Notes
Introduction
1 STC 20519, 50.
2 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 495n2.
3 See Kathleen Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2001), 12; 79; 88–105.
4 Stephen Yandell presents an alternate view of Adam of Usk’s use of prophecies by arguing that Usk was most concerned with career advancement and self-authorization. See Stephen Yandell, “Prophetic Authority in Adam of Usk’s Chronicle,” in Prophet Margins: the Medieval Vatic Impulse and Social Stability, ed. E.L Risden, Karen Moranski, and Stephen Yandell (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 79–100.
5 See Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell Press, 2000), 6.
6 Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 1.
7 Ibid., 3–4.
8 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 35.
9 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 7; Campbell, The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translatio (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), 1–7.
10 Eusebii Cæsariensis, “Vita Constantini,” in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.P. Migne, vol. 20, col. 939 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–86).
11 See John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 9.
12 Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 11.
13 Ibid., 16.
14 The first version in print is Syr Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance Poems, ed. Sir Frederic Madden (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1839).
15 At least one article has claimed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight anticipated the Protestant Reformation, largely based on the assumption that Piers Plowman did the same. See S.L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, “The Passing Seasons and the Apocalyptic in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’” South Central Review 3, no. 1 (Spring, 1986), 15.
16 Lynn Nottage, Sweat (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017).
17 David Cote, “Sweat,” Time Out, 3 November, 2016. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/sweat-1.
18 Susan Saccoccio, “Sweat a Riveting Study of a Factory Community Wrenched Apart,” Bay State Banner, 13 February, 2020.
19 Alexis Soloski, “The Writer Who Foresaw the Trump Era,” 28 October, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201020-the-play-that-predicted-trumps-victory.
20 Sarah Crompton: “Interview: Playwright Lynn Nottage: ‘We are a country that has lost our narrative,’” The Guardian, 2 December, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/dec/02/lynn-nottage-interview-play-sweat-america.
21 Exit poll data indicates that “the median Trump voter [made] some $17,000 more than the median American.” See Jeff Manza and Ned Crowley, “Working Class Hero: Interrogating the Social Bases of the Rise of Donald Trump,” Forum 15, no. 1 (May 2017) 14.
22 Pew Research Center polls indicate that Trump only earned 6 per cent of Black Americans’ votes and 28 per cent of votes from Hispanic Americans. “An Examination of the 2016 Electorate, Based on Validated Voters,” Pew Research Center, August 9, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/.
23 See Victor Fiorillo, “Can a Play Make Sense of Trump Voters?” Philadelphia Magazine, 6 October, 2018; David Finkle, “Sweat on Broadway: Setting the Stage for Trump,” The Clyde Fitch Report, 26 March, 2017, https://www.clydefitchreport.com/2017/03/sweat-broadway-lynn-nottage-trump/; Michael Schulman, “The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era,” The New Yorker, 20 March, 2017. 1.
1. The Sybil and Merlin
1 J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 1.
2 Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience,” Yearbook of English Studies 7, (1 January, 1977), 69; V.J. Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), 29–43.
3 Joyce Coleman, “The Flower, the Leaf, and Phillipa of Lancaster,” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), 33–58.
4 Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 3.
5 See H.W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1988), 23–5.
6 Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, The Fathers of the Church, trans. Sister Mary Francis McDonald (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 32–5.
7 Ibid., 33.
8 Frederico Santangelo, Divination, Prediction, and the End of the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 141.
9 See Rieuwerd Buitenwerf, Book Three of the Sibylline Oracles and its Social Setting (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 104–6.
10 Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy, 1.
11 Erich S. Gruen, “Sibylline Oracles,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8134.
12 J.R. Lightfoot, “The Sibyl,” in The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (Oxford University Press, 2007), 5; Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy, 7.
13 See The Sibylline Oracles: Translated from the Greek Into English Blank Verse, ed. and trans. Milton S. Terry (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1899), 56; J.L Lightfoot, “The Judaeo-Christian Background: Use of the Bible,” in The Sibylline Oracles (Oxford University Press, 2007), 219–53.
14 See Buitenwerf, Book Three of the Sibylline Oracles, 79–91.
15 See Paul J. Alexander, The Oracle of Baalbek: the Tiburtine Sibyl in Greek Dress (Washington D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Harvard University, 1967), 10; 23. This sixth-century Greek version of the prophecy may be based on an earlier fourth-century version, but no conclusive evidence of the existence of such a text exists.
16 Alexander, The Oracle of Baalbek, 1–30. All subsequent lines are quoted from this edition.
17 Ernst Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1898), 181–5. The Last Emperor is not present in the Oracle of Baalbek, and Christopher Bonura has convincingly argued that this element of the prophecy originated in the seventh-century Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and was only added to the Tiburtine Sibyl in the eleventh century. See Christopher Bonura, “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate? A New Look at the Textual Relationship Between The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the Tiburtine Sibyl,” Viator 47, no. 3 (2016), 47.
18 See Bonura, “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate?” 66–7. See Anke Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 11; Bernard McGinn, “Oracular Transformations: The Sibylla Tiburtina in the Middle Ages,” in Sibille e linguaggi oracolari: mito, storia, tradizione, ed. Ileana Chirassi Colombo and Tullio Seppilli (Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998), 613–14.
19 For the book’s popularity as a history more than a prophecy, see Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes, xix; 53–67.
20 See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 302. Also see Marjorie Reeves, “Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor,” Traditio 17 (1961), 323–70.
21 Ibid., 330.
22 Ibid., 324.
23 See Eustache Deschamps, Ouvres Complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. le Marquis de Saint-Hilaire, 11 vols. (Paris: SATFL, 1878), Ballades 192 (vol 2, pg. 9); 1046 (vol 5, pg. 329); 1212 (vol 6, pg. 204). All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. For an extended discussion of Deschamps’s other Sibyllic prophecies, see Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet, “L’accomplissement des prophéties,” in Eustache Deschamps en son temps, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), 133–43.
24 See Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, “The Feminist Voice of the Misogynist Poet: Deschamps’s Poems in Women’s Voices,” in Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier-Poet: His Work and World, ed. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 123–30.
25 For Bede’s Sibyllinorum, see Robin Raybould, The Sibyl Series of the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 33. For attributions of the Tiburtine Sybil to Bede, see Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes, 8.
26 Eric Weiskott, “The Idea of Bede in English Political Prophecy,” in Remembering the Medieval Present, ed. Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 273; 277.
27 Oeuvres completes d’Eustache Deschamps vol 1, 164–5.
28 See Christian de Mérindol, “De l’emblématique de Charles VI et de Jean de Berry: à propos d’un plafond peint et armorié récemment publié,” in Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France: Bureau de la Société Pour l’Année 2006, ed. M. Florian Meunier (Paris: Librarie de la Société), 120–35.
29 See Boudet and Millet, Eustache Deschamps en son temps, 122.
30 For Richard as the Donkey in French prophetic writing, see Glynnis M. Cropp and Alison Hanham, “Richard II from Donkey to Royal Martyr: Perceptions of Eustache Deschamps and Contemporary French Writers,” Parergon 24, no. 1 (January 2007), 101–36.
31 Boudet and Millet, Eustache Deschamps en son temps, 122.
32 Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie has not yet appeared in an edited volume. This quotation was taken from Christine Moneera Laennec, “Christine antygrafe: Authorship and Self in the Prose Works of Christine de Pizan with an edition of B.N. MS. 603 “Le Livre de Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie,” vol. 2 (PhD diss., Yale University, 1988), 22. Translation taken from Christine de Pizan, The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, ed. Charity Cannon Willard, trans. Summer Willard (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 12.
33 For a discussion of Merlin, the Sibyl, and Bede’s citation in French prophecy related to Joan, see Debeorah Fraioli, “The Literary Image of Joan of Arc: Prior Influences,” Speculum 54, no. 4 (October 1981), 811–30.
34 Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford:The Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977), 34; 45. All further quotations of the French text and translations are from this edition, hereafter cited in the text.
35 Kevin Brownlee, “Structures of Authority in Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc,” in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 140.
36 Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker, “The Political Poetics of the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 177–94.
37 See Bonura, “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate?” 66.
38 See Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 1–17.
39 See Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1–42.
40 See Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 18–65.
41 The prophecies may have been circulating in an incomplete version as early as the 1120s. See Bernard Meehan, “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecies of Merlin: New Manuscript Evidence,” The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 28, no. 1 (November 1978), 37–46.
42 Marjorie Chibnall, ed. and trans., The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–80) VI, xii: 380–8.
43 See Jean Blacker, “Where Wace Feared to Tread,” Arthuriana 6, no. 1 (1996), 39–40.
44 Laȝamon describes Wace’s presentation of the Brut to the queen. See Laȝamon Brut, eds. G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie (London: Early English Text Society, 1978) ll.20–3.
45 Blacker, “Where Wace Feared to Tread,” 40.
46 John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Dipolmacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 90.
47 Wace, Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss University of Exeter Press, 2002), 190–1. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Although Wace chose to exclude the extended prophecy, scribes have added it to at least two manuscripts of the Brut. See ibid., 190n2.
48 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: an Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 252–3.
49 Virgil, Aeneid, ed. Jefferey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library 64 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), VII.41. Translation is my own.
50 See Randall J. Pogorzelski, Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperialism in the Aeneid and Ulysses (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 122–4; Don Fowler, “Virgilian Narrative: Story-Telling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 269.
51 For an overview of scholarship on ambiguity in the Aeneid, see Richard F. Thomas, “A Trope by Any Other Name: ‘Polysemy,’ Ambiguity, and Significatio in Virgil,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), 381–407.
52 Layamon, “Layamon’s Brut,” in Arthurian Chronicles, trans. Eugene Mason (Tornonto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 264.
53 See T.M. Smallwood, “The Prophecy of the Six Kings,” Speculum 60, no. 3 (July 1985), 571–92 and Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place in Medieval England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 87–101.
54 Victoria Flood has argued that the prophecy is a reworking of Merlin’s prophecy of a goat from the camp of Venus within the Prophetiae Merlini. See Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place, 89–91.
55 MS British Library Harley 746, fol. 2r. Translation is my own.
56 Ibid., fol. 3r.
57 Julia Marvin, The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: the Manuscript Culture of Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 2017), 7.
58 Lister M. Matheson, The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 180 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University Press, 1998), 4.
59 Matheson, The Prose Brut, 34.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., ix.
62 For Edward and Arthur, see Marc Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 299–307.
63 See Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 13; Smallwood, “Prophecy of the Six Kings” 571.
64 See Michael J. Curley, “The Cloak of Anonymity and The Prophecy of John of Bridington,” Modern Philology 77, no. 4 (May 1980), 361; A.G. Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look,” Speculum 63, no. 3 (July 1988), 597. Lesley Coote has found evidence of some verses of the prophecy written as early as 1330. See Prophecy and Public Affairs, 118.
65 Ibid., 366. Also see Sister Helen M. Peck, “The Prophecy of John Bridlington” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1930), 22–6; Aubrey Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 129–37.
66 Michael J. Curley has suggested that, since the prophecy was already associated with the Bridlington area (and may have originated there), people recopying it attributed the work to the renowned friar John Thwenge, prior of Bridlington, in an effort to attach the predictions to “an appropriately sanctified author.” See “The Cloak of Anonymity,” 363.
67 M.R. James, “The Catalogue of the Library of the Augustinian Friars at York,” in Fasciculus J.W. Clark dicatus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 2–96; Paul Meyvaert, “John Erghome and the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington” Speculum 41, no. 4 (October 1966), 656–64; Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy,” 596–613.
68 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 36.
69 “John of Bridlington,” Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1859–1861), 181.
70 Ibid., 202–4.
71 See Wright, “Introduction,” in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1859–1861), xxviii–iv; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 142.
72 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 144.
73 See Eulogium Historiarum sive Temporis, ed. Frank Scott Haydon, Vol. 3 (London: Longman, 1863), 390–3.
74 Thomas Walsingham, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti, regum Angliae” in Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1866), 237.
75 Saul, Richard II, 99.
76 For more information on these prophecies in the manuscript, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 152–4.
77 J.J.N. Palmer, England, France, and Christendom: 1377–99 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 47–8.
78 For an overview of transmission as a fundamental component of medieval authorship, see Ian R. Johnson and others, “Vernacular literary consciousness c.1100-c.1500: French, German and English evidence,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 422–71.
79 See David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.
80 For discussion of the rise of the first-person narrative voice, see A.C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 1–32. Spearing notes that the trend begins with French dits in the thirteenth century but does not reach England until the fourteenth century. Although Spearing’s book primarily focuses on English works told in the first person without a named author, the first-person narrative voice lent itself to exploitation by authors who wanted to call attention to their literary craft. For authorial self-naming and self-description, see Burt Kimmelman, “The Machaut Map,” in Machaut’s Legacy, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2017) 89–138; Erik Kwakkel, “Late Medieval Text Collections: A Codicological Typology Based on Single-Author Manuscripts,” in Author, Reader, Book, eds. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 56–79; Stephen Partridge, “The Makere of this Boke’: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler,” in Author, Reader, Book, eds. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) 106–53; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Written Work: Langland, Labour, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 67–143; Lawrence De Looze, “Signing Off in the Middle Ages” in Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 162–78; Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 38; 189.
81 See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1–20.
82 Michael C. Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 189–215.
83 Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 168–90.
84 Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel” in John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–88, Studies in Medieval Culture 26 (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989), 159–87.
85 The 1561 edition was The vision of Pierce Plowman, newlye imprynted after the authours olde copy, with a brefe summary of the principall matters set before every part called Passus. Whereunto is also annexed the Crede of Pierce Plowman, never imprinted with the booke before (London: Owen Rogers, 1561), and the 1813 was Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. Or the Vision of William Concerning Piers Plouhman, and the visions of the Same Concerning the Origin, Progress, and Perfection of the Christian Life, ed. Thomas Whitaker (London: John Murray, 1813).
2. William Langland’s Parodic Prophecies
1 William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (Medieval Institute Publications: Western Michigan University, 2011), B.X.316–26. All quotations will be taken from this edition. I cite the B-text here because this is the version of the prophecy that Crowley published (in more modernized spelling).
2 Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter, “William Langland,” The Longman Anthology: British Literature, 4th ed., vol. 1A, ed. Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: Pearson, 2010), 443.
3 Lawrence Warner, “Piers Plowman: An Introduction,” Discovering Literature: Medieval, The British Library, January 31, 2018, https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/piers-plowman-an-introduction.
4 See Morton Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 65–98; and Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 276.
5 See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1–15; Bernard McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform: 1100–1500,” The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, ed. Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2003), 276–8.
6 Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 28–36.
7 Bernard McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 284.
8 Ibid., 284–9.
9 Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse, 120–1; Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 168.
10 See David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 62–79; Robert Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse: Learned and Popular Eschatology in Piers Plowman,” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 194–236; and Richard K. Emmerson, “‘Yernen to Rede Redels?’ Piers Plowman and Prophecy,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 7 (August 1993), 27–76.
11 See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 10; 56–7.
12 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 12.
13 An earlier version of this argument appears in Kimberly Fonzo, “William Langland’s Uncertain Apocalyptic Prophecy of the Davidic King,” in Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Robert E. Bjork. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 53–66.
14 “An Invective Against France,” in Political Poems and Songs, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Longman, 1859), 26–39; 30. Translation is my own.
15 For the political context of “An Invective Against France,” see Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 80.
16 “John of Bridlington,” in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1859–61), 166.
17 Ibid., 167.
18 See Josef Funkenstein, “Samuel and Saul in Medieval Political Thought,” Hebraic Political Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2007), 149–63.
19 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 96.
20 Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg. iv. 25, fol. 61v. Quotation and translation taken from Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 95. This prophecy exists in at least twenty manuscripts, all nearly identical. The first dates from roughly 1340, although it was later exploited by Lancastrian propagandists who sought to legitimize Henry IV’s usurpation. See T.A. Sandquist, “The Holy Oil of St. Thomas of Canterbury,” in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T.A. Sandquist and M.R. Powicke (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 130–44.
21 F.J. Furnivall, ed., Adam Davy’s Dreams about Edward the Second, Early English Text Society (London: Trübner and Company, 1878), 13. Although originally about Edward II, this poem circulated into the fifteenth century. For information about the manuscript, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 8.
22 For a list of manuscripts in which the prophecy, titled “Anglia transmittet,” by Coote appears, see Coote, “Handlist of Manuscripts,” Prophecy and Public Affairs, 239–80.
23 Eulogium Historiarum sive temporis, vol. 1, ed. Frank Scott Haydon (London: Longman, 1858–65), 419–20.
24 Ibid., 420. Translation is my own.
25 For the power struggle between church and state after the Gregorian Reform, see Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy With Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) and Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology 1957 Reprint (1957; reis., Princeton University Press, 2016), 42–86. For the papacy’s favouring of France in the conflict with England, see John Barnie, War in Medieval English Society: Social Values in the Hundred Years War 1337–99 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 12.
26 See Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 98.
27 See Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to Piers Plowman (Chippenham, Wilts: Four Courts Press, 2013), 11–28.
28 See Andrew Galloway, “Parallel Lives: William Rokele and the Satirical Literacies of Piers Plowman,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018), 43–111; 46.
29 See Ralph Hannah, William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 2–3; Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family, 22.
30 Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family, 24.
31 See Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 333–40.
32 See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 99.
33 See Lesley Coote, “The Crusading Bishop: Henry Despenser and His Manuscript” in Prophecy, Apocalypse, and the Day of Doom, ed. Nigel Morgan, Harlatxon Medieval Studies VII (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2004), 39–51.
34 See Barnie, War in Medieval English Society, 13–14.
35 Ibid., 14.
36 Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. Vivian Hunter Galbraith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), 49. John Ergome is also critical of the treaty in the prophetic verses ascribed to John of Bridlington. See Wright, Political Poems and Songs, 123–215.
37 Denise N. Baker, “Meed and the Economics of Chivalry in Piers Plowman,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), 56.
38 K.B. MacFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures For 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 38.
39 Sir John Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain &c., trans. Thomas Johnes (London: Bohn, 1852), 284.
40 See Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse,” 222.
41 Textus biblie cum Glosa ordinaria, Nicolai de lyra postilla, Moralitatibus eiusdem Pauli Burgensis additionibus Matthie Thoring replicis: Repertorium alphabeticum, 7 vols. (Basel: Johannes Petri and Johannes Frobenus, 1506–8), vol. 4, fol. 263r.
42 See Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 332.
43 See Andrew Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70, no. 1 (January 1995), 68–105.
44 Curtis A. Gruenler, Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 121–2.
45 See Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling,” 84–5.
46 Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 10.
47 See Marjorie Reeves, “Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor,” Traditio 17 (1961) 323–70; McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 286–8.
48 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 332–3.
49 Michael P. Kuczynski, Prophetic Song, 205.
50 Langland removed this line following the shorter version that he includes in Passus V of the C-text, which he attributes instead to Reason. Thus, it would appear to be less essential to the meaning of the passage that Langland otherwise chose to retain.
51 Haydon, Eulogium Historiarum, 417. Translation is my own. For an analysis the prophecies of the Sextus Leopard, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 114–15.
52 McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 276.
53 See Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 21; 34–5; 106.
54 McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 277.
55 Ibid., 289.
56 Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-clericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97–8; Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, 4. Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 153.
57 See Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-clericalism, 97–8.
58 McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform,” 285.
59 Kuczynski, Prophetic Song, 189.
60 A.V.C. Schmidt, “Literary and Historical,” in The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: J.M. Dent, 1995), 446.
61 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: an Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 158–9.
62 Qtd. in Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place, 89.
63 Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, 118.
64 London, British Library MS Harley 2253 fol. 127r.
65 See William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7.
66 Ibid., 18.
67 Jansen Jaeck, “British Library MS Sloane 2578,” 36.
68 Jaeck, “Politics, Protest,” 93.
69 Ff.107v-108r; transcription taken from Jaeck, “Politics, Protest,” 94.
70 Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 72. For an overview of the six manuscripts, see Eric Weiskott, “Prophetic Piers Plowman: New Sixteenth-Century Excerpts,” The Review of English Studies 67, no. 278 (February 2016), 21–41.
71 See Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman, 72–8.
72 Ibid., 76–7. Warner suggests that John Brynstan owned the manuscript and wrote the passage. Brynstan famously endorsed the king as head of the Church but decried the Protestant followers of “new books.” Warner notes the similarity between Brynstan’s perspective and the prophecy that combines Will’s and Clergy’s predictions. However, the manuscript does not contain that version of the prophecy.
73 For an extended analysis of this annotator’s prophetically inclined readings of Piers Plowman, see Sarah A. Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 34.
74 See Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Routledge, 1977; 2003), 178.
75 Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’” in Literary Pracitce and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–82; 18; Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 93–105; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” Written Work: Langland, Labour, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 121.
76 See Kane, “Piers Plowman”: The Evidence for Authorship (London: The Athlone Press, 1965), 69–70.
77 Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction,” The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland done into Modern English by the Rev. Professor Skeat (London: Alexander Morning, 1905), x.
78 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 581 (S.C. 987), Oxford, Oriel College, MS 79, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38, respectively.
79 sig. *iir.
80 STC 19907a.
81 Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82–4; Weiskott, “Prophetic Piers Plowman,” 27–8.
82 “‘This is no prophecy’: Robert Crowley, ‘Piers Plowman,’ and Kett’s Rebellion,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 42.1 (2011), 37–55, 47.
83 Ibid., 46–7.
84 Robert Crowley, Philargyrie of great Britayne, in The Fable of Philargyrie the Great Gigant, Reprinted from the only known copy, intro. W. A. Marsden (London: Emery Walker, 1931).
85 STC 19907a.
87 Sarah A. Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 34–7.
88 John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae posterior pars (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1559), 474. Translation is my own.
89 Excerpts of the poem did appear in anthologies, but Kelen notes that “in shortening the poem for its readers, those editors also obscured the complex and often contradictory experience of reading the poem, an experience that is itself part of Langland’s meaning.” Langland’s Early Modern Identities, 100.
90 STC 20519, 50.
91 George Hickes, Linguarum Vett[arum] septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et archaeologicus, vol. 1 (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1703–5), 107.
92 Thomas Dunham Whitaker, “Introductory Discourse,” in Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. Or the Vision of William Concerning Piers Plouhman, and the visions of the Same Concerning the Origin, Progress, and Perfection of the Christian Life, ed. Thomas Dunham Whitaker (London: John Murray, 1813), xxxvii.
93 Ibid., xxxviii.
94 Thomas Wright, “Introduction,” The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman (London: William Pickering, 1842), x. Also see Thomas Wright, “Introduction,” The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, ed. Thomas Wright, vol. 1 (London: Reeves and Turner, 1887), xxi.
95 P.H. Ditchfield and William Page, “Houses of Benedictine monks: The abbey of Abingdon,” in A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 2, ed. P.H. Ditchfield and William Page (London: Victoria County History, 1907), 51–62. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/berks/vol2/pp51–62.
96 Ibid., xvii.
97 Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction,” The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869), xxx.
98 Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, 127.
99 Ibid.
100 Richard K. Emmerson “‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?,’” 40.
101 See Pamela Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980), 71–102; David Lawton, “Lollardy and the Piers Plowman Tradition,” Modern Humanities Research Association 76, no. 4 (October 1981), 780–93; Christina von Nolcken, “Piers Plowman, the Wycliffites, and the Piece the Plowman’s Creede,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988), 71–120; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 398–408; John M. Bowers, “Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes Toward the History of a Wycliffite Langland,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 61 (1992), 1–50.
3. Henry IV and the Post Facto Construction of John Gower
1 Wim Lindeboom and Joel Fredell have proposed that Gower did add glosses to the margins of the Confessio Amantis to make it appear as if he had prophetically predicted certain aspects of the Papal Schism and Richard’s deposition. I take issue with some of their conclusions later. See Wim Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis,” Viator 40.2 (2009), 319–49; Joel Fredell, “The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths,” Viator 41.1 (2010), 231–50.
2 Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France and the Adjoining Countries, trans. Thomas Johnes (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1857), 611.
3 See Chris Given Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (Hambledon: Bloomsbury Academic: 2007), 44.
4 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 239.
5 Adam of Usk, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; 2008), 50–3.
6 See Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (London: Yale University Press, 2016), 138; Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7–8.
7 For lost prophecies, see Chronique de la Traïson et Mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre, ed. B. Williams (London: J & S Bentley, Wilson, and Fley, 1846), 180–7.
8 John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899-1902). Translation taken from The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. and ed. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 232–3. All subsequent quotations of the Vox clamantis are taken from these editions.
9 Stockton, “Introduction,” The Major Latin Works of John Gower, (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1962), 13; G.B. Stowe, “Richard II in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives,” Mediaevalia 16.1 (1993), 3–31.
10 Macaulay, “Introduction,” vol. iv, lxxiii.
11 Nigel Saul, “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?” in John Gower: Trilingual Poet, ed. Elizabeth Dutton with John Hines and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer), 88.
12 George R. Coffman, “John Gower: Mentor for Royalty, Richard II,” PMLA 69, no. 4 (September 1954), 953–64.
13 Stockton, “Introduction,” 13.
14 Maria Wickert, Studies in John Gower, trans. Robert J. Meindl, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 486 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2016), 10.
15 David R. Carlson, “Introduction,” in John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events, ed. David R. Carlson, British Writers of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period 2 (Toronto: PIMS, 2011), 1–18, 6.
16 See Karl Meyer, John Gower’s Beziehungen zu Chaucer und König Richard II, (PhD diss., University of Bonn, 1889), 29–32.
17 Macaulay, “Introduction,” vol. IV, lxxiii.
18 M.B. Parkes, “Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower,” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A.I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and A.J. Piper (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1995), 81–121, 98.
19 Ibid., 83.
20 Ibid., 83.
21 Ibid., 83–4.
22 Ibid., 84.
23 Parkes says that what he calls the second stage of revisions to the Vox “reflects a hardening of Gower’s attitude to the King,” and he cites the supposed rededication of the Confessio between 1392 and 1393 as his basis for the conclusion that the second stage of revisions took place shortly after that time. See Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 83.
24 Peter Nicholson, “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 10.1 (1988), 159–80.
25 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 87; 89.
26 In addition to Macaulay’s explanations, Parkes argues that the revisions were rolling due to additions made by the scribe that appear to be referring to Gower’s death. Yet, Gower could have wished to include passages that ask for prayers for the soul of John Gower before he died, particularly because he was going blind in the early years of Henry’s kingship, leading him to retire from writing. It is also possible that Scribe 4 made this revision later without the others having been temporally spaced apart in the manner that Macaulay and Parkes have suggested. See Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 86–90.
27 Ibid., 90.
28 Ibid., 90.
29 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7–8.
30 Ibid., 5.
31 Ibid., 7.
32 David R. Carlson, Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2012), 153–96.
33 Wickert, Studies in John Gower, 8.
34 Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377–99 (Oxford University Press, 2008), xxvi.
35 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 92–3. R.F. Yeager has postulated that the Arundel dedication was made nearer to 1408. See “Gower’s ‘Epistle to Archbishop Arundel’: The Evidence of Oxford All Souls College, MS 98,” in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey, ed. Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2019), 13–34.
36 See Carlson, John Gower, 124–5.
37 Ibid., 125.
38 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 177.
39 Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53, no. 1 (January 1978), 95.
40 Ibid., 99.
41 See Richard W. Kaueper, War, justice, and public order: England and France in the later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 272. Also see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Kingship and Scientific Jurisprudence,” in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, ed. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post, and Robert Reynolds (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 95.
42 France’s monarchy was a unique exception. It was able to promote a sacral kingship in ways that England was not. See Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). See Richard W. Kaueper, War, justice, and public order: England and France in the later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 272. Also see Kantorowicz, “Kingship and Scientific Jurisprudence,” 95.
43 Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Thomas Riley vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1864), 186.
44 Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. by G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 360, 361.
45 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 66.
46 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 87. This poem appears in G and H, added by Scribe 4 immediately after the Chronica Tripertita.
47 John Gower, “H. Aquile Pullus,” in John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R.F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), 46.
48 For more on Usk’s use of the prophecy, see Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 13.
49 See “H. Aquile Pullus,” 46n1.
50 R.F. Yeager has quipped, “Little notice was given to Edward’s status as Richard’s grandfather also.” See “H. Aquile Pullus,” 46n1.
51 See Nigel Saul, Richard II, 423–4.
52 Quoted in Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 8.
53 For the various permutations of this prophecy, see Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, Yale English Monarchs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 247–8.
54 Parkes, “Scribal Activity,” 88.
56 Stockton, The Major Latin Works, 445n11.
57 The edition of the Visio Anglie and Cronica tripertita that was edited by David R. Carlson and translated by A.G. Rigg has now superseded Macaulay’s, but Macaulay’s edition remains the standard one for the rest of the Vox Clamantis, including the Book VI revisions.
58 R.F. Yeager, “Politics and the French Language in England,” Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise Nowakowsi Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 127–57; 139.
59 Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics, Medieval Cultures 38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 125. Also see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), 112.
60 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 436–7. Saul seems to have arrived at the revision date of 1386 because this is when the reforms of the “Wonderful Parliament” were enacted, addressing Richard’s choice of “youthful counsel” in such as Robert de Vere and Michael de la Pole. Yet, the fact that several versions of Gower’s colophon include a description of the older version of the Vox clamantis, which exonerates Richard at the same time that they list the Confessio Amantis, illustrates that the changes were probably not made until at least after 1390, when the Confessio was written. Furthermore, this version of the colophon appears in many manuscripts containing the Confessio Amantis.
61 An earlier version of this argument appears in Kimberly Fonzo, “Richard II’s Publicly Prophesied Deposition in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Modern Philology 14, no. 1 (August 2016), 1–17.
62 Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2006), 416n9.
63 Peck, Russell A, “Introduction,” in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), 36.
64 Reinhold Pauli, “Introductory Essay,” in The Confessio Amantis of John Gower, ed. Reinhold Pauli (London: Bell and Daldy Fleet Street, 1857), xxxi.
65 G.C. Macaulay, “Date and Circumstances” The Complete Works of John Gower vol 1, ed. G.C. Macaulay (London: Henry Frowde, 1901), xxi.
66 Pauli, “Introductory Essay,” xxxi.
67 Macaulay, “Date and Circumstances,” vol. 1, xxiv.
68 Ibid., xxiv.
69 Ibid., xxv.
70 Ibid., xxv.
71 Ibid., xxv.
72 Peter Nicholson, “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 10.1 (1988), 159–80, 170.
73 See Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siận Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 73–98, 74–6. John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York University Press, 1964), 124.
74 John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, EETS (London: Kegan Paul, 1900–1), 1: cxxxviii-cli; Fisher, John Gower, 116. The earliest extant copies of the work are those dedicated to Henry when he was not yet king.
75 Fisher, John Gower, 116.
76 James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 135.
77 Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions,” 345–6; Fredell, “The Gower Manuscripts,” 231–50.
78 Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions,” 331.
79 Peter Nicholson, “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis,” The Chaucer Review 19.2 (Fall 1984), 123–43, 137.
80 Kate Harris, “Ownership and Readership: Studies in the Provenance of the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Unpublished Dissertation, University of York, 1993, 151n150.
81 Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 80.
82 Ibid., 81.
83 Derek Pearsall, “The Wollaton Hall Gower Manuscript (WLC/LM/8) Considered in the Context of Other Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” in The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners, and Readers, ed. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 57–67; 59.
84 Ibid., 59.
85 Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 80. It is worth noting that Fairfax 3 had been revised by Scribe 4, who made the changes to all four of the manuscripts of the Vox clamantis that made the text critical of Richard.
86 See Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 81 and A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the early fifteenth century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker, ed. M.B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 163–212; 176.
87 Ibid., 80.
88 Joel Fredell has, however, examined a related explanation. He has argued that later fifteenth-century audiences would have preferred the version dedicated to Richard II because it conformed to the popular de casibus tradition further advanced by authors like Hoccleve. See Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995), 61–93.
89 Humphrey owned Bodley 294; Thomas owned Oxford Christ Church 148; John owned Cambridge Pembroke 307. See Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations,” 95–7.
90 P.E. Russell, “Robert Payn and Juan de Cuenca, translators of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Medium Aevum 30 (1961), 26–32.
91 R. Wayne Hamm, “An Analysis of the Confisyon del Amante, the Castilian Translation of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Unpublished Dissertation, 1975, 19.
92 Russell, “Robert Payn,” 28. See Davis, “Ownership and Readership,” 154.
93 Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, The Routledge History of English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1977) 1: 209.
94 Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” in John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–88, ed. R.F. Yeager, Studies in Medieval Culture 26 (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989), 159–87.
95 Carlson, John Gower, 214–15.
96 Elliot Kendall, “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elizabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2010), 46–58.
97 John Gower, The Confessio Amantis, ed. in vol. 2 of G.C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower (1899–1902). All subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically.
98 Ibid., 177.
99 Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 40.
100 Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 174–5.
101 Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,”: 61–93.
102 See Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131–61.
103 Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books: Ideals and Reality in the Life and Library of a Medieval Prince (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997), 120.
104 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 157.
105 Thomas Walsingham, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti” in Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 204, 173.
106 The Deposition of Richard II: “The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II” (1399), ed. David R. Carlson, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 29 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2007), 30.
107 Thomas Walsingham, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti,” in Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 75.
108 Richard the Redeless: and Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. James M. Dean, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000).
109 See Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 17n83.
110 John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899–1902) 4: 246. Translation taken from The Major Latin Works of John Gower, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 323.
111 R.H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middles Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 93.
112 Fletcher, Richard II, 2.
113 Adam of Usk, The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 77.
114 See R.M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford: Political Revolutionary and Champion of the Liberties of the English Church ca. 1275/80–1348 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 278–327.
115 Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 132–4.
116 J.H. Burns, Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 517.
117 See Black, “Kingship,” 150.
118 John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 85.
119 Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 118.
120 Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.
121 The proper balance between mercy and punishment was of central concern in Gower’s political works, particularly the Mirrour de l’Omme. See Yoshiko Kobayashi, “Principis Umbra: Kingship, Justice, and Pity in John Gower’s Poetry,” in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R.F. Yeager, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 71–103.
122 John Urry, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Compared with the Former Editions, and many valuable MSS. Out of which, Three Tales are added which were never before Printed (London: Bernard Lintot, 1721), sig. br.
123 Qtd. in Fisher, John Gower, 23.
124 Ibid., 22.
125 Charles Cowden-Clarke, Tales from Chaucer (London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.), 43.
126 See Terry Jones, Who Murdered Chaucer: A Medieval Mystery (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 293–5.
4. “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame
1 Larry D. Benson, “Introduction,” The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), xv.
2 For Chaucer’s travels and literary exposure, see Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
3 See Kuczynski, Prophetic Song, 208–9.
4 “The Preface,” The workes of Geffray Chaucer newlye printed, wyth dyuers workes whych were neuer in print before: as in the table more playnly doth appere. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, A2v.
5 Robert Costomiris has proposed that its inclusion was not Thynne’s decision at all but that of his publishers, William Bonham and John Reynes. See Robert Costomiris, “The Influence of Printed Editions and Manuscripts on the Canon of William Thynne’s Canterbury Tales,” in Rewriting Chaucer, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 247.
6 Kathleen Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2001), 12.
7 See Linda Georgianna, “The Protestant Chaucer,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 55–69.
8 For claims of Chaucer’s secularity, see Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, 8; John Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Dante, Chaucer, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 53–4, 69; Robert Hanning, “‘And countrefete the speche of every man / He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale’: Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for the Canterbury Tales,” SAC 21 (1999), 27–58; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 182–4; Donald Howard, The Idea of the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 381–7.
9 See Megan Murton, “Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complain of Mars,” SAC 38 (2016); 75–107; Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010).
10 I borrow the term “threshold” from Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.
11 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5.
12 Francesco Petrarch, Africa, ed. Léonce Pingaud (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1872). Translation taken from Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch’s Africa, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 230. All subsequent quotations are taken from these editions.
13 Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1968) 3 vols., 2: 10478; 10535–650.
14 Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 17.
15 Although the term “subconscious” is an invention of Sigmund Freud’s, the concept had been forged by Plato and St. Augustine long before him and would not have been unfamiliar to Chaucer. See Guy Claxton, The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious (London: Little Brown, 2005), 15; 25–6.
16 Steven Lowenstam, “The Pictures on Juno’s Temple in The Aeneid,” The Classical World 87, no. 2 (December 1993), 37–49, 42.
17 See M.C.J. Putnam, “Dido’s Murals and Virgil’s Ekphrasis,” HSCP 98 (1998) 243–75.
18 Deborah Beck, “Ecphrasis, Interpretation, and Audience in ‘Aeneid 1’ and ‘Odyssey 8,’” The American Journal of Philology 128, no. 4 (Winter 2007), 533–49.
19 Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) 587–631. All subsequent quotations of Chaucer’s work are taken from this edition.
20 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1972, 1994), 53.
21 Teresa Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 118.
22 See Frederick Carl Riedel, “The Meaning of Chaucer’s House of Fame,” JEGP 27, no. 4 (October 1928), 441–69; John Koch, “Nochmals: Die Bedeutung Von Chaucers Hous of Fame,” Englische Studien 50, no. 3 (March 1917), 359–82; Rudolf Imelmann, “Chaucer’s Haus Der Fama,” Englische Studien 45, no. 3 (November 1912), 397–431.
23 This is a principle to which Chaucer adheres throughout his career. Although he launches broader social critiques within The Canterbury Tales, he does not personally excoriate living or historical individuals. The one exception to this is The Legend of Good Women, which I discuss later.
