The Literature of Sovereignty in Late Medieval England.
- Author/Editor
- Wharton, Robin.
- Title
- The Literature of Sovereignty in Late Medieval England.
- Published
- Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Georgia, 2009. vi, 302 pp. Fully available via https://openscholar.uga.edu/record/7013?ln=en&v=pdf (accessed February 23, 2026).
- Review
- Wharton "examines how some Middle English writers bring the conventions of estates literature together with an emerging and evolving 'literature of sovereignty' and thereby identify the individual as both a political subject and a target of regulatory authority" (abstract, n.p.). She argues that notions of self-governance found in legal works, especially Henry Bracton's "De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae," reflect English ideas of royal responsibility for social and political order and, in turn, affect understanding and development of political subjectivity for individual members of the traditional three estates. Trained as a lawyer as well as a literary scholar, Wharton reads literary texts alongside legal discourse for ways that they "flatten out the hierarchical or categorical relations among the estates into a series of fungible metonymies for an underlying public obligation that seems to bind everyone equally, and in doing so bring the individual subject to the forefront as a target for regulation and a potential agent of reform" (101-02). She adds nuance to traditional uses of estates material in literary criticism and aligns the estates literature with efforts to define legal responsibilities of king and subject alike, considering Chaucer's "General Prologue" and "Man of Law's Tale," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Wycliffite discourse, "Dives and Pauper," Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," and others. In her treatment of "Confessio Amantis," Wharton considers its status as a mirror for princes, its engagement with estates satire, the Tale of Constance, the relation of Book VII to the whole, and the rededication from Richard to Henry--all as evidence of a developing concern with individual sovereignty in civic as well as moral affairs. [MA]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations