Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's Verse

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

Karen Elaine Smyth 

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

Alastair, Irene and Zoë: family is one’s past, present and future

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

Karen Elaine Smyth University of East Anglia, UK

© Karen Elaine Smyth 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Karen Elaine Smyth has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Smyth, Karen Elaine. Imaginings of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s verse. 1. Lydgate, John, 1370?-1451?--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hoccleve, Thomas, 1370?-1450?-Criticism and interpretation. 3. Time in literature. 4. English poetry--Middle English, 1100-1500--History and criticism. I. Title 821.2'09384-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smyth, Karen Elaine. Imaginings of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s verse / Karen Elaine Smyth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0631-0 -- ISBN 978-1-4094-0632-7 (ebook) 1. Lydgate, John, 1370?1451?--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hoccleve, Thomas, 1370?-1450?--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Time in literature. I. Title. PR2037.S69 2011 821'.2--dc22 2010044269 ISBN 9781409406310 (hbk) ISBN 9781409406327 (ebk) I

Contents Acknowledgements   List of Abbreviations  

Introduction: Timely Readings of Modern Misreadings  

vii ix 1

1 Cultural Narratives of Time     Mechanization of Precision     ‘Within Timeness’     Understanding Time Measurement and   Coexisting Temporalities     Context-dependent Expressions     Visual Narratives     Time Regulation     Literary Imaginings     Ambiguities of Representation  

15 16 20

2 Framing the Moment: Lydgate’s Troy Book     Temporal Frameworks in Lydgate’s Troy Book    

59 62

3

Relative Comparisons with The Fall of Princes  

4 Visualizing Multiple Beginnings: The Siege of Thebes     Transits of Time: Lydgate’s Sky-map     Other Temporal Patternings: Blurring Temporal Boundaries     Demarcating Multiple Times  

21 24 25 30 33 51

79 95 96 105 110

5

Hoccleve’s Living within Time: The Regiment of Princes     Hoccleve’s Anxieties     Temporal Tensions in Concealing Historicity     Time’s Construction of Reception  

115 117 119 126

6

Hoccleve’s Temporal Unruliness: The Series     The End in the Beginning:    Temporal Consciousness in the Prologue     Complaints of the Present     A Dialogue of Conflicts and Synchronicities  

131 134 137 145

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Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

  The Anticipated Present:    Interplays of the Frame in the Tales     ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’     ‘Learn to Die’     ‘Tale of Jonathas’  

151 152 154 159

Conclusion: ‘As in tyme’  

161

Appendix: Chronology List   Bibliography   Index  

165 167 183

Acknowledgements It is with pleasure that I acknowledge the many obligations incurred during the production of this book. In its earliest manifestation, I owe special thanks for the guidance and support offered by John Thompson, as well as the direction of Malcolm Andrew and Julia Boffey. There are a number of other people who, at various stages of this project in their readings of selected parts or through engaging dialogue, have enhanced my understanding and communication of the ideas presented in this book: Catherine Batt, Charles Blyth, Isabelle Cochelin, Daniel O’Donoghue, Derek Pearsall, Nicola Royan, James Simpson, Thorlac TurvillePetre and Matthew Woodcock. Numerous library and archival staff have kindly helped me across the years, including those at the University of East Anglia, University of Nottingham, Queen’s University of Belfast, the British Library, the Guildhall Library of London, Society of Antiquaries in London, and the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard. In addition, I thank my students and all those who have responded to my conference papers, for they often generated new lines of thought. A special word of thanks goes to Whitney Feininger at Ashgate for her encouragement throughout this project, and to Averill Buchanan for her thorough reading of the entire manuscript. Finally, I welcome the opportunity to express my gratitude to Ashgate’s anonymous reviewer who provided not only meticulous but also sensitive readings of the text. Financial support for this project has been awarded from Harvard University, in the form of the Morton Bloomfield Visiting Fellowship, where I was able to develop my work on Hoccleve’s writings. I also received a grant from the Medieval Academy of America to SUNY, Binghamton, where I shared my work on medieval astrological discourse in literary imaginings. The University of East Anglia, University of Nottingham and the Queen’s University of Belfast have also enabled my work on this project through the provision of research time and resources. In this book I have revised material that has already appeared in print. A shorter version of the first chapter was ‘Changing Times in the Cultural Discourse of Late Medieval England’, in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance, 35 (2004): 435–54; a section of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘The Significance of Time Referents in Lydgate’s Works’, in Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riano (eds), Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse (Turnhout, 2003) pp. 363–72; ‘The Astrological Subtext of Lydgate’s Theban History’, in Mediaevalia, 29 (2008): 137–56, is an earlier version of Chapter 4; the early part of the discussion on Hoccleve’s Series (Chapter 6) was first trialled as ‘Reading Misreadings in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’, in

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Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

English Studies, 87 (2006): 3–22. I am grateful to the various publishers for their kind permissions to rework and revise this material. My greatest debt is to my family. I humbly thank them for their tremendous practical and emotional support throughout all stages of this work and for their patience with, and understanding of, the many discussions about time in which I have engaged them. I shall remain forever grateful to my parents for fostering a love of learning and literature from an early age. It is with great pleasure that I dedicate this book to Irene, Alastair and Zoë.

List of Abbreviations BL British Library EETS Early English Text Society EPACT Online database of scientific instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe held in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford; the British Museum, London; the Museum of the History of Science, Florence; and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. e.s. extra series MED Middle English Dictionary MWME A Manual of Writings in Middle English n.s. new series o.s. original series PMLA Publication of the Modern Language Association

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Introduction: Timely Readings of Modern Misreadings Al on change, worldly thing braydeth vpon tyme, The sonne chaungith, so doth the pale moone, The aureate noumbre in kalenderys set for prime, Fortune is double, doth favour for no boone … Al stant on change, like a mydsomer rose.

That John Lydgate ponders how ‘worldly thing braydeth vpon tyme’ points to an awareness of the multiplicities of representation in time. Time is regulated in so many ways, by lunar calendars or seasonal passages for instance, but it also controls as imagined in the forces of Fortune. It is ever-present, with everything dependent upon it, and yet it fades and is transitory. Interpretation of time is fluid and changes upon context, invoking numerous associations that can be artistic, political, social, private, public, objective or subjective, to list but a few. Varying and diverse representations of time are used as literary motifs or themes in medieval literature for exploring a variety of concerns such as identity, prestige, history and causality, which require self-consciousness in relation to the time and space of the world around. Based on close readings of Middle English texts, I study these writers’ imaginings of time within a historicist framework that takes into account theoretical perspectives on time in narration, the development of chronometers, specialist literature on technologies of timekeeping, as well as the social and individual management and perception of time. During the past few decades there has been a marked development of interest in the secular computation, management and perception of temporal orders in the medieval period. However, although there have been some magisterial studies of specialist angles, much of it has either failed to identify the interconnectivity of cultural discourse or somewhat simplified the complexity of secular perceptions in the later years of the medieval period. This book contributes to the understanding of the issues involved in such cultural studies by introducing into the debate Late Middle English texts, texts that act as both agents and products of this hybrid and sophisticated secular time consciousness. By stressing the multiplicity and context-specific nature of fifteenth-century experiences of time, fresh readings are   John Lydgate, ‘As a Mydsomer Rose’, in Minor Poems, Part II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 192 (London, 1934), p. 782; lines 41–4, 48. In citations from Middle English texts I do not reproduce editorial diacritics, emendations or indications of expansion, and have modernized all letter forms. 

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse



made of the work of the two most prolific poets of that period, the Benedictine monk and court poet John Lydgate (c.1371–1449) and the privy seal clerk Thomas Hoccleve (c.1367–1426). A special focus is on the large-scale poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve, with comparative links also drawn to their minor occasional poems throughout, as ‘it is surprising how often Lydgate’s refrains in his short poems can be read as embodiments of larger narrative and ontological questions’ due to the circularity, persistence and irresolution of the frames, that is to say, due to the relations between time and narrative in the extensive and minor poetry alike. An examination of their use of time markings offers an interesting and coherent approach for a reconsideration of how their extended verse on historical topics is consciously and carefully composed, as well as a means to re-evaluate medieval cultural attitudes towards time. At first glance, due to the didactic nature of the works, their formulaic and verbose style appears to offer little to the literary critic beyond being a rich resource for displaying these writers’ penchant for rhetorical devices of amplification and conventional sententiae. Yet their verse has, in recent times, particularly in the past two decades, been reassessed for its literary merits in relation to how both these poets play an active role in the public, political and ideological positioning of fifteenth-century vernacular poetry. But in this enterprise, the result has been that their large-scale texts have often been discussed in these terms rather than being employed as subject matter for close reading activities because, as Spearing says, ‘discussion of poems of such enormous length would inevitably be unwieldy … the overall large-scale effect is of more importance than the shaping of the individual line’. However, a study of Lydgate and Hoccleve’s single usages of time referents in these particular texts, as well as overall patterns in their usage, permits a revaluation of the inevitability of such an argument. Time references have great significance in shaping narrative coherence and development, revealing that there is a keen literary consciousness on the part of these poets in their choice and handling of descriptive, structural and thematic markings of time, as I will show. In this study, particular attention is paid to the ways in which the prologues and framing interludes of their major poems interpenetrate the tales. That is not to say that this study is akin to many in the past few decades that have exclusively 

 D. Vance Smith, ‘Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When’, in Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (eds), Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, The New Middle Ages (London & New York, 2007), p. 187.    Critics who have contributed to this field include Ethan Knapp, Robert MeyerLee, Nigel Mortimer, Maura Nolan, Jenni Nuttall, Lee Patterson, Derek Pearsall, Nicholas Perkins, James Simpson, Scott-Morgan Straker, and Paul Strohm (all these works are considered throughout this study). For a discussion of this move specifically in relation to the study of Lydgate see Anthony Bale, Review Article, ‘Twenty-first-century Lydgate’, Modern Philology, 105 (2008): 698–704.   A.C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), p. 66.

Introduction



focused on the beginnings and endings of these poets’ works; rather the focus is on the relationships and interplays that the narrative frames have with the poems as a whole. Morton Bloomfield observed that ‘there is always a certain magic associated with beginnings and endings’. The ‘certain magic’ of temporal markings and strategies in the framing parts of the fifteenth-century poems should not be underestimated; it is here that expressions about time are most abundant and play the most crucial roles. This book addresses a number of central issues which arise from this observation. The variety of presentations and roles that imaginings of time play in narrative framing techniques is scrutinized in order to determine why they should have such predominance. Is there an increased consciousness in the artistic potential for time markings in the fifteenth century, or a development in vernacular capacity for such expressions to be communicated? The focus on expressions of time, however, offers much more than just a revelation of these poets’ craft. To date it has remained unnoticed how it is in the prologues and framing interludes of these poems that original expressions about time are so central, dynamic and varied. The artistic varieties of time representations are illustrated and at the same time the question is asked as to whether the poetic imaginings of time are influenced by, or contribute to, social and technical changes in time reckoning and management. An emphasis on ideas about time in the narrative framing devices invites us to rethink many traditionally held assumptions about key concerns manifested in these texts, such as temporalities inherent in counsel and reading strategies, the existence of the individual or of the State in time, and the changing trajectory of the reception of fifteenth-century poetry. As a result, this book frames close readings of fifteenth-century poems within a wider historicist interpretative framework around medieval experiences and perceptions of time, revealing the mixture of ways in which ideas about time play versatile roles in key texts of Lydgate and Hoccleve. The result is an empiricalbased morphology and methodological reflection on the study of time imaginings in medieval literature. By examining literary writers’ appropriations, adaptations and innovations of this complex cultural discourse, hitherto undetected competitions of tradition and innovation become apparent. I trace trends in time narratives back as far as Bede and right up to the present day, yet also, paradoxically, distinguish distinct cultural specificities in fifteenth-century texts. At the heart of this paradox lies the question: is it possible to create a historicized morphology by which to study expressions of time? How do expressions about time mutate, some strands lasting longer than others, succumbing to oblivion in the face of timely adaptations? My work establishes the ‘cultural DNA’ of fifteenth-century poetic markings of time. With such distinctive elaborations of time discourses in the poetic traditions that they inherit, one might be tempted to ask why Lydgate and Hoccleve have not featured more prominently in discussions about medieval consciousness of time. One answer is that, until now, the study of Late Middle English literary texts    Morton W. Bloomfield (ed.), Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100– 1500 AD (Cambridge, 1979), p. 2.



Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

as cultural products and agents of multiple and complex medieval perceptions of time has been neglected. Jacques Le Goff’s well-rehearsed comparison of Church and Merchant times continues to dominate much scholarship, in spite of being initially coined in a short suggestive piece (not the result of detailed empirical research) published almost half a century ago. While his work made a welcome move towards breaking down notions of a single, monolithic medieval consciousness of time by emphasizing the differences in its conception among various groups within society, only a handful of scholars have observed that Le Goff’s divisions are too simplistic. As Peter Burke remarks, Le Goff’s ‘idea of “Church time” fails to distinguish between monks and the secular clergy. The idea of “Merchant time” does not distinguish between bankers, say, and shopkeepers’. When monolithic labels of ‘medieval’ narratives of time are tested, teased and challenged through empirical research, as this study does, the methods of comprehending time in the fourteenth century are seen to be mixed with some new methods in the fifteenth century. According to traditional models, time is qualitative, local, indefinite and unrefined. By contrast, modern societies conceive of time as quantitative, standardized, measurable and manageable. Yet such arbitrary periodic divisions do not hold true today let alone in the Middle Ages: our own age blends a form of the calendar used for centuries with methods for measuring nanoseconds developed only recently. This merging of tradition and innovation is true of the entire history of technology. Bruno Latour has convincingly persuaded us, with his antidualist philosophizing in We Have Never Been Modern, of the need to break down modernist notions that premodern society separates nature and science in contrast to the modern tendency to do so. Latour still recognizes the value of historicity but maintains that medieval and modern ages are alike in the fact that science (or the ‘scientific method’), technology, and society was (and continues to be) coproduced in a process of the reciprocal tuning of facts, theories, machines, human actors, and social relations. Our enterprise must then be not only to distinguish the mixing of new methods of computing and perceiving time with old ones, but also to offer an examination of the trends and dynamics in the coproductions of nature, society and technology. When and where in fifteenth-century texts is emphasis placed on coexisting temporalities or hierarchies of temporalities? What is specific to fifteenth-century attitudes, what is inherited, how is it transformed and adapted, and what exactly are the dynamics    Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980).   See Natalie Davis, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’, Past & Present, 90 (1981): 40–72, especially 60–62; Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago, 1996); Chris Humphrey, ‘Time and Urban Culture in Late Medieval England’, in Chris Humphrey and Mark Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 105–118; and Peter Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Viator, 35 (2004): 526–623.    Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, 526.

Introduction



between continuity and change in the vocabulary and imaginings of time in the texts? Answering questions that look at the relationships between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ narratives will not deny the historicity of medieval expressions of time, but rather emphasize the cultural specificities. Understanding modern misreadings of medieval literary imaginings of time is my starting point in demonstrating how to use a new empirical-based morphology in the study of expressions of time to explore the central role that temporal consciousness has to play in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s advisory poems. My focus on fifteenth-century writings is a response not only to authors’ prominent use of time markings in the narrative frames, but also to recent research by horologists, anthropologists, and economic and social historians. This research shows that in the fifteenth century there was an increasingly erudite understanding of secular computation and management of temporal orders. In conjunction with this cultural scholarship there has been recent revival of critical interest in fifteenthcentury English literature. Ethan Knapp explains that this attention is due to the recognition that the period speaks to our own present concerns with subjects such as ‘vernacularity, the centrifugal force of state power, textual dissemination’ and religious developments.10 The vernacular advisory text gains great cultural currency in these Lancastrian times of concomitant convention and innovation because: the constancy of the genre’s appeal rests in the unfixed and highly adaptable nature of its exemplarity … the past is, on the one hand, safely over, sealed from the present, and sanitized as “tradition”, yet it lies, on the other, open to reinterpretation, subject to unruly and unpredictable revival as an affront to settled arrangements of power.11

  Examples of this research include: for horological and social studies, David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, 1983), and Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour; for linguistic studies, Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Yoshihiko Nakamichi, ‘On the Historical Present in Sir Orfeo’, Reitaku University Journal, 33 (1982): 47–60 and ‘On the Historical Present in the Gawain-Poet’, Geibunkenkyu, 43 (1982): 173–84, Eugene Vance, ‘Saint Augustine: Language as Temporality’, in Mervelous Signals, Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, 1989), pp. 34–50; for economic and social histories, Carlo M. Cipolla, ‘Clocks and Culture: The European Masters’, in European Culture and Overseas Expansion (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 113–48, Jean Gimpel, ‘The Mechanical Clock: The Key Machine’, in The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York, 1992), pp. 147–70, and Le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages. There is, however, only sporadic use of English evidence in these landmark studies. 10  Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Medieval England (Pennsylvania, 2001), p. 1. 11   Paul Strohm, Politique: Language of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, 2005), p. 88.



Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

Paul Strohm ascribes the determinism of simultaneous temporal rhythms to the de casibus genre, as in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. I propose that the Janus-faced nature of advisory texts is integral to a much wider range of fifteenth-century poems, including other large-scale pseudo-histories such as Lydgate’s Trojan and Theban legends and the occasional poems. Within these poems, expressions of time and temporal patterns play central, imperative and energetic mediating roles in both reaffirming and transforming perceptions in the gap between exemplary figures and current monarchs, aristocratic figures, clerics and poets. Michael Hicks observes that the interest in cultural change within fifteenthcentury England has, in the past couple of decades, encouraged a more integrated and holistic view in the examination of conceptual categories that construct and are deployed in the act of living.12 According to Hicks, cultural narratives entwine conceptual categories such as religious ideas or attitudes to women with the political and public machinations of life. It is within this context of conceptual categories that I use the phrase ‘cultural narratives of time’. By embracing the full range of cultural narratives of time in the medieval poems, one finds that recurring and episodic rhythms of timelessness exist alongside temporal, fluctuating and progressive rhythms of being in time. Hence, there is a necessity to interrogate commonly accepted ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ models of time and the multiple methods used by modern commentators across the disciplines for interpreting discourses of time. This study highlights that what we now regard as modern dimensions of time consciousness – for instance, time as a quantifiable phenomenon, time as an embodiment of the age’s fears, the significance of human experience in time, control and manipulation of time, time as a continuum with causal connections – are also mediated within secular dimensions of Late Medieval time consciousness. However, it must be stressed that my work is not an attempt to refashion medieval attitudes towards time in modern terms or claim a universal aesthetic of time. Rather, it is an attempt to understand connections between medieval and modern narratives of time, illustrating how dominant views of medieval consciousness of time relate to a wider debate about the modernity or alterity of the Middle Ages. Borrowing the idea of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ categories of historical transition is a useful way to describe trends in modern scholarship in the interpretation of medieval perceptions of time. By appropriating James Simpson’s use of these categories, we can argue that revolutionary critics attempt to ‘destroy and efface’ those time markings that do not enable medieval consciousness of time to be defined and contrasted against other periods. The result is a rarefication of a dominant narrative of cyclical/seasonal, astronomical and liturgical time perceptions. In contradistinction, the reformist model ‘highlights continuities across historical rupture’ recognizing ‘that the old order is, either by identity or 12   See Michael Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (London, 2002).

Introduction



likeness, the future’.13 This study leans more towards the reformist typological metaphor, where the forces of change – those that result in individual, objective, linear, causal and thematic perceptions of time – are seen to be firmly rooted in the old order of the Church, the agrarian workers and those who act as public orators for the State.14 In other words, the aim of this study is to illustrate that the prescriptive Christian narrative that so often defines consciousness of time in these poets’ work actually interacts within context-dependent terms with a culturally specific, timebound, growing and changing consciousness of temporal experiences. That there is a new emphasis here not just on fifteenth-century perceptions of time, but on context-dependent, culturally conditioned consciousness is worth emphasis, because distinctions between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ (or ‘medieval’) time views are still too often made. For example, historians and anthropologists (such as Antony Aveni) often deem agrarian and commercial societies to have distinct and extreme forms of time consciousness. Horologists (like Eric Bruton) point to the mid-fifteenth-century invention of the coiled spring (enabling the portability of clocks), or the discovery of the escapement (enabling the standardization of time duration), or the works of Copernicus and Galileo as pivotal divisions between premodern and modern time management. Across the disciplines, and not least in literary criticism, it has been conventional to adopt a revolutionary approach, sharply demarcating modern and medieval time views. The celebrated question posed by St Augustine – ‘what then is time?’ – has often been cited to demonstrate the medieval intellectual, as opposed to empirical, interest in time. A long and fruitful tradition of literary scholarship examining the multiple and complex scholastic and philosophical time conceptions in medieval writings has shown that ‘the temporal experience – as an experience of change – has been at the centre of some of the most pressing questions regarding human meaning and fulfilment’.15 In such scholarship, the claim has been that medieval writers place meaning and fulfilment only within Nature and God’s domain, finding its expression within recurring and episodic seasonal, astronomical, astrological and religious coordinates. After all, one never has to look too far in a medieval text to discover an abundance of poetic descriptions of natural rhythms of time – seasonal, diurnal and life cycles – which convey time as a force that subjects humans to the cyclical rhythms in nature. The cyclical concept (or permutations on the cyclical pattern such as concentric, spiral or cursus) best suits the concept of salvational history and divine control of time.16 The similarities between selected episodes in   James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 215.  For a discussion of the revolutionary and reformist models see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 35. 15   Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riano (eds), Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 3–4. 16  For a discussion of the similarities and differences of the models of time, see John Wesley Harris, ‘The Structure of Cycles’, in Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction (London, 1992), pp. 93–106. 13

14

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse



a text that adopts this approach to time are emphasized by the explanation that a narrative is not a unified process of organic development but one connected by God’s existence from outside time.17 Mary Carruthers explains this time-tension in the plot of salvational history as a ‘sense of living in a time that is caught between the decisive event in the past (the Resurrection) and a final event in the future … a present which is in yet not of time’.18 Hence, due to the ‘temporal repetition of the salvational pattern’ there is the dominant sense of unification of sequences, of discontinuity, of stark alternations, essentially of timelessness in narrative structures.19 Such a time view is qualitative not quantitative, symbolic not empirical, Christian not secular, supposedly medieval not modern. At this point it must be acknowledged that a vast wealth of scholarship has demonstrated that this qualitative, Christian, medieval narrative of time is a complex one. The narrative has many strands, and has prompted, for instance, explorations of the pervasive subjects of predestination, fate, fortune and free will that make for many of the tensions in medieval literature: debates about the knotty Wycliffite versus Nominalist issues involving philosophical ponderings of the De tempore type and those of writers like St Augustine, Peter Aureol, John Duns Scotus or William of Ockham; and discussions of the innumerable exegetical debates on time frameworks in the Bible and the computus reckonings by the Fathers of Christendom. Medieval writers are also aware of alternative models that complicate Christian time, such as Jewish and pagan time. Anne Higgins describes the dominant narrative of time in the Middle Ages as having no ‘single view of time, no systematic philosophy of time, but a number of competing notions of time that were diverse and sophisticated’.20 The aim of my work is not to deny that in medieval society time is perceived in hybrid and sophisticated ways in relation, or as a prelude, to eternity – indeed it would be impossible not to consider these aspects in some form – but neither is it the purpose of my study to revisit these well-trodden paths. Scholarship across the disciplines in the past few decades has begun tackling the misrepresentative model of a medieval neglect of time (deemed as ‘neglect’ due to a perceived dominance of timelessness – eternity – and the ending of time – the apocalyptic – in medieval thought). Chris Humphrey observes that the popular and scholarly interest in time generated by the recent turn of the millennium has ‘led to a wider appreciation of the medieval origins of many of our temporal ideas,

 See Anne Higgins, ‘Medieval Notions of the Structure of Time’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 19 (1989): 227–50, for an overview of the critical work done on the widespread permeation in medieval writings of the concept of salvational history. 18  Mary Carruthers, ‘Time, Apocalypse, and the Plot of Piers Plowman’, in Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (eds), Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Context, 700–1600 (Norman, 1982), p. 184. 19  Carruthers, ‘Time, Apocalypse, and the Plot of Piers Plowman’, p. 176. 20   Higgins, ‘Medieval Notions of the Structure of Time’, p. 229. 17

Introduction



systems and technologies’.21 Yet even before the new millennium, literary scholars had developed a greater emphasis on specialist studies, arguing that any belief in a binary opposition between premodern and modern conceptions and experiences of time was misplaced.22 Most recently, critical interest has been in socio-economic and cultural historical studies of the use and management of time, or the processes of time, in Late Medieval England. An ever-increasing number of journal articles and collected essays now examine the cultural uses of calendars, prophecies and the likes.23 It is expedient to combine this appreciation of varied medieval cultural discourses of time with a reflection on the methods we use when reading the frequent and varied expressions of time in fifteenth-century English poetry. The need to address Middle English poetry is significant, for Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riano’s Time and Eternity is indicative of most recent essay collections, where out of a total of 32 essays, only two deal with literary representations of time in Middle English texts.24 Of greater significance for my readings of representations and processes of time in poetry is the rest of St Augustine’s remark: ‘I know what [time] is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked, I find

  Humphrey and Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World, p. 1.  Such examples are John Burrow’s study of age-schemes, which has done much to dismiss simplistic assumptions about medieval attitudes (The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought [Oxford, 1986]), as did his study of cultural attitudes towards the concept of the future in the Middle Ages (ed. with Ian P. Wei, Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, [Rochester, 2000]). J.D. North’s authoritative and technical study of Chaucer’s poetic competency and sophistication in his use of quantifiable, astronomical time markings (Chaucer’s Universe [Oxford, 1988]) has fostered an interest in cross-disciplinary studies of relationships between poetry and science, such as Ann Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Knowing (Ithaca, 1996) and Marijane Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe in the Canterbury Tales (Norman, 2002). Mary Carruthers’s study of memory (in The Book of Memory [Cambridge, 1990] and as co-editor of The Medieval Craft of Memory [Philadelphia, 2002]) has generated a great wealth of interest in the diverse and well-advanced schema integral to medieval negotiations of the past. Alastair Minnis, Lee Patterson and Strohm have all, in numerous publications, advanced theoretical perspectives on time in medieval narration. 23   Essay collections include: Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (eds), Medieval Lifecycles: Continuity and Change (Turnhout, 2011); P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (eds), Youth in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2004); Jaritz and Moreno-Riano (eds), Time and Eternity; and Humphrey and Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World. Two special edition journal volumes dedicated to studies of time include Disputatio, 2 (1997) and Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007). 24   These two essays are on the Gawain-poet by Cynthia Kraman, pp. 355–62, and on John Lydgate by Karen Smyth, pp. 363–72, in Jaritz and Moreno-Riano (eds), Time and Eternity. 21 22

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that I do not know’.25 Augustine acknowledges time as an impossible phenomenon to grasp systematically, due to its versatile and dynamic nature. Critical studies that have identified some of those diverse features and trends in medieval cultural perceptions of time to which Augustine points are synthesized here in my study. The result of placing hitherto unconnected perspectives together is a comprehensive insight into the various ways in which time is applied in the medieval period. This monograph should not, however, be expected to contribute to such an enterprise by providing an external historical apparatus to ‘explain’ Middle English expressions about time. Rather, it addresses how alternative registers of time operate within different societal groups, between the works of two writers, between different texts by the same author and even within a text. I support Burke’s observation that this approach to the history of time is part of a more general turn in historical practice that might be described – borrowing and redefining a term from seventeenth-century theology – as “occasionalism”. It involves taking account of the fact that the same people behave differently according to the occasion or situation.26

Or, in terms of my study, it involves taking into account the context-dependent nature of expressions of time. My approach leads to a reassessment, and indeed rewriting, of modern critical assumptions concerning ways to read perceptions of time in the Middle Ages. There are two main approaches to this idea of context-dependent expressions of time in my study of Lydgate and Hoccleve’s verse: examination of the micro occasions (measurements) and of the macro occasions (management). The ceaseless transformations in which nature is engaged – alternations of day and night, of the seasons, of birth to death, of wakefulness and sleep, of the lunar and solar phases – are in any age, in any society, reckoned and managed by devices. The nature, extent and combination of multiple coordinates of time allow for multiple and specifically context-dependent methods of arranging the narrative of time. Measurements of time require an examination of the small-scale impact that individual expressions create, and an investigation of the ways in which repeated use and/or varying functions of referents contribute to moving the narrative along in a particular or in multiple directions. These referents can be described, for instance, as regnal, calendrical, seasonal, mechanical; or as subjective and objective, traditional and modern, functional and aesthetic, structural and descriptive, communal and personal. These labels are not used to imply formulaic categories of medieval perceptions of time. There is no blueprint for exploring micro expressions of time. In one narrative, a type of referent – such as a tide, a seasonal reference or astrological calculation – can have multiple functions.  St Augustine, Confessiones, 11.14, qtd. and trans. by Landes, Revolution in Time,

25

p. 1.

26

  Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, p. 626.

Introduction

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Rather, each micro expression of time can only be described in relation to its context, to the occasion, in which it is used. Meanwhile, in the study of macro structures of temporal consciousness I adopt a different approach to textual study. This method involves consideration of deeper structures, of the manipulation of inter-relationships between past, present and future states in the narrative. Assessment of the management of time requires consideration of cultural and literary attitudes: the ease and unease, the simple and complex, harmonious and competing attitudes to temporal consciousness. Recognition of variations in the choice and use of micro and macro temporal coordinates and rhythms, not only between but also within narratives, while simultaneously acknowledging correlations with cultural narratives, reveals just how sophisticated these poets’ abilities are in the art of time narration. Indeed, it reveals more than artistic ability. By investigating these poets’ use of expressions about time and management of time within narrative structures, a morphology for analysing the medieval poet’s relationships with and negotiation of contemporary cultural readings of time emerges. The major poems of Hoccleve and Lydgate are quite close translations of Latin and French sources, as well as of Chaucer’s work, so care must be taken in making any general assumptions of fifteenth-century ‘Lydgatian’ or ‘Hocclevian’ forms of time consciousness. There are, however, two significant points to note. The first is that translation (discussed in the second and third chapters) is seen as a subjective and temporal process by these poets, and this book aims to explore ways to read markings of time that are inherited, as well as created, by writers in the fifteenth century. As already stated, a large part of my focus is on the function of the prologues and frameworks, where representations of time play their most active roles. Attention to the narrative passages that are original creations by Lydgate and Hoccleve was not determined by a desire to explore the fifteenth-century additions to the sources, but to examine the patterning or ‘certain magic’ that temporal markings and strategies have in these parts. There has been a growing realization of the reflexive thematic, structural and rhetorical relationships between the different parts of Hoccleve’s texts.27 Yet this reflexive aspect is one that scholars of Lydgate have dealt with only in passing. The second point worth highlighting is that there are barely any significant manuscript variations (where the difference affects interpretation) in the use of time referents or expressions about time. The few that I have detected are referenced. What we can deduce from this remarkable stability in transmission is that, while we cannot say with certainty that all these time markings are the input of our two authors rather than later scribal additions,

 Such explorations have focused on the prologue of The Regiment of Princes in relation to the rest of the poem, and the frame of the Series in relation to the rest of the collection. See, for example, Blyth’s discussion of how ‘the Prologue is just as didactic as the [text] proper and the latter just as subjective’, in his ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, 1999), p. 11. 27

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we can be sure that the readers of these numerous manuscripts had a similar experience of the text in this respect. The ways in which ideas about time are represented and used by Lydgate and Hoccleve have determined the groupings of texts considered in chapters 2 to 6: discourses of time govern principles of organization. (The book, therefore, is not arranged according to the composition chronology of the poems; a chronology chart is provided for reference in the Appendix.) The three texts of Lydgate’s that are under scrutiny are, first of all, the Troy Book, in which the micro expressions of time found to play a structural framing role are discussed, followed by the Fall of Princes in which I examine his use of descriptive referents, and finally the Siege of Thebes which I explore for the effects of polysemous temporal patternings and effects, including speculative and judicial astrology. Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes is then compared with Lydgate’s writings to reveal some striking similarities and differences. The final chapter focuses on Hoccleve’s personal engagement, confrontation and negotiation of time consciousness in his Series. While these texts cover extended time scales (the life-cycle of the individual, of literary history, of the Trojan nation, of Thebes, of Christian history), variations in the functions of time markings between these texts reveals just how conscious these fifteenth-century poets were of how the same type of temporal referent could operate in subtly different ways, resulting in variations of historical perspectives. In their large-scale exemplary poems both Lydgate and Hoccleve use time markings as a means to authorize their texts, yet there are inherent differences in their usage. Lydgate engages micro time markings as structuring and descriptive narrative framing devices, emphasizing the individual’s experience of time in relation to the large timescales of State and history. In contrast, Hoccleve treats time in a more thematic fashion, imagining interplays between past, present and future narrative times as a means to create an identity for a fictional narrator, locating the individual’s experience of time within their own lifespan and that of their community (sometimes the community is that of the court, but most often an urban and bureaucratic community is the central life-cycle at play in his work28). Despite these different approaches, both writers share a number of the cultural attitudes towards time that are noted in the first chapter, such as increased precision in expression, context-dependent usage and coexistence of traditional and modern expressions, the interplay between secular and religious perceptions and between poetic and pseudo-scientific discourses. This study illustrates how both these poets manipulate a range of cultural narratives of time in order to create multiple, and sometimes even competing, temporalities within single poems by combining various constructions of time drawn from literary history, or from individual, communal, poetic, contemporary, socio-political, historical, mythical 28

  Linnie Mooney has enlarged our understanding of Hoccleve’s bureaucratic career by identifying a large number of autograph documents that he copied during his time as clerk at the Privy Seal. See ‘Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007): 293–340.

Introduction

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or religious spheres. The overall function is to illustrate both poets’ resistance to chronological development to reveal instead a much more dynamic temporal awareness of reception at play. Understanding how they are traversing real time chronology and creating multiple fictional times helps to explain the need for a more nuanced, culturally specific trajectory of reception history for fifteenthcentury literature. The book closes with a commentary on how the study of time plays a central role in any study of culture. The poems selected for discussion in this monograph not only yield culturally specific perceptions of time narratives, but also create a dialogue with past, present and future readers through their temporal markings. In so doing, ramifications beyond the study of Lydgate and Hoccleve’s poems emerge: the transitory and ever-changing nature of reading the medieval becomes a challenge to the current fashion of rejecting ‘middleness’ in favour of the ‘premodern’. Reading time in Middle English verse challenges us to read the past through the temporalities of our own being in time. To reach this point of selfreflection I turn to a range of medieval poems, treatises, Church records, letters, chronicle notations, material and visual texts as a means to establish an empirically based morphology that can more meaningfully be used to read fifteenth-century cultural narratives of time.

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Chapter 1

Cultural Narratives of Time The cultural critic Aron Gurevich affirms that time is ‘felt and applied in various ways in different civilisations and societies, on different levels of the same society and even among individuals’. This study of medieval measurements, management and expressions of time in a wide range of socio-literary texts employs this inclusive and pragmatic approach, demonstrating the complexity and interconnectivity of time narratives in the period. The discussion provides a comprehensive introduction to the ways by which collective and individual attitudes towards time are instilled, communicated, explored, developed, confused and occasionally subverted in cultural discourse. Primary focus is on a wide range of English literary and practical texts, since previous studies have placed greater emphasis on European or Old English sources. In addition, my reading of timepieces as a manifestation of cultural narratives is a first, offering a new dimension in the study of medieval expressions of time. By examining a range of Middle English authors’ appropriations, adaptations and innovations of this complex cultural discourse, hitherto undetected competitions of tradition and innovation become apparent. In so doing, various commonly accepted medieval theories of time are interrogated and an empirically based morphology is established for examining the narratives of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s verse. This chapter is organized into eight parts, determined by the cultural narratives of time that have been detected. The first section explores the idea that new terms in the vernacular for expressing reckonings and duration of time were devised in tandem with technological developments. This leads into a discussion of what constitutes precision in expression and conception of time, and how tradition and innovation coincide. The second part examines the idea of living ‘within timeness’, where heightened awareness of temporal specificity occasionally becomes an important and problematic feature of fifteenth-century writings. The next section investigates evidence of individual and communal desire to understand time measurements. A greater conception of the impact on people on discovering they could measure time, and the potential this offered for its control and manipulation, also leads to an appreciation of the range of coexisting temporalities in fifteenthcentury discourse. The significance and consciousness of an empirical-based sense   Aron I. Gurevich, ‘Ideas of Space and Time in the Middle Ages’, in Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G.L. Campbell (London, 1985), p. 29.    The horological, economic and social surveys – such as those by David Landes, Arno Borst and Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum – also deal with English evidence only sporadically throughout their works. 

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of time constitutes the fourth cultural narrative, as the range and forms of contextdependent expressions of time are examined. The fifth section then considers chronometers as texts, for the importance and influence of these visual narratives of time are central to understanding the continuities and changes in fifteenthcentury conception, management and expression of time. The sixth part focuses on time regulation: who was regulating it and why, and what were the effects. What becomes apparent is that there was an increasing explicitness and formality in the organization of temporal divisions. The penultimate section adopts and embraces these varieties of cultural narratives as it turns to literary imaginings of time. The technical, conceptual, subjective, empirical, visual, organizing and disruptive narratives are traced in a range of medieval writings to produce new readings of familiar texts and a template demonstrating how to use this newly formed morphology for studying Middle English micro and macro expressions of time. The final section develops and tests the morphology, examining the anxieties and ambiguities of representing time that are so often expressed and never far from the surface in these Middle English writings. The result of this eight-part organization is a developing awareness that texts use different discourses of horizontal, vertical, cyclical, spiral, linear, thematic, synchronic times, and that there are many variations on these models, deeply rooted in the cultural specificities of period and place. Mechanization of Precision One palpable and central issue to start with is to discover whether the introduction of new chronometers affects discourses of time in any kind of significant way. In the 1449 text Amoryus and Cleopes, the construction of a mechanical sphere that replicates the medieval cosmos is hailed (at length) as a marvel. There can be little doubt that the most obvious manifestation in medieval society of an increasing sophistication in time reckoning is the advent and welcoming of mechanical, and, in turn, uniform and objective time measurement. England is renowned throughout Europe as the place where the first mechanical clock with an escapement was invented. It was as early as the thirteenth century, 1283 to be exact, by the Augustinian Canons of Dunstable Priory, Bedfordshire, that a ‘horologium’ can be found listed rather than the usual timepiece of the period, the

   John Metham, Amoryus and Cleopes, ed. Stephen F. Page (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), pp. 47–59, lines 507–625.    An escapement is the device that enables regulation, and thus precision, of time keeping. This is due to the fact that it converts continuous rotational movement into a backwards and forwards motion, allowing a pendulum or balance wheel to swing in a regulated fashion. For a discussion about this invention see C.F.C. Beeson, English Church Clocks from 1280 to 1850 (London, 1988).

Cultural Narratives of Time

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clepsydra (a water clock). Of western European countries today, England has the largest extant number of thirteenth-century records for mechanical clocks. Yet, while these clocks were, by the fourteenth century, popular features of towns in the more wealthy parts of Western Europe such as in Milan (1335), Genoa (1353), Bologna (1356), Ferrara (1362), and Chartres (two by 1359), they did not become a common feature in English urban dwellings until the fifteenth century. A royal charter for The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in London was not issued until 22 August 1631, although memorandum books for the company date back to 1527. Carlo Cipolla attributes the slower rate of dissemination in England both to the financial cost and to the fact that English civic municipalities were less powerful than those in France, Germany or Italy. In England, Church authorities dominated the production and care of clocks. My concern is not so much with who made the invention first, or statistics concerning where clocks were situated, but with how to read the impact of mechanical time regulation on society and individuals in medieval England. Burke poses the question: ‘did the invention of the mechanical clock lead to a new sense of time, or was the clock invented, like the printing press, when there was a demand for it?’10 No definitive answer can be provided, but the question does make explicit the issue of whether perceptions of time were dependent on technology or relative to it. Although the advent of mechanical hour measurements marks a new point of sophistication in the technical capacities of time regulation, I do not support the assumption that ‘it is a commonplace of cultural history that one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, some time in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weightdriven clock’.11 In the Middle Ages, one could not have failed to be conscious of time regulation before the mechanical clock due to the numerous methods of diurnal timekeeping, including the elaborate bell ringing systems each parish had,    It is seldom noticed that half a century later, in 1326, England was once again the location of the earliest dated European example of another timepiece, the astrolabe. It is now held in the British Museum, London, registration number: MLA 1909, 6–17. 1.    Beeson, English Church Clocks, p. 8, lists several: Exeter Cathedral (1284), Old St Paul’s in London (1286), Merton College Oxford (before 1290), Norwich Cathedral Priory (also before 1290), Ely Abbey (1291), Christchurch Cathedral in Canterbury (1292) and Salisbury Cathedral some time before 1306.    See Beeson, English Church Clocks, pp. 6–25 and John Scattergood, ‘Writing the Clock: the Reconstruction of Time in the Late Middle Ages’, in European Review, 11 (2003): 460.    London, Guildhall Library, Clockmaker’s Library MS 643.    See Carlo M. Cipolla, ‘Clocks and Culture: The European Masters’, European Culture and Overseas Expansion (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 113–48. 10   Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Viator, 35 (2004): 621. 11   A.G. Rigg, ‘Clocks, Dials and Other Terms’, in Douglas Grey and E. G. Stanley (eds), Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis (Oxford, 1983), p. 255.

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as well as devices such as candles, sundials, shadow sticks, water clocks, flame clocks, astrolabes and the cock’s crow. In the specialist library of the Londonbased Society of Antiquaries, almost one hundred documents containing entries pertaining to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century dials (mainly sundials and quadrants, but also astrolabes and tables) remain extant today. Likewise, there are numerous timepieces indicated in poetic sources. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, apart from the ‘abbey horologe’, time is calculated in various ways: by shadow length using a portable ‘chilyndre’; by distinguishing unequal and equal hours and dies vulgaries and dies artificialis; by chronology, genealogy, astronomy; by a variety of natural indicators; and by predictions of time duration until Judgement Day.12 Even in fifteenth-century literature, the vast range of alternative time markers are used with much greater frequency than the mechanical unit. Throughout all of Hoccleve’s poetry I have found no use of mechanical hours or minutes, and only a few instances in Lydgate’s works. Thus, at first glance, one might assume that the introduction of equinoctial hours as a significant development in time measurement and management went unnoticed. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum’s findings in History of the Hour support such a thesis: ‘as far as we can tell, contemporaries were rarely aware of the largely anonymous process of change in time consciousness’.13 He highlights the fact that the invention of the escapement is not registered in any contemporary chronicle or narrative account: that is, no new word is developed to indicate specifically a mechanical clock. The generic term ‘horologium’ that was already in use for all forms of timepieces was simply adopted to indicate the presence of a mechanical clock. In contrast, as Dohrn-van Rossum notes, there is an abundance of new words to describe the novelty of striking clocks. Terms such as ‘clokke’ and ‘clocca’ are used to signify the presence of bell clocks (from Old French cloche, meaning a bell). In England, the earliest known clock that audibly signalled the equinoctial hours is the 1386 clock at Salisbury Cathedral. So while the audible change (the striking clock) was consciously acknowledged, the linguistic evidence examined by Dohrn-van Rossum suggests that the technical change – the mechanical innovation of distinguishing equinoctial hours – was imperceptible as a novel excitement. Only where details of weights or escapements or other explicit indications are

  Linne Mooney, ‘The Cock and the Clock: Telling Time in Chaucer’s Day’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 15 (1993): 91–109; Laurel Braswell, ‘The Moon and Medicine in Chaucer’s Time’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 8 (1986): 145–56; Edgar S. Laird, ‘Astrolabes and the Construction of Time in the Late Middle Ages’, Disputatio, 2 (1997): 51–69; Peter W. Travis, ‘Chaucer’s Chronographiae, the Confounded Reader, and Fourteenth-Century Measurements of Time’, Disputatio, 2 (1997): 1–34, have all shown how familiar Chaucer was with a vast variety of time-telling methods. 13   Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago, 1996), pp. 232–3. 12

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given in the medieval records can a mechanical clock be clearly identified.14 That no new term was devised for the mechanical clock would suggest it was only in retrospect that the significance of mechanical time regulation emerged as a means of increasing control over one’s activities through quantitative precision. Such an indistinct impression in the chronicles regarding the exact nature of time reckoning devices should not, however, be taken as verification of a medieval reluctance to embrace advances in time measurement. As Augustine acknowledges, perceptions of time are not systematic; they have a plethora of representations. Alongside such absences, keen interest and competency in expressions of time can be found. The advent of the mechanical time regulator did involve, inevitably, some degree of conceptual change for it ‘brought with it a heightened sense of time and privileged virtues such as regularity, constancy, punctuality, exactness’ and, in turn – perhaps most significantly – expression.15 Smaller units – every hour – could now be distinguished rather than solely canonical divisions of the day. Instead of searching for explicit notations of the advent of mechanical technology, evidence of the significance in increased precision can be found in other ways. For instance, it is worth examining the changes in time notations that occur across the fifteenth century in the Paston letters.16 The letters, rather than the other fifty or so documents in the Paston collection, are my subject of concern here, for while the official documents (indentures, wills, etc.) obviously have an abundance of time markings because they are an integral part of the formal register of the record’s permanent authority,17 the letters, by contrast, provide an insight into the changing and increasing significance of time in personal discourse. This collection of around 1,000 letters reveals an increasing ability and consciousness of the necessity to quantify specific moments in time with greater precision. In the first years of the collection (1422–45), I have counted that two-thirds of the letters during this period mention the year, while half note the day and month, whereas during the last twenty years (1490–1509) dates in the letters are more specific, with one-fifth recording only the year, but nearly fourfifths recording the day and month. Of this latter majority, half no longer record the year at all, but many have multiple time markings within the one letter. For   Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, pp. 52–4. See also Rigg, ‘Clocks, Dials and Other Terms’, for a detailed discussion of English terms used in this period. 15   Scattergood, ‘Writing the Clock’, p. 469. 16   Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, R. Beadle, C. Richmond, 3 vols, EETS s.s. 20–22 (Oxford, 2004–05). 17   There is a consciousness throughout the medieval period of the type of precision of expression required by the context, awareness that time consciousness is determined by experience. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis has comprehensively explored the wealth of dating conventions in official documents of the early Middle Ages, illustrating how they display a keen consciousness of context-dependent expression (‘Year Dates in the Early Middle Ages’, in Chris Humphrey and Mark Ormrod [eds], Time in the Medieval World [Woodbridge, 2001], pp. 5–23). 14

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example, a letter of 17 January 1506 records the time twice using the mechanical hour: William Makefyrr informs Darcy and Alyngton that the king ‘mett this day at thre of the cloke, apon Cleworth Greyn, ij. Mylle owt of Wyndesower’. Makefyrr proceeds to give a vivid description of the king’s apparel and his escorts and concludes the letter: ‘from Wyndesouer this Saterday, at v. of the cloke’.18 The time notations in this letter reveal a number of interesting features. The increased precision is not solely in relation to the time, but also the place. Many of the earlier letters in the collection give locations, but notice how the exact number of miles has also been recorded in this letter, and the content of the letter makes much use of detail, revealing a rich vernacular vocabulary. Time markings contribute to the precision and colour of the developing vernacular language. This increase in specificity across the century signals how personal affairs had become not only more bureaucratic, dependent upon written communication, but also a more informal interaction between friends, relatives and business contacts. The changing nature of the time referents marks the increasing need for urgent and current transmission of knowledge in the later period, and indicates how the letter is a forerunner in this sense to newspapers, which to the present time note the day and date of the month, while e-mails, which enable an even quicker transmission of information, mark the hour, minute and second they were sent. ‘Within Timeness’ Alongside this trend for an increase in the precision and frequency of time markings is a similar trait in regard to the way time is used as a narrative construct. Conscious use of temporal ideas is a hallmark feature of historical narratives of the fifteenth century, which saw the development of a new form of historical record – the London Yearbooks. These listed contemporary events in annal form and organized them according to date marking (usually events are ordered under the years of the mayoralty). These chronicles were not composed for the recounting of past events but were written contemporaneously with the events they recorded, creating a new impetus for the trend that had been well established several centuries earlier in the Annales; as such, they demonstrate the impulse to communicate events as they happened and are evidence of a consciousness of the significance of temporal specificity.19 The rewritings and continuations of these yearbooks demonstrate the desire to locate the temporal significance of current affairs as they happen, or as their significance is understood. Edward Donald Kennedy highlights this   Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century (ed.), Norman Davis, R. Beadle, C. Richmond, EETS s.s. 22 (Oxford, 2004–05), pp. 173–4. 19   See Lister M. Matheson, ‘Historical Prose’, in A.S.G. Edwards (ed.), Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres (New Brunswick, 1984), pp. 220–04, for a survey of these London chronicles. Detailed descriptions can be found in Mary-Rose McLaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 2002). 18

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feature of temporal specificity in other fifteenth-century historical records, noting that single events (such as battles, tournaments and coronations) are, for the first time, frequently recorded as entire texts instead of moments within long periods of history.20 Rossell Hope Robbins notes another example: of over three hundred Middle English poems on contemporary conditions, less than fifty antedate 1400.21 A cultural narrative of heightened awareness of temporal specificity quickly emerges when these texts are surveyed side by side. My conclusion is that the focus on specific moments of human existence is an indication of the increasing secularization of historical perceptions. An event is an entity within itself, has its own temporal significance and does not have to be incorporated into the divine time scheme. In other words, in addition to the reconfiguration of Christian conceptions of time, the late medieval consciousness also configured the narration of history in relation to the human experience of – to borrow Martin Heidegger’s term – living ‘within timeness’. Understanding Time Measurement and Coexisting Temporalities In drawing these examples together, the desire for quantitative and subjective precision in calculating, using and understanding the moment becomes obvious. Does this mean, however, that the increased ability for quantitative expression and conception in the fifteenth century meant that there was no desire for such precision before this period? Were people of earlier periods more vague and lacking in interest in temporal specificity? Jean Leclerq blandly states: ‘whereas in the High Middle Ages time had been empirical fact, sacral and imprecise, in the Late Middle Ages, when man could measure time precisely by external mechanical means, time became more individualized and subjective – and more mechanical and objective’.22 Yet can such reifying of ages really be sustained? The simple answer is no; such period generalizations are not useful. Time reckoning had, of course, always been of secular importance. For instance, shadow sticks had been, and continued to be, vital for agrarian workers. In the Late Middle Ages calculations based on astronomical, and eventually mechanical, principles coexisted (usually comfortably) with the liturgical calendar. It should come as no surprise that in Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s writings we can detect time being marked by schema as various as religious feasts, mechanical hours, seasonal referents, astronomical calculations, subjective feelings and by ages of the world, to list just a few. Often multiple methods of time measurement, or coexisting temporalities, occur   Edward Donald Kennedy, ‘Chronicles and Other Historical Writings’, in MWME, 1050–1500, vol. 8 (Connecticut, 1989), pp. 2597–602. 21   Rossell Hope Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, in MWME, 1050–1500, vol. 5 (Connecticut, 1989) p. 1387. 22   Jeans Leclerq, ‘The Experience of Time and Its Interpretation in the Late Middle Ages’, Studies in Medieval Culture, 9 (1978): 140. 20

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simultaneously in the literature; but this does not necessarily give any specific form of measurement more authority than another: synchronicity of traditional and modern methods of time reckoning was often accepted. We can detect the cultural specificities by noting how and where there was new impetus towards this process of synchronicity: during this period the merchants, landowners, clerks, lovers and courtiers who were exchanging letters, the monks conducting business transactions, and those who were recording current affairs, all wished to calculate date, day and time. The significance of widespread measurement and use of time units must not be underestimated. In daily life, across a range of social groups, such coexistence is increasingly evident: alongside the feast days and canonical hours, the astrolabe, followed by the astronomical compendium, became portable commodities; church bells regulating prayers and durations of civic activities were as much a part of everyday life as shadow sticks and candle clocks; and vernacular literature on the computus was a genre that greatly expanded in this period. Texts on the computus date back to Bede’s 725 The Reckoning of Time treatise, which was itself compiled by a rearrangement of an established body of Christian scientific and computistical literature.23 The computus genre grew in popularity mostly due to the endless attempts to devise calendars, especially for the observation of the moveable feast of Easter, and the ecclesiastical tradition carried on, with Bede’s treatise continuing to be copied until the sixteenth century. However, by the thirteenth century, a large number of Latin computus texts were designed solely for functional, rather than exegetical, purposes. While Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, was the first to compose a treatise on the astrolabe in English, it was not until the fifteenth that computus texts – used to calculate date, day and time for secular purposes – were regularly written in the vernacular. Laurel Means notes: by the mid-thirteenth century, users [of the computus texts] would have included a small group of literate and numerate laymen; by the mid-fifteenth century, users would have included the less educated and even semiliterate, as a consequence of a more extensive range of computus material made available for the purpose in the vernacular.24

The change in audience for the computus manuals is more evidence of a widening social interest in time measurements. Linne R. Mooney has surveyed the growth in types of literature from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries that marks an increased interest in time.25   Faith Wallis, ‘Images of Order in the Medieval Computus’, in Warren Ginsberg (ed.), Ideas of Order in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, 1990), pp. xxii–xxvi. 24   Laurel Means, ‘“For as moche as yche man may not haue the astrolabe”: Popular Middle English Variations on the Computus’, Speculum, 67 (1992): 595. 25   Linne Mooney, ‘English Almanacs from Script to Print’, in John Scattergood and 23

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There were, at first, the Psalters and Books of Hours, then, in addition, the vastly popular secular astronomical calendars of lunar and solar conjunctions appear, as do an abundance of prognostications and, eventually, printed almanacs. I propose that what is of significance is not simply the growth in time-reckoning literature, but that these works reveal multiple attitudes towards time in this period. The almanacs and Books of Hours explore how to manage activities in time, and how to use time as an ordering principle, whereas lunar and solar calendars explore how to judge propitious and fateful times, revealing different perceptions of time – as a benevolent or malevolent force – and the human ability to anticipate the effects of time. Meanwhile, prognostications and the astronomical calendars reveal attitudes towards the future state. This desire to understand the significance of measuring time is indicative of the wider social trend of what today we tend to deem a ‘modern’ consciousness; the literature advising on how to calculate time moments and durations is also concerned with the effects that such calculations have on human action and direction, providing evidence of an understanding of temporal significance. As I discuss later, the fifteenth-century poets not only reflect this understanding, but also exploit their awareness of how beneficial the calculation of time could be for human activities. For example, both Hoccleve and Lydgate use time measurement as a means to establish authorial authority in their work, while Hoccleve also uses it to emphasize the significance of money (in his petitionary poems) and Lydgate (in his occasional verse) to gain political advantage for the Lancastrian regime. A key difference, however, between medieval and modern demarcations of time is the ability to calculate hours of uniform duration. In the medieval time system, hours were described as ‘unequal’ or sometimes ‘seasonal’, the length of an hour changing every day according to the duration of light and darkness. In winter, when daylight is short, the day hours were quite short with the sixth hour designating midday; whereas the 12 night hours were quite long, again the sixth hour designating midnight. The reverse was true in summer, with the daylight hours being longer than the night hours.26 These unequal hour durations were calculated by a range of clocks, such as water clocks and astronomical clocks, which appeared after the sundial. Yet before the technology for calculating equal hours had been developed, an understanding of the significance of hours of uniform duration had already emerged. Lynn Thorndike has noted how Robertthe-Englishman, in 1271, understood the necessity of an escapement to regulate hours of uniform duration before its existence.27 In describing failed attempts to Julia Boffey (eds), Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society (Dublin, 1997), pp. 11–25. 26   Only twice a year, at the equinoxes, were the day and night hours equal. For a detailed discussion concerning measuring practices of unequal hours see Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, pp. 19–20. 27   Lynn Thorndike, ‘“Robert Anglicus”: Sphere of Sacrobosco’, Speculum, 16 (1941): 242–3.

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make a wheel move as the equinoctial cycle does, powered by a falling weight which would turn a dial through one complete revolution between sunrise and sunset, Robert-the-Englishman admits the new timepiece would be objective, precise and more accurate than any astrolabe or other astronomical instrument. The ability to conceive new dimensions of time before the technical capacity to measure it existed is indicative of a keen consciousness and understanding of time processes. The concept of equal hours predates even Robert-the-Englishman’s speculations. If we look back as far as 725, to Bede’s Reckoning of Time treatise, he remarks: ‘if we wish to make all hours equal, that is to have equinoctial [hours], we must then give fewer hours to the winter day, and more to the summer day’.28 Although different to our modern system of uniform durations of time throughout day and night, Bede nevertheless had identified the concept of uniform duration in the form of light. He also supported the division of an hour into sixty minutes and a minute into sixty seconds, by harmonizing the ancient geometry of Euclid and Pythagoras and the teachings of Aristotle with Christian thinking. The phenomena of minutes and seconds were conceived, in theory, centuries before they became practical realities. What we can conclude from this is that changes in time consciousness are slow processes; innovations in conceptions and technology owe a debt to tradition. Likewise, innovations in poetic imaginings of time also owe a debt to literary traditions, my central argument throughout this book. Context-dependent Expressions The ability to conceive of coexisting temporalities reveals an awareness of time as context dependent. In the Middle Ages, reckonings of short time periods in daily life were often dependent upon subjective measuring systems, that is, by comparing the duration of one activity with that of another, such as the time it took to recite familiar verses and prayers, to cook a certain food, or, as in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, to walk a known distance: Sith my tale which that ye shal here, Vpon oure waie wil lasten a longe while, The space as I suppose of vii. myle. (p. 16; Part I, lines 322–4)

Subjective personal measurement of time durations was not replaced, but continued to exist alongside the concept of a shared communal order. Although time durations in daily life are today usually measured by mechanical units, comparative tasks are still used (such as the length of time it takes to view a television programme,   Bede: The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis (Liverpool, 1999), p. 15.

28

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to download a piece of software or to wait for a bus).29 Likewise, in medieval letters, chronicles and literary texts, precise date and time reckonings appear alongside subjective temporal indications such as ‘whilom’, ‘I haue receyued a letter lattly’, ‘in tyme to com’, ‘thre dayes Iourn’, where duration is relative rather than precise. Context-dependent expressions relate not only to the form of the time referent employed but also to the nature of its effect. Sometimes medieval writers are open about their awareness of the benefits and effects of a narrative based on multiple forms of temporal divisions. For instance, in the mid-fifteenth century, John Capgrave, in his Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, acknowledges the organizational role of time indicators, and dwells in his preface on the need for his readers to understand his three forms of referents (the years of the Lord, the regnal years of the Roman Emperors, and of the English Kings): ‘these reules had in mynde the reder shal more parfitely vndirstand this book’.30 Earlier, in the mid-fourteenth century, John Trevisa, in his translation of the Polychronicon, expresses a similar concern for the need for time referents to act as ordering structures: if in the configuration of events we take away ‘compot and accountes’, then narration is full of ‘lewednesse and vnconnynge’.31 Trevisa’s comments mark an explicit desire to justify the presence of temporal coordinates in this new form of largescale narrative, whereas by the time Capgrave writes, he feels only the need to explain what systems of markings he will be using. In the space of a century, then, the practice of detailed time quantification had not found a uniform register, but it had become accepted without needing to justify its use as a means to contain ‘lewednesse and vnconnynge’. It is just such an explicit acknowledgment (that the narration of history is based on temporal divisions) with which Lydgate and Hoccleve engage, and is a feature explored more fully in the third and sixth chapters. Visual Narratives Visual markings on timepieces in late medieval England offer another very rich, yet thus far unexplored, discourse about temporal divisions that reveal much about the changing perceptions and expressions of time. Reading the physical instruments alongside written records revives the medieval practice of linking practical timereckoning ability with theoretical conceptions of time. In medieval catalogues   J.R. Lucas, The Measurement of Time (London, 1973), pp. 61–4, discusses how public time can be determined by personal assessments of the passage of time, and how this form of measurement has remained alongside numerical clock time. 30   John Capgrave, Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, ed. Peter J. Lucas, EETS e.s. 285 (Oxford, 1983) p. 8. 31   John Trevisa (trans.), Polychronicon, ed. Churchill Babington (London, 1865–86), vol. 2, p. 1354. 29

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we find a range of time-reckoning instruments such as astrolabes, quadrants and cylinders listed alongside written manuals instructing how to make or use these pieces.32 Clock faces can be read as texts, for they not only mark time but exhibit cultural narratives in their styles of time presentation. The water clock (also known as a clepsydra), for instance, had a wheel as a face with 15 divisions corresponding to the 15 degrees of the equinoctial cycle.33 The wheel made one complete rotation every hour. Thus, the water clock face with its 15 divisions visually represented only the duration of a single hour, whereas mechanical clock dials displayed a more extended duration, with 12 or sometimes 24 hours marked. Whereas the mechanical clock face depicted the present moment in a visual context of past and future times. Not all the mechanical clocks had hands: the number of bell chimes indicated what hour it was while the eye located that hour in relation to the numbers preceding and succeeding it on the dial. The movement from the water clock to the mechanical dial was in effect a development from what today we would regard as a timer (such as a stopwatch, measuring an interval or fragment of time) to a modern clock dial (representing time as a continuum). This is a move from an episodic to an organic representation of time. Another major change in the visual expression of time in the late medieval period was the introduction of a dial with 24 markings; this development is so obvious that, to date, it has not received any attention. Astronomical clock dials, elaborate sundials and astrolabes had two distinct cycles, each consisting of twelve hours, one for the day and the other for the night. Only with the advent of mechanical clocks could day and night be counted as one successive cycle, a clear indication of the abandonment of the concept of unequal hours. Sometimes the mechanical dial had markings only from one to 12, but significantly only one cycle is shown, not the two sets of 12 hours as had been common. The need to differentiate between variations in night and daylight hours had ended; perception of time became both more simplified and more uniform. In addition to a reduction in the number of hour markings, the presentation of the dial face itself became plainer. In contrast to mechanical faces, astronomical clocks had intricate and sometimes moving dials that related to the patterns of the cosmos, illustrating the medieval concept of the universe. This can clearly be seen   This feature of library catalogues is highlighted in an essay by Catherine Eagleton, ‘John Whethamstede, Abbot of St Albans, On the Discovery of the Liberal Arts and Their Tools: Or, Why Were Astronomical Instruments in Late-Medieval Libraries?’, Medievalia, 29 (2008): 109–36. The tradition of borrowing time-reckoning instruments in the same fashion as a written text is still evident in the seventeenth century. 33   The only known manuscript illustration of a medieval water clock is found in a thirteenth-century French Bible moralisée: Paris, c.1235–45, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodle. 270b, fol. 183v, roundels D 1-2. It depicts Hezekiah and the water clock as an illustration of the biblical passage Kings 20: 1–11. The image can be viewed online at: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/imacat/13.html. 32

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in the image of Wells Cathedral’s astronomical clock on the front cover of this book. In each of the four corners, an angel holds one of the four cardinal winds, generating the power that makes the universe operate. Around the outside of the astronomical clock are two sets of 12 markings (the two sets of unequal hours) in Roman numerals, against which a moving golden sun shows the hour. Inside there is a second ring which in Roman numerals marks the 60 minutes of an hour, with a silver star as the pointer. Inside this ring, again with Arabic numerals, the moon turns to show its age and phase. In the centre the ball and clouds represent the fixed earth. Astronomical face dials visualize time in relation to the heavenly workings of the universe, whereas the mechanical clock visualizes a manufactured equinoctial division of time. It is worth noting here that while England’s Wells Cathedral has this astronomical clock inside (originally made in 1340 by the monk Peter Lightfoot), there is also a medieval mechanical dial (dated 1392), marking only the hours one to twelve, on the outside north wall.34 The mechanical dial did not replace the astronomical dial; they coexisted: secular and divine images of time movement were depicted simultaneously. This idea of the coexistence of interpretations of God’s and man’s control of time relates to a wider debate about the coexistence of Christian and pagan conceptions of the cosmos. While the astronomical dial presented the heavenly workings of the universe, it also invoked the zodiac. John Mortimer has noted this ambiguity and the failure to resolve it: If Robert Grosseteste could in the thirteenth century be violent in his hatred of astronomers, calling their teachings “impious and profane, written at the direction of the devil”, [Hexamemeron, V. XI.I] and Chaucer gently mocking of their methods in the “Franklin’s Tale” and the “Wife of Bath’s prologue” [Canterbury Tales, V, pp. 1261–96; lines 1117–35 and pp. 697–710; III, lines 609–20] it was nonetheless also possible for Boccaccio to defy the advice of Petrarch and hold a firm belief in the influences of the stars.35

Secular and religious coexistence is evident, even within the visual decoration of a single clock: in Wells Cathedral, two knights and two Saracens on horseback above the astronomical dial temporally rotate, jousting with one another when the clock strikes, while below the clock is the permanent figure of the Risen Lord. Meanwhile, such an insistence on the coexistence of the temporal and permanent can also be seen with the mechanical clock, as while the moving hand marks the passing of time, there is the permanent motto above the dial: nequid pereat – ‘let   Mike Bundock and Chris McKay, James W. Benson of Ludgate Hill, Turret Clock Makers (Kent, 2002), p. 10. Originally this had a dial marked in twenty-four hours with a single hand, but this was replaced in the nineteenth century with a dial that has twelve markings and two hands. 35   John Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005), p. 211. 34

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nothing perish’. In none of the medieval records of production and maintenance of clocks (English or European) have I found evidence of concern that the visual markings of time on mechanical dials could elevate consciousness of the time of the world (the temporal) to supersede the timelessness (the permanence) of God’s plan, which had been so clearly evident in the heavenly workings of the universe as depicted on the astronomical dials. Such a combination of religious and secular life can also be noted in the common location of English parish clocks. There are a few examples of the clock acting as a status symbol of wealth, for instance at Merton College, Oxford; at the residences of Edward III in London, Kent, Sheen and Langley; and at a manorial court in Devonshire.36 However, most fourteenth- and fifteenth-century records of English clocks come primarily from churchwarden accounts, as well as from sacrists’ fabric and patent rolls, cathedral statutes and monastery annals. During the late medieval period, the church was often the only stone building in the parish able to support a public clock, for these clocks usually ranged from five to hundreds of cubic feet in volume. As R.N. Swanson points out, the church served not only as a place of religious instruction but also as a site for trade, for the settlement of disputes, for teaching and administering the law: ‘the multiple uses for the church account for a rather secular approach to the buildings’.37 A comparison of the simplified mechanical clock dial with the astronomical clock face can tell us much about changing attitudes towards time. A precedent had already been set with the development and use of the sundial (they date back to at least the second century bc). Sundials at first had detailed markings for calculating the time, but between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, complex dialling had become an artistic hobby. For instance, a gilt brass octagonal polyhedral dial made for Cardinal Woolsey in the early sixteenth century, accommodating nine dials, each of which is divided into unequal hours with the solstices and equinoxes marked, demonstrates how the sundial had become an expensive and ornate showpiece rather than a merely practical instrument.38 Those sundials in the later period that were functional had calibrations not simply to indicate day hours, but typically had a sandstone dial with only two gnomons, showing priests and sacristans the hours

  For a discussion about the clocks commissioned by Edward III see R. Allen Brown, ‘King Edward’s Clocks’, The Antiquaries Journal, 39 (1959): 283–6. 37   R.N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), p. 258. 38   This dial has been attributed to Nicolaus Kratzer (1486–1550) who came from England to Munich as an astronomer and horologer to Henry VIII. The four-sided base has Wolsey’s arms, the arms of York Minster, and on two sides a cardinal’s hat. It is now held in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. Inventory no. 54054. EPACT record 407. Image accessible online at: http://emu.mhs.ox.ac.uk/Display.php?irn=2978&QueryPage=i ndex.php. 36

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of services and prayers.39 The reduction in calibrations on these dials is a reflection of what time indication was valued for. Similarly, the markings on the mechanical dial tell a story about how time was valued. Mechanical clock faces, in contrast to the astronomical dials of cosmic representations, simply mark the hours – a signal that there was a desire solely for equinoctial hours. The need for astronomical markings to work out moveable feasts and the positions of the heavenly bodies was no longer the dominating function of public time reckoning. Another form of visual time reckoning that yields illuminating insights into medieval representations of time is the palm of the hand. A combination of the human hand and the sun’s shadow provided another method for computing time. A pointer, for instance, held between the thumb and index finger at a particular angle casts a shadow on part of the palm or finger tips, thus determining the hour of day. This method of time reckoning (imagining a grid of points on the inside of the hand) highlights the practice of visual mnemonics. The art of mnemonics had reached an advanced stage by the Late Middle Ages, and medieval texts on the computus have many instructions about how to create a variety of mnemonic aids.40 The context of mnemonic usage can tell us much about medieval attitudes towards time. Poetic verse, for instance, often accompanies mnemonic formulas; perhaps the best-known medieval lines remain: Thirty dayes hath November, April, June, and September; Of xxviii is but oon, And all the remenaunt xxx and I.41

It is precisely because of its style – of the simple rhyme and rhythm – that this computation of the days in the months has endured. The key feature of practical, technical or computational writings is the poetic expressions that classify them as lyrics. For evidence of this common practice one only has to turn to Thorndike’s collection in ‘Unde versus’, which lists a large number of computist texts, from the time of Bede to Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. All of these texts employ simple rhyming verses (versus memorialis) and illustrations of the hand (manus memorialis) as artificial loci memory devices.42 The effect is to change what could be a technical difficulty – such as the computation of Easter – into a memorable formula. For example:   One example of a pendant sundial of this period can be seen in the Museum of History of Science, Oxford. Inventory no. 38841. EPACT record 388. Image accessible online at: http://emu.mhs.ox.ac.uk/Display.php?irn=3245&QueryPage=. 40   See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990). 41   Anon., ‘Thirty dayes hath November’, in Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (eds), Middle English Lyrics (New York, 1974), p. 109, no. 106. 42   Lynn Thorndike, ‘Unde versus’, Traditio, 11 (1995): 163. 39

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In Merche, after the first C, Loke the prime wherever he be; The third Sonday, full iwisse, Ester day trewly it is. And if the prime on the Sonday be, Rekene that Sonday for one of the three.43

The rhyme and rhythm indicates the use of mnemonics and chanting verse as an educative tool by a wide audience who relied on oral transmission of the information. The use of poetic phrases as an ordering tool of social control can also be seen in the written records, in the almanac verses and Books of Hours. These employ rhymes of computations as a means to order secular activities in given months and around a consciousness of religious moments (hours). The use of simple verse in these works promotes communication and instillation of both the methods of reckoning time and the ways to use it. Time Regulation Desire to regulate the passage of time is also a marked feature in the religious field. In the fourteenth century there appeared a new genre of literature about how time should be managed, with texts, such as the Horologium Sapientiae, Horologium passionis, Cordis religiosorum and Devotionis circa vitam Christi, instructing how to manage mystical clocks. Leclerq observes that ‘at the very moment when time became mechanized and secularized, the mystics set about a new spiritualisation of it’.44 Aveni concludes: ‘religious demands, more than the desire for quantitative science, played a major role in the increased precision of timekeeping’.45 That quantitative technologies should have been so warmly embraced was not a given, for centuries earlier the introduction of the sundial to ancient Rome provoked the following hostile response to the ‘unnatural’ division of the day: The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours. Confound him, too, 43   ‘Thirty dayes hath November’, in Luria and Hoffman (eds), Middle English Lyrics, p. 110. This rhyme means that Easter can be calculated if you count the third Sunday after the first new moon (determined after the moon is at 100 degrees) in March and if the first new moon is on a Sunday, begin counting that day as the first of three Sundays. 44   Leclerq, ‘The Experience of Time and Its Interpretation in the Late Middle Ages’, 146. 45   Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time (New York, 1995), p. 92. See also J.D. North, ‘Monasticism and the First Mechanical Clocks’, in J.T. Fraser and N. Lawrence (eds), The Study of Time II (New York, 1975), pp. 381–98.

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Who in this place set up a sundial, To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces! When I was a boy, My belly was my sundial – one surer, Truer, and more accurate than any of them This dial told me when ’twas proper time To go to dinner, when I ought to eat; But nowadays, why even when I have, I can’t fall to unless the sun gives leave. The town’s so full of these confounded dials.46

By contrast, in the late medieval period there can be no doubt that mechanical time regulation – of both night and day – was perceived by the Church as an opportunity to achieve order in daily life. For example, an Ordinance issued in 1302 by Bishop Orford of Ely Abbey, Cambridgeshire, indicates that perfect time regulation was desirable as a means to enable the monks to assemble by night and day: Surgat conventus horis congruis nocturnes diurnis per orelogium quod decens et securum in ecclesia habere precipimus et per monachum circumspectum salvo custodire pro diurnis officiis adimplendis quibis expletis non anticipando tempus nec minus prorogando.47

The inversion of the phrase ‘day and night’ to ‘night and day’ is, I suggest, significant because it deliberately emphasizes the ability to assemble at manufactured timeregulated instances at night. The Church, however, as Aveni seems to suggest, was not interested in time quantification for solely religious purposes. It is commonly acknowledged that there was not a sudden transformation from the calculations of holy days and Christian moments of history to the urban dwellers’ secularized quantification of time for money, just as there was no sudden change from astronomical to mechanical clocks. Time regulation was used by the Church for secular purposes. A 1306 record of the settlement of a dispute between the Bishop of Salisbury and the citizens of Sarum reveals that the chime of the cathedral clock regulated the start of market trading.48 The interchange of spiritual needs and market forces was the impetus that enabled the accommodation of both coexistence and tension between religious and secular perceptions of time management. A contemporary consciousness of the multiple functions of time within the one society can clearly be seen in the well-known literary allegory of the founding of a monastery, ‘The 46   From the Roman play Boetia, attributed to Plautus, qtd in David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 1983) pp. 15–16; for details of translation see Landes, p. 292. 47   Translated by Beeson, English Church Clocks, p. 9. 48   Cited by Beeson, English Church Clocks, p. 11 (original not provided).

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Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, written circa 1380. Attention is drawn to the practical usefulness of a public clock in a city: ther es orloges in towne that wakyns men to ryse to bodily trauayle, & that es the seke; and ther es orloges in the cete that wakynnes the marchauntes to wende a-bowte thaire marchandyce, that es the wynde that blawes daye. And ther es orloges in religion that of contemplacion.49

Yet it is worth recalling the expression of a desire to control the use of time (in the 1302 Ordinance) and the mention of a dispute (in the 1306 record); there clearly existed a degree of uneasy duality between secular and theological management of time. There may be recognition in the above passage of the diversity and usefulness of the functions of a clock, but paradoxically the passage continues with the objection: ofte it falles in relegion, be-fore that the Orloge falles or any belles rynges, Goddes gostely seruandes are lange wakenede before … And why rose thay so arely & so tymly? Witterly for the orloge of lufe … had wakened tham be-fore the tyme that the handmade orloge felle.50

Secular markings of time have no equal to the timely regulation of the natural forces controlled by God. As with the simultaneous existence of mechanical and astronomical dials in the same building, coexistence of religious and secular consciousness in fifteenthcentury verse dealing with contemporary conditions is commonplace. Robbins cites the examples of poems on the Evils of the Age and commemorations of kings, which would appear to be secular in their concerns though religious attitudes tend to prevail, while the poems that one would expect to be theological, such as those attacking the friars or Lollards, are often more political than religious.51 As is common with many medieval works, this blurring of religious and secular lines is a key thematic feature throughout Hoccleve and Lydgate’s verse, from the exemplary narratives through to the occasional pieces. My interest lies in observing how this fusion of religious and secular is reflected or manipulated in the linguistic register of expressions about time. Understanding the potential for ambiguity as well as harmony in the alternations between the discourse of eternity (time’s antithesis) and the progressive, subtle rhythms of sequential   Robert Thornton, ‘The Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, in Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, ed. George P. Perry, EETS o.s. 26 (London, 1914), p. 60. 50   Thornton, ‘The Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, p. 60. 51   For a fuller discussion see Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 1387. For an interesting discussion of Lydgate’s moral but pointedly secular distaste for the Lollards’ attack of the Holy Church, and specifically his own Benedictine abbey, see Mortimer, Fall of Princes, pp. 95–152. 49

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connections is a central cultural discourse that I shall use later when considering these poets’ writings. The above survey reveals a number of key cultural narratives of time; not only is there a development in the precision and range of vernacular expressions of time measurement, but perhaps more significantly there is also an interest in the ambiguities and opportunities offered by an increased focus on temporal specificity. The range of coexisting temporal markers does not represent merely a confusing plethora; rather, their existence indicates a desire to understand time reckonings, to identify and define one’s self within temporal boundaries, and to exploit time as tool of organization and division while using it as an accumulative and progressive rhythm. Context dependency is a characteristic feature of fifteenthcentury cultural narratives of time and perhaps this can be seen more clearly in the range of visualizations that illuminate social attitudes to time – to its conception, its use and its regulation. Literary Imaginings A consideration of cultural narratives of time in the mundane records of the Church, the Court and those probably best described as ‘pragmatically literate’ provides valuable insight into the culturally specific contexts within which literary writers were working. It also raises some interesting questions: do these cultural narratives of time offer new ways to read literary expressions? Can new glosses be given of familiar lines? Do they support the hypothesis that the methods of comprehending time in the fourteenth century amalgamated with new methods in the fifteenth? Most importantly of all, do literary writers merely imitate (under the influence of other factors), or do they reconfigure social perceptions through their skills of narration? Are time markings to be considered aesthetic tools of expression, divorced from the context of their production and with no cultural specificity, or do literary writers play a more active role in shaping and developing social perceptions? It must be repeated that this study is not an attempt to define formulaic treatments of time in Middle English literature, nor does it intend to suggest the fallacy of the constant artist, always conscious of the significance of their choice and use of time expressions. What is of particular interest, however, is the extent to which it is possible to estimate the ways in which diverse imaginings of time had an impact on, and were the product of, the intellectual and cultural climate of the period. To begin with, it is evident that the vagueness of the new vernacular terms for describing timepieces was exploited by the literary imagination. The full significance of the indefinite nature of ‘horologium’ (which came to indicate any form of timepiece) can clearly be seen in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. When a ‘clokke or an abbey orlogge’ is mentioned, the first reference is obviously to a bell clock (due to the specific term ‘clokke’), but it is impossible to state if the ‘abbey

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orlogge’ is a mechanical clock or some other form of timepiece.52 Potentially, it is of great significance that either the recently invented bell clock or any form of man-made timepiece is indicated at this point in the narrative. The natural method of telling time – the cock’s crow – is hailed in the most exaggerated of terms: Wel sikerer was his crowyng in his logge Thanne is a clokke or an abbey orlogge. By nature he knew ech ascencioun Of equynoxial in thilke toun; For whan degrees fifteen weren ascended, Than crew he that it myghte nat been amended. (pp. 253–4; lines 2853–9)

This passage raises Chauntecleer’s attributes so that his comical downfall (caused by pride) is more dramatic. Clocks are rejected as inferior to a cock who claims for himself supremacy above everyone and everything else, but who, in so doing, falls in comical disgrace, leaving us to chuckle over the idea that a cock’s crow could be superior to manufactured time regulation. If indeed Chaucer is referring to the newest forms of time regulators – possibly the mechanical as well as the bell clocks – it might just be that in revealing Chauntecleer’s misplaced sense of superiority, the poet confirms a place for latent cultural pride in the newest time regulators over natural markers of time.53 In literary imaginings, an understanding of the modernizing influences of increased precision in time regulation is apparent. A study of subliminal markings of time reveals the ways in which precision of expression plays a central and vital role in the cultural specificities of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century narratives. What differs across the centuries is the range of referents available (due to technological advances) for the expression of quantitative precision. One example can be found in Lydgate’s fifteenth-century pseudo-historical poem the Troy Book: as the suspense grows just before Jason begins his quest for the Golden Fleece, a quantified unit marks the time: ‘vpon the hour whan the clok is nyne’.54 Lydgate’s choice of a precise time marking, rather than the traditional marker of the cock’s   Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1987), line 2854. All references to Chaucer are to the Riverside edition. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. 53   Daniel J. Ransom provides a detailed examination of Chaucer’s ‘imprecise’ time markers, successfully demonstrating how Chaucer embraces ambiguities in terms of reference for moments such as sunrise, day midday, or second in such a way that he uses modes of time measure with reliable precision. ‘Imprecise Chaucer’, Chaucer Review, 43 (2009): 376–99. 54   John Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103 and 106 (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 107; Bk I, line 3204. All references to Troy Book are to this edition. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. 52

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crow, enhances his ability to manage and convey narrative suspense, through precise mapping of events in time. However, the advent of mechanical time regulation was not the initiator of a desire to create precise time measurements; it was simply a new means by which to effect precision. Another example can be found in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Shipman’s Tale, where the character Daun John demarcates the precise time by a ‘chylinder’ rather than by the mechanical hour. The cultural – or periodic – specificity lies in the nature and form that the precision takes. However, this desire for precision in expression is not affiliated only with quantitative time measuring methods. Even where time is perceived by more subjective means, as relative rather than empirical, the impulse for precision is still evidently used for literary effect. For example, in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, astrological unequal hours detail the exact time of the prayers of Palamon – ‘although it nere nat day by houres two’ (p. 55; line 2211); of Emily – ‘the thridde houre inequal that Palamon, / bigan to Venus temple for to gon’ (p. 55; line 2272); and of Arcite – ‘the nexte houre of Mars folwynge this’ (p. 57; line 2367). These hours are specified in order to time the prayers to coincide with the hour governed by Venus (in Palamon’s case), Diana (in Emily’s) and Mars (in Arcite’s), thus also indicating the pagan deities that influence and inform the actions of these characters. Yet, in addition, there is obviously a keen literary consciousness at work in the use of specific astrological hours and the counting of hours in order to chart the activities of the characters. It enables Chaucer to give a sense of the continuity of time (and therefore action), a sense of sequence (and therefore causal connections), and a sense of quick progression (and therefore of the pace of narrative development). The result is not a digression in the narrative, which prayer, by virtue of its association with retreat from this world, can create; rather the prayers, located in a specific time, become a central part of the action. Further evidence of an awareness of the art in using context-dependent temporal referents can be found in the Troy Book. When Lydgate attempts to convey a dream world (Paris’s vision of Mercury in Book One), he opts for a referent – the traditional cock’s crow – that conveys a sense of the passage of time without imposing the kind of stark reality that the precision of clock time may have given: ‘ther stood a cok, / singyng his houris trewe as any clok’ (pp. 215– 16; Bk I, lines 2475–6). Lydgate is conscious of the significance of the nature of time referents: here in the dream vision he selects the cock, whereas in the earlier example of Jason about to embark on his quest, he chooses the clock. Lydgate draws attention to the differences in narrative context and pace – the dream or the quest – through his choice of method used to express the passage of time. These examples from The Canterbury Tales and the Troy Book are clear evidence not simply of knowledge of time measurements, but of consciousness of the art in using time markings. The de casibus genre – modern examples of falls of princes – provides us with more evidence of the late medieval taste for topical specificity. This genre was used by Boccaccio and his imitator Chaucer, and, in the fifteenth century,

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by Premierfeit and Lydgate. Nicholas Perkins has remarked on how these poems were ‘open to an indefinite process of revision and updating … [thus] bringing the significance of legendary falls to the attention of current rulers’ and producing a ‘sense of transferred contemporaneity’.55 One example of an advisory poem of the de casibus genre is Lydgate’s On the Sodein Fall of Princes in Oure Dayes, a close reading of which clearly illustrates the keen sense of ‘transferred contemporaneity’ that is the trademark of this genre. The verse involves a quick excursion (seven lines each) into the reign of ‘certain Princes of Fraunce and Englande nowe late in oure dayes’,56 specifically Edward II, Richard II, Charles of France, and the Dukes of Orleans, Gloucester, Burgundy and Ireland. In the Fall of Princes (the poem that the Sodein Fall updates), Lydgate produced a narrative of ‘the disasters that befell the famous and the powerful in remote times and places’ in order to offer advice on the current need for good governance.57 The Sodein Fall takes the theme of contemporary relevance one step further by using subject matter not from the distant past but from living memory, making it more topical, like the later sixteenth-century text The Mirror for Magistrates. The function of this genre is to deny historical specificity in favour of a demonstration of the ‘universal’ norms of good behaviour and contingency of Fortune with topical referents. The success or otherwise of these overt strategies of transferred contemporaneity comes under close scrutiny in my discussion of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (Chapter 3) and in its comparison with Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (Chapter 5). The attitudes and perceptions engineered and promoted by the visual narratives on the chronometers discussed earlier play dynamic roles in literary imaginings, prompting us to ask if the writers reconfigured them or merely echoed them. There is one example where the visual markings on the mechanical clock dial literally function as the structural divisions in the text: in Heinrich Suso’s German mystical treatise Horologium Sapientiae the visual manifestation of secular, rather than liturgical, time division serves as the ordering principle.58 It is divided into 24 chapters, symbolizing the hours of an imagined celestial clock. Although such physical ‘mechanical’ division was not a common feature in medieval literature, Heinrich’s treatise had an extensive readership that included both Hoccleve and   Nicholas Perkins, ‘Musing on Mutability: A Poem in the Welles Anthology and Hoccleve’s The Regiment of Princes’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 50 (1999): 493, 498. 56   The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part II, ed. H.N. MacCracken, EETS o.s. 192 (1934, repr., Woodbridge, 1997), p. 660; 37, title. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. 57   John Thompson, ‘Reading Lydgate in Post-Reformation England’, in A.J. Minnis (ed.), Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 184. 58   Heinrich Seuses, Horologium Sapientiae, ed. P. Kunzle (Freiburg, 1977), pp. 250–255, has noted some 233 complete extant copies, 88 lost copies and 150 fragments. Vernacular translations, including English, were made throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 55

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Lydgate. Hoccleve translated from the Horologium Sapientiae for his ‘Learn to Die’ treatise, while Lydgate’s poem ‘Death’s Warning’ was read in conjunction with Suso’s text in three manuscripts.59 Suso’s decision to create twenty-four sections could be interpreted as an indication of an increased consciousness of the orderly, sequential structure offered by manufactured time regulation. Such a division rejects the common practice of structuring literary works by systems of ages that were based on a more fragmented divine time scheme like that found, for example, in the Polychronicon. Markers for daily living routines changed from the canonical hours to striking clock hours; there was a conceptual shift in the understanding of time, from time as a divisional marker to its counting, a process that is both cumulative and durational. The progression from water clocks and unequal hour clocks to the twenty-four hour mechanical dial – a visual move from fragments and stark alternations in time to a more organic perception of it – is also witnessed in written records from an earlier period. They show the development of time markers, from those employed as divisional structures to the use of a variety of time’s rhythms to create narrative sequences and coherence. Michael Swanton has noted how in Anglo-Saxon chronicles annalists are ‘not concerned with historical perspective, and will rarely relate one event to another’ but that increasingly, towards the twelfth century, there are whole narrative sequences in which ‘entries are fuller, syntactically more complex, and occasionally linked one with another’.60 Over the centuries, the general development – from annal listing through fragmented narration in the chronicles to the large-scale pseudo-historical narratives of Hoccleve and Lydgate – signals a wider change in consciousness of time in this period. Julia Boffey has also noted implicit evidence of this dimension of temporal consciousness in fifteenth-century letters, in which a ‘sense of individuals confused or uncertain about the significance of events around them’ can be noted. Such, for example, is William Cely’s 1484 speculation to his brothers: ‘as for Flaunders, wheder wee schall hawe warr or peese I cannot seye as yett’.61 There is recognition that the present moment is not a separate, unconnected interval of time but a moment that 59   See Benjamin P. Kurtz, ‘The Source of Occleve’s Lerne to Dye’, Modern Language Notes, 38 (1923): 337–40 and Steven Rozenski, ‘“Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour”: Hoccleve’s Amplification of the Imagery of Henry Suso’s Ars Moriendi’, Parergon, 25 (2008): 1–16, for a discussion of Hoccleve’s use of this source. The three manuscripts are: Harley 1706 (nos. 11, 12); Douce 322; and University Library Cambridge Ff. v. 45. 60   The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, trans. and ed. Michael Swanton (London, 2000), pp. xvi–xvii. For a discussion of how time is plotted in annals and should be read as a syntactical whole, rather than as fragmented entries, see Sarah Foot, ‘Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chronicles’, in Nancy Partner (ed.), Writing Medieval History (London, 2005), pp. 88–108. 61   William Cely, ‘9th May 1484’, qtd by Julia Boffey, ‘Middle English Lives’, in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999), p. 614.

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has significance, albeit confused or uncertain, in relation to events around it. That is to say, it is a moment in an ongoing process, whether that process turns out to be ‘warr or peese’. In chapters 2, 3 and 4, I examine historical narratives, usually considered to have fragmented structures, in relation to the role played by causal connections that create not only narrative continuity in the texts but also often the simultaneous existence of present, past and future. The increasing simplification of the markings on sundials and equinoctial dials was reflected by the use of less complicated temporal coordinates in the literature of the period. Chaucer’s host in the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, for example, takes some fourteen lines to convert shadow length into artificial time (p. 87; lines 1–14), while at the start of the Parson’s prologue, it takes eleven lines for the time to be given (calculated by solar and lunar coordinates).62 By contrast, Lydgate, writing some 35 years later, simply states: For by the dyal the hour thei gan to mark, That Phebus southward was reised in his arke So highe alofte that it drowe to noon. (Troy Book, p. 57; Bk I, lines 1517–19)

In the majority of cases, astronomical reckonings by Lydgate last only a couple of lines and simply indicate the position of the planet/star/sun – its compass point, altitude degrees or its meridian point.63 The significance of this increased economy of expression (not an attribute that Lydgate is usually credited with) lies in the fact that within only a matter of decades, astronomical reckonings were a normal, regular feature of vernacular English. As noted earlier, complex computational formulas were presented in lyric form to aid easy recollection. Lydgate, in circa 1425, composed such a verse calendar in which he prays: ‘kepe me euer from al confuyson’.64 Like many others of the period, his calendar attempts to make sense of the perpetual calendar. One manuscript colophon indicates that it was made ‘aftir the forme of a compote manuelle’.65 Lydgate provides not only the Easter wheel and the numerical aides of the Nones, Ides and Kalends with which to calculate any combination of day,   In this instance, Chaucer mistakes Libra as the moon’s exaltation, when it should be Saturn. Although Siegfried Wenzel suggests this may be a matter of poetic licence to enable a symbol of justice to be included. See The Riverside Chaucer, p. 955. 63   There are a few notable exceptions to this in the prologues of the Troy Book and Siege of Thebes, for example. These are examined in later chapters. 64   John Lydgate, ‘A Kalendare’, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part I, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 (1911; Oxford, 1962), p. 363. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. MacCracken notes that the verse calendar was ‘probably only revamped by Lydgate, and included here as doubtful’ (p. 363, n. 1). While authorship may be disputed, this does not affect the reason for its inclusion in this study. 65   Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 322, fol. 8v; qtd in Braswell, p. 151. 62

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date and month; he also marks the Saint and feast days of importance. As Pearsall remarks, ‘it was probably one of Bury’s claims to distinction that it had on the premises a monk who could versify anything, even this’.66 It is in the process of versifying these dates and days that Lydgate reveals his desire to understand the significance of these moments in time: he repeatedly emphasizes how he wants to ‘trist to lerne’ (line 50) how to live virtuously while ‘tyme passith’ (line 190), in the course of the changing nature (months) of time. Equally, in the field of literature the lyrical idiom plays a key role in imaginings of time; there is a wealth of secular love and religious lyrics that employ not the sophisticated expressions that were becoming available, but simple, natural time indicators. Lyrics often engage straightforward markers of seasonal change and the alternation between day and night without any elaborate computations; for example: Mirie it is while summer ilast With fugheles song – Oc nu necheth windes blast And wheder strong. Ey! ey! what this nicht is long, And ich wid wel michel wrong Soregh and murne and fast.67

The opening mood – ‘mirie it is, while summer ilast, / with fugheles song’ – is expressed in the conditional present tense, which is retained in the next lines, although the subject – summer – changes to winter. Transformations of emotions are associated with the changing seasons. The structure is a simple sequence of events but the associated change of mood, from temporal pleasure to woeful loss, creates an awareness of time patterns before and after loss. The summer is pleasant ‘while’ it lasts, the winter night an unpleasant battle of natural elements, but the cycle of time brings day after night even if the pleasant summer day lasts only for a while. The speaker’s mood is associated not only with the process of change between the seasons but also with the differences between the seasons. Summer is a bird’s song, winter the howling wind; summer is associated with a physical image whereas winter has the ethereal image of ‘necheth windes blast, / and weder strong’. The definition of the wintry state is progressed with a comment on the intolerable endurance of it – ‘Ey! ey! what this night is long!’ – and concludes with an exclamation of the speaker’s ‘soregh and murne and fast’. The progression from images with specific resonances of the summer’s birdsong to images of tempestuous weather creates an external manifestation of the speaker’s transition from yesterday’s pleasure to a night of unspecified woe. This   Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), p. 257.   Anon., ‘Woldes blisse’, in Luria and Hoffman (eds), Middle English Lyrics, p. 7,

66 67

no. 5.

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Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse

sophisticated awareness of the patterning of, and associations with, temporal states is regularly employed in lyrics, while a simplicity of expression and structure conveys mood impressions that can be shared by all; thus the possibilities for multiple interpretations (of what the lyric addresses) are created. In chapters 5 and 6, I investigate the ways in which expressions of time raise awareness of the temporal nature of interpretation in Hoccleve’s work. However, we also need to bear in mind the kind of heightened awareness of causal connections typically found in the annals, large-scale historical narratives and fifteenth-century letters discussed earlier, for in addition to traditional, stark alternations brought about by the twelve-hour cycle, it is possible to find cumulative lengths of time in Middle English texts – coexisting temporalities with subtle rhythms of growth and sequential connections. Acknowledging the lack of a distinction between ‘technical’ and ‘literary’ registers enables us to understand that the great interest literary writers were taking in the language of time reckoning in the medieval period. Begona Crespo Garcia observes that ‘the re-emergence of the vernacular was accompanied by the functional specialisation of language according to the different areas of knowledge that were springing up under the cultural trends of the period’.68 It was not eminent astrologers who felt the need to devise a word in the vernacular to describe the art of time reckoning. According to the Middle English Dictionary (MED), Lydgate first introduced the word ‘computacioun’ to the English vernacular in the Troy Book (at line 2774). The MED lists ten subsequent uses of the word – by Bokenham, Capgrave, Higden and Lydgate (all vernacular writers with an interest in historical writing) – ranging across lunar, ecclesiastical, regnal and age-scheme reckonings.69 Many writers of the period were interested in horological terminology: Gower in the technical use of the unit of a ‘minut’; Higden in the term ‘meridian’; and Capgrave in the word ‘annotacion’, meaning ‘notation or reckoning of time’, with which he is credited for introducing in his preface to Abbreuiacion of Chronicles.70 While still a geometric theory, the smallest divisions of time are employed by Lydgate in his calculation of the fate of Edippus: The Root ytaken at the ascendent Trewly sought out be mynut and degree The silfe houre of his natyvyte, 68   Begona Crespo Garcia, ‘The Scientific Register in the History of English: a Corpusbased Study’, Studia Neophilologica, 76 (2004): 125. 69   Middle English Dictionary, 2nd ed., gen. eds Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, 1956–2001), p. 478. Derek Pearsall believes that Lydgate deserves special attention for his introduction of new words into English, for ‘what is more important is not that he used words first but that he used new and rare words over and over again, embedding them forever in the language’ (‘Lydgate as Innovator’, Modern Language Quarterly, 53 [1992]: 7). 70   MED, p. 514 (Gower); p. 343 (Higden); p. 289 (Capgrave).

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Not forэete the heuenly mansiouns, First by Secoundes tiers and eke quartes. (Siege of Thebes, p. 18; Part I, lines 370–74)

Literary imaginings of time therefore include technical as well as creative expressions: ‘for ther is so gret diversite / in Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge’.71 Throughout his literary texts Chaucer displays a keen artistic interest not simply in using expressions of time but of actually understanding the significance of time measurements (such as the sky map of Troilus’s upward ascent into the heavenly spheres that occurs at the end of Troilus and Criseyde).72 J.D. North has demonstrated that it is possible to trace many ‘set styles of thinking’ concerning astronomical reckonings across all of Chaucer’s poetry, but points out that such instances are not merely pedantically formulaic, for what ‘emerges [is] an ingenious schemer, moved by a love of symmetry … a meticulous calculator’.73 This extensive knowledge of the cosmos has led some to contend for his authorship of the Equatorie of the Planetis, a translation of a Latin work derived from an Arab text, which describes how to build and use a planetary equatorium to calculate planetary orbs and positions; but what is certain is that he composed the Treatise on the Astrolabe.74 In his Treatise on the Astrolabe, Chaucer’s interest in and use of horological terminology suggests that this text is much more than a technical guide; it demonstrates an awareness of the aesthetic and cultural significance of having command of such a technical register of expression. His claim in the Treatise to be merely a humble compilator, as is the case with many of the narrative guises that Chaucer adopts in his work, should be treated with some caution. Could he perhaps be engaged in a broader agenda of cultural translation and the construction of literary identity?75 After all, Chaucer was the first to translate into   Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, p. 584; Bk V, lines 1793–6.   Karen Smyth, ‘Reassessing Chaucer’s Cosmological Discourse in Troilus and

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Criseyde’, Fifteenth-century Studies, 32 (2007): 150–63. 73   J.D. North, Chaucer’s Universe, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1988), p. ix. 74   The Equatorie of the Planetis was discovered in 1952, and it shares very similar language and continues many of the ideas that are in The Treatise of the Astrolabe. For a discussion of the arguments for and against Chaucer’s authorship, see Jennifer Arch, ‘A Case against Chaucer’s Authorship of the Equatorie of the Planetis’, Chaucer Review, 40 (2005): 59–79. See also Kari Anne Rand Schmidt, The Authorship of the Equatorie of the Planetis (Cambridge, 1993). 75   The majority of critical studies to date have been interested in Chaucer’s technical competencies, on the nature of fourteenth-century ‘science’, and in the potential readership of his work. One study stands out, and aligns with my interests in Chaucer’s literary voice in his Treatise, and that is the way in which Jenna Mead explores ‘the cultural valency of astrology’, producing a more ‘sophisticated analysis of the vernacular context of Chaucer’s text’. ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe’, Literature Compass, 3 (2006): 973.

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a more accessible language the rules of time reckoning, just as the twelfth-century scholar Adelard of Bath established his reputation by making a similar linguistic translation (he was the first to translate a treatise on the abacus from Arabic into Latin).76 While Chaucer’s Treatise acts as an authoritative guide on how to use the astrolabe, and the meticulous calculations in his poetry testify to his competency in this field, it is the issue of literary authority, rather than mathematical proposition, which seems to be at stake when his text is examined alongside Adelard of Bath’s treatise. Both authors, for example, seem keen to disclaim invention, Adelard writing in his preface, ‘it was a certain great man that discovered all my ideas, not I’, and Chaucer stating, ‘I ne usurpe not to have founded this werk of my labour or of myn engyn. I n’am but a lewd compilator’.77 But revealingly, Adelard qualifies his disclaimer by adding: ‘the present generation has this ingrained weakness that it thinks that nothing discovered by the moderns is worthy to be received – the result of this is that if I wanted to publish anything of my own invention I should attribute it to someone else’.78 While Chaucer’s treatise draws heavily on work ascribed to Massahalla, whose propositions and conclusions can be found in numerous fourteenth-century Latin astronomical treatises, a number of recent critical studies have argued that some of the contents of Chaucer’s treatise have no obvious source.79 Chaucer disclaims invention in his other works by citing unknown sources, such as in Troilus and Criseyde, where he gives Lollius as his authority. Chaucer’s Treatise contains other intriguing parallels with Adelard’s: Chaucer’s is addressed to his young son, Adelard’s to his young nephew; in composing their treatises Chaucer had ‘condescendith to the rightfulle praiers of his friend’, while Adelard had ‘yielded to the request of my friends’.80 Whether or not Chaucer knew about Adelard’s treatise, the similarities between these two texts provides, in microcosm, a history of time-reckoning methods transmitted from the Arabic   Adelard of Bath also wrote about the astrolabe, but Chaucer’s authorizing strategies discussed above share more in common with Adelard’s treatise on the abacus. That such a comparison can be made between the two is perhaps not surprising, as time reckoning is based on the principles of calculation. Chaucer, in his treatise, was the first writer to discuss in English the terms ‘calcule’ and ‘calculer’. Arabic numerals can be found on astrolabes, whereas English mechanical clocks used Roman numerals, perhaps an indication of the independent development of time measurement, from the thirteenth century on, in Western Europe. 77   Adelard of Bath, Conversations with his Nephew: On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and on Birds, ed. and trans. Charles Burnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. 83. 78   Adelard of Bath, p. 83. 79   This view was first seriously considered by Carol Lipson, ‘“I n’am but a Lewd Compilator”: Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe as Translation’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 84 (1983): 192–200. 80   Chaucer, Treatise, p. 662 and Adelard, p. 91. 76

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world to Western Europe via Latin, which was then translated into the new and unstable vernacular English, and presented either through simple rhyming and rhythmical phrases in technical texts, or through the use of colloquial time markings in literary texts. What Chaucer’s Treatise draws attention to is the great interest that medieval literary writers were taking in the language of time reckoning. The innovation of introducing technical terms to vernacular writings is, of course, noteworthy, but as A.C. Spearing notes with regard to Chaucer’s use of these terms, it is the fusion of scientific astronomy and classical mythology transformed into an elevated poetic style that is the real achievement.81 For example, Chaucer ‘transfers the word ‘orizonte’ from scientific contexts (such as his own Treatise on the Astrolabe) to put it to poetic use: ‘and whiten gan the orisonte shene’ (Troilus and Criseyde, V. 276). Lydgate’s later use of the word ‘merydyen’ illustrates the progression of this process of linguistic adaptation: whan Phebus passyd was merydyen And fro the south westward gan hym drawe, His gylte tressys to bathen in the wawe see. (Siege of Thebes, p. 174; Part III, lines 4256–8)82

A promising trend has emerged in recent decades of a desire to investigate the effect of literary writers’ scientific knowledge on the rhetorical tendencies in their poetry.83 Another related development in recent scholarship is the recognition of the medieval cosmos, not merely as a pseudo-scientific conception, but as a source of inspiration and innovation for a range of medieval poets, chroniclers and philosophers in their imaginings about religion and the nature of humanity: in [the medieval cosmos] exotic intermixing of the spiritual and the physical, the rational and the transcendent, the finite and the infinite, and its successful incorporation of the best of pagan classicism together with the incarnation on Earth of the Creator God of Genesis [the medieval cosmos], constituted one of the most dynamic and far reaching developments in the history of human thought. Quite simply, without those Angels Ascending the spheres,

  A.C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), p. 73.   Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 73. 83   See also, for example, O. Neugebauer, ‘The Early History of the Astrolabe’, Isis, 40 81

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(1949): 210–56; J.I. Cope, ‘Chaucer, Venus and the “Seventh Sphere”‘, Modern Language Notes, 67 (1952): 245–56; F.S. Scott, ‘The Seventh Sphere: A Note on Troilus and Criseyde’, Modern Language Review, 51 (1956): 2–5; P.A. Dronke, ‘The Conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde’, Medium Aevum, 33 (1964): 47–52; and North, Chaucer’s Universe.

