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ABSTRACT
This article investigates institutional forces that maintain the focus on canonical authors in Middle English studies, despite the ubiquity of anonymity in the Middle English corpus, and despite the extensive critique of the canon that the field has witnessed. It provides a snapshot of the current Middle English canon, surveys publication patterns in sample academic journals in the twenty-first century, examines the ways authorship serves (and anonymity does not) as a critical tool, and shows what anonymous texts might offer to the ongoing assessment of the literariness of Middle English texts. Analysis of the scholarship of two Middle English scholars over the first two decades of the current century demonstrates the challenges and opportunities in developing methods that discern the literariness of anonymous, non-canonical texts. Work in New Formalism and object studies offers possibilities for recognising the literariness of anonymous texts not traditionally considered in terms of their aesthetic or formal features.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to undergraduate Gabi Loue for her work collecting data for this project and to Lara Farina and Allan Mitchell for their encouragement and analysis. Conversations with Bobby Meyer-Lee, Maggie Solberg, Dan Birkholz, and Arthur Bahr enriched my thinking on this topic. Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin nudged the essay toward a much better version of itself, and the anonymous reviewer’s responses helped me clarify a number of points.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Graham D. Caie, ‘“I do not wish to be called auctour, but the pore compilatour”: The Plight of the Medieval Vernacular Poet’, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 29 (2004), pp. 9–21 (p. 9).
2 Such ascription seems to have been most common when the author was a contemporary of the scribe or collector, potentially someone they knew. This would seem to suggest that the allure of author ascription is not associated so much with perceived literary value as with personal familiarity. Margaret Connolly, for instance, describes this tendency in Shirley’s manuscripts: John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 5 and 45. See also Sebastian Sobecki, ‘Authorized Realities: The Gesta Romanorum and Thomas Hoccleve’s Poetics of Autobiography’, Speculum, 98 (2023), pp. 536–58 (p. 541).
3 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Fifteenth-Century Middle English Verse Author Collections’, in A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (eds.), The English Medieval Book (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 101–12 (p. 109). Edwards adds, ‘where complete texts [of Chaucer] exist in the manuscript there is no general consciousness of Chaucer’s identity reflected in the attributions’ (p. 102). Abigail Adams observes of the scribe of British Library MS Harley 2251 that, ‘Despite the Hammond scribe’s knowledge of Chaucer from his work elsewhere copying the complete Canterbury Tales, the very different aims of this manuscript bring with them a complete disregard for Chaucer’s name and his plan for the complete work’; ‘Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies’, PhD Diss. (University of Texas, 2022), p. 112. Seth Lerer observes that in such cases, ‘The poet’s name does not appear because its poems come to be concerned less with their origin than with their use. … These poems come together, therefore, to give voice to the literary aspirations of a readership, rather than to ground that readership in the named authority of authors’; Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 82. The manuscript appearance of the work of John Gower has been shown to be exceptional in this regard, in the process highlighting the distinctive norm extant in English manuscript culture; Ardis Butterfield, ‘Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex’, Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), pp. 80–96 (pp. 82–83).
4 See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) and Ardis Butterfield, ‘Why Medieval Lyric’, ELH 82 (2015), pp. 319–43.
5 For discussions of this process, see Julia Boffey, ‘English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthelet’, in Martha W. Driver, Derek Pearsall and Robert F. Yeager (eds.), John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020), pp. 219–30; Sîan Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2008); Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Megan Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Margaret Connolly, John Shirley; and Abigail Adams, ‘Putting Together the Pieces’.
6 Consider the Digital Index of Middle Index Verse: while organised according to first line (and thus not by author or title, reflecting medieval patterns in English manuscripts), it fills in gaps left by individual manuscripts by listing an author for each item which modern scholarship ascribes to a given author, so that—unless one is very careful—one gets the impression in working with the DIMEV that the author is named in individual manuscript appearances when in fact they are not.
