Literary London – Page 3 – Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

July 9, 2015October 12, 2017

Reading Chaucer in the Tower

Last week, I surveyed Chaucer’s representations of prison spaces throughout his corpus. Today, I consider one reader of Chaucer, for whom those images of imprisonment would have particularly resonated.

In January of 1549, John Harington of Stepney and Kelston was arrested and sent to the Tower of London.^[1] Harington remained in the Tower with his master, Thomas Seymour (the brother of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane) for more than a year.^[2] What was a literary-minded gentleman/prisoner to do with all of that time? Harington may have read Chaucer.

Harington was in the Tower following suspicion about the nature of Seymour’s relationship with the very young Princess Elizabeth. He was also questioned regarding his own role in setting up a marriage between Lady Jane Grey, the nine-days queen, and the young King Edward VI.^[3]

While in the Tower, Harington would have had access to books and illustrious, scholarly-minded company. The imprisoned Harington used this time to learn French, and he wrote a translation of Cicero’s De Amicitia.^[4]As he told Lady Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, in the dedication to his translation:

Wherby I tried prisonment of the body, to be the libertee of spirite … and in the ende quietnes of mind, the occasion of study. ^[5]

Though the 1550 date on the front of Harington’s copy of Chaucer is not definitive evidence that he held the book while he was in the Tower, the long and idle days of imprisonment would haven given Harington the time he needed to thoroughly annotate his copy of William Thynne’s 1542 edition of Chaucer’s complete works. Harington’s copy is now housed at the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.^[6]

John Harington’s dated signature on the opening plate of William Thynne’s 1542 edition of Chaucer’s complete works. The inscription reads “non Amo’ chi non Ama.” University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542.

Nearly every page of the 1542 book shows evidence of Harington’s attentive reading. This post, of course, cannot cover everything involved in Harington’s copious marginal writing, but if readers are interested, they can consult my more detailed article — “Reading Chaucer in the Tower: The Person Behind the Pen in an Early-Modern Copy of Chaucer’s Works” — forthcoming in The Journal of the Early Book Society, volume 18.

One of Harington’s key concerns throughout was correcting ‘errors’ where he saw them in his book. He ‘corrects,’ or modernizes, spelling and adds commas or other marks of punctuation where he finds them appropriate.

Updating spelling in “The Knight’s Tale.” Harrington deletes “layde” and supplies “laid.” University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. xi.r

Though these meticulous changes may make Harington seem a bit finicky, they reveal how closely he paid attention to every word on the page. He desired to improve his book, certainly an indication that he valued Chaucer.

At times, even Harington’s annotations received meticulous corrections. Here, Harington marginally notes “a gate of ^whit^ marble in a description of the arena in “The Knight’s Tale.” University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. vi.r

However, his annotations are much more extensive than simple summary notes and spelling changes. Of particular interest to Harington was Chaucer’s Boece, a translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. A full-page table of contents and summary precedes Boece on a blank verso page, and Harington marginally marks the translation throughout.

The table of contents and summary for Chaucer’s Boece. University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. ccxxxi.v

That Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy while in prison might have resonated with the imprisoned Harington.^[7] The imprisoned gentleman may have found Boethius’s discussions of free will, predestination, and changeable fortunes particularly relevant as he lamented the downturn of his own fortunes in court. Certainly this was the case for the imprisoned King James I of Scotland when he wrote his prison poem The Kingis Quair, which drew on Boethius.^[8]

Harington draws a manicule next to a passage concerning freewill in Chaucer’s Boece. University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. cclxi.v

Overall, Harington, who also occasionally wrote his own poetry, was an attentive reader, finding solace in careful study. He was meticulous, academic, and thorough in his annotations, but, it would seem, he was also attentive to the book’s correspondences with his own life and experience.

