{"title":"Behind Every Man(uscript) Is a Woman: Social Networks, Christine de Pizan, and Westminster Abbey Library, MS 21","authors":"E. Strakhov, Sarah Wilma Watson","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:London, Westminster Abbey Library, MS 21, a French lyric anthology dating to the mid-fifteenth century, bears the names of two male figures. Thomas Scales (c. 1399–1460), an English war commander, had his name and personal motto elaborately incorporated into the explicit of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours. Decades later, a Tudor reader added the name “Wyllam courtnay” to the manuscript’s margins. These two male names, physically visible on the surface of the manuscript, represent stable points of provenance data that provide important information about the use, meaning, and circulation of this medieval miscellany and the texts it contains. But how did Westminster 21 move from a fifteenth-century war commander to a Tudor courtier? A close examination of Westminster 21’s texts and marginalia reveals an invisible social network of female book owners undergirding the male-dominated historical record for this manuscript. This study traces a direct line between the two recorded male owners of Westminster 21 and finds that the compilation passes through several generations of women who married into homosocial male networks and built them up through their literary activities and social standing. By piecing together the available evidence surrounding Westminster 21’s male owners, we can produce an outline of the absent female presences in the history of this material artifact. We demonstrate that visible transnational, horizontal reading networks of men are invisibly and transhistorically structured by vertical female reading networks, rendering women’s reading practices integral to late medieval literary culture as a whole, rather than separable from men’s reading practices.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47031018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation by Andrew Kraebel (review)","authors":"D. Sawyer","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47199140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England by D. Vance Smith (review)","authors":"Julie Orlemanski","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44052277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chaucer’s Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion by Megan E. Murton (review)","authors":"Jamie C. Fumo","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48109099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life by Lynn Staley (review)","authors":"Alfred Thomas","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47346019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William Dunbar’s Liturgical Poetics","authors":"D. Ard","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Long hailed as one of the most technically gifted poets of the later Middle Ages, William Dunbar held a special interest in the lyric effects that could be generated through the appropriation of liturgical texts. This essay analyzes poems that are usually separated in categorizing Dunbar’s corpus—parodies, laments, and meditations—to show that Dunbar exploits the rhetorically capacious first person of liturgy in order to theorize the fashioning of his own poetic voice. He does so, moreover, by building on a tradition of liturgical adaptation that he inherited from the fifteenth century, including poets such as John Audelay and William Litchfield. Dunbar’s experiments with liturgical language and form reveal a heretofore unacknowledged poetic agenda: to expand the audience and performance possibilities of liturgically inflected, linguistically hybrid religious lyrics. He pursues this agenda in two complementary ways: by theorizing the linguistic toggling required in a bilingual devotional culture, as we see in his Marian anthem “Ane Ballat of Our Lady”, and by recomposing the calendrical rhythms of liturgy in a distinctly lyric mode.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45816810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” by Nicolette Zeeman (review)","authors":"Rebecca Davis","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66437482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott (review)","authors":"S. Lerer","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42342458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Dives and Pauper in Lisbon, 1465","authors":"Joe Stadolnik","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay discovers new contexts for a manuscript of Dives and Pauper copied, according to its colophon, in Lisbon in 1465. I connect the making of this Middle English book (now New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MS 228) to the Lisbon confraternity of Santa Catarina, which counted six English merchants among its members. First, I consider the book as an artifact of the culture of lay religious reading and book charity in these merchants’ ports of origin, London and Bristol. I then contextualize the making of the book in the resident English community of fifteenth-century Lisbon. Membership in Santa Catarina brought these merchants into contact with the bureaucrats and chroniclers of new Portuguese ventures of settlement and enslavement along the African coast. These contexts open up new questions about how this work of Middle English instruction in Christian charity and obedience served those of its late medieval readers visiting Lisbon, a place periodized as the launching point of transatlantic modernity.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46168356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy by Kara Gaston (review)","authors":"Maura B. Nolan","doi":"10.1353/sac.2021.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2021.0033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46567167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}