Clerks and Courtiers: Chaucer, Late Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process by Andrew James Johnston (review)

REVIEWS dreamt of, perhaps, in this volume’’ (p. 158), may ultimately be granted. Mary Flowers Braswell University of Alabama, Birmingham Andrew James Johnston, Clerks and Courtiers: Chaucer, Late Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process. Angelstiche Forshungen 302. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998. Pp. 410. $58.00. Clerks and Courtiers is an extremely ambitious book. Not only does it put forward a broad historical thesis about the parallel emergence of English literature and the English state, but it also sets out to critique the bulk of recent scholarly work on late medieval English vernacular writing. Although the book’s subtitle singles out Chaucer, this is by no means a purely Chaucerian analysis; Johnston includes chapters on Gower, Hoccleve , Boethius, and Pecock, and intersperses his discussions of Chaucer with commentary on contemporary theoretical trends and perspectives. As with many books that cast their nets widely, there is a tension in Clerks and Courtiers between the overall argument advanced in the Introduction and the individual readings adduced in support of the thesis, especially in the discussions of Chaucer—a poet always difficult to submit to a confining historical narrative. Nonetheless, Clerks and Courtiers is a book worth reading; though many will find themselves in disagreement with its claims, and occasionally frustrated by a lack of nuance in its readings, it is a thorough response to the groundbreaking work of scholars like Lee Patterson, Paul Strohm, and Richard Firth Green, and as such, deserves serious attention. The thesis of Clerks and Courtiers and the author’s debts to various theorists are described in a long introductory chapter that focuses on the ‘‘problem of the middle strata’’ and the ‘‘state formation process.’’ Put simply, Johnston argues that the notion of state formation derived from Norbert Elias provides a historical perspective that evades the problems inherent in Whiggish narratives of the rise of the middle class. It does so by constructing an account of the development of court soci389 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:10 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ety, the transformation of warriors into courtiers, and the emergence of a clerkly class of bureaucrats, especially lawyers, and by insisting on the court as the point of origin for the modern state. Johnston argues that Chaucer must be situated with reference to a foundational tension between the clerkly class and the courtiers, one produced in part by rivalry for power within the court, and particularly in relation to the king. Johnston’s Chaucer is neither clerk nor courtier; he stands between the two dominant groups, resisting the two literary models they represent: moral didacticism and fin amor. In their place, Chaucer and his friends— chamber knights like Clanvowe and Philippe de la Vache—substituted a notion of poetry for poetry’s sake, an ‘‘aesthetic of social spacelessness’’ (p. 378) that is ironic, ambiguous, purposeless, and formally experimental . It is, finally, an aesthetic of originality, one produced by specific social dynamics but defined in opposition to the social function of literature in its historical moment. This brief summary of the book inevitably leaves out a number of steps in the argument, including Johnston’s careful analysis of bastard feudalism, his discussion of the emergence of the clerkly class, and his examination of the notion of the ‘‘middle strata,’’ all of which are characteristically thorough. But even this necessarily brief recounting of the thesis of Clerks and Courtiers illustrates the paradox that undergirds the book: on the one hand, Johnston is prone to making sweeping generalizations about historical development that are presented as wholesale revisions of commonly accepted versions of state formation and of Chaucer ’s place within literary history. On the other, the conclusions he reaches—with which many readers will have some sympathy—are nevertheless tried-and-true formalist claims about the Chaucerian aesthetic. In a sense, Johnston marries New Historicism and New Criticism, deriving from their union a notion of the social situatedness and historical specificity of art for art’s sake, which he suggests was a revolutionary idea emerging from the particular nexus of interests at the court of Richard II. He further argues that after Chaucer—in figures such as Hoccleve , Lydgate, and Pecock—the...