Generation of 1399

Author/Editor
Grady, Frank

Title
Generation of 1399

Published
Grady, Frank. "Generation of 1399." In The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ed. Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 202-229.

Review
Grady uses three main works – Gower's "Cronica Tripertita," "Richard the Redeless," and "Mum and the Sothsegger"--to define a "Lancastrian poetic,” the shared thematic concerns and formal traits that unite the first generation of texts to appear after Henry’s ascension of the throne. He gives his greatest attention to "Mum and the Sothsegger," the most problematic of these texts since it appeared a bit later in Henry’s reign and thus has to deal with more of the consequences of the change of regime and since it takes a somewhat more skeptical view of the usurpation and its aftermath. He uses Gower’s poem, along with "Richard the Redeless," to identify two important formal characteristics of this group of texts: first, the abandonment of the dream vision as a way of engaging with contemporary events, despite the importance of the dream in the predecessors to these texts, particularly "Piers Plowman" and VC; and second, “the concomitant increase of interest in documentary models of discourse, particularly legal texts and representations of parliamentary activity” (206). In place of the “authorizing immediacy” (210) of the claim to have witnessed the events of the poem that is allowed by the dream vision, Grady notes that in the Cronica, Gower adopts the analogous procedure of pretending that each of the three sections is “composed contemporaneously with the events that it describes” (209), though all are quite surely written after the fact. (It is not crucial to his argument, but Grady refers to CA as if it too is in dream-vision form, though it is not.) And as part of the turn to the stability and “apparent fixity” of “documents, chronicles, and statutes” (222) that characterized the response to the legal uncertainties and instabilities of the time, Grady notes that the Cronica “is largely organized by its references to parliamentary activity” and that the poet “is clearly concerned with the legality of each proceeding” (223). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 22.2.]

Date
2002

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Cronica Tripertita