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so much of the content and metaphor of modern science and civilisation would not have existed.84

This new scholarly perspective is well illustrated by Chaucer’s shifting use of the terms ‘calcule’ and ‘calculer’, which he transferred from the context of his technical treatise into poetic form by punning on the word ‘calcule’ in naming the character Calchas in Troilus and Criseyde: Calchas engages in the mathematical processes of prognostication. Meanwhile, in Lydgate’s Troy Book, ‘the dawn and sunset and spring transitions of classical and medieval epic are expanded into great set-pieces … for which there is little precedent in the rhetorical tradition’, observes Allan Chapman.85 Literary writers’ eagerness to experiment with terms concerned with time measurement is perhaps best accounted for by Arno Borst’s assertion that ‘the ideal of eloquence also included the measured use of time’.86 Borst notes that in medieval iconography the symbol of the mastery of speech, the parrot, is displayed alongside the symbol of proper measure, clocks, in the later period. In other words, there is a consciousness of the association between mastery of expressions of time measurement and ideals of eloquence. In the sixteenth century this trend is singled out with regard to Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s verse: ‘I specially note their Astronomie, philosophie, and other parts of profound or cunning art … it is not sufficient for poets to be superficial humanists: but they must be exquisite artists, and curious uniuersal schollers’.87 It was not until the first half of the seventeenth century, however, that any kind of relationship between clock expressions of time and human experience of time became a prominent literary motif. René Descartes is usually credited as ‘the first major thinker to incorporate the clock analogy into a philosophical system’.88 From the seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries the clock metaphor, where the workings of the world become analogous to the mechanisms of the clock, became a prominent concept for philosophers, theologians and poets. However, in the tract Livre du Ciel et du Monde (1377), the ecclesiastic and mathematician Nicholas Oresme employs a metaphor of the universe as a vast mechanical clock regulated by God so that ‘all the wheels move as harmoniously as possible’ whatever the

  Allan Chapman, Gods in the Sky: Astronomy, Religion and Culture from the Ancients to the Renaissance (London, 2001), p. 217. 85   Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (London, 1973), p. 199. 86   Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Cambridge, 1993), p. 269. 87   Gabriel Harvey, dated 1585 and cited in Ann Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Knowing (Ithaca, 1996), p. 1. 88   Samuel L. Macey, Encyclopaedia of Time (New York, 1994), p. 113. 84

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season or time of night or day, always at a steady pace, never stopping.89 As Scattergood remarks: it is clear that Oresme knows precisely what he is about: orderly movement depending on power and resistance are at the heart of the mechanics that account for clockwork. So God became a sort of divine clockmaker: having constructed the ‘horologe’ and set it in motion he could leave it to move by itself.90

Similar imagery appears in Lydgate’s Testament, where a mechanical clock serves as a metaphor for the human frailty of ‘gerysh’ fickleness which: ‘lyk a phane, ay turning to and fro, / or like an orloge whan the peys is goo’.91 Lydgate’s allusion, however, contains multiple technical difficulties – the weight in a clock imparts constant rather than ‘gerysh’ movement, while the weights if they were to ‘goo’ would result in the clock stopping – and these inaccuracies imply a not yet fully realized comprehension of the technology.92 Nevertheless, it is irrefutable evidence that the literary imagination in the Late Middle Ages perceived a relationship between clock mechanics and human experience of time.93 But does the clock metaphor predate the technology? In their study of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, for instance, Bolens and Taylor reveal that the thirteenthcentury cathedral architect, Villard de Honnecourt, not only designed clock works but also drew relationships between them and the Wheel of Fortune; F.C. Haber, in an article on the cosmological clock metaphor, put forward an interesting thesis that decorations on European astronomical clocks were intended as metaphors for the workings of the universe and suggested that it was these medieval visual symbols which led to the mechanistic world metaphor in seventeenth-century literature; Stephen Nichols discusses the relationship between the mathematical divisions of propositions on the astrolabe and the teleological worldview that the

89   Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 3 (New York, 1934), p. 405. 90   Scattergood, ‘Writing the Clock’, p. 464. 91   John Lydgate, ‘The Testament of Dan John Lydgate’, in Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part I, pp. 329–62. 92   For a discussion of this mixed allusion and the parts of the mechanical clock to which Lydgate was alluding, see Rigg, ‘Clocks, Dials and Other Terms’, pp. 263–7. 93   For a discussion of such a ‘polysemous signification of late medieval clocks and the way in which their makers, whatever their actual intent, succeeded in linking them firmly to human concerns’, see Nancy Mason Bradbury and Carolyn P. Collette ‘Changing Times: The Mechanical Clock in Late Medieval Literature’, Chaucer Review, 43 (2009): 351–75. Bradbury and Collette focus particularly on the complex series of clock metaphors in Froissart’s L’Orloge Amoureus (1368) and Henry Suso’s Horlogium Sapientiae (midfourteenth century) and the Middle English early fifteenth-century version, Orlogium Sapientiae or The Seven Poyntes of Trewe Wisdom.

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astrolabe was meant to confirm.94 We saw earlier that awareness of quantifying uniform hours and minutes existed before the technology; similarly, awareness of the metaphorical relationship between human experience of time and technical machinations of time measurement existed before the clock analogy became a formulaic motif. Personifications of time also have an extensive literary heritage, with distinct cultural narratives in each age. As far back as the Roman calendar, personifications can be found of the year, the four seasons and of day and night. Then, until the thirteenth century, single figures personifying the months were common in calendars.95 By the fourteenth century, more realistic figures depict the labours of the months, and as secular ownership of calendars increased in the fifteenth century, imagery became increasingly focused on idealized courtly pursuits or patrons. Saturn is widely recognized in late medieval writings as representing the ‘cosmological embodiment and icon of time’. In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, for example, Saturn symbolizes both the age’s fears about the ‘destructive processes of time and the Christian humanist view of time’, while in Fall of Princes, Lydgate tells us that ‘this word Saturne / doth in it-silff nothing but tyme expresse’ (p. 39; Bk I, lines 1401–02).96 Such examples illustrate that modes other than the clock metaphor were used as manifestations of time in medieval art and literature. The process of personifying time traverses real time periods; only its representations and connotations vary according to cultural specificities. Clearly what can be deducted from this survey is that awareness of relationships between tangible visual signifiers and the phenomenon of temporality was of concern in the Middle Ages. Dohrn-van Rossum notes that personifications of Temperantia in late medieval art depict many of the new time measuring devices, and Lynn White perceives the relationship between the iconography of Temperantia and medical astrologers’ depiction of clock mechanics as a symbol of God’s moral regulation of man.97 The physical presence of clocks in daily life,   Guillemette Bolens and Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘Chess, Clocks, and Counsellors in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Chaucer Review, 35 (2001): 284; F.C. Haber, ‘The Cathedral Clock and the Cosmological Clock Metaphor’, in J.T. Fraser and N. Lawrence (eds), The Study of Time II (New York, 1975), pp. 399–416; Stephen Nichols, ‘The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture’, in Marina S. Brownlee et al. (eds), The New Medievalism (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 1–28. 95   For a detailed survey of the variety of personifications see Teresa Perez-Higuera, The Art of Time: Medieval Calendars and the Zodiac (London, 1998). 96   Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘Time in the Canterbury Tales’, Exemplaria, 7 (1995): 373; see also Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher, The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1991). Lydgate’s representation of Saturn as an embodiment of various natures of time in the Siege of Thebes is discussed in Chapter 4. 97   Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, pp. 6–8; Lynn White, ‘The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology’, in T.K. Rabb and J.E. Seigel (eds), Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1969), pp. 197–219. White’s thesis that the iconography celebrates the new technologies is challenged by Shana Worthen, 94

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and depictions of time regulation in art and literature, indicate a perception of time as tangible, representative and having an orderly nature. Mechanisms developed to both measure and express time were greeted with enthusiasm, matched by the desire to control their use and impact. Both Dohrn-van Rossum and Borst comment, for example, on the prominence of sandglasses in fifteenth-century art, where they signify the orderly regulation of the passage of time in the courtroom or church, while William J. Courtenay notes that the ‘earliest extant Oxford statutes prescribing times for disputations or lectures come from the opening of the fifteenth century’.98 The use of solar time for regulating the activities of academic life dates back to the Roman era, but by the fifteenth century the desire for greater control and the standardization of durations of time is evident in the new practice of ‘prescribing’ times in the statutes. The use of almanacs, which had ‘become a necessary possession for hundreds … not only for physicians, barbers and surgeons but also for merchants, churchmen, craftsmen, and – yes – farmers’, also indicates the desire for orderly management of a wide range of social activities in time.99 To these surveys of social discourse I add literary imaginings, where the idea that time is a commodity that can be managed is used as both a fictional theme and a structural device. The ‘modern’ concept that time equals money, for instance, is a theme explored by Lydgate in the Siege of Thebes, where Adrastus’ prudence is demonstrated by his awareness that in order to keep his troops under control he must pay for their time: ‘touching her terme-day, / that their to-forn wer serued of her pay’.100 In Hoccleve’s petitionary verse, the concept that ‘time is money’ is both the cause and product of these ‘begging poems’: they are the demands for action (payment) by the patron or ruler in the immediate present for deeds done (usually in the past) by the poet or subject. The indeterminacy of financial health finds a voice within time narratives of causal sequences and temporality. While connections between the past and present form the basic narrative of each of Hoccleve’s minor petitionary poems, what is striking is the imaginative variation in his use of this time strategy as a means to investigate the responsibilities within who highlights that such images also contain older devices and may have more to do with the classifying and grouping of inventions: ‘The Memory of Medieval Inventions, 1200– 1600: Windmills, Spectacles, Mechanical Clocks and Sandglasses’, University of Toronto Dissertation, DAI 67-06, 2006. 98   Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, pp. 253–4; Borst, The Ordering of Time, pp. 95–6; William J. Courtenay, Schools & Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1987), p. 8. 99   Mooney, ‘English Almanacs from Script to Print’, p. 11. See also Wenzel’s study of the ‘multidimensional’ management of time by peasants and clergymen, knights and merchants, H. Wenzel, ‘Multidimensional Aspects of Time during the High and Late Middle Ages’, Zeitschrift fur Germanistik, 6 (1996): 9–20. 100   John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Part I and II, ed. Axel Erdman and Eilert Ekwall, EETS e.s. 108 and 125, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911 and 1930), p. 111; Part II, lines 2683–4.

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hierarchical social relationships in an increasingly financially insecure age. That they explore such social relations is worth comment, for there are apparent tensions between the exemplary large-scale narratives discussed later in this study and these specific forms of occasional poetry. Scanlon explains: the poem-as-petition ‘postulates a royal voluntas that acts entirely at its own pleasure’, whereas the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition ‘posits a king who relies on counsel’.101 Yet, as Ferster points out, ‘the two genres’ contradictory assumptions about the ruler’s power and his freedom to use it get linked when the speaker claims to represent the people who are not otherwise represented in government’; an effective ruler should listen and pay heed to those of humble personages of low estate, for they are the true and wise counsellors.102 Hoccleve attains the status of humble advisor by using a number of strategies (as Ferster suggests), but also through micro expressions and macro interplays of perceptions of time. The exploitation of a range of referents – units, durations, sequences – in a variety of contexts and thematic uses provide a dynamic and diverse narrative for advising patrons of the need, and an obligation, for financial restitution.103 For instance, in Balade to my Lord the Chancellor Hoccleve uses the basic narrative (discussed above) of time as a measurable and quantifiable commodity, and asks that ‘myne arrerages been granted me’ (p. 58; xii, line 6). The request for payment, while relying on praise of the lord, employs the argument that the past should be acknowledged in the immediate present: ‘let see now’ (p. 58; xii, line 19). Meanwhile, To the Duke of Bedford, Regent of France offers readers another engagement with time that reflects its different context. The poem is itself the occasion for which sponsorship is sought: ‘this book presente / & of your reuerence / byseeche I pardon and foryeuenesee’ (p. 57; xi, lines 3–4). There is no impending sense of urgent action needed in the present, as there are no pressures of the past; focus on the present is developed by raising consciousness of the nature of temporality. The poet presents his work, the occasion, as subject to change, for his reader will see its poetic weaknesses ‘& what is mis / rectifie’ (p. 57; xi, line 18). By using the modesty topos, attention is brought to the inevitable temporal nature of language through the process of improvement; hence the necessity for

  Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, 1994), p. 130. 102   Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 147. 103   Maura Nolan has also observed, but in relation to Lydgate, that poems that wear their topicality on their sleeve, written to perform a function in response to a specific historical condition, simultaneously resist topicality by ‘asserting [their] status as a distinctively literary object, characterized by excess, ambiguity, and an overt concern for [their] status as part of a poetic tradition’ (John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture [Cambridge, 2005], p. 2). It is just such literary tactics of dialogism, polysemy, irony and so on that are discussed here in relation to Hoccleve’s occasional poetry. 101

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rewarding ‘entente’ rather than ‘rethorik’. The subject of temporality provides a narrative for the demand for payment. By contrast, it is the subject of continuity, rather than temporality, that is employed as a narrative in Hoccleve’s Balade to Henry V for Money. The petitioners of this poem are ‘your seruantz of the olde date’ (p. 62; xv, line 20), and references to lengthy duration of service in the past raise consciousness of the continuities in time, of causal connections between the past and the specific need in the present to ‘flowe vp on vs / gold’ (p. 62; xv, line 6). The Court of Good Company, to H. Somer also employs a brief, but effective, strategy of temporal awareness. In this poem, specific time markings are used as tools in order to create a narrative about the management of money. The date of ‘the firste day of May’ (p. 65; xvii, line 39) is used as a time limitation for the court to alter its ‘outrageous waast’ (p. 65; xvii, line 27). The response to Sir Henry’s request is to insist that the past obligation is met in the immediate future: ‘warned yee wern / for the dyner arraye / ageyn thorsday next, & nat it delaye’ (p. 66; xvii, lines 55–6). Consciousness of different context-dependent dates is the strategy used in this poem to discuss money management. The Balade to my Maister Carpenter is a petitionary poem where a single but perhaps more sophisticated time strategy is utilized. The main narrative repeatedly expresses anxiety about the relentless pressure from those demanding money. The urgency of this present pressure is conveyed not only by suggesting that time can be used as a means to defer action, but also as a pressure (a limitation) when demanding immediate action. Dimensions of the ‘modern’ consciousness of using time to one’s own advantage, of the potential for variable uses of time, extends beyond the internal narrative rhythms. Such an approach can be detected in the poet’s own use of the occasion, as indicated by the dedication to Carpenter and the obvious erasure of another name, explained away by the marginal note ‘A de B & C de A & C / Ceste balade feust tendrement considere & Bonement execute’. John Thompson observes that ‘such a formula gives the impression that Hoccleve’s poem may have been written to be recycled; it was then copied for the holograph collection before being redirected to Carpenter’.104 In other words, the time of the poem was designed to be immediate and then reconfigured when redeployed. Foregrounding the temporal processes in poetic composition is an intriguing feature in Hoccleve’s Balade to the Duke of York. The first strategy is to create a sense of the constancy of the poet’s humble gratitude. He implies continuity, stating ‘I am a detour’ to the Duke’s grace and favour ‘always’ (p. 49; ix, line 7). Having begun by raising consciousness of infinite time, the verse becomes more specific by reflecting on a previous time – ‘remembre his worthynesse, I charge thee’ (p. 49; ix, line 10). Having recalled why and how other ballads have   John J. Thompson, ‘A Poet’s Contacts with the Great and the Good: Further Consideration of Thomas Hoccleve’s Texts and Manuscripts’, in Felicity Riddy (ed.), Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (Woodbridge & Rochester, NY, 2000), p. 92. 104

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been sent to London, focus turns to the present poem: ‘and at the tyme / haue I noon other heer / but thee’ (p. 50; ix, lines 31–2). Attention is next paid to the future, ‘than aftirward’ (p. 50; ix, lines 37), and to the possibilities of who might be allowed to read the poem. In contemplating the future reception of the work, the poet raises the issue of the temporal status of a poetic creation and invites his reader ‘to amende and to correcte’ (p. 51; ix, line 53) his ‘wrytynge foleye’ (p. 50; ix, line 46). Having considered these various causal sequences, the poem closes as it began, with a sense of constancy, the poet wishing his lord and lady joy and prosperity ‘nat to endure / oonly two yeer or three, / But a .M.!’ (p. 51; ix, lines 68–9). Thus the Duke is associated with continuity and constancy, while the poetic creation is transient and impermanent; the Duke has financial security while the poet is subject to his whimsical generosity. Lydgate’s only ‘begging’ poem, Lydgate’s Letter to Gloucester, also reconfigures the temporal dynamics in and for an occasion.105 While some resonance of the temporal manipulations that Hoccleve employs is evident in Lydgate’s work, thus giving credence to the argument that a shared cultural narrative exists, Lydgate’s temporal patterns in this Letter produce a strikingly different overall impression, emphasizing continuities, rather than temporal specificities, and providing yet more evidence of the sophistication and versatility in expressions about time in medieval writings. As Pearsall acknowledges, Lydgate’s poem is a ‘minor masterpiece of the occasional epistolary art’ due to the development, in the opening stanza, of the metaphor of a sick purse, following which ‘succeeding stanzas play off nautical, monetary, medical, and alchemical images in skilful and complexly precise manner’.106 But the temporal dynamics of the poem are worth exploring too. The letter begins by indicating that the topic of the poem is the past process of ‘whan I wrot’ (p. 665; 39, line 4) and the action of present reading: ‘condescende leiser for to take / to seen the content of this litil bille’ (p. 665; 39, lines 2–3). The interpretative act, required in both the writing and reading processes, is perceived as temporal and subject to revision. It is just such a consciousness that Lydgate reconfigures in his petition for ‘gladdere letuarye’ (p. 667; 39, line 63) to act as a ‘restoratiff’ (p. 665; 39, line 9) to revise his ‘languor’ (p. 666; 39, line 27) of ‘lak of plate and of coignage’ (p. 665; 39, line 8). At the very moment where money is pleaded from the patron to pay the weak and ailing pocket of the poet for services rendered, we are reminded that while it is a temporal plea for one transaction, it is not simply that, but also a poetic product that can immortalize the generosity 105   While this is the only occasional poem of a petitionary nature, requests for payment for loyalty and services are to be found in the larger texts, following the same temporal strategies as I outline here. Pearsall examines Lydgate’s ‘beggings’ (although not the related time narrative) in the Fall of Princes in John Lydgate, pp. 228–30. 106   Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 228. For a more extended discussion of the metaphorical nature of the ill purse see Lisa H. Cooper, ‘“His guttys wer out shake:” Illness and Indigence in Lydgate’s Letter to Gloucester and Fabula duorum mercatorum’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30 (2008): 303–34.

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of the patron. Through the skilful interplay of the various images, this rhythm of the desire for ‘confortatiff … restauracioun’ (p. 665; 39, line 11) reconfigures the poem as a begging narrative, where time is money. The poet–patron relationship is clearly positioned within discourses of market and enterprise, creating a temporally specific poem for posterity. Ambiguities of Representation The desire to inscribe urgency in the present moment and express anxiety about the stability of causal connections between past and present extends much further than petitionary verse. There is evidence, across a range of socio-literary narratives, of great apprehension about the permanence of any visual, oral or intellectual expressions of time. There is latent tension between the representation of human action within a specific duration of time and the interpretation of permanence (relevance or reliability) in subsequent moments. One example of this tension is found in the practice of Proofs of Age, which raised questions about the reliability or permanence of the memory in the temporal order of life.107 Ambivalence about identifying not simply moments of time but temporal consciousness itself can be found when the reception of texts is considered. The Mirror for Magistrates – the self-proclaimed sixteenth-century updating of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes – had many difficulties in first becoming published, the delays caused by ambivalence about the use of temporally specific, sensitive information: the banning of Baldwin’s text probably demonstrates the nervousness of the new regime with regard to the perceived threat posed by the rapid dissemination of contemporary or near-contemporary writings displaying an interest in political history and moral philosophy.108

As we shall see in Chapter 6, Hoccleve’s anxiety about the reception of his works – how the ‘implied reader’ (in Wolfgang Iser’s terms) might influence conception – was rooted in issues connected to its temporal specificity. The all so common late medieval anxiety about temporal representation is a prominent feature in Hoccleve’s concerns about the reception of his work: how, in Iser’s terms, the implied reader influences conception. The ways that language was recognized in relation to changing cultural contexts has been explored by John S. Ott: bishops acted as ‘progenitors and keepers of social memory’ by employing written sources to resolve political and religious disputes to their own advantage, claiming land leases as long-term 107   Sue Sheridan Walker discusses oral recollection, and the credence given to it, in ‘Proof of Age of Feudal Heirs in Medieval England’, Mediaeval Studies, 35 (1973): 306–23. 108   Thompson, ‘Reading Lydgate in Post-Reformation England’, p. 106.

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eternal agreements while lay people could only calculate on the basis of their own lifetimes.109 The written record (the evidence of the long-term past agreement) was occasionally a source of conflict in the context of present time. Strohm insists modern scholarship should recognize such postmodernity in the medieval period, as it ‘is the plagued and proud possessor of motile signs, category confusions, representational swerves and slippages’, and the study of relationships between temporality and permanency in language provides an excellent forum for this kind of work.110 A sense of unease about the authority of temporal markers is never far from the surface in the literary texts; Chaucer, for example, draws attention to the dynamics of mobility in an address to Cleo, the muse of history: ‘ye know eek that in forme of speche is chaunge … in sondry ages, / in sondry londes, sondry ben usages’.111 Recognition of the temporality of representation is in relation to the present state of the unstable vernacular, but the past, in the form of history, is the muse to which such a consciousness is directed. Simultaneously, recognition of the temporal dynamics of the future is implied, as Chaucer anticipates the future reception of his work, asking that his book attain the status and renown of the great classics of the past. Such a request is made, once again, in the context of temporality: ‘for ther is so gret diversite … prey I God that non miswrite the’ (p. 584; Bk V, lines 1793, 1795). Anxieties about the variations of change (in the vernacular or in the reception and regulation of literature) dominate past, present and future consciousness in Chaucer’s poem. The whole process of regulating time was also a site for ambiguity, as witnessed in Arundel’s 1409 Constitutions and the subsequent fifteenth-century struggles over the control of speech and writing. As John Bowers notes, Hoccleve – and we could extend this observation to Lydgate – takes considerable risk by writing in the vernacular about theological matters after Arundel’s Constitutions. Yet a contradiction exists for these writers, for there is at this time ‘an unmistakable manoeuvre in the Lancastrian offensive against its opponents’ by employing the very terms – the language – of these opponents.112 In his study of Hoccleve’s dual roles as clerk and poet, Perkins observes his self-conscious contradictions and demonstrates that such a paradoxical consciousness existed not only within

  John S. Ott, ‘Urban Space, Memory, and Episcopal Authority: The Bishops of Amiens in Peace and Conflict’, Viator, 31 (2000): 1073–164. For a similar discussion see Stephen Weinberger, ‘Precarial Grants: Approaches of the Clergy and the Lay Aristocracy to Landholding and Time’, Journal of Medieval History, 11 (1985): 163–9. 110   Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), p. 160. 111   Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, p. 49; Bk II, lines 22, 25–6. 112   John M. Bowers, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition’, Chaucer Review, 36 (2002): 354. See also Nicholas Watson’s analysis of the risks Hoccleve takes in using English to defend orthodoxy in ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995): 821–64. 109

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legal, clerical and religious arenas, but also in the literary imagination.113 My work on Hoccleve’s verse advances awareness of how such ambiguities in temporal awareness complicate the poet’s role as well as the relationship between author and reader over theoretical modes of transcendence. Ambivalence about social acceptance and doubt concerning time measurement can be traced in the fictional responses to time regulators in literary texts. In the Old English Life of Saint Sebastian by Aelfric, for example, a timepiece provokes a hostile response just as did the sundial in the Roman play mentioned earlier. In Aelfric’s text, an astronomical device, described as ‘an excellent work of mechanical contrivance’, is condemned as ‘formed according to heathen error’ and destroyed.114 However, it is important to consider the tone of both the Old English text and that of the Roman play which berated the sundial. The Roman play was a popular satirical drama and the outburst of passion against the unnatural time regulator may have been met with amusement rather than fervent endorsement. This shift in interpretation parallels the example from Chaucer of Chauntecleer’s misplaced pride in the traditional cock crow and its supposed superiority over man-made time regulators. Similarly, while in the Old English text The Life of Saint Sebastian there is a moral objection to the timepiece as a false likeness and declarations that destiny is God’s will which should not be anticipated or changed, the attempts of Saint Sebastian to convert Chromatius from his pagan ways are only reluctantly endorsed. There is a sense of admiration in its description as an ‘excellent work’ and ‘so costly a work’ (line 290) which does not harm anyone: We worship it not with accustomed offerings; But it teacheth us, by wise instruction, as to yearly seasons, and the circuits of the planets (lines 268–70)

There is one example where the reverse was the potential target for satire in which it is the Church’s regulation of time that uncertainty exists about how to manage temporal orders simultaneously. In 1480, the merchant William Caxton translated the Mirrour of the World, which includes a homily providing instructions on the proper use of time. In this tract there is what on the surface appears to be clear evidence of Christian uneasiness with merchants’ measurement of time as profit. We are told one should be conscious of time in order to ‘praye at a certayn hour, and at an other hour in lyke wise to ete, and other thinges in his right hour’ and not for the ‘wynnyng of the goodes of the world’, because those who ‘serue God

113   See Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001). 114   Aelfric, ‘Saint Sebastian, Martyr’, in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Walter W. Skeat, EETS o.s. (Oxford, 1966), p. 251.

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the better in due tyme’ will ‘fare the better, and lyue the lenger’.115 It is tempting to conclude that the moral lesson here is that the Church felt uneasy with secular (mis)management of time. However, the fact that the author is one of the most successful merchants of the day invites speculation that the message was intended to be ironic. There is no doubt, however, that ambivalent attitudes about the moral status of secular time management impinged on the Church’s attitude towards the role of literature in the ‘real’ time of human existence. For instance, in a 1532 treatise the monk Richard Whitford expresses his unease with dramas which he perceives as misspent moments: they ‘ben spectacles of mere vanities which the worlde callethe passtymes and I call them waste tymes’, as they may do more harm than the ‘many thynges ful devout and that might edifie’.116 In his opinion, the real time of the spectators is mismanaged by their involvement in the fictional time of the performance. As is apparent in much of the religious literature of the time, the Church emphasized the need to manage the temporal moment in order to prepare for the timeless state of eternal life. In Hoccleve’s poem ‘Learn to Die’ similar echoes can be found, as we are instructed on the proper management of time – ‘in holy wirkes your tyme occupie’ – and in his Ad Spiritum Sanctum he laments that ‘ne our tyme in this world mis-spende and waste’.117 His unease was not with consciousness of time but with secular (mis)management of it. It is amusing then, in the context of Whitford’s remarks, that Lydgate, a Benedictine monk, should be the first to compose a wholly secular comedy, Disguising at Hertford.118 Lydgate’s occasional piece of 250 lines, about husbands’ complaints to the king about the ways in which boisterous women can manipulate prudence for secular gain, is one that does not contain ‘many thynges ful devout’, and is a comedy of performance based on temporal signifiers.119 In the Disguising of Hertford there 115   William Caxton, Mirrour of the World, ed. Oliver H. Prior, EETS e.s. 110 (London, 1913), p. 155. 116   Richard Whitford, ‘The Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection’, in James Hogg (ed.), Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 89 (1979): 89. 117   Thomas Hoccleve, ‘Learn to Die’, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, rev. ed., A.I. Doyle and Jerome Mitchell, EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (Oxford, 1970), p. 189, line 300; Ad Spiritum Sanctum, p. 282, line 28. 118   For a discussion of the ‘wholly secular’ nature of this comedy see Derek Forbes, The Disguising at Hertford: The First Secular Comedy in the English Language (Pulborough, 1998). For a discussion of why this text should be described as a disguising rather than a mumming see Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, p. 23–4. 119   Maura Nolan has also demonstrated how this piece can, and should, also be read as being concerned with the genre of tragedy as much as comedy. John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, p. 24. For a reading of how Lydgate is indebted and ironic of the Old French gender comedy tradition see Nicole Nolan Sidhu, ‘Henpecked Husbands, Unruly Wives, and Royal Authority in Lydgate’s Mumming at Herford’, The Chaucer Review, 42 (2008): 431–60.

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is a marked contrast in style to all the others that Lydgate composed: ‘instead of a lofty and impersonal moral debate, the conflict is a comedy about who shall rule in the home, the man or the woman’.120 As Pearsall notes, not only is the wives’ reply a ‘striking innovation’ because it ‘is ‘spoken in their own person’,121 but the temporality of the dramatic performance is also unusual. Forbes describes it as a visual show with words, where the dumb-show antics play a central role in the comic force of the piece. As such, the dramatic temporal specificities are central to the success of the disguising. One ploy to increase the dramatic tension is the gendered context-dependent distinctions that are made in relation to time perceptions and usages. These serve to mark the comical divisions between the ‘rude vpplandisshe people compleynyng on hir wyves, with the boystous answere of hir wyves’ (p. 675; 42. title). In the complaint by the husbands, time is demarcated into precise, separate states. Specific reference is made to the present time of the performance: ‘nowe in the vigyle of this nuvve yeere’ (p. 675; 42, line 5). The tyranny of the wives occurs during the extremes of the day: ‘at even and morowe’ (p. 676; 42, line 27). The abuse from their violent and often drunken wives, the husbands claim, happens at every moment in time, on ‘the weekday’ and ‘on Sondayes’ (p. 677; 42, lines 69 and 96). Their need to specify exact moments of time and the duration of their torment creates an exclusive focus on the time of the present. Their final request to the king, that ‘the Olde Testament for to modefye’ (p. 679; 42, line 146) demonstrates their perception of distinctions in time and how the present should be different from the past. In sharp contrast, the wives’ argument revolves around interconnections in time. The virtue of prudence is part of the female arsenal: ‘prudent wyff’ (p. 680; 42, line 181). In keeping with the usual medieval practice of allegorizing Prudence as a damsel, the literal association of virtue with the female gender perhaps implies that Lydgate desires a less vague, moral or philosophical interpretation of prudence. The wives continually use ancient statutes as an authoritative judgement on the present. Pearsall notes their reply is ‘a cento of reminiscences from Chaucer, especially the Clerk’s Envoy’, and naturally language of mastery imitating that of the Wife of Bath reigns dominant.122 Their argument closes, in contradiction with their husbands, with the assertion that the present should continue the customs of the past: they end ‘requering the statuyt of olde antiquytee’ (p. 680; 42, line 213). Lydgate’s final word on the role of temporal rhythms in public occasions and issues comes in the form of the king’s reply. As will become clear in my examination of Lydgate’s large-scale verse, the virtue of ‘hyeghe prudence’ (p. 681; 42, line 217) is the most valued perception of time. Prudence involves consciousness of the interconnections in time, or as Lydgate defines elsewhere:   Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, p. 46.   Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 188. 122   Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 188. 120 121

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Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse Thynges passyd remember & well dyuyde, Thynges present consider & well gouerne, For thynges commyng prudently prouyde.123

With this attribute credited not only to the king in these closing lines but also to the women (p. 681; line 244), the dispute is resolved in the ‘superbly evasive reply from the king’ where he suggests deferring the judgement for a year.124 The time duration, advocated ironically, gives the women the right, for at least a year, to continue to dominate. Perhaps another layer of comedy is implied, for in French sources such as conduct manuals and Christine de Pisan’s writings, prudence reinforces stereotypes of ideal femininity as a principle of self-control.125 Yet the rowdy Hertford wives invert the ideal and employ prudence as an ideological tool of power, suggesting that their idealization – or Lydgate’s stereotype – of femininity is not of subservience but of mastery over the husband. This disguising is not only comical in relation to the temporal specificities of the performance, but it also draws attention to Lydgate’s central theme in his occasional poetry: moral perceptions of reading time, in the form of prudence, can be used and manipulated (as the boisterous women demonstrate) for secular gain, just as Lydgate uses and manipulates the diverse range of temporal dynamics in his texts, or as the king does in his narrative of Lancastrian heritage. What all of Lydgate’s performative pieces demonstrate is that in the very genre where the present could be treated as a separate, fragmented occasion (a still picture frame), it is in fact the conscious manipulation and reconfiguration – or prudent – visual, oral, thematic and structural causal continuities within the narrative that characterize Lydgate’s attitudes towards temporal specificity. The conclusion to draw from this survey is that a dynamic, sophisticated and, most of all, varied temporal awareness exists in late medieval England. Literary imaginings offer a wealth of evidence concerning the complex, dynamic and central roles that consciousnesses of time play in the medieval period. But the imaginings also illustrate employment and manipulation of time processes, revealing a sophisticated literary consciousness in the art of time narration. Recognition of the variation, not only between each narrative but within narratives, in the choices and uses of temporal specificities exposes just how 123   John Lydgate, ‘A Pageant of Knowledge’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part II, p. 725; lines 17–19. This exact phrase describing the doctrine of prudential regnativa is also used by George Ashby in his ‘mirror for princes’ tract Active Policy of a Prince, lines 912–15. For a discussion of Ashby’s usage see J.A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (eds), Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge & Rochester, NY, 2000), pp. 44–5. 124   Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 187. 125   For a discussion of this French tradition see Carolyn Collette, ‘Heeding the Counsel of Prudence: A Context for Melibee’, Chaucer Review, 29 (1995): 419.

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sophisticated literary consciousness is in the art of time narration (as the rest of this study attests). However, distinctions are useful in relation to the morphology that we as literary critics adopt. There are two main distinctions between micro and macro structures, and the reckonings (the micro structures) and managements (the macro structures) of time require different approaches. The measurement of time requires investigation of the small-scale impact that individual expressions create, while management of time requires consideration of attitudes towards temporal consciousness. The literary micro structures involve time markings that convey the duration and passage of time, thus moving the narrative forward. Such referents can be described as regnal, solar, lunar, or seasonal; the discourses they create can be described as objective and subjective, or as modern and traditional, or functional and aesthetic, or structural and descriptive. Study of the choices and uses of specific measurements demonstrates the literary consciousness of the context-dependent nature of these micro structures of time. The study of the macro structures of temporal consciousness adopts a different approach to textual study: it involves consideration of deeper narrative structures, and of the manipulation of the inter-relationships between past, present and future within narratives. In determining how to characterize expressions of time in the fifteenth-century, the ideas behind new methods of mechanical regulation, the greater precision and the heightened awareness of temporal specificity are the most obvious to mention. There are, however, many other ways, as this survey has highlighted. Cultural narratives involve simultaneous temporal coordinates used in context-dependent ways, sometimes coexisting, sometimes competing. There is, on the one hand, a degree of vagueness about vernacular expressions, but on the other hand, a playful, even satiric, exploitation of this vagueness. There is a heightened sense not only of the variety of time markings available, but also of the descriptive and structural narrative opportunities for context-dependent durations, passages, quantitative and qualitative expressions. The idea of living within timeness is central to this heightened awareness. The visualization of time durations and processes offers dynamic opportunities for representing perceptions of time. Conversely, alongside the new impetus in cultural narratives there is an inherent recognition of tradition, enabling and embracing a range of coexisting temporalities. The cultural narratives of time in late medieval England create a discursive web, structured from the Church’s moral and practical readings and from legal, business and literary processes, dependent upon technical and creative, secular and religious, practical and decorative, representational and interpretative threads. There are many fruitful ways for reading narratives of time in medieval cultural discourse. As illustrated in this section, examining both micro narratives and the wider trends yields a multiplicity of ways in which collective and individual attitudes towards time are instilled, communicated, explored, developed, confused and, at times, subverted in cultural discourse. What any study requires is sensitivity to the historical context in order to enable cultural specificities to be identified, while recognizing that any reading of the past is caught in a web of its own, is mediated by past critical scholarship and our presence in modern culture. Such a hybrid

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approach governs the remainder of my study, which moves from an examination of a range of literary expressions to a discussion of Lydgate and Hoccleve in order to determine how these cultural narratives of time operate in their work.

Chapter 2

Framing the Moment: Lydgate’s Troy Book That the concurrent modernity and alterity of fifteenth-century perceptions of time identified in the opening chapter function as structuring and descriptive narrative framing devices in Lydgate’s large-scale exemplary poems is the focus of the next three chapters. My study challenges the tendency to apply convenient labels – vertical or horizontal, reciprocal, replicating or chronological, aeternitas or tempus – to describe the narratives of time in these works, in contradistinction to earlier and traditional methods of enquiry. The result is an exposition of the arbitrary nature of theorizing about ‘medieval’ discourses of time and the complications of theory in practice. No matter what we assume about Lydgate’s ‘typical’ or ‘medieval’ ideas, close readings of his work show him to be more inventive than that. The morphology in use is that determined by Chapter 1: multiple frameworks of time calculation, context-dependent expressions, visual manifestations of time, the ambiguities of temporality, and the use of the temporal state in literary constructions of time. In other words, the morphology is used to study Lydgate’s methods of narrative construction, the artistry and cultural specificity that characterizes Lydgate’s style. Every narrative is structured by conceiving and inhabiting rhythms of time that vary in tempo and intensity, and through framing, sequencing, synchronization and duration. In Lydgate’s long poems – the Troy Book, composed between 1412 and 1420, the Fall of Princes, composed between 1431 and 1439, and the Siege of Thebes, composed between 1421 and 1422 – he often appears to chart time in intervals that have no connection with the immediate past or future (as we saw earlier with the dials on the water clocks). In so doing, segments of time are inserted within the recurring salvational pattern. Yet close study of these ‘universal’ narratives rebuts a common criticism, that medieval historiographical consciousness lacks temporal cohesion due to the perceived unification of narratives by cyclical and discontinuous time rhythms rather than causal connections. My focus on the choice and use of micro markings illustrates how, in addition to the fragments of time in these narratives, Lydgate simultaneously conceives of events as measurable entities. These events have causal, synchronic and diachronic connections with the past and future (like the cultural narrative of time inherent in the twenty-four-hour dial). Focus on the micro expressions of such a complex consciousness of time involves surveys of dating schemes, astronomical observances, speculative forms such as astrology, and relationships between empirical and subjective markings, between secular and religious perceptions. At first glance it appears that these three poems should have a similar pseudohistorical perspective: each one is about stable truths in changing times. Robert W.

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Ayers explains the timeless nature of advisory texts: ‘the purpose was to provide an historical “mirror” wherein kings and governors particularly might observe the social effects of their actions, on the assumption that similar historical antecedents would lead to similar consequences’. Lydgate states that the Troy Book is designed to avoid time wastage: To fyn only, vertu for to swe Be example of hem, and also for to eschewe The cursyd vice of slouthe and ydelnesse.

His intention is not to present the historical context of the Trojan tragedy; rather it is to create an exemplary narrative about universal ideals of governance and civil behaviour. Temporal narration is interrupted, if not frustrated, by the unifiers, the rhetorical amplifications and moral commentaries. By this definition, it is a medieval narrative that contains no sense of time. Lydgate’s denial of historicity is part of a wider literary trope: Le Goff points to denials of historicity as a characteristic feature in medieval epics and gestes. He explains that while these narratives are in style ostensibly historical, they are in fact ‘negations of history … which used historical ideas only to strip them of historicity in the context of an atemporal ideal’. Strohm also notes the presence of this feature in the chivalric romance of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: any effects of causal connections in structuring the narrative are overridden or displaced by the unifiers of divine intervention and by the role of Saturn. Temporal narration is frustrated as a result. A challenge exists with these texts that insist upon their universality, for it is these texts that actively attempt to conceal – and the challenge is for us to disclose – the marks of their own historicity. It is worth pausing and focusing on the paradox of Lydgate’s ostensibly historical narratives employing denials of historicity. As is often the case, denial is only essential when there is potential for existence, or when there is a desire to bring attention to the very thing that is being denied. John Burrow explains the necessity of refuting individual agency in the exemplum: the process of metaphorical transfer, or translation, necessary to allegory ensures, we may feel, some degree of imaginative independence in that mode, but in

  Robert W. Ayers, ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, PMLA, 73 (1958): 467.    John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103 and 106 (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 3, Prologue, lines 81–3. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text.    Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work & Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), p. 33.    Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 130–4. 

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the literal mode of ‘exemplification’, the story may do no more than illustrate slavishly idees recues.

Yet Rita Copeland stresses how claims to negate historical consciousness by positing present culture in the past in fact expose the historicity of a text. Such a process draws attention to the writer’s independence as well as imitation – translatio and expositio – of classical sources. Cultural values and the authority of the present are superimposed on the past, which discloses the writer’s temporal agency. It is by interpretative translation that independence (rather than imitation) is gained. So how does Lydgate disclose the historicity of the text? After all, it cannot be disputed that Lydgate’s exempla are quite close translations of Latin and French sources. The answer lies in Derek Pearsall’s observation that Lydgate’s rhetorical additions are characteristically ‘medieval’ additions within which the marks of historicity are to be found. In Pearsall’s list of amplification devices, astronomical periphrasis is included, and he notes that the descriptions of dawn, dusk, spring and autumn are ‘the richest material from non-narrative sources’. In the Historia destructionis Troiae (written in 1287 by Guido delle Colonne, Lydgate’s main source), such rhetorical embellishments are merely hinted at, whereas ‘some of the great loci-classici of medieval seasons-description are in Lydgate’s Troy Book’. The time markings form an original addition, in characteristically Middle English style, to his narration of Trojan history. Recognizing how ‘it is in the forms at work in [Lydgate’s] particularly functional texts that historicity declares itself’ has allowed Maura Nolan to rethink the place of fifteenth-century poetry in literary history in her assessment of Lydgate’s mummings, disguising and public poetry, and she argues that ‘the initial embrace of the “literary” – attention to the forms and techniques by which meaning is made and feeling structured – is not to reject history, it is rather to assert that history as we know it is a formal matter, that through forms we come to apprehend and to know the past’.10 In keeping with this    J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the ‘Gawain’ Poet (London, 1971), p. 82.    Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991) explores this medieval practice of positing present concerns in the past in detail.    Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), p. 129.    Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 136.    Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 136. 10   Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005), p. 29. Throughout Nolan’s work this antithesis is the central focus where poetry for the minority and kingship becomes publicly representative by the way in which form and content symbiotically shape one another: Lydgate’s poems are written for a specific time and function but they resist topicality through their transhistorical excess of literary forms and traditions that anticipate the Renaissance, while, paradoxically, their fifteenth-century historicity is reflected though their topical formal structures.

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spirit, as we shall see, cultural determinacy in the flourish of additional poetical and structural temporal markings to the material that he inherits is how Lydgate creates a time-bound construction of the universal moral plan for Christian living. The time coordinates that act as amplification devices in the Troy Book and Fall of Princes are not confined solely to astronomical compilations and seasonal descriptions, which are generally considered to be traditional coordinates of the recurring and episodic Christian narrative of time. A close reading of Lydgate’s texts reveals artistic negotiation with a variety of time referents: the minute, hours indicated by dials as well as liturgical hours, nature (such as bird songs), durations (mornings/evenings, days/months/years), specific moments in time (dawn and dusk), a variety of age-scheme reckonings of individuals and of the world, and dating systems, in addition to solar, lunar and seasonal referents. It is not the fact that there is a multiplicity of referents used that is of note, but that, as shown in the first chapter, there is a predominate interest in how pseudo-scientific competencies in time reckoning and expression can be fused with a poetic lexicon producing a range of rhetorical effects. Such a list of ‘types’ of referent is not intended to suggest a schematic construction or perception of time. Analysis of selected passages from Lydgate’s three poems reveals the occasionalism of the referent as more significant than the type of form to which it can be ascribed: similar time indicators sometimes operate in different ways. Such findings disclose how time indicators act as significant micro structures, playing active, integral and occasionally dynamic roles in enacting the lessons of the narrative. Temporal Frameworks in Lydgate’s Troy Book The Troy Book, a poem of five books and some 30,000 lines, is loosely adapted from Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, and written under the patronage of Henry V. It provides a homiletic survey of the classical history of Troy from its origins in Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece to the heroic battles for Troy but ultimate downfall of Priam, ending with the catastrophe that meets the Greeks on their homecoming. The increasing vernacular competency and interest in linguistic registers of time, noted earlier in Chapter 1, is clearly evident in Lydgate’s Troy Book. The poem opens with an elaborate astronomical calculation by Lydgate, which indicates the precise time (4pm on Monday 31 October 1412) when he began his work: And of the tyme to make mencioun, Whan I be-gan of this translacioun, It was the yere, sothely for to seyne, Fourtene complete of his fadris regne, The tyme of yere, schortly to conclude, Whan twenty grees was Phebus altitude, The hour whan he made his stedis drawe

referents regnal

solar poetic

Framing the Moment: Lydgate’s Troy Book His rosen chariet lowe vnder the wawe To bathe his bemys in the wawy see, Tressed lyche gold, as men myghte see, Passyng the bordure of oure occian; And Lucyna, of colour pale and wan, Hir cold arysyng in Octobre gan to dyght, Tenchace the dirknesse of the frosty nyght, In the myddes of the scorpion; And Esperus gan to wester dovn, To haste hir cours ageyn the morwe graye; And Lucifer, the nyght to voyde a-waye, Is callyd than, messanger of day, Our emysperye to put out of affraye Wyth bright kalendis of Phebus vpryst schene Out of the boundis Proserpina the quene, Wher Pluto dwelleth, the dirke regioun, And the furies haue her mansioun; Til after sone Appollo lyst nat tarie To take soiour in the Sagittarie Whyche tyme I gan the prolog to beholde.

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lunar seasonal zodiac

gods

(pp. 4–5; Prologue, lines 121–47)

Critics have tended to skim over this ‘exceedingly ornate’ passage that is so ‘jarring in its sudden appearance’.11 Yet Lydgate’s astronomical discourse has an ‘inaugurating autopanegyric’ function, raising through stylistic prowess the status of his poetry (if not himself as poet) to emulate the worthiness of his patron’s reputation and historical subjects.12 As such, the passage deserves much greater credence and attention than it has been given to date. Time referents here range from secular computations to the rhythms of nature, from the objective to the subjective. Such a diversity of indicators immediately establishes three prominent roles that time markings play in the narrative: the importance of locating action in time as an authorizing strategy; the desire to employ multiple types of measurements, observations and expressions of time; and the significance of the order in which time referents are used. These three key strategies directly relate to the cultural narratives of time identified in the previous chapter. The sense of place and time that is conveyed raises awareness of the narrative that associates competency in expressions of time to ideals of eloquence and authority, as well as the cultural interest and desire to understand the significance of temporal specificities. Meanwhile, the multiplicity 11   Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘Lydgate’s Laureate Pose’ in Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (eds), John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, 2006), p. 46. 12   Meyer-Lee, ‘Lydgate’s Laureate Pose’, p. 47.

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of temporal coordinates raises consciousness of coexisting temporalities and of the crucial debate about what is at stake in the exchange between different forms and expressions. Finally, the other cultural narrative that is invoked by the importance of sequencing is the fifteenth-century forms of old subjective, seasonal and new, quantifiable methods existing simultaneously, where it is not just the vernacular range that is of significance but the rhetorical strategies that are employed in the expressions. What follows is a closer reading of these strategies in the contextspecific terms of their framing function in the Troy Book. That the first time indicator is a regnal year should not be overlooked: ‘it was the yere, sothely for to seyne, / fourtene complete of his fadris regne’ (lines 123–4). A precise timescale, not for the narrative action but for the activities of the author, is established. The completion date of the translation, some time in 1420 (given at the end of the Troy Book), is also calculated by a regnal year: the eyghte yere, by computacioun, Suynge after the coronacioun Of hym that is most gracious in werkyng, Herry the Fyfthe. (p. 869; Bk V, lines 3373–6)13

For the medieval writer, such precision is a form of historical ‘truth’: an effective historical account requires a time coordinate to verify the project. M.T. Clanchy has noted this sense of necessity for time markings in relation to medieval records of all types: ‘the purpose of being precise about the year, month, day and even hour’ was to provide the detail necessary for establishing ‘authenticity’.14 The Troy Book, Lydgate is keen to point out, is unlike Cornelius’s Roman history of the fall of Troy, which lacked ‘historical truth’ because of the absence of precision and detail – ‘nor of her dethe he dateth nat the yere’ (p. 10; Prologue, line 349). The importance of precision in expression – though not of economy – indicates a heightened consciousness of the significance that time indicators have in acting as essential authoritative details. However, the regnal year denotes more than just precision and accuracy. The effect of locating the action of writing within the time of contemporary society is that it separates the recording from the events being recorded. Regnal years are not counted at any other point in the narrative. This form is only used to locate the author’s actions in current time. The difference in time between that of the author 13   The location of this date is disputed. Although 1420 is usually assumed to be the eighth year of Henry V’s rule, a date as late as the 20 March 1421 has been suggested. The debate centres on when Lydgate would have calculated the New Year. C.R. Cheney (ed.), Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (Cambridge, 1995) outlines the various starting points of the year of grace that were current at this time. 14   M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London, 1979), p. 136.

