From Translator to Laureate: Imagining the Medieval Author

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 5/5 (2008): 918–934, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00569.x

From Translator to Laureate: Imagining the Medieval Author

Anthony Bale*Birkbeck College, University of London

AbstractToday we largely take it for granted that every text has an author, but what isunderstood by the term ‘author’ was very different in the Middle Ages. MedievalEnglish ideas of authorship were many and varied, and show some key changesfrom the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. In manuscript cultures, like Englandbefore the late fifteenth century, the author has little control over the repetitionof his text; in many medieval vernacular texts the author is represented as a craftsmanand translator rather than a visionary or virtuoso. Texts in manuscript were inher-ently open to rewriting and were often anonymous. The role and status of theauthor was interrogated by poets and scholars, often revealing a remarkably opensense of who, or what, an author could be. In the later medieval period, traditionsof depicting real (Geoffrey Chaucer) and imagined (Sir John Mandeville) authorsdeveloped, signalling a growing trend of attaching an authorial identity to a textworth reading. The development of mysticism and affective religion broughtfurther transformations in the role of the author, given the anxiety over who hasthe right and access to represent divine communication; this issue is raised in TheCloud of Unknowing and The Book of Margery Kempe, both of which play withconceits of anonymity. After Chaucer, in particular in the poetry of John Lydgate,we can identify the development of the English ‘laureate’ poet. In the early era ofprint, especially in the prologues of William Caxton, one discerns the emergenceof an author, through the posthumous image of Chaucer, similar to that knowntoday: not only a writer but also a creator, a celebrity and an authority.

Text, Manuscripts and Anonymous Authors

In contemporary literature, the author’s name is often the most importantelement of a book: we might read, or buy, a book because it is by a particularauthor, not because we are interested in its contents. Contemporary authorswin prizes and become celebrities, and often comment on issues other thanliterature. Today’s authors are seen as talented, inspired individuals who labourat their texts, deciding how it should be shaped. Whilst we might confi-dently say that a modern author is he or she who writes a book, a plethoraof terms presents itself regarding the medieval author: ‘writer’, ‘translator’,‘compiler’, ‘authority’, ‘composer’, ‘rhetorician’, ‘scribe’, ‘auctor’, ‘inventor’,

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/5 (2008): 918–934, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00569.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

From Translator to Laureate 919

‘constructor’, ‘founder’, ‘prompter’, ‘instigator’, ‘cause’, ‘auto-biographer’,‘creator’, ‘Creator’. Some of these terms are far removed from modern author-ship but each expresses at least a facet of medieval authorship, althoughnone describes it entirely.

In a manuscript culture, as was England before the 1470s, the author hasonly a limited authority. Authors in medieval manuscript culture had littlecontrol over the material form that their texts took. Moreover, authors hadlittle control over the meaning that their texts might be given by their readers.Repetition of the author’s text depended on scribes, copyists and readerswho could mark or change the text; this is the anxiety which sustains GeoffreyChaucer’s poem to his scribe, Adam: ‘so ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,/ It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, / And al is thorgh thy negli-gence and rape’ (lines 5–7).1

Whilst Chaucer seems in these lines to desire scribal felicity he is also awarethat his work would, inevitably, be subject to revision and rewriting. Thiswas not always described in the terms of textual violence (rubbing, scraping,‘negligence’, ‘rape’) imagined by Chaucer; rather, medieval habits like com-pilatio (compilation) and ordinatio (ordering and arrangement) brought oldtexts together in new ways. Compilations might be unified not by the identityof who composed them but by a theme, by ethical worth or by an overallunifying design (see Parkes 35–70). Very often, the organising principle wouldbe different from that of the ‘original’, exemplifying the fact that medievalreaders generally did what they pleased with texts. The medieval rearrange-ment of long texts like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or John Gower’s ConfessioAmantis and Vox Clamantis (on which see Summit, ‘Women and Authorship’99) shows how the author’s materials were reordered, reframed and thus,effectively, rewritten. ‘Signposts’ or ‘paratexts’ – glosses, titles, excerpts, com-mentaries, subdivisions, marginal comments, pictures, colophons – might beintroduced too by anybody from children to scholars. Such additions changethe ‘original’ text and guide the reader through the text in new ways (seeGennette). The compilation and glossing of textual material was, certainlyfrom the thirteenth century, seen as a literary activity in itself and very differentfrom ‘mere copying’ (Hathaway 19–22).

There was, therefore, in manuscript culture always a number of authorsinvolved in the production of any one text: sources, scribes, translators andcompilers could all play a significant role in the production of narrativeand the rewriting of the text. Responsibility for ‘meaning’ was not investedin any one person. The integrity of texts was certainly not guaranteed byrespect for the genius of those who had written them. Around 1200, theauthor of one Middle English debate-poem, The Owl and the Nightingale,explored and embraced the characteristics of this culture. At the end of thework, the poem’s protagonists, the owl and the nightingale, resolve to finda solution to their quarrel about who is the ‘better’ bird by going to findone ‘Maister Nichole, þat is wis’. A wren, sitting near the owl and nightingale,describes Nicholas thus:

920 From Translator to Laureate


These lines suggest that Nicholas is both the author (as composer, writer andjudge) and the authoritative figure in the poem. Yet we never find out Nicho-las’s judgement, and never discover, therefore, what meaning or conclusionshould be attached to the text; the author turns out not to be authoritative.The poem closes abruptly: ‘Her nis na more of þis spell’ (line 1794); thepoem’s meaning is devolved to its readers, leading to the plethora of inter-pretations it has received in recent times. The self-effacement of the authorof The Owl and the Nightingale – who may, or may not, have been Nicholashimself – is typical of many literary texts of the Middle Ages.