24 See Aldof Rambeau, “Chaucer’s House of Fame in seinem Verhältniss zur Divina Commedia,” in Englische Studien 3.3 (1880), 209–68 and Cino Chiarini, Di una imitazione inglese della Divina commedia: la casa della fama di Chaucer (Gius: Laterza e figli, 1902), 5. Also see Bernhard Egidius Konrad ten Brink, Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwickelung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (Münster: Adolph Russell, 1870), 88–124; Etienne Gustave Sandras, Étude sur G. Chaucer: considéré comme imitateur des trouvères (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1859), 120–5; Walter William Skeat, “House of Fame Introduction,” The Complete Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), vii-viii.
25 B.G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in the House of Fame, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 81.
26 Paul G. Ruggiers, “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 160–84; 167.
27 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism, 108.
28 John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 27, 43.
29 Paul Strohm, The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales (London: Profile Books, 2014), 206.
30 See Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, 7–8; William Franke, “Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared with Dante,” The Chaucer Review 34, no. 1 (1999), 87–106; Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 20–49. Katherine McKinley has creatively argued for a parodic reading of Dante via Boccaccio. See Katherine McKinley, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016).
31 Jamie C. Fumo, “Chaucer as Vates?: Reading Ovid through Dante in the House of Fame, Book 3,” in Writers Reading Writers: Intertextual Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of Robert Hollander, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 89–108, 93.
32 There appears to have been some early interest in Dante among the English clergy. In 1416, Bishop Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle completed a Latin translation of the Commedia, which he dedicated to two English bishops, Nicholas Bubwith and Robert Hallum. The work only survives in three manuscripts, though, and seems to have made little impact. See N.R. Havely, Dante’s British Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15.
33 Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 21.
34 Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience(s), Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual,” The Chaucer Review 18.2 (Fall 1983), 137–45, 138.
35 Franke, “Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,” 91.
36 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling, vol 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 142–3.
38 The three traditions are Ethopic, Aramaic, and Greek. See Robert Henry Charles, “Introduction,” in The Book of Enoch, ed. and trans. Robert Henry Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), ix-cx.
39 See Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 402.
40 For a list of Middle English Homilies on the subject, see Hans Kurath, “Antichrist,” in Middle English Dictionary, ed. Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 300.
41 Prik of Conscience: Part Five: Of the Day of Doom and of the Tokens that Before Shall Come, ed. James H. Morey, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), 446–53.
42 See Richard K. Emmerson, “Antichrist on Page and Stage in the Later Middle Ages,” in Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert E. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–2.
43 See John M. Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle: A Contemplative Symbol,” PMLA 75, no. 3 (June 1960), 153–9 and John Lyerle, “Chaucer’s Windy Eagle,” University of Toronto Quarterly 40, no. 3 (April 1971), 247–65.
44 See Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Job, Book ix, Chap. 32 (P.L., lxxv, cols. 884–5), Book ix, Chap. 33 (P.L., lxxv, col. 886), Book xix, Chap. 27 (P.L., lxxvi, col. 131).
45 See Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle,” 155.
46 See William S. Wilson, “The Eagle’s Speech in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50, no. 2 (April 1964), 153–8.
47 Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle,” 155.
48 See Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 9–15.
49 B.G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 172–3.
50 See Steve Ellis, “Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation,” The Chaucer Review 22, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 282–94; Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 20–49.
51 Helen Cooper, “Chaucer and Ovid: A Question of Authority” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian influences on literature and art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71–82; 74.
52 Ibid., 75.
53 Joseph S. Graydon, “Defense of Criseyde,” PMLA 44, no. 1 (March 1929), 141–77; 145.
54 Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 78.
55 Ibid., 78.
56 See Richard Kenneth Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, “Antichrist, Simon Magus, and Dante’s Inferno XIX,” Traditio 36 (1980), 373–98; 380.
57 Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 70.
58 Ibid., 71.
59 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 117.
60 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of Fame Made by Gefferey Chaucer (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483), d3r.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 See Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63.
64 I will henceforth refer to this poem as “When fethe failleth…,” although the spelling changes from version to version.
65 London, British Library MS Harley 2253 fol. 127r.
66 See James M. Dean, “Poems of Political Prophecy: Introduction,” Middle English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1996), 1–5.
67 It is worth noting that Caxton does not explicitly attribute Anelida and Arcite to Chaucer within the pamphlet. However, it was made to be bound along with other works in a Sammelbände, and existing Sammelbändes group it with other works by Chaucer such as The Parliament of Fowls. Therefore, one would imagine that Caxton was selling the pamphlet as a work of Chaucer’s. See Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Oxford University Press, 2006), 45; 67–77.
68 See Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 1236, f. 91r; Oxford, Bodleian Lat. MS Misc. c.66, f. 104.
69 For instance, London, British Library, MS Royal 17.A.XVI is an ornate fifteenth-century manuscript of astronomical charts and diagrams, many of which are related to planetary influence over English history and kings. The last page includes a diagram, made up of three rotating disks. On the verso side of the page (27v) a different fifteenth-century hand has added the unattributed poem, “When faith failleth…” The person who copied the poem into the manuscript seems to have chosen it because it easily fits on the back of the page, underneath the affixing string for the diagram and because its prophetic message, aimed at England, suits the manuscript’s theme. The London, British Library, MS Harley 1337 is dedicated to the prose Brut, which contains Merlin’s prophecies about England’s future. Later hands added several small items to the verso side of the final page, including three prophecies: “When fethe failleth…”, “Nomina illius Regis qui Sanctam Crucem venerabitur” (The King Who Will Find the Holy Cross), and a fragment of the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington.
70 See Robert E. Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 6–7.
71 For instance, George Ferrers’ Sammelbände ends with it. See Gillespie, “Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quaros: Miscellanies from Manuscript to Print,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12 (2000), 1–25; 6n17.
72 While usually copied onto the final page or flyleaf, the poem occasionally appears in the beginning flyleaf of a manuscript, as it does in Oxford, Bodleian, MS Rawlinson poet 32, a fifteenth-century collection containing several poems related to English nationalist themes (f. 4r).
73 It was sometimes attributed to Merlin. For instance, Bodleian MS Ashmole 59, produced in the fifteenth century, includes a variation of the poem, calling it “Prophecia Merlini doctoris perfecti” (f. 78r). It differs slightly in form in this version, beginning with, “Whane lordes wol leese þeire olde lawes / And preestis beon varyinge in theire sawes.” This version also ends with predictions specific to Arthur: “And whan the moon is on David stall, / And the kynge passe Arthures hall, / Than is the lande of Albyoun / Nexst to his confusyoun.” The poem is also sometimes attributed to John of Bridlington, as it is in the sixteenth-century London, British Library, MS Ashmole 1835, f. 47r and London, British Library, MS Sloane 2578, f. 106r.