Mimi Ensley
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

Footnotes

1. Ruth Willard Hughey, John Harington of Stepney: Tudor gentleman (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1971), 28.
2. Ibid., 29-30.
3. Ibid., 22-4. See also Harington’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12325
4. Ibid., 31-2.
5. John Harington, “The booke of freendeship of Marcus Tullie Cicero,” in Hughey, John Harington, 137.
6. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes, Newlye Printed: Wyth Dyuers Workes Whych Were Neuer in Print Before, ed. William Thynne (London, 1542).
7. For a similar suggestion, see the brief description of Notre Dame’s 1542 Thynne edition here: http://rarebooks.library.nd.edu/exhibits/fructus/middle_english/1542chaucer.html
8. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/mooney-and-arn-kingis-quair-and-other-prison-poems-kingis-quair-introduction

July 2, 2015October 10, 2017

Prison Break: The Permeable Prison Spaces of Chaucer’s Poetry

When we imagine imprisoned spaces, we often think of solitude, despair, and hopelessness. For medieval prisoners in the Tower of London or in London’s Newgate prison, this was often the case, particularly for debtors and the poorest inmates.

John the Baptist in Prison — John the Baptist pushed into prison and sitting, dejectedly, behind bars; Alsace, 4th quarter of the 12th century. London, British Library MS Additional 42497.

However, Chaucer, whose apartment at Aldgate was about a 10 minute walk from the Tower, often portrays prison as much more communal and permeable than we might imagine.

Take Palamon and Arcite of The Knight’s Tale for example. The knights share an imprisoned space, and though both are sentenced “to dwellen in prisoun / Perpetuelly,” they manage to leave their tower (I. 1023-4). Moreover, while imprisoned, the two characters have a close connection with the outside world. Emily’s garden shares a wall with their prison tower, and the two knights can gaze out at the seeming freedom of the beautiful maiden:

And so bifel, by aventure or cas,

That thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre

Of iren greet and square as any sparre,

He cast his eye upon Emelya (l. I. 1074-7).^[1]

Even through this small, barred window, love’s arrow pierces the imprisoned knights. Though that arrow further ensnares the knights in a metaphorical prison of love-longing, the action also demonstrates that their physical prison space is not impenetrable.

Samson in Prison — Samson in his prison, looking out through a barred window like Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; John Lydgate, *Fall of Princes*, England, c. 1450-c. 1460. London, British Library MS Harley 1766.

Julia Boffey details several other depictions of imprisonment in Chaucer’s corpus.^[2] If we look closely at each of her examples, we again see the potential for permeability and/or community in an imprisoned space.

There is Perkyn, the protagonist of the Cook’s Tale, who is “somtyme lad with revel to Newegate” (l. I. 4402). Newgate prison was notorious for its vile conditions.^[3] However, visitors were allowed inside the prison gates, and that Perkyn was “somtyme” in the prison could indicate that he was in and out of the space frequently.

Theseus’s prison in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women is so accessible that Ariadne and her sister can hear him “compleynynge” from their chambers (l. 1971). And though Philomela, in the next LGW narrative, initially seems conquered, she is still able to give a woven cloth to a serving boy and communicate with her sister (ll. 2335-70).

Queen Imprisoned — A queen looks out of her prison cell upon the bustling world around her. The gate to the prison is open and her window is unbarred, perhaps indicating, along with the busy scene, the permeability of her prison space; *Chroniques de France ou de St. Denis*, Paris, 1332-1350. London, British Library MS Royal 16 G VI.

In actual prison situations, those prisoners who had the funds to live comfortably were able to study, read, write and communicate with their fellow inmates.^[4] [Tune in next week to see my post about an imprisoned reader of Chaucer!] And those who wrote poetry from prison often used the prison as much more than an image of enclosure.

Prison could be a space of community and a space for creativity. Boethius, whom Chaucer translated, ultimately found answers to important philosophical questions through his prison experience. Moreover prison poets, like Charles d’Orleans and King James I of Scotland, wrote during their imprisonments to confront questions of fortune, providence, and even love.^[5]

Paul in Prison — An imprisoned Paul gives a scroll to a messenger, demonstrating the creative and reflective possibilities of imprisonment; the Bible of Robert de Bello, England, c. 1240-1253. London, British Library MS Burney 3.

Notably, prison poets following Chaucer were often influenced by him and by Boethius mediated through him.^[6] Chaucer, who was held captive briefly in 1360, had communicated something meaningful and perhaps even hopeful or positive about imprisoned experiences, and his writing inspired imprisoned poets in the medieval and early modern periods.

