English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime.
- Author/Editor
- Carlson, David R.
- Title
- English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime.
- Published
- Carlson, David R. "English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 375-418.
- Review
- This article is the earlier and longer version of what became the chapter, "English Poetry in Late Summer 1399," in Carlson's book, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (2012). Its subject is the extension to poetry of the Lancastrian "effort to manage information" (375) concerning the 1399 invasion and deposition. Carlson suggests, albeit through "indirect" evidence, that the Lancastrian regime not only managed information through official records and chronicles, but engaged in "public self-fashioning" (410) through a group of poems with certain key shared characteristics. While he admits that "[t]here is no evidence of writs going out to the English poets in late summer 1399 . . . nor are there receipts for payment and the like" (409), as there is for chronicle writers, Carlson finds in the poetry relating to the summer of 1399 consistencies which point to official pressure or encouragement. He analyzes five poems: two in Latin, "O deus in celis, cuncta disponens fidelis," and Gower's "Cronica tripertita," and three in English, "On King Richard's Ministers," and "Richard the Redeless", and the poem written as marginalia in a manuscript of Walsingham's "Chronicle," "Up on a hylle is a greene." At the end of the article (410-18), Carlson supplies an edition and translation of "O deus in celis," with extensive textual and explanatory notes. The four elements which suggest for "conspiracy" or "collaboration" are 1) how the poems discuss their own chronology with an implication of "predeposition composition" (381); 2) the poems "generic distribution and peculiar style," specifically, prophetic, recondite allegory; 3) their concern over the politics of the ruling elite; 4) their inclusion in a larger effort "to represent as righteous and lawful the lawlessness and crime used to put the Lancastrian regime in place" (377). He also argues that "the poetry was too particularly useful to the Lancastrian regime then in process of installing itself to pass now for spontaneous" (410). Specifically in terms of Carlson's treatment of Gower, he suggests that Gower does invoke contemporaneous composition ("journalism," in Carlson's words) "even though the 'Cronica's putatively current reportage often supersedes itself" (382). The section on "Genres and Allegorical Style" situates Gower's allegory in the CrT in a context of political writing, and provides a different explication for its political prophecy. Gower is also central in the construction of an image of "Henricus 'pius'," specifically, a Henry whose revolution was not bloody (403). [MWI. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2007
- Gower Subjects
- Cronica Tripertita
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations