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  • The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language, and Politics in Late Medieval England
  • Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Jenni Nuttall. The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language, and Politics in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 187. £50.00; $90.00.

The title and subtitle of this book succinctly express its interdisciplinary ambitions. These ambitions, of course, are not at all unusual for scholars of Lancastrian literature, who have now for over two decades pursued them, earning various degrees of appreciation from political historians. Jenni Nuttall’s book, however, achieves an unusually thorough and sustained level of interdisciplinarity. She manages this in part through broad and careful use of documentary evidence. In the study’s most rewarding analyses, she applies close reading techniques across a range [End Page 357] of text types, literary and documentary, to achieve the sort of mutual illumination that characterizes the best of historicist literary criticism. But more central in this regard are the book’s two interanimating arguments. First is the claim, which Nuttall puts forward in the book’s introduction, that the specific language legitimating the deposition of Richard II supplies the foundational terms of the succeeding government and thus also the language of the responsibilities to which it is held accountable—sometimes, ironically, at some cost to the credibility of that government. The second claim, also present in the introduction but articulated with most force in the book’s conclusion, is that Lancastrian literature is infused with this political language, but makes creative rather than merely reflexive use of it. This language denotes political values to accomplish literary purposes that are neither simply propagandistic nor simply satirical, but instead are complexly meditative, critical, and exhortative. Each of these arguments plainly depends on the informing power of the other, and yet the most basic object of each resides comfortably within one disciplinary boundary. Early on, Nuttall asserts, “Political and literary cultures are inseparable, demanding simultaneous study and analysis” (4), and her subsequent approach to a diverse array of texts bears out this belief; but as this statement also implies, much of the book’s hermeneutic power arises from simultaneously blurring and respecting disciplinary distinctions.

The common term of the book’s two arguments is, obviously, political language, a phenomenon well served by Nuttall’s approach because of its complex, varying degrees of sameness and difference across different illocutionary domains. This linguistic motility Nuttall examines with the help of historian J. G. A. Pocock, whose ideas about political speech acts are proximate enough to the traditional philological emphasis of medieval literary study that they seamlessly extend the book’s interdisciplinarity to the level of theory (a happy marriage evident also in Paul Strohm’s use of Pocock in his recent Politique: Languages of Statecraft Between Chaucer and Shakespeare [2005]). Nevertheless, neither this theory nor the book’s two arguments will, I suspect, strike most students of Lancastrian literature as especially ground-breaking. First, while Pocock provides a convenient and flexible vocabulary for analyzing the shaping power and transformation of political language, it is not clear to me how fundamentally different Nuttall’s approach is from that of some of the work on this period that examines political language without the benefit of Pocock—for example, Strohm’s earlier England’s Empty Throne: [End Page 358] Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation (1998), or, for the slightly earlier period, Lynn Staley’s Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (2005). Second, the book’s historical argument—to phrase it in its most general sense, that the terms of the charges of political failure become the terms of political accountability—seems somewhat self-evident, as it describes an illocutionary dynamic that we may easily recognize today when, say, one politician’s accusation against an opponent’s tax plan entails a scrutiny of her own. While it is surely worth recognizing that the labile nature of political speech acts is not only a modern phenomenon (as Nuttall herself suggests in the penultimate sentence of the book), it is also surely not surprising. Finally, the book’s literary argument—that Lancastrian literature is neither “rebellious criticism” nor “cowed propaganda” but rather offers...

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