Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture (review)

This is a collection of essays that Lee Patterson has written over the past thirty years, and it is very welcome. Though he calls them “Essays on Medieval Culture,” the theme is now, as it ever was, the relation of literature to history, not so much of literary texts to individual events in history, which is the character of the “old” historicism, as the nature of literature as an embodiment, mediator, and exploration of the deeper political, social, and economic movements of history. It is entirely appropriate that the collection should begin with the first chapter, “Historical Criticism and the Development of Chaucer Studies,” of Patterson’s first book, or essay collection, Negotiating the Past (1987). It is, along with its more theoretical companion, the second chapter of the book, which is a new historicist’s critique, so to speak, of the New Historicism, the best piece of writing that has been done on the relation of literature and history. It concentrates on Chaucer, not so much on the matter and detail of his poetry as on the history of the reputation of a poet who was seriously embedded in his history. Patterson makes short work of the New Criticism, which denies the importance of history, and gives most attention to the only kind of criticism that had, prior to the time he wrote, taken the subject in earnest, what Patterson calls “Exegetics” and what its chief exponent called “Historical Criticism.” D. W. Robertson is not a name to conjure with as it was thirty years ago, but tackling his work and influence head-on gave Patterson the freedom to establish his own historical criticism of Chaucer. The essay has worn well, though of course historically of its time, its ambitiousness sometimes echoing an earlier, more heroic era of criticism: “So, as Lenin once said, ‘What is to be done?’” (p. 30). (“Once” is an eloquent word in this kind of expression: it intimates an easy commerce with Lenin and his works, almost a personal familiarity.) By its nature, the chapter does not allow for much close work on Chaucer’s text, but this is not normally the case. Patterson has always been intensely concerned with literature in its formal as well as its historical embodiment, and it is this concern that has kept him on edgy terms with the New Historicism, even if at times tempted by its snappy chiasmic syntax and forms of thinking. The literary text may sometimes be filtered through the theoretical apparatus, but the engagement with literature is earnest and wide, and the close reading perceptive.

The core of the volume is in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7, which represent, in essays on Clanvowe, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the “Complaint,” Patterson’s more recent work on Chaucerian and post-Chaucerian literature. They are full of characteristically Pattersonian moves. In the Clanvowe essay, instead of accepting that the poetry of the court is monolithically aristocratic and hierarchical while bourgeois poetry is the real source of conflict and individuality, he simply reverses the formulation, finding the potential of the latter in the former. The poem is thus opened up to a richer interpretation, and Patterson is quick to perceive how to penetrate its apparent blandness, for instance in the use of the politically fraught word “withholde” (p. 60). The tyranny of love that the nightingale glories in becomes an echo of the political tyranny of the later Richard II, but it is a tyranny that likewise turns out to be ineffectual when the debate of the cuckoo and the nightingale is turned over to a parliament. The text is thus read against the grain, this way and that: one thinks the point has been made only to be told, “But it is also more than this” (p. 66). Then further, in another characteristic move, the cuckoo, who tried to speak “trew and pleyn,” is absorbed into court discourse and its conventional hypocrisies, his attempt to expose the painful injustices and arduous disciplines...