Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt
- Author/Editor
- Pearsall, Derek
- Title
- Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt
- Published
- Pearsall, Derek. "Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt." In Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture. Ed. Gallacher, Patrick J. and Damico, Helen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 63-70.
- Review
- Pearsall considers various interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt in late-medieval literary and historical accounts, including the "Visio" of "Vox Clamantis." His general point is that it is necessary to recognize "the shaping power of interpretive models" in the study of history as well as in the study of literature, but without reducing objective knowledge to thorough-going illusion (an idea Pearsall attributes to the relativism of Karl Popper) because "the possibility of falsifiability implies the existence of truth, however difficult of access" (69). Pearsall treats Gower's depiction of the 1381 Uprising in Book 1 of "Vox Clamantis" in a brief paragraph, associating it with "the prevalent image or model of the well-being of the commonwealth" found in petitions against laborers that depict them as "mindless." For Pearsall, Gower's is "the most powerful and sustained account of the Peasants’ Revolt in terms of the image of reason and nature overturned" but "Gower is not, to be frank, much interested in the actuality of the event, rather in the image of primal chaos and reversion to bestiality which follows on the challenge to the established political order" (65). Elsewhere, actuality is suggested--and a greater sense of historicity achieved--Pearsall shows, in several other versions of the Uprising (the "Anonimalle Chronicle," "Tax has tenet us alle," Froissart's account), distinguishing them from Gower's (and Walsingham's) by their degrees of "authenticating realism," a notion Pearsall draws from Morton Bloomfield's 1964 study of realism in Chaucer. [MA]
- Date
- 1989
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Vox Clamantis