Writing with the Grain: Form, Flow, and the Environment in Late Medieval Poetry.

Author/Editor
Lawrence, Ryan Wesley.

Title
Writing with the Grain: Form, Flow, and the Environment in Late Medieval Poetry.

Published
Lawrence, Ryan Wesley. "Writing with the Grain: Form, Flow, and the Environment in Late Medieval Poetry." Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2022. 175 pp. DAI-A 84.07(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global and via
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/97c3221b-3bfe-4387-8417-a5bc0d7a42f6 (accessed July 7, 2025).

Review
From Lawrence's abstract: "'Writing with the Grain' explores moments of dynamic conceptual and formal exchange between poetic and environmental worlds in late-medieval vernacular literature. It traces the ways that late medieval poets envisioned the environment as a participant in the production of poetry--a view which challenges the notion that, in creative expression, humans 'give form' to things, as if matter were brute, subordinate, passively awaiting the agent who shapes it . . . . I argue for a view of late-medieval poetic production that seeks to 'follow the grain' of the material world, so to speak, embracing the material fluctuations of the environment and allowing these fluctuations to participate in the shaping of poetry. . . . Drawing on phenomenological understandings of creativity, Chapter One reads Robert Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid" alongside Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" [specifically, the opening of the "General Prologue"] to argue for a view of poetic production characterized by human-environmental correspondences, where poets follow forms that are latent in the environment itself. In Chapter Two, I explore the conceptual and physical connections between poetic and environmental matter. I argue that Chaucer's "House of Fame," with its attention to concepts of movement and proliferation, puts forth a view that sees creativity born within the whirl of the Aristotelian world of fluctuation. In Chapters Three and Four, I demonstrate the ways medieval poets like John Gower and John Lydgate used literary form to enact environmental form, from the role of poetic form in structuring environmental concepts such as climate and pollution, to the use of fiction and dialogue in capturing our skillful engagements with material objects such as tools" (pp. 3-4). Lawrence's discussion of Gower focuses almost exclusively on portions of Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis." He follows J. Allan Mitchell (Becoming Human, 2014) in reading Gower's coinage "ylem" (CA 7.214-22) as a challenge to Aristotelian hylomorphism (73), and he explores other Gowerian coinages: "intersticion" and "impression" as "atmospheric phenomena" (110) and, at some length, "perifery" / "peripheries" (CA 7.265ff.) as atmospheric region / regions (107ff.). Lawrence uses this latter term as a device to structure his third chapter, connecting Gower's descriptions of three atmospheric regions or layers with modern climatological concerns, and aligning Gower's descriptions with those found in other late-medieval English works, e.g., "For knowlege of the inpressions concerning þe wedur," passages from Lydgate, and Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's "De proprietatibus rerum." One or another of Gower's descriptions, Lawrence tells us, "resists poetic form" (111) in a single rhyming pair, "hints [in a few words] at some recognition of the formal problems presented by . . .turbulent weather" (117), or includes in a word-play "a moment of poetic self-reflection" (127). In such ways, "Gower's poem functions to mediate the phenomenal relationship between human experience and the air" (125)--a large claim to be made on small evidence, but one given dimension here by connections with the other medieval literature and by attention to modern ecocriticism, new formalism, and materialist studies. [MA Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.2. ]

Date
2022

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification