Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 by Lynn Arner (review)

Lynn Arner’s monograph reminds us very forcefully that both Gower and Chaucer “were from the ruling classes” (22). She offers a bracing corrective to those of us who might drift along assuming that Chaucer and Gower wrote for and were read by some ill-defined middle class. They were part of the elite and their initial coterie readership was, too. But Arner’s book also argues that, in the years following the 1381 uprising, English courtly verse could not but address the real middling sort. Arner brings to this topic the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as well as insights from British cultural studies. The resulting analysis is broad-brush in some respects and narrow in others. Nonetheless, its polemical approach usefully directs our gaze to a key paradox. Writing in English opened up the prospective readership for classical and courtly subject-matter, but along with this came mechanisms of social control, elitism, and privilege. Limitations were imposed on who had the authority and expertise to interpret a text’s meaning and to define the purpose and remit of the literary.

Chapter 1 focuses its attention on the “upper strat[um] of nonruling urban classes” (17) as potential readers of Chaucer and Gower: those men and women below the ruling elite and wealthy merchants in social status but above servants and waged laborers. This stratum of craftspeople, shopkeepers, and less-well-off merchants supplied many of the rebels who participated in the 1381 uprising. Arner surveys the evidence that many of them could read English and a few could read Latin, and that many of them had had access to basic education of various sorts. Some owned books, some had sufficient income to buy books if they wished, and some lived near institutions that might have loaned them books. None of this, however, is quite the same as demonstrating that the Confessio Amantis or The Legend of Good Women was read by men and women of this social class in the decades immediately following the uprising. Arner’s argument remains essentially hypothetical: it is enough that such readership was possible. This book is not interested in engaging with codicological evidence for circulation and ownership (for example Malcolm Parkes’s coterie readers and scribes who diligently ensured that their manuscripts of the Vox clamantis and/or the Confessio were updated as new text became available). It is in essence a thought-experiment, more virtual than historically provable.

As well as being projected as putative readers, this social group were “available for mobilization and social redefinition” (27) in the wake of the events of 1381. Arner does not turn to historical studies to discover how this group were rehabilitated and brought on side politically, or seek to find evidence of emergent class-consciousness in primary texts. Rather, the argument is that such putative readers are “addressed,” though it is not always clear how this address might operate, in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Gower’s Confessio. Chapter 2 argues that the Confessio singles out those readers with elevated tastes, promoting their identification with those of higher ranks and separating them off from the faceless multitudes of lower ranks. The exploration of the Confessio as a conduit of cultural capital is somewhat sketchy. The analysis is not really interested in individual narratives or the handling of particular sources, but with something approaching a caricature of the poem as a whole as “high culture.” Arner pins down Gower’s attitude as a kind of benevolent paternalism, seeming to know what is best for readers of all levels. Gower’s Latin apparatus, accessible only to the very few, thus signals to this new class of potential readers that literary culture is only partially available to them. Whilst vernacular verse opens up access to this cultural capital, newly enfranchised readers with limited education are implicitly enjoined to rely...