7 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (Hammersmith: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48. The power of such identification is so great that it has extended beyond authors: Middle English studies in the last 20 years has witnessed an eruption of scholarly identifications of not only scribal hands but scribal identities, most famously Linne Mooney’s highly-publicized identification of London scrivener Adam Pinkhurst as the scribe of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales; ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum, 81 (2006), pp. 97–138. Among those questioning what I couldn’t help but call at the time a ‘Celebrity Scribe Hunt’ (2008 New Chaucer Society, Swansea)—which she more circumspectly refers to as ‘attributional paleography’—is Sonja Drimmer, who problematizes the urge toward ‘allocation of authority’ in ‘Connoisseurship, Art History, and the Paleographical Impasse in Middle English Studies’, Speculum, 97 (2022), pp. 415–68 (p. 416). Drimmer finds instead (in England, in contrast to France) ‘an ethos of circumstantial apathy to individuating’ (p. 436) and concludes that ‘we stand to develop alternatives to the structures of authority that attach to the practices of naming, even today’ (p. 468). The intense focus on historical evidence and historical author figures is apparent in the recent publicity, academic and non-academic alike, surrounding new documentary evidence, unearthed by Sebastian Sobecki and Euan Roger and revealed publicly via livestream, that they interpreted as indicating that Chaucer’s legal experience with Cecily Chaumpaigne surrounded her employment status rather than his sexual violence; Sobecki and Roger (eds.), ‘The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence’, special issue of Chaucer Review, 57 (2022), pp. 403–526.
8 Rita Felski, ‘“Context Stinks!”’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), pp. 573–91 (p. 580).
9 The book, Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), investigates Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, among whose items is Sir Orfeo, the only canonical contender in the collection.
10 Additional benefits to focusing narrowly on literary tradition via language and chronology can follow. For instance, ‘a closer look at “English literature” has value, too: observing the eccentricities and lacunae of the canon—asking, for example, Chaucer to cohabit with The Prick of Conscience—is another way to trouble English exceptionalism’; Daniel Sawyer, Reading English Verse in Manuscript c. 1350–c.1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 15.
11 The ascription of these poems to the same individual poet has made possible a lively region of Middle English studies. Recently, Jessica Brantley (in a chapter on the manuscript) concluded that ‘Medieval authors are frequently anonymous, but in [British Library MS] Cotton Nero A.x that anonymity is laced with urgent critical speculations about the author’s biography and identity. … But the manuscript also cautions readers to think multiply about authorship, in its textual and visual intersections with other books and its own many points of origin. The multiple hands at work … prompt far-reaching inquiries about how manuscript culture both conditions and destabilizes the nature of authorship and the status of the author’; Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), p. 224.
12 For instance, of the anonymous texts Sir Orfeo and The Owl and the Nightingale, Alan J. Fletcher observes that they may be near contemporaries, but they are not analyzed together because they are understood to be of ‘entirely different literary genre[s]’; Alan J. Fletcher, The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author, and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), p. 9. Perceiving romance and debate poetry as ‘entirely different’ (despite, for instance, the predominantly courtly orientation of both), highlights the critical tendency to approach anonymous poems through their genre identity and thus to sideline possible alternative modes of inquiry.
13 Scholarly publication in Middle English studies suggests that Nicholas Watson’s assessment in 2006 still pertains: ‘Chaucer is still the place where many of our new intellectual perspectives come from or find their ultimate test’; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘Manuscript Studies, Literary Value, and the Object of Chaucer Studies’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30 (2008), pp. 1–37 (p. 27); quoting from NCS Newsletter). Examples include the special issue of Chaucer Review on ‘Chaucer and Aesthetics’ (39.3 [2005]); Peggy Knapp, Chaucerian Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), published just as such discussions were getting underway in medieval English literary studies; and Ingrid Nelson’s current book project, tentatively titled Chaucer's Premodern Media, that ‘explores the institutional, spiritual, and perceptual contexts of medieval ideas of media, and draws on these to read Chaucer's poetry. … as works concerned with the literary capacities of mediation’ (<https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/inelson> [Date accessed: 27 January 2021]. Such cutting-edge projects tend to be produced through encounters primarily, or even exclusively, with Chaucer.
14 One recent example is Laura Saetveit Miles and Diane Watt, ‘Introduction: Colloquium on “Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon: Gender and Genre”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 42 (2020), pp. 285–93.
15 These volumes cover only the Middle Ages; they are not the Old-English-through-1800 volumes that are used most commonly in survey courses (and thus include even fewer Middle English texts).
16 It is worth noting that each play requires significantly fewer pages than does a romance, concerns that are not incidental when editing an anthology. Useful historical tracing of the development of the modern Middle English canon can be found in Fletcher, The Presence of Medieval English Literature, pp. 1–3, and Nancy Bradley Warren, ‘Changes in the Canon’, in Daniel T. Kline (ed.), The Medieval British Literature Handbook (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 184–98.
17 Elaine Treharne (ed.), Old and Middle English Literature, c. 890–1450: An Anthology, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
18 On a related topic, Robert Meyer-Lee observes that while the Norton changes its offerings in response to changing critical norms, the notes introducing each author continue to be ‘so consistently laudatory of aesthetic prowess that most undergraduates must come away with a powerful sense of judgment’s role in the discipline’; ‘Manuscript Studies’, p. 20.
