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Abstract
This essay seeks to revise our sense of late medieval allegory by examining the representation of crowds and urban space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower. I begin by looking at Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the flâneur, with a specific eye towards his sense that allegory is born in the hermeneutic challenge of making meaning out of the unknown faces in a city crowd. I then turn to readings of Hoccleve’s “La Male Regle,” Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the initial Visio in Gower’s Vox Clamantis to establish both the surprising frequency with which late medieval English allegory turned to depictions of crowds as well as the particular narrative structures generated out of the attempts to represent urban space in these three poets.
Notes
1. For an excellent survey of this history, see the recent collection edited by Copeland and Struck.
2. The fundamental work is Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship; but see also “Quadruplex Sensus, Multiplex Modus.”
3. On drama, see Beckwith Christ’s Body and Signifying God; on liturgy, see Holsinger. Also important for his long-standing championship of a material dimension too often covered over in studies of allegory is the work of Aers.
4. This hesitation, we might also note, has been the temporal issue on which poets and critics have lined up for or against allegory, for or against its refusal of the apparent simultaneity (and semiotic transparency) of its opposed partner, the symbol.
5. Paul de Man, of course, takes a different lesson from the Benjaminian emphasis on the temporal specificity of allegory, emphasizing not the remnants of materiality but rather the rhetorical sleight of hand allegory performs in underwriting the category of the subject in Romantic lyricism.
6. For a fuller discussion of the importance of the Arcades Project for Benjamin’s theorization of a specifically urban context for allegory, see Knapp, “Benjamin, Dante, and the Modernity of the Middle Ages.”
7. Kerby-Fulton even suggests one specific verbal echo in Hoccleve’s line “on †e hye auter it reyne or snewe” though the sentiment is general enough that the parallel may be due to Langland and Hoccleve’s shared enthusiasm for proverbial expression (“Langland” 83).
8. For further elaboration on this point, see Knapp, “Poetic Work and Scribal Labor in Hoccleve and Langland.”
9. In this aspect, “La Male Regle” might be compared to the Regiment of Princes, which also includes an itinerary as the backdrop to its action.
10. All citations of Hoccleve are drawn from Ellis and are cited parenthetically by line number.
11. For an inspired recent treatment of the Mede episode, and one that also connects it to specifically urban discourses, see Hanna 260–73.
12. On Gower’s legal preoccupations in the Mirour, see Giancarlo.
13. On Gower’s use of New Troy, see Federico.
14. Text cited from David Carlson’s editions of the Visio (with accompanying translation by A. G. Rigg).
15. On Gower’s relation to these events, see Salisbury, “Violence and the Sacred City.”
16. See Justice, and, especially, Lindenbaum.
17. For more on the Ovidian echoes of these passages, see the excellent commentary in Carlson.
18. The legal content of these lines is reinforced yet further in the Ovidian mythological lexicon by Acantius’ appearance in the Ars Amatoria, where he is used explicitly as a figure of advice for lawyers. (Acantius, it should be remembered, tricks Cydippe into reading the text of a wedding vow that she does not intend.)
19. Hoccleve: “Right as sparkles of fyr about sprede / Whan þat a greet toun set is on a lowe” (“How to Learn to Die” 702–3 in Ellis); Chaucer: “Thus north and south / Wente every tydyng fro mouth to mouth, / And that encresing ever moo, / As fyr ys wont to quyke and goo / From a sparke spronge amys, / Til al a citee brent up ys.” (House of Fame 2075–80). The simile is derived from James 3.5–8 (where it also concerns rumor) and the Wisdom of Solomon 3.7 (by way of Suso for Hoccleve), but only Hoccleve and Chaucer make the fire consume a city (simply timber in the predecessors).