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and readers and that of the classical time of the narrative is highlighted; thus the present and the past are differentiated. C. David Benson notes how, in attempting to separate narrative times, Lydgate pays careful attention to the alterity of classical customs. The result is that ‘the Troy Book reveals the beginnings of a genuine sense of historical perspective that is not found in any of the other Middle English histories of Troy’.15 Simpson supports Benson’s observation, claiming that the rhetorical role of the narrator in works of the Guido-tradition allows the translator to reshape the narrative at will in order that the reader becomes ‘detached from, and asked to analyse, the processes of history’.16 Perhaps it is no accident, then, that in the Prologue this lengthy description of the time encompasses numerous methods of calculating but has the notable exception of the most contemporary form available to Lydgate – the mechanical referent (which he does employ elsewhere in the narrative). It is, after all, a moment in the narrative that emphasizes the past as a distant time from present culture, and therefore the contemporary time marking has no function in this passage. In addition, the absence of any liturgical markings reflects the distinction of the past and present, of pagan and Christian registers. Smith has described this instance as one that clearly illustrates Lydgate’s awareness of historical differences despite his ever-present longing for a return to the past in the present; in effect, it is a refusal to accept the mutability of the moment but a consciousness of it, and this results in ‘repeated statements of the relation between the present in which Lydgate writes and the past that is suspended’.17 One should be wary, however, of assuming that such a distinction, or historical distancing, is consistently maintained throughout the text. Simpson acknowledges that ‘the competitive, aristocratic power blocks in Trojan and Greek society are characteristic of the readership for whom these texts were designed’ and therefore historical propriety cannot afford to go too far.18 Yet in his attempted reform of assumptions about a lack of medieval historical consciousness, he sidelines to a degree the culturally specific premodern discourse. In the Troy Book, direct speech is also often invoked, a common technique employed by medieval writers of history. Many rely on the use of direct speech as a consequence of Isidore’s assertion in Etymologiae that ‘the eye-witnessing of events was the best guarantee not only of the accuracy of the historical information but also of its presentation’.19 Indeed, it was not only those chronicling history but also the poets who adopted such an approach, as Carruthers illustrates in, for example, Chaucer and the Gawain  C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature (Woodbridge, 1980), p. 106. 16   James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), pp. 101–2. 17   D. Vance Smith, ‘Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When’, in Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (eds), Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (London & New York, 2007), p. 186. 18   Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 101. 19   Jeanette Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneve, 1981), p. 23. 15

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poet’s use of the historical present tense to convincingly recall and authenticate their stories.20 Similarly, in Lydgate’s text direct speech clearly negates any kind of separation between the acts of recording from the events being recorded: the reader is incorporated into the time of the narrative action. However, at other points the separation of the author and reader from the narrative time established by the regnal year marking is reinforced by phrases such as ‘in his tyme’ and ‘as I rede’. For instance, when describing how France was founded, Lydgate remarks that Francus: ‘tencressen his renoun, / bilt in his tyme a ful royal tovn’ (p. 36; Bk I, lines 839–40). In this passage Lydgate also refers to himself: ‘so as I fynde’ (line 851). The effect is that the historical moment is demarcated from the time of the narrative. Attention is drawn to the fact that the events are not in ‘our time’ but in ‘his tyme’. The reader is involved in multiple, even paradoxical, frameworks (past and present) in Lydgate’s narration. If we need any more confirmation of this we need only look to what happens after that clear historical distancing marked by the dating of the translation at the end of the Troy Book. As Smith has observed, after being so precise about the moment of completion, the reader is taken on a journey of some ninety lines in an encomium to Henry V (lines 2275–3465) where that precise moment shifts and becomes measured ‘against, or as, the span since the birth of Christ and the regnal year of Henry V’, and both the translation of the Trojan War and the representations of the prince’s transformation into king ‘during that span weave in and out of focus’. Once again the precision of the referent, due to Lydgate’s amplification, becomes overwhelmed, diffuse and even confused, exactly the point of the rhetorical process: it amplifies the time of his invention.21 A polyphonic time discourse is clearly operating throughout this text, at once insisting on precise moments and dates, on clear demarcations of historical periods, yet also blurring temporal boundaries, enlarging timescales and moments, forcing and enabling past and present times to synthesize: multiple perspectives are enabled to be used in relation to the place of the past in the present. Such a layered perspective in Lydgate’s text promotes more of a focus on the mediation of history than the authenticity of it. In addition to the interchanges in narrative times, paradoxical frameworks are highlighted through the acknowledgement and attempted silencing of sources. Lydgate claims his history is a close translation of Guido’s Historia Destructionis Troiae (which Lydgate doubles in length mainly through moralizations); yet, although not acknowledged, there are moments where Chaucer rather than Guido appears to be the influential source on the persona of the translator. Christopher Canon discusses how Lydgate casts Chaucer as an absent Criseyde – desired but available only through textual recollection – and casts himself as a debased version

20   Mary Carruthers, ‘Meditations on the “Historical Present” and “Collective Memory” in Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Chris Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod (eds), Time and the Medieval World (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 137–55. 21   Smith, ‘Lydgate’s Refrain’, p. 190.

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of Troilus, aspiring to a verbal ideal that is forever lost to him.22 Lydgate, however, not only acknowledges the recent past as a source but also refers to his Troy Book as the product of an older compilation by multiple ancient authors from the time of Troy, including Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Dares, Dictys and Cornelius Nepos (p. 5; lines 147–55).23 In so doing, Lydgate refers ‘tentatively to an imagined locus of legitimacy: that is, to an originary event and text that are all but lost except in the form of a dream that refers to an already evacuated space’.24 Attention to past authorities and present agency in translation is continually emphasized, silenced, yet in so doing is ambiguously confused and reinforced. Perkins notes a similar trend in relation to the time of the narrative, for when the term ‘Brutys Albyoun’ (p. 869; Bk V, line 3377) appears in close proximity to the failure of the Trojans, it does not collapse historical boundaries but sharply and uncomfortably creates causal connections between them.25 Chaucer also employs this causal descriptor to portray Henry IV as the ‘conqueror of Brutes Albyon’ in his petitionary poem ‘Complaint to his Purse’. A nuanced appreciation of the polyphonic layers in historical, imaginary and narrative times enhances the study of how cultural anxieties of origin legitimacy – in literary or political history – are continually confused and reinforced by Lydgate. After the regnal time marking in the prologue, a solar computation is made.26 Precedence is clearly given to calculated, objective, measurable time referents over the subjective and traditional ones that follow. Interest in quantifiable 22   See Christopher Baswell, ‘Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin’, in Jeanette Beer (ed.), Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 1997), pp. 225–34. 23   Whether or not these are Lydgate’s sources is not something that can be firmly established, for this list is a repetition of Chaucer’s ending in Troilus and Criseyde, with the exception of the addition of Cornelius Nepos. For an outline of the Latin versions that were derived from French translations of the Greeks’ Dares and Dictys’s first century ad accounts, see Diane P. Thompson, ‘Transmission of Troy Stories to the Middle Ages’, in her The Trojan War: Literature and Legends from the Bronze Age to the Present (Jefferson and London, 2004) pp. 126–37. Despite their claims, none of these versions were eye-witness records. 24   For a discussion of the negotiation between the markings of historicity in Lydgate’s and Guido’s texts, and the timeless, pan-historical nature of the imaginary ‘Troye Booke’ see Alan S. Ambrisco and Paul Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to The Troy Book’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1995): 42. For a discussion about Lydgate’s attitude towards Guido’s more recent authority as derived from accuracy as opposed to proximity to the original event see Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature. 25   See Nicholas Perkins, ‘Representing Advice in Lydgate’, in Jenny Stratford (ed.), The Lancastrian Court: Proc. of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, 2003), p. 176. 26   Work has been done on Lydgate’s astronomical references where both his skills and mistakes in this form of time calculation are considered; see especially Johnstone Parr, ‘Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate’s Poems’, PMLA, 67 (1952): 251–8.

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measurement of time is a marked feature in the Troy Book. As noted in the first chapter, literary writers act as agents in the dissemination of vernacular interest in time reckoning, and it is Lydgate who introduces the word ‘computacioun’ into the English vernacular in the Troy Book (at line 2774). Many forms of time calculation can be cited from the text; for example, the computation of the sun in the zodiac prior to Jason’s dishonesty to Lamedon: ‘the somer sonne / the sodiak hath thries gon aboute’ (p. 43; Bk 1, lines 1082–3); Medea’s charting of the lunar hour: ‘whan the mone was equat and stood / in the fifthe or the seuenthe hous’ (p. 60; Bk I, line 1632);27 and her calculation, as she awaits Jason, that ‘quarter was passid after pryme’ (p. 94; Bk I, line 2768).28 At one point Lydgate even uses the unit of a minute to stall the narrative pace: ‘and of the tyme a mynute will nat passe’ (p. 14; Bk I, line 92). It is not just Cethes and his guests who ‘by the dyal the hour thei gan to marke’ (p. 57; Bk I, line 1517), but also many of the other characters. Time quantification is a prevalent activity that occurs throughout the narrative. Of even more interest is the evidence of Lydgate’s artistic abilities in using such specific indicators, which offers an example of the cultural narrative of the desire to understand significance in measuring time. To revisit the example noted in the last chapter of Jason beginning his quest for the Golden Fleece, it is worth focusing on how time is quantified: ‘vpon the hour whan the clok is nyne’ (p. 107; Bk I, line 3204). The impact of an exact calculation at this moment is best seen if we view this time marking alongside an expression in a text from the same genre – the quest – but by a different author in an earlier time. At a similar stage (just before the quest is embarked upon) in the narrative of the fourteenth-century text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the referent is markedly different: ‘bi vch kok that crue he knew wel the steuen’.29 For the Gawain-poet the marking of time in the quest is more indistinct. In making such a comparison we can conclude that Lydgate is conscious of the effect that the development in precision of expression provides. The effect is an enhanced ability, over his fourteenth-century counterpart, for the literary writer to convey narrative suspense due to the advances in technological development, making available a wider range of expressions of time measurement. Appreciating Lydgate’s variations in recording moments and durations of time is a micro technique for reflecting on the creation of, and relationships between, indefinite and precise narrative contexts. In the extended passage of the Troy Book Prologue, quoted earlier, regnal dating and solar computation do not suffice as signals of when the translation was begun; there are yet more coordinates, such as poetic markers, and seasonal and   Manuscript variation: instead of ‘seuenthe’ the text reads ‘sixthe’ in British Library, MS. Arundel 99 and in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Digby 230. 28   This line is repeated in Digby 230, with the addition of ‘she gan rekene & knewe wel the tyme’, creating an even greater emphasis on the accuracy of the time reckoning process. 29   Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Andrew Malcolm and Ronald Waldron (Exeter, 1987), p. 280; fit IV, line 2008. 27

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zodiacal referents. A recurring feature throughout the Troy Book is the cultural narrative of multiple expressions of time coexisting in any one moment. It is as if a traditional, natural rhythm of time is used as a form of backup, or insurance, after a quantified time referent is used. There may be evidence of temporal consciousness, but it is evidence of an uneasy awareness. That time is perceived as measurable does not diminish the perception of time’s direction as a natural rhythm determined by divine providence. Linear indicators of time’s rhythm (the calculated measurements discussed above) exist simultaneously with cyclical indicators. Lydgate accounts for changes in time consciousness in his recognition of the old order (cyclical coordinates), while simultaneously positing the force of change (quantifiably precise units), reform and futurity within that order. One such example of this combination of multiple markings, in addition to the selected passage from the Prologue, is when Priam sets sail after his decision to plunder Venus’s temple in revenge for the loss of his sister (pp. 239–40; Bk II, lines 3319–55). An elaborate time framework emphasizes the passage of time. This movement is a clear indication that the pace of narrative events is to change from one of indecision and discussion to one of resolution and waging war. Spring is introduced – ‘the tyme aprocheth whan the sonne schene’ (p. 239; Bk II, line 3319) – and much poetic imagery of the sun and stars immediately establishes this as a time of rebirth, which is a very traditional allusion to the natural forces in nature. Then Lydgate introduces the newer astronomical method of time measurement with ‘the zodyak spere’ (p. 240; line 3336). In labouring the location of time he indicates that it is indeed not just spring but ‘the tyme of Ioly grene May’ (line 3339); the zodiac enables greater precision of expression. However, computation of the exact month does not suffice and another traditional type of time marking is used: the subjective traditional associations of spring. The use of the adjective ‘sweet’ and the aural evocation of bird song indicates that the previous tone of negativity in the narrative is to change to a positive one (for the Trojans). The causal relationship of this moment is emphasized in relation to past events and as an indicator of the future course of the narrative. Such a relationship is contextdependent upon the function of the exemplary narrative, for providential history returns to the past as a means of progressing in the future. In Lydgate’s attempts to create a coherent Lancastrian dynasty we find that old and new narratives of cultural practices and rhetorical discourses coexist in his narrative; but as Sylvia Federico explains, ‘the very idea of translatio imperii … rests precisely in its linearity, its assertion of movement in both time and space from the old to the new’.30 Although the direction of the movement is forward, the issue of linearity is problematic, as translatio imperii involves a genealogy that allows usurpations of any causality. Even on the level of how the micro perceptions of time operate we see that both reformist and linear models are complicated. In the passage from the Prologue, linear movement is inverted 30   Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 2003), p. 148.

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with more traditional referents following the newer forms, whereas in the Priam example discussed above, the moment of reform (when the narrative favours the Trojans) is subsequently destroyed by the chronological development of the Trojan tragedy. Troy presents, Federico argues, a ‘disjunctive space of temporality’;31 I would refine this description as a ‘space of coexisting disjunctive temporalities’. The vocabulary that locates action in time, the deployment of multiple types of measurements and the significance of the order in which they are used all contribute to the function of the narrative as one concerned with how temporal perceptions offer, but also complicate, strategies of locating the contemporary (Lancastrian) moment in a historical timescale.32 Manipulations of sequential connections that direct attention away from rhythms of change is the dominant narrative in all Lydgate’s work. Employing multiple strategies of locating the contemporary Lancastrian moment in a historical timescale is central in Lydgate’s verse. In order to see the full structural and thematic ramifications of such a time narrative, we must turn away from the Troy Book momentarily to look at one of his occasional poems, for this key narrative of a space of coexisting disjunctive temporalities exists to varying degrees in all his minor political poems. For example, in The Ballade to King Henry VI Upon His Coronation Lydgate clearly – and not surprisingly – shows that recourse to the past is useful for moulding the future.33 He prioritizes the cardinal virtue of prudentia so well known to fifteenth-century poets, but it is the degree of artistry involved in presenting such a narrative that is worthy of attention.34 The centrality and artistry of exchange between rhythms of temporality and stability have, until now, been largely neglected as a means of gaining insight into Lydgate’s rewritings of legitimacy. In the ballad to Henry VI, it first appears that demarcation, rather than connection, between the present and the past is to be the temporal pattern of this poem. Attention is on the present state of the Christian prince, who is a mere eight years old: ‘flouring in youthe and virtuous innocence’ (p. 625; 31, line 2), producing echoes of the temporal signifiers of the cult of primeful adult youth that are attributed to the virtuous and successful rulers in the Troy Book. The present becomes more precise with the focus on the coronation day of the young king. Reference is then made to the different historical reality of his predecessors, Edward and Louis, ‘in theyre tyme’ (p. 625; 31, line 12). However, in the quest for ‘parfyte stabulnesse’ (p. 629; 31, line 116) it is recognized that ‘alle thinges beon transytorye’ (p. 625; 31, line 23), especially the boundaries of time-states, or   Federico, New Troy, p. 147.   For a discussion of Lydgate’s negotiations of disrupted lines of succession see

31 32

Ambrisco and Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty’, pp. 40–57. 33   This is a sixteen-stanza poem surviving in four manuscripts. 34   For a discussion of the fifteenth-century tendency to rewrite rivals’ and enemies’ claims to legitimacy alongside the focus on ideas of prudence see Strohm’s chapter ‘Prophecy and Kingship’, in England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1390–1422 (New Haven, 1998), pp. 1–32.

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the sequences of royal lineage. As in Lydgate’s other writings, the past is brought into the present by the memory: ‘hathe putte in memorye’ (p. 625; 31, line 20), underscoring the medieval cultural narrative of memory as the medium of all temporal perceptions. However, specificities of real time with memories of recent disruption to royal lineage are conspicuously absent. Instead, examples ranging in sequence from distant, ancient and biblical past times up to the idealized youthful, virtuous culture of his father King Henry V’s court, provide the enveloping time context for the present day: these selected past moments are continued in the present ‘sith thou art frome that noble lyne / descendid dovne’ (p. 626; 31, lines 33–4). Demarcation and blurring of temporal states, as we will see later in the Siege of Thebes, work simultaneously; translatio occurs, as a variety of carefully chosen demarcated past times are recollected in order to endorse the stable continuities in the new, youthful present so that they ‘longe to contynue’ (p. 628; 31, line 91) and mature in the future. I agree with Colin Fewer, who thinks that Lydgate’s main objective in his poetry is to form historiographical constructions that ‘promote peace, social stability and common profit … creating an illusion of a unified, stable monarchy’ but by so doing helps to emphasize that it is an illusion.35 In Lydgate’s ‘ceaseless attempt to create continuity and unity where in the actual centre of power there is instability’, the only way to express rhythms of constancy is through the antithetical language of temporal coordinates.36 Returning to line seven of the extended Prologue passage from the Troy Book quoted above, yet more narrative framing functions become apparent when the other forms of temporal coordinates are considered. One has only to recall the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales where spring is described – ‘bathed every veyne in swich licour’ (p. 23; ‘General Prologue’, line 3) – to note the parallel in style of Lydgate’s passage: ‘to bathe his bemys in the wawy see, / tressed lyche gold’ (lines 129–30). The seasonal cycle, turnings of day and night, cycles of animal and plant life all mark time and affect the pace of the narrative. Across Lydgate’s vast oeuvre of writings, time descriptions operating in such a descriptive and functional fashion are abundant. Rosemond Tuve has made a detailed study of how Lydgate’s expansive rhetorical flourishes create an episodic and cyclical pattern of salvational history.37 Consciousness of these temporal natural cycles has two contrary, but not contradictory, effects. On the one hand, temporal cycles develop the narrative by creating alternations in settings (such as the transition from day to night, summer to winter and, in this Prologue, the transition from spring to autumn). On the other hand, if we recognize that the concept of temporality as transitory is a modern one, then such indicators can also be seen to convey time   Colin Fewer, ‘John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence’, Chaucer Review, 38 (2004): 229. 36   David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1997): 793. 37   Rosemond Tuve, Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry (Cambridge, 1974). 35

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as static due to their perpetual nature: they mark time in states, such as seasons, diurnal phases or age schemes, that are themselves changeless. The harmonious image in the Prologue passage quickly dissipates as the subjective seasonal referent comes to the fore: ‘cold arysyng in Octobre gan to dyght, / tenchace the dirknesse of the frosty nyght’ (lines 133–4). This transition highlights that ‘thynges all be transitory of condicioun’; just as seasonal change will come, so too will the fortunes of the Trojan War. It is not, however, simply poetic and seasonal allusions that suggest such a framework for the narrative action. Another form of time referent that is to be employed throughout the text is introduced: the gods. The use of figures of the underworld – Lucifer, Proserpina and Pluto – indicates that not all time referents are Christian coordinates or objective secular computations. The pagan gods also have a role – indeed a very subjective one.38 Introducing gods of the underworld and of the night immediately indicates, just as the seasonal referent did, the negative outcome for the Trojans. It is surely no coincidence that the god of prophesy, Apollo, appears at the end of this section: the rhythm in this passage of time markings frames, through prediction, the fate of those in the narrative that follow. Throughout the Troy Book, time referents acting as subjective prefixes to the narrative action are a major device used to provide structure to the narrative. This is clearly the case in Book III when the Greeks resolve that Hector must die. The ominous battle that follows is preceded with an elaborate lunar computation of the position of Hesperus. What is of interest is not the time coordinate itself but rather how the temporal referent signals the depths of darkness, emphasizing how this is the fateful night when Hector shall die (p. 471; Bk III, lines 2667–77). Ill deeds in the Troy Book, like in many medieval writings, are usually preceded by allusions to the darkness of the night: the tone of the narrative action is framed and indicated by the subjective nature of the time referent. Such a framing role will be easily understood, for in our modern film age the moment of dusk or night is still often used as the indicator that ominous events will follow: some subjective aspects of temporal consciousness traverse periodic boundaries. However, the structural roles that time referents play in framing the Troy Book’s narrative reveals the characteristic fifteenth-century feature of historicity of a specific range of coexisting temporalities. Donald J. Wilcox observes that although medieval writers make explicit moralizations in their direct statements to create narrative unity, ‘the actual narrative did not show that pattern so plainly’.39 The episodic universal pattern is disrupted because of the necessity for coherence

  J.D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford, 1990) unravels the medieval symbolism of such time indicators. The potential for tension in Lydgate’s work between opposing coordinates – Christian and pagan, objective and subjective – and identified in the first chapter as a dominant and shared cultural narrative, is discussed later in this chapter. 39   Donald James Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1969), p. 175. 38

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and development, achieved by the use of cause and effect sequences.40 This trait may be more predominant in modern thematic narratives because they seek to establish causal connections across and between events. It should not be assumed, however, that medieval models only configure events. As clearly illustrated in this study of the Troy Book, there is also a degree of conception and reconfiguration of rhythms of time involved in the art of narration. One such feature relates to how subtle sequential links are indicated in moments and durations of time throughout the Troy Book. In turn, these sequences promote narrative unity by acting as micro framing devices in the construction of the plot. The most frequent time referent used is the unit ‘that day’, or a variation such as ‘thilke day’ or ‘at this tyme’. Whether these units are subliminal or conscious markings by the writer is not really of significance; what is apparent is that they refer the reader’s attention to the current moment with which the narrative is dealing. A typical example is the description of battle that follows Achilles’s resolution to take vengeance on Troilus. Some 245 lines are unified by the use of such referents six times, which reminds the reader that all the action takes place within the duration of a single day (pp. 641–9; Bk IV, lines 2636–881). The time indicators unify the many actions being described (the plotting of Troilus’s death, the attempts to kill him, Lydgate’s lament and Menon’s actions). There is consciousness of the need to create a sequence in order to give shape to the narrative. The events narrated are not randomly ordered; they are not unified by an extra-temporal presence or listed in a fragmentary, episodic manner, but are all bound in succession by the duration of a day. They are unified by the linear logic of the narrative. While the pattern of time’s direction in this example is a linear one, elsewhere other more complex rhythms are created. The referent ‘thilke day’ often conveys multiple segments of narrative action as coexisting, creating a sense of narrative cohesion. In a description of an earlier battle in Book IV, the deeds of Paris are first narrated and then those of Ajax Telamonius follow, but the phrase ‘thilke day’ indicates that Paris’s and Telamonius’s deeds occurred simultaneously (p. 605; Bk IV, line 1441). As a result, the actions of Ajax and Telamonius are comparative; they are not separate events, but have a relationship through this simple connecting referent with one another. Lydgate’s consciousness of the importance of sequencing in narration has already been highlighted by Benson’s source study of Lydgate’s rearrangement of the Historia’s narrative.41 My study illustrates that dissecting the narrative at an even closer level evidences the centrality that attitudes towards constructing time in fiction have in shaping readers’ responses. We cannot help but compare the worthiness and effectiveness of the Trojan action over the Greeks due to the simultaneous timescale of events.

40   For a discussion of the importance of causal connections in medieval thought see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narratives’, History and Theory, 22 (1983): 43–53. 41   Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature, p. 105.

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An even more dramatic rhythm of time is conveyed when examples of Medea’s necromancy are listed: ‘and olde men sche koude make yong’ (p. 61; Bk I, line 1669).42 The natural direction of time is inverted. Medea’s secular manipulation of time’s course illustrates the recognition of a ‘modern’ dimension of consciousness of time, of the human desire to manipulate time’s rhythms: time control rather than time’s control. Such an attitude is viewed nonetheless with unease by Lydgate – in the traditionally opposing terms of pagan versus Christian perspectives – creating tension in the narrative. Another disruption of time is when the natural cycle of day into night is interrupted in order to prioritize night time over daytime. Inversion of such syntax was noted in Chapter 1, where the Ely monks wished to emphasize their newfound ability to regulate time perfectly at night as a means to assist their orderly management of devotional practices. Lydgate also employs this pattern of reversal, but in two different ways. Sometimes the day–night order is used as a means to reinforce the impression that night time is associated with inactivity. One such instance is when the Greeks ‘in her schippes the same nyght to reste / and in the morwe, whan the larke song’ (p. 129; Bk I, lines 3956–7) awaken and launch their invasion of Trojan lands. Previously the narrative was concerned with setting the scene through poetic descriptions of April and May. The turn from night to day acts as the signal for the narrative to proceed from seasonal description to the active Greek invasion of Trojan soil. By contrast, at other times in the narrative, priority is given to night time in order to emphasize the intensity of a particular action, the activity having occurred during the period usually associated with dormancy. One such example is when Cethes warmly receives Jason and Hercules, where we are told that ‘his offyceris tawayte nyght and day’ (p. 51; Bk I, line 1357) on them. It is not Cethe’s hospitality in itself that is important, but rather the continuance and endurance of it: the magnitude of his generosity is emphasized by the fact that his actions continue throughout night time. It should be noted that there are other instances when this cycle is not inverted, when notions of continuance are conveyed with the order of day and night employed. This is the case in Polyphemus’s ceaseless search for Ulysses: ‘a-monge the hilles he renneth day & nyght’ (p. 828; Bk V, line 1966). Due to the variations in employment of the day–night cycle we can conclude that Lydgate is conscious of how his choice of time referent affects the narrative emphasis. The sophistication of Lydgate’s time narration is evident in that causal relationships not only operate on the micro level but at times also communicate consciousness of macro states of time. When Hector is about to slay Merion he pauses to reflect on the action that has just occurred: ‘for thou so bolde were on me to-day’ (p. 449; Bk III, line 1899). Merion’s preceding activities result in Hector’s   This reversal of Jason’s old father to a youthful state is an original insertion in medieval accounts of Medea’s magic. Maura Nolan notes how Lydgate expands Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccaccio; see her ‘“Now Wo, Now Gladnesse”: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes’, English Literary History, 71 (2004): 531–58. 42

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forthcoming action. Here, universal lessons or moralizations are not what motivate Hector. In other places, causal connectors also frame readers’ consciousness of the future. When Hercules announces that he will set sail to attack Troy, two time references are employed. He remarks that he will sail ‘to-morwe erly in the dawenyng’ (p. 45; Bk I, line 1155) but will return before ‘thre yere’ (p. 45; line 1157). Impetus is given to the forthcoming narrative events by creating an impending sense of action. In addition, a framework for more distant activity in the future is created. This dual framework of immediacy and deferral clearly illustrates consciousness of how different durations or unities of time can provide a structure for the future sequence of the narrative. Variations in causal constructions demonstrate a consciousness of the need to understand relationships between different episodes of narrative action, or, by extension, causal historiography. Conversely, there are some medieval characteristics of Lydgate’s modernsense causal historiography. Medieval mnemonic strategies and tensions between prophecies and prognostications illustrate the need for historic sensitivity when reading these texts. The many lengthy descriptions of army sizes (usually consisting of several pages of typical Lydgatian ‘halting versification, turgid syntax, repetitiveness, long-windedness and verbosity’43) may, at first glance, appear to delay narrative progression, to do nothing more than stall time. Yet on reflection, one becomes aware that such episodes relentlessly locate detailed descriptions in the memory, enabling future battle victories and losses in the narrative to be understood and even predicted. Benson notes these digressions are not in Lydgate’s source and are ‘without the energy of battle description in the Laud, yet the added detail does allow us to visualize the scene more clearly’.44 Lydgate does not alter the facts of his narrative source but embroiders them and not just for rhetorical ostentation (or automatic prolixity). As noted earlier, Mary Carruthers has clearly demonstrated the medieval assumption that it is the past which mediates, or indeed reforms, perceptions of the present and the future, that memory is ‘the matrix of all human temporal perception’.45 Mnemonics may act as the interpretative tools for temporal perceptions (for calculating moments of time, for recalling past moments, for placing events in structured perceptions), but they are also in essence extra-temporal. Mnemonics protract, preserve and fix states of time. Lydgate makes tangible and creates an extra-temporal, if somewhat laboured, image of the size of the army, thereby enabling recollection in subsequent sequences, such as in the battle scenes. The frequent use of mnemonic aids in 43   Derek Pearsall, ‘The Apotheosis of John Lydgate’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005): 31. 44   Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature, p. 105. Benson (p. 115) draws our attention to how Lydgate actually emphasizes how Guido’s battle scenes are too general, in Bk III, lines 3596–8 (p. 498); Bk IV, lines 2586–8 (p. 640); and Bk IV, lines 4262–4 (p. 689). 45   Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), p. 192.

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many medieval writings provides evidence of a widespread awareness of the need to manage simultaneous temporal orders. Lydgate develops this Augustinian view of memory as the foundation of consciousness through Priam’s recognition of the need to enact historical dramas in order to complete the creation of a new Troy (pp. 170–71; Bk II, lines 917– 27). Lydgate demonstrates the role of memory not just in narrative development but also in the creation of social consciousness. The misremembering of the faults of old Troy, and selective presentation of its virtues in Priam’s imaginary re-enactment, presents a revisionist view of history. Alan Ambrisco and Paul Strohm assert that such a reconstructive cultural process marks the historicity of Lydgate’s representations of memory systems, for ‘in Lancastrian practice, the ostensible exercise of memory screens a highly selective assault on inconvenient or obstructive elements of the received past’.46 The inconvenience of Chaucer’s Ricardian creation of a new Troy is selectively silenced by Lydgate’s naming of his literary inheritance, where Chaucer as an explicit source is excluded in favour of Guido. Prophecies, dissimilarly to mnemonics, are perceived from outside present time and thus are analogies of God’s omnipotent perception of time. God’s perception, as Boethius explained, is outside time for ‘the past, the present, and the future are all alike eternally present to Him … God’s providential or “purveiaunce” is perfect and infallible’.47 Prophecies allow humans to partake in this divine perception. Through foresight the future is brought to exist within the present worldly time. In Lydgate’s Troy Book Cassandra is professed an ‘outsider’, ignored and imprisoned when she forecasts the Trojan defeat: the spirite of trewe proficye, Availeth nat, – nor al swich sapience, In place wher ther is noon audience. (p. 460; Bk III, lines 2300–302)

Temporal processes are not the focus of concern; instead, the nature of prophecies is emphasized. Cassandra’s experience is internal, involving the senses: ‘with-Inne hir silfe considered & beheld, / and saw … herynge the noise … so inwardly, sche might hir nat restreyne’ (pp. 458–9; lines 2239, 2243, 2249); her emotions are tested to the limit: ‘with sodeyn rage her herte was to-tore’ (p. 459; line 2248). Scott-Morgan Straker observes that the association of unruly restraint undermines the role of the prophet as a prudent advisor.48 The prophecy is not a rational, quantified insight but a sensual, emotional involvement in the time that has yet to come.   Ambrisco and Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty’, 54.   J.A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (eds), Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the

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Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 47. 48   Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes’, Review of English Studies, 52 (2001): 18.

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Anxieties also surround the more secular methods of time measurement. The prognostications of Calchas and Medea allow for the modern concept of the present/ future relationship as a knowable state through rational scientific investigations. It has been claimed that such a perception was non-existent in the Middle Ages. Aveni, for example, remarks: ‘during the scientific Renaissance and the Enlightenment in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe … people came to believe that they might be able to inquire for themselves about the future’.49 Yet Calchas and Medea offer prognostications as indicators of the future direction of narrative development, presenting the changing present as a measurable phenomenon. Medea, unlike Cassandra, relies not on her emotions but on ‘accountyng the houres of the nyght’ (p. 93; Bk I, line 2740). Throughout her scenes she engages with a wide variety of astronomical and astrological methods for quantifying time. Her frequent and detailed time markings are described as an ‘arte’ (p. 94; Bk I, line 2769). Thus it is not her inquiries into time patterns that are of concern but rather her reversal – her manipulation – of time’s natural rhythms (discussed earlier). Such control over time is questioned, for ‘God forbade we schule gif credence’ (p. 62; Bk I, line 1711) to such unnatural abilities for ‘euery cristen steadfast in bileue’ (line 1715) cannot accept that any ‘lyvyng creature / scholde haue power, I do yow pleyn assure, / so cursede thinges supersticious’ (p. 63; lines 1719–21). Lydgate spends some 89 lines lamenting human manipulation of time and expounding the virtues of God as solely responsible for directing and predicting the rhythms of time.50 If any lesson is to be learnt from the anxieties surrounding time demarcation in the Troy Book, especially prophecies and prognostications, it is that history can only be understood retrospectively. While time control in moral terms is unacceptable to Lydgate, a flourish in the astronomical reckonings allows him to exploit this lexicon and reveal a keen interest in the methods, rather than the purposes, by which Medea and Calchas compute their prognostications (a marked progression from the Roman attitudes). Benson has noted how ‘Lydgate is not soft on paganism, but he has more interest in its customs and greater respect for them’ than scholars usually credit him with.51 That Lydgate may have respect, if not enthusiastic interest, for the custom of prognostication that Medea presents is evidenced by his abundant use of secular methods of quantifying time’s rhythms throughout the narrative, and by the fact that Medea, despite numerous crimes against Christian morals, escapes curiously unpunished. Maura Nolan explains that Medea’s survival is a result of Lydgate’s attempts to synthesize and juxtapose a range of source texts.52 Nolan’s thesis about inherent contradictions should be extended to include the ways in which imaginings of time are reckoned and expressed simultaneously in counter registers, as in this   Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time (New York, 1995), p. 139.   Here can be heard echoes of the Roman attitudes to the sundial and the Old English

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criticism of the astronomical dial explored in Chapter 1. 51   Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature, p. 108. 52   Nolan, ‘“Now Wo, Now Gladnesse”: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes’, 541–3.

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case of the prophecies and prognostications. We may find Lydgate ‘pleynyng’ the outcome, but he is consistently ‘pleying’ with the time reckoning method. In his choice and use of time referents throughout the Troy Book, Lydgate incorporates both pagan and Christian, eternal and secular, aesthetic and functional, traditional and modern perceptions as rhythms of narrative development and structural cohesion, through which it becomes possible to permit and express a range of ambiguities. Thus Lydgate’s Troy Book demonstrates an artistic awareness of temporal ploys within narrative structures, many of which are functional but accumulatively also create a discursive web of coexisting causal and disjunctive attitudes towards time. What is revealed is not solely an ability, on Lydgate’s part, to use multiple expressions of time to invoke traditional associations of cyclical patterns of time, subjective effects of time consciousness, or poetic and rhetorical flourishes; nor is it merely an interest in experimenting with new registers and referents. What is revealed is also an interest in the significance of the occasion in relation to a hybrid range of continuities in time. The cultural narrative of heightened awareness of temporal specificity clearly merges with the narrative of desire and exploitation of understanding temporal significance. By closely reading the framing effects of the micro markings of time within this large-scale narrative one can clearly see that poetic and political authority is decentred; there is a multiplicity of interpretative strategies presented for negotiating associations between the past, present and future. Micro scale sequences in the narrative and macro chronologies of literary and state history are disrupted, for instance, drawing attention to multiple origins of authority in the variety of expressing and representing past times. The contextdependency of the time referents reinforces that there are numerous interpretations of the present, which require controlling and exposition. While future desires for peace and maintenance of tradition are clear, tension about the reading the future is never far away; the potential range of alternative futures are always lurking as a potential threat, requiring reconfiguration, or reformation. Lydgate tells us in the opening elaborate time calculation that frames his narrative to pay heed to his discourse of time: he promises us that he will ‘of the tyme make mencioun’. Closely reading the range of expressions of time in the context of the cultural narratives established in the previous chapter enhances our awareness of the artistry and flexibility of inherent interrelationships between past, present and future states in the structure of the Troy Book.

Chapter 3

Relative Comparisons with The Fall of Princes Exemplary but ordered in different fashions is how the three major texts of Lydgate’s under scrutiny in this book could be described. The first, the Troy Book, has a chronological structure. The second, the Fall of Princes (and the topic of this chapter), could, on the surface, be seen as the exact opposite to the Troy Book since it is more reciprocal in its organization. Although the Siege of Thebes was composed before the Fall of Princes, it is third in my study because it is a replicating narrative within the confines of an oppressive linearity. In other words, this study moves from large-scale poems with supposedly alternative temporal structures to one that appears to directly negotiate both patterns. Although the multiple micro time observances in the prologues have significant macro roles in framing the structure and content of these narratives, it is important to ask if similar forms of time referents have different roles depending upon the narrative structure. To what extent are the expressions of time context-dependent? In this chapter, I consider whether individual time referents have an influential role in shaping different narrative models of the past for present and future audiences (in turn, revealing a hybrid consciousness in the art of time narration), or whether the differences are a product of the cultural moment, the result of changes in social time consciousness. Perhaps they are the result of a changing time consciousness within Lydgate himself. With a gap of almost 30 years between the start of the Troy Book and completion of the Fall of Princes, can we apply St Augustine’s argument that temporal perception is not systematic and varies even on the level of individuals? The Fall of Princes, written between 1431–8, and comprising some 36,365 lines of verse ordered in nine books of mostly rhyme royal stanzas, is an adaptation of Laurent de Premierfait’s 1409 translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and was commissioned by Lydgate’s regular patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The poem relates, or even inflates, nearly 500 examples of legendary tragic figures – beginning with Adam and Eve and ending in the fourteenth century with King John of France – that enjoy power and grace but   For a discussion of Gloucester’s library and how the Fall of Princes reveals how the Duke was ‘deeply concerned with the politics of reading … not merely to accumulate books but actively to shape their uses and interpretations toward specific political goals’ see Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) p. 31. 

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then fall due to either the caprice of Lady Fortune or their own failings. Alexandra Gillespie notes, however, that there is something radical in the way Lady Fortune is presented in Lydgate’s version (in comparison to Boccacio’s Latin original), because ‘the mightiest prince can straddle fortuna’s wheel; with proper literary guidance, with careful study, he can “contune” there unchanging. But [there is always a sense of] the unpredictable force of fortuna and her repeated affronts to settled arrangements of power’: a pull between stasis and transience, the ruler and advisor, the past exemplars and future rulers, ‘represents and endeavours to contain worldly change and the vagaries of fortune’. In other words, Lydgate’s political programme accepts and yet tries to restrain temporality. The Fall of Princes, while being a large-scale exemplary poem like the Troy Book, is stylistically very different. It does not have as strong a narrative frame because it does not present a chronological journey through a specific historical period. By contrast with the Troy Book, it appears more cyclical than linear, offering an encyclopaedic collection of narratives that illustrate and reiterate the same key successes and failures, whether dealing with mythical figures, biblical rulers or recent kings. Yet there is artistry involved. Strohm draws our attention to the ‘seldom noticed aspect of [Lydgate’s] achievement’ of reconciling ‘complaints, envoys, excursus on classical mythology, dramatic monologues, debates advice to princes, warnings about women, apostrophes, epistles, remedies, exempla, fables, mirrors, homilies, and other recognized forms’. The result is that sequential patterns or causal connections used to move the narrative along are not as important as they were in the Troy Book. Their relative absence is a clear acknowledgement of the influential role that time referents play in shaping different historical perspectives. Strohm has outlined how ‘an attitude toward time is a precondition of narrative, with different conceptions of time encouraging variations in narrative form’. Micro expressions of time operate differently in the Fall of Princes than they do in the Troy Book: rather than serving as narrative framing devices, they are treated thematically as a historical discourse. My study explores the influential impact that this treatment has on the narrative form. The cultural narrative of ambiguities in temporal representation, highlighted in Chapter 1, comes under closest scrutiny here in the study of the Fall of Princes. While there is some discussion in the Troy Book about the importance of the written document as a permanent record of universal truths, with the qualifying recognition of the underlying tension in the mobility of such truths across languages and times (pp. 5–7; lines 149–225), in the Fall of Princes the whole Prologue is dedicated to a commentary on this subject. Its focus is the responsibility of clerks   Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 175–6.    Paul Strohm, ‘Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court’, in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999), p. 653, n. 27.    Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, 1989), p. 114. 

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– rather than poets – in this ambiguous process of preserving notable examples from the past for the present and for all future generations. Inevitably, as this is a ‘mirror for princes’ tract, what is of primary importance is the assertion of political authority and moral instruction for a contemporary readership, through the examples of past lessons. It is not, however, simply the act of writing past examples, to ‘putte in remembraunce / therin to shewe Fortunyns variaunce’ that is noted. Lydgate is obviously influenced here by what A.J. Minnis describes as the utilitas of compilatio: the literary process of composition is justified by its provision of doctrine that will bring us eventually to salvation. How history is shaped as much by the subjectivity of writers as by Fortune is discussed at length by Lydgate: Artificeres hauyng exercise May chaunge and turne bi good discrecioun Shappis, formys, and newli hem deuyse, Make and vnmake in many sondry wyse, As potteres, which to that craft entende, Breke and renewe ther vesselis to a-mende. (p. 1; Bk I, lines 9–14)

In the Prologue there are a number of places where processes of compilation are defined (such as the reference above), always with the inference that their effect on original material is to ‘shappis, formyss, and newly hem deuyse’. What is of great significance is Lydgate’s perception of the malleability of his subject matter: just as the potter changes the forms and identity of the materials he works with, so too does the compiler. Minnis tells us that a medieval compiler denied ‘any personal authority and accepted responsibility only for the manner in which he   For a discussion of Lydgate’s representation of himself as a clerk who engages in allegorical readings that create new written forms to decode moral truisms, as opposed to a poet who uses rhetoric to sweeten and illuminate messages of virtue, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, 1993), Chapter 1.    For a discussion of characteristics in the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 1996).    John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS o.s. 121–4 (Oxford, 1967), p. 2; Bk I, lines 53–4. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. However, as John Mortimer has observed, Bergen’s edition is not the best reading guide for this poem; see Mortimer’s ‘conspectus of the narrative’ and useful reading chart in his John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005), pp. 278–95.    A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, 1988), p. 204. 

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had arranged the statements of other men’. Although Lydgate frequently refers to his auctores throughout the narrative, any sense of stability or preservation is undermined by this definition of the craft of ‘artificers’. The Prologue highlights the temporal nature of historical accounts by exploring the subjective process of selection in narration – the ways in which the compilators ‘make and vnmake in many sondry wyse’.10 Paradoxically, the Prologue foregrounds desire for permanence: ‘to putte in remembraunce’ (p. 2; line 53). Tensions between time and eternity, the temporal and permanent, are prominent features in this text. These tensions are most dramatic in the narrative frustrations caused by the interruptions of some sixty-nine envoys. In the Troy Book, I count only two references to an eternal sphere and time whereas in the Fall of Princes references to eternity are abundant in all parts of the text. Thus, it is unsurprising that time references are not given as dynamic a role in shaping the narrative; the linguistic register prioritizes ideas about timelessness over time. In the Prologue, Lydgate reminds us that Bochas instructs: … men sholde enclyne, Sette ther hertis, void off vnstabilnesse, Vpon thynges which that been deuyne, Where-as ioie perpetueli doth shyne Withoute eclipsyng in that heuenli see, Void off all cloudis off mutabilite. (p. 4; Bk I, lines 114–19)

As this is a narrative exploring the relationship between time and eternity rather than the various natures of time, one type of time indicator usually suffices in any single episode. The coexistence of multiple time coordinates so central to the polyphonic time discourse of the Troy Book has no place in a narrative concerned with eclipsing the clouds of mutability. Lydgate’s interest in subduing temporal rhythms as a means to rewrite contemporary anxieties is not employed only in discussion of distant times, nor just confined to his historical writings. If we turn momentarily to his occasional verse, not only recent history but also the ongoing present moment receives this treatment of absent temporalities. Temporal exchanges between real and fictional   Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 192.   See Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of



10

Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (Exeter, 1999), pp. 316–21, for a discussion of the Middle English views of translation as a subjective process of selection and, in particular, how Lydgate partakes in the ‘complex discussion about the shaping of English as a literary language, and not as mechanically repeating gestures learned from [his] predecessors’ (p. 321). This discussion is traced by an examination of the vernacular prologues as ‘readings of source texts part of whose purpose may indeed lie in their difference from those texts’ (p. 317).

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time are often distinctly absent. Just as in the example from the Fall of Princes, at times silence or absence of time markings in his occasional verse can have as powerful an impact as any complex patterning of temporal perspectives. Artistic redeployment of political tensions between specific moments and never-ending time can perhaps be seen nowhere better than in Lydgate’s celebratory poem On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage. The nuptials of Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, and of Jacqueline of Hainault that made Humphrey lay claims to Hainault, strained the relationship with Burgundy, a necessary ally for England’s presence in France. Straker astutely observes that within this poem Lydgate adopts ‘a meticulously apolitical rhetoric of praise; however, his carefully deployed literary, biblical, and historical references covertly restore the political context and hence expose the danger’.11 A survey of the absent temporalities highlights just how exactly generalities on past marriages reconfigure an admonitory political narrative for the celebration of this specific marriage. The poem begins with a sense of timelessness. Allusion is made to the world of the gods, with a specific reference to the unity between Venus, the mother, and her son, Cupid. This establishes a focus on the constant ‘cours eterne of the sterres cleere’ (p. 601; 26, line 4), with the assurance that God and nature are ‘perpetuelly tendure’ (p. 602; 26, line 6) with regard to such love in familial relationships. The poem then moves into a more specific time of the world, though it is still vaguely some epoch of the distant past: ‘ensaumple in bookes … executid is of so yoore agoon … in cronycles autentyk and olde … many a story of antiquytee’ (pp. 602–3; 26, lines 29, 31, 36, 37). The time referents function to indicate duration, to indicate endless examples which demonstrate that marriage originates from God’s pure source. The range of past examples emphasizes the legitimacy of the present occasion. Focus is next directed to the individual union between Jacqueline and Humphrey in order to suggest that the union should result in national peace. In reality, the appearance of harmony was sought in the public rather than private aspects of the union, achieved through acquisition of foreign lands, for Jacqueline had not received an annulment of marriage from Jean of Brabant. Yet it is the realm of personal union towards which Lydgate’s discourse of time draws attention. Consciousness of political (if not specific) realities is acknowledged in the pressures that are created on the present, with the hope that the marriage ‘in boothe londes, texcluden al derknesse / of colde hatred and of al rancour’ (p. 603; 26, lines 61– 2). The ancient established narrative of marriage suggests that the present should change the immediate past times of strife. To reinforce this political rhythm of change, Lydgate provides a survey of distant past examples, including Helen and Paris, the truest of couples yet paradoxically also the most duplicitous. To avoid such specific distractions, the narrative soon returns to a discussion of the virtues 11   Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Propaganda, Intentionality, and the Lancastrian Lydgate’, in Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (eds), John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, 2006), p. 109.

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of fortune, grace and reason, led by the virtue that signifies the interconnectedness of time – prudence. The marriage of Gloucester and Jacqueline is simultaneously presented in moral and specific deceitful contexts. Their marriage is discussed in the timeless terms of a ‘perpetuelle bande’ (p. 605; 26, line 119) and Gloucester’s worthiness is placed in an architectural mnemonic, creating a timeless image of his being ‘regystred in the Hous of Ffame’ (p. 606; 26, line 133). Strohm signals how any careful readers of Lydgate would detect scandalous associations in registering Gloucester’s knightly fame with Chaucer’s ambiguous House of Fame.12 The examples from the past are constantly discrediting the rhythm of stability that the temporal referents are vying to create. Present consciousness is quickly returned to the past greats in a discussion of the worthy nine. This alternating pattern between worthy and questionable old examples and the union of Jacqueline and Gloucester provides an enveloping time context for their status; that is to say, Lydgate celebrates the union of Jacqueline and Humphrey by mingling old stories of heroic figures with flawed women and men responsible for outbreaks of violence. The poem concludes with a consideration of the ways in which present action – ‘yif so were thees landes were alle oon’ (p. 607; 26, line 165) – could affect the future by bringing everlasting peace: ‘that pees final were sette betweene hem tweyne’ (p. 607; 26, line 168). Consciousness of time states (past, present and future) is general, allowing specific concerns to be subsumed, and reconfiguring the politically specific occasion into a universal, timeless celebration of the ‘desyrous tyme of … truwe lovyng’ (p. 601; 26, title). As in the Fall of Princes, the nature of eternal, as well as temporal, consciousness reconfigures the political specificities of the moment in time. In addition to the rhythms of timelessness promoted in the Fall of Princes, the context-dependent time referent with which the Fall of Princes’ Prologue opens indicates much about this relationship between the time register and narrative function. Like the Troy Book, it opens with a calculation of a regnal year but with a notable difference.13 In the Fall of Princes, the regnal year marks the date of his source rather than his own authorship; but what is of more interest is the fact that the regnal year is indicated by an event, rather than by the date of the king’s reign: The tyme trewli remembrid and the date, The yere14 whan kyng Iohn thoruh his mortal fate Was prisoner brouht to this regioun, Whan he first gan on this translacioun. (p. 1; Bk I, lines 4–7)

  Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 193.   The regnal year is a miscalculation. Lydgate mistakes the date of Laurent de

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Premierfait’s translation, citing the regnal year that denotes the capture of John of France. This date is actually the date of Boccaccio’s first writing. 14   In John Rylands Library, Manchester University, MS. English 2 (c.1450), ‘yere’ reads as ‘there’, implying an even more vague referent.

