CONSTRUCTING THE FATHER: FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPTS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S WORKS Roberta Magnani A Thesis Submitted in Candidature for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cardiff University September 2010 CONSTRUCTING THE FATHER: FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPTS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S WORKS Roberta Magnani A Thesis Submitted in Candidature for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cardiff University September 2010 UMI Number: U516666 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U516666 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed HV (candidate) Date ! STATEMENT 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD.......................................... Signed ............................. (candidate) Date I STATEMENT 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed.... (candidate) Dat e STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed.... (candidate) Date STATEMENT 4: PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BAR ON ACCESS I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loans after expiry of a bar on access previously approved by the Graduate Development Committee. Signed (candidate) Date SUMMARY OF THESIS This is a study of the multiple constructions and appropriations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s paternitas of the English literary canon. It examines the evidence from the compilatio and ordinatio of fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies containing the poet’s works, and it interrogates the social conditions of production of these codices, as well as the ideology informing their compositional and paratextual programmes. Conceptually, my thesis is underpinned by a broad engagement with manuscript studies, as the codices to which I attend become objects of bibliographical and codicological examination, while being scrutinised through a post-structuralist framework. This theoretical approach, which comprises Michel Foucault’s revisions of historiography and the contiguous debates on translation practices and queer theories, allows me to read critically the socio-cultural situations which inform the plural incarnations and appropriations of Chaucer's paternal authority. My study is structured in four chapters. I begin in Chapter I by engaging with Thomas Hoccleve's literary and iconographic mythopoeia of Chaucer who is positioned as the clerical and sober fons et origo of English vemacularity. In Chapter III interrogate the appropriations of this initial paradigm of paternal authorship and I demonstrate how fifteenth-century manuscript collections fabricate Chaucer as a courtly and lyrical Father whose work is validated by his affiliations to and reproduction of dominant aristocratic literary practices. Chapter III situates these hegemonic modes of composition and mise-en-page in the context of French manuscript culture with which Chaucer's patemality of the English canon is inextricably intertwined. These associations with the ‘master’ culture, however, disperse the Father's authority in an intervemacular site of linguistic and cultural negotiations. Similarly, Chapter IV engages with the displacement of Chaucer's paternitas in the material space of the codex, as the glossarial apparatus of the manuscript copies of his works articulates voices of dissent. No longer the stable patriarch constructed by Hoccleve, Chaucer occupies a fluid and permeable space of authority that can be inhabited by a polyvocality of hermeneutic voices and is, therefore, susceptible to perpetual acts of co-option. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe the greatest gratitude to Prof Stephen Knight for his patience, wisdom, eruditioi and encouragement; I am most thankful for his guidance, but also for allowing me the intellectual freedom to pursue my interests. I would like to thank Prof Ruth Evans for her priceless support during the early stages of this project. For financial support I am grateful to the School of European Studies for funding the first stages of my research, to ENCAP for awarding me a grant, and to the Bibliographical Society for a substantial scholarship. This thesis has greatly benefited from the exceptional scholarship and generosity of Professor A. S. G. Edwards and Professor Helen Phillips. My heart-felt thanks are also due to Dr Ann Alston, Dr Jackie Belanger, Dr Louise Harrington, Dr Irene Morra, Dr Becky Munford, and Dr Heather Worthington for the precious gift of their sisterly friendship and scholarly acumen. I have also been extremely lucky in my fellow graduate students at Cardiff; Gerardina Antelmi and Victoria Gibbons, in particular, have been wonderful friends and generous advisers. I have been helped tremendously by staff at the British Library, by Dr Bruce Barker- Benfield at the Bodleian Library and by my colleagues at Cardiff University Libraries; they have all offered prompt assistance and shared their considerable knowledge with me. Above all, all my gratitude goes to my parents who have unreservedly supported my choice to pursue academic research even if it has taken me so far away from them. However, this thesis is dedicated to Richard, my wonderful husband. If this thesis is an achievement, it is as much his as it is mine; for his unwavering love and support during numerous crises and the occasional moments of sheer happiness that working on old books brings, I will always be thankful (‘Trust I seek and I find in you'). Table of Contents Declaration and Statements Summary of Thesis Acknowledgements i Table of Contents ii List of Illustrations iv Introduction Chaucer's Literary Paternitas: an Epistemological Palimpsest of Authorship. 1 Chapter I The Iconography of the Father: Hoccleve’s Construction of Chaucer’s Paternitas, 14 Introduction - Chaucer’s Manuscript Portraits: a Semiotics of Authorship. 15 1. ‘Thow were aqweynted with Chaucer, pardee’: Individualising the *Fadir\ 18 2. The Death of the Father: Portraits as Strategies of Memory. 38 3. From Domesticated Father to Collective Icon: Disseminating Chaucer as a Foundation Myth among Fifteenth-Century Readers. 47 Chapter II Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Production and the Canonisation of the Courtly Father. 53 Introduction - The Construction of Chaucer's Courtly Paternitas in the Ordinatio and Compilatio of Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts. 54 Section I - Evidence and Principles of Canon-Formation: the Lyrical and Courtly Father in Fifteenth-Century Anthologies of English Verse. 60 1. John Shirley's Manuscripts: the Vocabulary of Aristocratic Literary Practices. 60 2. Compilatio: Principles of Textual Selection. 73 Section II - Titular Polyvocality and the Establishment of a Chaucerian Courtly Canon. 81 1. Medieval Titology: Chaucer's Palimpsested Paternitas. 81 2. Compendious Collections: The Grammar of Courtly Culture. 84 Section III - Chaucer as ‘Founder of Discursivity’: Lydgate’s Affiliations to the Father. 92 1. Lydgate's A Complaynte o f a Lovers Lyfe and Courtly Culture. 92 2. The Complaint o f the Black Knight : Chaucer’s Paternitas of the Canon. 99 Section IV - ‘Titled Compendyously': Generic Complexity and Normativity. 107 1. ‘The Complaint o f Mars' And ‘The Complaint of Venus’ in Shirley’s Manuscripts: Chaucer's Courtly Mythopoeia. 107 2. The ‘kalundare of John Shirley' and the Scholastic Origins of Titular Multivocality. 112 Conclusion - Chaucer as the Paternal Nucleus of Fifteenth-Century Verse Anthologies. 118 Chapter III From French Song to English Book: the Codicology and Epistemology of Courtly Vernacular Literature. 120 Introduction - Translating French ‘Cultural Capital' onto Chaucer's Literary Paternitas. 121 ii Section I - The 'Cultural Invasion* of French Manuscript Culture in England. 131 1. Translating the “Cachet of the Literary Chic’ into the English Vernacular: Chaucer's Indebtedness to French Formes Fixes. 131 2. Charles d’Orleans and the Usurpation of Chaucer’s Paternitas. 141 3. Chaucer’s Infantilised Paternitas and French Manuscript Culture. 149 Section II - Translating Mise-en-page: the Use of French Titles in Fifteenth- Century Manuscripts of Chaucer's Works. 156 1. Titles as Sites of Negotiation between Emulation and Co-Option. 156 2. The Manuscripts of the Oxford Group and the ‘Cultural Capital’ of French Verse. 161 3. Disjunctive Acts of Translation in Shirley’s Holograph Manuscripts. 174 Section III - ‘Translatid out of frenshe': ‘Lyrico-Narrative’ Discourse. 184 1. The Composition and Mise-en-page of Interpolated Poems. 184 2. Anelida and Arciteand the ‘Hermeneutics of Recovery’ of the French Mise-en-page. 188 3. Anelida and Arcite's Sixteen-Line Stanzas and their Diagrammatical Layout: