At William the Conqueror’s death in 1087, a chronicler at Peterborough Abbey, continuing the Anglo-Saxon tradition of writing history in English, announced that “we will write about him as we perceived him, we who looked upon him and sometimes dwelled in his court” (ðe him on locodan ond oðre hwile on his hirede wunedon) (The Peterborough Chronicle, ed. Cecily Clark [Oxford, 1970], 11). It was perhaps the last intimate contact for centuries between English writers and English kings. Only by the reign of Richard II in the late fourteenth century could another group of English writers claim courtly connections and direct royal attention. John Gower, for instance, states around 1390 that King Richard II invited him to board the royal barge, then asked the poet to write “som newe thing.” Gower’s subsequent massive English poem the Confessio amantis, which presents (like his other writings) many lines on the limits and ethics of kingship, seems to answer this request in full—at least until Gower lost confidence in Richard (or perhaps the king had already lost the throne) and revised the poem to omit the whole scene (Prologue 50*).

Between these periods, English literature and the communities it spoke to and for often seem exiled from royal power and attention. Such literature leading up to the Ricardian period has also been exiled from the mainstream of literary scholarship and teaching, though now reemerging into view in a series of studies. David Matthews’s quietly solid survey of a strand of topical and historical literature in Latin, French, and English from the late thirteenth through the mid-fourteenth century shrewdly organizes this writing in terms of its repertoire for imagining the addresses of a “nation” to the king. As historians such as W. Mark Ormrod and Gwilym Dodd have shown in recent years, the early and mid-fourteenth century saw a complex shift toward at least more overtly representative petitions in parliament; Matthews shows how literary voices implying political commonalty emerged well outside such official venues, and he situates their literary strategies to show how they set the terms for genuinely courtly English authorship and a wide audience—and ultimately a national political community. But he emphasizes how his works construct merely wishful, performative speech acts that often obliquely acknowledge their limited powers to reach any such royal ear. Stressing this allows their interest to emerge better than might any use of them to illustrate political realities directly.

Matthews treats works that used to be called “literature on contemporary events”: speaking as if their perspective on the nation mattered, as if they would be heard by the powerful, as if they aptly represented the voices of the marginal or even the poor for whom they sometimes explicitly speak—although all those “as ifs” can be doubted. It has always been hard to know what to do with these works. Their numbers are significant throughout the fourteenth century, especially in English, yet their point can seem too simple to deserve close analysis. Topical medieval writing of any kind has faced an unpromising environment in modern literary study. Matthews is certainly right to note the general neglect of the works he focuses on: the long verse chronicles by “Robert of Gloucester” in mid-thirteenth-century English (never properly edited in full) and Pierre Langtoft in French (whose most recent editor abandoned the task after one volume), as well as the Latin polemics by William of Pagula (only recently translated), the short Latin Song of Lewes and the rarely studied Middle English Adam Davy’s Five Dreams about Edward II, capped by the mid-fourteenth-century anti-Scottish and anti-French polemics in the Northern English of Laurence Minot.

Readers of Thorlac Turville-Petre’s England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996) and of recent articles by Thea Summerfield, Joyce Coleman, and others will find some of this turf familiar. But those studies generally proceed without concern for the massive critical attention to Chaucer’s period and beyond—indeed, Turville-Petre takes pains to disassociate his findings from later developments. Matthews, in contrast, is explicitly aware of the implications for the Chaucerian period that his concerns hold. A major goal for him is to pull back the date mark of several developments seen as key to later fourteenth-century literary history: a newly encompassing “public” vernacular poetry; a new potential for sophisticated insurgent ideology by the lower orders (which he, like historians such as Rosamond Faith, shows nearly erupted in the 1330s, as prelude to 1381); and a newly if inchoately nationalist outlook (a controverted issue for any period of medieval literature and culture that gets thoughtful attention here).

These are important recalibrations in literary history. This is also “writing the nation” in a desperate and defensive way, as with the Yorkshire borderer Minot, who provides “an example of mid-fourteenth-century nationalism in full-throated cry” (152). The rhetorical orientation that Matthews defines—the implied or overt trope of writing to the king—generates a fragile and strident definition of national community, produced mainly by negative means: invective against the Scots, against the French, against the king’s exploitative administrators. The aesthetics of such literary voices have for understandable reasons been little appreciated by modern critics, especially, as Matthews usefully but perhaps too starkly emphasizes, as a result of our post-1917 uneasiness with imperialist wars. That historicizing of our critical standards is important. But it leaves open the question of differences not only between Minot’s literary ethics and ours but also between his and those of later Ricardian writers in London and Westminster. Gower’s criticisms of the Crusades as needless violence in the Confessio amantis (book 3) or condemnation by Lollards like the authors of the “Twelve Conclusions” of war in any form as homicide show that uneasiness with imperialist war is not strictly post–WW I. Yet suggesting new ways to understand Minot will surely contribute to the ongoing debate about the ethical voice of works like the late fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem, with its orgy of violence against the Jews. Is it coincidence that this work is also likely from the Yorkshire borderlands?

Like most important finds, the basic rhetorical formation that Matthews identifies is plainly visible once noted. But his demonstrations and contextualizations of it yield subtle and convincing readings, and an excellent sense of the multitude of urgent, not untalented, and certainly not sheepish voices where too many critics and historians have proceeded as if there were artlessness or silence.