The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (review)

To entitle your book "The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship" after twenty years of sustained scholarly attention to the rhetorical claims of the Lancastrians is to suggest that you are able to provide a magisterial overview of the cultural project of Lancastrianism in both its medieval and contemporary dimensions. The aims of this book are much more modest than its title. They are, in fact, to deploy the strategies of rhetorical analysis developed by the British political historian J. G. A. Pocock to demonstrating the shared pool of communication tools—narratives, topoi, images—present in both official government documents and in other works, chiefly poetic ones, that can be considered independent of, or marginally indebted to, the Lancastrian crown, such as the alliterative poem The Crowned King or the literary productions of that ever-dubious case, Thomas Hoccleve. The aim of this analysis—introduced systematically in four chapters dealing with the textuality of Richard II's deposition at the beginning of the book and then applied in readings of literary texts in chapters 5 through 8—is to suggest the horizontal "conversationality" of political discourse in the period, the fact that all of this shared discourse could be used in discussion with and about the Lancastrian monarchs and their government rather than inevitably either for or against them.

Yet the war against the binaries of propaganda and dissent that such a position implies is surely belated, eroded under the steady weight of two decades of deconstruction-inflected New Historicist criticism. The problem is that, apart from a passing initial reference to the work of her thesis supervisor, Paul Strohm, far too little of this scholarship is acknowledged; in fact, though she states in her introduction (p. 2) that her work takes off from Strohm's England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (1998), the book sidesteps any serious engagement with it, as is especially evident in her discussion of the John of Canace exemplum in Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (pp. 113–19), a showstopping feature in Strohm's interpretation which she ignores almost completely. Likewise, that other pillar of the New Historicist scene, Lee Patterson, is mentioned just once in the notes, and other scholars of the late 1980s and the 1990s, that decade in which the Lancastrians were positively in vogue, are missing. Given that the entire second half of the book is devoted to analyzing "discourses of credit and loyalty," where is Robert Meyer-Lee's brilliant article "Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money," (Exemplaria, 13.1 [2001], 173–214)? Likewise, if reciprocity is thematic to her discussion of relations in the period, where is Straker's "Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate's Troy Book," (New Medieval Literatures, 2 [1999], 119–47)? The extensive literary scholarship on Hoccleve, including a series of formative articles by John Burrow, is not in the bibliography. A reviewer elsewhere has praised her selective bibliography as judicious; to me, it appears irresponsible, making it unclear to whom her work is directed. A specialist in the Lancastrian period, either historian or literary scholar, will find little that is new empirically (it is instructive to recall that many documentary sources cited were gathered into the volume Chronicles of the Revolution 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II by Chris Given-Wilson in 1993) or theoretically, as the restricted pragmatism of the Pocock approach is resolutely antitheoretical. The exception would be a useful summary of literate personnel in Lancastrian governmental circles in the conclusion (pp. 120–30).

It might be possible to find in this book a rallying cry against the theoretical excesses to which the Lancastrians have latterly been subjected, especially in American criticism, but if so, it is tightlipped. Those of us who have tried to read Henries IV through VI via poststructuralism will find ourselves elided, not in favor of any emergent big picture but in a kind of knee-jerk return to...