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  • Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Politics, and Society
  • Derek Pearsall
Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Politics, and Society. By John Scattergood. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010. Pp. 272; 14 illustrations. $74.50

John Scattergood’s new collection of his writings includes seven published essays from the 2000s, on Andreas Capellanus, medieval concepts of time, Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, Skelton’s Magnyfycence, Wyatt’s Epistolary Satires, and Leland’s Itinerary; and five essays, previously unpublished, on English national identity in the Middle Ages, the Elegy for Piers of Bermingham, English roads and outlaws, the Lollard rising of 1414, and the capture of French ships at Whitby in 1451. The title of the book is just right. There were occasions when talks were to be given or essays supplied for collections; and the subjects addressed are occasions in history or in texts that have a lively engagement with history. A critic with an “agenda” might think this the high road to miscellaneity, but the book has only the virtues of miscellaneity (variety, the unexpected, the promise of something fresh over every page) and none of the vices (which need no name). There is a consistency of approach rooted in the author’s character and preferences and also in the kinds of subjects he chooses. It is always a literary text with an important hinterland in history, or a historical event that may be read between the lines or through the lens of a piece of writing. Scattergood almost never makes aesthetic or evaluative comments: he values texts for the entry they provide into history, a history that is not guarded by the usual protocols but open, off-guard, likely to yield more than the original author was aware of or indeed might have cared about.

The kind of history that is laid bare in these texts is not that of reigns and depositions, battles and victories, nor even the richness of aristocratic life, but the life of lesser folk and the material realities with which they were encumbered. The Anglo-Irish Elegy for Piers of Bermingham, for instance, was crying out for the attentions of a scholar like Scattergood. He restores it to the vileness and violence of the hatred between the Irish and the Anglo-Irish, and makes pretty short work of the view that the eulogy of a man who massacred the O’Conors at a feast in his own house must be ironic. The essay on Leland’s Itineraries is also superb, not so much on what Leland thought he was doing—collecting information about monastic libraries—as on what he more importantly did, which was to invent a conception of the land and landscape of England shaped by the uses of men and the dynamics of history. Roads and travel are important again in the essay on outlaws, where Piers Plowman, as often in Scattergood’s essays, figures significantly. His appetite for the detail of social and economic practice and for the material [End Page 127] reality of everyday life on the move makes him something of a latter-day Jusserand (the nineteenth-century author of English Wayfaring Life).

It is interesting that two of the essays are directly about subjects that Paul Strohm has written on, Chaucer’s Purse and the 1414 revolt. Scattergood’s aim is to put us in touch with some of the more humdrum historical realities to set beside the heady excitements of the encounter with the New Historicism. What he gives vivid expression to in the Chaucer essay are the realities of impending poverty to someone like Chaucer cast adrift without a protector in an expensive city (“London Lickpenny,” as one poem calls it) quick to exploit the rich and cast out the poor. As in the essay on Oldcastle and 1414, Scattergood makes a wide-ranging sweep through a mass of vernacular writing of the kind he first plundered in his pioneering study, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (1971), and gathers together a multitude of their writers’ perceptions of their time in history.

Some other familiar moves are made. Scattergood has found...

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