"Verba Vana": Empty Words in Ricardian London.
- Author/Editor
- Ellis, Robert.
- Title
- "Verba Vana": Empty Words in Ricardian London.
- Published
- Ph. D. Dissertation. Queen Mary, University of London, 2012. Open access at https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8821 (accessed January 29, 2023). 2 vols.; continuous pagination.
- Review
- Ellis's dissertation explores the "anxieties concerning the notoriety of empty words" as they are evident in "urban writings" produced in London in the 1380s and 1390s, works not only about "idle talk—such as 'janglynge,' slander, and other sins of the tongue—but also about the deficiencies of official discourses which are partisan, fragmentary and susceptible to contradiction and revision" (3). His texts are varied—"Letter Book-H," various petitions, city records, Richard Maidstone's "Concordia," three tales by Chaucer ("Cook's Tale," "Squire's Tale," and Manciple's Tale), John Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupide," and the tales of Phebus and Cornide and of Orestes from Gower's CA. Generally, Ellis tells us, these texts reveal "specific responses to the prevalence of empty words in the city, while also reflecting more broadly on the remarkable cultural, linguistic, social, and political developments witnessed in this period." His treatment of Gower's two tales (pp. 162-97)—read alongside the "Manciple's Tale and accounts of the execution of London cordwainer, John Constantyn—focuses on how "words incite violence, and the ways in which words are used to give meaning to that violence" (157). Concerned with the tales as exempla and engaging the role of silence, particularly the silence (and silencing) of women, Ellis discloses how the seemingly straightforward messages of the tales are problematized in several ways: by proximate tales and/or attendant Latin glosses in the case of "Cornide," and, further, by the thematics of fame and notoriety and the difficulty of controlling discourse in "Orestes." In Ellis's reading, Gower's tales reveal interest in and anxiety about "authorial control over the fate of tidings" (191), and they reflect the poet's ongoing concern with "revision and reinvention" (197), which, he demonstrates, is refracted in the figure of Clytemnestra in "Orestes" and in Gower's later treatment of her in his "Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz." Volume II of Ellis's dissertation comprises texts (with photographic facsimiles) and translations of the bureaucratic materials he discusses in volume I. [MA]
- Date
- 2012
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz