CHANGING UNDERSTANDINGS OF GENTILITY: STATUS, GENDER, AND SOCIAL OPPORTUNITY IN ENGLAND, C. 1400-1530 By KRISTIN CANZANO PINYAN A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of James Masschaele And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2017 ©2017 Kristin Canzano Pinyan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Changing Understandings of Gentility: Status, Gender, and Social Opportunity in England, c. 1400-1530 By KRISTIN CANZANO PINYAN Dissertation Director: James Masschaele This dissertation addresses the problem of the gentry in late medieval England and how this problem led to a unique moment of social opportunity during the fifteenth century. Modern scholars have struggled to develop a comprehensive definition of the gentry as a social group because members of the gentry themselves had difficulty articulating their social position. The fourteenth-century English nobility’s method of social closure through the hereditary summons to Parliament effectively divided the kingdom’s aristocracy. Forced out of this elite group, the knights, esquires, and gentleman were left to develop their own separate group identity. In this they failed. Any sense of kinship among them, that together they formed a gentle community with its own culture, was disrupted by that culture’s overlap into other groups. The continued use of the term “gentle” to refer to characteristics that were associated with all elite ranks of society made it impossible for the gentry to achieve any positive distinctions as a social group. Unable to define themselves, the gentle ranks found it difficult to exclude newcomers, increasing the range and diversity of individuals who could claim to be part of the group. Texts on heraldry, conduct, hunting, hawking, and language indicate that multiple paths to gentility opened up during the fifteenth century in response to the gentry’s failure at social closure. I argue that these texts demonstrate a contemporary recognition and acceptance of the ii changes occurring during this period in criteria for evaluating social distinctions. The indeterminate characteristics of gentle status led to the commodification of gentility as authors, scribes, and printers recognized the demand for texts that could provide an entrée into elite lifestyles. While these texts purported to reach out to an audience of gentle readers, they also expanded opportunities for others to join the group, packaging gentle culture in a way that was easily accessible and convenient to the literate, wealthy commoners who were most likely to seek social elevation. Spurred by the gentry’s inability to develop a distinctive and exhaustive set of membership criteria, the commodification of gentility provided a guide to social opportunities that these commoners could exploit. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If a dissertation is meant to be the culmination of an education, this one has done its job. As this project came to its present conclusion, it drew together threads from all my past educational experiences. The bibliography includes books that I first read as an interested high school student. Material inspired by my undergraduate mentors at Georgetown University appears in several chapters. The section on yeomen incorporates articles that I first read for an undergraduate essay on the origins of Robin Hood overseen by Jo Ann Moran Cruz, whose own scholarship appears in the section on education. In revising sections on literacy and reading practices, I called upon readings from my first graduate course, taken as an undergraduate, with Penn Szittya. Work done at Fordham University for Maryanne Kowaleski looms large throughout the project. Even more than that, I must credit her for shaping an enthusiastic but directionless master’s student into a historian. To this day, hers is the standard to which I aspire in all my work. Finally, readings done for coursework and examinations at Rutgers University became relevant to the project at surprising moments. I have had the opportunity of working with a phenomenal group of scholars at Rutgers, especially the members of my dissertation committee. Many thanks are owed to my advisor, James Masschaele, for allowing me the independence to pursue my project in whatever directions it took me, for good-natured but pointed criticism at crucial moments, and for patient prodding on several occasions when progress ground to a halt. Samantha Kelly not only taught me to be a more rigorous scholar, but how to translate that rigor into the classroom. My teaching benefited enormously from assisting her for two semesters, and many of my best lectures are based on hers to this day. Alastair Bellany opened the eyes of this stubbornly myopic late medievalist to the centuries after 1500. The foundation provided by his rigorous directed iv readings course enabled this project to span the boundary between medieval and early modern and to gain better perspective about why the gentry matters. Rudolph Bell’s no-nonsense attitude inside and outside the classroom has grounded me at important moments. His comment at the end of my proposal defense, that I had packed into it a lifetime’s worth of projects, stuck with me and helped me shape this thesis into a more manageable package. I am also indebted to my other teachers at Rutgers for treating me as an interesting and valuable academic colleague, and then shaping me into one – especially Indrani Chatterjee, Nancy Hewitt, Allen Howard, Jennifer Jones, Phyllis Mack, and Jennifer Mittelstadt. Research for this project would not have been possible without travel and research support from the Rutgers University History Department, the Graduate School-New Brunswick, and the Rutgers University-Newark History Department. Many penetrating questions and helpful suggestions were provided by the audiences for papers given at: the Binghamton University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University; the Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies; the Midwest Conference on British Studies; the New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Seton Hall University; and the University of Toronto. Comments by Caroline Barron, Jennifer Da Silva, Amy Froide, Karen Gross, Barbara Hanawalt, and Clare Costley King’oo were particularly enlightening and have had an impact on the final product. Throughout this process, I have had support from several wonderful communities of scholars – at Fordham, where I did my master’s work; at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Toronto, where I attended summer programs; and of course, at Rutgers. I am grateful to all the members of my cohort in the history department for fellowship and support over the years, as well as colleagues in the inaugural class of the Pre-Doctoral Leadership v Development Institute, especially Elanor Arnold, Mark Duggan, Elisabeth Ettreim, Matt Friedman, Alix Genter, Molly Giblin, Michael Hill, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Katharine Lee, Kathryn Mahaney, Alejandro Gomez-del-Moral, Martina Saltamacchia, Meagan Schenkelberg, and Arnout van der Meer. Particular thanks are owed to Stephen Allen, Danielle Bradley, Elizabeth Churchich, Annalise Kinkel DeVries, April Graham, and Dustin Neighly, who all read and commented on drafts of this project. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support. Thank you to all of my family members – my parents, brother, grandparents, and numerous in-laws – for bearing with me through this long process and especially from refraining for the past few years from asking too many questions about when I would be finished. (Feel free to ask now.) Over the past few years, I have enjoyed solidarity with my brother-in-law, Charles Pinyan, and niece, Katherine Conner, as they embarked on their own graduate educations, albeit in different fields. My parents, Nicholas and Jane Canzano, and my brother, Michael, have been unswerving in their encouragement since the beginning. It took a great deal of faith for this middle-class family to allow their daughter to devote her expensive private university education to an archaic-sounding subject; while they certainly raised questions, they never resisted, confident that I would succeed no matter what I chose to do. My parents’ trust has shaped me into a strong, independent scholar and woman, and for that I am eternally grateful. Most of all, I would like to thank my husband, Jeff, who likewise did not flinch when I declared that after our wedding I was going back to graduate school and would be relying on him for financial support for the next several years (maybe he would have flinched if he knew how many it would be). Without his constant love, patience, and encouragement, this project would not have been started, let alone finished. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents .............................................................................................................