Abstract
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's new monograph is the latest addition to a body of scholarship that considers how profession and labour impacted the production of English literature in the Middle Ages. Her central question in this text is why the English language experienced a ‘literary resurgence’, the unlikeliness of which, competing as it was with Latin and French, is too often understated (p. 14). To answer this question she examines a class of writers not often attended to in literary scholarship: the clerical proletariat. She defines the membership of this group as the ‘professional but underemployed clerk’ (p. xiv), an individual examined more in historical than in literary scholarship. And, as in her previous work (Books Under Suspicion and Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman), she centres the internal and external conflict that motivated these Middle English writers. Importantly, she also contextualises this examination against a twenty-first-century crisis her readers are, or should be, aware of: a university system increasingly dependent on low-paid and part-time labour and an anaemic job market for graduates of doctoral and masters programmes, especially in medieval studies. Dedicating the book to her graduate students, Kerby-Fulton draws comparisons between Middle English writers and ‘our own modern “clerical proletariat,” the young, underemployed intellectuals in our day’, who she implies can still contribute in ground-breaking ways to the development of the field (p. xviii).
Throughout the book, Kerby-Fulton collapses divisions – between methodological approaches, between theoretical approaches, between the secular and the religious and between the author and the clerk. She pulls together manuscript studies, literary studies and the work of historians. She also examines the unexpected (from a modern perspective) marginalisation of the educated English-speaker in the Middle Ages, an approach combining Marxist and identity theories. She questions the long-accepted label of ‘secular’ for writers such as Hoccleve, proposing an ‘amphibian’ identity for these authors preoccupied with both theology and their own security (p. 11). She centres the functional clerk or lower clergy as instrumental authors in the revival of English literature. Given this boundary-shattering approach, it is unsurprising that Kerby-Fulton focuses equally on well-studied and recognised authors such as Hoccleve and Langland and the anonymous authors of understudied Middle English lyrics. These latter do not feel so anonymous once contextualised within the carefully built narrative of the clerical proletariat, the ‘precariat’ (p. 6). Through this multi-focal approach, Kerby-Fulton constructs a ‘poetics of vocational crisis’, a reimagining of the Middle English literary landscape (p. xv).
Kerby-Fulton's authors are those who are unhappy with the state of their current employment – or reflecting on past unhappiness – very often unbeneficed clergy cobbling together a living from both church and court positions. In Part I, she identifies the roots of the ‘poetics of vocational crisis’ in the Early Middle English works written by ‘mostly anonymous writers’ without whom ‘there would simply not have been Late Middle English (LME) literature’ (pp. 35–36). Their texts include Laȝamon's Brut, The Owl and the Nightingale, ‘The Prisoner's Lament’ and Wynnere and Wastoure (as a bridge text). These texts introduce a ‘bibliographic ego’, an I-voice, providing insight into the acute anxieties of their authors (p. 36). They also experimented or struggled with English as a language, presenting orthographic errors in manuscripts or a ‘nostalgic form of English’ (p. 53).
After establishing generic conventions introduced in EME literature, Kerby-Fulton turns her attention to major authors Langland, Hoccleve and Audelay alongside less well-known or anonymous authors in their milieu, including John Tyckhill and the scribe emending the Z-text of Piers Plowman. Studied together, the texts present a ‘theme of clerical vocational crisis […] made utterly compelling for [Langland's] own generation […] and the one that immediately followed it’ (p. 78). Langland, and the authors influenced by him, brought a unique perspective and background to their texts: ‘proletarians’ in which ‘poetry, account-keeping, and liturgical training converge’ (p. 102). They inhabited both secular and religious environments in their search for security and brought knowledge from both areas to bear in their poetic appeals. This understanding helps us to redefine authors such as Hoccleve, often read primarily as secular, as rather ‘public theologian[s]’ who make theology accessible due to their own education and experience (p. 125). In fact, Kerby-Fulton argues that some of these authors, especially Audelay, though disgruntled or anxious about financial security, were not, in the traditional Marxist sense, ‘alienated’ from the religious aspects of their profession – but rather genuinely invested in the church and its reform (p. 152). It is ‘career disappointment’ that motivates their ‘bitterness’ instead (p. 171).
In Part II, Kerby-Fulton focuses on (primarily anonymous) lyrics and poetry: York's Second Trial Before Pilate and St. Erkenwald, produced in the context of the cathedral. Her authors are ‘singing clerks, chantry priests, and other minor court officials’, producing not only religious but secular texts (pp. 177–78). She identifies cathedrals as a network for exchange of Middle English works and asks the reader to consider the role of these anonymous scribes and clerks in creating the corpus of Middle English literature as we know it. This makes sense, she contends, ‘when we realize that cathedrals were humming with underemployed clerks of sophisticated musical, liturgical, and often documentary training, usually stuck in that liminal space between the lay and clerical worlds, and eager for lay endowment’ (p. 189). This precariat class, for example, engaged with and produced vocally macaronic texts, lyrics sung simultaneously in both English and Latin. The ‘hybridity’ of cathedral-produced lyrics reflects their ‘ambidextrous’ authors (pp. 203-204). Some of these lyrics also, importantly, remind us of the inequity and abuse built into these systems of underemployment. They comment on corporal punishment in school and the ableist expectations of church employment. Satirical poems remind us of the rarity of ‘upward mobility’ (p. 218).
In this book, Kerby-Fulton introduces to us a new, or newly-recognised, class of Middle English author, one often constructing authority amid insecurity but one also generous (see discussion of Audelay's commitment to ‘open access’, p. 299) and often sincere. She ends her analysis with a summary of the clerical proletariat's shared qualities and a list of the defining ‘elements’ they contributed to LME. Kerby-Fulton is convincing: we would be poorer without this body of writers as much as the field of medieval studies will be without the new and underemployed scholars to which she dedicates her work.