Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (review)

This wide-ranging book about artisans in medieval culture is engaging and insightful. Rather than pursuing one overarching argument about the social function of artisans in the Middle Ages, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England pursues what Lisa Cooper calls a “multi-faceted historiography” of artisans through their representation in literary and nonliterary texts (11). What I most admire about this study is Cooper’s ability to discover artisans and artisanal concerns in texts where we might not expect to find them: instructional vocabularies, fabliaux, spiritual allegories, and mirrors for princes. In presenting an innovative survey of medieval genres, the book fulfills its promise to offer “a useful account of the varied roles that artisans and artisanal imagery play in late medieval didactic and imaginative writing” (4).

The book’s chapters are organized by genre, and Cooper examines texts about, for, and (in some cases) by artisans; the disparate narrative contexts range from Anglo-Saxon texts for monks to fifteenth-century bilingual manuals for merchants. By traversing diverse social spaces, Cooper demonstrates that artisans occupy “multiple roles in medieval English literature” (15, her italics). Shape-shifting, multitasking artisans serve many narrative conventions and discursive aims—pedagogical, vocational, spiritual, or political—and comprise crucial tools for thought for medieval writers. (The implicit pun on “tools” is my own; Cooper adapts Lévi-Strauss, asserting artisans are “good to think with” [7].)

The introduction to Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England establishes the study’s aims, with an excursus on Chaucer. Cooper notes that the poet aligns poetry making with artisanal craft, but that he also takes pains to distinguish between literary composition and the creation of physical artifacts (11–14). Chapter 1 examines understandings of craft production in pedagogical vocabularies, from Ælfric’s tenth-century Colloquy to Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English (c. 1480–83). Cooper reveals how these texts provide insight into perceptions of artisans and their social positioning, and she draws upon Bourdieu to argue that the texts also confer cultural capital upon their readers, pursuing symbolic profit and material gain (22).

Chapter 2 explores artisanal community and domesticity in the masons’ Constitutions, Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, and anonymous texts about artisans (The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools, The Wright’s Chaste Wife, and The Smyth and His Dame). The fifteenth-century Constitutions, which interweave legends and didactic materials, “provide a substitute, if metaphorical, home” for medieval masons who were largely itinerant (58). In making this argument, Cooper astutely observes that masons lacked an established guildhall and formed contingent communities that were reconstituted at one construction site after another. Transitioning to fabliaux as examples of “medieval domestic fiction” (83), Cooper explores how poems about artisanal households manage concerns about domestic order and social harmony.

Chapter 3 traces how Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine exploits imagery of artisanal craft and labor and how such phenomena are transformed in Lydgate’s English translation. Cooper demonstrates that “both metaphorical craft language and actual (if nonetheless still allegorical) scenes of craft practice are the means by which the pilgrim-narrator is informed” on theological matters, and she persuasively argues that artisanal production often comprises the poem’s epistemology (107). The reading of Occupation, a net-maker by trade, is compelling: Cooper shows that Lydgate adapts this figure to mitigate the radical threat it poses to conservative notions of social hierarchy (136–40).

Chapter 4 turns to political education, revealing how texts in the mirror for princes tradition employ the figure of the artisan to theorize social hierarchy and proper relations between rulers and subjects. Opening with Alfred’s Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Cooper invokes kingly cræft (an interpolation absent in the original Latin) to establish the conceit of “the ruler as master artifex of the realm” (146). This ruler-as-artisan construct is traced through reiterations over time. In Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (c. 1431–38), artisanal...