Abstract
At the end of the sixteenth century, a potential reader could have found Piers Plowman in a relatively recent edition, either one by Robert Crowley (1550) or that by Owen Rogers (1561). After the Rogers edition of 1561, there were no new editions of the poem for well over a century. Someone wishing to read the poem at the end of the seventeenth century would have had to acquire and use a copy over a century old. Piers Plowman was not the only medieval work relatively inaccessible for late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century readers. None of John Lydgate’s actual works were published from 1559 through the seventeenth century, although in 1784 an edition of the fifteenth-century satire London Lyckpenny was printed under Lydgate’s name. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis was published three times in the sixteenth century but not at all in the seventeenth century.1 The one medieval English author whose works remained relatively accessible well into the eighteenth century (whether through editions of the works themselves or through allusions and borrowings) was Chaucer.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This is not to say that there was no antiquarian interest in the Middle Ages in the late seventeenth century. David C. Douglas discusses the importance of Anglo-Norman and particularly Anglo-Saxon religious history for Restoration theological and political polemic; Douglas, English Scholars: 1660–1730 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 18–22. Discussions of seven-teenth-century medievalism can also be found in Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), especially Chapter 5; and D. R. Woolf, “The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500–1730” Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992): 5–35; R. J. Smith analyzes the historiography of the seventeenth century in The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Charlotte Brewer gives a brief overview of the seventeenth-century reception of Piers Plowman; Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20–22.
Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 41.
A number of such modernizations are collected in Betsy Bowden, Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1991).
There are a handful of studies of the development of the literature anthology. In Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Barbara M. Benedict focuses on all literature collections, not just collections arranged historically. Jonathan Kramnick identifies eighteenth-century literary historiography as divided between the idea of the past as indecorous and a nostalgia for the past in Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Trevor Ross outlines the pre-history of the eighteenth-century canon in The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Other books that discuss the anthology in its early stages include: Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Laura Mandell, Misogynous Encounters: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky: 1999), which includes a discussion of the way women writers were (and were not) anthologized in the eighteenth century. 5. William Winstanley, England’s Worthies: Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons of the English Nation, from Constantine the Great, Down to These Times (London: Obadiah Blagrave, 1684).
The “life” of Mandeville is on 87–90; Chaucer is on 116–123. Winstanley, following Speght’s biography of Chaucer, quotes briefly from The Testament of Love and The Plowman’s Tale (both attributed to Chaucer) to establish facts about Chaucer’s life and sentiments. These quotations are given for the purposes of biography rather than literary history; moreover, they constitute only a small portion of Winstanley’s discussion of Chaucer. I therefore do not count Winstanley in the same category as the anthologizers I discuss below. The introduction of the historical anthology does not entirely displace historical lists of poets; one later example of such a work is Joseph Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica.
Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England.. .3 vol (London: Thomas Williams, 1662), 3:8–9.
Barbara A. Johnson, Reading “Piers Plowman” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 146. 9. Fuller, 3:8. Fuller cites Michael Drayton, John Selden, Poly-Olbion
Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets, Especially the Most Eminent, of all Ages. The Antients Distninguish’t from the Moderns in Their Several Alphabets (London: Charles Smith, 1675).
William Winstanley, The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, or the Honour of Parnassus (London: Samuel Manship, 1687).
Winstanley, Lives, 79–86. Winstanley’s notion that a poet’s “Life” consists primarily of laudatory verses by others mirrors the guiding principles in the Life of Chaucer that first appears in Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer; it too is largely a series of paeans to the poet; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer. . ., ed. Thomas Speght (London: Adam Islip, 1598). The Life covers fourteen pages (biir–ciiiv), of which five (civ–ciiiv) consist of verses of praise.
This short text was only printed in 1949; it fills just over ten printed pages. It is edited by James M. Osborn in “The First History of English Poetry” in Pope and His Contemporaries, Essays Presented to George Sherburn (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1949), 230–250. Osborn speculates that Spence wrote the history in French “while in an early flush of enthusiasm during his first visit to France and Italy when acquiring fluency in the tongues of these countries”; Osborn, 232.
