Chaucer, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Literary History by Anne Middleton;edited by Steven Justice;

Author:Anne Middleton;edited by Steven Justice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

III: Toward a new history of literature

We are finally in a position to revise our understanding of Chaucer’s familiar humanist legend of vernacular authorship as aspirant to membership in a dead poets’ society – and to make a different kind of sense of his ultimate turn to a contemporary setting, multiple “authorial” voices, and a pilgrimage-framework for his last work of fiction.

In 1377 or very early 1378, the B-version of Piers Plowman entered copying and circulation, and it did so from London. Copies must have multiplied very rapidly: by 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death, the poem in all three of its versions must have been extant in literally scores of copies: no other explanation could account for the state of, and complex relations among, the more than 50 MSS that survive. If by 1381, the dissident priest John Ball, who began his career in York, could refer repeatedly to various moments and figures of the B-version, in letters to and for the peasant rebels that seem to have originated in Essex, and invoke in them the figure of Piers Plowman “my brother” as if it were a household word, it is a safe bet that the word was on the street in London well before that.23 Moreover, if the C-version confessio records, as it pretends to, where and how its author lived at the time he undertook the long version of the poem, then Langland lived in or near Cornhill in the middle 1370s, a factoid at least consistent with the circulation of B from London, and also with the detailed knowledge of legal, especially Chancery, procedures manifested in the poem. For in fourteenth-century London, the stationers’ shops were concentrated in the district between Chancery and St Paul’s (less than a half-mile from Cornhill); there one could arrange for production of a book, or enlist in individual “bespoke” writing projects the “moonlighting” talents of a variety of scribes whose regular “day jobs” were in various offices within the metropolis, such as the writing staffs of the cathedral, Inns of Court, and Chancery. Meanwhile, in the 12-year period from 1374 to 1386 Chaucer lived in a house over Aldgate (less than a half-mile from Cornhill in the other direction); his “day job” was collector of customs, and it was from the drudgery of such bookkeeping that the Eagle of Hous of Fame proposed to expand Chaucer’s sights to include the news “almost at they very dores.” By 1378, Chaucer’s travel to the continent on various (unspecified) missions in his majesty’s service was virtually over. It is therefore not merely unlikely but inconceivable that in the decade between 1377 and 1387 Chaucer remained unaware of Langland’s poem. His humanist legend of the canon of literary tradition becomes in this light a strategic detour around an unnamed and still unassimilable presence, almost at his very doors.

At this point it hardly needs saying how I would rewrite the received genealogy of English vernacular literature into an alternative model of literary history. Reading Langland’s

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