Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser

At the heart of Ryan Perry's Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition lies the relationship between coteries and literary traditions. Such coteries were not just physical, Perry argues, but also imaginary; they occurred over distances, both geographic and temporal. Another way of looking at the pairing of coterie and tradition is to think of synchronic as well diachronic literary culture: how do such bespoke reading and reception circles contribute to the formation of trends and canons over time?The introduction does much of the heavy lifting for the book's lofty arc, with Perry positing the relationship governing his twin centers—coterie and tradition—as organic: “Coteries . . . emerge as one of the primary ways of establishing one's relationship to [the English literary] tradition, as well as one of the principal means of keeping that tradition moving” (p. 23). If tradition is the negotiated accretion of coterie output, then it is therefore through coteries that traditions change. This insight may be as compelling as it is plain, yet it is somewhat misleading to characterize such coteries as defined by authorial agency. In moving seamlessly from historical to rhetorical coteries, Perry assigns too prominent a function to authors in such coteries, thereby eliding the determinative role of scribes (and readers who are not authors) in coterie circulation and transmission. This creates the impression that authors enjoyed an outsized role in shaping literary traditions over the medieval centuries. This model may seem self-evident for post-print literary culture, but manuscript transmission works counterintuitively, prising control out of authorial hands, forcing them to articulate their anxiety of influence.In turn, the chapters tell the story of coteries over two hundred years, from Chaucer's London readers to Spenser's Elizabethan circles. The seven chapters gathered here are leavened by two “theoretical interludes” that reflect on the larger conceptual stakes underpinning the overall investments of the book. These interludes pay off, casting a thoughtful canopy over the book's tightly argued foundations. Chapter one focuses on a London coterie that included Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Usk, among other, nonliterary members. Perry argues that such coteries serve as a bridge between small, intimate audiences and larger publics, building a lasting sense of vernacular authorship. The well-known interaction between Chaucer and Gower through Troilus and Criseyde and the Ricardian recension of the Confessio Amantis takes center stage, with Perry noting that the authors’ use of each other's names marks a departure from the way that poets’ names tended to function in comparable medieval contexts.Chapter two offers a cross-Channel coterie, loosely made up of Chaucer again, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps. This coterie is characterized by its members’ shared interest in French literary tradition, particularly the Roman de la Rose. Unlike the London coterie in chapter one, this particular circle was not based on physical proximity but rather on a shared literary sensibility. Perry unpacks how Deschamps, in a ballade addressed to Chaucer, praises him as a “grand translateur” for rendering the Roman de la Rose into English. This praise, however, is qualified by Deschamps's own assertion of literary authority. Chaucer, in turn, in his Complaint of Venus, a translation of de Granson's Cinq balades, engages in a subtle competition with the French poet, using the Roman de la Rose to “correct” de Granson's work. Chaucer's apparent silence in response to Deschamps’ ballade suggests that coteries require active participation and that they can dissolve when faced with indifference, a telling reminder of the fragility not just of coteries but of literary traditions. Next, the first Theoretical Interlude shines new light on the tension between the public and the private in the world of medieval reading circles. This section invites us to consider that poets negotiate and contest authority within a literary tradition.In chapter three Perry turns his attention to Thomas Hoccleve's role in the formation of an English poetic identity through his association with Chaucer and his effacement of Christine de Pizan. Somewhat surprisingly, Perry suggests that Hoccleve's social position as a Privy Seal clerk differed from Chaucer's in that it limited his access to powerful individuals. However, copies of Hoccleve's works found their way into the hands of influential people, and his professional proximity to the highest echelons of power was not necessarily less than Chaucer's, whether the latter was proofreading wool accounts at the Custom House or overseeing repairs to royal structures. In Perry's argument, Hoccleve's The Letter of Cupid (a translation of Christine's L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours) is an attempt to gain recognition by aligning himself with English and French bureaucratic circles while acknowledging neither Christine nor Chaucer as sources. By contrast, in The Regiment of Princes Hoccleve establishes a coterie relationship with the deceased Chaucer to establish his own poetic authority.John Lydgate's use of virtual coteries is at the heart of chapter four. Such virtual coteries, Perry maintains, connect the poet and his patrons, sources, and literary forebears, thus expanding the role of coteries in literary tradition. Covering several of Lydgate's shorter works, the chapter examines the poet's use of virtual coteries in relation to his patrons, particularly Thomas Montagu, the Earl of Salisbury, who commissioned Lydgate's translation of Guillaume Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. Although Lydgate's praise for Salisbury borders on propaganda, Perry argues that Lydgate's virtual