The word ‘anonymous’, to describe a literary text, was coined only in thesixteenth century (on which see Ferry), a corollary of the developmentof new attempts to ‘fix’ authorial personae, but a great deal of medievalwriting does not have an author’s name attached to it. This includes someof the best-known English writing of the Middle Ages: Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight, the mystery and morality plays, The Cloud of Unknowing,and most lyric poems. Julia Boffey comments that ‘remarkably few of theauthors of [medieval love lyrics] seem to have felt the need to publicize theiridentities in any way at all’ (Boffey 62). In this way, the namelessness ofthe medieval author foreshadows the ideas of the French semiotic theoristRoland Barthes; Barthes argues that no author controls what his text may betaken to mean. According to Barthes, it is ‘language that speaks, not theauthor’ (126). In The Owl and the Nightingale the author declines to imposemeaning on his poem, making the poem’s language do the talking and thereader’s interpretation do the work: we might be able to attach an author’sname to the poem but it does not greatly help us to understand its meaning.

Thus in many accounts of medieval authorship ‘naming’ the author wasimportant only in terms of this author’s posthumous reception, not in termsof defining a poet’s immediate audience. John Burrow, following a well-known description of authorship by St Bonaventure (1221–74), gives a five-fold model of medieval authorial roles: scribe, compiler, commentator,translator and auctor. The auctor is an authority or authoritative voice, usuallynamed and identified; it is the auctor who puts his own words ‘in primeplace’, adding the words of others ‘only for purposes of confirmation’(Burrow 29–30). Burrow forcefully asserts that ‘there is no sign in Englandof the specialised, professional, vernacular writer’ (29). Similarly, StephanieTrigg delineates medieval authorship through the categories of ‘poet’ (a

He wuneþ at Porteshom,At one tune ine Dorsete,Bi þare see in ore flete.Þar he demeþ manie ri3te dom,An diht & writ mani wisdom:An þurh his muþe & þurh his honde

lives town by the sea where there’s an estuary reaches many a correct decision composing and writing much that is wise through mouth

Hit is þe betere into Scotlonde. (lines 1752–8)



social performer within the oral tradition), ‘writer’ (creating and shaping thetext whilst working with an ‘inherited textual tradition’) and ‘author’, whosets the terms of the reception of previous works and of his own work andis necessarily identified as a specific person (Trigg 44–55).

It would be wrong to surmise that the anonymity or inconclusive authorialidentities of much medieval literature reflects the haphazard circulation of textsin manuscript. According to Aristotle’s theories of causation, which becamehighly influential from the thirteenth century, the author was regarded as thetext’s causa efficiens, or efficient cause: the force that shaped it into a particularform in which it entered the world. In this view, the author was merely akind of craftsman, shaping rather than creating. Consequently, medieval writersoften used the vocabulary of making and crafting to describe the compositionalprocess: Chaucer describes his poetic art as a ‘craft’ (Parlement of Foulis line1). The causa materialis, the material cause, was something the author hadto acquire from elsewhere, and that, like other matter, was generated byGod (see Minnis 28–30). The individual author – a producer, labourer – wasin a relatively lowly position in the hierarchical generation of the text, directedby previous auctores, and by God, the divine auctor.

If medieval authors effaced themselves, they were not necessarily effacedby their readers. Certain Latin authors, such as the Church Fathers St Jeromeor St Augustine of Hippo, acquired the status of auctor: a term that, in the earlyMiddle Ages, did not designate a writer but somebody on whom readers insubsequent ages conferred auctoritas, a cultural prestige which made thesewriters’ texts worthy of repetition (Minnis 8–10). As Alastair Minnis wrylysuggests, paradoxically ‘the work of an auctor was a book worth reading; abook worth reading had to be the work of an auctor’ (12). Yet, as Minniscontinues, if readers cited an auctor it was not so much the individual whowrote the texts who was being thought of, but the texts themselves. Theword ‘auctor’ was frequently applied to anonymous or generic texts, in for-mulae like ‘as myne auctor seyes’ and ‘This seyethe my auctor’, as in theromance Partonope of Blois (Bødtker lines 317, 1095). So the auctor was notnecessarily being celebrated as an individual but as the representative and‘cause’ of a worthy or attractive text: writings, rather than the person whowrote them, were treated as worthy of citation. One gets the strong impressionthat, in English literature before around 1400, texts did not acquire auctoritasbecause they were ‘by’ a particular person; texts certainly did not acquireauctoritas because they said something new.

Imagining and Portraying the Author

Medieval readers would have been familiar with exalted images of godlyauthorship from their religious books: images are commonplace of St Lukeholding or writing his gospel or the Evangelists holding their gospels, St Anneteaching her daughter the Virgin Mary to read, St Jerome writing at hisdesk, St Dunstan holding a tome. Such were holy auctores, images of whom



foreground the active and partly compositional role of author. This kind ofimage promotes the author as responsible for the actual writing of theobject of the book, that the author physically created and shaped bothbook and text. Adapted for vernacular authorship, this is how Chaucerappears in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of The Canterbury Tales(London, British Library Lansdowne MS 851, f. 2r).2 Chaucer stands alone,framed by the opening text of the ‘General Prologue’, holding his book asif reading from it, akin to the public, social role of oral poet described byStephanie Trigg which suggests the ‘voice of moral authority, instructingand informing’ (51). Chaucer, the vernacular writer, is here portrayed assomebody who commands – or, who is worthy of commanding – theattention of his audience.

