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Kristina Ottosen
MA Thesis Proposal
Joanne Findon
April 2, 2008
Belling the Cat: Public Misrule and Literary Political Technologies in 1381
Statement of the Research Question
My thesis is concerned with antagonistic discourses and the textual environment of
London in the fourteenth century. To focus this topic, I will concentrate on Ricardian publics
surrounding the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. Since I am interested in how texts are informed by
social antagonism and discourses on conflict, I will employ a range of texts not usually read
together. This range of texts will include legal documents, particularly parliamentary petitions
and civic proclamations, insurgent letters, chronicles, and the “public” poetry of Chaucer,
Langland, and Gower. By considering these texts, I will be able to analyze how discourses
function in a variety of texts produced around the same time and explore the concept of social
fragmentation characteristic of the medieval social theory of the Three Estates roughly divided
into those who fight, those who pray, and those who work.
Literature Review and Theoretical Framework
Steven Justice’s monograph Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 is an invaluable
resource. It is from this well-written, thoroughly researched piece that I draw my area of inquiry.
While Steven Justice’s work attends to delineating the difference between literacy, illiteracy, and
functional literacy, it does not consider the role of Latin in documentary culture, which I intend
to argue may have been a central feature. As Justice points out, “the point, for Walsingham, [a
monastic chronicler of the revolt,] was not that the rebels wanted to kill priests or destroy service
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books or churches, but that they sought to eliminate the twinned disciplines of (Latin) grammar
and manuscript culture that enabled ecclesiastical culture” (199). For Justice, accounts referring
to the “uproar and burning of court rolls” are not able to reconcile “the rebels’ constructive
enterprise, their desire to create their own documentary culture” (195) with their own
commentary on the rebellion. Nevertheless, Justice demonstrates that “the commons who rose in
1381 defined themselves too as a textual community” (251).
While Justice’s book provides a critically engaged, rigorous study of the Peasants’ Revolt
itself and the writings surrounding it, Nicholas Watson’s excellent article, “Censorship and
Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation
Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” which was published the following year, reveals
the precarious position of vernacular theology. Watson’s article locates the debate within the
vernacular itself and this location will be extremely useful to my project. According to Watson,
“the [1409] Constitutions were the peroration of an intense, approximately sixty-year cultural
argument that took in larger questions about the intellectual capacities of the laity, the role of the
clergy in ministering to them, and the suitability of vernacular language as a vehicle for religious
truth” (837). The attitude toward the religious education of the laity was along the lines of “Do
not throw bread to dogs or Pearls to swine” (Matthew 7.6), which, to Watson, signals that:
The laity should think on ‘things to avoid, that is, the seven deadly sins; things to fear,
that is, the pains of hell; things to believe, found in the creed; […] things to hope for,
everlasting reward; these are all needed for salvation.’ Nor does the vernacular fare any
better than those who speak it. Error is seen as an inevitable result of translation into a
barbarous tongue like English, with its small vocabulary, its lexigraphical oddities,
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tendency toward monosyllable, and lack of inflection, which make it grammatically and
rhetorically inadequate as a vehicle for truth. (‘…’ Deanesley 425-6 qtd. in Watson 842)
However, allowing theology to be disseminated in the “barbarous tongue” of the English would
not only render it “grammatically and rhetorically inadequate as a vehicle for truth” but would
also render clerics and theology itself useless to the laity.
To situate this analysis within the discourses of antagonism, I will turn to a volume
entitled The Postcolonial Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Two essays in this work
will ground my own: “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author”
by John M. Bowers and Kellie Robertson’s “Common Language and Common Profit”. In
“Chaucer after Smithfield,” Bowers locates English at the close of the fourteenth century as a
colonized language in a state of transition. It was fractured into a variety of regional dialects in
the absence of standardization and was augmenting its vocabulary with French. As the editor of
The Postcolonial Middle Ages notes,
Chaucer’s exclusive use of London English is somewhat surprising, considering that
French was for him both a domestic and courtly language; even the five courtly pilgrims
who would have been bilingual never speak a word of French. […] He never imagines a
country united in an essential Englishness because to do so would have validated the
otherness of the English as a subaltern people against the French. (9)
Compounding the idea of English as a colonized language in a state of transition is Robertson’s
link between vernacularization and trade since translation is the merchandizing of knowledge.
