Medieval Autographies: The 'I' of the Text by A. C. Spearing (review)

A. C. Spearing's latest book continues the work begun in Textual Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 2005) on characterisation and narration in medieval literature. 'Autography' is - according to Spearing - a super-genre that centres on a written, rhetorical first person. Unlike the tendency of modern scholarship to assume a division between hidden authorial meaning and explicit narrative content, autography entails the convergence of author, narrator, and written expression. Also central is Spearing's premise that speech in autography creates an illusion of orality but is really grounded in written rhetoric often inseparable from the physical existence of the text. Autography has the tendency to be about writing and this reliance on textual deixis - in Spearing's words - 'liberates discourse by distancing it from the communicative I/you context in which the spoken word originates' (p. 10).

The first and second chapters serve as an introduction to the concepts of autography and an exposition on the implications of the united author/ narrator. The second chapter then discusses first-person prologues and the dit - a style of French poem characterised by the illusion of speech in a form dependent on writing.

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of Geoffrey Chaucer's prologues, with a particularly enjoyable examination of the Wife of Bath and her textualised existence. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer revels in 'textual deixis' (p. 68) and in undermining the illusion of orality by continued reference to the tales' textuality and material existence as words on a page.

The fourth chapter is a somewhat generic excursus about why the autography super-genre was so appealing for English and French authors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Despite the digression, this chapter reminds us, importantly, that medieval poets were creators and inventors who enjoyed textual freedoms and experimentation.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus onThomas Hoccleve, beginning with the preamble and prologue to The Regement of Princes, then focusing on his Series. Hoccleve's autography teeters on the brink of autobiography: the persona specifically names himself, we can document traces of the 'real' Hoccleve, and the poems constantly negotiate the idea of the self, shifting between introspection and opinions of. Yet, for Spearing, the rhetoric surrounding the Hoccleve-persona obscures the 'real' Hoccleve, and 'it is enough for the poem to produce effects of proximality and experientiality' (p. 145).

The final chapter introduces the Legendys of Hooly Wummen, an all-female hagiography by Osbern Bokenham, a fifteenth-century Augustinian friar and poet of the Chaucerian tradition who has received little critical attention. The Bokenham painted by Spearing is a lively storyteller who, through his first-person narration, relishes the entertainment value of his vitae.

Medieval Autographies is sensitive, wide-ranging, and engaging. Spearing aims to attract a wider audience: quotes are translated and each text is carefully summarised and contextualised. However, inexperienced readers would be advised to equip themselves with a good encyclopaedia to cope with the jargon and name-dropping inescapable in such a theory-heavy subject. The structure is logical, with texts increasing in complexity with regards to their author/narrator, foregrounding the beginnings of the shift from autography to autobiography, and the development of modern ideas of selfhood.

Particularly valuable to this study is the discussion of the influence of dits on Chaucer and, in turn, Hoccleve and Bokenham. The dit provides the means by which a series of unconnected stories can be held together as a cohesive narrative by a narrator and its influence perhaps contributed to the growth of first-person writing in fourteenth-century England.

Although the discussion covers extensive ground, Spearing's analysis is limited in scope to 'homodiegetic' texts - that is, texts in which the narrator is also present as a character. This carefully skirts around the problematic areas of the generic narrators of romances and chronicles, and the transferable personas of medieval lyrics. The analysis also (to its detriment...