Medieval Autographies: The "I" of the Text

Chapter 7: Bokenham's Autographies

209 C h a p t e r 7 B O K E N H A M ’ S A U T O G R A P H I E S the second fifteenth-century poet in the Chaucerian tradition whose autographic writings i wish to examine, osbern Bokenham, is less well known than hoccleve. to judge from the survival of manuscripts, he was far less widely read in his own time, though i hope, and think it likely, that interest in him will increase in future years. in the lectures on which this book is based i jokingly suggested that a young medievalist looking to make a quick scholarly profit should not buy shares in hoccleve, whose value in terms of academic fashion had probably reached its peak, but would do better to invest in Bokenham, whose price had not yet been driven up so high. that was in 2007, when it was still possible to make jokes about the stock market, but my advice, though differently phrased, would remain the same, both because of the intrinsic merit and distinctive interest of Bokenham’s work and for the fortuitous reason that in 2004 a manuscript was discovered containing a large number of his writings in verse and prose, many of them previously unknown. Bokenham’s exact dates are uncertain, but he was born about 1393 (probably in the norfolk village now called old Buckenham1 ), and he may have been still alive in 1467. thus he belongs to a later generation of Chaucer’s followers than hoccleve—Chaucer’s grandsons rather than his sons. unlike Chaucer and hoccleve, but like many other english fifteenth-century poets, including John lydgate, John Capgrave, 210 M e d i e v a l a u t o g r a p h i e s and John skelton, Bokenham was a cleric, in the sense of being in holy orders. he was an augustinian friar, who studied in his order’s house at Cambridge, rising to the level of doctor of divinity, and spent most of his life based in the friary at stoke-by-Clare in suffolk. By birth and residence, then, he was an east anglian, and in his time east anglia was the most prosperous area of england and a major cultural and religious center. (the three Johns mentioned above all had east anglian links: lydgate as a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury st edmunds in suffolk; Capgrave as an augustinian friar, like Bokenham, but at lynn—now King’s lynn—in norfolk; and skelton as rector for many years of diss, also in norfolk.) the augustinians, like the other orders of friars, were not enclosed, and Bokenham traveled widely, not only within east anglia, where he had many connections among the nobility and gentry, but also abroad: he specifically mentions visits to italy and spain. in 1461 and 1463 he was vicar general for meetings of the augustinians’ provincial chapter—a man of some eminence, then, whose interests were both local and international. at one point he asserts that “spekyn and wrytyn i wyl pleynly / aftyr the language of suthfolk speche” (4063–64: i will speak and write plainly in accordance with the spoken language of suffolk), but at another he refers rather grandly to “the laste tyme i was in itayle” (108: the last time i was in italy). his poetry similarly ranges between pungent colloquialism and a latinate high style in touch with classical mythology and through it with what t.s. eliot called “the mind of europe.”2 none of Bokenham’s works can be described as famous, but the least unread, and the one i shall discuss in this chapter, is a group of lives of female saints, now generally known as the Legendys of Hooly Wummen, the title supplied by the editor of the early english text society edition, Mary serjeantson. the manuscript from which serjeantson edited this collection, the only one then known, British library Ms arundel 327, has no title, but she explains that she took her title from a passage in the preliminary material to the vita of Mary Magdalene, in which Bokenham refers to Bokenham’s autographies 211 dyvers legendys wych my rudnesse From latyn had turnyd into our language of hooly wummen. (5038–40)3 —— [various legends of holy women which, in my clumsy way, i had translated from latin into our language.] the arundel...