Richardian Literature

(Minor Field)
Richardian Literature and its Afterlives

RATIONALE

This minor field scrutinizes the transition in the habits of thought and practice regarding the poor and the idle in late medieval England. With the increase in vagrancy, immigration into towns, and urban poverty after the demographic upheaval of the Black Death in 1348 and a concomitant increase in the commercialization of society, the authorities viewed the poor and the idle as a threat to social order and good governance (McIntosh 88). Courts, especially those in highly commercialized communities, began to implement "new procedures and new punishments" in an effort to resolve what were perceived as growing social problems, such as sexual misconduct and hedgebreaking, associated with those people socially unmoored by changes in the labor market (88 and 109). As well, there was a shift in the institutional context of the response to poverty because the poor were no long housed in hospitals with the sick, but were moved into almshouses, often founded by the elite of the middling rank, in which the moral and religious discipline of the poor could be conducted with new vigor (105). By reading William Langland's Piers Plowman, "Wynnere and Wastoure," "Piers Plowman's Crede," "The Plowman's Tale," The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, along with selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Gower's allegorical estates satire in Mirour de L'Omme, I wish to understand the representations of poverty in relation to the legal and institutional responses created to settle the social conflict generated by the expansion of the market. In addition, how is religious and political dissent, as well as the increasing expansion of the power of the monarchy to control and punish its subjects, depicted in texts such as The Book of Margery Kempe, "The Plowman's Tale," Thomas Hoccleve's The Regiment of Princes, and The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript? How does gender and sexuality figure in the governance of the self and state, as represented in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and his "The Parliament of Fowls," as well as The Book of Margery Kempe, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, and Gower's Mirour De L'Omme?

Works Cited

McIntosh, Marjorie K. "Finding a Language for Misconduct: Jurors in Fifteenth-Century Local Courts." In Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 87 - 122.

PRIMARY READINGS

Anonymous. "Piers the Plowman's Crede." In Six Ecclesiastical Satires. James Dean, ed. Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1991.

Anonymous. "Wynnere and Wastoure." In Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages. Warren Ginsberg, ed. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1992: 13 - 42.

Anonymous. "The Plowman's Tale." James M. Dean, ed. In Six Ecclesiastical Satires. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1991 and Mary Rhinelander McCarl, The Plowman's Tale: The c. 1532 and 1606 Editions of a Spurious Canterbury Tale. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997.

Anonymous. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987 and 1996.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Canterbury Tales." The Riverside Chaucer. Third Edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. (Selected Tales)

-----. "The Parliament of Fowls." The Riverside Chaucer. Third Edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.

Langland, William. The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17. Second Edition. A. V. C. Schmidt, ed. London: J. M. Dent, 1995.

Gower, John. Mirour de l'Omme. William Burton Wilson, ed. Medieval Texts and Studies 5. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992.

The Book of Margery Kempe. Lynn Staley, ed. Medieval Institute Publications. Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1996.

Hoccleve, Thomas. The Regiment of Princes. Charles Blythe, ed. Medieval Institute Publications. Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1999.

Lydgate, John.
"Against Millers and Bakers."
"A Ballade in Despyte of the Flemings."
"King Henry VI's Triumphal Entry into London, 21 Feb. 1432."
"A Mumming for the Mercers of London."
"A Mumming for the Goldsmiths of London."
In The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Henry N. McCracken, ed. EETS OS 192. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.

Warner, Sir George, ed. The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-Power, 1436. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.

SECONDARY READINGS

Aers, David. "A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the History of the Subject." In Culture and History, 1350 - 1600: Essay on English Communities, Identities, and Writings. David Aers, ed. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992: 177 - 202.

Barr, Helen. Socioliterary practice in late Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Bowers, John M. "Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes Toward A History of the Wycliffite Langland." Yearbook of Langland Studies. 6 (1992): 1 - 50.

Britnell, Richard H. The Commercialization of English Society, 1000 - 1500. Second Edition. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Crane, Susan. "The Writing Lesson of 1381." Chaucer's England: Literature and its Historical Context. Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1992: 201 - 221.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Madison Press, 1989.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 - 1580. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Ferster, Judith. Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Fisher, John. "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England." PMLA 107 (1992): 1168 - 80. Repr. In The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996.

Frantzen, Allen J. "The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness." PMLA. 111 (1996): 451 - 64.

Justice, Steve. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Kaye, Joel. Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Keiser, Elizabeth B. Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, and Steven Justice. "Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380 - 1427." New Medieval Literatures. 1 (1997): 59 - 83.

Freedman, Paul. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Griffiths, Ralph A. "The Trial of Eleanor Cobham." King and Country: England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century. London: Hambledon Press, 1991: 321 - 64. Orig. in Speculum. XLIII (1968): 589 - 632.

Little, Lester K. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

McIntosh, Marjorie K. Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370 - 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Mollat, Michel. The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Patterson, Lee. "'No man his reason herde': Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer's Miller , and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales." South Atlantic Quarterly. 86:4 (Fall 1987): 457 - 495.

Shklar, Ruth Nisse. "Cobham's Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking." Modern Language Quarterly. 56 (1995): 277 - 304.

Sponsler, Claire. "Alien Nation: London's Aliens and Lydgate's Mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths." In The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000: 229 - 242.

Strohm, Paul. England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399 - 1422. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

-----. Theory and the Premodern Text. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000.

Wallace, David. "Chaucer and the Absent City." In Chaucer's England: Literature in Social Context. Barbara Hanawalt, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1992: 59 - 90.