Thinking Historically after Historicism:

The contributors to this collection share an indissoluble link to the distinguished scholar Lee Patterson, who taught medieval literature at the University of Toronto, The Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and Yale University, from where he retired as the Frederick W. Hilles Professor Emeritus of English. Lee was a masterful teacher who electrified the classroom and fostered in his students a taste for Middle English and for poetry of all kinds. He mentored dozens of young medievalists, and his writing continues to have a devoted following. His doctoral students found him a formidable advisor whose exacting standards they would later recognize as marks of respect with which no praise could compete.Patterson built towering models of scholarship in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (1987) and Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991).1 These books are vintage Patterson, elegant and fearless. Field-changing when first published, they have become classics of Chaucer criticism and of the critical movement that came to be known as New Historicism. Students of Chaucer still cut their teeth on Chaucer and the Subject of History, while Negotiating the Past and the Speculum article “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies” (1990) remain essential guides to the contentious terrain of medieval studies.2The model of interpretation exemplified by Patterson requires hard, patient work. It also requires a constant admission to ourselves that the evidence we unearth may be scant, our understanding of it partial, its manifestations multiple, and our analyses totally dependent on the methodologies and assumptions available to us in our moment. However, as Patterson pointed out, by trying to uncover some truth in those things that are specific, particular, local, and contingent in medieval culture, we have the opportunity to resist the homogenizing tendencies of our own culture.3 We hope that these eight essays offer new and exciting ways to think with historicism after historicism.The historicists of the 1980s and 90s, aided by a robust feminist historiography, challenged the existence of an autonomous aesthetic realm, putting in its place a textual model of culture in which poems could be read alongside legal documents, and in which bodies, ideologies, and events could be read as discourse. Even as it remains influential, the approach has been vigorously critiqued in recent years, in part for sidelining other approaches such as psychoanalysis, and in part for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, losing what is particular to literature—its formal qualities—and losing what is particular to literary disciplines.4 These losses have perhaps been the greatest for poetry, especially the lyric, although the last few years have witnessed something of a revival, and the lyric may prove to be the comeback kid of the twenty-first century. Consequently, many of the questions that mobilized historicist criticism are still pressing: What is the value of the category of the literary? And what belongs exclusively to literary art?Beneath these questions lies another that informs all literary criticism: How does the past continue to mean to the present? For many medievalists working in the last decades of the twentieth century, a literary text yielded value insofar as it exposed the operations of political power, resistance, and injustice.5 More recently, scholars have significantly rethought this question about value from the perspectives of affect and ethics.6 In a complementary way, many critics have been engaged in the project of historicizing affect, ethics, and emotion.7 By interrogating the category of the literary, Patterson and his contemporaries encouraged generations of critics to evaluate their own desires and stakes in the past.In “Literary Value and the Customs House: The Axiological Logic of the House of Fame,” Robert J. Meyer-Lee returns the question of literary value to the historical realm by asking what the relationship between literary aesthetics and socioeconomic value reveals about the worth of poetry. Meyer-Lee's subject is the House of Fame, a highly experimental poem that uniquely references Geoffrey Chaucer's work as customs controller. In Meyer-Lee's reading, Chaucer's poem showcases the metaliterary activity of accounting for literary value. As many critics have noted, the House of Fame registers the poet's contact with Trecento Italian authors and proclaims his status as a vernacular author in ways very different from, say, English imitations of the dits amoreaux, which were the literary currency of the royal household. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of production, Meyer-Lee explains that, when Chaucer became controller, he found himself outside court circles where writing poetry was a normative activity. With the House of Fame, the poet highlights the mismatch between these two fields of production. In his retelling of Virgil's story of Dido, for example, he converts Dido's legendary desire into “wikke Fame” (349). In doing so, he links his role as controller to his narrator's role as an “observer of the process of [fame's] creation, valuation, and dissemination.”8 According to Meyer-Lee, the Aeneid helped Chaucer revaluate poetic work between the social location of the court and the mercantile location of the customs house, where value was weighed and recorded.The New Historicist movement has recovered many noncanonical texts for literary study and expanded the purview of literary criticism to include broadsides, travel narratives, confessional handbooks, and trial records. This process of inclusion also has helped us see how medieval poets understood literary value differently from poets in later periods.9 For example, the boldly experimental form of William Langland's Piers Plowman, and its obsession with gains and losses, establishes the question of value as one of that poem's chief concerns.10 For the poet, the value of poetry is bound up with moral and spiritual value—that is, how learned verse conveys information or inculcates attitudes that lead to salvation. The poem's preoccupation with its own