This book tracks the interrelations of the English parliament and English poetry from about 1376 to 1414. Its central claim is not just that the two were linked but more boldly that, in a way not seen before or after, parliamentary politics and imaginative literature during these forty-odd years shared similar concerns, concerns that developed out of the bureaucratic culture within which parliamentarians, clerks, scribes, and poets worked. Drawing on a variety of historical, visual, and literary sources, Matthew Giancarlo examines the rise of parliament and its use as a resource for narrative art by writers such as John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Langland. His approach is not primarily the one-dimensional historical one of linking parliamentary clerks with clerkly poets nor the mimetic one of searching for representations of parliament in literature (although at times he engages in a bit of both) but rather the examination of parliament as a form of and forum for literature. To that end, his study considers parliamentary events, controversies, and ideologies as a crucial environment for the production of late medieval English poetry.
The book falls into two parts, a shorter one chiefly concerned with parliament and a longer one, with literature. After an introduction that makes a case for the importance of examining the connections between parliament and literature, the next two chapters chart the development of parliament in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the first chapter, Giancarlo lays out the historical development of parliament, focusing especially on its waves of competing and overlapping voices—the baronage, ecclesiastics, and the commons—all claiming to be the communitas regni. Giancarlo reminds us that in the thirteenth century it was the barons who effectively dominated, acting as the “public,” if public is defined as the voice of opposition; during this period, parliament was chiefly a court of baronial grievance, and the concept of a strong king working with strong barons on behalf of the estates was posited as the parliamentary ideal.
By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, the Commons had seized the roles of communitas regni and vox communis, as argued in chapter 2. Parliament became increasingly willing to legislate aspects of social life—as laws such as the Statutes of Laborers show—and was increasingly involved in both vernacularity and writing. In 1363 parliament opened for first time in English, and its doings were now documented as never before (Giancarlo cites as an apt example the Anonimalle Chronicle's account of the 1376 Good Parliament that records the Commons’ deliberations), and it produced documents (such as the “Mercers’ Petition” submitted in the 1388 Merciless Parliament, the earliest surviving petition in English, which was written by Adam Pinkhurst and functioned as a form of propaganda whose intended audience extended well beyond parliament itself ). It was this short period of parliamentarism proper that in Giancarlo's view provided a potent model for poets.
The next four chapters explore parliament as a thematic and artistic preoccupation for writers. Using as its starting point Gower's involvement in the Septvauns property affair of 1365–66, chapter 3 examines the role of property and parliamentary thinking in the Miroir de l’Omme and the Cronica Tripertita; Giancarlo argues that these texts present conflicted examples of the complexities of adopting a vox populi. Noting that Chaucer was the member of Parliament for Kent in the 1386 Wonderful Parliament and that his works have more links to parliament than any other writer before John Milton, Giancarlo in the next chapter considers Chaucer's representation of parliaments in “Melibee” and the Parliament of Fowles, texts that share thematic and formal aspects of an inquiry into the limits and voice of communitas. The fifth chapter treats Langland's use of parliament in Piers Plowman, particularly in the parliamentary trial of Lady Meed in passus 2–4. In Giancarlo's reading, Piers Plowman offers the image of an irreconcilable and multivocal public discourse and thus stages a move from a unified and singular common voice to plural—and potentially divisive—common voices. Chapter 6 examines the poems inspired by Piers Plowman in the years following Richard II's deposition in 1399; Giancarlo interprets The Crowned King, Richard the Redeless, and Mum and the Sothsegger as signaling the waning of parliament as the impetus for poetry, noting that, ironically, as parliament itself became stronger once loosed from Richard II's stifling of its powers in the late 1390s, it became weaker as a structuring device for poetry. The concluding chapter explains the rationale for the book's endpoint, arguing that by 1415 the moment for a parliamentary poetry linked to the notion of a unified public and grary endeavors. Giancarlo convincingly demonstrates that parliament provided an inspiration for late medieval English writers engaged in the ambitious task of writing a uniquely public poetry. This book will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike and makes an important contribution to recent explorations of voice and authorship, the development of a public sphere, and the growth of documentary culture in fourteenth-century London.
