Singing the New Song: Literacy and Literature in Late Medieval England (review)

“Go, litel boke”—as Katherine Zieman acknowledges via the closing lines of Troilus and Criseyde, writing can find its way into the hands of readers with interests quite different from those of an imagined or intended audience. As a specialist in early medieval music and director of music at a collegiate institution, my claims to authority in reviewing this book are at best partial. What follows is accordingly less an attempt at comprehensive evaluation than a weaving together of at times unexpectedly shared concerns.

Zieman’s central proposal is that, from the late thirteenth century through the early fifteenth, ritual practices of “reading and singing” became unmoored from their deployment within choral communities. Such practices expanded beyond the confines of clerical literacy, mutating into portable skills that served to transform a variety of modes of public discourse, thereby complicating notions that the late medieval period was one in which writing supplanted forms of oral communication. Particularly attractive is the claim that this period witnessed a passage from repertory-based knowledge to an era in which ritual reading and singing were fundamental to civic representation and the formation of an English vernacular voice.

While making occasional appeal to musicality, it is mainly changes in verbal practice that Zieman examines through select readings. The first chapter opens with the unnamed felawe’s confession in The Prioress’s Tale that “I lerne song; I kan but small grammeere,” which is taken as a starting point for unpicking the idea that grammatical instruction was foundational to medieval education. Emphasis is placed rather on vocational knowledge, with liturgical practices of “reading and singing” considered an outcome of clerical membership rather than a precondition for learning. Earlier medieval practice is summed up in two sentences taken from an early ninth-century letter by Archbishop Leidrad of Lyon detailing his establishment of schools for cantors and readers, while Zieman argues that it is only with new forms of benefaction in the thirteenth century that boys were required to undertake such tasks as specialist choristers, these stipulations in turn serving as an incentive for their wider learning. Ongoing research into the liturgical roles assigned to young people in the earlier Middle Ages by, among others, Susan Boynton and Christopher Page would suggest that the historical divide is not quite as neat as Zieman implies, yet the general point that specialized song schools for choristers were a later medieval invention and focused educational attention on preparation for liturgical celebration appears well founded.

Chapter 2 focuses on the terms clericus and litteratus, tracing a fragmentation of the former through specialization and a lowering of basic requirements, while the latter is held to shift from an identification of status to a skill. Two examples are discussed in some detail: William of Wykeham’s dispute in 1370 with masters of St. Cross Hospital over the extent of their duties, and the misbehavior of one William Elys of Salisbury. The former case turns on whether St. Cross was a hospital with responsibility to the infirm and poor or a choral institution, the latter on the level of literacy expected of vicars choral. With boundaries between an increasingly literate laity and an expanding body of clerics becoming ever more porous, such questions of definition serve to chart changing expectations of literacy itself. The ways found to discipline those whose claims to clerical status rested increasingly on a minimum of literate skills might again not seem unusual to an earlier medievalist, the Benedictine intention mens concordet voci appearing to overlap considerably with the requirement psallite sapienter.

A similar emphasis on interior understanding and discipline as a basis for legitimation in the face of a migration of ritual reading and singing beyond the confines of choral communities is traced in the third chapter, this time woven through extracts from The Simonie and John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme. Chapter 4 loosens the opposition between the external authority of Latin and the seeming potential...