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Chapter 1: Chaucer’s and Gower’s Early Readership Expanded
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1 chaucer’s and gower’s early readership expanded J ohn Sharnebrok, a chandler and citizen of London, owned ‘‘Clensyngsyne,’’ valued at 8d. in 1376. Nearly two decades later, Gilbert Prynce, a London painter, left a missal to the church of St. Giles without Cripplegate, London. John Clifford, a mason and citizen of Southwark, willed one book to his parish church in Southwark in 1411 and two books to a convent of Franciscan nuns. Upon his death in 1443, a York glover named John Newton bequeathed two books, one of which seems to have been Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. Richard Person, an armorer of London, willed his grandchild a Psalter in 1446. John Cadeby, a mason of Beverley, possessed a pair of writing tables and six English books, the latter valued at 10s. at the time of his death, around 1450.1 All these men were from the nonruling classes. Nonetheless, they owned books. Examining social practices surrounding education and literacy, along with a constellation of legal records, this chapter demonstrates that substantial portions of the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, including men like these testators, possessed the ability to read the vernacular, and occasionally Latin, in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. Deploying similar types of evidence, I argue that significant portions of these strata owned and consumed books and that these men and women were among the readership for Chaucer’s and Gower ’s vernacular poetry prior to 1425, strata that had produced substantial numbers of rebels in the English Rising of 1381. Delineating Groups Before turning to the literacy of these strata, this chapter explains the formulation the ‘‘upper strata of nonruling classes,’’ discusses the significance CHAUCER, GOWER, AND THE VERNACULAR RISING of these ranks, and positions this readership in relation to other lay groups Middle English scholars have envisioned among Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership. Maintaining that the Ricardian period ushered in vernacular poetry (such as the writings of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland) concerned with common profit and the public good, Anne Middleton has argued that early readers of Chaucer’s poetry included ‘‘New Men,’’ resembling the Canterbury-bound Man of Law, Franklin, Monk, Clerk, and Squire, a readership that Chaucerians have frequently reiterated.2 Middleton grounds her demographics in Paul Strohm’s scholarship, scholarship that has helped structure how most literary scholars conceptualize Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership. Strohm argues that Chaucer’s primary reading circle for his poetry during his lifetime consisted of his fellow knights and esquires in Richard II’s household and of civil servants and lawyers in the London-Westminster area, men in social situations close to the poet’s. Strohm adds that this circle may have included educated women at the court and wealthy London merchants prior to the fifteenth century. Identifying Chaucer as part of a ‘‘middle social grouping,’’ Strohm locates the poet’s primary reading circle among the ‘‘middle class,’’ ‘‘the middle strata,’’ or the ‘‘ill-defined middle ranks of society,’’ which he conceptualizes as excluding royalty, ecclesiastical orders, peasants, wage laborers, and the highest levels of the aristocracy.3 Replicating the amorphousness of this category, it is common for Chaucerians and Gowerians to conceptualize what were in fact the protobourgeoisie and portions of the aristocracy as occupants of a ‘‘middle class’’ or ‘‘middle strata’’ when discussing these groups as readers and/or audience members for Chaucer’s and Gower’s poetry.4 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice’s scholarship on Langlandian reading circles has also been enormously influential on understandings of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership. Pointing further down the socioeconomic ladder, Kerby-Fulton and Justice argue that Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and, later, Thomas Hoccleve shared a ready, central readership of bureaucrats, consisting of sergeants and justices of law, civil servants, and legal scribes, in London, Westminster, and Dublin from 1380 to 1427.5 Although Kerby-Fulton and Justice do not pursue questions surrounding the socioeconomic origins or alignments of these men, the higher echelons of these London-Westminster circles emerged from the ranks of the landed gentry and the merchant class, an example being Chaucer himself, often 18 [44.200.77.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:51 GMT) EARLY READERSHIP EXPANDED classified as a high-ranking civil servant.6 The lower ends of these LondonWestminster circles, however, are of greater interest in my project. KerbyFulton and Justice point out that the lower levels, among whom they place Langland, included...