From Literacy to Literature: England 1300-1400.
- Author/Editor
- Cannon, Christopher.
- Title
- From Literacy to Literature: England 1300-1400.
- Published
- Cannon, Christopher. From Literacy to Literature: England 1300-1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Review
- Cannon's topic is grammar schools, in which "the most basic literacy training" took place, "and that training's lasting and significant effects" in "the long moment during which a profusion of writing in Latin slowly mutated into a profusion of writing in English" (4). His basic argument is that what was learned in these schools "shaped . . . writing ever afterwards" (8). He takes Chaucer (his major focus), Langland, Gower, and (less often) Trevisa and the "Gawain" poet as his primary examples, while admitting that "our ignorance about their schooling is almost complete" (9). Training in grammar school inculcated the idea of language with rules and structure, while also encouraging "experimentation and exploration [i.e., composing verses], since knowledge of grammar was most fully proved when a student could deploy it to make phrases or sentences that were wholly new" (13). Cannon identifies the influence of Gower's grammar-school training throughout the "Confessio Amantis": Genius is presented as a kind of school-master, exhibiting "grammar-school style" in his tutelage of Amans (117-18); throughout, the Latin verses and prose glosses "translate" the English and vice-versa, thus replicating "the translation exercise that was one of the grammar school's most basic pedagogical forms." Medieval readers would have understood the Latin texts as "integral to the English" (146-147); the structure and approach to ethical narrative in the CA are derived (164-65) from early models encountered in the "Distichs of Cato," the "Fables of Avianus," debates from the "Eclogue" of Theodulus, Maximian's elegies, and "The Rape of Proserpina," for tragedy (on "Distichs" and "Avianus" see also 186-90). Cannon also identifies what he calls "patchwork"--the "piecing together" of lines, phrases, and images first discovered in grammar texts with original sections--as characteristic of "Ricardian style" as represented by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland (194-95). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations