ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: THE WHEEL OF LANGUAGE: REPRESENTING SPEECH IN MIDDLE ENGLISH NARRATIVE, 1377- 1422 David Kennedy Coley, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Dissertation directed by: Professor Theresa Coletti Department of English This dissertation examines representations of speech in narrative poetry in English between 1377 and 1422, a four-and-a-half decade span marked by almost constant political, religious, social and economic upheaval. By analyzing the work that late medieval writers imagined the spoken word to perform – or, alternately, by examining how speech acts functioned performatively in medieval literary discourse – the author demonstrates how the spoken word functioned as a defining link between the Middle English text and the cultural tumult of the late medieval period. More important, by focusing on speech as a distinct category within linguistic discourse, the study allows for a reappraisal of the complicated relationships between text and cultural environment that have been illuminated by scholarship on the politics of vernacularity and the development of the English language. Chapter one uses The Manciple’s Tale to probe Chaucer’s engagement with the nominalist philosophy of William of Ockham, a philosophy which opposed the via antiqua and threatened to overturn the linguistic, epistemological, and ontological hierarchies that had been prevailed in various forms since the writings of Augustine of Hippo. Chapter two analyzes representations of sacramental and priestly speech in the anonymous Saint Erkenwald. By doing so, it redirects the critical conversation about the poem away from the role of baptism in redeeming the righteous heathen and toward the eucharistic theology that undergirds it, a critical that shift extends our understanding of the poem’s engagement with the emerging Wycliffite heresy and with typological notions of medieval Christian identity. Chapter three focuses on the works of Thomas Hoccleve, fifteenth-century Privy Seal clerk and would-be court poet. By examining the overtly performative speech acts in Hoccleve’s Marian lyrics, particularly “The Story of The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,” it establishes the existence of an idiosyncratic economy of speech within the poet’s canon, an economy that becomes paradigmatic for the mingled systems of monetary and interpersonal exchange that prevailed in the Lancastrian dynasty’s early decades. THE WHEEL OF LANGUAGE: REPRESENTING SPEECH IN MIDDLE ENGLISH NARRATIVE, 1377-1422 by David Kennedy Coley Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008 Advisory Committee: Professor Theresa Coletti, Chair Professor Verlyn Flieger Professor Robert Gaines Professor Marshall Grossman Professor Thomas Moser ©Copyright by David Kennedy Coley 2008 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One of the pleasures of finishing this dissertation is having the formal opportunity to thank those who have supported me along the way. I owe an unpayable debt to my advisor, Theresa Coletti, and it is to her that I give my first and loudest thanks. Since I arrived at the University of Maryland, Theresa has encouraged me intellectually and professionally; I owe what I am, as an academic and a scholar, to her. I am also deeply grateful to Thomas Moser, whose advice, insight, and careful engagement with my work has been immensely valuable. Finally, thanks to Verlyn Flieger, Marshall Grossman, and Robert Gaines for reading and responding so thoughtfully to this dissertation, and to Michael Israel for his help at an early stage of the process. Outside the University of Maryland I have also received a great deal of encouragement. I offer my gratitude to David Wallace, Jennifer Summit, and Frank Grady, each of whom has helped shape my work in important ways. To Kenneth Bleeth, who first introduced me to medieval literature and whose friendship I value to this day, I give my deepest thanks. I am fortunate to have a family that has been unfailingly supportive of my decision to pursue graduate study. My parents and my step-parents have provided much- needed emotional and material support, and their collective belief in the intrinsic value of education has been a shaping influence on my life. To my wife Kim, whose love and patience I have too often returned by glowering at the computer screen, I can only offer my unending love and gratitude. I give this dissertation to the two people from whom it has taken the most, my daughters Johanna and Alison. Finally, it is done. Now we can go outside and play. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 “That whel wol cause another whel” 1. “A wikked tonge is worse than a feend”: 37 Nominalism, Speech, and Power in The Manciple’s Tale 2. “And chaungit cheuely hor nomes”: 94 Eucharist, Baptism, and Sacramental Utterance in Saint Erkenwald 3. “Seye it eek with good deuocioun”: 157 Economies of Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve EPILOGUE 213 “With hym ther was a Plowman, was his brother”: The Two Plowmen and the Power of Speech BIBLIOGRAPHY 218 iii INTRODUCTION “That whel wol cause another whel” Just before it crashes to a premature and inconclusive end, the alliterative Wars of Alexander relates how its eponymous hero, having pressed his army well past the boundaries of the known world, reaches the shore of a vast ocean. There, at the ragged edge of the earth itself, the fated conqueror hears the sound of his own language lapped back at him by cold, monster-infested waves: [Alexander] ... cairis on forthire To !e Occyan at !e erthes ende, & !are in an ilee he heres A grete glauir & a glaam of Grekin tongis. "an bad he kni!tis !aim vnclethe & to !at kithe swym, Bot all at come into !at cole, crabbis has !aim drenchid. "an sewis furth !at souerayn, ay by !a salt strandis Toward !e settynge of !e son in seson of wintir.1 The potent blend of alterity and familiarity in this passage – the terrible crabs that drown Alexander’s men and the accustomed speech of “Grekin tongis” – is enigmatic; the whole scene evokes nothing so much as the siren songs beckoning Ulysses on his journey home from Troy. But Alexander’s odyssey is of a different sort than Ulysses’s, and the voices 1 [Alexander carries on farther to the ocean at the Earth’s end, and there, on an island, he hears a great chatter and a din of Greek tongues. Then he bade his knights to unclothe themselves and to swim to that place, but crabs drowned all that went into the cold water. Then the sovereign proceeds forth, always by the salt strand, toward the setting of the sun in the season of winter.] The Wars of Alexander, ed. Hoyt Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, EETS s.s. 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 174 (ll. 5628- 5634), translation mine. 1 that call to the Macedonian warrior king from the island at the end of the world seem to mock rather than entice, to confront Alexander with the futility of escape from his ignoble bloodline, the inevitability of his death, the senselessness his often violent conquests, and the utter impossibility of his martial aspirations.2 Does Alexander send his men into the ocean to investigate the familiar speech from across the waves; or does he send them out, as he has done so many times before, to conquer what confronts him and subdue the words that echo from the edge of the earth? Whatever the reason, the attempt is ultimately futile. As his men drown horribly, Alexander can only turn the remains of his army toward the failing sun and toward a Macedonia he knows he will not live to see. Alexander was not the only doomed king preoccupied with spoken language. On another island near the edge of the known world, Richard II struggled to maintain control of the English crown in the face of an increasingly aggressive cabal of appellants.3 In the summer of 1397, he attempted to squelch those appellants once and for all by making them answer for the Merciless Parliament of 1388, a proceeding in which the appellants severely (if temporarily) circumscribed Richard’s royal authority. Chief among those appellants was Richard’s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester. Seized by Richard’s forces and held captive in the English territory of Calais, Gloucester was eventually coerced into admitting wrongdoing; just before his death he issued a full 2 Christine Chism observes that “in teasing at the barrier between self, other, and monster, [these lines] suggest the monstrousness of Alexander’s whole endeavor, the extremity of the desires that drive him.” See Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 149. 3 While it is impossible to assert with certainty the composition date for Wars of Alexander, most critics have located it between the years 1361 and 1450, thus making it possible that the literary struggles of Alexander coincided with the dynastic struggles of Richard II. For a brief, cogent analysis of the poem’s authorship and date, see Duggan and Turville-Petre’s introduction to Wars of Alexander, pp. xlii-xliii. 2 spoken confession, which was recorded and then read aloud to Parliament.4 Among the most serious articles in the confession was Gloucester’s admission that he engaged in treasonous speech: Also, in that I sclaundred my Loord, I knowleche that I dede evyll and wykkedly, in that I spake it unto hym in sclaunderouse wyse in audience of other folk .... Also, in that I was in place ther it was communed and spoken in manere of deposal of my liege Loord, trewly I knowlech wele, that we were assented therto for two dayes of three, And then we for to have done our homage and our oothes, and putt hym as heyly in his estate as ever he was.