Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381

Introduction

introduction T he spring and summer of 1381 witnessed the most geographically widespread series of rebellions, featuring the largest number of insurgents, in medieval English history. In the immediate aftermath, John Gower composed book 1 of the Vox Clamantis, describing the event in vitriolic terms and portraying rebels as beasts ontologically incapable of intelligible speech. Preaching to the demographics who overwhelmingly opposed the English Rising of 1381, the Vox staged a dramatic refusal to engage with subordinate classes, as the poem’s educational prerequisites attest.1 Around 1386 Gower began the Confessio Amantis,2 in which the memory of the rising persists,3 although the two poems offer dramatically divergent strategies for grappling with the event. Requiring neither fluency in Latin nor conversance with GrecoRoman antecedents, the Confessio acknowledged that the eagerness of the ruling classes alone was insufficient to reproduce social relations and that recruitment is easier when the ruling and subordinate classes speak a shared language. Spending far less time than the Vox on explicitly politicized speech, the Confessio relocated the debate to an expressly literary register, promoting culture as a powerful site at which to engage in political struggle. No longer the preserve of the ruling classes, learned poetry structured by a Greco-Roman and erudite European literary tradition addressed members of the populace directly in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, and, as the Confessio testifies, offered a viable locus for intersecting with the consciousness of the subordinate classes. Ultimately, this study is less concerned with the English Rising of 1381 than with the larger ‘‘crisis of authority’’ that the rebellion signaled and with responses to this crisis.4 This crisis of authority was an incitement to discourse, and one response CHAUCER, GOWER, AND THE VERNACULAR RISING was the flourishing of an erudite, highly literary Greco-Roman English poetry, a key site of political struggle in late medieval England. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After  examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English while the ability to read was burgeoning among significant numbers of men and women from the nonruling classes in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England.5 This transmission required a dissemination of cultural authority and offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. The late medieval vernacular turn meant that large portions of the nonruling classes no longer needed the more highly educated to dispense this knowledge or to interpret it for them. The Vernacular Rising argues that while Geoffrey Chaucer’s and John Gower’s writings were key conduits of these cultural riches into the language of the populace, these writings simultaneously engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise and defining gradations of cultural authority. At the founding of a highly literate English tradition, this poetry attempted to circumscribe the democratizing potential of this new knowledge and worked to grant certain socioeconomic groups leverage in public affairs, all the while promoting relations of dependency for others. As part of its analysis, The Vernacular Rising scrutinizes multiple addresses to different sectors of the early readership for Chaucer’s and Gower’s English poetry, with particular attention to the Confessio’s complex, often contradictory address to sizeable portions of nonruling groups upon their entrée, as a significant readership, into an erudite literary legacy. Classificatory systems in Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts encouraged all sectors of their early readership to make social distinctions: first, among varied groups of readers; and, second, between these groups and those not among them. By doing so, these writings participated in determining, at the sites of vernacular poetry and poetics, who could legitimately contribute to the production of knowledge in late medieval England. Furthermore, The Vernacular Rising argues that at formative moments in the English literary tradition (as it is now conventionally celebrated), the poetry of Chaucer and Gower circumscribed the field of debate regarding appropriate responses to poetry and acceptable categories of analysis for understanding and for adjudicating texts, helping to establish which conversations about literature were possible. Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings jointly participated in forging a highly effective set of discourses about English poetry, some premises of which subtend current praxes surrounding 2 INTRODUCTION English literature. While their writings were typically consonant regarding constructions of cultural expertise, gradations of cultural authority, and the circumscription of the democratizing potential...