The travel-writer known as Sir John Mandeville was depicted in a similarway, even though ‘Mandeville’ is a fictional character and the genuine authorof this text is unknown. Mandeville’s Travels, an outlandish account of travelsto the East and the monstrous races there, plays with expectations of author-ship; the narrator claims to be a knight called Sir John Mandeville from thetown of St Alban’s in southern England, writing in the mid-1350s. Given thatthe Travels is a compilation of others’ writings and is itself about extra-ordinary fantasies and manifest untruths, there is little reason to believe inthe truth of the author’s identity. Indeed, it is not clear whether one or manypeople wrote Mandeville’s Travels, whether it was first written in French, Latinor English, and whether it was written in England or France. As Iain Higginssays of ‘Mandeville’, ‘[t]he author is not so much dead, then, as deeply andprobably irretrievably encrypted’ (8). Yet such was the desire for an author-image that in one manuscript of Mandeville’s Travels (London, British LibraryAdd. MS 24189, f. 4r), the illustrator depicted ‘Mandeville’ writing on a rollof parchment very much in the manner of a holy auctor. Here Mandevilleresembles Christian authorities such as St Luke, usually shown seated andwriting his Gospel, or St Jerome, often depicted writing at his desk. Beyonda luxurious curtain, there is a great vaulted building: it hard to say whetherthis most resembles a monastery or cathedral, aristocratic palace or university.In other manuscripts, ‘Mandeville’ is depicted in a spectrum of author roles:as pilgrim, knight on horseback, hardy traveller, knight of the faith, donorof his book to a lofty patron. So far from announcing the ‘death of theauthor’, here an author-figure was invented, creating an idealised view of theproduction of the text, the ‘authorship’ in terms of actual witnessing andwriting. This could even happen when, like the enigmatic ‘Mandeville’, theauthor was likely a composite fiction.

A further popular kind of author portrait, which developed in the laterMiddle Ages, shows the author as character in their own text – such as thefamous picture of Lydgate with the Canterbury pilgrims in a copy of hisSiege of Thebes (as used for the cover of the Riverside Chaucer paperback).In such images the author is conflated with the text, signalling a need for thetext to be associated with a specific person; in fifteenth-century England,



literary manuscripts both reflect and dictate a preoccupation with the figureof the person – the author – who formulated the work in the first place.

Finally, the attachment of an author’s name to a work seems to haveestablished a new divide between ‘literature’ or literary writing and sub-literary forms (ballads, lyrics, and the kinds of material found in common-place books). The ascription of a text to a named individual came to indicatethe cultural, intellectual and/or political respectability of the work and, indue course, became expected of ‘literary’ material. The author image eclipsesthe scribe and copyist, and is opposite to the ‘death of the author’ as theauthors are shown as vitally connected to the text.

If the evidence of Middle English manuscripts suggests the emergence ofthe importance of the author as a figure in the later medieval period, MiddleEnglish texts are more ambivalent about the importance of the author tothe text’s audience. Layamon’s Brut, a chronicle from around 1200, asserts anauthor’s identity – ‘An preost wes on leoden, La)amon wes ihoten’ – but thepoem communicates little else about the author’s life (line 1). William Lang-land’s Piers Plowman (late fourteenth century) has an obscure author-figureabout whom the poem tells us little, other than ‘ “I have lyved in londe”,quod I, “my name is Longe Wille” ’ (XV:152): such hidden authorshipcannot really be said to assert the author’s importance or biographical primacy.This reference to ‘Longe Wille’ could refer to a historical entity called WilliamLangland, but it could also be a pseudonym, a reference to an individual withan errant will, or a code for the long endurance of the human will (seeBenson). Likewise, Thomas Malory at several points openly declares hisauthorship in his mid-fifteenth-century Morte Darthur but these paratextualdeclarations – ‘BY A KNYGHT PRESONER, SIR THOMAS MALLE-ORRÉ’ or ‘BY SYR THOMAS MALEORÉ, KNYGHT’ (Malory 110,726) – do not offer a biography or authorial personality, but merely a shadowycharacter about whom the audience lacks detail. As in The Owl and theNightingale, such texts might announce an author-figure and attach a nameto the text, but knowledge about this figure is not crucial for understandingor engaging with the text. ‘Interiority’, authorial opinions and a sense ofbiography being tied to creativity – all hallmarks of a modern sense of author-ship – do not accompany such little instances of biographical self-assertion.

The case with Chaucer is somewhat different. Chaucer examined and inter-rogated both authorship and cultural authority, whilst presenting his own roleas rehearser or ‘lewd compilator’ (see Minnis 190–210), as if arranging thewritings of others. In The Canterbury Tales the narrator playfully defers respon-sibility for the content of the work: as he says in the Prologue to The Miller’sTale, ‘... I moot reherce / Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse / Or elles falsensom of my mateere’ (I.3173–5). In his great romance Troilus and Criseyde(c.1385), Chaucer refers some eleven times to ‘myn auctor’, ‘citing’ a namelessauthority. Such references tend to occur not at points of citation but at timesof elision of others’ sources. For Chaucer, the ‘author’ is not generally a fixedreferent but rather the medium for conflicting accounts, not least in the



spurious ‘auctor’ figure, Lollius (I.394; V.1653). The ambiguous role of theauthor in Troilus is consonant with the poem’s examination of what it is tobe an author: its acts of narrating, the (un)reliability of different accounts ofthe same event, and the awareness of characters as authors, through letters, songsand dreams, of their own stories. Chaucer’s pose as translator is most full devel-oped, and most conspicuous, in Troilus and Criseyde, in which the narrator claims,teasingly and dishonestly, ‘For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I’ (2.18). Simi-larly, and more seriously, in The House of Fame, as in much of Chaucer’s poetry,authorial reputation is fragile, with the house built on ice, on which areengraved the names of famous people, slowly melting away and becoming‘unfamous’ (line 1146).

Mysticism and Authorship

Chaucer is the best-known example of a medieval English author who, whileostensibly denying his own importance, in fact interrogates it and sometimesasserts it. It is clear that ‘authorship’ – what it was to have authority, what itwas to write something worthy of reading – was a fraught topic for many latemedieval writers. This was particularly acute for mystical writers, whose textsgrappled with personal experience and its relationship to traditions, narrativesand structures of authorship. Who has the right to author divine commu-nication? How is personal mystical experience given meaning through theauthor? Mystical writing, with its hostility towards embodied language, hasan inherently ambivalent attitude towards written authority and to the ideaof the writer as author or auctor (see Watson 18–27). The mystical pursuit ofthe suspension and transcendence of the physical world (known as ‘apophasis’)demands the dissolving of clear and literal meaning; yet this must be recon-ciled to the ‘fixed’ and didactic forms of textuality and orthodox meaning.

Issues concerning the author’s role, and the author’s own authority, arekeenly felt by the (anonymous) author of the contemplative treatise The Cloudof Unknowing (c.1400), which advises its readers to seek God through contem-plation and love, not knowledge. The Cloud-author launches a brilliantdisquisition on the roles of language and metaphor in which he explores hisown, imperfect authorial status:

Þan wil he sumtyme parauenture seend oute a beme of goostly li3t, peersyng þis cloude of vnknowing þat is bitwix þee & hym, & schewe þee sum of his priuete, þe whiche man may not, ne kan not, speke. Þan schalt þou fele þine affeccion enflaumid wiþ þe fiire of his loue, fer more þen I kan telle þee, or may, or wile, at þis tyme. For of þat werke þat falliþ to only God dar I not take apon meto speke wiþ my blabryng fleschely tonge; &, schortly to say, al-þof I durst, I wolde not. (ch. 26)

perhaps spiritual

mysteries

even if I dared



Here, the Cloud-author claims he is unable to express the reality or essenceof the mystical experiences that he commends to his readers; neither histongue nor his words are able to describe a spiritual ‘affeccion’. In an intenselyverbal way, the Cloud-author describes the limits of authorial language, throughthe image of the lumpy, embodied, onomatopoeic ‘blabryng fleschely tonge’.This contrasts with the visual ‘shew’ of the divine beam of ghostly light,demonstrating the primacy of the spiritually visual over the written or verbal(‘þe whiche man may not, ne kan not, speke’). So, paradoxically, where theauthor seeks to transcend or overcome his own language this language isasserted most forcefully; the inadequacy of the human author is articulatedat the same time as the author’s voice is most clearly discerned. The Cloud-author describes himself as an imperfect author who does not want to impingeon God’s role as author (‘þat werke þat falliþ to only God’). This correspondswith the Cloud-author’s sense of himself not as auctor-expert but as noviceand abject causa efficiens – simply writing the text – as opposed to the divineAuthor. This helps explain the Cloud-author’s carefully constructed anonymity:he wanted to be read not as a named or quasi-divine auctor but rather as ateacher and novice, guide, translator and fellow-traveller.

Similar concerns over the relations between writing and mysticism arearticulated in a well-known mid-fifteenth-century example: The Book ofMargery Kempe. Often incorrectly described as the first autobiography inEnglish, Margery Kempe of Lynn (Norfolk) has attracted a great deal of criticalattention partly because she has seemed to embody Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’sprivileging of female experience over both conventional ‘auctoritee’ (orthodoxprecedent) and conventional literary authorship. The Book of Margery Kempeis not, accurately, an autobiography, if an autobiography is the story of one’slife written, authored, by oneself. The Book was neither ‘written’ by its subjectnor authored by its subject, although Kempe endures through her book. TheBook has a famously fraught relationship to its own textuality; this is ironicbecause almost all we know about the book’s subject is from The Book itself.Its proem describes its difficult passage from lived life into written text: notonly ‘thyngys turning up-so-down’ (line 23) in Kempe’s life but also the bun-gled authorial processes through which ‘[t]hys boke is not wretyn in ordyr,every thyng aftyr other as it wer don, but lych as the mater cam to the creaturin mend whan it schuld be wretyn ...’ (lines 134–9). The text is advertisedas a faithful copy of Kempe’s visions – thereby attributing these visions witha degree of experiential rather than written authority – and presents the scribeas a haphazard amanuensis. In this way Kempe is ultimately dependant onand authorised by God, not her scribe. At the same time the text explicitlydraws attention to the jumbled nature of Kempe’s own account (that whichhas been ‘forgetyn’), possibly a device to suggest the difficulty of renderingKempe’s ‘unique’ mystical experiences into narrative. Elsewhere in the pro-logue, the scribe’s input as author is implied: he is described as ‘the prestwhich wrot this boke’ (line 1760; also lines 1917, 5122–3) although Kempetoo is ‘ocupiid aboute the writyng of this tretys’ (line 7368; also lines 82,



1073–4); how far these roles are scribal, compositional or authorial is unclear.Evidence of the scribe as editor is abundant (for example lines 1745, 4834–6,3820, 4479–80) and the composition of the text was evidently co-operative,with Kempe checking, and thus ‘authenticating’, the scribe’s ‘every word’(line 132). The Book of Margery Kempe offers a good example of the pro-foundly collaborative nature of medieval authorship, but it seems that thosewriting The Book – Margery and/or her scribes – sought, like the Cloud-author, to indicate the limited nature of textual authority and to retain a senseof mystical ‘difficulte’ within the narrative. Thus Lynn Staley (1–39), suggeststhat Kempe’s scribes are a trope behind whom Kempe, as a secular woman,hides and thus authorises her own authorship. Jennifer Summit too sees suchstrategies as specifically female modes of ‘authorship by negation’, in whichbecause, rather than in spite of, the lowly status of women ‘visionary writinggave them special access to divine knowledge that transcended, and revealedthe insufficiency of, [official] learning’ (‘Women and authorship’ 96). Likewise,Kimberley Benedict sees such Christian writing as ‘empowering collabo-rations’, in which ‘authorship’ is a mutual negotiation between women (barredfrom preaching and exegesis) and ordained men (with a pastoral responsi-bility to produce texts about the nature of God).

Kempe does, at points, construct herself as author, engaging with auctoresand establishing her right to inherit their auctoritas, through citations of textual,scribal and visual sources. Famously, in the eighteenth chapter of her book,Kempe visits the anchorite and mystical writer Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416) which, whilst not explicitly a literary homage, does reveal Kempe’sdesire to show herself engaging with an orthodox and authorising precedent.Kempe’s experiences are modelled on other holy women, particularly theSwedish mystic St Birgitta (1302/3–73), who provide Kempe with powerfulmodels of conduct, resistance and strategies of authorisation (see Summit,‘Women and authorship’ 95–7). Thus Kempe can be seen as a kind of auctorin that her performances usually exist in an imitative relationship to estab-lished auctores and cite or manipulate earlier texts.

Crucially, Kempe was still alive when she attempted to build an edificeof her own authority, rather than having it constructed by her followers.Kempe’s attempts to make her own authority rather than having it retro-spectively made for her conflicted with established conceptions of the author,whose greatness was judged by imitation and memory. But Kempe’s senseof herself as a self-authored subject, and a self-haloed saint, does fit with othercurrents in medieval literary culture, as living writers increasingly soughtexplicitly to construct and assert their own authorial identity.

The Re-Invention of the Laureate Author

The royal clerk and satirist Walter Map (d. c. 1209) notoriously joked thathis work would have been more widely read had he killed himself (Minnis11–12). Yet in the later Middle Ages living, rather than long dead, writers



became attributed with distinction and eminence, reviving the ancient Greekcustom of crowning poets and heroes with the laurel of Apollo (hence ‘lau-reate’). This development of English laureateship, the subject of the remainderof this essay, signals new conceptions of the author. A useful way of thinkingabout this kind of authorship is as a kind of celebrity: the name precedesthe text, as the author’s name has a public or social cachet which suggeststhe worthiness of the text. At the same time, laureateship is an ideologicallycharged category, invoking both politics and nationalism in how the authoris identified.

The first post-Classical author we can accurately call laureate is the Italianpoet Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304–74). The term was adopted inEnglish, probably shortly after Petrarch’s death, by Chaucer in the ‘Clerk’sPrologue’ (‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete’, IV.31), which in turn wasrepeated in the early fifteenth century by John Lydgate in his Mumming forMercers (line 32). We cannot accurately speak of an English poet laureate,in its modern sense (of a paid poet who writes court-odes as an officer ofthe Court), until the time of ‘poet laureate’ and ‘historiographer royal’ JohnDryden (1631–1700). However, after Petrarch, we can clearly discern thedevelopment in England of a state-endorsed public poet who is both livingauthor and authority. Again, terminology is indistinct but we might considerseveral figures – Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and John Skelton (c. 1460–1529) – who reflect changing meanings of the term ‘laureate’ and were instru-mental in shaping the late medieval and early modern image of ‘the author’(see Helgerson on the construction of the laureate author in RenaissanceEngland).

Chaucer may have been the earliest poet buried in Westminster Abbey’s‘Poets’ Corner’ but this is not because he was a ‘laureate’. In fact Chaucerwas buried at Westminster because he was Clerk of Works at the Abbey(Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 276); besides, the ‘Poets’ Corner’ traditionwas invented in the sixteenth century when Chaucer’s tomb was moved, apart of the retrospective turning of Chaucer into an auctor (see Prendergast).Chaucer’s construction as laureate was certainly started in earnest shortlyafter his death, as evinced in the poetry of John Lydgate, a monk of theBenedictine abbey at Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) (see Lerer 3–7; Pearsall, JohnLydgate 49–79). Lydgate was instrumental in the construction and estab-lishment of Chaucer as the first English auctor, describing the dead poetin lavish terms previously applied to Classical or Christian auctores. At leasteight times Chaucer is, in Lydgate’s words, ‘my maister Chaucer’, for examplein The Fall of Princes (1.275–80) and The Siege of Thebes (line 4501), establishingat once Chaucer’s authority and Lydgate’s subjection-and-inheritance. ForLydgate, Chaucer’s authoritative authorship lies in his rhetorical and descriptiveskill and his novelty as a British poet:

Floure of Poetës / thorghout al breteyneWhich sothly haddë / most of excellence truly



In rethorike / and in eloquence(Rede his making / who list the trouthë fynde) (lines 40–3)

Lydgate’s praise is more multifaceted that may at first appear. The referenceto ‘Breteyne’ makes Chaucer’s literary dominion the mythical realm in whichArthurian romances are set. In using the term ‘Bretayne’ Lydgate calls tomind a literary heritage from Arthurian romance, not the Latin (Boethius)and Italian authors (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio) to whom Chaucer is soindebted. Throughout his writing Lydgate thus identifies Chaucer as anauthorial entity: as father (see Lerer 85–91), as ‘founder’ of English/Britishletters, as ‘inventor’ of remarkable figures (‘Floure of Poetës’), and as causamaterialis, of Lydgate’s poetry itself, through emulation and citation of Chau-cer’s ‘making’.

Lydgate himself has often been named, and defined, as a laureate; the studyof ‘laureate Lydgate’ was inaugurated by Derek Pearsall, who demonstratedhow closely Lydgate’s poetry was linked to the Lancastrian court (Pearsall,John Lydgate 160–91). Most recently, Lydgate has been explicitly named asthe writer who ‘brought into English a laureate poetics that serves as theground of laureate performance’ (Meyer-Lee 50) in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies. Lydgate’s laureate role has proved attractive to many contemporarycritics because it resembles modern laureateship – the political and financialimperative to write poetry for the monarch accompanies the idea of thenamed author as a particularly accomplished rhetorician who thereby enjoysa kind of celebrity. Richard Firth Green has called this a ‘semi-official’ roleat the Lancastrian court (189) although Lydgate wrote popular poetry tooand also received commissions from the provincial gentry and Londonmerchant-class (see Meyer-Lee 50–51). More recently Lydgate’s ostensibleservility has been seen as cleverly alert to ambiguity and radical discussion;Mortimer argues that, by building an edifice of authorial servility, ‘shrewd’and ‘forthright’ Lydgate was able to explore difficult topics in his writing(see Mortimer 277). For the present discussion, the pertinent feature ofLydgate’s career is his construction of himself as an authoritative and highlymarketable authorial persona. By this point, in the first quarter of the fifteenthcentury, the earlier effacement of the writing self and the emphasis on audienceresponse has given way to bold assertions of the writer’s identity, as seen bothin Lydgate’s poetry and in Margery Kempe’s prose.

