A Different Kind of Book for Richard’s Sake: MS Bodley 581 as Ethical Handbook

Although the first version of the Confessio Amantis, completed in 1390, famously offers up a mixture of Aristotelian wisdom and literary recreation “for king Richardes sake,” Gower’s advice does not seem to have been received as intended. Two years later the author rescinded his gift, rededicating the Confessio to Henry of Lancaster and recharacterizing his book as “for Engelondes sake.” ¹ While Gower’s multiple dedications have received a great deal of scholarly attention, ² little of it has extended to another book of advice offered to Richard II at about the same time: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 581 (described in the Appendix). Like the Confessio Amantis, the constituent treatises of MS Bodley 581 undertake a task that is at once politically and rhetorically tricky: offering advice to a sitting monarch who was, according to both traditional wisdom ³ and his own stated position, ⁴ no longer susceptible to the forms of counsel offered to minor kings and royal heirs. Not surprisingly, both efforts were unsuccessful as royal advice texts, whatever their other achievements. Here, however, the similarities largely end. Where the Confessio Amantis embraces the teachings of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum, especially in its climactic seventh book, MS Bodley 581 increasingly distances itself from this most popular of medieval Mirrors for Princes, implicitly critiquing its efficacy and questioning its entire model of advice. Instead, MS Bodley 581 seeks to reform the king through book technology. A combination of lavish illustrations, elaborate charts and diagrams, multiple indices and tables of contents, and even a rare cutaway thumb index entice the king to make decisions via the “scientific” practices of physiognomy, dream interpretation, and geomancy, rather than according to his own untutored will. These procedures assure that the king’s actions will be rational even if he himself is not, but they also have a disciplinary purpose. MS Bodley 581 thus serves as a particularly complex and ambitious instance of the habit-inducing objects Aristotle describes in the Nicomachean Ethics, shaping body and mind through an array of interpretive regimes. Where for Aristotle a harp creates a harpist and a building creates a master-builder, MS Bodley 581 sets out to make the king bookish by teaching him a specifically clerical mode of reading that will transform him into a para-clerical figure of discretion and justice.

In the process, MS Bodley 581 addresses the crises of advice that marked Richard’s early reign by teaching the king, alone with his book, to advise himself. ⁵ In contrast to other aristocratic geomancies of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Libellus Geomancie that occupies the bulk of MS Bodley 581 is clearly designed to be used without professional help. Though written in Latin, its operative sections require the reader to parse only single words and short phrases, and its extensive series of tables spares the reader the time-consuming calculations required by other geomancies. (In fact, although the contents of the Libellus are conventionally geomantic, the skills it requires have more to do with navigating a codex than with interpreting earth signs.) As a result, MS Bodley 581 seems to imagine royal advice not in the relatively optimistic terms of the 1390 Confessio Amantis, but in those of the somewhat earlier and much less courtly Piers Plowman. Langland’s poem takes as its starting point the traditional assumption that kings need neither clerical reading skills nor clerical discipline because they can consult authoritative Latin writings indirectly, through their trusted counselors. However, when a personified Reason arrives to counsel the king—accompanied by his servant “Caton,” who embodies the wisdom of the Disticha Catonis, a grammar school staple—his advice proves to be untranslatable (B.4.17). ⁶ When Reason concludes his perfectly sound moral exhortation with the suggestion “Late [þi] Confessour, sire kyng, construe [it þee on englissh],” he unwittingly unleashes a flood of self-interested interpreters, “Al to construe þis clause for þe kynges profit,/Ac noʒt for confort of þe commune ne for þe kynges soule” (B.4.145, 150–51). For...