The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Medieval English Literature

The Voice of the Hammer should be retitled the Voice of the Stylus. From the first paragraph Nicola Masciandaro makes it clear that this "is not labor's voice as the self-expression of medieval laborers," rather it is about the literary representation of work in the poetry of late fourteenth-century England, and the role given to work in the construction of the self.

Masciandaro begins the book with an historical agenda. He has chosen this poetry because it was the product of a time in which the regulation of labor had become a major public issue after the plague, and he also wants to challenge a tradition in modern history of nostalgically opposing the medieval and the modern, which suggests that "modern work is separated from the life of the household, or even life itself, [but] medieval work was fused with social and personal experience."

The problem with this agenda, for an historian, is that Masciandaro takes little account of historical writing on attitudes to labor, or on the relationship between work and the household, and his ideas of both the medieval and the modern are based on slight and outdated bodies of literature. There are passing references to the work of older historians, such as Coulton, Thrupp, Hilton, and Tawney, but no references to many of the staple works on post-plague English labor regulation such as Bertha Putnam, Stephen Penn, Christopher Given-Wilson, or Anthony Musson, or even to the published ordinances of labor or the published records of the justices of labor. Thus he is unaware of debates about the representation of labor in the administrative milieu in which some of his authors also were employed. Similarly Masciandaro grounds the historical tradition of opposing medieval and modern work practices in the ideas of Marx, but has not read more recent historians on this subject. There is no reference to the publications of Caroline Barron, Sandy Bardsley, Judith Bennett, Harold Fox, Jeremy Goldberg, Barbara Hanawalt, Barbara Harvey, Maryanne Kowaleski, Mavis Mate, Lawrence Poos, Felicity Riddy, Stephen Rigby, Phillip Schofield, Heather Swanson, Donald Woodward, or Jane Whittle, to name just a few of the senior scholars who have written about the many diverse and particular forms of medieval work and their variable relationships to practices of householding. Such studies debate at length the function of work in relation to the construction, performance, and perception of gender, age, and status, producing ideas and material that could be essential to Masciandaro's interest in the role of work in the construction of the self. They also unpick the nostalgic view of the medieval household and complicate and challenge the legacy of Marx, not least through their consideration of gender.

Masciandaro's ignorance of this scholarship means that he ignores all issues relating to gender, lifecycle, employment, patronage, service, and hired labor within his conception of work. Masciandaro's view of labor is thus historically extremely generalized. It is ignores all variation in relation to time, place, and person. What emerges is a preoccupation with an idea of work relating to the clerical and male literary ego, and both the medieval and modern desire to justify intellectual work as a form of labor appropriate to men. The only woman in the entire book is Chaucer's Second Nun, who appears as an example of desire for an "authorship conventionally unavailable to women," though that "convention" and the work of female authors is explored no further. It is a shame that Masciandaro seems entirely insensitive to this all-pervasive gendering of his project, given the extensive work by literary medievalists on writing and gender with which he could engage, and the work of authors such as D. Vance Smith and Glenn Burger on writing and masculinity in particular.

The first chapter pursues the semantics of work through five words: travail, labour, swink, werk and craft, building on the work of the Middle English Dictionary. Masciandaro misses (or does he deliberately ignore?) the fundamental sexual connotations of postlapsarian labor in a number of the sources he quotes. For example on p. 17: "Ffor the erthe was made of erthe / At the first begynnynge, / That erthe schuld labour the erthe / In trowthe and sore swynkynge." The restriction of the discussion to a small number of Middle English poems also prevents consideration of the multi-lingual context in which these words became "English," since there is no consideration of the terminology used in contemporary accounts of the employment or regulation of labor in French and Latin as well as English. The remainder of the first chapter turns to a discussion of the relationship between vocabulary and culture, and an elaboration on work as a process and a product. He disproves Ruzena Ostrà's (1967) claim that there was an essential dichotomy in the medieval vocabulary of work between urban and rural labor. Instead he asserts that the vocabulary of work was gradated according to the status attached to different kinds of labor, from hard physical labor, to the mechanical arts and crafts, to the labor of the intellect. Masciandaro then suggests that this traditional discourse became merged into a single category of werk, in which all labor embraced a "sense of ethically and historically consequential action." This is an interesting observation, but I was less convinced by his attempts to contrast this broad medieval werk ethic with a narrower modern ethics of work. In a long meditation Masciandaro draws on Calvin, Weber, Arendt, and Tawney (1962) to consider the differences between medieval werk's polysemy and modern work's alleged separation from life. Not only does this seem to contradict his own agenda but the conceptual framework for the construction of the "modern" seems insubstantial.