For Robertson, both these terms are redefined by their relation to the “common profit” and
through this commingling, it, the “common profit”, becomes a hybrid in Homi Bhabha’s
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definition of the word: “a resistant site where authority is deformed and subverted” (13). The
“common profit,” then, is the site of deformation that I must look towards.
Methodology
In the introduction to my thesis, I will synthesize approaches from post-colonial and poststructuralist theories. To do so, I will employ Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Foucault’s
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature
of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Anderson’s Imagined
Communities, Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, Said’s Beginnings, and Cohen’s The
Postcolonial Middle Ages. This will establish a framework compatible with the medieval social
theory of the Three Estates, which I will then apply to late fourteenth century public texts
surrounding the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. While I am confident in my approach, I am, in the
medieval view, illiterate: I do not speak Latin. While I have been able to track down Eric
Stockton’s translation of Gower’s Vox Clamatis, I still need to locate a reference work with
translations of the Latin phrases that occur throughout Piers Plowman. Given the specialized
nature of this research and my illiteracy, I will no doubt need to do a sizeable amount of my
research at the Pontifical Institute, which is thankfully located at University of Toronto but noncirculating. To address this sizeable problem, I have applied to take the intensive Summer
Program in Medieval Latin at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Toronto.
Chapter Outline
The chapters of my thesis are organized from the least Latinate author (Chaucer) to the
most Latinate author (Gower). This strategy will allow me to position the audiences for these
works and contextualize portions of my theoretical framework as it pertains to developing my
argument that the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 may not have been concerned with the eradication of
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documentary culture entirely but rather an attempt to de-professionalize documentary culture and
make it more useful to the functional literacy that, according to Steven Justice, the insurgents
possessed.
The first chapter of my thesis will examine Chaucer’s estates satire and parliamentary
critique in The Parliament of Fowls, Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales, and The House of
Fame. Close readings of these works will concentrate on Chaucer’s conception of “common
wel”, “choys al fre”, “trewth”, and “noyse” in an attempt to build on the arguments surrounding
“the gift of the tongues” (143) described in Jill Mann’s monograph, Chaucer and Medieval
Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales, where drunkenness can – as Gower previously noted – make “lay people talk Latin and
French, and makes the clergy forget his Latin” (143). The device of talking birds, like those in
Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame, and the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in The
Canterbury Tales, is, like drunkenness, typically used by medieval and classical writers as a
metaphor for “the uncomprehending repetition of church services by ignorant clerics or layfolk,
or minstrels who recite the literary creations of others” (Mann 143).
The second chapter of my thesis addresses Piers Plowman. The primary concern of this
text is the “common wel” and within this social satire and theological allegory, the author is
concerned with addressing the corruption of the Three Estates. The first part of Piers Plowman
is concerned with the narrator’s dream journey - guided by a simple plowman, Piers, who reads
but cannot write – in the pursuit of “trewþe“ while the latter part of the work is concerned with
the narrator’s search for “Dowel”, “dobet”, and “dobest”. While the main concern of this chapter
is the representation of secular life, the causes of corruption and dissolution of unity, and the
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author’s concept of “trewþe“, I will also draw attention to the Latin phrases that give oaths to
God or otherwise engage theological teachings or deploy theological/dream allegory.
The third chapter of my thesis will consider Gower’s prophetic Mirrour de l’homme (in
particular the ‘prologue’ l. 1-36, the section concerned with the different estates l. 18373-26604,
and his general social analysis and suggestions for reform l. 26605-27480), his response to the
Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in the form of the Vox Clamantis (with special attention given to the
dedicatory epistle addressed to Thomas Arundel), and his English work the Confessio Amantis
(the prologue, Book 1, and Book 7 specifically) composed at the request of Richard II.
The fourth and final chapter of my thesis will draw attention to the dehumanization of the
rebels by chroniclers, with a particular emphasis on the use of “noyse” in their representations,
and consider the repeated invocations of “trewþe“ as well as references to popular ballads and
literature deployed by insurgent letters during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.1
1
Realistically, I think I’m going to end up revising my paper and comparing to incorporate this
material into the preceding chapters when appropriate.
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