Anarchy in the UK: Chaos and Community in Late Medieval Political Writings.
- Author/Editor
- Ganim, John.
- Title
- Anarchy in the UK: Chaos and Community in Late Medieval Political Writings.
- Published
- Ganim, John. "Anarchy in the UK: Chaos and Community in Late Medieval Political Writings." In Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean, ed. Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018), pp. 71-89.
- Review
- Ganim traces a history of popular movements described as anarchic in later medieval literature, with particular focus on political writings; he extends this trend into twentieth-century medievalisms. For Ganim, this trend is more dialectic than a direct lineage; he is particularly interested in links between apocalypticism and anarchy. The piece opens with a history of the intellectual and indeed theological underpinnings of this connection, tracing the thought of Joachim of Fiore into Franciscan spirituality. Ganim builds on James Dean's work in "The World Grown Old," identifying a "fundamentally pessimistic and entropic view of the world [that] permeates a spectrum of genres" (75). From this foundation, then, Ganim moves to exploring how English writers engage this worldview, beginning with Chaucer and Gower; he notes not only the small, potentially direct moments in which Chaucer engages with the 1381 Rising but also traces the themes of apocalypse, chaos, and popular revolt into works such as the "Knight's Tale." As he turns to Gower, Ganim focuses on the "Visio Anglie" of the "Vox Clamantis": he suggests that both writers present not just moments of crisis, but also everyday life as itself anarchic in more mundane ways. Ganim traces this mundane anarchy to patterns of social anxiety in the late fourteenth century as well as to a growing concern about personal taboos in confessional manuals. From there, he outlines some of the afterlives of this connection between anarchy and the Middle Ages in later medievalisms, ranging from the Sex Pistols to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," with a particularly nuanced reading of William Morris's "News from Nowhere" and "The Dream of John Ball." By way of conclusion, he returns to medieval literature, tracking ideals of collective action in the miracles recounted in John Lydgate's "Miracles of St. Edmund." [KMcS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Confessio Amantis