By the mid-1420s Lydgate had become the Lancastrian court’s poet, firstto Henry V (d. 1422) and then to courtiers, nobility and patrons of letters(Pearsall, John Lydgate 169–72). Lydgate’s vast Troy Book, started in 1412 forthe future Henry V, announced the Lydgatian laureate auctor, opening witha characteristically self-promoting disclaimer. Lydgate’s pen ‘bareyn is of aureate[gilded] lycour’ (prologue, line 31), but the poet goes on to describe his‘translacioun’ (68) as a virtuous example in honour of Henry, governor of‘Brutus Albyoun’ (104), again evoking the mythic British, rather than English,polity for whom the author speaks. Lydgate’s explicit minimalisation of



his own contribution to the text of the Troy Book co-exists with a key politicalfunction: the promotion of the language that Englishmen shared and formedthe basis of their common identity.

We get a stronger image of the author in Lydgate’s semi-autobiographicalpoem, the Testament. The Testament does provide some ‘individuating’ (butconventional) details, notably concerning the author’s wayward childhood(‘Loth to lerne, loued no besynesse, / Saue pley or merth’ [lines 617–18]).The Testament is free from Lydgate’s bold announcements of subjection tohis patrons – princes, kings and abbots – that are, perhaps paradoxically, mostauthorizing in terms of laureateship (see further Meyer-Lee 54). The Testamentappeals instead, through petition, to Christ the auctor, and, as a biography ofrepentance, to St Augustine. Just as Augustine’s Confessions describe the youth-ful stealing of fruit from a pear-tree, ‘we nasty lads went there to shake downthe fruit and carry it off at dead of night’ (Augustine 67–8), Lydgate describeshow he too, in the Suffolk of his childhood, ‘Ran into gardeynes, applesther I stall; / To gadre frutes, spared nedir hegge nor wall ...’ (lines 638–9).As Augustine took the image of illicit fruit-picking from the biblical bookof Genesis as an authoritative symbol of youthful transgression and concupis-cence so Lydgate borrowed the image from Augustine. And like The Bookof Margery Kempe, Lydgate’s Testament looks like an autobiography throughassertions of the author’s identity, although it is often unoriginal, with formulaeof sacrifice, pity and redemption and long meditations on the name of Jesus,the facets of springtime, and the power of the Crucifix.

Lydgate evidently became an auctor and celebrity. Surviving portraits showLydgate as servile patronage poet: kneeling to his patrons and presenting hisbooks to them (see further Pearsall, John Lydgate 162–7). Lydgate also appearsas saintly-inspired vates or seer, genuflecting at the shrine of St Edmund inthe manuscript of The Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund (Pearsall, John Lydgateplate 3), and writing in his study, looking like St Jerome. Common to almostall these images is Lydgate’s distinctive black Benedictine garb and his monastictonsure. These are probably not only for the sake of likeness; they establishLydgate’s piety and spiritual authority whilst forming a stable, instantly recog-nisable commodity of Lydgate the monk-poet. However, underlying all theseapparently bold assertions of Lydgate’s author-identity are well-rehearsedconventional poses: the writer as advisor and counsellor, the writer as trans-lator, the writer as confessor, the writer as laureate, the writer as beggar (seeFerster 137–50; Meyer-Lee 27–32). The only pose missing is that of the writerin prison, a pose deployed by Malory and many others (see Summers).

Lydgate’s texts too construct an authorial edifice, through Lydgate’s fre-quent citation of himself, in formulae found in The Fall of Princes such as‘my name is Iohn Lidgate’ (appendix, line 670) and ‘I was born in Lidgate/ Wher Bachus licour doth ful scarsli fleete’ (8:194). As Michel Foucault pointsout in his essay ‘What is an Author?’, the author’s name is not an indicationof identity but ‘the equivalent of a description’ which indicates that the textis not normal everyday speech, that it is part of a network of texts and that



it is worthy (Foucault 105–8). Fifteenth-century readers of Lydgate very fre-quently marked his poems with tags which called attention to Lydgate’smonastic vocation, such as ‘by Lidgate dan Johan Monk of Bury’ (The Legendof Seynt Margarete, in Minor Poems 1:173) and ‘here begyneth a balade whychIohn Lydgate the Monke of Bery wrott & made’ (That Now is Hay Some-Tymewas Grase, in Minor Poems 2:809). These tags advertise the worthy pedigree oftext and author, a ‘brand value’, to use one critic’s terms, which ‘crossedfactional as well as estate and class boundaries’ (Meyer-Lee 52).

This commodification of Lydgate as auctor reaches its apogee in the remark-able chantry chapel of the Clopton family at Holy Trinity, Long Melford(Suffolk). Lydgate’s abbey at Bury decided, within thirty or so years ofLydgate’s death, to rebuild the church; this was funded by John Clopton(1423–96), a local and wealthy textile merchant. The Clopton chantry isdecorated with extracts from Lydgate’s ‘Lamentation of the Magdalen’ andfrom the Testament (see Trapp); the text that remains does not mention Lydgateby name. The verses from the Testament, painted onto wooden plaques (resem-bling ‘sheets’ of writing), show a hand in a brown sleeve composing the verses(Fig. 1). This is indubitably the hand of the ‘author’, but is it the hand ofLydgate, of Clopton, or of God? We would expect Lydgate’s sleeve to beblack, in keeping with his Benedictine habit. The Long Melford hand issimilar to the Hand of God elsewhere; if the Long Melford hand is thehand of God then Lydgate’s poetry is presented as divine. Perhaps, at LongMelford, the author really is deified, indistinguishable from God.

In an appendix to Lydgate’s career, two figures took on some of the rolesof the laureate apparently inaugurated by Lydgate. John Kay ( fl. 1482) describeshimself, in his translated description of the island of Rhodes, as ‘poetelaureate’ to Edward IV (see Caoursin). Likewise, the French Augustinian Ber-nard André, who came to England to tutor Prince Arthur (1486–1502), wrote

Fig. 1. The author’s hand holding his text? Clopton chantry chapel, Holy Trinity, Long Melford(Suffolk). Photo: Tim Phillips



for Henry VII; his main function at court was ‘panegyrist and historiographer’(see Walker 36). Both Kay (a translator) and André (a biographer) reprised thepropagandist role played so enthusiastically by Lydgate; their literary careersand status depended, even more so than Lydgate’s, on royal patronage and theywere ‘laureate’, not amateur, writers.

The poet, schoolmaster and satirist John Skelton was also dubbed ‘poetlaureate’, which, in Skelton’s case, appears to have been an academic, ratherthan royal, distinction. Skelton seems to have been ‘laureated’ at Oxford (by1490) and, by 1493, also at Louvain and Cambridge (A. Edwards 43–53). Thisevidently conferred on Skelton the privilege of wearing a special gown forlaureates embroidered with the name ‘Calliope’ (H. Edwards 287), the museof epic poetry and Homer’s muse. Skelton’s witty, inventive and satirical poetrycan hardly be called epic but the laureate gown perhaps represented theappeal of Classical auctores. By wearing the gown, the author had, by this point,become a living celebrity whilst inheriting the Classical muse and beingschooled in an elevated form of authorship. Verses dating from 1499, writtento celebrate the visit to England of the humanist scholar Erasmus (c.1466–1536), partly construct Skelton’s fame around Classical auctores:

Graecia Maeonio quantum debedat Homero, Mantua Virgilio,Tantum Skeltoni iam se debere fatetur Terra Britanna suo.[As much as Greece owes Lydian Homer, Mantua to Virgil, so much should theland of Britain now confess that it owes its Skelton] (after A. Edwards 44)

Once again, the archaizing terms of ‘Britain’, rather than England, are usedto define for whom the author speaks. This ‘Britain’ is the home of the newHomer and Virgil, implicitly inheriting Classical eloquence. Underlying thisrepeated reference to Britain is a nationalistic, perhaps territorial, ambitionfor poetry and laureateship. Yet Skelton’s fortunes were by no means stableand he was often out of royal favour, and thus his claims to the title ‘laureate’and ‘orator regius’ might be read as anxious and ambitious self-advertisements.As Greg Walker has argued, Skelton was likely one of several university-educated ‘laureates’, and he was, in his self-proclaimed pre-eminence, alsoself-crowned (see Walker 38–53).

The Author in Print

Thus it seems, on the eve of the Reformation, the author has become he whodefines and promotes himself as such: this is far from those earlier medievalwriters, for whom the insertion of authorial identity in the text was playful,hidden or anxious. The posthumous ‘branding’ of Lydgate and the self-advertisements by Skelton seem unrelated to the shadowy (and ineffective)figure of Nicholas of Portesham in The Owl and the Nightingale. Of course,anonymous poetry continued to be produced, but generally in demotic and‘unofficial’ forms – like broadside ballads, carols, political literature, polemicalprose and commonplace books. This kind of writing is individuated, local,



sometimes congregational and often scurrilous or controversial. By the timeof Henry VIII and the ascendancy of printing, almost all ‘good’ literature– literature ‘worth’ reading and reproducing – had an authorial name attachedto it, even if this name was spurious (like the apocryphal texts attributedto Chaucer and Lydgate in the fifteenth century). The importance of WilliamCaxton and print in the process of naming the author cannot be overstated.To some extent, a printed text is by its very nature more ‘fixed’ than onein manuscript – that is, only several versions of a printed text are likely tocirculate whereas each manuscript is unique, and printed texts are under thecontrol of printers whereas manuscripts are open to an almost limitlessaudience of potential rewriters. Thus a printer’s version of an author’s textmore forcefully established a ‘correct’ version of a text. Notably, in 1521 atruncated version of The Book of Margery Kempe was printed by HenryPepwell which re-presented the text as ‘A shorte treatyse’, excising Kempe’spilgrimages and domestic life and foregrounding her private prayerfulness(see Summit, Lost Property 126–38).

Yet, as my essay has shown, print culture did not invent the commodityof the author. Likewise, early printers did not depart absolutely from somepre-print modes of depicting the author; as Alexandra Gillespie has argued,Caxton, the first English printer, found the medieval author ‘already writtenand sometimes writ or pictured large, in the texts and paratexts contained byfifteenth-century vernacular manuscripts’ (Gillespie 55). Caxton’s booksusually have a prologue which relates the author to his auctors, or a dedi-cation to the text’s patron, or an author-portrait, or a disclaimer pointingto the simple-mindedness of the mere translator. At the same time, Caxtonsometimes published speculatively, and always had a product to sell, whichmeant attaching a marketable name to texts; printing made book productioncheaper, but changed from a ‘bespoke to a truly speculative business’ (Gillespie66). In England from the 1470s, in the era of print, we might discern audi-ences becoming more interested in authors, more concerned with attachingan authorial identity to texts, whether or not authors themselves were inter-ested in promoting themselves in their writings.