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This example marks a key difference in both the choice and use of referents between Lydgate’s texts: the Fall of Princes generally uses time indicators in comparison to other events, so time is relative, whereas time markings in the Troy Book are used for the effect that they impart (determined by the narrative context).15 In the Fall of Princes, time markings function more often as descriptive tools than as structural devices. In each of the nine books, more than three-quarters of time markings act as symbolic or thematic references. One such example can be found in the story of Adam and Eve, where the sun ‘mor cleer dede shyne / than it doth now in his midday lyne’ (p. 17; Bk I, lines 599–600). The solar position is not indicated in order to progress the narrative, or to create an alternation in narrative setting or effect a change in narrative pace. Rather it serves as a point of comparison in the description of the brilliance and intense clarity of vision in Eden: it acts as a descriptive tool. The value of engaging in close reading of the context-dependent nature of the micro expressions of time in the Fall of Princes is apparent when one considers the patterns they create. I estimate that less than one-quarter of the time referents act as structural devices in the narrative. Where they frame the narrative, significant variations are apparent. In the first book these structural referents, in four-fifths of the cases, act as divisional markers for charting historical times. As the narrative progresses, from Book II onwards, these structural referents serve as causal connectors or as indicators for sequential patterns of narrative action. For instance, in Book III, a number of time markings are used in close succession (in the space of 741 lines) as structural devices. When Alcibiades goes to Sparta, an imprecise reference – ‘vpon a certeyn day’ (p. 422; line 3365) – indicates the start of a new period of narrative action. The expression becomes more specific with a statement of the time taken to recapture the town: ‘the space off half a day’ (p. 427; line 3537). The effect is to create a precise framework for a particular period of narrative action. The next marking of time preserves Alcibiades’s prowess through the act of memorial: ‘thus certeyn daies thei halwed’ (p. 428; line 3571) and finally ‘the tyme approchid and the date’ (p. 430; line 3627) of Alcibiades’s death. The precise end of Alcibiades’s life brings this narrative sequence to a close. Just as in the Troy Book, numerous passages in the Fall of Princes signify the active role time referents play in creating narrative coherence and continuity. Nevertheless, there is a much greater sense of time referents acting as descriptive aids in the Fall of Princes. This impression is primarily due to the frequency of the adjectival role they play (as illustrated in the Adam and Eve story). The different functions that time markings play is clear evidence of how central the discourse of time should be in our determining of Lydgate’s historical perceptions and artistic formations.   The capture of King John actually relates to Boccaccio’s first writing rather than Laurent’s translation. See Johnstone Parr for more examples of Lydgate’s miscalculations: ‘Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate’s Poems’, PMLA, 67 (1952): 251–8; and ‘The Astronomical Date of Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady’, Philological Quarterly, 50 (1971): pp. 120–25. 15

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There is one exception to the trend of descriptive markers found in Fall of Princes when one type of time referent is consistently employed for direct effect upon the narrative structure. Dating schemes operate throughout the Fall of Princes, not as descriptive tags but as divisional markers for narrative episodes. While the three ages of man is the most common scheme employed, references are made to a much wider range of schemes than appear in the Troy Book. Karl Zender would see Lydgate’s text as one among many that act as a collective repository of the variety of conceptualizations and traditions of ageing that can be found in medieval texts: the most frequent, tracing back to Hippocrates and famously expressed by Shakespeare in As You Like It, represents human life as consisting of seven ages; also prominent is the depiction, originating in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of human life as divided into four ages corresponding to the four seasons of the year; and […] other commentators – Aristotle, Marcus Varro, St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede – argue for three or five or six divisions as well. All of these schemas identify a stage, variously called gravitas, manhood, maturitas, media aetas, middle age, perfecta aetas, corresponding approximately to the concept of middle age.16

In the Fall of Princes, the scheme of four ages is depicted in the riddle of the sphinx (pp. 93–4; Bk I, lines 3407–30): at a number of points, the four seasons relative to the four ages of man are mentioned, while the ages of man and of the world are also occasionally noted. As noted above, precise date markings are initially given as biblical years, but by Book II dates are counted by regnal years and by Book V Roman years are used.17 It is not just macro age schemes that are employed as divisional indicators; significantly, micro age markings are also frequently quantified. For instance, exact ages are given for a number of the characters, such as Hannibal who was ‘nyne yeer of age’ (p. 638; Bk V, line 1903). Duration is also specified, for example, as the space between named canonical hours – ‘at evyn and at pryme’ (p. 286; Bk II, line 3058). The length of time here conveys the scale and period of Apollo’s wisdom. Such specificities are calculated as a means to reinforce a particular historical perspective. The most common effect of these time references is to periodize each narrative episode on a timescale. Dating is much more significant in this narrative because it presents a different type of historical perspective; the Fall of Princes can be described, in Donald Wilcox’s terms, as a reciprocal narrative. In this model, key moments of human

  Karl F. Zender, Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity (Baton Rouge, 2008), p. 2.   This is a similar structural division to that noted in the previous chapter in

16 17

Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, thus implying a generic correlation in temporal narrative divisions in those texts that chart extended periods of human history.

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history illustrate virtues or vices, or the rewards or just punishments of God.18 Adopting Patterson’s historical terms one could be tempted to argue that the Fall of Princes is a compilation which, like the earlier monastic chronicles, involves providential intervention in the narration of history. Meanwhile, the Troy Book represents an alternative model: as an aristocratic history with a concern to provide secular and causal historiography.19 Lydgate explains the unity of his Fall of Princes narration in such terms by commenting on the narrative interruptions, on the ways in which his envoys illustrate the virtues or vices: I sholde in eueri tragedie, Afftir the processe made mencioun, At the eende sette a remedie, With a lenvoie conueied be resoun, And afftir that, with humble affeccioun, To noble pryncis lowli it directe, Bi others fallyng [thei myth] themsilff correcte. (p. 204; Bk II, lines 148–54)

John Mortimer reckons that of the sixty-nine envoys, fifty-eight explicitly promote this advisory idiom in ‘broadly ethical rather than specifically political or legal’ terms. Rulers are frequently exhorted to avoid vicious behaviour, be it pride (I. Ch. 4), lust (I. Ch. 12; III. Ch. 4), adultery (I. Ch. 16), anger (I. Ch. 19), or sloth (II. Ch. 13).20 Narratives such as this one therefore reconfigure the Christian conception of God’s intervention in the time of the world: the unity in selection of episodes represents the view that history is not a unified process of organic development, but one connected by God’s existence from outside human time. This is the interpretation of St Augustine’s view of history – as a selection of the significant moments of the past that are related to the paramount moment in human experience of time, the Incarnation. What is of importance is not the sequence of action but the selection of episodes. At the start of Book I, Lydgate emphasizes that selection is the basis for his narration, the organizing principle for his work. In the description of the first age of the world he simply notes, ‘in whiche space, who that considieth weel, / ther be no thyngis write in special’ (p. 40; lines 1457–8). The only detail given of the first age is its duration: ‘bi turning off the heuene, / a thousand yeer, seuene hundrid and elleuene’ (p. 40; line 1456). A mere nine 18   See Donald Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1969), for a detailed discussion of reciprocal and chronological narrative models. Other terms, such as ‘aeternitas’ and ‘tempus’, have been employed as a means to distinguish between extra-temporal and episodic narrative forms. Strohm, ‘Time and the Implications of Narrative Form’ in Social Chaucer, pp. 110–43 provides a detailed account of the variations between and within these forms. 19   Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991), p. 96. 20   Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, p. 59.

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lines later the age of the world is noted as ‘a thousand foure hundrid & fourtene’ (p. 41; line 1463). Such quantified precision of duration and a moment in time provides clearly delineated stages, that of the first age from Adam to Nimrod, and the second from the time of Cadmus. Attention is not so much on the stages but on defining one period as distinct from the other using the criteria of when ‘notable’ or ‘historial’ (p. 41; line 1460) events for narration can be found. Despite the periodic divisions, the envoys in the Fall of Princes continually interrupt any chronological narration. The narrative is concerned with presenting cross sections of moments, not sequences. It is tempting, however, in accepting such arbitrary labels – chronological or reciprocal modes – to ignore the art of time narration in such narratives. After all, as noted in the Prologue, the Fall of Princes places great emphasis on the fact that it is ‘a chronycle or histoire’ composed through the agency of a poet as a means to justify the selection of significant moments that have been narrated. Temporal narration may be frustrated by unifiers (by the moral digressions and rhetorical amplifications), but it does not result in a neglect of time, as illustrated in the examples discussed above. A comparative examination of age descriptions in the Fall of Princes and the Troy Book reveals varying emphases and approaches towards presenting cross sections of time.21 Variations in the types of age descriptions and functions across these texts reveal just how conscious Lydgate is of the subtly different ways in which the same type of referent operates, resulting in variations of historical perspectives. In the Troy Book, the description of Jason as ‘the yonge, fresche, the lusty man’ (p. 52; Bk I, line 1380) could be taken from anywhere in the narrative, for without exception there is a formulaic indication of age in every character description. Age is not conveyed by quantified units but by the common medieval motif of age schemes. The phrase ‘the yonge, fresche, the lusty man’ is not concerned with fundamental aspects of time as flux and as a process of growth; it is not used to provide a sense of an individual character’s identity. Time is neglected, for life is presented as sudden jumps between the perpetual states of youth, middle age and old age, which are in themselves changeless. Lydgate adopts the most basic scheme, that of the biologists’ theory of three ages, the most fitting scheme in this context, where he wants to make generalized references to age states.22 Lydgate is like most medieval writers who, John Burrow observes, ‘speak of the course of human life not as a process of continuous development but as a series of transits from one distinct stage to another’, each stage containing

21   Comparison of age descriptions across these two texts and in a variety of other texts by both Lydgate and Hoccleve is explored in a wider context in my essay ‘Imaginings of Age in the Fifteenth Century: Nation, Everyman and the Self’, in Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (eds), Medieval Life-cycles: Continuity and Change (Turnhout, 2011), forthcoming. 22   It is more fitting than using the other more complex schemes of the physiological theory of four, historians’ theory of six, or astrologers’ theory of seven ages.

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‘a certain stable set of characteristics’.23 From this perspective the age indicators appear, at first glance, to be operating as no more than descriptive tags. They do not act as dynamic coordinates to progress the narrative; that is to say, they appear to serve a descriptive purpose in the same way as do time referents in the Fall of Princes, rather than play a distinctly structural role as they do in the Troy Book. However, when these abbreviated and frequent indicators are examined alongside the more detailed, varied, but less frequent age descriptions in the Fall of Princes, an interesting variation in their function emerges. In the first four books of the Troy Book there are an abundant number of references to the state of youth but only two to middle age. The first is found in Dares’s description of Diomede’s ‘mydel age’ (p. 276; Bk II, line 4616), and the second when Pyrrhus lies to his son and everyone – ‘olde & yonge and of mydel age’ (p. 843; Bk V, line 2472) – becomes aware it.24 In Books I to IV there are also relatively few references to old age (Book V is the exception and is discussed later). In the Troy Book, Lydgate does not think in terms of three ages, which explains his reticence about middle age; rather he thinks in terms of a duality: youth versus the old. By contrast, references to all three states – youth, middle age and old age – exist throughout the Fall of Princes, although not as frequently. This variation has several consequences. For example, the Troy Book has a selective focus on youth whereas the Fall of Princes explores all three states. In the first four books of the Troy Book, it is possible to discern what Burrow describes as ‘the cult of youth’ which has been noticed in certain later medieval writers [and this cult] clearly represents a fundamental characteristic of their new courtly culture, as against an older monastic culture in which the transcendence ideal worked towards a denaturing and devaluation of that particular age.25

Thus the descriptive tags do not simply refer to the state of specific historical characters; they also accumulatively reflect the courtly culture of the present. Throughout, an image of a culture repeatedly displays the ‘flour of manhood’ as ‘yonge, so fresche, and so coraious’, lacking only in a degree of ‘inward prouidence’ due to its ‘tendir yeeris’. This is not to say that the redaction of the Fall of Princes, begun some twenty years after the commencement of the Troy Book, reverts to and employs the older monastic tradition of ‘denaturing and devaluing’ youth as a means to focus on ideals of eternity. Instead, I believe the Fall of Princes is one of those texts from   J.M. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986), p. 178. 24   This description of middle age has no distinctive qualities. Rather it mixes the usual attributes of youth and old age simultaneously but with a notable exception. The youthful features of strength and bravery are not accompanied with a reference to innocence, implying the loss of innocence is a specific feature of middle age. 25   Burrow, The Ages of Man, p. 189. 23

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the later period that ‘reflects a renewed sense of the rich and various order of nature in which every age of life, and not least youth, can claim its legitimate place’ (my italics).26 Time is a central principle of concern in the Fall of Princes: it is no accident that in the opening book Lydgate creates a rich, merciless identity for time – ‘tyme with his rasour hath doon so gret vengance’ (p. 40; line 1437). He establishes his interest not just in ideals of transcendence but also in the effects of time, in time as a process of dissolution: ‘kam tyme vpon, and bi processe off yeeris / ther memory hath duskid and ther mynde’ (p. 40; Bk I, lines 1443–4). The Fall of Princes, by using many more rich and various adjectives for all three states, investigates both the conformities and the limitations of human nature in the natural state of the three ages. While the ‘yonge, fresche, the lusty’ state of youth is often presented as it was in the Troy Book, there are many descriptions that offer very different perceptions of youth, and certainly not those that would be promoted in the ‘cult of youth’. For example, youth is described as encouraging ‘fals auoutri’ (p. 77; Bk I, line 2830); as full of ‘foli’ and ‘presumpcioun’ (p. 218; Bk II, line 681); as ‘hasty’ causing destruction (p. 221; Bk II, line 785); as ‘onbridled’ (p. 231; Bk II, line 1129); and even the phrase ‘lusti youthe’, which in the Troy Book always denotes the vigour and vitality of youth, in the Fall of Princes signifies one of the limitations of Phaedra when he slays himself (p. 78; Bk I, line 2865). Even the destructiveness of youth becomes the subject of one of Lydgate’s laments, as he recalls Bochas’s diatribe against the immorality of princes: The play off youthe folk calle it lecherie, Seyn that it is a gamen off Nature, And to sustene and bern vp ther partie, How it sit weel, be record off scripture, Onto euerich liffli creature That stant in helthe and is coraious, Off verrai kynde for to be lecherous Vicious report thei han in remembraunce, But virtuous thing is ferr out off mynde; Flesshli lustis and lecherous plesaunce In ther desirs be nat left behynde. Auauntyng, lieng thei can off newe out fynde; And now-adaies thei holde curtesie Othes horrible, flatryng and ribaudie. (p. 362; Bk III, lines 1198–204)

Meanwhile, throughout the Fall of Princes, numerous references to middle age (as the ‘flouryng’ of age) contrast sharply with its appearance only twice in the Troy Book. In the Fall of Princes, middle age is frequently described as the time where prudence, fresh courage and excelling in manhood occur, and we even find   Burrow, The Ages of Man, p. 189.

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a quantification of when this middle state begins: ‘parfitt off age as man of thretti yeer’ (p. 14; Bk I, line 505). Similarly, the Fall of Princes use a wide range of referents for old age, implying a sustained interest in the state. These descriptions include poverty, feebleness, shame, lameness, lack of might, and the loss of worthiness and social position. Yet there are also descriptions of old age where positive attributes are indicated, such the description of the seven princes who attack Oropastes: ‘prudent and manli and off yeris olde’ (p. 378; Bk II, line 1788). There are even moments where strict demarcations between the ages conflate, such as the description of the goddess Nasica, who laboured for the good of Rome, who was ‘old of discrecioun & but yong of yeeris’ (p. 635; Bk V, line 1783). A recognition that the Fall of Princes demands a detailed examination of the rich and various natures of the three ages of man invites us to reconsider the descriptive functions of the age references in the Troy Book. Do the descriptions in the Troy Book act as simple descriptive indicators of two cross-sections of time – youth and old age (Book V)? Are they employed simply in order to create a positive reflection of contemporary court culture, or can they be seen to have an additional role? On closer inspection one sees that such age referents not only precede every character description but also often indicate the nature of collective groups, such as the Greeks who are ‘so yong, so fresche, so hardy … so strong’ (p. 375; Bk II, line 8072). The age descriptions of both individual characters and collective groups always precede the progression of narrative action, suggesting that these descriptive age tags have a framing role for forthcoming narrative action, just like the other forms of time referents in the Troy Book discussed earlier. Hence, the cult of youth is an indicator of which character the narrative episode will favour, seen, for example, when ‘ful pitousli trembling, Quakyng for age and lak of myth / Ther gret feeblesse be signes out shewyng’ (p. 14; Bk I, lines 478–9). The Greeks are described as a small group of 7000, while the Trojans have taken horse, ridden out and are waiting with their 100,000-strong army. It should not come as any surprise, however, that 157 lines later, the less equipped and smaller army of Greeks force the Trojans ‘backward to resort’ (p. 380; line 8229), for it was the Greeks who had the cult of youth on their side. No age indicators had been given for the Trojans. Age referents therefore have a dynamic and vital role in structuring the pattern of this narrative. Another look at the state of old age reveals one more striking variation between these texts. In both, decay of some form or another is characterized as having been caused by time acting as an agent of destruction. A distinction, however, can be made between the use of relative time in the Fall of Princes (where the process of decay is used in order to describe the nature of other states, characters, events or objects) and the Troy Book’s narrative in Book V, where time itself becomes the subject (and where the destructive effects of time act as commentary upon the forceful nature of time). Throughout the Fall of Princes, the effects of time do not simply describe the state of the characters – Adam and Eve, for example, after Cain slays Abel (pp. 21–2; Bk I, lines 750–73) – but act as comparisons for other states. The description of Adam and Eve dwells on old age, emphasizing the loss

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of basic faculties and the beauty of youth. Yet the destructive nature of time is not the subject of the narrative; instead, it acts as a conceit for the loss of innocence and the consequent suffering that humanity must endure: that neuer man hadde liberte, Sithen that Adam our Lord gan disobeye Ageynes deth, but that he muste deye (p. 22; Bk I, lines 782–4).

In the Troy Book images of old age have an additional function in the narrative. The cumulative presentation of the destructive effects of time in the final book, displayed in the descriptions of many ageing characters, expresses fears about the destructive process of time. These age indicators do not solely describe the nature of characters or situations, but portray a perception of time itself. This fear of the encroaching passage of time is illustrated by Pelleus, who in the final book is in his ‘castel olde and ruinous’ and is ‘ful of sorwe and care … drede of deth day & nyght … disespeired in his vnwedly age’ (p. 840; lines 2364–7). This is in sharp contrast to Pelleus, the youthful King of Thessaly described in Book I, who was ‘wys & discrete & also virtuous’ (p. 12, line 4). New old-aged characters are not introduced in Book V; the effects of time are indicated by the deterioration of the characters who had appeared earlier in the narrative, and who had once been youthful and active. Old age is not presented as a separate, static state coexisting with the other ages of man, as was the case in the Fall of Princes, but as the product of time’s passage. Lydgate draws attention, in Book V, to the association between the breakdown of order and structure and the loss of youth brought by the decay of time. In Lydgate’s closing remarks in the Troy Book, time is presented as a state that fades. One could therefore assume that the narrative has been concerned with what Burrow describes as ‘the transcendence ideal’,27 that is, what has traditionally been deemed as the ‘medieval’ view of time: As in this boke exaumple ye shal fynde yif that the list & enprente it in your mynde – How al passeth and halt here no soiour, Wastyng a-way as doth a somer flour, Riche and pore, of euery maner age: For oure lyf here is but a pilgrimage. (p. 874; lines 3565–70)

However, it is precisely what is usually deemed the ‘modern’ time view – the experience of the temporal state as a narrative of self-destruction – that has been the focus of concern, especially in the fifth book.   Burrow, The Ages of Man, p. 189.

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The study of choices and use of time referents in the Fall of Princes can once again be read in conjunction with the cultural narratives of time that were identified in the first chapter: the context-dependent nature of expressions; the coexistence of the objective and subjective, episodic and causal, fragments and sequences, functional and aesthetic expressions; and the interest in the ambiguities of temporal representation. The relative scarcity of time markers and coexisting referents should be expected in a narrative that intends us not to waste time in secular mismanagement, but wants us to turn our mind away from wilting summer flowers to eternal life. However, close study of the negotiations between eternal signifiers and temporal indicators has uncovered more than cultural specificities or genre-determined narratives in thematic and structural representations of time; it also reveals that Lydgate’s advisory agenda has inherent temporal specificities and anxieties. The use of schematic temporal divisions as organizing principles, the variations and specificities in dating macro and micro ages, the rich investigation of the different states of ageing, the use of relative time and descriptive functions, the silencing of temporal rhythms that draw attention to this very process, and the disruptions of chronology all merge to create a contrast between the ‘grand design of eternity’, which makes the temporal a mere aspect of fallen human nature, and the acute human consciousness of the temporal, giving rise to much of the narrative tension. These close readings reveal, then, that there is a much more sophisticated literary consciousness at work in Lydgate’s advisory verse than critics have appreciated to date.

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Chapter 4

Visualizing Multiple Beginnings: The Siege of Thebes Time markings in the Prologue of another of Lydgate’s large-scale poems, the Siege of Thebes, have similar narrative shaping functions to those in the Troy Book and Fall of Princes. That they do so deserves attention because the time discourse is of a very different nature. Lydgate employs a single form of micro referent – judicial astrology – in such a comprehensive manner as to produce similar narrative framing functions as when he uses a polyphonic time discourse. Lydgate focuses on creating an elaborate stellar constellation in the Prologue of his Siege of Thebes, as a means to frame the structural, thematic and rhetorical features of the tale that follows. In so doing, a keen literary consciousness in the art of time narration is revealed. Lydgate employs an astrological subtext to comment on themes of temporality within both political and literary history. More specifically, his astrological subtext sets up shifting temporal perspectives in the work, thereby challenging the reader to think across times, and to recognize the circularity inherent in both literary history and State politics. Furthermore, this underpinning of circularity invites readers to call into question all beginnings and endings. One of the areas on which this sheds new light is Lydgate’s treatment of his own relationship to Chaucer, and it suggests that rather than trying to usurp Chaucer’s legacy, as some have thought, Lydgate is instead participating in the circularity of literary history by reforming or rebeginning the title of ‘Floure of Poets’ for himself. The reception of Chaucer is therefore seen in a much less linear fashion than usual.   I am sympathetic to James Simpson’s rejection of the commonly used title Siege of Thebes, as he has used convincing internal narrative and manuscript evidence to suggest the poem should be entitled Destruction of Thebes. See James Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies and fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (eds), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Grey (Oxford, 1997) pp. 15–16. However, the title the Siege of Thebes is the accepted convention, and for that reason I continue to refer to it as such.    John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, EETS e.s. 108 and 125, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), p. 3, line 40. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. There is another version, edited by Robert R. Edwards in 2001, in the TEAMS Middle English Texts series, but I have opted for the EETS on grounds of consistency as most of the other texts considered in this book are from that series. There are no significant variations between the TEAMS and EETS editions in relation to the time markings that I focus on in this study. 

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Transits of Time: Lydgate’s Sky-map Differences exist not only between Lydgate’s own texts but also between his text of Theban history and Chaucer’s. My argument is that the original rhetorical embellishments by Lydgate are more than imitations or amplifications of Chaucer’s ‘astrological blueprint or subtext [which] serves as a cosmological analogue to the protagonists’ sense that they are trapped within a situation from which there is no escape’. In Lydgate’s text, the astrological discourse plays a crucial role in mapping the historiographical rhythms that Theban history signifies. While poetic imaginings and zodiacal coordinates of Saturn as indicative of springtime appear to ensure a Chaucerian opening for the Siege of Thebes, the coordinates are different enough to demand closer inspection. Astrology is not just about what any given planet denotes but the meaning created from its particular transit. At the start of The Canterbury Tales, Saturn is positioned where it is least powerful, in the Ram, but by the end, in the Parson’s Prologue, Saturn is entering Libra, its rulership. Lydgate’s lines do not imitate Chaucer’s; rather they mark the progression of this particular transit. The Sun has now passed out of the Ram and ‘Saturn stands in (malevolent) opposition to the Moon’, indicating it will have a much more encroaching and aggressive role to play in the narrative. This movement in time establishes a different mood from Chaucer’s work: it creates a ‘context of unpropitious, more powerful natural forces whose sources are infected at the root’. The traditional view, that Lydgate’s text is ‘more outspokenly a “mirror for princes” than anything else’, is upset by acknowledging the negative Saturnine forces at work in the tale, because the ‘dark and powerful sense of historical forces … negate the enterprise of prudential, truthful eloquence’. Simpson offers an insightful explication of Lydgate’s manipulations of dark Saturnine Theban dynamics as told from a Christian perspective, but yet more can be made of Saturn’s transit in the Prologue. The transit is a detailed and complex one, revealing much about Lydgate’s reform of Chaucer’s cosmological lexicon. By reassessing Lydgate’s astrological mappings in the Prologue and their reflexive relationships with the poem, one can gain more of an insight into the ways that expressions about time shape powerful historical perspectives in Lydgate’s tale. As in Lydgate’s two other narratives considered so far, age indicators have a central and dynamic role to play in the Siege of Thebes, but in this third poem, they convey a passage of time rather than a cross section of time. In the Prologue the first indication of Saturn’s nature is that of old age: ‘Satourn old with his frosty face’ (p. 1; line 3). Saturn is often characterized as an old man because, of all   Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991), p. 219.   Simpson, ‘Dysemol daies and fatal houres’, p. 33.    Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of XVth Century, trans.  

Ann E. Keep (London, 1961) p. 64. See also Robert W. Ayers, ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, PMLA, 73 (1958): 463–74.    Simpson, ‘Dysemol daies and fatal houres’, p. 21.

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the planets, it takes the longest to cross the heavens (about 30 years). In order to reinforce the importance of age we are told of Saturn’s eastern position: ‘Aurora was in the morwe red’ (p. 1; line 9); in medieval reckonings, Saturn in the east signifies age: ‘the bigynnynge of elde yif he were estren’. Lydgate then informs us that Saturn is in the constellation of Virgo: ‘in Virgyne taken had his place’ (p. 1; line 5). Saturn in Virgo is a good position for clerks and poets because, here, Saturn represents the principle of agnosia (‘not knowing’) and Mercury becomes involved as the principle of logos (‘word’ or ‘go-between’). If the sky-map Lydgate has been building had been a day chart we could have read this constellation as having symbolic valence for the ideological function of the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition. Virgo has as its function the intestines, which separates that which is useful from that which is not. This function in Virgo symbolizes a process of reification that leads more directly and easily to the truth, moral or political, which is of course the intention of advisory literature. However, with the reference to the moon it is clear that Lydgate’s Virgo is in a nocturnal chart, where the moisture of the night works against distinction and analysis. Those observing are required to work harder to clarify circumstances and chaotic situations. Lydgate’s narrative at this point is about age schemes, so the sky-map suggests we need to clarify some kind of indistinction and chaos about age processes. Decoding the obscurity of the stellar conjunction illuminates the circumstances that require clarification. When Virgo ‘is in the day house of Mercury, the exaltation or sign of maximum power of Mercury’ is signified. Alkabicus, in his fourteenthcentury treatise, explains ‘of age [Mercury] signifieth yongthe and perfeccioun’. Interaction between old age and youth is introduced, for ‘Satourn old’ is in the constellation where youth is in its maximum power. Old age is in combination with youth, but also in conflict with it: Saturn ‘was also in th’oposicioun / of Lucina the mone’ (p. 1; lines 6–7). North tells us that the moon ‘signifies the age of childhood’.10 The combination and opposition of age relationships frames the role of the reader in the forthcoming narrative, for age descriptions are not simplistic (a fact already seen in the Troy Book and Fall of Princes), and the reader is continually required to clarify their significance. A lengthy passage in Part III of the poem (pp. 121–3; lines 2931–84) contrasts youth and old age, drawing attention to the folly of living only in the present as opposed to considering future consequences. This has led some critics to assume a simple juxtaposition between the states of youth and old age: ‘the narrator distinguishes good counsellors from bad ones by a simple criterion, the former are old and wise whereas the latter are

  J.D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford, 1988), p. 204.   Jacqueline de Weever, Chaucer Name Dictionary: A Guide to Astrological, Biblical,

 

Historical, Literary, and Mythological Names in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York, 1996), p. 207.    De Weever, Chaucer Name Dictionary, p. 207. 10   De Weever, Chaucer Name Dictionary, p. 208.

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young and inexperienced’.11 On closer inspection, however, one sees that such simple opposition is not consistent: old age is not always a virtue. For instance, the guests at Edippus’s doomed wedding are of ‘croked Age’ (p. 37; line 866); Edippus declines rapidly ‘with sorow and unweldy age / this Edippus fille into dotage’ as he becomes ‘blynd and old’ (pp. 42–3; lines 997–8 and line 1017). Meanwhile, the ‘yonge, fresche, the lusty’ state of youth is often presented as it was in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale or in Lydgate’s Troy Book. Lydgate describes Layus’s Knights as ‘yong and coraious’ (p. 26; line 567); Jocasta reflects on her ‘tender age’ (p. 39; line 919); and Lycurgus’s child is ‘wondre tender of age’ (p. 125; line 3032). After all, the opening scene of the Prologue not only draws our attention to old age and youth as simple juxtapositions; it also emphasizes old age in combination with youth. Alan Renoir has observed that while Lydgate pitches the wisdom of age against the recklessness of youth, he also argues for union between force and wisdom, the combination of the virtues of youth and old age.12 Saturn’s nocturnal transit through Mercury acts as a narrative framing device, clearly indicating the Siege of Thebes is one of those texts from the later Middle Ages that Burrow classifies as investigating the different natures of, within and between ages.13 Returning to the Prologue, there are yet more astrological rhythms of time and, in turn, narrative frames to be observed. Mercury in addition to youth is also associated with ‘rethorik … prophecie and divyninge, and proverbs … and the science of versifyinge’.14 Beyond astrological treatises, we also find this association of Mercury with language and learning if we look at Boethius’s discussions in Consolation of Philosophy, and we can trace it back as far as the early fifth century in Martiannus Capella’s work, ‘The Marriage of Mercury and Philology’.15 Much critical research has noted that these are the very qualities which are Lydgate’s most original additions to his tale of Theban history. At first, scholars such as Walter F. Schirmer and Lois Ebin saw the significance of these additions as developmental, simply poetic flourishes of rhetorical confidence.16 The modern critical impulse of appreciating Lydgate’s strategy of reform rather than improved imitation was not evident until Straker’s examination of the ways in which Lydgate employs ‘the power of rhetoric to influence history’.17 The function of the tale is to demonstrate that rhetoric and eloquence are essential tools of good governance, as embodied   Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes’, Review of English Studies, 52 (2001): 16. 12   Alan Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate (Cambridge, 1967), p. 126. 13   J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986), p. 189. 14   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 207. 15   Jim Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, 1987), p. 115. 16   For an exploration of Lydgate’s narrative poetic and moral additions see Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 63. For a discussion of how Lydgate’s ‘myrie tale’ reveals his confidence in the use of rhetorical eloquence see Lois Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston, 1985), p. 56. 17   Straker, ‘Deference and Difference’, p. 2. 11

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in the poetic skills of Amphioun and in the use of the word before the sword by Adrastus and Tideus. Understanding the elaborate conceptions of the influences of medieval astronomical reckonings enables a reflexive relationship to be identified between the Prologue and the poem, and between the stylistic additions and the thematic concerns. Lydgate engages yet another cultural narrative of time, the conscious associations between mastery of time measurement expressions (as evidenced by this sky-map) and the ideal of eloquence (as a political as well as poetic tool). Associations of ‘prophecie and divynynge’ related to Saturn’s position in the day house of Mercury are complicated when Lydgate proceeds, in the Prologue, to indicate that ‘Jubiter in the Crabbes Hed / hath take his paleys and his mansioun’ (p. 1; lines 10–11). Jupiter in this day house, coupled with Saturn, signifies ‘nigromauncie and incantatiouns’.18 The contentious debate, witnessed in both the Troy Book and Fall of Princes, about the coexistence of prophecy and prognostications resurfaces.19 The interplanetary cycle of Jupiter and Saturn is the most important of all; they are known as the ‘Great Chronocrators’ (or timemakers). Their conjunction predicts collective events of great importance, events affecting kings and kingdoms, clearly an appropriate symbol of the narrative’s subject. Lydgate changes Chaucer’s emphasis of the historical forces by making Jupiter much more negative in its influence. In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the ‘First Movere’ speech, where Theseus seeks to bring a self-replicating process of violence to a definitive close, has encouraged a recent proliferation of antiThesean readings, but with the inclusion of Egeus’s bleak wisdom, that nothing in this world lasts, philosophical consolations are deeply problematic in Chaucer’s work. Not so in Lydgate’s. The presence of Jupiter has a definitive role to play in Lydgate’s narrative. The sequence of the astronomical associations of prophecy (Mercury) and then necromancy (Jupiter), but ultimate predominance of Jupiter’s negative connotations, foreshadows the outcome of Lydgate’s Theban tale. The tale ultimately rejects the ability to escape the recursive nature of Theban history despite its dominating linearity. The planetary conjunctions are more than aesthetic elaborations of Chaucer’s lines, having central framing roles for the historical perspective that follows. In Lydgate’s poem the first example of future consciousness is a prognostication rather than a prophecy. Knowledge of the future is not natural – not God-given – after all, Saturn in the house of Mercury is coupled with Jupiter. There is a lengthy passage on the process of predicting the future in Part I, lines 370–99 (pp. 18–19). ‘By craft only of Calculacioun’ (p. 18; line 367) the fate of King Layus’s child, Edippus, is revealed: ‘that with his swerd his fader shal be slawe; / ther may no man helpe it nor excuse’ (p. 19; lines 398–9). Detailed astronomical reckonings (much   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 205.   This debate about the compatibility of mathematical-astronomical reckoning

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and the subsequent interpretation of astrological characteristics of such charts had been circulating since St Augustine’s day.

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more sophisticated than any of those in the Troy Book or Fall of Princes) are used to calculate the future. Despite the quantifying skill displayed, the prognostication is presented as a negative occasion. Layus’s response is to defy the prognostication when he orders Jocasta to kill their son. He fails (as do many other characters in the tale) to heed the signs of the future. While the flourish of astronomical predictions is being made, we serve as voyeurs, reading Layus’s response as a failure to appreciate man’s inability to alter time’s course. Layus is shadowed by a linear temporality that will overcome him, just as is Troilus in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. There may be great skill displayed in the quantification of the future, but the focus is on the refusal to accept the inevitability of the prognostication. It is the failure to accommodate judicious prudence harmoniously in the present that is the dark force, not the actual telling of the future. Echoes of interest in Medea’s computations, and condemnations of their use in the Troy Book can clearly be heard in this episode, with Layus giving voice yet again to the cultural narrative of religious anxiety about time management (as opposed to time regulation). Next, prophecy is introduced with King Adrastus’s terrifying vision that a wild boar and a lion will wed his daughters (pp. 52–3; lines 1226–35). There are no elaborate astronomical time reckonings, no attempts to control time. Knowledge of the future is not intentionally sought but is visited upon Adrastus when the subconscious reigns, in sleep (as was the case with Cassandra in the Troy Book). Unlike Layus, Adrastus does not attempt to change the shape of destiny even though he is troubled by the dream. Instead, he continues his actions in the present (his entertainment of Polyneices and Tideus), while prudently keeping this knowledge in mind for the future. At this stage we are also ignorant of the significance of the dream, only learning, like Adrastus, of the animal images on Polyneices’s and Tideus’s shields when the marriages are about to take place. Apart from heightening narrative suspense, our participation in this sequence allows us to experience the knowledge of foresight without hindsight: as in the Prologue, through these narratives of Layus and Adrastus the different natures of prognostications and prophecies are enacted. In the final part of the poem, prophecy and prognostication are combined. Amphiorax is introduced to us as having … a spirit of trewe prophecye And cowde aforn ful opynly dyvyne Thyngges begonne how they shulde fyne. (p. 116; lines 2810–13)

The next few lines detail how Amphiorax eke be craft of Calculacioun Gif a dome of every questioun And hadde in magik grete experience. (p. 116; lines 2813–15)

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By contrast, in Part I, the fate of Edippus ‘by craft only of Calculacioun’ (p. 18; line 367) is determined solely by a prognostication. Adrastus, in Part II, gains future consciousness only via a prophecy. The Prologue frames the inevitable combination of prophecy and prognostication, and by Part III Amphiorax’s dual ability draws attention away from the debate about the means of gaining future consciousness to the ways in which this knowledge is managed in the present. When the Greeks are told of ‘her dysemol daies and her fatal houres’ (p. 119; line 2893), they are not prepared to accept Amphiorax’s warnings, whether they be prophecies or prognostications. The Greeks’ insistence that what Amphiorax foresees is ‘vntrewe’ (p. 120; line 2925) is yet another example (and indictment) of belief in fate as changeable in one’s own favour, no matter how the knowledge of the future is gained. History in this model, once again, can only be understood retrospectively. At the end of the tale, Lydgate remarks on Amphiorax’s failure to read future states in a prudent manner. His descent into hell is presented as an indictment against his prognostications that relied upon idolatry, necromancy and infernal astronomical dealings with the devil and other powers (as opposed to astrological transactions with celestial bodies and their dominations): Lo, what avayllen incantaciouns Of exorsimes and conjurisouns; What stood hym stede his nigromancye, Calculacioun, or astronomye; What vaylled hym the hevenly manciouns, Diverse aspectis, or constellaciouns? (p. 166; lines 4049–54)

At first this appears to be a straightforward repudiation of ‘swiche werkes supersticious’ (p. 166; line 4057), but when considered in the context of the poem as a whole, the condemnation of Amphiorax’s craft has another significance. We are reminded here of the opening scene of the Prologue, for there the narrator told us that Saturn was in Jupiter’s mansion. When these planets combine, ‘nigromauncie and incantatiouns, or enchauntmentes and exorcismes’ are to be expected,20 which is precisely how Amphiorax’s craft is described in the lines quoted above. The condemnation of Amphiorax reminds us of the unpropitious historical forces by which the tale is governed; we are reminded of time’s control in which the characters are imprisoned. Thus the Greeks’ appointment of Melanippus to replace Amphiorax is explained not only by the current narrative in Part III of the tale but also by the past narrative of the Prologue; narrative patternings are framed by the subtext of recursive rhythms that Theban history signifies. The revision of past perceptions is the final reading strategy that the astrological discourse promotes. The Prologue progresses towards its end with the employment   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 205.

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of the specific details of the age, attire and disposition of the narrator, and salient comparisons can be made with the nature of Saturn at the start of the Prologue. As noted, Saturn in the east signifies the beginning of old age and the narrator, too, is entering old age at this stage, being, we are told, fifty years of age. In his translation, Trevisa states that Saturn ‘is pale in colour othir wan as leed, and hath tweye dedliche qualities, cooldness and dryness’,21 while the host notes that the narrator ‘loke so pale al devoyde of blood’ (p. 5; line 89).22 Furthermore, Saturn ‘signifieth long pilgrimages’23 while the narrator informs us that he is ‘to do my pilgrimage’ (p. 5; line 94). Another striking parallel is that Saturn was deemed to ‘signifieth sothly blake clothinges’,24 while our narrator is dressed ‘in a cope of blak’ (p. 4; line 73). It has often been noted that black was the colour of the habit of Benedictine monks, and hence the narrator is explicitly fashioned by the author on the author himself. However, in the context of the other comparisons between Saturn and the narrator, there is room for both narrative interpretations. If we are to draw the conclusion that not only is Theban history but the narrator influenced, or indeed embodied, by the same nature as Saturn, then such comparison is all the more significant in relation to the most commonly known features of Saturn. North summarizes Alkabicus’s account: ‘the best [Saturn] was said to offer was the wisdom or inheritance associated with old age, while at worst he could set in motion a veritable succession of nastiness’.25 The first description of himself that the narrator offers is his age: in this context Lydgate’s purpose, to ‘teach some moral and political lessons’,26 and this matches the positive Saturnine nature. On the other hand, Saturn is in a malevolent position. Why should Lydgate want his readers to associate the narrator with a malevolent Saturn? Are we to expect the narrator to set in motion a veritable sequence of unpleasantness? The answer, I believe, lies in the role the writer intends us to play in the reading of the text. The narrator begins with a reflection on the past work of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and ends up bringing us into the fictional time of the pilgrims,   Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 479.   Alexandra Gillespie highlights how Lydgate’s colourless and broken body is

21 22

indicative of how literal and political bodies cede to misfortune due to natural physical and moral corruption, and in turn how this undermines all the journeys undertaken, tales told, the function of fiction, narrators and authors, in their moral purpose. That, in this reading, the pale colour signifies an association with decay and emptiness and a moral register about the art and purpose of the transience of authorship is furthered in these next few paragraphs by my establishment of how correlations between the narrator and Saturn draw our attention to the author’s temporal place in literary history. Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, pp. 16–21. 23   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 204. 24   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 205. 25   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 205. 26   Ayers, ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, 463.

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presenting himself as the pilgrim who will tell the first tale on the return journey homeward. We become part of this imaginative past time by being engaged in the present time of Lydgate’s narrative. John M. Ganim explains this phenomenon as a feature throughout Lydgate’s Theban tale: ‘we must exercise our linear understanding of history in order to understand, paradoxically, the limits of that understanding … we are forced to become participants as well as voyeurs’.27 The narrator involves us in a succession of nastiness, in the inevitable progression of the Theban tale that we already know, heightening our pity and frustration and therefore our understanding. One feature of Saturn’s nature not yet discussed is that ‘Saturn is the planet under whose influence men are imprisoned’.28 Imprisonment obviously takes place in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, as Arcite and Palamon are, at first, literal prisoners after the Theban war, and then become prisoners to love and to fate; they are also imprisoned by the conflicts within chivalric values deriving from both pagan and Christian traditions. Lydgate’s tale, by contrast, has a sharper focus on the imprisonment of characters and readers by the rhythms of time. His characters are imprisoned by the circularity of Theban history in ‘a replicating history that pre-empts a linear or developmental progress’,29 while the poem’s readers are imprisoned by the role in which Lydgate engages us as participants (not just voyeurs) in the narrative. Lydgate’s tale is, therefore, very much a tale about the negotiation of multiple states and rhythms of time. The Prologue, in emphasizing the problems of defining a clear point within recursive history, clearly frames not only the tale that follows but also medieval attitudes towards the (re)writing of Theban history. Robert R. Edwards provides an excellent overview of the medieval Theban tradition of amendments: Statius rejects the Virgilian epic in a dark vision of classical culture, while Boccaccio introduces chivalric culture into the tragic history; then Chaucer radically prioritizes the theme of the erotic over the political, revising Boccaccio’s ‘courtly values as the regulating mechanism over the aristocratic will’.30 Lydgate, I suggest, contributes to this process of revision, his astrological subtext introducing a dynamic rebeginning in the saga of Theban history telling in regard to the agency of the teller. Lydgate desires his readers to consider another rebeginning. Saturn’s best known role is the Greek tradition of Kronos: ‘he is signifier of fadres’.31 If we accept the arguments above, that the narrator shares the nature of Saturn, then the narrator is also the ‘father’. However, it is Chaucer who is hailed as the ‘first in   John M. Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton, 1983), p. 81. 28   De Weever, Chaucer Name Dictionary, p. 324. 29   Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 77. 30   For a detailed discussion of these different versions see Robert R. Edwards, ‘Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track’, in Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (eds), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto, 2002), p. 114. 31   North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 204. 27

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oure language, / Chief Registrer’ (p. 3; lines 47–8) and as the ‘Floure of Poetes’ (p. 3; line 40). At first, the Prologue praises Chaucer’s skill – ‘enlumynyng the trewe piked greyn / be crafty writinge of his sawes swete’ (p. 4; lines 56–7). Yet ‘sawes swete’ can denote either pleasant or deceitful writing.32 After this equivocal praise we are invited to consider comparison between the signifier of fathers and the narrator. As in the patterning of beginnings and rebeginnings of the Theban tale, perhaps Lydgate is subtly claiming the title of ‘Floure of Poetes’.33 Pearsall’s assertion that Lydgate is attempting ‘to improve on Chaucer’ may well be true, but in a greater sense than Pearsall conveyed.34 Lydgate, by engaging such temporal rhythms, does not usurp Chaucer; rather he reforms (that is, rebegins) the title for himself. As Simpson suggests, rivalry between Lydgate and Chaucer is fraternal not Oedipal: Lydgate enlarges Chaucer’s perspective in length and breadth but does not eliminate The Knight’s Tale.35 There is a ‘dynamic rather than teleological sense of a poetic career’ that the Theban track in medieval literary culture offers; alterations in genre and topic from writer to writer do not indicate a progressive view of literary history but the expanse of coexisting expressive possibilities of medieval vernacular culture.36 The astrological subtext to Lydgate’s narrative directs our attention to this fact that there exists in literary history, as much as in Theban history, a circularity calling into question all beginnings and endings. Lydgate’s concentrated narrative of speculative astrology plays a crucial role in mapping the historiographical rhythms that Theban history signifies for both State politics and literary genealogy. Judicial astrology is a process of casting a sky-map that ‘concerns human affairs on a level that is comparatively precise; typically it generates “judgements” (predictions or advice) regarding specific individuals and/or enterprises’.37 In the Middle Ages, a tradition was emerging where implicit links were made between maps of England’s realm and astrological practice, which ‘holds consequences not simply for the history of cartography 32   Straker, ‘Deference and Difference’, p. 6, discusses the double connotation of ‘sawes swete’. 33   See John Thompson, ‘After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, in Derek Pearsall (ed.), New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 198, who also argues, on examining the manuscript evidence, that both Hoccleve and Lydgate, elsewhere in his writings, present themselves as the new inheritors of the coat that Chaucer wore, rather than as mere imitators, ‘offering moments of resistance to a master narrative that would stress the shared values of a monolithic “Medieval” literary culture, one that is dominated by Chaucer’. 34   Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), p. 153. 35   James Simpson, ‘Chaucer’s Presence and Absence, 1400–1550’, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge, 2003), p. 259. 36   Edwards, ‘Medieval Literary Careers’, p. 124. 37   Daniel Birkholz, ‘The Vernacular Map: Re-Charting English Literary History’, New Medieval Literatures, 6 (2003): 53.

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and/or the history of science, but moreover for English literary nationalism and cultural history’.38 As shown above, Lydgate’s sky-map belongs to this practice, for its subtext not only generates judgements of individuals – the Theban characters, Lydgate’s fictional Canterbury narrator, himself as author and translator – but also frames the enterprise, or cultural narrative, of Theban history in medieval England and in vernacular literary history. The sky-map, just like the highly structured computation of the translation date of the Troy Book and relative indicators of time in the Fall of Princes, clearly frames structural, thematic and rhetorical features of the tale that follows. In varying his linguistic register from a polyphonic time narrative to a concentrated narrative of speculative astrology, Lydgate reveals a keen interest in experimenting with the variety of time discourses available to him. Other Temporal Patternings: Blurring Temporal Boundaries So far, the examination of the Siege of Thebes’s Prologue has demonstrated how Lydgate exploits a cosmological lexicon in order to prioritize patterns of causal connections, rebeginnings and never closed endings not only in cycles of fictional, moral, Theban or Lancastrian times, but also in literary history. But in addition to this elaborate stellar picture, there are other temporal patternings that create analogies of the historiographical perceptions which Lydgate seeks to prioritize in his tale: historical, contemporary and fictional reconfigurations between the past, present and future occur and have formative and emblematic relationships with Lydgate’s exemplary Theban history. The effect is to promote a sophisticated awareness of multiple ways to read history, as we shall see. Within the one poem, various and dynamic interpretative models operate, which rely upon active participation on the part of the reader. Historical, contemporary and fictional relationships between the past, present and future occur in this Prologue and have thematic, structural and rhetorical relationships with Lydgate’s reading of Theban history. Quite boldly following in the fashion of The Canterbury Tales, Lydgate opens the Siege of Thebes by locating the narrative actions in springtime. Comparison has been made between the syntactical structures of Lydgate’s and Chaucer’s seasonal depiction, and these lines have become known as ‘one of the most infamous sentence fragments in English Literature’.39 Lydgate’s version has suffered by comparison with Chaucer, because his lines have been found ‘lacking in any logical or semantic function’.40 E.P. Hammond remarks on the superior quality of Chaucer’s art:

  Birkholz, ‘The Vernacular Map’, p. 67.   D. Vance Smith, ‘Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When’, in Lisa H. Cooper and

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Andrea Denny-Brown (eds), Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 2008): 186. 40   A.C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), p. 74.

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Chaucer’s first eighteen lines assure us of his full command of complex phrasing, his clear view of his goal. In line twelve, Than longen folk is the prompt and expected conclusion of the Whan of lines 1 and 5. But Lydgate’s endeavour to imitate this poise expresses itself only in beginnings and rebeginnings, in an accumulation of clauses to their final exhaustion on line 78 – or 91? – without reaching a principle verb.41

Ganim observes that a general feature of Lydgate’s style is that his ‘rambling sentences often seem to be literally attempts to shepherd our responses’.42 If Lydgate’s ‘ramblings’ are not judged by modern expectations of grammar, it is possible to see significance in the syntactical structure altered from Chaucer’s work. Smith offers a convincing argument in favour of this reading, where the appeal of the inconclusive nature of the ‘when’ is seen as a central feature of Lydgate’s lyrical sense of time, enabling a persistence of the present ‘by a charming, even heroic, refusal to submit to its aporia, to the impossibility and utter desirability of ever really being present in any sense’.43 The patterning of Lydgate’s opening lines can be read as indicating the nature of the tale that follows. When Lee Patterson states that ‘beginnings are always rebeginnings’,44 his observation is not in relation to the opening lines but to the subtext of Theban history: ‘Theban history in its pure form has neither origin nor end but only a single, infinitely repeatable moment of illicit eroticism and fratricidal rivalry’.45 This opening springtime description deserves attention in relation to its stylistic relationship with the patternings of beginnings and rebeginnings in the rest of the poem. The poem starts with what first appears to be the beginning of the historical events, with the founding of Thebes: … of olde antiquité, Upon the tyme of worthy Iosué, Be dyligence of kyng Amphioun. (lines 187–9)

It soon becomes clear that this is not the time that the narrative is about, but a past time that has remained in the present to the author’s time through memory: … [Amphioun’s] fame which nevere shal away, In honure floureth yit unto this day,

  E.P. Hammond (ed.), English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, 1927),

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p. 415.

    44   45   42 43

Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative, p. 120. See Smith, ‘Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When’, p. 186. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 24. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 77.

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And in story remembred is and preised. (lines 191–3)

It is then acknowledged that narration of past times is a subjective process and that accounts can differ and be revised; after all … Some expositours, Groundyng hem upon olde auctours, Seyn that Cadmus the famous olde man, Ful longe afor this cité first began. (lines 293–6)

Amphioun’s beginning may be a rebeginning of Cadmus’s marking of the Theban site. Such a paradoxical concept of beginnings and rebeginnings had been established in Benoit’s Roman de Troie, the authoritative version of Trojan history in the Middle Ages.46 I question Edwards’s idea, that Lydgate ‘labors to obscure’ the scandal of dual origin (and hence legitimacy), since the mediation and reconfiguration of time is accentuated in Lydgate’s account much more so than in Benoit’s version.47 With the opening of Lydgate’s tale demarcating the past from present time, highlighting the survival of the past in the present through memory, the result is a focus on the potential for multiple perceptions of time, which causes confusion as to the origins of time states. Readers are presented with their challenge: the competing necessity of the need to recognize the difference between past and present times, but also to accommodate time states that have ambiguous beginnings or rebeginnings. Lydgate shares such consciousness with Chaucer, as noted in Chapter 1’s discussion of the Proem to Book II of Troilus and Criseyde, which singles out the rhythms of change as central to understanding a moment of time: ‘in sundry ages / in sundry londes, sundry ben usages’ (lines 27–8). The lesson learnt is that our present perceptions of time are not stable and can be subject to change. Merging fictional and real times also helps Lydgate to foreground interpretative challenges for the reader. By line 18 of the Prologue, it becomes clear that the depiction of spring is not of the present time but rather of a past moment: ‘the tyme in soth whan Canterbury talys / complet and told’ (p. 2; lines 18–19). This past time, however, will ‘alwey fressh ben in my memoyré’ (p. 3; line 45): the past work of Chaucer is in the present due to the process of memory. The structure of the Prologue foreshadows a major device in the poem: Lydgate continually requires his readers to merge time states. This treatment of time is a characteristic feature of Lydgate’s style in general: ‘if anything marks Lydgate’s style, it is the blurring of distinctions. In syntax, images, and elaborations of all sorts it is often difficult 46   Patterson, in his Chaucer and the Subject of History, has extensively shown how Guido’s historicization of Benoit’s poem is central to Chaucer’s work. 47   Edwards, ‘Translating Thebes’, p. 325.

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to tell where one element begins and the other leaves off’.48 Phillipa Hardman, in her study of Lydgate’s stylistically uneasy syntax, agrees that he moves ‘from past to present to future, from narrative to commentary to prayer, without definite stops between’, and argues that this can be seen as ‘stressing the continuity of prophecy, revelation in time, and faithful response’.49 In general, this tale is about the past, about ancient Theban history, the ‘rytys used in the olde dawes / aftere custome of paganysmes lawes’ (p. 25; lines 543–54). Yet the tale is also about the immediate present, and has topical relevance to the veracity of Henry V50 and to the Treaty of Troyes.51 Then again, its lessons of good governance, relying on the word rather than the sword, are universal, applicable for all times, past, present and future, a ‘mirror for princes’.52 The cultural narrative of temporal specificity, which gained an important position in fifteenth-century historical writings, here plays a central role in controlling connections between the real time of composition and the fictional time of Lydgate’s narrative. In the Prologue, fusion of Lydgate’s present imaginings with the past time of Chaucer’s reaches a climax when the fictional narrator presents himself as joining the host and the pilgrims. Transition into the fictional time of The Canterbury Tales brings us into the presence of the past, as the host greets the narrator: ‘ye be welcom newly into kent’ (p. 5; line 84). That past time is now, paradoxically, the present time of the narrative is emphasized by temporal specificity. Quantification of the narrator’s age is made: ‘nygh fyfty yere of age’ (p. 5; line 93). The actions of the narrative – the meeting of the Lydgate-pilgrim and the host – are located in a specific time, as he is invited to ‘soupe with us tonyght’ (p. 5; line 98). The movement of the narrative as a whole also conveys temporal specificity: from a general time (springtime) to a specific fictional historical moment (the telling of the Canterbury tales); from real-time memory of Chaucer’s work to the current fictional imaginings of Lydgate. Negotiations between past and present times in the Prologue are perhaps the most significant indicator of the tale that follows. Although there may be no allegorical personifications of prudence such as those we find in Lydgate’s disguisings, Simpson notes that the essence of the poem’s being (as is the Troy Book’s) is in praising the central virtue of prudential foresight. This virtue is exercised by clerical voices as a means to advise aristocrats on how to act, although it simultaneously illustrates how such prudence is restrained by unpropitious historical destiny. While Simpson details the ways in which prudence is practised by the aged characters in the poem, I intend to focus on the ways that we, the   Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative, p. 119.   Phillipa Hardman, ‘Lydgate’s Uneasy Syntax’, in Larry Scanlon and James

48 49

Simpson (eds), John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, 2006), p. 19. 50   See Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 64. 51   See Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 22. 52   See Ebin, John Lydgate, pp. 55–6.

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readers, are required to engage in such thinking across mutable and chaotic times, while being advised (or restrained) by authorial strategies. Obvious echoes can be heard here of Hoccleve’s advice on how to read or misread (discussed in Chapter 5), and of both poets’ occasional poems that accentuate prudent reading strategies. There can be little doubt that the purpose of our reading Lydgate’s tale (and the other advisory narratives) is to practise prudence according to the classical definition: to ‘perceive consequences, to comprehend the cause of things, their precursors and their antecedents, so to speak; to compare similarities and to link and combine future with present events’.53 For instance, despite widespread critical dismissal of Isiphlye’s tale as yet one more example of Lydgate’s inability to coherently organize his material, I suggest it is not accidental that an interlude in the plot of Amphiorax’s downfall takes place.54 During this interlude, when Lycurgus’s son dies, Isiphyle laments: ‘I may it not eskape / the pitous fate that is for me shape’ (p. 133; lines 3233–4). She displays what the Greeks lack, the Cardinal virtue of prudence. Isiphyle reflects on ‘the stok of her kyndrede’ (p. 130; line 3158) and the events ‘upon a certeyn nyght’ (p. 130; line 3166) that caused her to flee her country and be taken to Lycurgus. She considers the cause of her current position, as charge of his child and the future consequence of the present moment: ‘that I mot be ded’ (p. 133; line 3236), the result of her immediate past action of ‘slouth and my neclygence’ (p. 133; line 3237). Before the narrative returns to Amphiorax, Jocasta also repeats this process of thinking across times. She reminds Eteocles of his past, ‘how he dide wrong’ (p. 151; line 3652), while also considering the future consequences of his intended actions: ‘thow shalt accountys and a reknyng make / for alle tho that persshyn for thi sake’ (p. 152; lines 3677–8). Jocasta does this in order to encourage Eteocles to recognize past pressures and future influences on the present moment, for ‘the tyme is come it may be non other’ (p. 153; line 3701). The future moment that the narrative has so long been conscious of – the war between Polyneices and Eteocles – has arrived. These narrative interludes allow Lydgate to illustrate Amphiorax’s weakness by means of contrast, but only if the reader engages in prudence by making connections in real time; the reader is implicitly invited to think about his/her previous experience of the narrative and the present narrative of interludes in preparation for the forthcoming discussions about Amphiorax that have already been framed by the Prologue.

  Cicero’s definition of the Cardinal Virtue of prudence in De officiis, qtd in Simpson, ‘Dysemol daies and fatal houres’, p. 18. 54   Amphiorax’s downfall is about his failure to appreciate that while events can be predicted they cannot be changed; that is to say, his downfall is the result of his inability to recognize the relationship the future has with the past and present. 53

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Demarcating Multiple Times As in the Troy Book, a polyphonic time discourse is in operation in the Siege of Thebes, but in relation to macro rather than micro structures. A paradoxical temporal strategy to blur temporal boundaries is simultaneously employed, that of demarcating time. These multiple strategies engage readers in a negotiation of multiple perceptions which, we will see later, is the moral lesson in Theban history that Lydgate stresses. Throughout the poem, the narrator reminds us of the different imaginative times that distinguish us from the time of the narrative. We are reminded ‘of the pylgrymes rydyng round aboute’ (p. 45; line 1058), with the focus on the time of telling this next part of the tale: ‘of the clok that it drogh to nyne’ (p. 45; line 1045). Pearsall has noted that ‘the fiction [of the pilgrimage] is kept up through the tale with more realism than Chaucer ever admitted’.55 Is this evidence of how the child nurtures and develops the father’s legacy? I suggest not. An interesting pattern of ways to read narrative and historical time emerges if, instead of reading these lines as a simple improvement on Chaucer, we focus on what the new emphasis on the pilgrimage does in Lydgate’s narrative. This distinguishing of different time states is repeated in numerous ways, and at first appears to be a stabilizing strategy. For instance, in Part II the Theban lords decide that, in order to solve the dispute of who should rule Thebes, Eteocles and Polyneices should ‘euerich of hem to regnen after other, / yeer be yeer as it cam aboute’ (p. 48; lines 1116–17). Difficulties in the present are dealt with by planning future durations of each of the brother’s governance, these durations having clearly demarcated origins and endings. Differentiation of time states is maintained, as temporally specific details are employed to focus on the present time of Polyneices’s one-year exile from Thebes. A few such examples are when the actions of the narrative are set in a specific context, as when Polyneices rides to a forest by the sea while it ‘drowe to nyght’ (p. 50; line 1170), or at the end of the tempest, when ‘it was passed almost mydnyght hour’ (p. 51; line 1186). There are no patterns of beginnings and rebeginnings; each time state is presented and explored as an entity in itself. While this method of reading and managing time works for some (for the Theban community and Eteocles), the refusal of Polyneices to accept such strict demarcation of time states in his attempt to manipulate his position of power is yet one more indication of the ways in which the poet seeks to highlight a multiplicity of temporal perceptions, rather than providing a didactic instruction on how to read time. The full significance, or tragedy, in demarcating and only retrospectively appreciating interconnections in time states reaches its powerful and ominous conclusion in the return of Edippus to Thebes. En route to Thebes, Edippus solves the riddle of the Sphinx.56 It is no coincidence that the riddle should be about the   Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 152.   The riddle is at lines 259–78 (pp. 29–30) and the solution at lines 699–735 (pp.

55 56

31–2).

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ages of man, where man ‘retourneth kyndely ageyn / to the matere which that he kam fro’ (p. 30; lines 674–6). Edippus recognizes both the linear progression of states of time and their cyclical nature, the connection of the end to the start, the future with the past. His resolution of the Sphinx’s puzzle foreshadows the resolution of his own identity. Until his succession as king, his life has progressed in episodic stages. By contrast, when Jocasta recalls the birth of her child, the prognostication and the slaying of her husband, Edippus makes causal connections as he ‘fonde out wel, be reknyng of his life / that she was both his moder and his wyf’ (p. 42; line 988). The subsequent insanity into which Edippus falls, due to his awareness of his fratricidal and incestuous actions, is the result of understanding his present as a product of causal rather than episodic relationships. He achieves the same self realization as Hoccleve does of temporal dynamics in the mirror scene of the Complaint (see Chapter 6), but Lydgate’s realization is both more dark and unpropitious. Towards the end of the poem (the last 200 lines) the invitation to develop a more sophisticated method of reading time is issued, as we are challenged to consider the interrelationships between different time states. There are a number of references to ‘my mayster Chaucer’ (p. 185; line 4501) and to how ‘some auctours make mencioun’ (p. 186; line 4541). By these frequent references, our consciousness is raised in relation to the historicity of the material that has been narrated. In addition, the ‘real’ time of the history is calculated: It was acountyd, in bookys ye may Se, Four hundred yeer, as mad is mencioun, To-foor the beelding and fundacioun Of gret Rome. (p. 189; lines 4622–5)

The effect is to draw attention to the historical reality of the imagined time in which we have engaged. Having demarcated the difference in Theban time from our own, but also having revised the impression of fictional time to real time, the poem closes with one last series of time negotiations. Perhaps this is the most important recognition of different time states and of their interrelationships, as our reading serves to illustrate what Ganim notes about Troilus and Criseyde: ‘to the extent that narrative poetry is bound by perception in time, it is very much like the world itself … [and] the world in time and the world beyond time are connected’.57 Lydgate connects the cupidity and hate that destroyed Thebes to Lucifer’s revolt in heaven (yet another rebeginning), and claims that this past event has resulted in original sin that has permeated the world in social strife to this day (pp. 191–2; lines 4660–89). Having established the connection with the past, Lydgate proceeds to consider the future in the context of a New Testament reading. He imagines how love and charity will   Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Literature, p. 102.

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spread through the land. In prophesying ‘pees and quyet / concord and vnyte’ (p. 192; line 4703), the narrative returns our consciousness to ‘this lyf present’ (p. 193; line 4713) in the closing lines. Many critics have noted how these words are closely reminiscent of the 1420 Treaty of Troyes: ‘Item, ut Concordia, Pax, & Tranquillitas inter prædicta Franciæ & Angliæ Regna perpetuo futuris temporibus observentur’.58 Yet, as Patterson argues, the peace proposals do more than convey a sense of topicality; they actively invite the reader to revise their connections of the present time in the narrative with the previous tale that they have read, for the Theban tale confounds any messages of peace.59 Edwards concurs, explaining that Lydgate’s passage does not represent ‘a formulaic turn to Christian charity as an antidote to miscarried secular fame and social disorder’; rather it is much more culturally specific with its ‘hard-won recognition that chivalric [contemporary] culture at the limit threatens itself’.60 Our consciousness is raised about the ways in which Lydgate reconfigures lessons of pagan statecraft and aristocratic selfgovernance as a complex web of competing narrative times. Lydgate invites us to revise any past perceptions of the poem as being only about fictional, historical or universal times. He encourages us not only to adopt a much more synchronic perspective but also to regard the poem as specifically occasional, as a tale about the negotiations of past and future in contemporary fifteenth-century time. A similar strategy of never-ceasing revision of time occurs in the Troy Book, although executed by a different discourse of time – through micro causal expressions as opposed to the recursive macro interplays of time states that predominate in the Siege of Thebes. As Christopher Baswell observes, in the Troy Book ‘Lydgate uses his opening and closing verses to generate a second story of translation in addition to Troy’ by locating his translation of Guido’s narrative in a precise contemporary time; thereby a more ‘inferential narrative of the imperial projects his patron was engaged in’ emerged.61 Moreover, the Troy Book, like the Siege of Thebes, closes on the idea of a treaty, rather than military action, as the basis for peace, repeating the Trojans’ plan of a peace-making marriage, but implying a reversal in its success with allusions to the marriage between Catherine and Henry: yet ‘its peace-making impact is emphatically left in the future tense’.62   Qtd in Erdmann and Ekwall’s Siege of Thebes, Part I, p. vii.   Lee Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John

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Lydgate’, in J.N. Cox and L.J. Reynolds (eds), New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 97. 60   Robert R. Edwards, ‘Translating Thebes: Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Stow’s Chaucer’, English Literary History, 70 (2003): 323. 61   Baswell identifies the imperial narratives embedded within the text: the accession of the English throne by patrilineage, continental conquest, marriage to Catherine Valois, and the diplomatic activities that made him heir to the throne of France (‘Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin’, in Jeanette Beer [ed.], Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages [Kalamazoo, 1997], p. 217). 62   Baswell, ‘Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin’, p. 223.

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Like the Siege of Thebes, the tale ends in an ambiguous moment of rebeginning and non-closure. I accept Strohm’s verdict that Lydgate is a reformist ‘functioning not as a recycler of convenient platitudes but as a purposeful moralist committed to the presentation of hard truths behind a skilfully manipulated mask of indirection and dulled affect’.63 The simultaneous use of multiple context-dependent micro markings in the sky-map and macro interplays of time states locates present concerns within a wider timescale as a means to advise on what rhythms of continuities need to be affirmed or surreptitiously disrupted. In this narrative, Lydgate clearly illustrates how the disturbance of chronology – the traversing of time periods – acts as a central dynamic in Lydgate’s advisory agenda. Temporal consciousness is manipulated, or rewritten, through the use of a variety of the cultural narratives outlined in this book, as a means to reconfigure the political, social and poetic specificities of that moment in time. Exploring Lydgate’s work line by line means that no matter what we assume about his ‘typical’ or ‘medieval’ ideas, his work is much more inventive than that. Across Lydgate’s vast oeuvre of writings, time markings are frequent, striking and original features. Lydgate is more locally varied in his methods for comprehending and describing time than any of the common generalizations of Le Goff, Leclerq and others allow. That Lydgate artistically employs temporal referents in an acutely conscious and varied manner in these three texts illustrates the central role that time coordinates play in producing different narrative rhythms. Time markings must be read narratively: the manner of producing attitudes towards ideas about time is as much a theme of these texts as a feature of their structure. Reading Lydgate’s time markings on such a micro level convincingly recovers medieval exemplary narratives from the modern monolithic categorization of a non-causal, non-thematic medieval consciousness of time. It has not been possible to create categories of medieval time markings in these narratives, as was the case with the range of socio-literary narratives studied in the first chapter: boundaries between Church or Merchant times, linear or interlocking times, cross-sections or sequential developments, objective and subjective, slip according to changing narrative contexts. Temporal rhythms comprise the salvational plan of history and pagan tensions, fragmentary and thematic patterning, quantifiable and subjective reasoning. Lydgate is deeply conscious of highlighting the exact influences – or ‘occasionalism’ – of time in his texts, displaying his individual artistic ability in negotiating a hybrid consciousness of time deeply rooted in the cultural narratives of his period.

63   Paul Strohm, ‘John Lydgate, Jacque of Holland and the Poetics of Complicity’, in David Aers (ed.), Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 2000), p. 115.

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Chapter 5

Hoccleve’s Living within Time: The Regiment of Princes If anything characterizes the function of temporal structures in Lydgate’s work it is that they emphasize the past in the present. This is why the discussion so far has focused on the interplay of memory in present and future perceptions, on the ideas of translatio imperi, on the mediation of the narrator and the author, on the structural sequences and causal effects, and on the multiple time strategies and mappings of time to create narratives about retrospective historical rhythms. Conversely, Hoccleve’s interest is in what Mark Currie has described as the ‘correlative issue’ in ‘which the present is experienced in a mode of anticipation’. Currie explains: Narrative is understood as retrospection more readily than it is understood as anticipation, but it cannot really be one without also being the other. If, in order to look back at what has happened, we tell a story, we must also know that the present is a story yet to be told. The present is the object of a future memory, and we live it as such, in anticipation of the story we will tell later, envisaging the present as past.

Although Currie is outlining his theory in relation to modern novels, this emphasis on the present as an anticipatory experience is a useful way to understand Hoccleve’s artistic negotiations with temporal structures. Similar cultural narratives of time as those studied in Lydgate’s work resurface here, but in Hoccleve’s work there is an overwhelming sense of living within the present in anticipation of the story. In The Regiment of Princes, this takes the form of an exchange between an Old Man and the Hoccleve-narrator: the narrator is trapped in his present consciousness with anxieties about the past and his future potential impinging on his current behaviour, while simultaneously our consciousness of the advisory text that is to follow undermines the didactic reading strategies on offer. In the Series, Hoccleve’s consciousness of time is an aspect of how he ultimately resigns himself to the impossibility of stability and so commits to a world of contingencies in which the whole notion of mis/reading is open to discussion. In drawing our attention to how the present is a story yet to be told in these two texts, Hoccleve gives voice to the cultural anxieties noted in the first chapter about the unease of representations in    Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 6.

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time, of time management and of the ambiguities in processes of recollecting time. The point of this chapter is to illustrate Hoccleve’s resistance to chronological development, for in his work we see a much more dynamic temporal awareness at play. The focus here is on Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, composed 1410–11, comprising some 5463 lines of rhyme royal stanzas, and comparable to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes in also belonging to the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition. It is a homily on the virtues and vices of a ruler, and is addressed to the future King Henry V. In addition to the exempla and moralizations, the poem deals with Lancastrian issues of legitimacy and the subject of peace, and is petitionary in character. It is also prefaced with an extensive Prologue in the form of a dialogue between an Old Man and the Hoccleve-narrator that touches on life in London and the local taverns. Time perceptions in the Prologue disclose marks of historicity, unsettling any notions of universality in the main narrative that readers might presuppose. By negotiating interrelations, conflicts and synchronicities between time discourses, Hoccleve is able to disclose his awareness about culturally conditioned temporal agencies in the translation and exposition of didactic material. The focus in this chapter, therefore, is on the interplay between macro and micro time structures in the poem’s frames. R.F. Yeager has noted that Hoccleve in The Regiment – and to this we can add the Series – has ‘devoted atypical space and labor creating his frame’. Yeager argues that Hoccleve’s elaborations of the fictive instructions (the frame) create a striking emphasis on looking forward and backwards in an ‘unvarnished topicality’; The Regiment’s present time is not a fictive one but the historical moment of London in 1410–11, while time in the Series’ frame is presented as the autobiographical time of the Hoccleve-narrator. The frames become stories figuring the hermeneutical verse that follow. Interplay between time states in these frame stories reveal implied reading processes for intended and imagined readers, encouraging them to play a more active role in the construction and reception of Middle English verse than has previously been thought. Hoccleve’s constructions of interpretative patternings will be explored in the light of Wolfgang Iser’s idea that reading is a constructed act that takes its cue from various guidelines established by the author, and that meaning is only created when the reader evaluates these constructions in the context of their own experience.

  For a discussion of the poem’s date see John Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages: English Writers of the Late Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1994), vol. 1, no. 4, p. 18.    R.F. Yeager, ‘Death is a Lady: The Regiment of Princes as Gendered Political Commentary’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 26 (2004): 175.    See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader’, in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 27–38. 

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Hoccleve’s Anxieties Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes ‘oghte a mirour be to al mankynde’. In 1968, Jerome Mitchell declared that the poem could best be classified as a ‘didactic’ text which contained universal truths for all time, and qualified this by adding that ‘the passages on the social problems in England and the political situation in France bring it also into the realm of political verse’. Literary and historicizing features were to a large extent neglected until Pearsall shifted the focus of attention to the arresting poetic personality created by the ‘direct and personal mode of address’ and the poet’s treatment of the subject of implied reception. However, while Pearsall acknowledged these literary features, he did so in order to explore Hoccleve’s political agenda, his ‘larger program of kingly selfrepresentation’. More recently, both Nicholas Perkins and James Simpson have rejected conventional readings of the poem in which Hoccleve is seen to act as an agent of Lancastrian rule, or to be at the mercy of literary and political constraints of the ‘mirror for princes’ genre. According to this school of thought, Hoccleve is perceived to have been an ‘audacious combiner’ of genres, where the Regiment of Princes ‘eludes or overflows the categories of mirror for princes, complaint, propaganda, autobiography, consolation, or begging poem’ and discourses range and interact from royal, ecclesiastical, social, household, economic to parliamentary linguistic registers, which were read and reshaped in exemplary, philosophical, narrative, historical, biographical and educational ways. As a result, a persuasive argument has developed that regards royal advice as a hermeneutical verbal and political exchange, blurring the boundaries between the reader and actor, creating discourses of challenge and subversion as much as of deference. My work builds on this model by illustrating how consciousness about the unease of representations and management of time is a central component of the implied reading position. Due to the explicit comments contained within the poem we could expect formulaic strategies of devotional practice, not least the cyclical and fragmented   Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, 1999), p. 144; line 3517. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text.    Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Chicago, 1968), p. 31.    Derek Pearsall, ‘Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: The Poetics of Royal SelfRepresentation’, Speculum, 69 (1994): 410.    Nicholas Perkins, ‘Haunted Hoccleve? The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead’, The Chaucer Review, 43 (2008): 108.    See Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001), and James Simpson, ‘Chaucer’s Presence and Absence, 1400–1550’, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 251–69. 

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rhythms of salvational history. The structure of the text, ‘a loosely sprawling medley of autobiography, complaint, social satire and moral reflection’,10 incorporates digressive discussion of the virtues and vices that royalty (or the poet, in the case of the Prologue) need to display and avoid. Such digressions act as the means to introduce, reflect on or connect the historical tales and anecdotes; the narrative’s reciprocal structure means that it is the didactic material, rather than causal connections or sequences, that forms the basis of cohesion and development. The result appears to be an exemplary narrative about the ideals of governance and civil behaviour; once again we find temporal narration is interrupted, if not frustrated, by imprecise unifiers, rhetorical amplifications and moral commentaries. In the poem, authorial denials of historicity intermingle with declarations of universality, and claims that the material selected ‘may ensample and mirour be to us’ (p. 133; line 3202). At first glance, in such a context, frequent references to the contemporary social and political concerns seem to support the assumption that medieval advice books for princes posit present concerns in the past, in order to deny the historicity of the text. The narrative moves with ease from discussing examples derived from ‘dayes olde’ to aspects of Prince Henry’s anticipated rule. The text is unlike Lydgate’s Fall of Princes in that it does not contain physically separate envoys; instead, it includes moral digressions in the body of the text. The impression of an episodic narrative may not therefore be as great, but the widespread permeation of moral digression into the flow of the narrative results in the prioritization of didactic functions rather than the exploration of any secular patterns of historical connections in both Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s texts. Borderlines or aspects of cultural specificity between different periods of time seem to be non-existent. Yet, as noted in the discussion of Lydgate’s works, Copeland argues that it is through interpretative translation that independence (rather than imitation) is gained, as cultural values and the authority of the present are superimposed on the past, disclosing the writer’s temporal agency. So how does Hoccleve’s use of negotiating interrelations, conflicts and synchronicities between time discourses enable him to disclose his awareness of culturally conditioned temporal agencies in the translation and exposition of didactic material? In an attempt to answer this question I do not read this text chronologically. First I consider the significance of time markings in the short passage midway through the book, known as the Proem, in relation to the subsequent Regiment of Princes narrative, usually referred to as the text proper. Then I return to the beginning and make a study of the time perceptions in the Prologue.11 My choice of the commonly recognized divisions by modern critics – of Prologue, Proem and text proper – is justified in   Derek Pearsall, ‘The English Chaucerians’, in D.S. Brewer (ed.), Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (London and Edinburgh, 1966), p. 223. 11   Blyth has noted confusion about the terms to use when describing the three parts of Hoccleve’s text. Some manuscripts identify the Proem as a separate part of the text, usually calling this section the ‘Prologue’; but this is ‘a designation which goes against the 10

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the answer I provide to D.C. Greetham’s query about whether the ‘apparent self indulgence’ of the Prologue is a ‘genuine part’ of the overall unity of The Regiment of Princes.12 Time perceptions in the Prologue disclose marks of historicity that unsettle any notions of universality in the Proem and the text proper that readers might presuppose.13 The value of beginning in the middle and then returning to the start is in demonstrating that an appreciation of the parts (in Iser’s terms, the ‘vacancies’) of the poem are crucial in reading implied attitudes towards temporal contexts. Temporal Tensions in Concealing Historicity The midway brief Proem passage has two main functions. On the one hand it authorizes the text, while on the other it defers interpretative responsibility to the reader. The first strategy in authorizing the text is to attribute the work to three sources – Egidio Colonna’s De Regimine Principum, Jacobus de Cessolis’s Liber de Ludo Scacchorum, and also Chaucer’s work.14 The significance of naming sources has the effect of establishing authenticity and stabilizing the material. Throughout the text proper, the repetitive naming of sources, as well as the use of opaque references such as ‘as I have rad’, ‘in dayes olde’, or ‘I compile out of this auctores olde’ reinforces the desire to assert the historical legitimacy that is witnessed in this Proem. In addition, Hoccleve, like Lydgate, employs direct speech – the style of eyewitness accounts – implying a passive role for himself as compiler. Furthermore, from the start of the Proem, Hoccleve adopts the modesty topos, claiming to be subservient to his authorities by using the conventional device of declaring immaturity in his work: ‘I am so childissh ay’ (p. 99, line 2058).15 Such a device serves as a disclaimer, indicating that the traditional label of ‘Prologue’ for the first 2026 (or 2156) lines of the poem’ (The Regiment of Princes, p. 97, n. 1). 12   D.C. Greetham, ‘Self-Referential Artifacts: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device’, Modern Philology, 86 (1988–9): 245. 13   A number of recent studies have recognized the need to acknowledge the reflexive relationship between the different parts of the poem, in explorations of other thematic and rhetorical interplays between the Prologue and the text proper. See, for example, those by Perkins, Knapp, Torti, and Hasler listed in the Bibliography. 14   Although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, Hoccleve also drew his moral and political principles from the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum. For Hoccleve’s use of sources see William Matthews, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’, in MWME, ed. Albert E. Hartung (Connecticut, 1972), pp. 749–50, and Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, pp. 24–7. For Hoccleve’s use and adaptation of Boethian philosophy and Chaucer’s works, especially Troilus and Criseyde and The Book of the Duchess, see Nicholas Perkins, ‘Haunted Hoccleve’, pp. 103–39. 15   Lydgate also adopts the modesty topos in the Prologue to the Troy Book, p. 2; lines 54–61. For a discussion of Lydgate’s self-minimizing see Alan S. Ambrisco and Paul

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translation process merely preserves past wisdom and experiences for posterity without any intervention – that is to say, culturally conditioned interpretations – by the translator. In the Proem Hoccleve states: ‘plotmeel thynke I to translate’ (p. 99; line 2053); piecemeal selection is the basis of translation. Hence one could read Hoccleve’s frequent reference to his ‘auctores’ and scarce allusion to the ‘plotmeel’ process as a legitimizing strategy to claim imitation, concealing the marks of the text’s historicity. As well as addressing authorial responsibility, the second main function of the Proem passage is to impose a sense of responsibility on the reader, thereby aiding in the negation of authorial responsibility. Prince Henry is addressed: whan yee been in chamber at eeve, They been good for to dryve foorth the nyght; They shal nat harme if they be herd aright. (p. 102; lines 2140–42)

There are many references in the text proper to the danger of royal subjects taking advice as negative criticism (see especially p. 130; lines 3088–101). Hoccleve is therefore keen to invoke an image of relaxation by locating the reader in a private, familiar place in the period of night time – ‘in chamber at eeve’ – as a means to influence interpretation of the text as one of a ‘good’ read that ‘shal nat harme’. What is worth noting is the desire to fix, to stabilize textual interpretation; the Proem clearly seeks to create a framework for the way in which the text is to be received, offering to suppress the markings of historicity and instability in order to deliver advice, presented in the form of a safe translation of established truths. Perkins, however, focuses on the way that modern critics have generally failed to rise above this implied reading position: in ‘portraying Hoccleve as an agent of monarchical power, Lancastrian rule or Prince Henry’s reputation, [modern critics] replicate the traditional image of Hoccleve as a poet at the mercy of his material, unable to control the literary or political forces that occupy his text’.16 While universal truths in the text proper predominate, due in large part to the recurring moral commentaries, there are temporal strategies at work that undermine such assumptions. One such strategy is the marginalia, the Latin glosses. Authorial Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to the Troy Book’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1995): 40–57. For a survey of how fifteenth-century writers use the modesty topos as a guise to assert challenging ideas and opinions see David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1997): 761–99. 16   Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, p. 4. Judith Ferster also rejects this tradition of reading, and illustrates how Hoccleve does not always conform to the ideal of sanctioning advisor, as he raised ‘the most troubling and divisive issues of the reign’ and in so doing risks criticizing, rather than counselling, the man whose patronage he desires (Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England [Philadelphia, 1996], p. 158).

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glosses, in the stable linguistic register of Latin, act as an external apparatus enveloping the text proper as a means to convey moral authority.17 Yet, in the Middle Ages the practice of perpetual glossing emphasized the role of the interpreter in explaining moral truth. The instability of such a framework can best be explained if we consider Scanlon’s observation that: the Church valued the exemplum not because it passively submitted to Christian doctrine, but on the contrary, because the exemplum’s status as narrative gave it an ideological power doctrine often lacked … The exemplum illustrates a moral because what it recounts is the enactment of that moral. The moral does not simply gloss the narrative. It is more than a principle.18

While the various narrative episodes enact the moral of the digressions in the text proper, Hoccleve also extracts the stable signifier of these moral lessons – the Latin explanations and associations – from the narrative, by placing them literally in the physical framework. Thus the apparatus of glosses implies a hermeneutical frame of reading advice about reading the advice, rather than the persuasive enactment one would expect in a didactic genre. The use of images alongside the text is a visual signifier that on close inspection acts as another device to prioritize the temporality of the text. Chaucer, as a source, is not only eulogized in three passages; he also accompanies the text in the form of a visual mnemonic in the apparently lifelike portrait of Chaucer in Harley Ms 4866, f.88: so ‘that they that han of him lost thoght and mynde / by this peynture may ageyn him fynde’ (p. 186; lines 4997–8). The past, through its representative presence, endorses the present, and that conveys an implied authority for Hoccleve as the true heir to Chaucer’s tradition.19 Martha M. Driver has defined this practice of using images as ‘a kind of memorial reconstruction’ where an image relates ‘intervisually’ with other representations from different contexts, as recalled by the viewer.20 The Chaucer portrait relates the present text with a literary succession. Nevertheless, it also highlights the difference between the past and present context 17   For a discussion of the function of the glosses as giving an ‘aura of authority’ see The Regiment of Princes, ed. Blyth, pp. 11–12. 18   Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: the Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, 1994), p. 33. 19   For insightful analysis of these passages see recent discussions by Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Medieval England (Pennsylvania, 2001), pp. 107–28; Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, pp. 117–21; Derek Pearsall, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation’, Speculum, 69 (1994): 402–03; and David R. Carlson, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 54 (1991): 283–300. 20   Martha M. Driver, ‘Medievalizing the Classical Past’, in A.J. Minnis (ed.), Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 229.

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because it highlights the historicity of the current representation. In addition, in BL, Ms Arundel 38, fo.37r, the picture of Prince Henry in the presentation portrait encourages us to consider the king as a reader.21 Perkins explains how it was customary to surface read representations of a royal reading figure as a powerful literary judge, but suggests a more nuanced interpretation of royal hermeneutics: the pose was more than simply a means to enhance Henry V’s reputation; it was challenge to the royal reader: ‘faced with the threat of being read in the future, kings must themselves learn to read now’.22 Meyer-Lee has explored this trend across fifteenth-century texts, where negotiations with royal patrons are executed by textualizing their subjectivity, resulting in conflations of author–reader–patron roles.23 With reference to the strategic conflation of poetic subject positions in Hoccleve’s text, an investigation is needed, then, into the ways that temporal relationships (that is, relationships between the past, present and future) present to the king such a process of anticipating the present as a challenge. Numerous strands of temporal dynamics coexisting with claims for stable universal truths create many such challenges. As noted, Hoccleve states in the Proem: ‘plotmeel thynke I to translate’ (p. 99; line 2053); piecemeal selection is the basis of narration.24 Emphasizing the ‘plotmeel’ nature of selection underscores the subjectivity and consciousness of the writer’s temporal agency, which we saw also in the discussion of Lydgate’s construction of the Fall of Princes. The tensions between imitation and independence exist, as clearly illustrated in the hermeneutical framework (glosses) and memorial reconstructions (the visual portraits). Hoccleve employs the image of a potter, in his discussion of the variability of Fortune, as an acknowledgement that ‘right as shee made me to clymbe on highte, / sodeynly so shee may me make alighte’ (p. 72; lines 1140–41). The ever-present presence of temporality – be it of success, the moment, event, moral or translation process – creates tensions with any claims for stable universal truths. The notable absence of time markings (such as regnal, seasonal, lunar and solar) is one last feature to note about the Proem. The absence of the linguistic register of temporality is an indication of the desire to emphasize stability of didactic truths rather than the subjective, ‘plotmeel’, transitory nature of interpretation if – and this is an important qualification – the Proem and the text proper are read as separate from the Prologue. If we provisionally read the text proper as a separate entity it is no great surprise that, as in the Proem, time references are scarce in 21   The Prince Henry portrait was originally at BL, MS Harley 4866, but has been removed. The Chaucer portrait was in a later place at BL, MS Arundel 38, but has also since been removed. 22   Nicholas Perkins, ‘Representing Advice in Lydgate’, in Jenny Stratford (ed.), The Lancastrian Court: Proc. of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, 2003), p. 174. 23   Robert Meyer–Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007), p. 3. 24   Blyth remarks that ‘the word “plotmeel” is evidently Hoccleve’s invention, and in context suggests casual, undisciplined work’ (The Regiment of Princes, p. 9).

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this self-proclaimed didactic text. As noted earlier, Wilcox has observed that elements of causal connections are inevitable in any narrative form, even in those that have extra-temporal moral discussion as an organizing principal. Therefore, it is possible to note in the text proper a few examples of time references that act as framing structural devices, as they do in Lydgate’s works. These examples are to be found in the exemplum about John of Canace and the vice of prodigality. The precise length of time that Canace has the gold provides a framework for the following events: ‘no lenger ne more / than dayes thre, and he wolde it restore / at his day’ (p. 163; lines 4211–13). Time during these three days is continually counted, increasing consciousness of the limited time that Canace has to deceive his daughters. It is through the time references that narrative suspense is created. After he borrows the money, the narrative progresses by alternating from night to day – ‘on the morwe’ (p.163; line 4215). A precise location is created for the commencement of Canace’s plan, narrowing the timescale of three days that has already been indicated. Repeated references in the next few lines to the ‘nyght’ when his daughters and their husbands stay for supper provides a progression of events throughout the evening, building a sense of anticipation. The next progression of the timescale – ‘on the morwe at the brood day light’ (p. 164; line 4238) – marks the propitious moment when the gold is shown. The daughters’ reflections on the events that have occurred are then signalled by the reference to ‘yistirday’ (p. 165; line 4275), which creates further narrative unity. A new stage in Canace’s deception process is marked by calculating the length of time the daughters are under the mistaken illusion of their father’s wealth: ‘aftir this day … til the day cam of the fadres dyyng’ (p. 166; lines 4313–14). Time references, in the form of causal connections and sequences, act as structural devices in order to unify and progress 134 lines of the narrative. This example is, however, the exception. Nowhere else are multiple references given in any one narrative episode. Single time referents are occasionally used in the text proper in minor structural or descriptive roles. For instance, sequences are created: ‘the nexte day aftir’ (p. 143; line 3557); ill deeds are situated in night time: ‘by nyghtirtale he slayn was by Kyng Darie’ (p. 152; line 3849); the transitory nature of seasonal change acts as a description for the possible duration of enjoyment of vices: ‘in his welthe but a litil sesoun’ (p. 173; line 4574); and the age indicator of the Knight whom Alexander aids – ‘an aged Knyght of his, for verray cold, / his lyfly might yloren hadde almoost’ (p. 134; lines 3251–2) – highlights, not the state of old age, but the measure of Alexander’s compassion. Despite these occasional uses, just as we saw earlier with structural functions characterizing the Troy Book and descriptive roles predominating in the Fall of Princes, the choice and use of time referents in Hoccleve’s works are determined by the nature of the narrative. Time markings – and their relative paucity – have the primary function in the text proper to create a sense of generalization. There are no dates – regnal, Roman or biblical – provided anywhere in the whole narrative. Time references do not periodize narrative episodes, demarcate historical periods or convey a sense of the interest in treating time historically. Instead, imprecise referents and dates are

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often employed. For instance, in the discussion of justice, the Romans’ decision to punish adulterers is noted not by a quantified unit but by a relative indicator emphasizing the place, rather than time, of the decision: ‘ther was a lawe ymaad upon a tyme / at Rome, by the consules assent’ (p. 119; lines 2731–2). The place, as well as the time, is sometimes expressed in indefinite terms. One such example is when Alexander is ‘in a tyme in the feeld with his hoost’ (p. 134; line 3250). At other times even the identity of the character being discussed is abstract: ‘whilom ther was a tirant despitous’ (p. 127; line 3004). Dating and specificity of expression are not as important as in the Fall of Princes. Such frequent imprecise references emphasize the exemplary lessons that may be from any time or place, or that may affect anyone. Such a survey of the qualitative not quantitative, symbolic not empirical, Christian not secular, supposedly medieval not modern narrative would appear to support the claims that there is a neglect of time, a lack of historical perspective in this seemingly culturally unspecific didactic text. However, by turning to Hoccleve’s minor occasional poems, as we did in the study of Lydgate, we can see how dynamic absent temporalities are in the fifteenth-century Lancastrian narrative of succession; that is, we can see how dynamic generalized states of time are in emphasizing the cultural specificity of the present. In Hoccleve’s Counsel to Henry V on his Accession to the Throne (no. iv) and in Two Balades to Henry V and the Knights of the Garter (nos v and vi), there are no interchanges between present and past states; nor is there an impending sense of present time. Instead, the focus is on eternity. In the Counsel to Henry V, the new king is advised of the need for order and unity in the realm, and this political message is reconfigured in the poem’s use of rhythms of continuance. The stability of God’s eternal rule is praised as it does ‘nat varie’ (p. 39; iv, line 3) and is ‘so constant’ (line 4). By outlining the various virtues of justice, pity and prudence, defending the right of law and of the Holy Church against heretics, Henry V is told that he: ‘in reule virtuous continue may’ (p. 39; line 8). Meanwhile, Hoccleve’s poems to Henry V and the Knights of the Garter praise how the king is ‘thensaumple and the mirour / to Princes alle’ (p. 41; v, lines 10–11), due to his recognition of the need to ‘qwenche al this nusance’ (p. 42; vi, line 47) of heresy. As in Consul to Henry V, the king’s constancy is the political message of the poem, and is reconfigured in the absence of any associations of his rule to temporal dynamics. The lack of time referents as a deliberate strategy in discussion of his rule is all the more marked by the following passage: And yit, this day, the feendes fikilnesse Weeneth fully to cacche a tyme & hour To haue on vs, your liges, a sharp shour And to his seruiture / vs knytte and thralle. (p. 41; v, lines 19–22)

The heathens (the Lollards) are the ones who are associated with fickle, imprisoning rhythms of hour, day and time. An absence of time markings reconfigures the

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temporal specificities of the moment, emphasizing the desires for natural, Godgiven stability, constancy and unity in the moment of Henry V’s accession to the throne. In turn, these poems reconfigure a narrative from the occasion: the eternal time rhythms that specify the occasion in poetic terms produce a narrative of stable rhythms for real time, for Henry V’s future governance. So is the claim to universal truth in the Proem and text proper of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes the only reason why there should be a neglect of rhythms in time? Such omission, as in the occasional verse, reads as a mark of anxiety concerning the evolutionary history of the Lancastrian regime. Simpson points out how Hoccleve denies stark alternations in dynastic history, preferring more select and subtle rhythms of sequential connections to be prioritized, selectively editing the genealogical line so that: Richard II was cast down by ‘Fortune’ and Henry IV is hardly mentioned. The ideal models are the figures on either side of the rupture by one remove: Henry V for the future, while Henry Duke of Lancaster and John of Gaunt, the Prince’s great-grandfather and grandfather respectively, are the great political exemplars of the recent past.25

Instead of arguing that there is a neglect of time in the text, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is a neglect of causal connections in favour of more inexact and removed perceptions of time, because of the dubious and dangerous cultural specificities of this ‘universal’ narrative of rightful succession. The time narrative witnessed earlier in the Mirror for Magistrates, of cultural anxiety about topical references, especially those concerned with royal advice, can clearly be detected here. This selective neglect of certain causal sequences in Lancastrian genealogy is also a strategy embedded within the text proper, in the selection of exempla. The majority of the tales are examples from classical Rome, while a few are from more recent periods in history, suggesting that Hoccleve is using the past as a mask, his selective choices creating a narrative that related directly to the current prince’s state and nature. As demonstrated by Hoccleve’s other ploys to create imprecise times or disrupt chronology, temporal tensions within any of the exempla he narrates are never far from the surface. As Ferster observes, Hoccleve ‘pointedly updates the stories of Marcus Regulus and the Roman counsel (II. 2288–9, 2769–72), looking for the heirs of virtue in England, pointing out the current rulers’ failure to live up to these high moral standards’.26 When Hoccleve appears to neglect historical perspective, in relation to genealogy or general classical exempla, through strategies such as the disrupting of chronology or updating the specificity of the narrative, temporal tensions and the historicity of the material emerge.   James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), p. 208.   Ferster, Fictions of Advice, p. 155.

25 26

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Time’s Construction of Reception When we survey the self-reflexive relationship between temporal indicators in the Prologue and the text proper of The Regiment, any assumption that Hoccleve might be producing a propagandist text for the future Henry V is difficult to maintain. (One should remember that the Prologue appears along with the Proem and text proper in all of the 43 extant manuscripts; confusion among scribes and modern critics is only in relation to what headings to give to each section). I suggest it is no accident that Hoccleve’s text has both a Prologue and a Proem, but a deliberate strategy in order to prioritize the hermeneutical nature of advice on offer. In contrast to the Proem or text proper, consciousness of temporal strategies is a marked feature in this part of the text, in the dialogue between Hoccleve (the narrator) and the Old Man: Allas, wher is this worldes stablenesse? Heer up, heer doun; heer honour, heer repreef; Now hool, now seek; now bountee, now mescheef. (p. 40; lines 47–9)

In the desire for permanence, temporality is inherently recognized. Anxiety about how ‘this world unstable is’ (p. 59; line 705) is a central principle in the art of narration in the Prologue. The subject explored is Hoccleve’s problematic sense of negotiating between past, present and future places of time within his own timescale. Interchanges between states of time in the opening sequence have an effect beyond the structuring of the narrative sequence, beyond serving as relative descriptors for other phenomena; they also make temporal consciousness the main subject of concern. Hoccleve describes the time and place when he began his work: ‘as I lay in my bed upon a nyght’ (p. 39; line 6) in Chester Inn. Instead of proceeding with the depiction of this night, the narrative becomes retrospective: ‘and many a day and nyght that wikkid hyne / hadde beforn vexed my pore goost’ (p. 39; lines 8–9). Even though it is first established that the narrative is dealing with a specific night, the present time is placed in a context of a past and continuing process. Narrative time is complicated further by the introduction of a wider social context of events through the recollection of Richard II’s fall from power. After situating the author’s present restlessness in relation to the social upheaval that has recently occurred, we are incorporated into the time of another past through the use of direct speech; we enter the time of old narratives about the narrator when happiness existed before this time of anxiety. Reflection and recognition of a variety of contexts has been created. The next time referent – ‘this ilke nyght I walwid to and fro’ – refers the reader’s attention back to the current moment in which the narrative is situated, with a focus on this moment: ‘so long a nyght ne felte I nevere noon’ (p. 41; line 78). Progression in narrative time is then indicated, as we are told: ‘passe over, whan this stormy nyght was goon / and day gan at my wyndowe in to prye’ (p. 42;

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lines 113–14). This alternation in narrative time follows the traditional motif of a dream vision in the progression from the disturbed sleep to the daytime, when vision (and understanding) will become clearer.27 As the walk in the field begins, time becomes more specific: it is no longer simply the ‘day’ but ‘a certeyn tyme, / were it an hour I not, or more or lesse’ (p. 42; lines 120–21). Just before the change to day time, day and night are presented as exact opposites: ‘as discordant as day is unto nyght’ (p. 42; line 96). It is precisely this opposition – between day and night, the guide and dreamer, the wise old man and the foolish young Hoccleve, and perhaps most significantly, between the temporal (interpretative) and the universal (didactic) – that is the subject of concern. The multiple time states in this opening sequence continually present changing narrative contexts: from considerations of the individual to the wider social unease; from the restlessness of Hoccleve’s present state of mind to the authoritative and stable wisdom of old books; from the state of confusion to the process of gaining understanding; from the role of receiver to the role of instructor; from the present into different states of past times, and back to the present again. The Prologue engages us not in the discovery of stable fixed truths but in a perpetual process of interpretation. Temporal strategies abound beyond the opening scene; they feature throughout the whole Prologue. In the dialogue much time is spent discussing the virtues of old age in contrast to the foibles of youth (it is much longer than the exploration of age states in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes). In addition, moments and durations are frequently indicated, acting as much more than devices of narrative construction. For instance, Hoccleve carefully calculates the length of time he has served at the privy seal office: ‘have twenti yeer / and foure come Estren, and that is neer’ (p. 62; lines 804–5). This referent certainly conveys a sense of real time and helps to locate the action; but this is not its only purpose, for the sustained duration is analysed as an indicator of worth: ‘that is a fair tyme; / the tokne is good of thy continuance’ (p. 62; lines 806–7). The significance of the duration of his service is explicitly remarked upon: time is the subject. Time marking is employed for the effect that it imparts itself. Temporal consciousness is given dynamic importance when the Old Man tells Hoccleve that this is the propitious moment to expel his wasteful thoughts: ‘hy tyme it is to voide and lat him twynne’ (p. 47; line 276). The overall function of the frequent explorations of age, the moments and the durations in the Prologue is to draw attention to temporality, to the fact that ‘thow art heere in this world transitorie’ (p. 76; line 1292). The Old Man tells Hoccleve to take his advice – ‘it seemeth thee needith a gyde’ (p. 45; line 210) – and leads him through a discussion in order to encourage Hoccleve, in true Boethian fashion, to transcend worldly concerns (of nonpayment of annuities and an ageing body) and write a religiously orthodox treatise

27   C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study of a Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1958) established the recognition that the guide, the waking process and entry into the field are key characteristics of the medieval dream-vision.

