Common Voices in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England.
- Author/Editor
- Galloway, Andrew.
- Title
- Common Voices in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England.
- Published
- Galloway, Andrew. "Common Voices in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England." In Richard W. Kaeuper, ed. Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. 243-86.
- Review
- Galloway's complex argument--a quest to identify what he calls "literary voicing"--uses "voice" as a tool "to explore the boundary between works making primarily aesthetic claims and those with more direct claims on social and other social and other extra-narrative meaning" (244). To reach his subject, he triangulates between texts of Wyclif ("De civile dominio"), Chaucer ("Parliament of Fowls"), and Gower ("Vox clamantis"), with briefer excurses into John Clanvowe's "Book of Cupid" and--initially--Thomas Usk's "Appeal" (1383). Galloway sees Usk's behavior described there to influence the mayoral election pitting John of Northampton against Nicholas Brembre as an early attempt to harness the "common voice" of the people to influence a political result--something made to seem possible by the growing sense, from 1371-72, that such a "voice" existed, that it could be located in parliament, which should be accommodated by the king and lords' council in any laws passed. This surfaced powerfully in the Good Parliament of 1376 (246-50), hardened in the Merciless Parliament in the hands of the Appellants in 1388, and was further manipulated by Richard II in 1397 (251). This "common voice" could also be impacted by religious discourse. John Wyclif was especially effective in this, providing "intellectual resources" (252) to the concept, while developing "his own theory of 'collective voicing'" in "De civile domino" (253) and preaching against the Good Parliament. One result was the accusation that Wyclif bore responsibility for the 1381 Rising, to which Galloway accords some credence (254-58). Such developing concepts of "common voice" thus laid groundwork for the development of "further theoretical articulations [that] took place among the poets" (260). Chaucer, and especially Gower, cleared space for individual "literary voices"--an altogether new entity--through a trope of the "poet as reader"--bringing the collective "voice" of "old books" to bear on political issues which engaged the "configuration of society's 'voices'" (261). Gower uses "old books" to "give him words to describe modernity, and thus to articulate his contemporary condemnations" (263). This "wresting of original meanings to his own uses shows how history . . . is a language or medium of art, malleable to present purposes" (264). Gower manages a "blending of his voice of present condemnation with the texts he lifts and reapplied produces a temporal retrojection of himself as narrator. His 'common' voice becomes archaized: he utters the direct speech of textual wisdom . . . his voice seems of a piece with his ancient books--and hardly allows credit to be granted to it as his own" (264). Gower furthers this sense of his as the voice of "ancient wisdom" by casting himself as old and blind--a move Galloway suggests is more a trope than a fact--and somewhat ironic in light of the Septvauns affair (265-71). Chaucer's approach to old books and "authorities" in the "Parliament of Fowls" and to a lesser extent the "Book of the Duchess" Galloway presents as inextricable from his interaction with Gower from 1377 on (271-74), even suggesting that while there "is no direct proof that Chaucer used the Parliament to respond critically to Gower's "Vox" . . . the circumstantial evidence is compelling" (274). Gower's reply to the Parliament, Galloway decides, was the "Visio Anglie"--another "beast fable"--and the CA. In both of these, Gower's emphasis is on "self-sacrifice," in direct rebuttal of Chaucer's (and the cuckoo's) "Hobbsian" (283) world of self-interest and authoritarian control (280-85). In VC, this self-sacrifice is the subsumption of the individual authorial voice into an impersonal "speaker from long ago: less a modern reader of old books than a fragment of old books himself, a frozen image deictically aiming his poem's frozen arrows to a future that only the works readers could vivify by lived experience" (281). In the context of contrast with Chaucer, Galloway concludes with something like a plea for critical acuity: "The argument over whether Gower's entire poetic work is somehow 'unified' or endlessly dissonant should include not just what his work is, but also what it persists in seeking. Gower's continued and paradoxical effort both to speak for but also renew the 'old' suggests what we may call a Wycliffian ideal of the common voice: radical and elitist in its hopes of remaking institutions and society, yet conservative in its loyalty to what is imagined as having always been 'truly' expressed" (286). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 2013
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis