INTERVENTIONS New Studies in Medieval Culture Ethan Knapp, Series Editor Answerable Style The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England Edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS | COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Answerable style : the idea of the literary in medieval England / Edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway. p. cm. — (Interventions : new studies in medieval culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1207-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1207-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-9309-6 (cd) (print) 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2. Lit- erature, Medieval—History and criticism. I. Grady, Frank. II. Galloway, Andrew. III. Series: Interventions : new studies in medieval culture. 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ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 contents List of Illustrations vii Introduction The Medieval Literary ANDREW GALLowAY 1 PART I: The Literary between Latin andV ernacular Chapter 1 Horace’s Ars poetica in the Medieval Classroom and Beyond: The Horizons of Ancient Precept RITA COPELAnd 15 Chapter 2 Latin Composition Lessons, Piers Plowman, and the Piers Plowman Tradition WENDY SCASE 34 Chapter 3 Langland Translating TRAugott LAWLER 54 Chapter 4 Escaping the Whirling Wicker: Ricardian Poetics and Narrative Voice in The Canterbury Tales KATHERINE ZIEMAn 75 Chapter 5 Langland’s Literary Syntax, or Anima as an Alternative to Latin Grammar KATHARINE BREEn 95 vi CONTENTS Chapter 6 Speculum Vitae and the Form of Piers Plowman RALPH HANNA 121 Chapter 7 Petrarch’s Pleasures, Chaucer’s Revulsions, and the Aesthetics of Renunciation in Late-Medieval Culture ANDREW GALLowAY 140 PART II: Literarity in the Vernacular Sphere Chapter 8 Chaucer’s History-Effect STEVEN JUSTICE 169 Chapter 9 Seigneurial Poetics, or The Poacher, the Prikasour, the Hunt, and Its Oeuvre FRANK GRADY 195 Chapter 10 Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme MAURA NOLAn 214 Chapter 11 Troilus and Criseyde: Genre and Source LEE PAttERson 244 Chapter 12 The Silence of Langland’s Study: Matter, Invisibility, Instruction D. VANCE SMITH 263 Chapter 13 Voice and Public Interiorities: Chaucer, Orpheus, Machaut DAVID LAwton 284 Works Cited 307 Index 333 illustrations Figure 1 Anima’s speech of self-naming. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W), fol. 86v 101 Figure 2 Anima’s speech of self-naming. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 (F), fol. 61r 102 Figure 3 Ebstorf World Map, c. 1230–1250 109 Figure 4 Speculum theologiae. Table of the Ten Commandments. Robert de Lisle Psalter, London, British Library, MS Arundel 83 II, fol. 127v 112 Figure 5 Speculum theologiae. Table of the Seven Petitions of the Paternoster. London, British Library, MS Royal 1.B.x, fol. 4r 113 vii introduction The Medieval Literary ANDREW GALLOWAY N RECENT YEARS, scholars working in a range of periods have begun to I talk about aesthetics, form, and “the literary” in reanimated ways. A new emphasis, if not a movement, has emerged, in which what counts as dis- tinctly literary form and as the very category of literature is receiving atten- tion with a focus and energy suggesting a major reorientation of a number of familiar approaches, including historicism, theory, and gender studies. Such developments have proven immensely productive, and have already begun to generate historical and theoretical reflections on the critical shift itself. With very few exceptions, however, the scholars building and mapping this new emphasis have paid scant notice to medieval literary scholarship, much less the Middle Ages.1 This raises interesting theoretical and historical questions. Are, for instance, either the “premodern” materials or the ways in which they have been approached so stubbornly distinct from postmedieval things of all kinds? If so, one might wonder, is there any special value that such other- 1. See especially Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (March 2007): 558-69. As Grady’s essay in chapter 9 below notes, mention of a single medievalist, Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, appears in a bibliographical appendix, in a section entitled “Alternative Solutions to Problems Raised by New Formalism,” found at sitemaker.umich.edu/ pmla_article. For a thoughtful reassess- ment of the role of earlier “literary theory” in this new emphasis, see also Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 1 2 INTRODUCTION ness—in approach and materials—might offer? Would a renewed emphasis on “the literary” (however we choose to define that) help us appreciate these earlier periods in new ways? Or should, perhaps, the methods currently avail- able for postmedieval works treated in this vein be altered in some way to suit those materials? If so, how? These are questions that this volume both directly and indirectly pursues. But this volume is also predicated on the point that these questions have already long been pursued by medievalists. Here we return to the question of why such inquiries have gone unremarked by scholars of later periods. Essays explicitly on the medieval ideas of “the literary” have increasingly appeared in recent years, often including a wide range of scrutiny of how focus on histori- cism or theory or gender studies can aid or occlude this attention. Moreover, those recent inquiries among medievalists are in turn building on decades of medieval scholarship that has aimed at some of the same topics. Indeed, since at least the 1970s—before the topic became central to Renaissance studies (and well before Stephen Greenblatt’s provocative 1997 essay on the emer- gence of the literary in the Renaissance as a form of “cultural capital”2)— medieval studies has centrally pursued ways of understanding “the literary” and the distinctive powers and implications of literary form. Yet here medi- evalists may share some responsibility for the invisibility of their attention to this topic, at least to critics of later periods. However legion the ingenious and wide-ranging work on this topic by medievalists, however deep the criti- cal roots, no wide-ranging conference, monograph, or collection of essays has addressed this topic for medieval literature overtly or in any significant breadth of scope and theoretical approach. Given the potential interest for all concerned, it seems high time such a volume were assembled. One reason medievalists have not done so before may be the very rich- ness of their scholarly and critical lineage. Although the focus on this topic is explicit and pervasive in medieval literary essays in recent years, the lineage of attention to this in medieval literary criticism extends much further. The questions framed above have been with us in medieval studies for a long time, and what is “new” about this book is not simply its posing them. In fact, to offer a collection on this topic as if no earlier treatments of the issue existed in medieval criticism would be as misleading as the elision in postmedieval accounts of the current trends in medieval criticism. Scattered essays on “the medieval literary” continue to appear in numbers, but all such work proceeds with a sense of continuing and developing a set of questions, and refining a range of complex literary and nonliterary materials, that medievalists have 2. Stephen Greenblatt, “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 460-81. GALLOWAY, “THE MEDIEVAL LITERARy” 3 been working on for decades. This offers grounds not for announcing a new movement, but instead for taking stock of some major earlier tributaries to this focus, and for defining and demonstrating new possibilities. Recalling a body of previous work on which literary criticism remains dependent, even while we are engaged in advancing these pursuits in new ways, is regularly necessary at moments of rapid disciplinary shift and growth. An important opportunity to pursue this dual goal for this topic was a con- ference organized by Steven Justice and Maura Nolan at the University of California, Berkeley, on “Form after Historicism,” in honor of Anne Middle- ton on the occasion of her retirement as the Florence Green Bixby Professor of English. At this conference were first presented a number of the papers— many by those who have known or been taught by Anne—that were then substantially revised and rewritten for this volume. To this core were joined a number of other original essays from scholars making notable contribu- tions to the topic of “the medieval literary,” and who were moreover explic- itly attentive to the debt their work owes to Middleton’s approaches to this issue. The essays generally, though not exclusively, treat the later fourteenth- century poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, where this topic has been most often elaborated and where Middleton’s own work has made the most significant contributions. The essays also and by design speak to a wide range through the premodern centuries, focusing on various interacting traditions and linguistic spheres. By these means it is hoped that this collection can be instructive for medievalists of all kinds