coterie allows for a more complex interplay of agency, in which the poet can both praise and critique his patron. The second Theoretical Interlude dwells on the role of coteries in the formation of a literary tradition, specifically on the transition from coterie poetics to the Chaucerian tradition.Chapter five focuses on the works of three poets, Sir Richard Roos, William Dunbar, and John Skelton, who represent a later generation of Chaucerian writers. In turn, Perry discusses Roos's translation of Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans Mercy, Dunbar's Lament for the Makars, and Skelton's Garlande of Laurell. The Chaucerian tradition, having been “ratified” by the generations of later writers covered in this chapter, becomes robust enough to generate new coteries and even spawn new traditions that would then compete with it.In chapter six, the book moves into the mid-Tudor period and examines the coterie poetics of Tottel's Miscellany, the first printed anthology of poetry, a collection that includes works by Thomas Wyatt; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; and Chaucer, among others. One of the strongest sections of the book—perhaps because of its focus on a single anthology—this chapter presents Tottel's Miscellany as a palimpsest of coteries, with the later coterie of those who produced and consumed the miscellany publicizing the earlier coterie of Surrey, Wyatt, and their circle. While Chaucer's poetry is included in Tottel's Miscellany, it is often decontextualized and excerpted, reflecting the coterie's desire to make Chaucer conform to new formal trends. But herein lies the crux of all coteries: this is the same process that severed Chaucer and other authors over the preceding 150 years from the attribution to their own works. Misattribution, which continues to occupy modern editors, is not just the product of secondary audiences with no knowledge of a poem's “effective authorship” (see Sobecki, “The Author's Three Bodies: Codicological Intentionalism and the Medieval Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53 [2023]) but a function of coterie power, a power that determined the course of literary tradition and one that authors by and large failed to direct.The final chapter keeps Chaucer in play and elucidates Spenser's engagement with the earlier poet in The Shepheardes Calender. Perry argues that Spenser's hybrid coterie, which includes Gabriel Harvey and the persona of E. K., uses Chaucer to authorize Spenser's own poetic project. Perry draws attention to the role of the printing press in the dissemination of The Shepheardes Calender and its paratextual apparatus, suggesting that the uniform production of print allowed Spenser's coterie to reach a wider audience and to shape the reception of their work. This chapter complicates and partially contradicts some of the assumptions underlying this book, in that print appears to be able to accomplish for authors what preprint coteries could not: the exercise of authorial control. Spenser's inclusion is justified by his debt to Chaucer, but the natural target for this chapter would be Sir Philip Sidney's use of coterie and manuscript circulation, not least given Henry Woudhuysen's magisterial book on this topic, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (1996). Perry does mention Sidney's coterie several times but likens it to the Wyatt-Howard club covered in chapter six. That said, the fact that Sidney uses his celebrity status to insist on manuscript dissemination half a century after Tottel's Miscellany makes for a set of powerfully assertive statements about the role of coteries and the authority of literary tradition, a topic on which he had much to say in his Defence of Poesy (ca. 1580).The ease with which Perry shifts from actual to virtual coteries is perhaps the most problematic element of the book's argument. This move only works if we understand the term “coterie” as an association of authors, but by dint of its slow and limited means of reproduction, medieval manuscript culture relied on coteries that may have included authors but were certainly not controlled by them. What is absent from this book are scribes and scribal authorship, that is, the documented and well-researched forces behind manuscript transmission and coterie formation. And perhaps one of the best-connected and influential medieval coterie curators, John Shirley, has fallen by the wayside, save for a footnote, despite the fact that Perry has in the past written illuminatingly on Shirley's “virtual coteries.” We may speculate about the exact nature of the authorial ties behind the Chaucer-Gower link via Troilus and the Confessio, but we possess hard evidence for manuscripts being gifted among literati, such as London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B XV, which is inscribed, in Shirley's hand, “mercy ihesu Caudray”—Richard Caudray being Shirley's neighbor and fellow book collector (see Sobecki, “Quo Vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography,” Speculum 99 [2024]).Coterie power mattered, but it was a power that overwhelmed English authors, who could not control their reception and thus direct the course of literary tradition, as Rory Critten has demonstrated on the basis of manuscript circulation (Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature [2018]). Actual coteries, it turns out, were a poor medium for the transmission of authorial designs for their reception (vide the House of Fame) and instead negotiated the course of English literary tradition through scribal dissemination. Perry has made an important start, but the story of the role coteries played in the building of a literary tradition in medieval and Tudor England remains to be told, and it cannot be told without paying close attention to manuscript transmission and scribal authorship.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.