The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College of The

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts SPACE, ECONOMICS, AND THE POETIC IMAGINATION IN ENGLAND’S LITERARY LANDSCAPES, 1125-1590 A Dissertation in English by Sarah Dee Breckenridge © 2011 Sarah Dee Breckenridge Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 The dissertation of Sarah Dee Breckenridge was reviewed and approved* by the following: Robert R. Edwards Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Patrick Cheney Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature Caroline Eckhardt Professor of English and Comparative Literature Scott Smith Assistant Professor of English Lorraine Dowler Associate Professor of Geography and Women‘s Studies Robin Schulze Professor of English Head of the Department of English * Signatures are on file at the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT Post-conquest English writing focused in significant measure on historical and geographical accounts that identified and legitimated a new political order. Twelfth-century historical writers used the techniques of chronicle and genealogy to argue simultaneously for the continuity and distinctness of post-conquest national identity. A significant body of critical writing has shown the importance of these historical documents. Less apparent but equally important are the techniques of religious writing to the project of reformulating English identity. Religious writers give an extraordinary prominence to landscape as a foundation on which to build institutions, narratives, and national memories. This dissertation investigates the strategies and techniques of representing landscape in texts from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. I examine a series of texts that provide key moments in which the portrayal of landscape does both elegiac and political work. The landscape is an object of attention and even celebration, but it also serves ideological aims in establishing continuities over time, framing exemplary narratives, and structuring social memory. William of Malmesbury‘s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum appropriates the funerary landscape of Anglo-Saxon England in order to establish and regulate a national memory that combines native and foreign conceits. The South English Legendary uses the language of cartography to resituate Worcester as the center of Christian geographical consciousness. The landscape of Chaucer‘s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales represents a new sphere of civic and economic movement within established space. And finally, Langland and Spenser devise new ways of turning political landscapes back into the imagination. Without losing political resonance, they emphasize iii landscape as a domain of exploration and discovery that serves at the same time as a figure for art and authorship. My approach combines the formal and historical methods of literary analysis with the interpretive tools of cultural geography. Each text is a carefully crafted artifact fully conscious of its tradition, rhetorical claims, and literary genre. Each is specifically situated in a historical context as propaganda, devotion, satire, or allegory. The uses made of space across these works become fully visible, however, through the interpretive resources of modern cultural geography. Landscape is not simply local or topical but invested with social, political, and imaginative significance. It is the medium on which memory is recorded and recovered in narrative, ceremony, and lived experience. It is also the domain in which imagination can push back against history in order to forge new possibilities for understanding identity. The primary texts in the dissertation represent key moments in a narrative of English identity, sustained through religious writing rather than secular history or panegyric. Together, these texts outline a narrative of landscape‘s use in early religious writing. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, physical landscapes functioned as spaces on which to consolidate national and regional identity, spheres of political and economic movement, and finally domains for the poetic imagination. My examination of this narrative reverses the traditional claim that history dictates how people read the landscape, and suggests instead that poetic manifestations of physical landscapes dictate how people read and write identity. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. ………………………………..……………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One. The Soil‘s Holy Bodies: Chorography and Nation in William of Malmesbury‘s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum ……………………………..………………………………... 31 Chapter Two. From Nation to Region: Mapping Worcestershire in the South English Legendary ……………………………………………………………..... 79 Chapter Three. Economic Mobilities in Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales ……………………….. 119 Chapter Four. Poetic Geographies in Langland‘s Piers Plowman …………………………… 158 Chapter Five. Cognitive Landscapes in Spenser‘s The Faerie Queene, Book Two ……….…. 208 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………. 253 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….. 256 v Introduction As early as the eighth century, the English were preoccupied with identifying the world and their place within it. Central to this project was the use of landscapes to regulate national memory in legal charters, mappaemundi, literature, and other media. This dissertation considers how literary representations of physical space informed English identity in the medieval and early modern periods. Specifically, I trace three types of literary landscapes that developed from the twelfth through the sixteenth century to demonstrate that landscapes served national, regional, economic and imaginative purposes in England by establishing continuities over time, framing exemplary narratives, and structuring social memory. Space has long been recognized as an important category in explorations of medieval literature and culture. The publication of Henri Lefebvre‘s La production de l’espace (1974), and the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu, have encouraged literary scholars to read space as a structure imbued with political, social, and economic meaning. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka write, for example, ―space is thoroughly imbued with quantities and qualities marking the presence of bodies, signs, and thoughts that had disappeared from view.‖1 Cartographical concerns have also captured the modern imagination. Studies by Daniel Birkholz, Evelyn Edson, and Alfred Hiatt all consider how mappaemundi inform our understanding of medieval culture.2 This project moves beyond spatial theory and cartography to consider how physical landscapes were used to define nascent communities in medieval and early modern England. According to leading cultural geographers James and Nancy Duncan, ―Identities are performed in and through landscapes.‖3 By observing England‘s literary landscapes, I expose a fundamental aspect of medieval and early modern identity- building. 1 Scholarly approaches to early-period landscapes often suffer from one of two omissions: they disregard historical circumstances, or they disregard the literary imagination. In the first case, scholars focus on the forms and features of landscapes without considering the historical climates that generated them. Studies by E.R. Curtius, Niels Bugge Hansen, and Paul Piehler, for example, all focus exclusively on the aesthetics of medieval landscapes, while others discuss landscape types without positioning their discussion within a larger historical narrative of spatial theory.4 Catherine Clarke considers the locus amoenus in literature from the fifth to the fifteenth century, but because she fails to theorize medieval approaches to landscape, her study merely chronicles literary representations of this topoi, rather than demonstrating how the topoi contributes to historical understandings of space and identity.5 Studies that do consider the historicity of physical landscapes are often historical to a fault. In Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing‘s collection, essays consider the influence of history on the Bewcastle monument and Bede‘s Jarrow, for example.6 In each case, historical moments are recovered through literature, but historical verity is assumed without taking into account the literary artifacts that inform this history. As a consequence, these studies fail to realize literary strategies of historical and geographical representation. Landscapes replace literature as texts, rendering irretrievable spaces the sole authority on historical conditions. Lefebvre critiques such approaches to spatial studies, arguing, Does it make sense to speak of a ―reading‖ of space? Yes and no. Yes, inasmuch as it is possible to envisage a ―reader‖ who deciphers or decodes and a ―speaker‖ who expresses himself by translating his progression into a discourse. But no, in that social space can in no way be compared to a blank page upon which a specific message as been inscribed…. Both natural and urban spaces are, if 2 anything, ―over-inscribed‖: everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory. Rather than signs, what one encounters here are directions—multifarious and overlapping instructions. If there is indeed a text, inscription of writing is to be found here, it is in a context of conventions, intentions and order. (2.12)7 Space alone is untenable as a historical record because it is not just a producer but also a product of history. In Lefebvre‘s idiom, it is a ―stake, the locus

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