Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England by Lisa H. Cooper (review)

Early in her Introduction to Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England, Lisa Cooper uses a metaphor that captures the essence of the phenomenon she examines from many angles throughout this fascinating and eye-opening book. Noting the tension in much medieval literature “between the earthly . . . and the divine, between matter and metaphor, and between work and words,” Cooper writes that medieval writers “often chose to bridge it with an image . . . of an artisan” (p. 3). The image of a bridge is a particularly apt vehicle for describing the function of artisan figures in the many works Cooper considers, for as she demonstrates, when writers employ artisanal metaphors in expositions of abstract concepts, they inevitably call to mind concrete artisanal practices as well. Like a bridge, in other words, the figure of the artisan enables travel in two directions, and as a consequence, even as the concrete methods and tools of craft labor offer a means for thinking about such abstract “crafts” as kingship, authorship, and moral self-reformation, they are also grounded in a real world in flux that is driven by the labor of nonfigurative, flesh-and-blood artisans, who are at once anxiety provoking and indispensable: as Cooper puts it, this is a world that is “increasingly technologically inclined, commodity-oriented, and socially mobile” (p. 18). Ambitious in scope, the book’s four main chapters illuminate the two-sided bridging effect of the artisan figure in genres that pertain to four cultural spaces—“schoolroom, household, monastery, court” (p. 15)—and span the eleventh century to the early sixteenth.

Chapter One, “Making Conversations: From Ælfric’s Colloquy to Caxton’s Dialogues,” examines the meeting of “the symbolic order of words [and] . . . the material practice of work” (p. 22) in a series of medieval texts for foreign-language learning, including, besides the chapter’s titular opening and concluding works, Adam of Petit Pont’s De utensilibus (ca. 1140–50), Alexander Nequam’s De nominibus utensilium (ca. 1175–85), and John of Garland’s Dictionarius (ca. 1220). As Cooper shows, even though they are replete with artisans and their tools and products, these texts reinforce attitudes toward craftsmen that preclude the very conversations they model. The pattern is set in the Colloquy by Ælfric (ca. 955– 1020), which scripts a dialogue between a “counselor” and a series of artisans whose parts would be played by novice Anglo-Saxon students of Latin in training for the monastic “work of prayer” (p. 19). Each of the Colloquy’s craftsmen has a chance to speak about his labor, but when the smith interrupts the counselor to claim the value of his craft over the monastic occupation, the counselor quickly brings the dialogue to a close, admonishing the artisans to make peace with each other and advising all, “whether priest or monk or peasant or soldier” (p. 20) that they will avoid disgrace by keeping to their given social stations. In shutting down an incipient debate, the counselor, Cooper argues, demonstrates that the Colloquy’s value for its intended audience of young monks “is not the language of craft, but the craft of language” (p. 21). If Ælfric’s Colloquy stages the usefulness of that craft as the means by which monks are able to maintain a social advantage over artisans, Caxton’s Dialogues, as Cooper shows, puts bilingualism—here French and English—on display as the fulcrum that allows merchants to leverage economic advantage in their real-world conversations with the craftspeople whose products constitute the wares of their trade. If “making conversation” usually involves bridging difference, these conversations are drawbridges that may be readily drawn up so as to prevent real social crossings.

In Chapter Two, “Laboring Legends: Writing Home in Fable and Fabliau,” Cooper brings together an intriguingly heterogeneous array of texts to reveal a concern with “craft households” (p. 57) that preoccupies them all, from the textual households of masons constructed by their Constitutions to the fabliau dwellings of three carpenters...