that land were violently persecuted and humiliated by the slaves."3 As the only recorded European popular revolt between the sixth and tenth century,4 the rebellion of the Saxon Stellinga

The rhetoric of riddling in late-medieval england: the 'oxford' riddles, the secretum philosophorum, and the riddles in piers plowman

Abstract: Scholars have long recognized that riddles were part of literary and intellectual culture in late-medieval England, and considerable effort has been expended to ponder a prominent handful of late-fourteenth-century writings in Latin and English that use them, including John Ergome's commentary on the Vaticinium of "John of Bridlington," the seditious vernacular letters circulated during the Rising of 1381, and most famously Piers Plowman, all notorious for the use of peculiar and difficult riddles that flaunt their interpretative challenges and the social power of their hermeneutical barriers. Comparatively vast gaps, however, remain in our knowledge of the range, distinctive modes, and customary contexts of riddles in this period, so that the isolated uses of them that have been studied seem, in May McKisack's words about Piers Plowman, to speak "to us from a forgotten world, drowned, mysterious, irrecoverable."' What follows is a discussion and a set of transcriptions of a newly identified and correlated body of materials from the early fourteenth through the late fifteenth century that display the presence and principles of riddling in latemedieval rhetorical materials and intellectual culture more completely than previously available texts have allowed. My hope thereby is to begin to fill in this lacuna in literary, intellectual, and rhetorical history so that we might appreciate more fully the period's literary, religious, and political applications of such materials. Finally, I propose on the basis of these materials a new solution to some of the riddles in Piers Plowman, including the central riddle sequence in that poet's successively revised work: that of Patience at the end of the banquet with the Doctor of Divinity, a riddle that the poet presents in very different forms in the B and the C texts of the poem. I speak here of "the poet's" work and revisions advisedly, for although it seems nearly otiose at this date to add

The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent

Abstract: The Clerk's Tale is the most elusive and least reassuring of Chaucer's religious tales. Though bad things happen to good people in the other religious narratives in the Canterbury collection, repeated assurances in those tales confirm that the world is governed by a powerful God intent on rewarding his faithful followers. By comparison, the Clerk and his tale are disturbingly silent on the subject of God's plan until the very end, leading many readers to categorize the tale as secular, developing in what seems "a moral void" (Cooper, 137), or worse, a perverse story of a bullying tyrant and his spineless wife.' In spite of Griselda's virtue, which is attributed to God's grace, she suffers alone, and the reasons for her suffering are made to seem arbitrary and weak. A domestic story of husband and wife set neither in the remote past nor far off in a heathenfilled land, the tale proceeds without the special effects of divine intervention that help guide our response to the stories of Constance, St. Cecilia, and the child-martyr of the Prioress's Tale. Miracles, mass conversions, and mysterious sea journeys seem out of the question in the closed and predictable world of Saluzzo. Even when Walter's people urge him to consider the problem of death, as arbitrary as it is inevitable, the solution they put forward is not transcendent or spiritual but prudential: Walter should settle down, take a wife, and produce an heir. Walter answers the people's mundane "preyere" to "delivere us out of al this bisy drede" in the pragmatic spirit in which it was delivered: he agrees to marry and promptly produces a child (albeit a girl child), removing what seems the only obstacle to complete "felicitee" in the realm.2 Even when religious motifs enter the poem, in the biblical allusions attending the description of Griselda's virtue, they enter quietly, with no apparent intention of upsetting the values of prudent accommodation and good government that guide the poem's opening scenes. On the contrary, Griselda's virtue is almost immediately "translated" into the "commune profit" (385, 431). Having observed her transformation from poor subject to wise co-ruler, the people surmise that she was sent by God to preserve the realm and promote the common good:

East Meets West in Chaucer's Squire's and Franklin's Tales

Abstract: Near the conclusion of the so-called marriage group in the Canterbury Tales sits Chaucer's Squire's Tale, a strange, hybrid narrative of love and betrayal located in the Mongol empire. ' Surprisingly, however, none of the many modern readers of the tale has made a study of how the Squire's Tale's setting in the East is connected to its view of the subject that dominates Fragments IV and V of the Canterbury Tales: love, power, and the negotiation of a settlement in the prolonged war between the sexes. The omission is especially perplexing when the Squire's Tale is read in combination with its companion narrative, the Franklin's Tale. Indeed, the relation of Squire to Franklin is normally seen as old money to new, aristocrat to parvenu without reference either to the question of female power or to the geographical and cultural oppositions upon which the stories also insist. When the Squire is understood as making a contribution to the conversation initiated by the Wife of Bath and carried on at least through the Franklin's Tale, it is generally on the subject of true nobility, chivalry, or gentillesse-not on the "gentle sex." Donald Baker even goes so far as to rechristen G. L. Kittredge's marriage group a "gentillesse group" in order to include the Squire in its discussion.2 A closer examination of the cultural geography of the Squire's and Franklin's Tales will show that, rather than undermining false social pretensions in his upstart Franklin, Chaucer is more interested in commenting on a different sort of excess here: an excess of female sexual power connected by both the Squire and Franklin with the exotic East. To be sure, I do not deny that the Squire and Franklin are characters well suited to dramatize and discipline this surplus of female power. But I will not be arguing that therefore the point of either tale is the narrator's reflection in it. The Squire sets up an argument about women, pleasure, and the East that the Franklin will dismantle, and the Franklin's argument will in turn be put under the correction of the Physician; in each phase, we regard the teller as well as the tale. But our analysis should never stop with the teller, whose limitations may be seen as merely heuristic, taken in the context of his total performance.3

Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman

Abstract: Early contractarians such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stretched the idea of contract to encompass all realms of society: the political, the economic, the familial. Contract is still a fundamental concept for many modern disciplines; indeed, it names fields in political philosophy, in economics, and in law. There was no such governing notion of contract in the fourteenth century, no metaphor of exchange that could link together ideas about agency, conditions, profit, and responsibility from different disciplines and provide a theory of the basis of society itself. Retrospectively it may seem that scattered ideas about contract were, in fact, being developed: for instance, by the common law in the actions called debt, covenant, and trespass; by constitutional theory, in conciliarism; by economic thought, in a miscellany of glosses and laws redressing fraud and regulating prices and markets; by theology, in discussions of will, intention, and the marriage sacrament; by the civil law, in Roman law of contract; and by canon law, in treatments of individual consent and incapacity in marriage. Yet nothing about this discontinuous hodgepodge predicts that a fundamental connection among those topics will emerge in later political theory. To find a powerful combination of social analysis and political philosophy that takes up the issues deliberated by the later contractarians, we can call upon a medieval allegorist. In a brilliant intellectual synthesis, the fourteenth-century English text we call Piers Plowman draws ideas about agency from three separate arenas in order to inaugurate a proleptic general consideration of contract: the three ideas are unity of person (from marriage law), just price (from economic thought), and constitutional monarchy (from political philosophy). Centuries before modern contract theory, Piers Plowman manages to think across disciplinary boundaries, to see agency in its various philosophical, legal, sexual, economic, and political contexts, and to invite its audience to compare the different accounts of agency

Remembering the Annunciation in Medieval Polyphony

Abstract: Il est difficle de reunir le repertoire de musique polyphonique consacre a la fete de l'Annonciation, notamment pour les XIII e et XIV e siecles. C'est pourtant parmi les fetes mariales la plus celebree des le V e siecle de notre ere en Occident. L'A. tente donc de retracer les contours de ce repertoire en examinant d'abord le theme de l'Annonciation dans la culture medievale, puis en l'examinant dans la liturgie de la meme epoque. Il s'appuie enfin sur les decouvertes les plus recentes en matiere d'histoire de la liturgie consacree a cette fete mariale

The Troubadour's Lady Reconsidered Again

Abstract: Long a widespread and comfortable assumption in medieval studies, the notion of "courtly love" has come under considerable attack in recent years. Beginning in the 1960s, American scholars such as D. W. Robertson, Jr., E. Talbot Donaldson, and John F. Benton sharply criticized the whole concept, suggesting that it is a "myth" of rather recent origin, that it is an impediment to understanding medieval texts, and that it ought to be banned from scholarly discourse. ' Being rather crude and unrefined by modern intellectual standards, the original theory of courtly love was very vulnerable to such criticism. By calling it into question the Robertsonians performed a useful and salutary service to scholarship, launching a much-needed reassessment which is still going on. And yet, because these revisionist scholars accepted at face value some of the most questionable assumptions underlying the theory, their critique of it often presents a view of medieval literature and society just as distorted as that which it seeks to replace. The total effect of their intervention has thus been to confuse the issue thoroughly rather than to clarify it. Among the tacit assumptions shared by the proponents of courtly love and its recent critics, I should like to mention two. The first posits a direct, unproblematic relationship between medieval literature and medieval society in which the former is viewed primarily as a reflection of the latter. Courtly love was seen by its proponents as essentially a phenomenon of social history, accessible to us today, however, almost exclusively through poetic texts. Far from challenging this special relationship, the Robertsonians invoked the principle of irony in the reinterpretation of medieval texts, in order to bring them into line with what they knew, or thought they knew, about medieval society. The second, related assumption posits for medieval literature and society a degree of homogeneity and uniformity that neither possessed. In combating the sweeping generalities of courtly love, Robertson imposed on medieval literature and

Two fragments of an old english manuscript in the library of corpus christi college, cambridge

Abstract: In 1962 appeared one of the classic articles in Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies, the publication of two eleventh-century fragments of leaves of Old English found in the binding of a seventeenth-century printed book in the library of the University of Kansas, Lawrence.' The fragment that more nearly concerns the present article now carries the shelf mark Pryce MS C2:1 in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library (formerly Y 103). It is a large part of a single leaf from The Legend of the Holy Cross before Christ, an edifying work known in full only in a twelfth-century copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, fols. 14v-20v (Ker no. 310, item 12; Cameron B 3.3.5).2 Working from a photograph the great paleographer and codicologist N. R. Ker attributed the hand of the Kansas fragment to the scribe who also wrote the texts of two bits of the same work found in the library of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury (1559-75), at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now MS 557 (Ker no. 73). He concluded, no doubt rightly, that all three are part of one manuscript.3