The second and most successful chapter focuses on medieval histories of work. The stage is set by a consideration of John Ball's Adam and Eve and their representation of antediluvian labor as both egalitarian and necessary to the human condition prior to the construction of social class. By contrast the history of masonry contained in the Cooke maunscript rejects this Biblical history in favor of emphasizing the postdiluvian gentle origin of masons, which is derived from the higher status of their art. Their aristocratic aspiration is signaled by their awareness of History in both the products of their labor (the cathedral and the castle) and in the commissioning of the Cooke manuscript. By contrast with the gentle masons, Gower is seen as the bourgeois. His treatment of labor in the Confessio Amantis advances the archetypal bourgeois cause of seeing work as an expression of virtue, and virtue (not birth) as the path to gentilesse. This leaves Chaucer in the Former Age to reject the status of work altogether and to embrace alienation from it, in a world view "in which authentic work, work without complicity in the world's violence and greed, is not only unavailable but unimaginable."

The final chapter, "My Werk," focuses on fragment VIII of The Canterbury Tales to pursue the late fourteenth-century's interest in the subjective dimension of work. The opening paragraphs show a tendency to believe authors such as Gower: to read their protests at the greed and laziness of laborers as based on a realistic assessment of the actions of workers "motivated by desires of wealth and status." Such common sense generalizations about work essentially buy into Gower's agenda and unconsciously reproduce it. Masciandaro's treatment of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale takes the work-idleness distinction as its major theme. First he sets up the chapter in relation to Langland's apologia which starts with the "poet-cleric's alienation from . . . material labor" but ends with "his renewed and deepened identification with the labor he has chosen and been called to." In the end it is this thesis of the necessity of choice which emerges as the partially unvoiced conclusion to The Voice of the Hammer. The first two chapters argued that separate categories of labor and their vocabularies became fused in a more general conception of werk in which all labor had productive value, and in this chapter this value is seen to lie in work's opposition to idleness. Masciandaro argues that the Yeoman's rejection of the idle work of alchemy in preference for the true work of telling his tale, like the Second Nun's desire for authorship, are both stories of choice in which alternative varieties of work are scrutinized. In both cases meaningful work can be the only right choice in preference to idleness, and in both cases the most meaningful work is found in the work of authorship.

The book has no conclusion. The last paragraph of the last chapter dwells on the elusiveness of work's meaning: "Work is always a work in progress . . . true work is an imperfectly realised ideal, a significance, that subsists in the human longing for it." And there the work ends, or rather suspends itself. In adopting the present tense, Masciandaro leaves us with the impression that his final words convey a kind of natural truth about humanity, whose condition is found in their longing for meaningful work rather than idleness. Gower could have no better apologist for his views on the "common little people" whose unwillingness to work at menial tasks deprived Gower of the food owed to his own table while he got on with the higher business of writing.

And thereby hangs the main problem. The Voice of the Hammer is undoubtedly a thought-provoking book with some very clever ideas, which are beautifully expressed. But as a PhD thesis it really needed more revision for the author to develop, and above all clarify, his purpose. I feel like Gower myself—get back to work, your necessary labor is not finished yet!