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  • Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England by Michael Johnston
  • Christine Chism
Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. By Michael Johnston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 301; 15 illustrations. $89.

This well-researched, lucidly written study combines three methodologies—1) literary analysis, 2) Marxist social history, and 3) codicology—into a reading of nine late medieval romances written by and for the gentry. These romances all feature heroes marked not as nobles but as gentry. They include Octavian, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, Sir Degrevant, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Isumbras, Sir Launfal, [End Page 136] and two Arthurian romances: The Avowing of Arthur and Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle. Johnston argues that these romances enact a gentry imaginary that projects the worldviews, anxieties, and aspirations of an emergent class of gentry in socially conservative ideological maneuvers.

Johnston's study situates these romances in the locales in which their manuscripts were first produced, circulated, and consumed, as far as those can be ascertained. Rather than trying to excavate the intentions of compilers, he strives to track the exigencies of readers, using codicological inscriptions, textual groupings, dialects, collations, script, catchwords, and mises en page to bolster his claims. The result is a double intervention. First, Johnston maps with new force and clarity the role of the gentry as an emergent late medieval social class that is far more numerous and self-articulate that is often acknowledged. Second, Johnston urges manuscript studies from its historical focus on London workshops as loci of professional and commercial manuscript production into the provinces, where copyists in cities like Leicester, the clerical staff of manors, or literate manorial gentry themselves devise new and revealing codicological practices.

Nine manuscripts nucleate these romances and Johnston's study: 1) Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn II.i; 2) Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6 (the Findern Anthology); 3) Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38; 4) Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.3.1 (the Heege Manuscript); 5) Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 (Thornton); 6) London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A. ii; 7) London, British Library, MS Egerton 2862; 8) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61; and 9) Princeton, University Library, MS Taylor 9 (the Ireland Manuscript.). Of these Johnston devotes most attention to those that can be historically and geographically situated: in Derbyshire (Findern, Heege), Yorkshire (Thornton), and Lancashire/Chester (Ireland). Each of these regions is is given a full chapter. For all nine manuscripts Johnston constellates features he identifies with local production, which means that the manuscript producers were close to or identical with their consumers. He then scours regional archives and secondary studies to compose a history of the socioeconomic activities of the families that owned, wrote (or had written), and read the manuscripts. Johnston thus situates the readers and copyists whose social fantasies are served by these gentry romances, often drawing upon the other texts and documents collated with them in the manuscripts. This kind of embedded manuscript analysis gains interpretive force when Johnston charts the literary and ideological work attempted (not always triumphantly) by the romances.

After an introduction that sets out these central arguments, Chapter 1 draws upon Raymond Williams, Christine Carpenter, and Peter Coss to argue for the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gentry as an emergent late medieval social class in a unique socioeconomic position, coming to self-consciousness and participating in its own ideological reproduction. Johnston nuances the gentry as different in kind as well as in degree from the nobility above it and the yeomanry, merchants, and landowning commons beneath it. While appropriating many of the nobility's values (such as heroic chivalry and courtly love), the gentry both of these romances and of late medieval England are keenly preoccupied with holding their own against aristocratic power even as they claim aristocratic values. Simultaneously they hold the line against social mobility from below in a classic bicycle posture—upwardly bowing while downwardly kicking. The gentry themselves break into three strata: the knights on top, the esquires in the middle, and the nebulous class of gentlemen beneath. [End Page 137]

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