Disciplining the Tongue: Speech and Emotion in Later Middle English Poetry by Spencer Strub a Dissertation Submitted in Partial

Disciplining the Tongue: Speech and Emotion in Later Middle English Poetry By Spencer Strub A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Medieval Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Maura Nolan, Chair Professor Steven Justice Professor David Hult Summer 2018 Abstract Disciplining the Tongue: Speech and Emotion in Later Middle English Poetry by Spencer Strub Doctor of Philosophy in English and Medieval Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Maura Nolan, Chair Late medieval English writers confronted what they saw as a crisis of false display. Across genres, the relationship between the inner self and the outer world was depicted as one prone to deception and hypocrisy. Speech was the privileged site for this concern. For religious writers, the solution was stringent verbal and emotional honesty. Poets, by contrast, exploited this perceived disjunction for the purposes of their art. But both drew on a vocabulary that linked speech and emotion, first developed in fourteenth-century instruction on the “sins of the tongue.” This lexicon included words like “scorn” and “shame” as well as those less recognizable today: “sclaundren,” for example, meant “to induce shame,” while “boistous” speech was honest, rude, and affectively harsh. As the first chapter of Discplining the Tongue shows, this vocabulary initially provided a devout reading public with a sense of belonging and a language for itself. “Boistous” texts fostered scorn, anger, and shame: emotions invariably identified with speech acts, each capable of binding a community of strangers together. This lexicon proved portable, and subsequent chapters turn to its place in foundational works of English poetry. William Langland’s Piers Plowman repeatedly invokes shame, but its shame does not create a sense of virtue or belonging, as contemporary religious writing would suggest. Instead, its scenes of misspeaking link shame with learning; as the poem repeats these scenes, the act of poetic making itself comes to seem a shameful but licit act of discovery. Chaucer makes mirth, comfort, and pleasure––words that elsewhere describe the act of prayer––the emotional norm that governs the telling of the Canterbury Tales: sacred pleasure becomes the pleasure of idle fiction. The fourth chapter turns from the lexis of medieval emotion to its physiology. In Mum and the Sothsegger and Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, cautionary images that depict affect swelling and bursting out as intemperate speech become self-reflexive figures for poetic making. These reinvented metaphors suggest how elements of truth-telling satire and religious instruction become incorporated into poetic self-presentation. Rather than offering a narrative of secularization, however, the project as a whole points to the common ground where literature and prescriptive religious writing meet. Antinomies of ethics and aesthetics resolve in a shared understanding of the speaking self, its inward feelings realized only in intersubjective exchange. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 1. The Public Sins of the Tongue 16 2. Langland’s Shame 52 3. Chaucer’s Rules for Speech 88 4. Hard Truths 116 i Acknowledgments This dissertation is the product of many hands, many eyes, many conversations, and many acts of generosity and kindness. It may not be possible to adequately account for all the debts incurred in the years of research and writing, but it is still a pleasure to try. My first thanks are due to my dissertation director Maura Nolan, without whose guidance this project would never have begun. As a reader, Maura has an uncanny ability to understand what one really meant to write. Her comments have consistently pushed the project to be more true to its sources, more original, and more interesting, not to mention better written. Maura has been a true mentor in all things academic, from research to teaching to mentorship itself. Our conversations over the past seven years – which have sometimes unfolded as leisurely brunches at the Sunny Side Cafe, and sometimes as frantic cross-country phone calls – have made me a more confident scholar and a better thinker. Thank you. I am also deeply grateful to the other members of my committee. I first met with Steven Justice before I began applying to PhD programs. He has been a rigorous reader and interlocutor ever since; his insights have improved this dissertation from the sentence level to its methodological framing. The questions behind this project emerge from a seminar paper I wrote for David Hult. David has been a generous critic, quick to point out the oversights of Middle English studies, and I am glad to count him as a mentor and a friend. Many members of the Berkeley faculty have helped shape my scholarship and teaching. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Jennifer Miller, and Emily Thornbury taught me how to be a medievalist. Kevis Goodman has been a ceaseless advocate. My work on the page and in the classroom has benefited from conversations with Oliver Arnold, C. D. Blanton, Kathleen Donegan, Nadia Ellis, Eric Falci, Joshua Gang, Lyn Hejinian, David Landreth, David Marno, and James Grantham Turner. I could not ask for a better group of friends and colleagues than the graduate community at Berkeley. Over the past half-decade, Aileen Liu and José Villagrana have read every draft of every chapter, article, and conference paper I have written; they have helped me become a better teacher and academic citizen; and they have offered inspiration and commiseration every day. Thank you both for the fellowship we have made. When I arrived at Berkeley, I knew nothing about graduate school and not much about Middle English literature; R. D. Perry taught me almost everything I needed to know. I am grateful for his guidance, his careful reading, and for our many conversations about Langland, Lydgate, and everything else. I am proud to have been a part of the Berkeley graduate medievalist community, and I want to say thank you for everything to Amy Clark, Sean Curran, Bernardo S. Hinojosa, Jacob Hobson, Marian Homans-Turnbull, Jennifer Lorden, Jasmin Miller, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, Michelle Ripplinger, Ben Saltzman, Jenny Tan, and Evan Wilson, each of whose thoughts have contributed to the dissertation that follows. I have also benefited from the expertise and conviviality of my colleagues from the English graduate community. Thank you to Aristides Dimitriou, Sarah Jessica Johnson, Evan Klavon, Christopher Mead, Lucy Sirianni, Jason Treviño, Brandon White, Esther Yu, and Isaac Zisman. To all of you, I hope I am able to repay some of the kindnesses you have shown me. ii While this dissertation began in California, several chapters were written in Massachusetts, and I have had the good fortune of participating in another remarkable community of medieval scholars there. Nicholas Watson introduced me to Chaucer as an undergraduate and now, at the end of graduate school, continues to introduce me to understudied Middle English and Anglo- Norman devotional texts; throughout, he has been a generous reader and advocate. My understanding of late medieval devotional culture is indebted to conversations with Amy Appleford, who also helped welcome me to Boston University’s Department of English. James Simpson has offered support and encouragement throughout my graduate career. I owe each of them a debt of gratitude. The same goes for friends and colleagues I met in greater Boston: thank you to Aparna Chaudhuri, Taylor Cowdery, Helen Cushman, Anna Kelner, Stella Wang, Erica Weaver, and Eric Weiskott. Thank you, too, to Colin Moore and Jane Rosenzweig. Beyond Berkeley and Boston, I am grateful for the friendship and guidance of scholars including Katharine Breen, Megan Cook, Seeta Chaganti, Daniel Davies, Vincent Gillespie, Noah Guynn, Galena Hashhozheva, Carissa Harris, Robert Meyer-Lee, Travis Neel, Jenni Nuttall, Wendy Scase, Joe Stadolnik, Zachary Stone, Elizaveta Strakhov, Amanda Walling, Claire Waters, and David Watt. Special thanks are due to C. David Benson and Pamela Benson, whose kindness and generosity are well known but deserve to be celebrated at every opportunity. My students have consistently challenged my assumptions and provided new perspectives on the texts we study and how we study them. Thank you to the students I have taught at Berkeley, BU, and Harvard, and particular thanks to Matthew Bowie, Beth Hightower, and Alison Lafferty. Portions of this project were presented to the Harvard English Department, the Harvard Medieval Colloquium, the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, and the Making of Thomas Hoccleve Conference at the University of Manitoba. Participants in Berkeley Connect in English and the Berkeley Medieval Colloquium read and commented upon full chapters. I am grateful to the audiences and organizers of each of these venues for their questions and insights. Thank you, too, to the archivists and librarians of the Bancroft, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the British Library, and the Weston Library at Oxford. The research and writing of this dissertation was supported by the Bancroft Library, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of English at UC Berkeley, the James D. Hart Chair in English, and a Schallek Award of the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society – American Branch. Part of Chapter 2 will appear as “Learning from Shame” in Yearbook of Langland Studies 32, forthcoming in 2018. Finally, I want to thank my family: my father Tracy, who has been a tireless supporter of my education; my late and living grandparents, each a model of integrity and commitment; my great- aunt; my aunts and uncles and cousins; and the extended Naidu and Derenoncourt families. I owe particular thanks to two people. Ellora Derenoncourt is my first and most incisive reader, whose intellectual rigor inspires me daily, and without whom none of this would have been possible.

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