Mimi Ensley
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

Footnotes

1. Quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer. For a more extensive discussion of Palamon and Arcite’s prison space, see V.A. Kolve, “The Knight’s Tale and Its Settings,” in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1984), 85-157.

2. Julia Boffey, “Chaucerian Prisoners: The Context of The Kingis Quair,” in Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, eds. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London: King’s College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), 84-103.

3. For details about the medieval Newgate, see Margery Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 18.2 (1943): 233-46.

4. For one early modern prisoner’s experience building a reading and learning community in the Tower of London, see my article, “Reading Chaucer in the Tower: The Person Behind the Pen in an Early Modern Copy of Chaucer’s Works,” forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Book Society.

5. The TEAMS volume The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems is an excellent resource for these poets.

6. Mary-Jo Arn, “General Introduction,” in The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005).

June 18, 2015October 10, 2017

Interpreting Impairment in MS. Douce 104 Piers Plowman

Bodleian Library MS. Douce 104, dated 1427 by the scribe, contains the only extant cycle of illustrations in a copy of Piers Plowman. The manuscript contains 72 miniatures, ranging from major characters to allegorical personifications to figures mentioned only in passing in the text of the poem. As Kathleen Scott has noted, illustrators in the fifteenth century generally worked from templates or models of figures used in other texts; because of Douce’s singularity in its extensive illustrations of the poem, we can conclude that the images in the manuscript were inspired not by commonly used models, but by the illustrator’s personal response to the text at hand. Thus, the Douce images offer modern readers a unique opportunity to understand how medieval readers (or at least professional readers, like scribes and illustrators) of Piers Plowman may have interpreted Langland’s famously complex poem–and, for the purposes of this post, the poem’s impaired sinners.

While Langland describes his Seven Deadly Sins as rather grotesquely impaired and occasionally disabled in the C-text, the Douce illustrator largely normalizes physical aberrance in his images of the Sins. When taken together, the descriptions in the poem and their accompanying images encourage an interesting relationship between sin and impairment, namely that while sin indeed results in physical impairment, the impairments are perceptible largely to the sinner him- or herself.

Sloth; William Langland; *Piers Plowman*, England, 1427; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 104, f. 31r

For example, in MS. Douce 104, Sloth is depicted as a young man with rumpled clothing and a boot on only one foot; the other foot remains bare and tucked up behind the booted foot in what could perhaps be a protective gesture (though it’s equally likely that he has just curled up in his sleep). Though Sloth is initially described in the poem as “byslobered with two slimed yes” (C.VII.1), the only concession the illustrator makes to any physical deformity is that single missing shoe, likely indicative of Sloth’s gout, the swelling from which would have prevented him from wearing his boot. What is most interesting here is that the illustrator’s interpretation seems to have normalized Sloth’s appearance from the description presented in the poem, in which Sloth is quite obviously impaired or even deformed.

Envy; William Langland, *Piers Plowman*, England, 1427; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 104, f. 25r

Envy provides another relevant example. In the C-text of Piers Plowman, Envy laments the physical repercussions of his sins: “no sugre ne swete thing [may] aswage my swellynge” (C.VI.88); further, he complains that he has become “so megre for Y ne may me venge” (C.VI.94). In spite of these physical descriptions, the Douce illustrator’s interpretation of Envy is in no way noticeably impaired. Envy appears in folio 25^r, an adult man wearing a belted tunic and boots, his left hand raised in a fist (presumably in reference to “A wroth his fuste vppon Wrath”) while his right hand clutches his shirt. In contrast to Langland’s Envy, who describes himself as simultaneously swollen and “megre,” his stature is neither stout nor thin; he actually looks quite healthy and strong. When taken together as they appear in Douce 104, Langland’s written description and the illustrator’s image enable an interpretation of Envy’s physical ailments as discernible only to Envy himself, perhaps indicating that the consequences of sin, though physical, are felt most acutely by the sinner.

There is, of course, much more to say about sin, impairment, and disability in Piers Plowman; for the moment, though, let us revel in both the fascinating glimpse into fifteenth-century reception of the poem and the interpretive possibilities for modern readers provided by the illustrator of MS. Douce 104.

Dana Roders
PhD Candidate
Department of English
Purdue University