value resonates with modern concerns about the value of imaginative literature. We ask over and over: What is the study of literature worth in terms of institutional reward, market value, or moral gain? To what ends do we read and write? And for whose good?Jennifer Sisk, in “Paul's Rapture and Will's Vision: The Problem of Imagination in Langland's Life of Christ,” pursues the problem of imaginative value by zeroing in on a strange quotation in Piers Plowman B.18: the dreamer, misquoting Saint Paul, claims to have special access to revelation and to mysteries out of reach of normal mental capacity. This misquotation occurs in a scene of vivid poetic imagining—the life and death of Christ—and feels startlingly out of place. As Sisk points out, Langland likely derived his quotation of Paul from the context of Saint Augustine's visionary schema, for which a dramatic imagining of Christ's life would belong to the category of spiritual vision (which relies on imagination and which therefore runs some interpretative risks) as opposed to intellectual vision (which, granted from above, avoids the perils of the imaginative faculty). Sisk argues that the quotation highlights an important contrast between revelatory vision and the kind of visionary goals a poem like Piers Plowman can hope to attain. At the same time, the quotation reflects a qualified optimism about the power of images, an optimism that runs throughout the poem and more generally in late medieval devotional literature. For Langland, in other words, the potential value of vernacular religious verse resides both in the success and the failure of images to lead readers to higher knowledge of the divine.Well versed in the vitae of saints, medievalists always have had to think creatively about the relationship between life and text. This has been especially true for studies of medieval women like Margery Kempe, who often confound modern expectations of genre, identity, and period.11 New Historicists, by showing how authorial lives are constructed under social and political pressures, get to the heart of medieval exemplarity by asking such questions as: How can lives (and deaths) be read as texts? And how do texts generate new forms of living?12 These questions pertain especially to writers such as Langland, Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Usk, writers who critiqued their social worlds by fashioning complex personas and other forms of authorial lives.As Candace Barrington points out in “Personas and Performance in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” the stress of being a medieval commentator was felt most acutely when the object of criticism was the king and court. Gower's notorious bid for patronage in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis, a prologue he revised when the Lancastrians came to power, has been seen as an opportunistic retreat from political engagement and a sacrifice of critique for royal favor. Along similar lines, scholars have proposed that Gower's authorial persona in the Confessio—a lover confessing to a priest—redeems the courtly discourse that Gower would have once thought reprehensible. Barrington takes a different tack, reading the earliest version of the Confessio as a tough critique of Ricardian court culture, enacted through a series of authorial self-transformations. Presenting himself first as a didactic author, Gower next performs the role of a courtier so as to gain entry to a frivolous court in need of reform. Finally, he names the lover-courtier as himself, now apparently in his proper person as an old man who despairs of implementing the reforms that the Confessio recommends. By this reading, the poet has not done an about-face so much as he has found another mode by which to address the moral failings of Richard II's court. In Barrington's view, the poet uses multiple personas in order to deliver a Lancastrian critique in advance of the Lancastrians. In the process, he creates a fictive career for a literary persona who assumes various guises in order to try to shape his circumstances.Along similar lines, George Shuffelton examines the circumstances that shape a literary life in his essay “John Carpenter, Lay Clerk.” Shuffelton's subject is the relationship between literacy and career as they converge in the activities of John Carpenter, London Common Clerk (1417–38), intimate associate of Richard Whittington, and the compiler of the customary Liber Albus. Late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century London/Westminster was a bureaucratic hub and a forge for civic politics. It is therefore an ideal site for thinking about relationships between literary production and the various modes of literacy that urban culture supported, including civic records, chronicles, and legal or commemorative documents.13As Shuffelton argues, Carpenter's London opened up new careers for literate men, even those lacking a university education. Carpenter's literacy, while looking forward to a fully secularized bureaucracy, also lay claim to a Latin intellectual inheritence usually associated with the monks of Bury St. Edmunds, cathedral canons, and chancellor-bishops like Richard of Bury, author of the Philobiblon. The contents of Carpenter's library, which included a copy of the Philobiblon, reveal him to be a highly Latinate reader, more along the lines of an ecclesiastic figure than a merchant. Ultimately, Carpenter's literary life shows that a well-connected lay clerk in fifteenth-century London could make claim to functions once belonging exclusively to priests and chroniclers, specifically, the stewardship of urban memory and the organization of a communal afterlife.In the last few decades, literary scholars have come to see genre as an expression of, or intervention into, the relationship between ideology and form. Such formal intervention is easier to detect in texts that do not meet expectations of genre—and harder to detect in those texts that, like Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, set generic expectations. In “‘Ain’t gonna study war no more': Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini,” Christine Chism explores Geoffrey's lesser-known work, the Vita Merlini, arguing