19 Sawyer, Reading English Verse, p. 16; Sawyer borrows the term ‘pedagogical canon’ from Susan VanZanten Gallagher, ‘Contingencies and Intersections: The Formation of Pedagogical Canons,’ Pedagogy, 1 (2001), pp. 53–67 (p. 54). See, too, Robert J. Meyer-Lee, The Problem of Literary Value (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), p. 82.
20 Sawyer, Reading English Verse, p. 16.
21 Felski, ‘“Content Stinks!”’, p. 580.
22 This investigation considers only articles on Middle English texts, not those on anonymous Old English texts.
23 Not included in the study was postmedieval: during this period, it published special topics issues exclusively, a degree of curation that made the journal a less useful indicator of the work patterns of individual scholars and the editorial choices that structure the field. JMEMS also regularly publishes special topics issues and clusters but does so alongside open topic issues.
24 An approximation of the proportion of anonymous texts within the Middle English corpus can be ascertained by considering the texts available through the Early English Text Society (EETS) and TEAMS Middle English Texts; that data is part of my larger project.
25 This data comes from the MLA Directory of Periodicals. In a separate part of this larger project, I investigate the institutional positioning of those scholars publishing on anonymous Middle English texts and those publishing on canonical authors, particularly in more elite journals.
26 The most regularly discussed anonymous Middle English texts are romances (subject of nearly half of the articles), with about 20% of the articles on Middle English drama. 15% of the anonymous texts addressed in these journals are devotional texts (including saint’s lives), with a similar percentage of articles addressing didactic, exemplary, or practical texts.
27 They also attest to the particular texts that scholars consider the most productive examples and interlocutors, when they are developing new knowledge; I address that topic later in this essay.
28 Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 13; Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2020), p. 134. See also Robert J. Meyer-Lee, The Problem of Literary Value, p. 4.
29 A frequent touchstone is Marjory Levinson, ‘What is New Formalism?’, PMLA, 122 (2007), pp. 558–69.
30 Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (eds), ‘The Literary through—or beyond?—Form’, in Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (eds.), The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–11 (p. 1). Meyer-Lee has been leading the way among Middle English scholars in attending to the matter of literary value, culminating in the new monograph The Problem of Literary Value, which takes Chaucer Studies as representative of literary studies at large and includes a chapter on canonicity. The book is available open-access: https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526167958/9781526167958.xml [Date accessed: 25 July 2023].
31 Meyer-Lee and Sanok, ‘The Literary through’, p. 1.
32 Thomas A. Prendergast, ‘Canon Formation’, in Marion Turner (ed.) A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 239–51 (p. 239).
33 Ibid., pp. 240, 244, 248.
34 Robert Meyer-Lee further observes, ‘in very many cases, a stable, persistent constellation of value ascriptions has the pragmatic effect of making some objects appear to us as more tightly associated with some kinds of value than they are with others, so much so that their value strikes us as indeed inherent and self- evident, requiring no explanation or defence’; The Problem of Literary Value, p. 103.
35 Tara Williams, ‘Enchanted Historicism’, postmedieval Forum I. October 2011. ‘Historicity without Historicism’, postmedieval 1.2 (2010), pp. 1–10, https://postmedieval-forum.com/forums/forum-i-responses-to-paul-strohm/williams/ [Date accessed: 25 July 2023].
36 Recently, Felski has observed that ‘[w]hat an artwork affords is exceptionally hard to disentangle from our response; its qualities disclose themselves only as we attend to them’; Hooked, p. 7.
37 Claire Waters, ‘What’s the Use? Marian Miracles and the Workings of the Literary’, in The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form, p. 15.
38 Ibid., p. 20. Meyer-Lee and Sanok describe Waters’ analysis as ‘[t]aking advantage of the special status of instrumental texts in medieval literary culture—the blurry line between the literary and non-literary in a period before those categories were codified—[to] show, in particular, how this notion of the literary may be complicated by attention to the reader’s role in receiving and “performing” the text’; ‘The Literary through’, p. 8.
39 Ingrid Nelson observes, ‘Moreover, in taking “value” as a critical term we are restoring a conceptual category that was central to medieval culture’ (‘Lyric Value,’ p. 144). Katharine Jager’s introduction to the edited collection Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages provides a summary of work on form in Middle English literature over the past 25 years. There, she notes, ‘This scholarship is invaluable in its careful examination of aesthetics, form, and formalism in late medieval literature and art. However, the bulk of this scholarship has primarily focused on the aesthetic texts and objects created for elite, textually literate, often wealthy audiences’; ‘Past Vernaculars: The Aesthetic and the Everyday’ (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2019), pp. 1–20 (p. 9). This valuable reconsideration of Middle English verse has focused, in other words, on canonical texts, often those linked today with a known author.