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that will provide advice to the prince.28 By the end of the Prologue it appears that the Old Man is conveying unequivocal truths that need to be passively received, and Hoccleve achieves this by presenting a narrative that offers stable, universal advice, as noted earlier in the use of generalized time references in the text proper. He accepts the challenge to: Kythe thy love in mateere of sadnesse. Looke if thow fynde canst any tretice Growndid on his estates holsumnesse Swich thyng translate and unto his hynesse. (p. 95; lines 1948–51)

But what about the engagement of the reader in the changing contexts of interpretation in the opening sequence, and the keen focus on aspects of temporality in the Prologue? It has been claimed that in medieval texts, dreamer-guides – such as the Old Man with his allegorical personifications – ‘fix’ interpretation in that they ‘produce stable meanings and mirror unequivocal truths’.29 Earlier we saw the narrator adopt such a didactic role in the brief Proem to the text proper. Yet Hoccleve is not a passive, accepting listener in the dialogue until the end. Instead, he reveals his state of mind as a struggle to affirm belief in the Old Man’s wisdom. This struggle is depicted in the physical altercation in which they engage at their first meeting: the conceptual state literally conflicts with the secular figure when the Old Man ‘stirte unto me and seide, “Sleepstow man? / Awake!” and gan me shake wondir faste’ (p. 43; lines 131–2). Hoccleve responds, ‘with a sigh I answerde atte laste … go thy way, talke to me no more’ (p. 43; lines 133, 139). The Old Man does not offer the means for comprehension; he simply orders acceptance of the spiritual realm (the nature of didacticism). The difficulty is that the Old Man engages the didactic role that relies upon stability and certainty, but Hoccleve operates in the context of biographical time – that is, in the context of secular, temporal, literal experiences – and is engaged in processes of reading and (mis)interpretation. It is generally assumed that the Prologue examines the role and responsibilities of the poet or compiler; but I would suggest that the Prologue examines the role of the reader. Hoccleve operates in the context of secular, temporal, literal experiences and is engaged – in the Prologue – in processes of reading and (mis)interpretation. Perkins has observed that Hoccleve focuses on the issues of intention in the Prologue, there providing guidance on how to read the rest of   See James Simpson, ‘Nobody’s Man: Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes’, in Julia Boffey and Pamela King (eds), London and Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1996), pp. 149–80, where he characterizes Hoccleve’s dialogue with the Old Man as Boethian and therapeutic. 29   L.A. Finke, ‘Truth’s Treasure: Allegory and Meaning in Piers Plowman’, in S. Trigg (ed.), Medieval English Poetry (London, 1993), p. 89. 28

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the poem.30 Charles R. Blyth has noted these dynamic interactions between the Prologue and the rest of the poem, between the ‘poet’s mirror (self-portrayal) and prince’s mirror (as in Fürstenspiegel), between private and public’ and, I would add, between writer and reader. Blyth describes the effects of such interactions: ‘in its way the Prologue is just as didactic as the [text] proper and the latter just as subjective’.31 Thus a re-examination, in the text proper, of the frequent suggestions that the prince read the work as constructive advice may be reinforcing the desires for fixed stable truths precisely because the depiction of the interpretive process in the Prologue (of authoritative advice) is presented as incomprehensible. The conclusion, therefore, is not the inevitable acceptance that Almighty God will be your saviour and guide (as the Old Man dictates). Spiritual advice is mediated through the process of interpretation not as passive or permanent, but as dependent upon changing contexts. Due to the recognition that ‘al stant on chaunge’, the intended meaning or interpretation of Hoccleve’s text proper can be indicated, but it is ultimately insecure. Temporal consciousness of the processes of interpretation in the Prologue complicates and undermines the universalizing effects of the indefinite time referents in the text proper. Thus Hoccleve has the artistic ability to reveal the versatile and dynamic role that time markings can play, not simply in the construction of the narrative but also in its reception. Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes is marked with a desire to understand, to experiment and to question the versatility of roles that time markings can play. He considers the paradoxes of viewing time as an ordering tool while being uneasy about the nature of temporal representation. Study of the time strategies employed by Hoccleve reveals the centrality of consciousness of time in the construction, and the poet’s anticipated reception, of his works. Narrative framing devices and hermeneutical reading habits (involving past and present times, in both the reader’s time and fictional time) reveal the interpretative act as contextual, thereby demonstrating a keen awareness of temporal specificity.

30   For a study of how Hoccleve employs the same strategies of academic accessus to establish reading patterns that are found in Chaucer’s Prologue to The Legend of Good Women see Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, p. 81. 31   The Regiment of Princes, ed. Blyth, p. 11.

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Chapter 6

Hoccleve’s Temporal Unruliness: The Series To compare The Regiment of Princes with Hoccleve’s Series may seem anomalous at first glance, as The Regiment appears to have had a much more extensive contemporary readership, implying, perhaps, that a different cultural value was placed on the text. Patterson notes that The Regiment of Princes ‘was extremely popular and the [Series] something of an embarrassment’, due to its topical relevance and political alignments. The Regiment of Princes survives in 43 manuscripts while the Series is extant in six, with some additional fragments. Although extant copies of the Series are less numerous, most are in manuscripts that also contain The Regiment of Princes, providing evidence of ‘some disciplined and sustained’ early attempts in the fifteenth century ‘to promote both The Regiment of Princes and Series together, as part of a Hoccleve “anthology”’. Both are, as Thompson notes, ‘courtly poems about moral, spiritual and political health and guidance’, and both display an interest in poetic self-revelation. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that reading time in these two texts contributes to the modern scholarly interest in Hoccleve’s moral, spiritual and political strategies of authorial self-promotion. What will be revealed is how the model of rhetoric in the exemplary narrative ‘makes the practice of ruling intimately linked to those of writing and reading – and perhaps even listening to advice’. Hoccleve’s use of negotiating interrelations, conflicts and synchronicities between time discourses   For a discussion about the different political climates that account for such different reception histories of these two poems see Lee Patterson, ‘Beinecke MS 493 and the Survival of Hoccleve’s Series’, in Robert G. Babcock and Lee Patterson (eds), Old Books, New Learning (New Haven, 2001), p. 81.    The Series closes with a dedication to Lady Westmorland, and may have been presented to Duke Humphrey. The dedication is in the Durham University Library, MS Cosin V. iii. P fair copy made by Hoccleve himself. For a description see Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. John Burrow, EETS o.s. 313 (Oxford, 1999), pp. x–xi. See p. lxii for discussion of the possible presentation to Duke Humphrey and p. lxiii for a survey of the possibility of nine complete copies.    For a comprehensive outline of different styles of Hoccleve anthologies in scribal and early print traditions in the fifteenth century, see John Thompson, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and Manuscript Culture’, in Helen Cooney (ed.), Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin, 2001), pp. 81–94.    Thompson, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and Manuscript Culture’, p. 93.    Nicholas Perkins, ‘Representing Advice in Lydgate’, in Jenny Stratford (ed.), The Lancastrian Court: Proc. of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, 2003), p. 191. 

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enables both writer and reader to become self-conscious about temporal practices of reading and writing. The Series, composed circa 1419–21, begins with an introspective ‘Complaint’ that develops into a public ‘Dialogue’. Conventional themes, such as the ills of society, the need for counsel and the art of receiving it, are addressed, but there are also suggestive autobiographical traits and a dynamic debate about the need for urgent action in the present in a discussion about the reception not just of the author’s work but also of the author himself. There are multiple experiences and perceptions of the present state of the author and his work offered through a variety of fictional interpreters. The narrator (and fictional writer of the work) – Thomas – is engaged in a complex and detailed process of revising his understanding of the relationships between the past, present and future. He also confronts (and revises) his readings of the interpretations made by the fictional readers in the tale, his friends. In the Complaint, the friends’ perceptions are mediated to us through Thomas (as a persona); then, in the Dialogue, we experience, reject, negotiate and eventually accommodate a friend’s perceptions in the present of the narrative. This extensive framing narrative is then followed by two narrative tales with a moral treatise between. In different and competing ways that celebrate and destabilize temporal structures, each of these tales show Hoccleve engaging with the end of time and his own mortality; the tales enact, test, tease, challenge and even threaten to subvert the interpretative strategies of interplays between the past, present and future created by the frame. Throughout the Series there is a disturbance of the temporal consciousness that underpins anxieties about production and reception of verse, a narrative that we have already seen at play in The Regiment of Princes. Much critical interest has focused on the frame, but has been mainly concerned with how to define (medically or rhetorically) Hoccleve’s illness. Such attention needs also to discuss how, as in The Regiment of Princes, it is fictional readings and misreadings that are of primary concern. The frame uses theories of transcendence in fictional time to explore relationships between the past, present and future significance of the narrator’s illness. The emphasis, however, is somewhat different from that in The Regiment of Princes; instead of accentuating temporal consciousness as a subject that challenges stability of interpretation, an assortment of interpretative patterns dependent upon multiple ways of perceiving time is created, which raises many more concerns not only about reading methods but also about the writing process   The ‘convenient’ term ‘Series’ to describe Hoccleve’s partially linked set of poems and prose moralizations is well documented as having first been used in 1927 by E.P. Hammond. Recent, thought-provoking discussions of Hoccleve’s illness include James Simpson, ‘Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series’, in J. Boffey and J. Cowen (eds) Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry (London, 1991), pp. 15–28; Antony J. Hasler, ‘Unregimented Body’, in Paragraph, 13 (1990): 164–83; and Matthew Boyd Goldie, ‘Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in London, 1416–21: Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend’, Exemplaria, 11 (1999): 24–52. 

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itself. Focus in this frame is on synchronic states of episodic, cyclical, linear, causal and thematic temporal patternings, just as in the second chapter the arbitrariness of the critical divisions between so-called premodern and modern classifications of temporal consciousness was exposed. Hoccleve’s interest in writing and book-making as a fictional metatextual theme has been well charted, especially by John Burrow. Until now, studies of Hoccleve’s representations of production have however sidelined consideration of his fictional depictions of reception. Even in the most recent book-length study of Hoccleve’s works, the frame of the Series is described as ‘an introductory dialogue largely concerned with writing’ and no mention is made of processes of reading as being inextricably linked to the discussion. Pearsall’s assertion that ‘reading is always an act in which we share with the writer in the making of meaning’ is certainly recognized by Hoccleve and exploited as he directs our attention in the narrative frame to how ‘chaunge sank into myn herte roote’.10 Perkins remarks that ‘our desire as critics to place hermeneutics at the center of textual and political activity’ can be paralleled with medieval concerns, for ‘we should remember that authors of advice texts … were also intimately engaged in writing and interpretation’.11 The frame of the Series is not an advice text in the traditional sense; instead it acts like an exemplum, in that it enacts a skill – the skill of appreciating the existence of multiple interpretive strategies and relationships between reading and writing. In the narrative frame of the Series, Thomas reflects on a time in the past when he was ill, and thinks about the change to his present state of mind, wondering if others will judge him on his past or present state.12 Acceptance and understanding of past and present states are not seen, though, as simple processes. Thomas considers the hermeneutical interrelationships that these different states of time have, displaying a consciousness that such readings are themselves subject to temporality, to ‘chaunge and variance’ (p. 3; line 10) by others. The negotiation and confrontation with others’ perceptions results in a tale about the anticipatory present, because complex questions arise about how to understand and define   J.A. Burrow, ‘The Poet and the Book’, in P. Boitani and A. Torti (eds), Genres, Themes and Images in English Literature (Tubingen, 1986), pp. 230–45.    Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Medieval England (Pennsylvania, 2001), p. 161.    Derek Pearsall, ‘Texts, Textual Criticism and Manuscript Production’, in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Studies (Hamden, 1984) p. 132. 10   Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. John Burrow, EETS o.s. 313 (Oxford, 1999), Prologue, p. 3; line 7. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text. 11   Nicholas Perkins, ‘Musing on Mutability: A Poem in the Welles Anthology and Hoccleve’s The Regiment of Princes’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 50 (1999), 57. 12   For a concise summary of the plot see James Simpson, ‘Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series’, p. 17. 

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temporal perceptions and experiences. In the fictional readings and misreadings of time, the lessons learned about temporal consciousness are those that Strohm has suggested in his consideration of Chaucer’s works: that a range of causal connections act as ‘stabilising strategies’, while paradoxically the multiplicity of time patternings in the narrative override, by accident and by design, any stability creating ‘ultimate temporal unruliness’.13 Strohm’s method of examining the coexistence of both the writer’s attempt to organize time structures and how the text disperses into temporal disruptiveness is precisely what Hoccleve examines in his fiction. Hoccleve, however, is uneasy with these temporal categories of stability and unruliness being alternate states, as the study below shows. Instead of temporal dominance inducing unruliness, he sees mutual coexistence of these categories as the means to create the tension and friction necessary for gaining a sophisticated and stable consciousness of temporal instability. Hoccleve scrutinizes medieval discourses of synchronic temporal states, the characteristic feature of fifteenthcentury time consciousness discussed in Chapter 1. The End in the Beginning: Temporal Consciousness in the Prologue Hoccleve exposes the full complexity of his understanding of temporal patternings in the opening lines when he describes the fluctuations of the autumn season: Aftir that heruest inned had his sheeues, And that the broun sesoun of Mighelmesse Was come and gan the trees robbe of hir leeues That greene had been and in lusty fresshnesse, And hem into colour of yelownesse Had died and doun throwen vndir foote, That chaunge sank into myn herte roote. For fresshly broghte it to my remembrance That stablenesse in this world is ther noon; There is no thyng but chaunge and variance. (p. 3; Prologue, lines 1–10)

These lines are often compared to the famous description of spring in The Canterbury Tales.14 To date, comparative readings have concentrated on Hoccleve’s negative perceptions of autumnal decay in contrast to Chaucer’s positive associations of spring as a time of renewal. The different seasons have been interpreted as   Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, Medieval Cultures, vol. 26 (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 65–6. 14   See, for example, J.A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages: English Writers of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Aldershot, 1994), p. 216; and M.C. Seymour (ed.), Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford, 1981) p. xxiv. 13

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symbolic guides to the differences in tone, mood and purpose between the works of the two writers. In such comparisons, Hoccleve’s autumnal setting is seen to establish the context as a time for melancholy meditation on what has been lost – in John Burrow’s words, for ‘brooding on the unhappy aftermath of his illness’.15 By contrast, Chaucer’s springtime setting evokes inspiration and desire, and a sense of anticipation in embarking on the pilgrims’ project. Such analyses, however, have failed to look beyond Hoccleve’s use of the traditional images of ‘the broun sesoun’ (line 2) when all the ‘colour’ (line 5) and ‘lusty fresshnesse’ (line 4) has ‘died’ (line 6). Emphasis in these opening lines is not so much on the descriptive time referents of autumn as on the activity of reading such indicators. The very first word – ‘aftir’ – indicates that the subject of concern is what happens after the trees lose their leaves and the green turns yellow. Focus is on the end of the clause, on how ‘that chaunge sank into myn herte roote’ (line 7). The change accepted and understood by the heart provides the inspiration for the narrator – Thomas – to embark upon his project: ‘for freshly broghte it to my remembrance’ (line 8). It is not simply that autumn is a time of decay or despondency in Thomas’s mind; it is also a time of change. (It is worth noting that ‘chaunge’ is emphasized, occurring twice in the space of four lines and is the only significant repetition in this opening frame.) In reading autumn’s significance as being one of change, Thomas reveals a keen consciousness of temporality, as his conclusion demonstrates: ‘stablenesse in this world is ther noon’ (line 9). The Prologue highlights that just as when in autumn ‘ther is no thyng but chaunge and variance’ (line 10) in this world, so too is there instability in the temporal nature of wealth, life and health. The opening description of autumn is not only relative, acting to describe the ‘brooding … unhappy’ state of Thomas, but the nature of time itself is the central subject explored. Temporal specificity is then brought to the fore with reference to ‘Nouembre vpon a nyght’ (p. 3; line 17). The framework of autumn has been narrowed to a November night, and just as the time referent becomes more specific so too does the location: ‘as I in my bed lay’ (p. 3; line 18). This specificity, however, is not a structural device locating the narrative action in time; rather temporal specificity itself is the subject of the narrative. Focus is on the context of this moment in a wider timescale. A useful comparison can be made with the opening of The Regiment of Princes, when the reference to a sleepless night in Chester Inn situates the start of the writer’s composition in a process that has occurred in the past and is ongoing in the present. Similar interplay of past and present contexts is evident in the Series’ Prologue, for after Thomas situates himself in the context of a specific time and place, we become aware that the ‘sighynge sore’ (p. 3; line 18) of this night has happened before: ‘which many a day / before I took’ (p. 3; lines 19–20). This November night is part of a past and continuing process. The interplays of time in the opening scenes of these two texts, however, serve very different purposes. Movement between the multiple time states in The   Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 261.

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Regiment of Princes engages the reader in a perpetual process of interpretation, whereas in the Series’ Prologue, different states of time are presented not as ones the readers is required to negotiate but as states that have already been experienced and interpreted by the writer. That Hoccleve should vary his treatment of time between different poems is worth attention. Thompson has noted this feature – of variations on a topic – in relation to Hoccleve’s self representations in his poetry, and I propose that the linguistic register of time can be read as part of the discourse that represents the self.16 Movement towards temporal specificity within the framework of autumnal change provides a focus on the temporality of the present; this specific moment is then read in the context of its relationship with the past. In the present moment, Thomas is ‘vexid’ due to the ‘thoghtful maladie’ (p. 3; line 21) that has had a duration of ‘many a day / before’ (p. 3; lines 19–20) this specific night. This ongoing process of ‘thoghtful maladie’ is causally linked by Thomas with a previous time in his past: ‘I sy wel syn I with seeknesse last’ (p. 3; line 22). Reflection on this past period of dull and lifeless spirits, in contrast to a time before this when favour shone brightly on him, is presented as the ongoing ‘thoghtful maladie’: the process of remembering is the subject. It is the consideration of the relationships between these different states of time in his past that has caused the ‘greef aboute myn herte’ (p. 5; line 29) to ‘brast out’ (p. 5; line 35) and led to this specific November night, where temporal consciousness has been determined as the significance of this vexing process. The Prologue illustrates Thomas’s recovery of temporal consciousness. He reads time as an ordering principle, as having – to borrow Strohm’s concept – ‘stabilising strategies’ in thought and writing. Such strategies are illustrated in the movement between states of present and past times that are the cause and effect sequences which led to this specific moment. To have begun with a complete realization of how to read time might suggest that our foreknowledge of the conclusion ‘permits us to assume a [common medieval] position outside the story’s temporal dimensions exactly analogous to God’s position outside history’.17 Frank Grady has illustrated how Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde enacts such a Boethian concept (derived from the Consolation of Philosophy). But is Hoccleve really affirming transcendence of the conflicts between human experience of time and the divine apprehension of eternity in this Prologue? Synchronicity, rather than transcendence, is the pattern emphasized in these lines. In true postmodern fashion, Hoccleve simultaneously situates causal sequences within the destabilizing context of ‘chaunge and variance’ of temporal unruliness, within the autumnal framework. The inherent tensions in the coexistence of stability and change act as   John J. Thompson, ‘A Poet’s Contacts with the Great and the Good’, in Felicity Riddy (ed.), Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (Woodbridge, 2000) p. 78. 17   Frank Grady, ‘The Boethian Reader of Troilus and Criseyde’, Chaucer Review, 22 (2000): 230. For a study of the many resonances of Boethian isolation and disenchantment in the frame see Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 159–84. 16

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the impetus for Thomas to ‘brast out’. In the Complaint he begins his reflection on how his previous misreadings developed into this sophisticated reading strategy of the complexities of temporal consciousness. Complaints of the Present The Complaint begins in the present tense with a reflection that leads us into the present of the past, leaving us in a problematic relationship with the writer. Lee Patterson asks: Whose voice do we hear? Is it that of man speaking extempore, describing a condition that exists in the moment of its utterance? Or one speaking from the perspective of the present looking back upon a confused moment in the past that has now been understood?18

In the Complaint the narrative patterning is not didactic in its instructions on how to understand time: ‘the sense [the frame] makes is not conceptual but experimental, we can understand it only by tracing the twists and turns by which it approaches but finally evades coherence’.19 The coherence is determined not by the writer but (if we succeed as the persona does in the Prologue) by the reader. The opening of the Prologue established that Thomas could perceive the subtleties of time’s rhythms due to an ability to relate it to his personal experience (the transcendental model of Iser’s ‘implied reader’), whereas the opening of the Complaint displays a less complex appreciation of temporal rhythms. At this stage he is an ‘informed reader’, to borrow Stanley Fish’s term: he has the basic knowledge of how to process the text and is aware of himself as a reader. The Complaint demonstrates Thomas’s temporal consciousness as competency in quantifying an exact moment in time and the ability to differentiate between past and present states: in other words, he fragments time into episodes. This is only the beginning of the process of recovery. He focuses on his ability to measure and express time in neglect of the complex causal relationships between past and present. It is Thomas’s failure, at this stage, to appreciate his lack of full temporal consciousness that the Complaint explores. With the foreknowledge that coexistence rather than competition of multiple time perceptions is the end-goal, readers in true Boethian fashion begin as voyeurs in the Complaint. We watch the conflict between the narrator’s own sense of linear and episodic time and his friends’ belief in time movement as cyclical. These differing discourses are at first presented as distinctly antithetical to one another. The Complaint opens with an ongoing process, for God: ‘visiteth folk al day as men 18   Lee Patterson, ‘“What is me?” Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001): 443–4. 19   Patterson, ‘“What is me?”’, 445.

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may see’ (p. 5; line 37). A reflection follows this process, as Thomas engages the past tense when he indicates that he was one of the ones to whom God made such a visit: ‘he forgat nat me’ (p. 5; line 39). The effect of this sequence is to provide not simply a focus – on one particular example of God’s visitations – but also a sense that Thomas is ‘among othir’ (p. 5; line 39) in having the ‘wylde infirmitee’ (p. 5; line 40). The debate begins with one being who shares his experience with a community. Then it is established that there were witnesses to Thomas’s sickness: ‘as many a man wel kneew’ (p. 5; line 41). While he was ‘out of myself’ (p. 5; line 42) his friends in concern ‘for myn helthe / pilgrimages highte’ (p. 5; line 47). Reflecting on this past state before addressing the present establishes the different experiences of the same period of time that Thomas and his friends had. This focus on different experiences of the same time introduces a major theme, and creates the framework for the narrative to proceed: it establishes the context for different perceptions of Thomas’s state in the present. Such divisions can be found in Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘analogy of being’, where time is divided horizontally into very different realities of substances and accidents. Yet the emphasis here is on how the narrative is developed by related temporal sequences rather than being unified by general causes. Both Thomas and his friends display self-consciousness in relation to the time and space of the world around. Although sharing very different perspectives, both parties demonstrate that time consciousness is context dependent, that perception relies on experience. Perhaps the most significant aspect of temporal consciousness in this opening frame is the description of the nature of Thomas’s illness as ‘the substance of my memorie / wente to pleye as for a certein space’ (p. 5; lines 50–51). Burrow has stated that Hoccleve: ‘does not dwell upon the nature of his illness, which remains something of a mystery’.20 I disagree. Hoccleve goes to great lengths in the Complaint and Dialogue in order to ensure his readers develop an appreciation of the ‘infirmitee’. The nature of this ‘infirmitee’ is the loss of temporal consciousness, the loss of ‘the substance of my memorie’. While Matthew Boyd Goldie has identified psychosomatic details that can be found in contemporary medical tracts and notes that features such as the Wild Man confirms Hoccleve’s illness as memory loss, he maintains we never get an insight into the nature of the illness, for the narrator has no recall of this period of infirmity.21 Again I dispute this interpretation, because, as I shall illustrate, in the developmental stages of recovery that we experience in the frame, we become fully conscious of what was lost. Understanding of the illness is retrospectively gained (akin to Lydgate’s retrospective understanding of history). As noted in the first chapter, the medieval assumption was that it is the memory that mediates perceptions of the present and the future. Hoccleve, like Lydgate, is just one of the medieval writers for whom the role of the past raises complex issues concerning the use of interpretative tools for temporal perceptions. While   Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 210.   Goldie, ‘Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in London’, pp. 24–43.

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the memory can be used for recalling events as been and gone, placing events in distinct sequences, it can also make such moments extra-temporal, preserving and recreating a time in all times. Pausing to focus on Hoccleve’s variations in his use of mnemonic strategies reveals a keen consciousness of the significance of context-dependent time expressions. While in The Regiment of Princes Hoccleve’s art is mediated by the visual memorial reconstruction of Chaucer, by contrast there are no such visual mnemonics in the Series frame. Instead, passages reminiscent of Chaucer’s work can be found, such as the seasonal opening of the Prologue; the reader is actively required to make causal connections with the present and past. The focus is on the Augustinian idea of memory as the foundation of consciousness, on how the ‘substance of my memorie’ is the basis for perception. In these terms, Thomas’s loss of memory means a loss of the ability to perceive states of time and their interrelationships. That the focus is on the loss and recovery of the ability to mediate time can be seen even in the micro time structures of the narrative. The duration of his absent memory is undefined – ‘a certein space’ – the nature of the referent reflects the lack of temporal awareness. A few lines later it is therefore significant that a precise point in time is quantified; that is, when his memory returns he reckons the time as the first of November: ‘at Alle Halwemesse / was fiue yeer neither more ne lesse’ (p. 7; lines 55–6). An explicit comment on the difference between the past and the present conveys his recovery. The present, we are told, differs from his past because now ‘my wit and I han been of swich accord’ (p. 7; line 59). Such a division of time denies any causal connections. Demarcation of the present and past as distinct states becomes complicated by his friends’ reading, because: ‘thogh that my wit were hoom come ageyn, / men wolde it nat so vndirstonde or take’ (p. 7; lines 64–5). Thomas’s friends are presented as being unable to accept the recovery, the ‘chaunge and variance’ in him. However, this inability to accept is not so much an indictment of Thomas’s present health, but a rejection of his strict demarcation between the past and present: Althogh from him his seeknesse sauage Withdrawe and past as for a tyme be, Resorte it wole. (p. 9; lines 86–8)

So are his friends presenting a ‘modern’ consciousness of the causal relationships between states of time, in contrast to Thomas’s very typical ‘medieval’ denial of causal connections and sequences? It may appear so initially, but on closer inspection such stereotypical divisions can be challenged. Unlike Thomas, their reference to the duration of the present is not precisely quantified as a period of five years; rather it is a loose time frame: ‘for a tyme be’ (p. 9; line 87). The need to demarcate states of time is not their concern, hence the inexact referent. The friends’ focus is not on strict ‘chaunge and variance’ between states of time but on their belief in the recurring cycle of time, for although they admit he is well

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now, they assume his illness will return. Thomas views each period as episodic (in a chronological fashion), whereas the friends view time states as a perpetually recurring cycle (in a reciprocal manner). At this point it is useful to recall that the homogeneity of such arbitrary narrative labels was challenged earlier in the micro study of Lydgate’s markings of time. In the Series’ Prologue, distinct models are also challenged but in a different way. As we shall see, Hoccleve presents a third option of synchronic connections in the Dialogue, which emerges not in contradistinction to traditional narrative models but as a resolution of the negotiations between Thomas’s chronological and the friends’ reciprocal models. Yet Thomas in the Complaint is still directing our attention towards the fact that his friends’ perceptions are based not on his present state but on their predictions that his future health is firmly rooted in the past: ‘whan passynge hete is … trustith this, / assaile him wole ageyn / that maladie’ (p. 9; lines 92–3). A picture of the malady is created by his friends as one of a man with a ‘wylde steer’ (p. 11; line 120) and a ‘bukkish’ brain (line 123), conveying a sense of internal upset in a ‘braynseek’ (line 129) man, while the description of shifting feet and eyes ‘wauynge to and fro’ (line 131) conveys a restless nature. In short, the description highlights the unstable, the ‘heer and ther’ (line 127) nature of Thomas’s mind and body. His friends believe any present state can hardly be stable due to this changeable and mutable past, whereas Thomas interprets mutability in a different fashion, maintaining that as each time state is changeable from the other, each is episodic. He defines his stability according to the state that has been occurring in the five years since his malady: ‘many someres been past … it shoop nat as they seide’ (p. 9; line 98). In examining how others should judge his present state, he stresses that his focus is on the need to: … takith heede ofte may bee This worldes chaunge and mutabilitee In sundry wyse how needith nat expresse. (p. 11; lines 116–18)

The subject of change introduced in the Prologue is the point of contention, offering various ways by which we view the present. What prefaces and follows Thomas’s comment on the world’s temporal nature is significant. Before Thomas’s remark is the observation ‘God hurte now can and now hele and cure’ (p. 11; line 112), explaining man’s inability to predict. In the Prologue we were told of the God-given origins of his ‘maladie’; now the focus is returned to the uncertainty as to ‘whom how ne whanne God wole’ (p. 9; line 104) visit. God, not man, determines the world’s ‘chaunge and mutabilitee’. The denial of human ability to foresee time’s rhythm (of time control rather than time’s control) is a typical medieval (or perhaps it would be more accurate to label it Christian) view. There are many examples of tension between prognostication and prophecy to be found from the period (not least in Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes). Hoccleve does not present such a conservative view without

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ambiguity; indeed, one could go so far as to argue that he displays some degree of critical agency. The ordering of this sequence is an explicit attempt (by Hoccleve rather than the narrator) to influence our reading of the friends’ perceptions: Thomas has indicated the variant nature of God, directed us to take heed of the world’s change and mutability and then given illustrations of what he perceives as his friends’ failure to do so. It is possible to find the focus on the divine nature of ‘chaunge and variance’ in this world as conveying authority in Thomas’s perception that his change from his past state is morally vindicated. By contrast, his friends’ reading of time receives no such moral vindication, as they assume his change is but temporary and that he will return to his past ‘infirmitee’. Yet there may be a failure too on Thomas’s part, since he seems not to appreciate the full nature of God’s ‘chaunge and mutabilitee’. In Thomas’s insistence on the present as having changed from the past, he fails to acknowledge his friends’ argument that the present is equally anticipatory, subject to ‘chaunge’, that just as God has performed His ‘hele and cure’, He could once again ‘hurte’. Ratification of the irrelevance of history is shown to be the danger of Thomas’s sense of the present. In the context of the growing fifteenth-century interest in temporal specificity noted in Chapter 1, the end of the Complaint can be read as Hoccleve’s warning against narrating human history in relation to the human experience of living – to borrow Heidegger’s term again – ‘within timeness’. Thomas challenges his friends’ reading when he withdraws from their company by questioning not simply how anyone can ever know another’s mind or spirit but, in doing so, how the present temporal state can ever be defined by anyone. His heart reads his friends’ views just as the heart in the autumnal setting of the Prologue reads the significance of temporal consciousness. In the Complaint his heart is no longer a stabilizing force, but an unstable one full of ‘chaunge and variance’ on considering his friends’ views: ‘now frosty cold now fyry hoot’ (p. 13; line 154). With such a preface, the first of several references in the Series to the mirror image is introduced. Pearsall proposes that when Thomas looks into the mirror and asks the question ‘is this the face of a man who is mad?’ we should see this in the modern context of the way the mirror acts as ‘the means to define identity, to prove the existence of the individual’.22 When Thomas looks at his reflection, in order to identify and amend any of the faults – any signs of madness – that he might see, he states that he can see ‘no thing repreeuable / to hem that han conceites reasonable’ (p. 15; lines 167–8). Thomas is unable to perceive anything in his present state, captured in that moment by the mirror image that his friends so object to; so it is tempting to conclude that he asserts self identity at this moment – that he does prove to himself that he is himself. However, far from Thomas achieving ‘the reassurance of selfhood’23 when he fails to detect madness, Thomas fears that he may be ‘blynde:’   Derek Pearsall, Gothic Europe, 1200–1450 (Harlow, 2001), p. 234.   Pearsall, Gothic Europe, p. 234.

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Men in hire owne cas been blynde alday, As I haue herd seyn many a day agoon, And in that same plyt I stonde may. (p. 15; lines 170–72)

As Greetham observes, Thomas becomes conscious ‘that because of his emotional and mental state, he may not be able to see “reality” as observed by his friends, but only the “illusion” caused by his own illness’.24 Such a conclusion causes Thomas once again to draw attention to the interpretative process itself. It would be too hasty to totally reject the interpretative strategy that the medieval Latin tradition of speculum offers.25 The six other references to the mirror image in the Series belong to this speculum tradition, reflecting the ‘truth’ about one of the traditional themes of history, nature, true kingship or salvation.26 It should not be surprising, therefore, that this reference can also be read in this speculum fashion. However, at this point Hoccleve reappropriates the speculum tradition in a modern way; the knowledge reflected is a sense of insecurity in the temporal processes of self perception.27 Insecurities in his ability to read the present are highlighted, just as they are indicated by the variable nature of his heart’s readings prior to this attempt to read with his eyes. That his insecurities are reinforced not just by his heart but also by his sight is significant, for Aquinas had made popular in theological thought the belief that ‘the sense of sight has a special dignity; it is more spiritual and subtle than any other sense’.28 As Suzannah Biernoff argues, the process of visualizing oneself, according to medieval optical theory, involves a dynamic model of reciprocal vision in which the eye is both a passive receptacle of what is before it and an active extension of a sensible soul. Of particular significance is the medieval belief that corporeal vision is intimately connected to the intellectual as well as spiritual vision.29 In Hoccleve attempting to accept what he sees in front of himself, a soul racked with temporal uncertainties becomes apparent; he gains a

  D.C. Greetham, ‘Self-Referential Artifacts: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device’, Modern Philology, 86 (1988–9), 247. 25   Pearsall, Gothic Europe, p. 234. 26   The mirror image is also used at the following points in the Series: the ‘Dialogue’, p. 64, line 608; ‘Learn to Die’, p. 164, line 697; p. 165, line 727; p. 189, line 295; p. 195, line 455; the ‘Tale of Jonathas’ p. 238, line 637. 27   That the mirror image in the Complaint belongs to a more modern truth theme is entirely appropriate for, as Patterson observes, the exploration of Hoccleve’s psychological state is one ‘that resists being located in the categories provided by conventional moral truths’ (‘Beinecke MS 493 and the Survival of Hoccleve’s Series’, p. 86). 28   Thomas Aquinas, qtd in A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge, 1993) p. 5. 29   Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2002). 24

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sense not of some universal moral truth, but a cognitive vision of the individual’s existence in time. It is at this point, where the feasibility of reading the present is challenged, that the crisis of a lack of temporal consciousness, the nature of the ‘wylde infirmitee’, reaches a climax of doubt rather than reassurance, expressed in the vexing question: ‘how shal I do which is the beste way / my troublid spirit for to brynge in reste?’ (p. 15; lines 173–5). Knapp outlines the nature of Thomas’s doubt: if the true self is to be represented as that which proceeds and returns, and both “memorie” and “seeknesse” obey this pattern, how is one to know which self is in fact authentic? The difficulty forces Hoccleve to argue inconsistently both for and against “mutabilite”.30

Instead of regarding such inconsistency as a fault, I propose that insecurity rather than stability is of crucial significance at this point; in becoming conscious of his lack of temporal consciousness, his crisis is complete as he achieves the selfknowledge of the nature of his ‘infirmitee’. At this climax, having explained the nature of his crisis in the past, Thomas recognizes and begins to focus on the relationship between his past and present states instead of regarding time as episodic. He remarks that his changing or unstable state has not in this period of recovery altered from its state in ‘that tyme’, for in the present ‘haue I ful ofte / cause had of anger and inpacience’ (p. 15; lines 176–7). Due to his volatile state he: … kept silence Lest that men of me deeme wolde and seyn “See how this man is fallen in ageyn”. (p. 15; lines 180–82)

That due to his changing temperament he should be viewed as ‘fallen’ is not perceived by Thomas as evidence of a lack of recovery, but as a sign of the ineptness of his friends in understanding his present state. The best way for him to bring his troubled spirit to rest is for him not to challenge his friends. We are told that he ‘nat answerd ageyn but kept silence’ (p. 15; line 180) at others’ inability to accept ‘chaunge and variance’. Perkins provides a detailed study of how the silent trope in medieval writings, especially educational tracts, acted as a way to demonstrate how ‘the reader is at once empowered by learning the language, and constrained by the knowledge which that language imparts’.31 Hoccleve is admitting to a relationship between his own perceptions and the language of his   Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, p. 167.   Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint

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(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 14–17.

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friends, but recognition constrains his objections into passive acknowledgement of the differences. The next phase of regaining temporal consciousness is embarked upon in the penultimate section of the Complaint, but significantly, as is shown below, it is us, the readers, rather than Thomas, whom Hoccleve engages in this process. After the crisis of the mirror scene, Thomas’s friends also use their sight – their ‘outward doom and iugement’ – but are mistaken in believing their ability to judge by sight. The ordering of these scenes draws attention to the fact that because his friends are not ill they have not experienced the crisis of self-revelation that Thomas endures in the mirror scene. Ruth Waterhouse and John Stephens observe that in many medieval poems ‘subtle use of order of presentation forces us to co-operate actively in the building up of an equally complex final effect’, resulting in us frequently having to reassess our interpretations.32 Such use of ordering is evident here in the relationship between Thomas and the friends’ readings. We are first informed by his friends that Thomas was deemed to have had in the past a ‘wylde infirmitee’, due to his restless spirit, but in this context of his friends’ misreadings of his inward present state we are tempted to query, or reassess, their readings of his past ‘wylde’ state. Thomas does not deny his infirmitee: ‘O lord, so my spirit was restelees’ (p. 17; line 194), but in the period since – the period of his recovery – ‘I soghte reste and I nat it fond’ (p. 17; line 195). As noted earlier, his changing temperament is still present in his period of recovery, so what is the ‘greuous venym’ of his past that in his present God has ‘voidid’ (p. 19; line 234) him of? My suggestion is that within the fiction, Thomas attempts to manipulate our response via subtle linear ordering of presentation, so that we regard the ‘venym’ not to be a crisis in his temporal consciousness but to be the misperceptions of his friends. At this juncture, if we think of the episodes in the narrative as progressive and accumulative, our reading has to be reassessed. Thomas has shown that his crisis in confidence of perceiving his present state in the mirror was engendered by his friends’ reading of his present state. He has demonstrated his recovery in now being able to measure and express both past and present times. He shows that his friends are unable to accept his ‘restless spirit’ of ‘chaunge and variance’ both in and between the past and present. If the nature of the ‘wylde infirmitee’ is a lack of temporal consciousness, we may question whether in their failure to perceive ‘chaunge and variance’ the friends are the ones shown to lack temporal consciousness. As if to anticipate such suspicion, Thomas reflected in the Prologue on the period of ‘infirmitee’ when he was unable to perceive as ‘the dirke shour / hildid doun right on me’ (p. 3, lines 25–6), whereas now in the Complaint it is not Thomas but the friends on whom ‘a dirk clowde / hir sighte obscured withynne and withoute’ (p. 23; lines 292–3). The last 100 lines or so of the Complaint internalize these thoughts, as the friends’ thoughts are replaced with those of the personification of Reason. This 32   Ruth Waterhouse and John Stephens, ‘The Backward Look: Retrospectivity in Medieval Literature’. Southern Review, 16 (1983): 357.

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final section enables Hoccleve to draw our attention back to the weaknesses of adopting Thomas’s viewpoint of his friends’ readings. Burrow has demonstrated how Hoccleve uses the same narrative frame at this point as does Isidore of Seville in his allegory of spiritual consolation, Synonyma, where a man’s feelings that his enemies unjustly persecute him are explored, and then he is ‘interrupted and admonished by Reason … [instructing] his sorrows are justly ordained by God as a punishment for his sins, and as a refining process’.33 Hoccleve’s source presented Reason’s role as a ‘refining process’ and it is precisely such a process that is required of Thomas to achieve the next step in his recovery. The Complaint closes with Thomas accepting Reason’s challenge to develop a greater accommodation of the unruliness and contradictions in temporal consciousness, and it is in the Dialogue that such an achievement is realized. A Dialogue of Conflicts and Synchronicities In the Dialogue, the central debate moves to a more complex consideration of whether or not the past – the ‘wylde infirmitee’ – should in the present ‘reherce’ (p. 35; line 27) or ‘hyde or leyne’ (p. 35; line 16). Our narrator changes his attitude: now he recognizes the need to address connections between the past, present and future. He argues that his Complaint should be published since ‘men of me speke in myn audience’ (p. 37; line 44) of his past ‘infirmitee’. Friend disputes this, being confident that of his illness ‘men han foryete it, it is out of mynde’ (p. 35; line 30), arguing that mention of the past should not be made in the present. The cultural narratives of the role of memory and ambiguities in the permanency of any record in time frame this debate. The group of adversaries – or friends – are personified into the single figure of Friend, and the position the friends held is reversed. Now it is Friend who signifies the perception of the present as a separate entity from the past. In addition, Friend is now presented as the reader, while Thomas assumes the responsibilities of the author concerned with stabilizing the current and anticipated future reception of the present. A strict dichotomy between reading and writing is conflated, with the personification, or internalization, of the role of the reader.34

  J.A. Burrow, ‘Hoccleve’s Complaint and Isidore of Seville Again’, Speculum, 45 (1970): 564–74. 34   This split and multiple role-playing is characteristic of Hoccleve’s authorizing and interpretative strategies across his work. Nicholas Perkins has noted a similar jockeying for doubled personae in The Regiment of Princes: he argues how there is a general move from the private to the public voice, but also how Hoccleve plots ‘a move from melancholy outsider to (precariously) authoritative counsellor. Other doppelganger abound: does the paternal Old Man stand in for a nearly absent Henry IV, or for “father” Chaucer? Is Hoccleve, then, a shadow of Prince Henry in the Dialogue?’ Perkins, ‘Haunted Hoccleve?’, p. 115. As well as recognizing a range of social and historical voices being ventriloquized, 33

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In the shifting focus, we can explore the author’s purpose in prestructuring the reading process. Simpson believes Thomas’s problem in the Dialogue is that since ‘his voice is publicly regarded as being unstable after his madness … he wants his position as teller to be regarded as stable’.35 J.M. Bowers observes that Hoccleve focuses on the themes of sanity and insanity, or private and public perceptions, and in so doing was unwise to promote a ‘reputation for personal instability when political stability was so much at stake’.36 Yet it is through instability that our narrator emphasizes his desire and consciousness of the need to gain a public reputation of constancy. The change in Thomas’s view of time indicates recognition of the complex, at times unstable, subtleties of time’s rhythms that enable writing to commence. Our attention in the Complaint was directed towards methods of interpreting time (the processes of reading); in the Dialogue, however, the emphasis is on how to use this knowledge to construct temporal relationships (the application of writing).37 After introducing the debate about whether or not causal connections between states of time should be acknowledged, a lengthy commentary is made on the contemporary evils in society. Activities of the ‘extorcioner / or a robbour’ and especially those of a ‘coin clypper’ (p. 37; lines 65–6) are discussed when he digresses (pp. 41–6; lines 99–196).38 This is a later interpolation in the text – with an updated reference to the May 1421 statute requiring the weighing of coins (p. 43; lines 134–40). The immediate present is the subject of significance. We may recall in the Complaint that the present was not as pressing, as it was a longer duration, a period occurring in the past five years. Critics have remarked on the central significance in the Dialogue of temporal relevance: ‘Hoccleve himself seems to have been obsessed with the need to revise and update the “Dialogue”’.39 This devising and adjusting that Thompson notes appears to be confined to the Dialogue as opposed to the Complaint. This is a point worth pursuing further. The significance of topical specificity suggested by the obsessive need to revise and

we can, as I illustrate here, hear writer and readers’ voices becoming intermingled and double play-acted. 35   Simpson, ‘Madness and Texts’, p. 21. 36   John M. Bowers, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition’, Chaucer Review, 36 (2002), 360. 37   In Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, especially the second chapter, the same theme of the relationships between reading and writing are explored (but in the context of royal hermeneutics rather than perceptions and structures of time). Perkins poses the same question as I do here – how is Hoccleve teaching his readers to read, interpret and write? 38   For a discussion of the recoinage statute and the exact nature of the later additions to the text see Burrow (ed.), Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, pp. 120–24. 39   Thompson, ‘A Poet’s Contacts with the Great and the Good: Further Consideration of Thomas Hoccleve’s Texts and Manuscripts’, p. 83.

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update the work reveals that the Dialogue’s function is to draw attention towards the role of ‘now’ in the narrative. Yet I have been arguing that it was in the Complaint that the present was the primary focus, in contrast to the Dialogue’s focus on the relationship of the past and future to the present. So why does this digression sharpen sensitivity to topical specificity in the Dialogue? The answer lies in how heightened temporal consciousness is a stabilizing strategy in the writing process. Time consciousness is heightened not simply by topical references but also by a number of causal sequences and time limits. Thomas sets a limit – ‘withynne this two yeer or elles three’ (p. 47; line 192) – for the evils of the coin clippers to be corrected, or else truth will be ‘overthrowen’ in ‘so moche of this land’ (p. 47; line 194). This wide social setting then narrows with reference to the time constraints on the future imagined readers of the ‘Learn to Die’ treatise that follows the frame. Thomas warns of the impending time limits in order that his readers correct their sins: ‘while he tyme hath and fressh wit and vigour, / and nat abyde vnto his deethes hour’ (p. 49; lines 223–4) for ‘short tyme is thanne of his offenses olde / to make a iust and treewe rekenynge’ (p. 49; lines 229–30). These limits, on society and on his readers, draw attention to the nature of temporal perception, to how consciousness of duration can act as an ordering structure for correcting our actions and thoughts. Thomas, while directing his readers towards consciousness of the ordering rhythms of time, also engages it himself. That he is no longer simply quantifying time durations but is appreciating the significance of temporal relations is clearly indicated when he calculates his age. As in the Complaint, Thomas displays the ability to precisely quantify time – ‘of age am I fifty wyntir and three’ (p. 51; line 247) – and to express time states as evidenced in his descriptive account of old age (pp. 51–2; lines 246–59). Here, quantified expressions no longer demarcate time states but place the moment in relationship with other time durations: causal connections are recognized. Prior to this age calculation Thomas remarks that his activities as a writer are also to be constrained in time: And whan that endid is I neure thynke More in Englissh aftir be occupied … Wherfore I cesse thynke be this doon; The nyght approchith it is fer past noon. (p. 51; lines 239–40, 244–5)

His state in the present (his age) is the cause that will limit the duration of his current abilities (of writing English) in the future. The time referent has a direct relation with the immediate future, heightening consciousness of the time limits under which he operates due to his age and his perceived long-term capacities, or incapacities. This signals a somewhat different approach from that indicated earlier in the Complaint, when he rejected his friends’ readings of future states as prophecies: Thomas now acknowledges the importance of recognizing interrelationships in states of time.

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As the discussion becomes more general, attention moves away from Thomas to the state of time itself. Stephen Kohl comments: [Thomas] no longer presents himself as a purely individual case but as an exemplum of God’s grace; in fact he has learned to see his life in general Christian terms and depicts himself as a sort of Everyman.40

It has already been noted how, at the start of the Complaint, he viewed himself as ‘among othir’, as being only one example in God’s process of visitations. In the Dialogue, Thomas now has the ability to make a detailed exploration of God’s ‘chaunge and mutabilitee’ due to the universalizing of the individual experience. Strohm notes that medieval writers tend to use the self ‘not as the ultimate center of interest, but as an imaginative exemplification of broader issues’.41 The broader issue Hoccleve exemplifies via the universal self might, at first glance, appear to be religious devotion, for what follows are ‘orthodox patterns of [religious] belief and expression, [conveyed] at the same time by a strong sense of personal conviction and faith’.42 Charity Stokes remarks how this mixture of orthodoxy and sense of self are the hallmarks of Hoccleve’s religious verse. As in his religious poetry, the topic is suffering, but closer examination reveals it is not suffering according to the traditional liturgical or biblical motifs, but the suffering of ignorance. Ignorance of God’s ability to ‘hele and cure’ but also to ‘hurte’ is no longer an indictment of tracing elements of the past in the present (as it was in the Complaint); rather, it is seen as an indictment of the opposite, of having only ‘loue of this lyf present’. The central debate about the relationship between permanence and temporality comes to the fore, and this is illustrated when Thomas’s friend asserts: ‘abyde and thy purpos putte in respyt / til that right wel stablisshid be thy brayn’ (p. 54; lines 306–7). Thomas’s rejection of such a chastisement is all the more significant in relation to the ordering of the narrative. The disappointment Thomas expresses in Friend’s remarks – ‘a verray freend certes, sore am I greeued / that yee nat leeue how God me hath releeued’ (p. 54; lines 328–9) – follows a lengthy discussion concerning the temporal nature of the fading flowers, shadows, worldly possessions and life. The sequence displays Thomas’s consciousness of the need for a balance between recognizing the temporality of this ‘lyf present’ without focusing solely on the present, and of the need for stability – a degree of permanence – without denying the change and variance in and between states of time. Thomas’s recovery of temporal consciousness is fully complete, and signified when he laments the lack of trust in friendship: 40   Stephen Kohl, ‘More than Virtues and Vices; Self-Analysis in Hoccleve’s “Autobiographies”‘, Fifteenth Century Studies, 14–15 (1988–9), 23. 41   Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, 1989), p. 143. 42   Charity Stokes, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’s Mother of God and Balade to the Virgin and Christ’, Medium Aevum, 64 (1995), 75.

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Whoso nat leeueth what that a man seith Is signe that he trustith him but lyte; A verray freend yeueth credence & feith Vnto his freend whatso he speke & wryt. (p. 55; lines 330–33)

The very nature of the temporality of meaning is addressed, though no longer in relation to how the interpretative process is subject to ‘chaunge and variance’, but to what we ‘speke & wryt’ and how it is subject to the temporal context of interpretation. The relationship of reading to the writing of time is what the Dialogue now highlights. By admitting to and appreciating the temporal nature of interpretation, Thomas can at last regard time consciousness as a stabilizing force. He pledges: ‘my sclendre wit feele I as sad and stable / as euere it was at any tyme or this’ (p. 56; lines 367–8). Echoes of the conclusion of the Complaint are heard in these lines; echoes are heard of the passage when Thomas acknowledged that the changing temperament of his past ‘infirmitee’ was just as evident in the present but his ‘wit’, in ‘any tyme or this’, is no longer changing, but was ‘stable’. In other words, his temporal consciousness will remain steadfast, so he shall not return to the ‘infirmitee’ of his past. At this point Friend insists that ‘in me shalt thow fynde no variance’ (p. 56; line 371) and warns: ‘the smert of studie oghte be mirour / to thee let yit thy studie be forborn’ (p. 57; lines 409–10). The challenge of others’ lack of ‘chaunge and variance’ and misreading of the mirror image is again rehearsed, though this time Thomas is able to do more than simply remain silent. Roger Ellis has detected how Hoccleve rejects the biblical tradition found elsewhere in medieval writings (such as Chaucer’s retraction in The Canterbury Tales) of books ending with silence as, in part, they metaphorically join readers and writers.43 The refusal to be silent signals the Dialogue is about the writer recognizing and dealing with unruly interpretative processes.44 In confronting others’ unruly readings through dialogue rather than silence, an uneasy coexistence between Thomas (the composer) and Friend (the listener) is achieved. Although Friend does not reject the validity of his perception – ‘euere I am agast & dreede this’ (p. 60; line 474) – he accepts the necessity for accommodation. He accepts that his interpretations of Thomas’s sanity should be based on his experience of the present:

43   Roger Ellis, ‘Introduction’, in My Compleinte and Other Poems: Thomas Hoccleve (Exeter, 2001), pp. 32–3. 44   Knapp observes how noisy Thomas is in the Dialogue: ‘despite Friend’s preemptive soothing tone, Hoccleve does indeed become ‘wroth’. He is given to verbal repetition in small outbursts (“‘A, nay’, quod I, ‘nay, nay!’”, line 35); he accuses his Friend at several moments of paying no attention … and he interrupts their discussion to treat the Friend to a lengthy disquisition on the nature of real Friendship’ (The Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 178–9).