that it is not merely an experiment in genre—pseudo-hagiography, for example, or twelfth-century Virgilian pastoral; it is also a calculated response to the relentless violence of Geoffrey's massively influential Historia. Whereas the Historia depends on cycles of aristocratic male violence, the Vita Merlini rejects the trappings of a culture wedded to patriarchy and fantasies of empire.One of New Historicism's strengths is its ability to address the ideological functions of historical narratives by identifying those functions as formal tensions in literary texts.14 In this spirit, Chism analyzes the dialectics of history that spur both historical and nonhistorical twelfth-century writing. In her reading, the cycles of warfare in the Historia make British nationalism a pretext for writing a history about treachery, foundation, and conquest. At the same time, the portion of the Historia most excerpted in the Middle Ages—Merlin's prophecies—mystifies the bloody operations of history, turning dynastic struggle into “a pantheistic bedlam of warring dragons, apple-bearing hedgehogs, and shouting forests.”15 The Vita Merlini, however, which appears twelve years after the Historia, roundly rejects the sovereign fantasies of its predecessor by relocating the prophet, now mad with grief, to a British landscape isolated from political struggle. This landscape, itself an ecocritique of the ravages of colonialism, becomes the site of an alternative society devoted to natural science, egalitarianism, communism, and peace. The Vita Merlini thus represents Geoffrey's surprising and rarely noted intervention into his own oeuvre.Like Geoffrey, Gower staged a formal intervention into his own oeuvre, one that literary history has also conveniently ignored. One of the fourteenth century's most versatile poets, Gower wrote in French, Latin, and English and in a number of meters. His literary career has become emblematic of the trilingual culture of late-fourteenth-century England and of the ascendancy of English over Latin and French as England's literary language. In the last few years, scholars of Anglo-French literature have shifted the historical paradigm by focusing on the simultaneity of language cultures and the varieties of French in England.16 As Emma Lipton shows, Gower's little-studied Traitié pour essampler les amants marietz, a compilation of ballades about marriage composed after the Confessio Amantis, poses a serious challenge to the teleologies of literary history and, likewise, to critical accounts of Gower's career ending with the rise of English.Lipton argues that Gower recuperates with the Traitié some of the losses of the Confessio. Written in Anglo-French, the traditional language of English law, the Traitié maintains the general structure of a legal compendium, a form that allows the poet to investigate the relationship between case and rule, using a literary casuistry he has tried out already in the Confessio. In the Confessio (and especially in Book 8), Gower tells many exemplary tales having to do with marriage, all standard Fürstenspiegel (advice for princes) fare, illustrating tyranny, jealousy, and so forth. In the Traitié Gower is more ambitious regarding exempla on the institution of marriage. By retelling them in ways that reflect legal methods, Gower links marriage to general principles regarding the common good and contractual integrity. Marriage exempla become similar to legal precedents in case-based law: in a continual dialectic with larger principles, they both illustrate those principles and help to shape them. With the French Traitié, in other words, Gower portrays the English Confessio not as the culmination of a life's work but as a project in need of revision, whose ideas on exemplarity, marriage, and law were yet to reach their full potential.As an interpretative method, literary historicism is vulnerable to the criticism that it is bad historiography, enthralled to anecdote and to a version of political history prefabricated for critical consumption. In ways that recall Barrington's argument about Gower, Larry How can we good in the that is, a first and as literary? In and The Problem of on the of medieval poetry and on the of modern literary He argues that scholarship on Thomas one of the fifteenth-century by New a of the historicist to into two reading the poet as a political or a Lancastrian and, as or As these are insofar as they in the however, to the ways that ideological are into literary or to medieval an of the and the to these of as political or Lancastrian would be more readers that is of For by about that most of medieval the context of his persona in the of to a in political discourse. the court is and for are by their very is the In argues, to to in the of history, we remain with the narratives we about the that may or may not with our own aesthetic and political and the of the Middle as explores some of the in medieval studies that historicists have and to For as for Patterson, much critical the question of the What does the category of the modern mean for scholars trying to figure out the between and a field of study by As medievalists often to the of the Middle or on some kind of argues that a through this can be found in the of and in of the terms a or a form of One of such a form is the in which the in the to one person from the In essay on this or is the ideal to the of the than say, medieval in his a of as an urban which also in and to the Vita It is not that has from in in is, in desire to see and in the his in the of other of the modern argues this form of urban found in the Vita of into the medieval and the In this way, uses the author of as an of how to between of also one of has on the of thinking we can historicism In after us that historicist work by on the and of the Middle that is to of medieval texts and even opposed to the of the all its and a critical category for literary History be or history a constant on the literary work, as form or and The essays in this to Lee scholarship by the by history and form and by with they how literary in the ways that Patterson and his contemporaries continues to advance the study of medieval literature.

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