Pope himself was quite a Chaucerian; among his juvenalia are a twenty-six line imitation of a Chaucerian fabliau and translations of The Merchant’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. All three of these Chaucerian texts appear in Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, a Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 9–10, 76–98, 98–110. Pope’s Merchant’s Tale first appeared in Alexander Pope, et al., Poetical Miscellanies, the sixth part, containing a collection of original poems, with several new translations (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709). His translation of “The Wife of Bath: Her Prologue, from Chaucer” appeared in Richard Steele, Poetical Miscellanies, Consisting of Original Poems and Translations (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). 29. Arthur Sherbo, “Samuel Pegge, Thomas Holt White, and Piers Plowman,” YLS 1 (1987): 125–127.
Hearne’s ownership of the Crowley edition (acquired in 1725) and his access to manuscripts lent by John Urry (by 1719) and Peter LeNeve (in 1725) are discussed in Vincent DiMarco, “Eighteenth-Century Suspicions Regarding the Authorship of Piers Plowman,” Anglia 100 (1982): 124–125. Hearne also owned British library MS Lansdowne 398 (B text sigil R) by 1732, on which see Benson and Blanchfield, 93.
Carl James Grindley, “An Eighteenth-Century Concordance of Piers Plowman,” Notes and Queries 42 (1995): 162–164.
The geological debates of this period are covered in Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1977), and Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 43. The word “fossil” at this point meant simply, “something taken out of the earth”; it had not yet developed its specialized reference to the remains of prehistoric animals (OED, s.v. “fossil”). See also V. A. Eyles, “The Extent of Geological Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century, and the Methods by Which It Was Diffused,” in Toward a History of Geology, ed. Cecil J. Schneer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 173. 44. Eyles, 175–176. John Woodward, Fossils of All Kinds Digested into a MethodSuitable to their Relation and Affinity.. .(London: William Innys, 1728).
Edmund Halley, “A Short Account of the Cause of the Saltness of the Ocean, and of the Several Lakes That Emit No Rivers; with a Proposal, by Help Thereof, to Discover the Age of the World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 29 (1714; reprint edition: New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1963): 296–300.
Romantic and Victorian medievalism differed in their depictions of and attitudes toward the past. Romanticism identified the medieval past as a still present influence on contemporary social life; Victorians saw it as a discrete and closed historical period. On this distinction, see Elizabeth Fry, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 1–3. On the ideology of nineteenth-century medievalism, see also Brian Stock, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History 5 (1974): 527–547.
Oldys’s lending of volumes is recorded in his diary, reprinted as A Literary Antiquary: Memoir of William Oldys, Esq., ed. James Yeowell (Spottiswoode & Co.: London, 1862). References to Cooper’s borrowings are on 1, 4, and 7. Oldys lent books to Warton as well; the entry for Monday, July 4, 1737 reads: “Returned Sir T. More’s works: some of his English poetry therein might be for Mrs. Cooper’s work, or Mr. Hayward’s on Fortune, &c” (4). Although the DNB entry on Cooper suggests that Oldys did most of her work, René Wellek has laid this sexist presumption to rest: The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 143, 226–227.
Eighteenth-century linguistic and literary commentators agreed that the English language had advanced since Chaucer’s time; however, there were two possible corollaries to this. Most common was the sentiment that such progress would continue; such a sentiment produces Pope’s famous dictum in the Essay on Criticism: “what now Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.” Leonard Welsted argued directly against this view, claiming instead that “the English language is not capable of a much greater Perfection, than it has already attain’d”; if English changes in the future, in Welsted’s view, it will only be to decay. Welsted, “A Dissertation Concerning the Perfection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, &c.,” in Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1725, ed. Willard Higley Durham (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915), 358. 70. Warton, History, 1.i.
David Nokes, Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press, Ltd., 1986), 1.
Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols., second ed. (London: R. Griffiths, 1753), 1.18–20. Cibber is not Cooper’s only follower. Vincent DiMarco has noted that Godwin’s Life of Chaucer (1804) includes elements copied from Warton’s History of English Poetry, which itself borrowed passages from Cooper’s anthology; “Godwin on Langland,” YLS 6 (1992): 126. Warton’s debt to Cooper is discussed below; it is not clear whether Godwin knew Cooper’s work directly.
Helen Cooper, “Langland’s and Chaucer’s Prologues” YLS 1 (1987): 72.
Robert Anderson, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, 13 vols. (London: John & Arthur Arch, Bell & Bradfute & I. Mundell & Co, 1792–1795), 1:2.
Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118 (2003): 1263.
Copyright information
© 2007 Sarah A. Kelen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kelen, S.A. (2007). Langland Anthologized. In: Langland’s Early Modern Identities. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608764_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608764_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52876-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60876-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)