The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (review)

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s learned study concerns the ‘class’ of clerics in medieval England who were unable to realize their goals to become beneficed priests, and who of necessity, therefore, became the ‘underbeneficed king’s clerks, lawmen, household chaplains, civic record keepers, careerist clerks in government’ (p. 35)—the focus of Part One (four chapters)—and ‘the singing clerks, chantry priests, and other minor court officials of cathedrals and colleges’ (p. 177)—the focus of Part Two (three chapters). Yet the liminal space between civic and church worlds these well-educated, tri-lingual workers occupied allowed them to contribute significantly to the development of English literature in the Middle Ages. Kerby-Fulton thus aims to: 1) bring these figures forward—some named, most not—in order to recognize the significant role they played in the story of how literature written in Medieval England became literature written in Middle English; and 2) to explore more precisely what that role entailed and to call on literary scholars to join her in furthering research in this area (the historians are ahead of us here, as she often chidingly informs us).

Applying her own considerable expertise with manuscripts, linguistics, and paleography, Kerby-Fulton not only shows us where these clerics have been hiding in plain sight, but also shares the work they sometimes wrote themselves: for example, John Tyckhill (Chapter Two), a chantry chaplain at St. Paul’s, who served as the rent collector, and who ‘[wrote] the poem down on that most bureaucratic of writing surfaces, a roll, in fact his own St. Paul’s rent roll for 1395–96’ (p. 97). She chooses Tyckhill not just as a literary exemplar, but also as a window into the lives of these liminal figures: the surprising eroticism of his ‘A Bird of Bishopswood’ gives us insight into churched laborers who, because unbeneficed, were not required to take vows of chastity. But more canonical writers, Thomas Hoccleve in particular, receive more attention; I read with interest her explication of the influence Langland, not just Chaucer, had on him (Chapters Two and Three). Langland emerges as important to understanding many of these clerics because they identified and resonated with the themes of church reform and related issues of personal and priestly virtue Piers Plowman foregrounds (see her discussion in Chapter Four of Thomas Audelay on the decidedly unmeritocratic benefice sweepstakes of his time). Also of special interest to Kerby-Fulton is the multi-tiered world of cathedral culture (Chapters Five–Seven). Vicars choral command the stage here: despite their frustrated career ambitions—or maybe because of them—they demonstrate advanced skills and sophistication in their own creative works: the knowledge of music and music performance they display, for instance, in the lyrics they compose for their own carols and motets in English.

There are many other treasures in this book: the ‘corrective imitation of Langland’ that the redactor of the Z-text of Piers shamelessly performs, the involvement of York Minster’s vicars choral in the Second Trial Before Pilate, to name only a few. Kerby-Fulton ranges widely and gathers a sizeable and broad representation of these contingent, contract workers of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries to sketch the even more sizeable community behind them. Readers will have quibbles with some of her specific readings—I do with her treatment of Lawman—yet the high quality of her research and the infectious enthusiasm she displays in presenting it makes for an enjoyable read of truly consequential scholarship. I confess, however, that I found the Marxism she invokes to be more of a rhetorical gesture than a deeply-rooted analytical framework. Hers is, as it were, a more micro- than macroeconomic cultural analysis of the religious sector of late medieval literary production. Calling these clerics ‘proletarians’ blocks some of the light she shines on the individuals, groups, networks, and cultures that...