74 Paratexts, 1.
75 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1975), 45. Translation qtd. in Genette, Paratexts, 2.
76 Genette, Paratext, 16–17.
77 William Thynne, “The Preface,” The workes of Geffray Chaucer newlye printed, wyth dyuers workes whych were neuer in print before, ed. William Thynne (London: William Bonham, 1542), A2v.
78 There is a broader debate about the degree to which Thynne was intentionally attempting to attribute non-Chaucerian works to Chaucer. Arguably, Thynne never attributed these three poems to Chaucer to begin with, since they are presented before the table of contents. Critics such as R.F. Yeager have argued that Thynne truly believed the works that he attributed to Chaucer to be genuine, while Walter W. Skeat has argued that Thynne was working within the tradition of the medieval manuscript miscellany, never intending to pass off other works as Chaucer’s own. See R.F. Yeager, “Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William. Caxton and William Thynne,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984), 135–64; 148; Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon, with a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 94–116.
79 Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and Herician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76–8.
80 Ibid., 76–8.
81 He consulted Caxton’s printed version of Anelida and Arcita in putting together his work, so he certainly saw Caxton’s use of the prophecy. See James Edward Blodgett, William Thynne and his 1532 Edition of Chaucer (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1975), 110. He also used the version of the prophecy with the additional stanza, “It falleth for every gentylman,” included by Caxton.
82 Greg Walker, Writing under Tyrrany, 59.
83 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, 1580–1625, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1872), 181. Also see Gertrude H. Campbell, “Chaucer’s Prophecy in 1586,” Modern Language Notes 39, no. 6 (June 1914), 195–6.
84 This flyleaf is now missing, but records of it exist in IMEV, NIMEV, and DIMEV 3943.
85 See John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, eds., The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, vol. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 531. The manuscript was later donated to Trinity College by Sir Thomas Nevile, but as Manly and Rickert explain, the manuscript may have passed on to Parker’s son, John, and on to Nevile through him. The Tudor Rose drawn into the initial “H” on f. 247r suggests that it was produced sometime after 1485. The manuscript contains Parker’s typical red marker pagination of the recto pages, and “T.W.” appears in the same red on f. 5r.
86 The earliest complete existing version appears to be London, British Library, MS Royal 18 B XVII, which was produced in the early sixteenth century and appends the work as a companion piece to The Vision of Piers Plowman. See Tim William Machan, “The Visual Pragmatics of Code-Switching in Late Middle English Literature,” in Code Switching in Early English, ed. Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 303–34; 320. In 1553, Reyner Wolfe printed a version of the Creede with The Vision of Piers Plowman (STC 19904). Skeat had argued that the Reyner Wolfe printed edition was copied from the same manuscripts as the London, British Library, MS Royal 18 B XVII and the Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 were. A.I. Doyle has since concluded that the printed version was copied from a different manuscript but that Royal and Trinity were most likely copied from the same manuscript or closely related manuscripts. See Walter W. Skeat, “Preface,” in Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, ed. Walter W. Skeat (New York: Greenwood press, 1867; 1969), iv–v; A.I. Doyle, “An Unrecognized Piece of Piers Plowman’s Crede and Other Work by its Scribe,” Speculum 34, no. 3 (July 1959), 428–36; 435. Doyle also finds a portion of the Crede in British Library MS Harley 78, ff.3r. Doyle determines that the scribe who had copied it lived during the reign of Edward IV.
87 See Lawrence Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 133.
88 Alexander Devine, “On a Case-by-Case Basis: The History Case,” Parker Library, 26 September, 2017, https://theparkerlibrary.wordpress.com/category/matthew-parker/.
89 As Anthony Grafton has pointed out, Parker “did not start collecting manuscripts in a big way until he could mobilize the resources and power of his archbishopric,” which did not begin until 1559. The manuscript was clearly revised and rebound a few decades after Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Workes had been published, so there is no possibility that it could have been Thynne’s own source. See Grafton, “Matthew Parker: The Book as Archive,” History of Humanities 2.1 (Spring 2017), 15–50; 24.
90 John Urry, “The Preface,” The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Compared with the Former Editions, and many valuable MSS. Out of which, Three TALES, Out of which, Three TALES are added which were never before Printed, ed. John Urry (London, N.P, 1721), viii.
91 Urry, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2.
92 Ibid., 2.
93 Ibid., ccxlvii.
94 John Bell, “Life of Chaucer,” The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in Fourteen Volumes. Printed for the John Bell British Library (Edinburg: Apollo Press, 1782), xxiv–v.
95 Henry J. Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer Collected from Authentick Documents (London: R.C. and J. Rivinton, 1810), 119–20.
96 Samuel Weller Singer, “Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 1, v; xxviii.
97 Singer says that “the flyleaf of a miscellaneous old MS, penes me, containing the Meditation of St. Anselm and other devotional pieces in Latin.” The Fitzwilliam manuscript fits this description. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. v, ed. Samuel Weller Singer (College House, Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1822), 179.
98 Ibid., 179–80.
99 Ibid., 180.
100 F.J. Furnivall, A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1868), 107–8.
101 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 6, The Aldine edition of the British Poets, ed. Richard Morris (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), 307. Morris cites a version of the poem that includes the following lines: “Ora pro anglia sancta maria quod Thomas cantuarie.”
102 Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction,” Chaucer: The Minor Poems, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888) xxxv.
103 Ibid., xxxv.
Afterword
1 “Piers Plowman: An Introduction,” Discovering Literature: Medieval, The British Library, 31 January, 2018, https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/piers-plowman-an-introduction.
2 John Gower, The Mirour de l’Omme or Speculum Medantis, ed. in vol. 1 of G.C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower (1899–1902). Translation taken from John Gower, Mirour de l’Omme: The Mirror Mankind, trans. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), 347–8.
3 John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University, 1964), 98.
4 G.C. Macaulay, “Introduction,” in The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), vol. 1 xlii.
5 R.B. Dobson, The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 97.
6 See R.F. Yeager, “Gower’s French Audience: The Mirour de l’Omme,” The Chaucer Review 41, no. 1 (2006), 111–37.