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Complete Dissertation Final Draft The Ecology of Reform: Land and Labor from Piers Plowman to Edmund Spenser William McLeod Rhodes, Jr. Charleston, South Carolina B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 2007 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia April 2015 _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ ii iii Abstract The Ecology of Reform offers a new literary history of English vernacular reformism from William Langland to Edmund Spenser, uncovering a deep genealogy of political ecological thought in the Piers Plowman tradition, English Reformation literature, and Irish colonial writings. I argue that the figure of the agrarian worker emerged as a key figure in this period for imagining processes of social change in terms of humanity’s relationship to the earth. Departing from generic categories like the pastoral, and crossing the medieval-modern divide, I consider a range of texts from Middle English husbandry manuals to Reformation-era polemical tracts and Elizabethan colonial literature in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which agrarian laborers, landscapes, and economies mediate the role of nature in shaping human societies. The Ecology of Reform traces a distinct canon of reformist poetry that uses allegory, alliteration, and stylistic roughness to imagine and affect the complex process of cultural change as it unfolds within specific historical ecologies from the aftermath of the Black Plague to the early modern colonization of Ireland. iv v Acknowledgements I never would have made it this far without the guidance and encouragement of my director, Elizabeth Fowler, whose kind attention, unwavering belief, and challenging advice have spurred every phase of this project. Bruce Holsinger shaped this project from its inception as an inspiring interlocutor who supported my tendency to be more fox than hedgehog. And finally, John Parker’s care as a reader, rigor as a thinker, and generosity as a teacher has helped this dissertation avoid countless inconsistencies, infelicities, and errors. All those that remain, however, are mine entirely. The Medieval Academy of America provided much-needed support during the final year of this project thanks to their generous award of the Schallek Fellowship. My deepest gratitude goes to my family – Dee, Mac, Dorothy, and Anna, whose love has made all of this possible. In the years it took me to write this dissertation, friends picked me up and inspired me at every turn, especially when I felt most lost. Rachel Geer, my academic partner in crime and confidante, has sustained me throughout this journey. Jenny Foy has been an insightful reader and a most steadfast friend from the very beginning. Kristin Gilger and Jason Eversman have taught me so much in countless conversations over many delicious meals. Drew Scheler, Ben Lee, Michael Pickard, Eric Rettberg, Anna Ioanes, Tim Duffy, Zachary Stone, Jesse Bordwin, Elizabeth Erickson Voss, and Victoria Long have made life in Charlottesville and the process of getting a PhD a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been. And lastly, thanks to Jess Lee, who swooped in during the home stretch and gave me strength to finish. vi vii Table of Contents Introduction The Ecology of Reform: Literature, Labor, and Political Ecology 1 Chapter One Medieval Political Ecology: Labor and Agency on the Half Acre 25 Chapter Two The Spirit of the Beehive: The Worker, the Sovereign, and the Writer in the Piers Plowman Tradition 63 Chapter Three Labors of Reform: The Political Ecology of the English Reformation from Skelton to Bale 111 Chapter Four The Dialectic of Reform: Poetic Inspiration and Colonial Ecology in Edmund Spenser’s Late Work 159 Works Cited 209 viii 1 Introduction The Ecology of Reform: Literature, Labor, and Political Ecology Sometime in the latter half of the fourteenth century, an English poet tried to understand the relationship between work and waste within prevailing moral, legal, and economic frameworks. How could these two seemingly opposed activities depend upon one another within a functioning economy? The poet thought the best way to tease apart these intertwined aspects of social life was through a personification allegory, pitting a figure representing productive work, Wynnere, against a figure representing leisured consumption, Wastoure. As these two prosopopoetic creations argue and insult each other, it becomes clear that any separation between the production of wealth and the destruction of wealth is nearly impossible. This effectively makes Wastoure the winner of the debate, but his argument insists that these two figures need one another. When Wastoure asks, “What scholde worthe of that wele if no waste come?” (253), he effectively concedes that winning “wele” is necessary, but it is also worthless if it remains unused and unconsumed. In Wastoure’s words, “Whoso wel schal wyn a wastour moste he fynde” (390).1 What Wynnere and Wastoure articulates is the need for models of thought and art capable of grasping the relational dimension of social reality, where fixed labels like producer and consumer or worker and waster are not adequate to the complex, social circulatory system of cyclical agrarian production. This need for such models of thought and art was particularly acute thanks to changing market relations in the aftermath of the Black Plague (Breen 217; Barr, Socioliterary Practice 11). Wynnere and Wastoure meets this need, paradoxically, through an allegory that grants such labels separate ontological 1 All my quotations of Wynnere and Wastoure are drawn from Stephanie Trigg’s edition. 2 status, only to reveal their mutual constitution in conflict.2 In so doing, the poem explores the order and movement of goods and energy within human communities: the oikos, or household arrangement, of the court, city, and country – in other words, England’s political economy.3 As Wynnere and Wastoure discovers, however, tracing these relationships is impossible without addressing the land and labor from which wealth and its waste spring, pushing the investigation towards the oikos of human and non-human communities, forms of life, and forces of nature – in other words England’s political ecology. Wynnere shows this when he describes the environmental effects of Wastoure’s laxness: “His londes liggen alle ley, his lomes aren solde, / Downn bene his dowfehowses, drye bene his poles […] This wikkede weryed thefe that Wastoure men calles, / That if he life may longe this lande will he stroye” (234-43). Like Wynnere and Wastoure’s relationship with each other, these personified agents have a mutually affecting relationship with their land, animals, infrastructure, and the people that live and work within this assemblage. Understanding waste and leisure means defining it against labor, which for the poet of Wynnere and Wastoure, among the many others studied here, meant the world-shaping, landscape-altering, community-defining task of manual toil. The neglect of this toil is vividly reflected in the landscape that bears the marks of its absence. This turn from economic morality to agrarian ecology as the framework for describing the consequences of Wastoure’s actions (or inactions) crystallizes the mode of thought that is the subject of The Ecology of Reform, just as the poem’s form as an alliterative 2 For a description of this phenomenon in another tradition of personification allegory, see Masha Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul. 3 As Katharine Breen puts it, “the poem’s personifications are at once literary devices and instruments of thought that enable readers to define, manipulate, and evaluate new economic concepts” (187). 3 personification allegory characterizes many of the works it studies. These poetic and intellectual modes together create a tradition of reformist writing that understands work as a mediator between nature and culture, situating institutional religion and political organization within a broad agrarian ecology that is at once the symbol and the site of enacting general cultural reformation. This turn to the agrarian landscape and community in Wynnere and Wastoure also presages the appearance of another personification of waste in William Langland’s Piers Plowman. If, as Katherine Breen argues, Wynnere and Wastoure “bequeaths to Piers Plowman […] a recognizable form of personification allegory” (222-3), then the appearance of Wastour in passus 6 represents Langland’s attempt to situate the problem of economic interdependence within broader problems of embodiment, agency, and human need. Piers Plowman explores the spiritual consequences of human entanglement within the economic and ecological relationships represented in Wynnere and Wastoure, inaugurating a poetic mode of writing religious reform that attends to the relations among land, labor, theological concepts, and institutional power structures (especially the manor and the church) that would continue to find strong adherents for the next two centuries and beyond. These two closely related poems, in their twinned approach to elucidating economic problems through allegory, reveal the extent to which thinking economically also means thinking ecologically. As Eleanor Johnson argues, these two poems represent a form of “medieval ecocriticism” that “aesthetically renders the undeniable connectedness of all people” (472) through discourses of waste inflected by anxieties
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