Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media

TRUTH &TALES Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media Edited by FIONA SOMERSET and NICHOLAS WATSON INTERVENTIONS: NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor Truth and Tales J Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media Edited by FIONA SOMERSET & NICHOLAS WATSON THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS s COLUMBUS Copyright © 2015 by !e Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Truth and tales : cultural mobility and medieval media / edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson. pages cm. — (Interventions: new studies in medieval culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978 -0-8142 -1271 -4 (hardback) — ISBN 978 -0-8142 -9376 -8 (cd-rom) 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100 -1500 —History and criticism. 2. Civilization, Med- ieval. 3. Literature and society—England—History—To 1500 . 4. Mass media—Great Britain— History. I. Somerset, Fiona, editor. II. Watson, Nicholas, editor. PR 260 .T78 2015 820 .9'001 —dc 23 2014031664 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Printed by !omson-Shore, Inc. Cover image: Cessio actionis : A property deed handover. From the Omne Bonum, London, Brit- ish Library MS Royal 6 E VII . Used by permission. British Library Board. !e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z 39 .48 -1992 . 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 !e two editors, in company with eleven of the scholars who together wrote this book, dedicate it with respect and fondness to its twel#h contributor, Richard Firth Green: friend, colleague, teacher, mentor, model. C O N T E N T S J Acknowledgments ix Preface NICHOLAS WATSON and FIONA SOMERSET xi Introduction FIONA SOMERSET 1 PART ONE s THE TRUTH OF TALES 1 1 “The Vanishing Leper” and “The Murmuring Monk”: Two Medieval Urban Legends RICHARD FIRTH GREEN 19 P A R T T W O s REPETITION AND CONTINUITY: THE CLAIMS OF HISTORY 2 Don’t Cry for Me, Augustinus: Dido and the Dangers of Empathy THOMAS HAHN 41 3 The New Plow and the Old: Law, Orality, and the Figure of Piers the Plowman in B 19 STEPHEN YEAGER 60 4 The Exegesis of Tears in Lambeth Homily 17 M. J. TOSWELL 79 5 Mingling with the English in Laǟamon’s Brut FIONA SOMERSET 96 viii C o n t e n t s PART THREE s CULTURAL DIVIDES AND THEIR COMM ON GROUND 6 Unquiet Graves: Pearl and the Hope of Reunion ALASTAIR MINNIS 117 7 Mercantile Gentility in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. 2.38 MICHAEL JOHNSTON 135 8 Resident Aliens: The Literary Ecology of Medieval Mice LISA J. KISER 151 9 Toward the Common Good: Punishing Fraud among the Victualers of Medieval London BARBARA A. HANAWALT 168 PART FOUR s NEW MEDIA AND THE LITERATE LAITY 10 The Ignorance of the Laity: Twelve Tracts on Bible Translation NICHOLAS WATSON 187 11 York Merchants at Prayer: The Confessional Formula of the Bolton Hours ROBYN MALO 206 12 A London Legal Miscellany, Popular Law, and Medieval Print Culture KATHLEEN E. KENNEDY 223 13 Tourists and Tabulae in Late-Medieval England MICHAEL VAN DUSSEN 238 PART FIVE s THE TRUTH OF TALES 2 14 Oral Performance and the Force of the Law: Taillefer at Hastings and Antgulilibix in Smithers ANDREW TAYLOR 257 Publications of Richard Firth Green, 1976–2014 275 About the Editors and Contributors 279 Index 283 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS J he chapters in this book were rst presented as papers at the fourth T annual meeting of the Canada Chaucer Seminar in Toronto in April 2012 . !e editors thank Suzanne Conklin Akbari and William Rob- ins, co-organizers of the seminar, for helping us to think through the pro- posal on which the event and (by extension) the book were based, and for their e"cient and good-humored help with conference logistics: Truth and Tales might not have come into being without them. We also thank those who attended the seminar as speakers or audience for their thoughts, especially (again) Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Ethan Knapp, conference respondents. Funding for the conference was provided at the University of Toronto by the Canada Chaucer Seminar, the Department of English, the Centre for Med- ieval Studies, the Faculty of Law, St Michael’s College, Trinity College, the Pontical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and Victoria University (within the University of Toronto); at !e Ohio State University, by the Department of English and the Division of Arts and Humanities; and by the departments of English at the University of Western Ontario and Harvard University. We are grateful to all these entities for their generosity. We also thank Malcolm Litcheld and (again) Ethan Knapp, for agreeing to publish this book