40 Among them are Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017); Fletcher, The Presence of Medieval English Literature; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Authorship’, in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 137–54; Jane Griffiths, ‘The Author’, A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature, ed. Marilyn Corrie (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 120–41; Andrew Kraebel, ‘Modes of Authorship and the Making of Medieval English Literature’, The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 98–114; A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1984; rprtd. 2009); Sebastian Sobecki, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England, Oxford Textual Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). See Edwards, Invention and Authorship, pp. xviii–xxviii for a detailed summary.
41 Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (eds.), Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory & Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). This dearth is true of all of the texts listed in the preceding footnote, as well.
42 Gillespie, ‘Authorship’, p. 137.
43 Rosalind Field, ‘Romance in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 152–76.
44 Ibid., p. 168. Elsewhere, in the Cambridge History chapter on Piers Plowman, anonymity is briefly associated with polemical writing; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘Piers Plowman’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, pp. 513–38 (p. 514).
45 Nicola McDonald, ‘Gender’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 63–76. This piece and Gillespie, ‘Authorship’, hold the only purposeful discussions of anonymity across the handbook, with ‘anonymous’ appearing elsewhere only to indicate the absence of an author’s name.
46 Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
47 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
48 Ibid., p. 15.
49 Ibid., p. 3.
50 Ibid., p. 10.
51 Rev. of Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 28 (2006), pp. 281–4 (p. 281).
52 The publication in 2021 of poet Simon Armitage’s modern English translation of The Owl and the Nightingale (London: Faber and Faber)—following Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), The Alliterative Morte Arthur (London: Faber and Faber, 2010, under the title The Death of King Arthur), and Pearl (London: Faber and Faber, 2016)—is just one indicator of this early poem’s status as a poetic jewel.
53 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, p. 200. Meyer-Lee elsewhere observes that Hanna acknowledges that ‘the return to a canonical author is “an inevitability,” indeed, one that supersedes the will of the critic’; ‘Manuscript Studies’, 17.
54 Ibid., p. 200.
55 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
56 Ibid., p. 9.
57 F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture, Essays in Criticism, 66.3 (2016), pp. 277–300.
58 Ibid., p. 288.
59 Cannon’s work since 2016 has not engaged directly with matters of anonymity and canonicity; he has contributed further to Chaucer Studies by co-editing A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer; Stephanie Batkie, Matthew Irwin, and Christopher Cannon (eds.) (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2021). He also published an article (‘The Ploughman’s Tale’) in a section on ‘Chaucer’s Langland’ in The Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 315–31. Cannon has also co-edited two clusters for PMLA, on ‘Monolingualism and Its Discontents’ (2022) and ‘Aurality and Literacy’ (2020).
60 Lisa H. Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
61 Ibid., p. 11.
62 ‘The Poetics of Practicality’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Middle English, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 491–505 (pp. 492–93).
63 Ibid., p. 492; italics in original.
64 Ibid., p. 498.
65 ‘Agronomy and Affect in Duke Humfrey’s On Husbondrie’, Speculum, 95.1 (2020), pp. 36–88.
66 Ibid., p. 40.
67 Ibid., p. 42.
68 Ibid., p. 43.
69 Ibid., p. 48.
70 Since the Speculum piece appeared in 2020, Cooper has continued her work on a book investigating a ‘poetics of the ordinary’, portions of which I heard her present at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium (2022), the New Chaucer Society congress (2022), and the Modern Language Association convention (2023).
71 Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (eds.), Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Meyer-Lee and Sanok, The Medieval Literary.
72 A similar orientation can be seen in a collection that addressed some of these questions, five years earlier: Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (eds.), Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013). In this collection, every chapter on a Middle English literary text focuses on the work of a named author, despite a title that alludes to the full range of Middle English literature, thus demonstrating the lingering centrality of named, canonical authors in the field and, especially, to considerations of literariness.
73 Ingrid Nelson, ‘Form’s Practice: Lyrics, Grammars, and the Medieval Idea of the Literary’, in The Medieval Literary, pp. 35–59. In ‘Lyric Value’, What Kind of a Thing is a Middle English Lyric?, ed. Maria Cervone and Nicholas Watson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), pp. 135–58, Nelson presents Middle English lyric as a valuable contributor to understanding lyric value(s) more broadly, demonstrating how much is lost by not including it in our larger study of English lyric across periods. Research elsewhere on this project demonstrates that edited collections and journal special issues are much more likely to include scholarship on anonymous, non-canonical texts than are open submission journals.
74 Ibid.