[Robert J. Meyer-Lee]

This session addresses the following questions: What new perspectives and interpretive possibilities emerge if we embrace the anonymity of most Middle English manuscripts? What might be the critical utility of deferring recourse to an author? Panelists consider drama, lyric, narrative poetry, manuscript compilations, and their critical receptions. Claire Waters (U of California, Davis) will preside.

Here are the panelists and their presentation titles:

1. Thomas Sawyer (U of Chicago), “Unauthoring Interpretation through Manuscript Production Units”
2. Kathleen Burt (Middle Georgia State U), “Power of the People Unknown: the Value of Anonymity in Popular Medieval English Poetry”
3. Megan Cook (Colby C), “Anonymity, Attribution, and the Lydgate Canon”
4. Holly Crocker (U of South Carolina, Columbia), “Feminist Subjectivity and Unauthoring Pearl”
5. Maggie Solberg (Bowdoin C), “Playing Without Authors”
6. Myra Seaman (C of Charleston), respondent

 

Here are the presenters\’ full abstracts:

Thomas Sawyer (U of Chicago)

\”Unauthoring Interpretation through Manuscript Production Units\”

In this paper, I argue that interactions between manuscript production units can form the primary locus of literary work for interpretation in Middle English studies conducted in the absence of authorial influence or intention. Critical theory and textual criticism alike bind inextricably work and author by way of presence, absence, and substitution. In this way, common praxis binds equally inextricably problems of literary interpretation and historical agency within the ambit of the authorial text. Insofar as works must be texts, they cannot help but have authors, however figured or identified; and insofar as Middle English literary criticism takes the text as primary unit of inquiry, the category of author can only be transformed or relocated.

In order to understand literary meaning in terms untethered to authorial fashioning, the primary locus of the work itself much shift. Proponents of “whole book” methodologies and certain strains of New Formalism within medieval studies have argued persuasively for taking the individual codex as locus for alternative interpretive schemes, particularly in consideration of multi-text manuscripts (often rhetorically situated as “miscellanies” or “anthologies”). Such approaches, however, run the risk of substituting scribal authors for originary authors by way of perceived textual affiliations, so implicitly substituting the modern critic’s sensibilities for historical intention.

By attending to the intersections of material evidence for how Middle English manuscripts were crafted as objects known not only by their texts but by their patterns of decoration, extension, excision, and modification that identify them as artefactual works, scholarship can further reconsider the boundaries of generic affiliation and meaning bound up in each unique manuscript object. The careful analytic work of understanding how a book was made, in overlapping layers of agency and intention, might reveal complex cultural attitudes towards gender, sexuality, race, class, and other areas without necessarily pinning those attitudes to any specific historical agents, named or anonymous, whose reconstructed statuses as author-figures might otherwise delimit the boundaries of interpretation. To identify and describe units of material production is to identify and describe parameters for unauthored critical inquiry.

Kathleen Burt (Middle Georgia State U)

“Power of the People Unknown: the Value of Anonymity in Popular Medieval English Poetry”

In Author Unknown, Classicist Tom Geue argues that there is power and meaning in the nameless, commonplace, and ambiguous. Part of his goal is that his discussions, “will continue the important work of shepherding these texts more into the mainstream of a community, {…} that had often not known what to do with them, apart from exercise a scholarly mastery over them and work to put them in their place.” (25) I suggest that this approach has both material applications and textual possibilities for the many medieval texts lacking attribution or stable texts. Medieval popular poetry makes for a good test case as both the textual and material evidence is often nameless, commonplace, and ambiguous.

Using Geue’s attention to what might be called “coding” provides a method to locate cultural and historical meanings in texts that might otherwise lack concrete contexts. By “coding”, I mean the often subtle references that suggest culturally significant categories such as race, class, or sexuality. While the codes and meanings change over time and place, part of the utility of Geue’s approach is that such changes are acceptable beyond a reader response or intentional fallacy-based method. What Geue’s argument includes is that uncertainty opens up the text to a more community-based meaning, which I suggest applies as much to the original context as it does to a much later one. For example, “The Nut Brown Maid” is a typical lover’s dialogue (15th c.) extant in two copies, one labeled textually imperfect and authorless (BL Add.27879) that contains a later marginal note: “From the chiding wordes of this part <…> it should seem qt the author was a woman”. (210r) The annotator saw a coded moment and interpreted it, and that note itself might now be viewed through a different coding, as sounding sexist. Similar strategy is already used in queered and racialized readings, and when adopted with Geue’s attention to the value of the ‘every-person’ perspective, it opens up texts considered low-value due to perceived lack of context or originality as containing worth and meaning that is allowed to change over time.

Megan Cook (Colby C)

\”Anonymity, Attribution, and the Lydgate Canon\”

How can attending to the material, literary, and ideological contexts in which names become attached to Middle English poetry elucidate the stakes of centering—or, as this panel seeks to do, intentionally decentering—the role of the author in our understanding of such texts?

As modern readers, we experience the attribution of Middle English poetry in large part as a retrospective phenomenon. Setting aside the cases where authors name themselves or discuss their work in their own writings, we are for the most part dependent on scribal rubrics and colophons, the jottings of later readers, and the occasional admiring tribute. This evidence can bring the moment of composition—and by extension the author—into view, but it is often a distant and somewhat hazy prospect. Manuscript evidence is incomplete, contradictory, or seems to represent a tradition for which the other corroborating evidence has been lost.