in !e Ohio State University Press New Studies in Med- ieval Culture series, the press readers for their many useful comments, and Lane Baker for his work on the index. Finally, we owe a special debt to Chris Chism for a particularly incisive and sensitive report which went well beyond any conceivable call of professional duty. Besides being of signicant value to many individual chapters, Chris’s report was instrumental in helping the editors rearticulate the book’s larger themes and structure. ix P R E F A C E J NICHOLAS WATSON a n d FIONA SOMERSET his book was conceived and written by colleagues and students of T Richard Firth Green, the book’s dedicatee and honorand of the conference from which it developed: “Truth and Tales: Medieval Popu- lar Culture and the Written Word,” held at the Canada Chaucer Seminar at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Toronto in April 2012 . A!er Oxford, the University of Toronto is Richard’s alma mater, and he himself spent much of his career in Canada, at Mount Allison University, the University of British Columbia, Bishop’s University, and the University of Western Ontario, where he taught for two decades before moving to "e Ohio State University in 2002 as Humanities Distinguished Professor of English. A towering #gure on the Canadian and American medieval scenes, it is #tting that he should be cele- brated in a book grounded in a Toronto conference but published by "e Ohio State University Press in its important new series Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Given the breadth of Richard’s interests and in$uence, not to mention his gregariousness, it is also #tting that the contributors to this book are a diverse group, including not only past and present department colleagues from Ohio State and the University of Western Ontario and former students but scholars with no relationship to either university. Although all of us would reckon ourselves among those touched by his scholarship, we are also a diverse group intellectually. Richard’s work has made its mark on a rather high proportion of the historicist work published in Middle English studies for well over thirty years. Yet it is one of his distin- guishing characteristics that he has always preferred to cultivate his own gar- den, quietly in$uencing those around him and aware of their work but not xi xii P r e fa c e seeking to lay down a method for others to follow, let alone to found a school. "e scholars who most in$uenced him have mostly been from outside Mid- dle English—apart, perhaps, from his Oxford tutor, John Burrow, and a few others of that generation, including George Rigg. In the case of his brilliant #rst book, Poets and Princepleasers, these included cultural historians such as Owen Bar#eld. In that of his great second book, A Crisis of Truth, and much of what has (so far) come a!er, they have included anthropologists, especially Jack Goody, and scholars of orality, especially Walter Ong, Brian Stock, and Michael Clanchy. All his work is indebted to French social historians, notably the “Annalistes,” Georges Duby and Jacques le Go%, and some of it also to their Russian counterpart, Aron Gurevich. "ose whom Richard has guided as students or colleagues will know the frequency and admiration with which names like these come up in conversation. But his advice, even when he will give it directly, most o!en has the e%ect of deepening one’s existing methods of thought and work, not pulling it in the direction he might himself wish to follow. "e result for this book, whose contributors seek to honor Richard by presenting him with something that emerges from their own work, not a pastiche of his, is a wider variety of approaches than perhaps typical of the festschri! genre. Even the book’s title bespeaks the results of his demand that others think for themselves. Only its #rst half, Truth and Tales, which explicitly alludes to A Crisis of Truth, is directly redolent of his work, acknowledging the strong impression that book makes on many chapters of this one, as well as noticing, allusively, the two books’ interest in the transmission and transformation of authoritative materials across the boundaries of time, culture, language, and genre. "e title’s second half, Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, broad- ens the object of the book’s interest out into various contiguous #elds, not all of which have been cultivated by Richard, among them social history, book history, vernacular studies, and media studies. Here emphasis falls on the continuities, communalities, and negotiations that linked what are still too o!en called the “high” and “low” cultures of the later Middle Ages, rather than on transformations or divides.

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