During my nine days in London this summer in and around the
inestimable NCS Congress, I was strongly reminded that memorials, especially
graves, are everywhere. This realization
is not, if you’ll forgive the pun, ground-breaking. Earth is old, and the
people who have lived on it have long been concerned about how they will be
remembered. I think I noticed it afresh
in part because of the turn my research has been taking: I have been caught up
in thinking about memorials and collective memory in Middle English literature
over the past year as I reconsider how the dissertation-that-was is slowly
morphing into the book-to-be.
And so: memorials. I
spent part of a day on a pilgrimage of sorts to Southwark Cathedral. If you haven’t visited, you should –
Southwark is a beautiful church, and Karen and I were lucky enough to be there
while the organist was practicing. We
explored the church and the gardens and the neighboring market all morning,
then returned on Sunday to attend services there. The point of the trip, though, was to visit
an old friend by the name of John Gower, the poet who has been a companion, a
comfort, and an occasional aggravation to me since my first semester in
graduate school. (As a sidenote: some of
my earliest conference presentations were on Gower’s works, and I spent several
months writing a chapter on Gower’s Visio
Angliae that never made it into my dissertation. I find his work beautiful, compelling,
powerful, and frustrating, and I return to it often: in fact, this upcoming
year, I am working with my first independent study student, who is working on
Gower’s Confessio Amantis.)
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| Selfie with John Gower: a photo I think many of us working in Middle English literature have taken. |
Gower’s tomb is obviously invested in legacy, and it entwines
literary and literal afterlives. Gower’s massive pillow, here obscured by my
head, is made of his three major works, their names given in Latin. The inscription again emphasizes Gower’s
poetic work: he is described first as a celebrated English poet (“anglorum
poeta celeberrimus”) and then as benefactor to the building that houses his
tomb. It seems to me that John Gower gets
legacy. The tomb is trying to do for
Gower what the opening lines of the Confessio Amantis seek to do for the work
in question, that is, they put Gower’s work into the context of a broader
canon:
Of hem that writen ous tofore
The bokes duelle, and we therfore
Ben tawht of that was write tho:
Forthi good is that we also
In oure tyme among ous hiere
Do wryte of newe som matiere,
Essampled of these olde wyse,
So that it myhte in such a wyse,
Whan we ben dede and elleswhere,
Beleve to the worldes eere
In tyme comende after this. (Confessio Amantis, Prol.1-11)
The bokes duelle, and we therfore
Ben tawht of that was write tho:
Forthi good is that we also
In oure tyme among ous hiere
Do wryte of newe som matiere,
Essampled of these olde wyse,
So that it myhte in such a wyse,
Whan we ben dede and elleswhere,
Beleve to the worldes eere
In tyme comende after this. (Confessio Amantis, Prol.1-11)
The “newe” thing in the reader’s hands thus fits into a
perfect lineage: it emerges from old writings, then moves forward to inform
“tyme comende.”
Yet what is obscured by this memorial? Well, to begin with, the rest of Gower’s
work: his short Latin and French poetry and the English “In Praise of Peace” go
unmemorialized, much as they often go unread.
(Not that there are hordes of medievalists reading the Vox Clamantis or the Speculum Meditantis – unfortunately, I
say, but that is perhaps a post for another time.) The monument to Gower’s work is thus partial,
incomplete. It doesn’t capture the
poet’s whole literary corpus – only the works that are themselves
monumental. In fact, it doesn’t contain
the poet’s physical corpus, either: the literary present tense means that Gower
is always off doing something in the many articles and books written about his
literary work.
A monument is a physical construction of history, but it can
only be partial. Monuments require a
context, a story: inscriptions are meant to help, but they only take us so
far. Some Middle English literary
monuments try to be complete: lengthy inscriptions capture an episode, a
prophesy, some nugget of the story. The
past gives the present much-needed context: in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the grave of Sir Patryse, who dies an untimely
death through a poisoned fruit, reads: “Here lyeth sir Patryse of Irelonde,
slayne by Sir Pynell le Saveaige that enpoysynde appelis to have slayne Sir
Gawayne, and by myssefortune sir Patryse ete one of the applis, and than
suddeynly he braste.” Thus, the inscription memorializes Sir Patrick himself,
but it also preserves the circumstances of his death. Further, it emphasizes Guinevere’s innocence in
that death for the future readers, since the tomb also includes a description
of the trial by combat that proved she was not complicit in the murder (Malory,
Works 621, lines 12-20). While Patryse’s memorial seems to feature
quite a lengthy text, other literary monuments prove inaccessible: the
“roynyshe” golden writing in St.
Erkenwald troubles those gathered at St. Paul’s Cathedral precisely because
it cannot be read, though all the physical signs suggest the person this tomb
memorializes is important and should be known.
While Sir Patryse’s grave tells the story of his death (if not many
details of his life), the judge’s tomb in Erkenwald’s
needs a narrative – the writing needs miraculous, posthumous glossing by the
very figure it is meant to memorialize.
These monuments, it seems to me, are entangled with writing
itself as a medium. The paradox and the
power of the memorial is the same as that of writing: it can’t capture
everything. As the burned manuscript
means the medieval document is lost forever, so the misplaced notebook, the
to-do list we accidentally wash, and the hard drive crash remind us that
"writing it down" is no guarantee of survival. At the same time, sometimes
writing preserves too much: debates about Gower’s recensions of the Confessio Amantis are ongoing, and we
cannot know which one(s) Gower wanted in circulation.
While at NCS, I heard R. F. Yeager’s presentation on Gower’s
afterlife in Reformation England. He opened
the talk by comparing Gower’s monument to Chaucer’s, and he pointed out that
Gower didn’t fare so well: the tomb is now restored, but evidently poor Gower
had his nose broken off at one point, among other damages. Perhaps not so celebrated, then. (Access, too,
is an interesting question: As M. W. Bychowski noted in her Facebook
reflections post-conference, you can see Gower for free, but visiting Chaucer
is a somewhat more costly enterprise.) Gower’s
work long suffered a similar fate: extracts from the Confessio first appeared in the ninth of the Norton Anthology of British
Literature, published in 2012. And yet, this
summer I visited Gower’s restored monument, and next year I hope to return to
the UK to join colleagues and friends for the fourth International John Gower Society conference, to be held in conjunction with the Early Book Society
conference at Durham University.
Preservation – of books,
of reputations, even of monuments – is always at the mercy of other’s judgments
and interests, no matter how well we plan for it.
