Course summary 

This course examines the developing ideas of the poetic self in poetry in Britain in the late Middle Ages and early sixteenth century. It asks the simple question: when did the poetic 'I' become personalised in English? When did poets start using the 'I' in order to indicate either themselves, or a literary persona based on themselves? 

The usual answer to this, in the English context, is that it occurs in the mid-fourteenth century, with the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hence in this course we start with Chaucer, and the poem usually taken as one of his most powerful meditations on questions of poetic authority: The House of Fame. 

The course then winds back, first to look at European predecessors, such as Petrarch, so influential on Chaucer and on later English tradition. But we will also look at some less well known English poetry of the first half of the fourteenth century, which appears to cast doubt on the notion of Chaucer's originality where the poetic 'I' is concerned.   

In later weeks, we will examine other examples of so-called Ricardian writing, and then go on to the reception of Chaucer in the fifteenth century, especially by Lydgate and Hoccleve, before turning to the complicated legacy these writers left for the last medieval poets, Hawes and Skelton. We will also consider early modern writings, concluding with some of the poems of Wyatt and Surrey.

Summer reading: if you want to get ahead, you can follow the reading list below. Note that the Blackboard pages for the course are still under construction so some of the reading is not yet available there. But you could get ahead by getting a Chaucer edition and reading the House of Fame, a difficult but rewarding poem which is fundamental to this course.  From there, you could also read some of the other material by Chaucer. Texts marked with a double asterisk in the reading list are available on the TEAMS website so you can also download those directly; see note 3 immediately below for more detail about this. 

A note on texts:

 
1. You will need a reliable edition of the works of Chaucer: I recommend the Riverside Chaucer, which will be in Blackwell's. (It will not be practical or economical to use stand-alone editions of the various texts.)
 

2. Asterisked texts in the seminar list below will be supplied via Blackboard.
 

3. A few texts - those marked with a double asterisk - should be downloaded from the TEAMS website: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm. Note carefully the following: TEAMS texts come with glosses in the right-hand margin which are essential in helping you read the Middle English. If you are planning to print, you may need to resize the text in your browser in order to make sure the notes print. Alternatively, you may want to change the print setting to 'landscape' rather than the default, 'portrait'.

Seminar structure 

1. Introduction: The Poetic Self and Authority

Chaucer, The House of Fame; Troilus and Criseyde, conclusion, V.1786-1889

 2. Love and Laurels

*Petrarch: sonnets (with their adaptations); Chaucer, House of Fame; Skelton (*"Calliope"; *excerpt from Garlande of Laurell)

 3. The Vernacular I

*Harley Lyrics (esp Fair Maid of Ribblesdale); *Adam Davy Dreams of Edward II; **Laurence Minot (read Poems I, V, VII)

 4. The Vernacular I: Playing the Authority Game

Chaucer, General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (lines 1-42); **Lydgate, Prologue to the Siege of Thebes

 5. The Visionary I

*Langland, Piers Plowman (Prologue); Chaucer, trans. Romance of the Rose opening (lines 1-508); Legend of Good Women (Prologues; use F as your main text); House of Fame.

 6. The Trials of the Poetic Self

*Hoccleve, Complaint; **George Ashby, Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet

 7. The Trials of the Poetic Self, cont'd

*Hoccleve, Dialogue with a Friend

 8. The Poet and the Court

*Skelton, Bowge of Court; *Hawes, The Comfort of Lovers; *Wyatt

 9. The Poet and the Patron

Chaucer, Book of the Duchess

 10. The Poet and the Patron, cont'd

*Skelton, Garlande or Chaplet of Laurell

 11. At the Hour of our Death

Chaucer, Retraction; *Lydgate, Testament; Surrey, *penitential psalms

 12. Summary, conclusion, retrospective

Some secondary reading:

REFERENCE:
 

Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988)

Alistair Minnis and Ian Johnson (eds.) The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

 James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 2: Reform and Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

CRITICISM:

 
Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)

 Burt Kimmelman. The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (New York: Peter Lang, 1996)

 Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)

 Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006).

 Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

 A.C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005