Most notably, and explicitly, this was achieved in Caxton’s establishmentof Chaucer the Author. Chaucer was described by Caxton, in his prologueto his edition of Boethius (1478), as ‘worshipful fader & first foundeur &embelissher of ornate eloquence in our englissh’ (Caxton 37). Chaucer thuscame to represent a commodity under whose authorship and authority wasestablished the canon of English writing. In Caxton’s prologue to The Can-terbury Tales (1484), Chaucer was many things in one author, a ‘noble &grete philosopher’ who ‘may wel haue the name of a laureate poete’, who‘by hys labour embelysshyd / ornated / and made faire our englisshe’ (for‘in thys Royame was had rude speche’) in ‘beauteous volumes / and aournatewritynges’ (Caxton 90–1). For Caxton, Chaucer represented the coalescenceof several key but disparate aspects of medieval authorship and here some-thing akin to the modern author emerges: at once writer, celebrity, national



poet, translator, instigator, craftsman, historian, authority, rhetorician, inventor,founder, father and creator.

Short Biography

Anthony Bale studied at the universities of Oxford and York and is seniorlecturer in medieval studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Heis the author of a study of late medieval English writing about Jews calledThe Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006) which was awarded a Koret FoundationJewish Studies Publications Program award and the 2006/7 Ronald TressPrize. He has recently completed a study of the patrons of the poetry ofJohn Lydgate and ideas of prestige in fifteenth-century culture and is nowbeginning a major study, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, intoaffect, emotion and response in late medieval images of Judaism.

Notes

* Correspondence address: School of English & Humanities, Birkbeck College, University ofLondon, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK. Email: [email protected].

1 References to Chaucer’s works are to The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1987).2 The images described from British Library manuscripts can be viewed online via the BritishLibrary’s ‘Images Online’ service <http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk>.

Works Cited

Augustine. The Confessions. Eds. and trans. Maria Boulding. London: Hodder and Stoughton,1997.

Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London:Fontana, 1977. 142–8.

Benedict, Kimberley. Empowering Collaborations. Writing Partnerships between Religious Women andScribes in the Middle Ages. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004.

Benson, C. David. ‘The History of the Langland Myth’. Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarshipand Late Medieval English Culture. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2004. 3–42.

Bødtker, A. Trampe. The Middle-English Versions of Partonope of Blois. London: Kegan Paul, Trenchand Trübner, 1912 [EETS ES 109].

Boffey, Julia. Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages. Woodbridge:Boydell and Brewer, 1985.

Burrow, John. Medieval Writers and their Work. Middle English Literature and its Background 1100–1500. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Caoursin, Gulielmus. Obsidionis Rhodiae descriptio. Facsimile. Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1970.Caxton, William. The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton. Ed. W. Crotch. London: Oxford

UP, 1928 [EETS OS 176].The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling. Ed. Phyllis Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford

UP, 1944 [EETS OS 218].Edwards, A. S. G., ed. John Skelton: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1981.Edwards, H. L. R. Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet. London: Jonathan Cape,

1949.Ferry, Anne. ‘Anonymity: The Literary History of a Word’. New Literary History 33 (2000):

193–214.

http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk



Ferster, Judith. Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England.Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. ‘What is An Author’? The Foucault Reader. Ed. and trans. Paul Rabinow.Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 101–20.

Gennette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations. Trans. Jane Lewin. Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1997.

Gillespie, Alexandra. Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate and their Books 1473–1557. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Green, Richard Firth. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature in the English Court in the Late MiddleAges. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980.

Hathaway, Neil. ‘Compilatio: from Plagiarism to Compiling’. Viator 20 (1989): 19–44.Helgerson, Richard. Self-Crowned Laureates. Spenser, Johnson, Milton and the Literary System. Berkeley,

CA: U of California P, 1983.Higgins, Ian M. Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania

P, 1997.Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition. Ed. Barry Windeatt. Cambridge:

D. S. Brewer, 2004.Langland, William. The Vision of Piers Plowma. Ed. A. V. C. Schmidt. London: Dent, 1978.La)amon. Layamon’s Brut. Eds. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie. London: Oxford UPs, 1963 [EETS

OS 250].Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.Lydgate, John. The Fall of Princes. Ed. Henry Bergen. London: Oxford UP, 1924–7 [EETS ES

121–4].——. The Minor Poems 1: The Religious Poems. Ed. Henry Noble MacCracken. London: Kegan

Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1911 [EETS ES 107].——. The Minor Poems 2: Secular Poems. Ed. Henry Noble MacCracken. London: Oxford UP,

1934 [EETS OS 192].——. The Siege of Thebes. Eds. Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall. London: Oxford UP, 1911–

30 [EETS ES 108 and 125].——. Troy Book. Ed. Henry Bergen. London: Oxford UP, 1906–35 [EETS ES 97, 103, 106,

126].Malory, Thomas. Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.Meyer-Lee, Robert J. Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Minnis, Alastair. The Medieval Theory of Authorship. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Wildwood, 1988.Mortimer, Nigel. John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political

Contexts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.The Owl and the Nightingale. Ed. N. Cartlidge. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001.Parkes, M. B. ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development

of the Book’. Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Disseminationof Medieval Texts. Ed. M. B. Parkes. London/Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1991. 35–70.

Pearsall, Derek. John Lydgate. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1970.——. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.Prendergast, Thomas. Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus. London: Routledge, 2003.Staley, Lynn. Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State

UP, 1994.Summers, Joanna. Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 2004.Summit, Jennifer. ‘Women and authorship’. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writ-

ing. Eds. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 91–108.——. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589. Chicago, IL: U

of Chicago P, 2000.Trapp, J. B. ‘Verses by Lydgate at Long Melford’. Review of English Studies 21 (1955): 1–11.Trigg, Stephanie. Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer, Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis, MN: U

of Minnesota P, 2002.Walker, Gregg. John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520’s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.Watson, Nicholas. Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Documents

From Translator to Laureate: Imagining the Medieval Author