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Had I nat taastid thee as that I now Doon haue, it had been hard maad me to trowe The good plyt which I feel wel that thow Art in I woot wel thow art wel ynow, Whatso men of thee ymagyne or clappe. (p. 60; lines 485–9)

Thomas asks his friend ‘haue I nat seid reson?’ (p. 60; line 472), reminding us of Thomas’s submission to Reason at the end of the Complaint. Now it is his friend’s turn to submit. Thomas is the one in the Dialogue who, in accommodating the unruly temporal rhythms, ensures that temporal consciousness remains steadfast. Strohm argues that a ‘text’s ultimate temporal unruliness always finally trumps its own stabilising strategies’.45 Hoccleve, however, does not present multiple time patternings to evoke chaos but adopts, we could argue, a poststructuralist position. In acknowledging and allowing for rhythms of temporal consciousness, and most importantly, by directing us towards his perceptions of such, he hopes to secure, as demonstrated in the dialogue with his imagined reader, variable and changing interpretations as a logocentric process for reading the texts that follow. In a way, it is not only God who operates on the cyclical model; interpretation can also be read as spiralling between healing and hurting. In the remainder of the Dialogue, the selection and compilation processes of composition are outlined for the texts that follow. Here we have a fictional author drawing attention to the translatio processes that real authors (Hoccleve or Lydgate) so superficially deny. This section provides the image of an organized, stable structure: of a ‘narrative pattern of causal and temporal sequences of events and psychological results’.46 Imprecise and precise time referents no longer compete but combine as a method to indicate and emphasize the duration of preparation: ‘I haue a tyme reasonable abide … serche & see in fyue yeer’ (p. 59; lines 442, 445–6). Connections with past actions are made: ‘thow seidist of a book thow were in dette’ (p. 62; line 532). The sequence of the promise to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and hearing of his return from France initiates the writing process. The process of selecting suitable pieces of work is then discussed in some detail, returning our focus to the role of anticipated reception and highlighting its relationship with the writing process. The Dialogue has redirected the exploration of fictional perceptions towards real topical contexts of reception in the tales that follow the framed narrative. Thomas is keen to negate authorial responsibility for his previously written ‘Letter of Cupid’, a tract that abuses woman’s nature. He insists upon the distinction between author and reporter: ‘was I noon auctour. / I nas in that cas but a Reportour’ (p. 70; lines 760–61). This discussion of Hoccleve’s anticipation of the story he is about to tell and which we will tell later, and whether or not past reception of his   Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, p. 65.   Kohl, ‘More than Virtues and Vices’, p. 125.

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work should influence his current project, allows Thomas to reaffirm his desire to stabilize not only others’ readings but also his own. Paradoxically, this discussion also allows Thomas to acknowledge the temporal and unruly nature of interpretation by admitting – if account is taken of previous reception of his work – that it is possible that his ‘stabilising strategies never entirely succeed’.47 Thomas remarks: What world is this how vndirstande am I? Looke in the same book What stikith by? … For had yee rad it fully to the ende, Yee wolde seyn it is nat as yee wende. (pp. 70–71; lines 774–5, 783–4)

As writer he claims merely to report, but this comes after a discussion of the subjective choices in compiling works. As a writer he claims to have no control over others’ interpretations but then proceeds to instruct on the necessity for ‘proper’ reading, having illustrated throughout the frame his perception of the strengths and inadequacies of the reading process. Thomas’s recovery has been fully illustrated in the frame of the Series. The questioning of temporal consciousness, the ‘wylde infirmitee’, is the experience that we have also endured in the progression of the framed narrative. Therefore the writer’s recovery that was so evident in the Prologue is the point at which we, the readers, arrive at the end of the Dialogue. Have we journeyed through causal connections or gone full circle? What is clear is that we do not read the text as a linear account; we read it as an investigation of the reciprocal exchanges between reader and writer. Understanding these exchanges is achieved in the fiction by acknowledging, just as we concluded at the end of the previous chapter, that there is a need to collapse divisions in models of temporal consciousness: antitheses are collapsed between stable and unruly, progressive and regressive, passive and productive, individual and communal, and, most significantly, between production and reception models. The frame shows that our attitudes towards temporal interplays influence whether we are well or infirm: whether we read or misread. The Anticipated Present: Interplays of the Frame in the Tales Three texts follow the frame of the Series: the ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’, ‘Learn to Die’, and the ‘Tale of Jonathas’.48 The two ‘Tales’ are moralized adventures taken   Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, p. 65.   All quotations from this section of the Series are taken from Hoccleve’s Works: The

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Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz; rev. by Jerome Mitchell and A.I. Doyle, EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 140–242. Hereafter, references are cited in the main body of the text.

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from the Gesta Romanorum, while the treatise is a translation of the Ars morendi chapter of Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae.49 My interest lies in how the Complaint and Dialogue frame these tales – that is, how disorderly or disrupting time strategies are significant in the tales, and how temporal consciousness becomes the subject of focus. The frame and tales need to be read as a sequence, not least because, as David Lorenzo Boyd has observed, ‘the compilation and juxtaposition of texts in the manuscript matrix can set up a sophisticated intertextual hermeneutic network that reflects, and in some cases attempts to shape or control, the actual medieval reception’.50 That the author should have created explicit internal links between the frame and the tales strengthens this argument. The frame emphasizes the significance of sequential connections and there is significance in the sequencing of the varying time treatments in these three poems. The first poem, the ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’, uses time consciousness as a stabilizing strategy in writing and reading processes; ‘Learn to Die’ accommodates more sophisticated time rhythms, allowing contrary perceptions and competing relationships, as well as interrelationships between the past, present and future, determined not just by the author but by the reader too. The final tale, however, brings our attention back to destabilizing time patterns. Why this pattern of reaffirmation, development and then subversion might be the case is examined below. ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’ After exploring the nature of temporal consciousness in the frame narrative, which concludes with stabilizing strategies in the writing and reading process, the first text in the Series reaffirms these patterns through exemplification. Kohl’s description of the Dialogue’s narrative as a ‘pattern of causal and temporal sequences of events’ could similarly be applied to the ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’.51 This is not just a useful descriptive tag, directing us away from traditional thinking of medieval narratives as only episodic in form, or focusing on patterns of salvational history, or on rhythms of eternity or the apocalypse; it also draws attention to Hoccleve’s tendency to underscore authorial and readerly engagement with the challenges of negotiating representations of narrative time. The different experiences of Jereslaus’s wife are presented as causal sequences that unify narrative action 49   A discussion of Hoccleve’s choice of Gesta Romanorum version and nature of his translations is in Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Chicago, 1968), pp. 43–7; 86–95. 50   David Lorenzo Boyd, ‘Reading through the Regiment of Princes: Hoccleve’s Series and Lydgate’s Dance of Death in Yale Beinecke MS 493’, Fifteenth-Century Studies, 20 (1993), 16. See also Robert Meyer-Lee, who outlines the thematic strands and surface structure that unites these different parts of the collection in ‘Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money’, Exemplaria, 13 (2001), 202. 51   Kohl, ‘More than Virtues and Vices’, p. 125.

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yet simultaneously draw attention to the subversion of relationships in various actions: her husband’s absence causes her brother-in-law to attempt to rape and hang her, leading an earl to come to the rescue. Later, due to her unknown origins, the earl falsely accuses her of the murder of his child; as a result she flees and hires a thief-servant, who betrays her to a shipman. The shipman then threatens her but she escapes to a nunnery, where all those who have abused her confess. While there is an obvious pattern of cause and effect established by this sequence, it also raises moral questions about fortunate and unfortunate falls, about loyalty as a false security and as a moral virtue, about natural goodness triumphing over dubious origins, and about male and female power relationships. The significance to Hoccleve of this tale lies in the strife that results from sin, and in confession as a form of treatment. In other words, the tale relies on strategies of time patterns – temporal connections – as a means to create order and stability out of unruly deeds, clearly demonstrated by these causal connections and temporal sequences. There are numerous moments, sequences, durations, processes and connections that are explicitly marked as a means to structure the narrative, but the causal relationships do not mean that it is always structured in a straightforward linear fashion. Even in the opening lines we witness the cultural narrative of coexisting temporalities that were charted earlier in Lydgate’s pseudo-historical works: the coexistence of authenticating and imprecise referents. The tale begins with the use of the ancient past as an invocation of authority – ‘in the Romain actes written is this’ (p. 140; line 1) – implying a continued narrative in time; a moral that has withstood the test of time into the present will be what this tale is about. Yet within the space of one line encroaches a sense of imprecision as to what the function of the referent is, as we are told that ‘Whilom an Emperour’ (p. 140; line 2): an unnamed figure from the past is the means used to introduce Jereslaus. The blurring of temporal boundaries is maintained with, on the one hand, an increased specificity as to when the action of the tale occurred, while on the other hand, no specificity beyond the narrative context as to when this is: ‘in his bed lay / Vpon a nyght … on the morwe’ (p. 140; lines 16–17, 19), the dreamer tells us of his thoughts. The events relate to a specific turn of night into day, but to which period it relates – the Roman era or now – no one is quite clear. The need to create a narrative context that is specific to the tale, but located too vaguely in time to be interpreted is emphasized with a narrative interruption a quarter of the way through the tale, when we are reminded that: This chaunce shoop many a yeer agoon That tyme par cas was no swich array As that in sundry Countrees is this day. (p. 146; lines 194–6)

Our attention is drawn to the imagined historical time that the tale is about, as opposed to the present time that the reader occupies. But the differences between historical realities, with this transition between the past to the present, is still

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imprecise as to time and place. The narrative is about a past time, holding a moral truth that has survived from the Roman days, but it is also context-dependent in reference to an unknown time and place, for our attention is drawn to the fact that it is a different time from now, having happened many years ago. The effect is to place responsibility on the reader not only to interpret how the past relates to the present, but to decide to which present it relates. The moral of the story is about more than how innate goodness can hold true despite hardships exacted by family, friends and strangers, or about how those who commit ill deeds will see the errors of their ways through confession; it is more than a celebratory tale of woman’s good nature. It is also an experiential lesson for the reader in how to interpret causal connections and temporal relations, and in how to prudently understand the present in relationship to the past. After the tale is finished, Thomas shifts role from writer to reader in ‘The Moralising of the Story’. In this prose passage, he requires us to revise our past readings of the causal connections and temporal sequences in the poem when he directs us to be concerned ‘nat oonly with goodes temporel but also with goodes spirituel’ (p. 177). In this context, the causal connections and temporal sequences, as Thomas explains, have Christian significance, although the possibility for multiple interpretations is left open. Thomas explains to his friend that his source contains no moralization, that he only reads one after writing the tale when he accepts his friend’s book: the Christian interpretation is both read and written after the tale. In Thomas directing us how to read the tale properly, we become conscious not only of our own past reading, but also of the potential of others’ past reading, in the form of these possibly imagined or possibly real books. Paradoxically, in attempting to stabilize our interpretation, our consciousness is raised of the temporal nature of readings as subject to the interpretative context. ‘Learn to Die’ A spiritual treatise follows in which, as we might expect, Hoccleve considers his own engagement with the end of time and how to prepare for it: ‘in holy wirkes your tyme occupie, / and whyle it tyme is vices mortifie’ (p. 189; lines 300–301). Not only is this a conventional spiritual theme on which to reflect (knowledge of Suso’s text would demand such reflection), but the opening frame of the Series’ Prologue anticipates it; there we have a dreamer not contemplating commonplaces about love, but the transitory nature of the world and how all men must die. The end is in the beginning, seen not only in relation to the narrator’s temporal awareness in the Prologue (by contrast with the Complaint or Dialogue), or in narrative time, where the Prologue recounts the memories of that November night that has already occurred, but also on the more macro level concerning the moral lessons one recurrently has to negotiate in the collection of tales: from the start, the encroaching and liminal moment of the end of time is negotiated. Therefore, it is no surprise that in this treatise about the instability of the world there are many

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references to ‘eternel lyf’ (p. 179; line 19) and to how ‘man is mortel’ (p. 179; line 43), but there are also references to the nature and dynamics of time’s rhythms. It is worth emphasizing here that in none of Hoccleve’s other minor moral poems does he use the polyphonic range of time expressions that are employed in ‘Learn to Die’. In the other moral poems, references to eternity, to memory and abstract durations are common, whereas in this treatise quantified units are often used in addition – such as, ‘xxxti yeer of myn age’ (p. 192; line 378), or ‘x yeer in a fourneys’ (p. 196; line 493) – but more significantly, there is sustained discussion about the nature and the interrelationships of time states; in other words, discussion is about the necessity of time consciousness as much as about the necessity of belief in eternity. At a quick glance, the treatise certainly appears to focus on the ending of time (death) and time’s antithesis (eternity). The opening references celebrate ‘eterne sapience, O vniuersal Prince’ (p. 178; lines 2–3), ‘eternal lyf’ (p. 179; line 19) and ‘eternal god’ (p. 181; line 101), while there are repeatedly humble acknowledgements that ‘man is mortel’ (p. 179; line 43) and that we all carry a ‘mortel wounde’ (p. 182; line 119). Stanzas 15 to 16 invoke the customary cycle of life from birth to death, where at first youth is not the wild misspent time of life but is praised: ‘yong is strong and prosperable … spare my youthe of age rype ynow’ (pp. 182, 183; lines 112, 144). This positivity resounds throughout the opening stanzas; to begin with, time is viewed as a constructive phenomenon – ‘good precious tyme’ (p. 186; line 234) – as it affords us the opportunity in the present to prepare for eternity. However, it is soon recognized that such perceptions of time are the ideal, that the experiential sense of time is subject to human mismanagement: ‘allas, so many a fair and gracious day / haue y lost’ (p. 188; lines 271–2). This lament (which is a cultural narrative of the time witnessed in Caxton, Whitford and Lydgate’s writings) is intensified with a focus not just on wasted days, but wasted hours: ‘how many houres haue y lost’ (p. 193; line 401). Misuse of the precious commodity of time highlights the perception of time as irreversible and uncontrollable by man: ‘the tyme is past the tyme is goon for ay; / no man reuoke or calle ageyn it may’ (p. 187; lines 251–2). Perception of its positive nature is temporary, relative to its role as a prelude to eternity. When presented as the antithesis to the permanence offered by eternity, time is no longer viewed as having such a ‘fair and gracious’ nature: fful fewe been that so with hertes ere, Konne apparce thinstabilitiee Of the world. (p. 216; lines 262–4)

Instability is deemed as ‘the malice of tyme’ (p. 199; line 568), as an unsettling, disruptive feature in this ‘wrecchid world changeable’ (p. 206; line 765). By contrast, in ‘The Joys of Heaven’ there is no such focus on the nature of time, for

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‘noon age is there ne miserie or wrecchidnesse of age’ (p. 213): in heaven time does not exist, only eternal joy. We can conclude, then, that ‘Learn to Die’ is a tract written about antithetical ‘precious’ and ‘wretched’ perceptions of time. But it contains many more views of time than these, and the result is that arbitrary divisions between these two perspectives do not last. As was the case in the ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’, a sense of continuities in time duration plays a prominent role. However, in this instance it is not the use of ancient, distant past authorities being invoked; the timescale has narrowed to the time span of Hoccleve’s life. In the Dialogue, the narrator tells the Friend that he intends to translate ‘Learn to Die’ as his next literary endeavour (p. 117; lines 204–11). The implication here is that this decision has recently occurred and the activity not yet taken place, that it will take place within the time of the narrative, when the tale appears later in the Series. But a mere few hundred lines later (pp. 125–6; lines 439–48) it becomes clear that the project has had a much longer existence in time: ‘trustith wel this pourpos is nat sodeyn’ (p. 125; line 439). As Cristina von Nocklen observes, Hoccleve wants us to be aware that he probably began his work on the treatise well before he even thought of the Series: ‘A man in his conceit may serchee & see / In .ve. yeer what he do may, pardee (p. 126; lines 445–6).52 Her study explores how, in assigning a higher spiritual authority to him occupying his time in the good deed of translating the Ars morendi, Hoccleve’s interpolation of working on the Complaint and Dialogue can be read as a distraction to the main central goal of translating ‘Learn to Die’. This interplay of narrative time and the lifespan of the narrator enables us as readers to revise and re-revise our initial understanding of [the Series] in the light of information he has initially withheld … We may at first accept that the troubles he hints at are indeed those involving the loss of patrons and friends that he deals with in the Complaint. But retrospectively we realise that what he really needed to do on that late November evening was learn to die.53

In effect, the opposition between precious time and wasted time becomes more urgent and our role becomes more active. His riotous misspent youth, lamented in this treatise as occurring in his thirties, is no longer confined to distant memory, but is by extension ongoing, if we do not revise our readings of his Complaint and Dialogue as an exercise in learning how to die. Many more dynamic parallels of the treatment of time in the frame are discernable when we focus on the readings of the complex interrelationships between the past, present and future that are offered in the narrative. Interrelationships between the dying man – the Disciple – and the reader’s understanding of time are at stake 52   For a discussion of Hoccleve’s stages of renderings, see Christina von Nocklen, ‘Lerne for to Dye and the Author’s Death in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 10 (1993), 34. 53   Nocklen, ‘Lerne for to Dye’, 34.

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in this tale: it is not just a complaint about time, but a dialogue with competing perceptions and manipulations of time. The dialogue between the image of death and the Disciple enables the dying man to become rehabilitated within a social image, an echo of the Hoccleve-narrator’s wish in the frame for rehabilitation within social, work, friendship and reception communities. Steven Rozenski explains the centrality of dialogue in Hoccleve’s negotiations with the ending of time: The uneasy desire of the Hoccleve-figure to reclaim and redeem his reputation through language, dialogue, and writing – coupled with the awareness that writing alone can never entirely achieve this (making dialogue, even one as stylised as Lerne to Die, a crucial intermediary between text and world).54

Such mediation is evident in the interplays between the frame and this treatise. Just as Thomas, at the beginning of the Series, rejected the validity of prophecy, this treatise begins with the declaration of man’s inability to read the future: Tho men ful blynde been, & bestial. Of that shal folwe aftir this lyf present, fforsighte swich folk han noon. (p. 184; lines 176–8)

The dying man then recalls his past life: ‘of my dayes I the harm bewaill, / ffruytlees past sauf with bitter fruyt of synne’ (p. 185; lines 184–5). He recognizes that his chance to amend his sins is no longer, that time is gone: ‘allas, to longe hath be the tarynge / and the delay of my correccion!’ (p. 191; lines 365–6). Unlike Thomas, the dying man is only too conscious of the causal connections between that time and now, of the fact that his current woe and unreadiness for death is due to his misspent time in the past: ‘my dayes I despente in vanitee; / noon heede y tooke of hem but leet hem passe’ (p. 187; lines 239–40). His present experience (of the death hour) now makes him aware of how his past should have been: so short was nat the tyme that is goon, but y, of goostly lucres and wynnynges mighte haue in it purchaced many oon. (p. 187; lines 253–5)

He is conscious that the past is past and therefore that he is unable to amend his ways: ‘allas, I, caytif for anqwissh and sorwe, / my teeres trickelen by my cheeks doun’ (p. 187; lines 260–61). Like Thomas, the dying man feels he is not understood: ‘thow vndirstandist me nat’ (p. 184; line 171). 54   Steven Rozenski Jr, ‘“Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour”: Hoccleve’s Amplification of the Imagery and Intimacy of Henry Suso’s Ars Morendi’, Parergon, 25 (2008), 12.

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As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that the dying man is going through a crisis that the Disciple has not experienced; there are clear echoes of the position Thomas’s friends were in during the mirror scene in the Complaint.55 There are other echoes, with a dialogue concerning the giving and receiving of advice when the Disciple asks for advice about how to read: ‘whan that the deeth an other day to yow / approche shal as yee may see’ (p. 195; lines 464–5). The Disciple takes on the role of inquisitor, the role that the dying man held earlier in the treatise, and comes to the same conclusions concerning the effects of misspent time, while the same encroaching awareness of how the ‘houres extremitee’ (p. 208; line 797) enhances sensitivity to the temporality of this ‘wrecchid world changeable’ (p. 206; line 765), in contrast to the joys of ‘eterne sapience’ (p. 207; line 777). The purpose of this shift from the dying man’s consciousness to the Disciple’s is the notion of a shared experience. The past, of the dying man, now becomes another’s present: ‘myn yistirday and this day vn-to thee’ (p. 201; line 609). The treatise moves from demarcations between the past and the present to a focus on their interrelationships, on the anticipatory present. This is not just in relation to the time of the Disciple, but also to that of reader in the present: ffor whan that tyme is comen, and that hour, Repreeued shal be the past vanitee; Remembre therefore on thy Creatour In thy fressh youthe & lusty iolitee, Or tyme come of sharp aduersitee, And or that yeeres approche of disese. (p. 209; lines 845–53)

The movement we saw Thomas accomplish – from rejecting prophecies to the prudent recognition of the necessity to appreciate the interrelationship of past and present, present and future – has also occurred in this treatise. The dying man, conscious of the differences and causal connections between his past and present, now advises the Disciple – and us – to think of the future in our youth. Thus, what we learn is that when the future is our present, our past may be forgiven. By directing us how to perceive interrelationships in the temporal rhythms of time, he advises us how to be well in infirmity: how to learn to die.

  In this scene there are several references to the images of mirrors; for example, when earthly ties are rejected due to their instability we are told, ‘this world, it is a mirour of deceit’ (p. 195; line 455). See Rozenski ‘Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour’ for a discussion of how the mirror references are additions by Hoccleve to Suso’s text in this treatise, and how they help to create affective bonds between the Disciple and Image. 55

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‘Tale of Jonathas’ Hoccleve closes the Series with a tale that engages the unruly and destabilizing features so central to time consciousness investigated in the frame. A return to the narrator’s anxieties in the frame is evident in the themes of the ‘Tale of Jonathas’, with ‘betrayal of trust, the impossibility of learning from experience, sin manifested as sickness, confession as the only cure’ all explored, but now assuming a ‘darkly vengeful turn’ of their own.56 This thematic pattern of return and dislocation is reinforced by the macro structures of time in the tale, where unruly interplays of temporal consciousness triumph, no longer in relation to the personal reading processes of the narrator but as threateningly unresolved strategies for the readers. Thomas consents to his friend’s request for a tale ‘of a woman that was vnchaast / and deceyuable and sly’ (pp. 216–17; lines 31–2), but he queries the selection of the Gesta story, for ‘this that yee me now reede is al contrarie / vnto that yee me red han heer-before’ (p. 217; lines 50–51). This reference brings to mind the Friend’s advice prior to the first tale, of the need for Thomas not to abuse women’s nature. While this can be seen as a stabilizing strategy – in the sense that it creates causal connections between the parts of the Series – ultimately attention is drawn to the temporal, unstable nature of interpretation. The problems explored at the end of the Dialogue, of the writer’s control over future reception of the text, resurface here. Although the Friend asserts, ‘no womman wole to thee ward maligne, / but swich oon as hath trode hir shoo amis’ (p. 218; lines 65–6), Thomas is correct that the advice is contrary to what he was told before. (Friend first advised Thomas to gain women’s favour by writing only about their attributes, but now advises Thomas to write a tale about the deceitful nature of women, in order to warn young men.) Knapp observes that this pattern of apologies, creating a metatextual conundrum, ‘seems designed to create further suspicion of authors, and is so common [in medieval texts] that we should perhaps read many of them as attempts to initiate querelles over their works’.57 Although a causal connection has been made, it only serves to raise consciousness of the possibility for unruly, varied querelles beyond the writer’s control. It raises consciousness of the temporal nature of interpretation. A number of other instances in the narrative suggest that the function of time strategies in this tale is to create temporal unruliness, in both the writing and reading processes. The flow and progression of the narrative is repeatedly interrupted by disruptive time patterns. When Jonathas takes Fellicula on the magic cloth ‘right to the worldes ende’ (p. 229; line 386), she pleads to Jonathas to return to the moment that they had been in before. Her wish – ‘I were as I was this day morwenynge’ (p. 231; line 429) – is granted, leaving Jonathas behind in this other time and causing him to regret his very existence in time: ‘cursid be that   Patterson, ‘“What is me?”’, p. 86.   Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, p. 49, n. 9.

56 57

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day / that I was born and tyme and hour also / that my modir conceyued me’ (p. 232; lines 471–3). In ‘Learn to Die’ emphasis was placed on the irreversible nature of time as a feature of its stability, while in this tale it is the departure from and reversal of time, the destabilizing of time’s course, which triumphs. Strohm’s assertion that a ‘text’s ultimate temporal unruliness always finally trumps its own stabilising strategies’ is worth recalling here. It is not simply time strategies in the ‘Tale of Jonathas’ that promote uneasy, or unruly, temporal consciousness, but also the final section of the Series, the ‘Moralisation of the Story of Jonathas’. In this moralization there are three references to time’s antithesis: ‘eternel blisse … perpetuel reste’ (p. 241) and ‘eternel lyf’ (p. 242). Explicit invitations were made to compare the prologues of the first and last tales; likewise, I suggest we compare the endings. In the moralization after the first tale, where stable time strategies had been employed, temporal consciousness could be raised as a subject for discussion, for the tale enabled the demonstration of the means to read and write about time. Yet this final tale does not afford such means, and the result is that Thomas must remain silent on the issue of temporal consciousness in the final closure. If we read these poems as an interconnected series, then echoes of the Complaint are heard in this silence. That silence is the final strategy leaves us in the position that Thomas was in at the end, not of the Dialogue but the Complaint: recognizing the need, but not yet having worked out how, to accommodate the complex variations in temporal consciousness. Silence is a very uncomfortable and inconclusive space. Hoccleve’s discomfort in both The Regiment and the Series is about any reader’s desire to stabilize the contours of the field. In enabling self-consciousness about the practices of reading and writing, Hoccleve’s poems manifest anxieties about unease in representing time, about time management, and about the ambiguities in processes of recollecting time. Such blanks continue to be filled with every new reading. Herein resides the positivity of such nonclosure and negation: the lesson learned is that temporal unruliness is the nature of reading. Reading time in Hoccleve’s poetry reveals how necessary it is for us to recognize that our interpretative paradigms are subject to our own consciousness of being in time.

Conclusion: ‘As in tyme’ This book has explored the diversity of ways in which time ‘now flowe[th], now ebbe’, how it brings us ‘now ioie, now myschaunce’; that is to say, it has investigated the multiplicity of ways in which ideas about time played multifaceted roles in fifteenth-century literary culture. Perceptions of time are an integral part of our reading of any kind of literary text where, according to a variety of manipulations practised by authors, time is perceived to move faster or slower, in spiralling motion, to be sequential, causal or to lurch forward in episodic form, or even cease to exist altogether. These manipulations are, in turn, geared to the contemporary social understanding of time and the whole history of chronometers. As the start of this study showed, examining the machines and methods for calculating time provides a useful digest of historical scholarship offering a fascinating perspective of fifteenth-century poems. In tandem, it also shows how the poetry sheds light on the cultural narratives of time: an artistic interest existed for exploring the thematic and structural possibilities offered by the temporal rhythms of living in time. The overall argument of this work is that fifteenth-century writers mixed methods of telling the time – some new, some old – from a variety of different spheres, a view that challenges the well-established notions of Merchant and Church times that still often dominate scholarship. In confronting these models, the exploration of Lydgate and Hoccleve’s work, line by line, unearths much evidence to demonstrate that they had artistic ability in the art of time narration. They are more locally varied in their methods for comprehending time and describing time than has ever been credited hitherto. The value of recognizing the sophistication of their expressions is that through close reading, one dominant feature emerges: a patterning of references to time consistently and repeatedly performs key shaping functions in all their narratives. This function is not simple or programmatic, nor does it confirm the usual assumption that medieval understanding of time and history was always cyclic, episodic and exemplary; rather it reveals that linear and causal interplays also have their place. The place that such interplays occupy can be defined as the range of shared cultural narratives that are clearly evident in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s imaginings: the effects of the duration of time are given meaning in the many context-dependent uses of age schemes. Attitudes towards the significance of moments of time have been found in their astronomical discourses. The increasing sophistication in time measurement is exploited as an opportunity for increased precision in    John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 123 (London, 1924), p. 390; Bk III, line 2195.

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expression, for a wider employment of context-specific referents, and even for satire offered by ambiguities in the vague signifiers of new technological and conceptual developments. There is recognition of how to use time for profit in petitionary claims and in rewriting literary inheritances, to create genealogies for individuals and nations, and there is much play in these poets’ work within the range of medieval attitudes towards the ever-shifting, competing and overlapping relationships between past, present and future perspectives. An understanding of the cultural contexts from which medieval writers derived their perceptions of time aids in the examination of literary imaginings of temporal human experience. In all of Lydgate and Hoccleve’s large-scale exemplary narratives, they indirectly ask their readers to revise perceptions through deferential and challenging interplays of fictional, historical, contemporary and ‘universal’ times, thereby creating an inconclusive sense of the instability of the moral, political and social present. One could even go so far as to say that their skill and audacity in combining, revising and rebeginning traditional and innovative discourses of time is manipulation of the highest degree, as they disclose how all worldly things – including interpretation of any form of truth – ‘stant on change’. Concurrently, this study has revealed a subtle difference in the use and presentation of time by Lydgate and Hoccleve. The significance of these differences relates to general trends in their works as a whole. Lydgate’s poems generally consider the present in a wider context; the focus is not so much on the present as on the historicity of reconstructive cultural processes. In contradistinction, Hoccleve’s verse generally invites us to focus on the present via dates, durations and sequences, heightening consciousness of the temporal moment in order to communicate an urgent need for action in the present. To summarize, Lydgate’s verses create a narrative for situating the moment in a timescale of past and future relevance, his poems functioning as verses that reconstruct time; whereas Hoccleve’s poems generally heighten consciousness of the temporal moment in order to communicate an urgent need for action in the present and are characterized by an impending sense of the anticipatory present. In other words, Lydgate’s Troy Book, Fall of Princes and Siege of Thebes employ a vast range of approaches to narrate various patternings in framing perceptions or experiencing rhythms of worldly time; whereas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes and Series have as their focus the difficulties of representation in time, the ambiguities of temporality for the writer and the reader, and emphasize present pressures on context-dependent meaning. There may be differences in style when Lydgate and Hoccleve create temporal dynamics in their works, but what they do share is a sophisticated literary consciousness of the art of time narration. That variations exist within and between these writers’ works should be seen as a hallmark of their cultural specificity. My study challenges one of Pearsall’s well-documented verdicts that still curries favour among some: ‘my [Pearsall’s] argument has always been that Lydgate’s importance and his claim on our attention is his representative and

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non-innovatory medievalness’. This verdict can be qualified somewhat when one considers the role of temporal consciousness in Lydgate’s works. While there can be no disputing that traditional ‘medieval’ literary expressions of seasonal change, for example, can be found in no better place, and shared cultural narratives of time are certainly manifested in this poet’s work, the comparative study with Hoccleve’s imaginings of time demonstrates that both writers are acutely conscious of time markers, and create engaging and strikingly original narratives with their aid. Close readings of these poets’ work offer a new way to emphasize how – albeit in different ways – specific moments in time are not treated by Hoccleve and Lydgate as isolated fragments in a divine time plan of salvational history but rather as continuities in time. It is no accident that my focus has been on the large-scale exemplary poems, for these are the genres considered the most ‘medieval’. A study of the imaginative dimensions of temporal consciousness has provided a route for the re-evaluation of advisory literature as narratives in which notions of ‘medieval’ specificities of temporalities within the counselling strategies should be replaced with recognition that the varied, complex and dynamic breadth of time perceptions results in a variety of simultaneous advances while maintaining existing literary trends and motifs. In other words, while expressions about time have a certain degree of cultural specificity, such expressions in fifteenth-century literature are not confined to a given period but are products of negotiating preceding traditions as well as agents of early modern perceptions. As Chaucer acknowledged, ‘out of olde bokes, in good feyth, / cometh al this newe science that men lere’ (Parliament of Fowls, p. 385; lines 24–5). The features of these fifteenth-century narratives of time identified in the first chapter – the wide variety of measuring and expressing time; the increased precision in time expressions; the focus on temporal specificities; the desire to not just measure time but also to understand the temporal rhythms; the coexistence of objective and secular, modern and traditional, episodic and causal, functional and aesthetic, religious and secular perceptions; the use of time as an ordering tool; anxiety about the use of signifiers of temporality – have provided the morphology and methodology for the examination of Hoccleve and Lydgate’s works. Whether a micro study is made of the types of time referent chosen – their patterning, the contexts of their usage and their effects – or a macro examination of the thematic treatment of interplays of time states, such features are central, vital and dynamic parts in Hoccleve and Lydgate’s writings: ‘as in tyme, foorth euerythyng is brought, / so tyme ageynward bryngith euerything to nouht’ (Fall of Princes, p. 39; Bk I, lines 1413–14).

  Derek Pearsall, ‘Lydgate as Innovator’, Modern Language Quarterly, 53 (1992), 5.



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Appendix: Chronology List This is not a chart of the entire corpus of either Hoccleve or Lydgate; rather it is a list of those poems that I have cited in this book whose composition dates have been established or suggested. This list is derived by selecting entries and merging the tables compiled by Derek Pearsall (Lydgate) and J.A. Burrow (Hoccleve). I have borrowed Pearsall’s use of the ‘x’ symbol to indicate that composition was between these dates but did not necessarily last as long as the time covered by the dates. 1406 x 1407 Hoccleve 1410 x 1413 Hoccleve 1412 x 1417 Lydgate 1413 Hoccleve 1416 or 1414 Hoccleve 1419 x 1421 Hoccleve 1421 Hoccleve 1421 x 1422 Lydgate 1421 Hoccleve 1422 Lydgate 1425 Lydgate 1427, 25 Dec. Lydgate 1429, 6 Nov. Lydgate 1429, 6 Nov. Lydgate 1431 x 1438 Lydgate 1440 x 1449 Lydgate

Balade to the Chancellor The Regiment of Princes The Troy Book (begun 13 October 1412) Balade to Henry V To Henry V and the Company of the Garter The Complaint and the Dialogue with a Friend Balade to Henry V The Siege of Thebes (finished by 31 August) To Henry Somer On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage A Kalendare Disguising at Hertford Ballade at the Coronation of Henry VI The Soteltes at the Coronation of Henry VI The Fall of Princes De Profundis: The Testament of Dan John Lydgate

   Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), pp. 50–52; J.A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages: English Writers of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), p. 32.

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Bibliography Manuscripts Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Ashmole 59, ff. 33r. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodle. 270b, fol. 183v, roundels D 1-2. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Douce 322, fol. 8v, colophon. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Digby 230. British Library, London, MS. Arundel 99. Guildhall Library, London Clockmaker’s Library. MS. 643. Jesus College, Cambridge, MS. 56, ff. 27r–29r. John Rylands Library, Manchester University, MS. English 2. Chronometers Astrolabe. Date: 1326. British Museum, London. Reg. no. MLA 1909, 6–17. 1. Astronomical clock. Date: 1340. Designed by Peter Lightfoot (monk). Interior of Wells Cathedral. Mechanical Dial. Date: 1392. Exterior of Wells Cathedral. Pendant sundial. Date: 15th century. Museum of History of Science, Oxford. Inventory no. 38841. EPACT record 388. Polyhedral dial. Date: early 16th century. Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. Inventory no. 54054. EPACT record 407. Primary Sources Adelard of Bath, Conversations with his Nephew: On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and on Birds, ed. and trans. Charles Burnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Aelfric, ‘Saint Sebastian, Martyr’, Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS o.s., ed. and trans. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, The, trans. and ed. Michael Swanton, rev. ed. (London: Phoenix Press, 2000). Aquinas, Thomas, qtd in A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

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Ashby, George, ‘Active Policy of a Prince’, George Ashby’s Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, EETS e.s. 76 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899), pp. 12–41. Augustine, Confessiones, 11.14, qtd. and trans. by David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), p. 1. Bede: The Reckoning of Time, trans. and ed. Faith Wallis. Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 29 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999). Capgrave, John, Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, ed. Peter J. Lucas, EETS e.s. 285 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Caxton, William, Mirrour of the World, ed. Oliver H. Prior, EETS e.s. 110 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1913). Chaucer, Geoffrey, Treatise on the Astrolabe: Addressed to his Son Lowys by Geoffrey Chaucer, AD 1391, ed. W.W. Skeat, EETS e.s. 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1872). –––– The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). –––– The Parliament of Fowls, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 383–94. –––– Troilus and Criseyde , in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 471–586. Hoccleve, Thomas, Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (1892 and 1925); rev. by Jerome Mitchell and A.I. Doyle. 2 vols in 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). –––– The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1999). –––– Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M.C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). –––– Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. John Burrow, EETS o.s. 313 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Lydgate, John, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS o.s. 121–4 (1924–7) (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). –––– Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Part I and II, ed. Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, EETS e.s. 108 and 125 (1911 and 1930) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Robert R. Edwards, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part I, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 (1911, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). –––– Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 126 (1935), repr. of e.s. 126 (Milwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1975). –––– Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106 (1906); repr. of e.s. 97, 103, 106, 3 vols in 1 (Woodbridge & Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1996).

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–––– The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS o.s. 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934, repr. Woodbridge, 1997). –––– ed., John Lydgate: The Siege of Thebes, TEAMS (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). Metham, John, Amoryus and Cleopes, ed. Stephen F. Page. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1999). Middle English Lyrics, ed. Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, R. Beadle, C. Richmond, 3 vols, EETS s.s. 20–22 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–05). Seuses, Heinrich, Horologium Sapientiae, ed. P. Kunzle (Freiburg: Universitatsverlag, 1977). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1987). Thornton, Robert, ‘The Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse: Edited from Robert Thornton MS (c.1440) in the Lincoln Cathedral Library, ed. George G. Perry, EETS o.s. 26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), pp. 51–62. Trevisa, John, trans. Polychronicon, ed. Churchill Babington, rev. ed. (London: Longman, 1865–86). Whitford, Richard, ‘The Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection’, in James Hogg (ed.), Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 89 (Salzburg: Institute fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979). Secondary Sources Ambrisco, Alan S. and Paul Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to The Troy Book’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1995): 40–57. Arch, Jennifer, ‘A Case against Chaucer’s Authorship of the Equatorie of the Planetis’, Chaucer Review, 40 (2005): 59–79. Astell, Ann, Chaucer and the Universe of Knowing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Aveni, Anthony, Empires of Time (New York: Kodansha International, 1995). Ayers, Robert W., ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, PMLA, 73 (1958): 463–74. Bale, Anthony, ‘Review Article, ‘Twenty-first-century Lydgate’, Modern Philology, 105 (2008): 698–704. Baswell, Christopher, ‘Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin’, in Jeanette Beer (ed.), Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages,

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Index

‘Abbey of the Holy Ghost, The’ (Thornton) 31–2 absent temporalities/timelessness/eternity 8, 32, 82–3, 84, 89, 93, 123–5, 136, 152, 155 Ad Spiritum Sanctum (Hoccleve) 54 Adelard of Bath 42–43 Aelfric 53 ages of man 86, 88–92, 97–8, 102, 110–11 ages of the world 87–8 almanacs 23, 30, 47 ambiguities of representation 51–6 amplification devices 61, 62 anxieties 117–19 apocalypse 8, 152 Aristotle 24, 86, 138 astrolabes 22, 26, 45–6 Treatise (Chaucer) 22, 41–3, 44 astronomical clocks 26–8, 29, 53 astronomy/astrology 62–3, 69, 77, 96–105 authorial responsibility 81–82, 120, 150–1 and roles of interpreter and reader 51, 119–21, 128–9, 154 Aveni, A. 30, 77 Ayers, R.W. 59–60 Balade to the Duke of York (Hoccleve) 49–50 Balade to Henry V for Money (Hoccleve) 49 Balade to my Lord the Chancellor (Hoccleve) 48–9 Balade to my Maister Carpenter (Hoccleve) 49 Ballade to King Henry VI Upon His Coronation, The (Lydgate) 70–1 Baswell, C. 112 Bede 22, 23 bell clocks/chimes/clocca/clokke 18, 26, 32–4

Benson, C.D. 65, 73, 75, 77 Bloomfield, M. 3 blurring temporal boundaries 105–9 Blyth, C.R. 129 Boffey, J. 37 Book of the Duchess (Chaucer) 45 Books of Hours 23, 30 Borst, A. 44, 47 Bowers, J.M. 52, 146 Boyd, D.L. 152 Burke, P. 4, 10, 17 Burrow, J.A. 60–1, 88–9, 92, 133, 138, 145 calendars 22, 23, 38–9 Canon, C. 66–7 Canterbury Tales see Chaucer, Geoffrey Capgrave, J. 25, 40 Carruthers, M. 8 causal relationships 74–5, 123, 152–3, 154 Caxton, W. 53–4 Chapman, A. 43–4 Chaucer, Geoffrey Book of the Duchess 45 Canterbury Tales 18, 27, 71, 96, 102– 4, 105–6, 108, 110, 134–5, 139 Knight’s Tale 35, 46, 60, 99, 103, 104 Man of Law’s Tale 38 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 33–4 Shipman’s Tale 35 House of Fame 84 Parliament of Fowls 163 Treatise on the Astrolabe 22, 41–3, 44 Troilus and Criseyde 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 66–7, 100, 107, 111, 136 Christianity 7–8, 9–10, 12, 22, 24, 46, 62, 70, 96, 121, 124, 140, 154 and paganism 27, 35, 43–4, 72, 74, 103 religious and secular control of time 4, 27–8, 31–2, 53–4

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role and nature of God 77, 87, 136, 137–8, 140–1, 148, 154 salvational plan of history 7–8, 59, 71, 113, 118, 152, 163 chronometers 1, 16, 36, 161 Clanchy, M.T. 64 clock metaphors 44–6 cock’s crow 34–5, 53 coexistence of disjunctive temporalities 69–70 of religious and secular time 4, 27–8, 31–2, 53–4 of stability and change 5, 16, 136–7 of time measurement methods 21–4, 68–9 Complaint (Hoccleve) 132, 137–45, 146–7, 148, 150, 160 computus texts 18, 22, 29 conflicts and synchronicities 145–51 context-dependent expressions of time 10–11, 24–5, 57, 84–5 continuity 49–50 Counsel to Henry V on his Accession to the Throne (Hoccleve) 124–5 Courtenay, W.J. 47 Court of Good Company, to H. Somer, The (Hoccleve) 49 Currie, M. 115 dating schemes 86–7 day and night order 31, 74 de casibus genre 6, 35–6, 48, 51, 79–93, 81, 96, 97, 108, 116, 117, 129 demarcating multiple times 110–13 Dialogue (Hoccleve) 132, 140, 145–51, 156, 159 direct speech 65–6, 119 Disguising of Hertford, The (Lydgate) 54–6 Dohrn-van Rossum, G. 18, 46–7 Driver, M.M. 121 duration 7, 15, 18, 23–6, 37, 47–9, 51, 55–7, 59, 62, 73, 75, 83, 86–8, 110, 123, 127, 136, 139, 146–7, 150, 153, 155–6, 161–2 Edwards, R.R. 103, 107, 112 equinoctal dials 38 escapement 16, 18, 23–4

eternity, see absent temporalities Everyman 88, 148 Fall of Princes (Lydgate) 36, 79–93, 163 ages of man 86, 88–92 ages of the world 87–8 cultural narratives 80–1, 93 dating schemes 86–7 ‘mirror for princes’ tradition 81 personifications of time 46 and Regiment of Princes, The (Hoccleve) 118 regnal year 84–5 timelessness 82–3, 84 and Troy Book 62, 80, 84–5, 86, 87, 88–92 Federico, S. 69 Fersert 125 Fewer, C. 71 framing interludes 2–3 Ganim, J.M. 103, 106, 111 Garcia, B.C. 40 Gillespie, A. 80 God, role and nature of 136, 137–8, 140–1, 148, 154 Greetham, D.C. 142 Guido delle Colonne 61, 62, 66–7, 112 Gurevich, A.I. 15 Hammond, E.P. 105–6 Hardman, P. 108 Higgins, A. 8 Historica Destructionis Troiae (Guido) 61, 62, 66–7, 112 historicity denial of 60–1, 118 temporal tensions in concealing 119–25 value of 4–5 ‘horologium’/horologe 16–17, 18, 33–4, 45 Horologium Sapientiae (Suso) 36–7, 151–2 hours of uniform duration/equal hours 18, 23–4 House of Fame (Chaucer) 84 Humphrey, C. 8–9 inversion of time 74 Isidore of Seville 65, 86, 145

Index Knapp, E. 5, 143 Knight’s Tale (Chaucer) 35, 46, 60, 99, 103, 104 Kohl, S. 148, 152 Latour, B. 4 Le Goff, J. 4, 60 ‘Learn to Die’ (Hoccleve) 54, 147, 152, 154–8 Leclerq, J. 21, 30 Letter to Gloucester (Lydgate) 50–1 Life of Saint Sebastian (Aelfric) 53 literary imaginings 33–51 London Yearbooks 20–1 magic 3, 11, 45, 74, 159, Man of Law’s Tale (Chaucer) 38 manuscript variations 11–12 marriage 83–4 Means, L. 22 mechanical clocks 16–17, 18–19, 23–4 dials 26–8, 29 vs cock’s crow 34–5, 53 mechanization of precision 16–20 medieval and modern notions 4–5, 6, 7, 8–9 memory 71, 76, 138–9 mnemonics 29–30, 75–6 Minnis, A.J. 81–2 Mirror for Magistrates 36, 51, 125 ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, see de casibus mirror scene: Series 141–3, 144, 158 Mirrour of the World (Caxton) 53–4 Mitchell, J. 117 moods and seasons 39–40, 134–6 Mortimer, J. 27, 87

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Ott, J.S. 51–2 paganism and Christianity 27, 35, 43–4 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer) 163 Paston letters 19–20 Patterson, L. 87, 106, 112, 131, 137 Pearsall, D. 39, 50, 55, 61, 104, 110, 117, 118, 133, 141, 162–3 Perkins, N. 36, 52–3, 67, 117, 120, 128–9, 143 personifications of time 46–7 also see Saturn petitionary poems 47–51 prologues and framing interludes 2–3 prophecies and prognostications 76–8, 99–101, 108, 140, 157 prudence 54–6, 70, 76, 91, 96, 100–1, 108–9, 154, 158 quadrant 18, 26

night and day order 31, 74 Nocklen, C. von 156 Nolan, M. 61, 77–8 North, J.D. 41 Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Chaucer) 33–4

reader, see authorial responsibility/and roles of reader Reckoning of Time, The (Bede) 22, 23 reformist models 6–7, 69–70 Regiment of Princes, The (Hoccleve) 115–29 absent temporalities 123–5 anxieties 117–19 causal relationships 123 direct speech 119 and Fall of Princes (Lydgate) 118 ‘mirror for princes’ tradition 116, 117, 129 and Series 131–3, 135–6 sources 119 temporal tensions in concealing historicity 119–25 time’s construction of reception 126–9 regnal years 64–5, 84–5 Robert-the-Englishman 23–4 royal lineage 70–1, 125 Rozenski, S. 157

On Gloucester’s Approaching Mariage (Lydgate) 83–4 Oresme, N. 44–5 organizing role of time 20, 25, 134, 150

St Augustine 7, 9–10, 19, 87 sandglasses 47 Saturn 46, 96–7, 98, 99, 101–2, 103 Scanlon, L. 48, 121

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Scattergood, J. 45 seasons 71–2, 105–6 and moods 39–40, 134–6 secular and religious control of time 4, 27–8, 31–2, 53–4 secularization of historical perceptions 21 sequential/causal connections 8, 22, 35, 37, 39, 47–8, 50, 60, 70–3, 75, 78, 85, 97, 99–102, 109, 115, 118, 123, 126–8, 136, 138–9, 141, 147–8, 150, 152–4, 162 Series (Hoccleve) 131–60 causal relationships 152–3, 154 coexisting stability and change 136–7 Complaint 132, 137–45, 146–7, 148, 150, 160 Dialogue 132, 140, 145–51, 156, 159 ‘Learn to Die’ 54, 147, 152, 154–8 mirror scene 141–3, 144, 158 Prologue 134–7 and Regiment of Princes, The 131–3, 135–6 ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’ 151–4, 156 ‘Tale of Jonathas’ 151–2, 159–60 Shipman’s Tale (Chaucer) 35 Siege of Thebes, The (Lydgate) 40–1, 43, 47, 95–113 ages of man 97–8, 102, 110–11 astrology 96–105 blurring temporal boundaries 105–9 context-dependent expressions of time 24 demarcating multiple times 110–13 ‘mirror for princes’ tradition 96, 97, 108 past times 106–8 prophecies and prognostications 99–101 and Troy Book 112–13 Simpson, J. 6–7, 65, 108–9, 117, 125, 146 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 66, 68 Smith, D.V. 65, 66 solar computation 67–8 solar time 47 Spearing, A.C. 2, 43 stability 70–1 stabilizing strategy 110, 147, 151, 152, 160 Straker, S.-M. 83

striking clocks see bell clocks/chimes Strohm, P. 6, 52, 60, 80, 84, 113, 134, 136, 148, 150, 160 Ambrisco, P. and 76 sundials 26, 28–9, 30–1, 38, 53 Suso, H. 36–7, 151–2 Swanton, M. 37 synchronicities and conflicts 145–51 ‘Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife’ (Hoccleve) 151–4, 156 ‘Tale of Jonathas’ (Hoccleve) 151–2, 159–60 Testament (Lydgate) 45 Thompson, J.J. 49, 51 Thornton, R. 31–2 ‘time is money’ 47–8 time measurement coexisting methods 21–4, 68–9 micro and macro perspective 10–11, 57 religious and secular 4, 27–8, 31–2, 53–4 time referents in narrative texts 2–3, 7–8, 11–12 time regulation 30–3 time-reckoning literature 22–3 and see computus texts timelessness/absent temporalities 82–3, 84, 123–5 translation 11, 25, 36, 41–2, 60­1, 64, 66–7, 79, 82, 84, 85, 102, 105, 112, 116, 118, 120, 122, 152 Treatise on the Astrolabe (Chaucer) 22, 41–3, 44 Trevisa, J. 25 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer) 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 66–7, 100, 107, 111, 136 Troy Book (Lydgate) 34–5, 38, 44, 59–78 astronomical calculations 62–3, 69, 77 causal relationships 74–5 classical sources 61 coexisting disjunctive temporalities 69–70 cultural narratives 63–4 direct speech 65–6 and Fall of Princes 62, 80, 84–5, 86, 87, 88–92

Index inversion of natural direction of time 74 linear and reformist models 69–70 prophecies and prognostications 76–8 regnal year 64–5 sequential connections 70, 72–3 and Siege of Thebes, The 112–13 solar computation 67–8 temporal frameworks 62–78 Two Balades to Henry V and the Knights of the Garter (Hoccleve) 124 unequal hours 18, 23, 26­–8, 35, 37 vernacular advisory texts 5–6

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vices and virtues 86–7 visual narratives 25–30, 36–7 water clocks (clepsydra) 26 Waterhouse, R. and Stephens, J. 144 Wells Cathedral 26–8 Whitford, R. 54 Wilcox, D.J. 72, 86–7, 123 ‘within timeness’ (Heidegger) 20–1, 141 Yeager, R.F. 116 zodiac see astonomy/astrology