This paper takes as its test case shorter poems attributed to John Lydgate, examining three crucial and very different moments for their attribution (or, we might say, the integration of texts that had previously been functionally anonymous into an authorial matrix): the manuscripts of John Shirley, mostly compiled in the second quarter of the fifteenth century; the annotations of the sixteenth-century antiquarian John Stow; and the scholarship of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars, culminating in the publication of Henry Noble MacCracken’s edition of the Minor Poems of John Lydgate (1911, 1934) for the Early English Text Society.

At each stage, these commentators attach Lydgate’s name to poems that had previously circulated without a named author. Working backward toward the initial circulation of these texts, we might ask, what sort of interpretive possibilities are foreclosed upon in these moments that assign a poem to a single, historically delineated author? How does the case of the Lydgate canon, in particular, reveal the differing ways that religious and secular material have been handled by later readers? Approaching attribution as a historical concept rather than a static practice, I ask how the attributive impulses of Shirley, Stow, and MacCracken contribute to the vexed state of authorship in medieval studies today.

Holly Crocker (U of South Carolina, Columbia)

“Feminist Subjectivity and Unauthoring Pearl”

In this paper I argue that Pearl assembles a “feminist subjectivity,” or a positionality associated with women, but inhabited by a host of differing bodies, through its representation of the maiden and its vision of heavenly community. While scholars have focused on the dreamer’s attempts to consolidate a “sovereign” selfhood, the failures of which then prompt him to confront his fragmented subjectivity, I suggest that these two (masculinist) positions, which Lisa Ruddick has argued constitute the prevailing understandings of subjectivity circulating in contemporary postmodern theory, are insufficient to capture the boundless, pervious, and collective selfhood the maiden makes available. Her shared notion of subjectivity, which is galvanized by a vulnus, or the Lamb’s bleeding wound, is open to all who work together to unite earthly and heavenly communities. The faceless, unbounded subjectivity she reveals, “Alle that may therinne aryve Of alle the reme is quen other king” (Stanbury, 2001, 447-48), is confounding to the dreamer, but should also be instructive for critics. Rather than creating an author fiction to explain the poem’s formal brilliance (after giving up on identifying an historical person, critics have subsequently sought a social setting elevated enough to situate the poem’s literary achievements), I suggest the poem’s aesthetics should prompt us to rethink our encounters with poetry—not as distanced scenes of analysis involving prohibition and separation, but, as I’ll argue the maiden teaches (and Rita Felski theorizes), as an open, immersive experience of vulnerability, attunement, and attachment.

Maggie Solberg (Bowdoin C)

\”Playing Without Authors\”

I propose a paper that would respond to the questions of the CFP by taking up early the history of early English drama studies as a case study.
The genre of early English drama is authorless.

At first, scholarship received this absence as a grave problem. Until the twentieth century, the subfield identified itself, although authorless, as a precursor to the very highest authority: medieval drama was what came before Shakespeare, the foil to his brilliance, the Neanderthal to his Cro-Magnon. Simultaneously, specialists started to invent Great Men of their own. As the literary genius of certain medieval playscripts gained greater and greater recognition (thanks to the slow but patient labor of generations of antiquarians, editors, and booksellers), scholars began to discover corresponding literary geniuses. In 1907, Charles Mills Gayley invented the “Wakefield Master” and in 1968 J. W. Robinson “the York Realist.” And yet while these authors validated medieval drama’s newfound claims to literary value, they also severely limited their meaning. Through the end of the twentieth century, scholarly consensus cited the projected piety of these imaginary clerical authors as irrefutable evidence that medieval drama had to have been “propagandistic,” “confirmatory,” and “didactic.” Even long after the Wakefield Master and the York Realist had been thoroughly debunked, the subfield maintained old limitations by replacing the imaginary author with an imaginary audience. The theoretical responses of supposedly historical spectators policed what texts could and could not mean and perpetuated the ideology of the subfield, described by David Bevington in 1991 as “intellectually and academically conservative,” resistant to “post-structuralism, semiotics, anthropology, Marxism, feminism, and the like.”

In the twenty-first century, the subfield of early English drama studies has deployed innovative tactics to break free of these old rules. As Noah Guynn writes in Pure Filth, we now understand medieval drama as “a highly intricate, deeply self-conscious cultural form that can accommodate, and indeed depends upon, multiple, conflicting modes of interpretation.” Recent research has focused its attention not on the restrictive authority of an allegedly factual writer or spectator, but rather on complex networks of collaboration between many sources of value, meaning, and craft—including manuscripts, performers, costumes, donors, and city-streets. Smells, seasons, and acoustics have been the stars of new work on early drama by Jonathan Gil Harris, Erika Lin, and Mariana López. Furthermore, recent criticism has shifted from the old model of objective theater history to an exploration of trans-historical multivalence. Recent monographs by Tison Pugh, Noah Guynn, and Matt Sergi coin new phrases—Pugh’s “the subjunctive,” Guynn’s “plural reading,” and Sergi’s “practical approach”—to explain this innovation. Pugh wants to explore “the could, the would, and the should necessary in interpreting words on a page and performing them”; likewise, Sergi seeks to discover not “what performers have done” with the text, but rather “what performers might do.” Putting aside the myth of the individual author has allowed the subfield to come into its own as the study of an inherently collaborative artform, a creative commons that asks, in its very form, to be endlessly revived in collective acts of performance.

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