Acknowledgments

Medieval authors adopted prophetic roles within their works because the prophet is an authoritative but intermediary figure. Although the prophetic subject position allowed authors to imply their own importance, it also allowed them to acknowledge external sources of inspiration. I suspect that most medieval authors would appreciate the sentiment of the contemporary, formal “Acknowledgments” section, even if its execution is considerably less artful than their own methods of acknowledging others. I myself appreciate the opportunity to thank the people who helped me write this book.

I would like to acknowledge Blair and Barbara Labatt’s generous financial support of the five-year Labatt Scholar fund, which allowed me to conduct manuscript research and attend conferences to develop the ideas in this book. I also appreciate the support of the Cecelia Jacobs Endowment in British Literature, which helped to fund this book’s publication. I am grateful to Robert W. Barrett, Lynn Staley, Karen Fresco, and Martin Camargo for their useful feedback on this project at its earliest stages. True to character, Charles D. Wright also selflessly offered his prompt and thorough input on my drafts of chapter 1. Robert Adams magnanimously read drafts of chapter 2 and shared valuable insights on William Langland’s historical contexts. I am also indebted to Andrew Rabin for helping me polish various portions of the first two chapters and to R.F. Yeager for sharing his input on the Vox clamantis portions of chapter 3. I have been blessed with a generous mentor in Dominique Battles, who provided advice on chapter 4 and moral support throughout the process of writing this book.

Eric Weiskott serendipitously organized a conference session about medieval prophecy at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at just the right moment for me to share and revise some of the ideas in this book, and he has since invited me to multiple conference sessions sponsored by the Piers Plowman Society. I am thankful for his collegial support and encouragement. Aaron T. Pratt gave me assistance with bibliographic details as I researched early print editions of medieval works, and Ann Hubert was kind enough to confer about my Latin translations on multiple occasions. My colleague, Mark Bayer aided me in writing my book proposal and navigating the publication process. It has been a privilege to work with acquisitions editor Suzanne Rancourt as well as the external readers of this book, who dedicated their time and expertise to helping me improve it.

I deeply appreciate the support of my parents, Raymond and Joyce, who have always encouraged my love of history and literature. My sister, Colleen, is one of the best editors of early drafts that I have found. Finally, this book would not be possible without my husband, Stephen. He has done over a thousand things, large and small, to support me during its composition. If I have a source of sublime inspiration as I write, it is he.

Introduction

The prescience of medieval English authors has long been a source of fascination for readers. In The Art of English Poesie, written in 1589, George Puttenham describes how William Langland “bent himselfe wholly to taxe the disorders of that age, and specially the pride of the Romane Clergy, of whose fall he seemeth to be a very true Prophet.”¹ Ostensibly, Puttenham emphasizes Langland’s foresight for two interrelated reasons. First, his claim bolsters Langland’s reputation as a wise authority, worthy of study. Even as Puttenham characterizes England’s fourteenth-century past as an age of “disorders,” he emphasizes Langland as a bright luminary in a supposedly dark time. Second, Puttenham portrays his present as being not only superior to the past but also anticipated by great thinkers like Langland. This perpetuates a comforting historical view that the English nation is progressing and improving, led by its best artists and scholars.

Modern readers have focused on medieval authors’ supposed predictions of historical events with similar enthusiasm. In 1968, Russell Peck wrote of the dedications to Henry of Lancaster in the Prologue of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, “That he sees hope for England residing in a man like Henry of Lancaster … even as much as seven years before Henry would become king, is indeed clairvoyant.”² This perspective on Gower, hardly limited to Peck, also celebrates the author’s wisdom and implicitly makes the case for studying his works. Although medieval literature now has a place in most university English departments, Gower rarely garners much attention on syllabi or in academic conferences. In this sense, Peck’s pronouncement of Gower’s clairvoyance shares an aim with Puttenham’s declaration of Langland’s prophecy. By focusing on Gower’s “true” predictions, an editor can enhance the author’s reputation as a compelling vox clamantis in deserto, demanding our due attention. To a lesser degree, Peck, like Puttenham, is advancing a comforting view of history by touting Gower’s clairvoyance. The notion that Gower predicted Henry IV’s rise to power does not do much to affirm the present day, but it does imply that destiny and justice have guided England’s past.

The aim to see the seeds of contemporary progress in past prophetic authors is still evident in literary criticism about Geoffrey Chaucer. The modern tendency to view Chaucer as an aberrant medieval secular humanist arguably has its roots in Chaucer’s early modern reputation as a proto-Protestant. This reputation was developed in apocryphal poems and prophecies that were attributed to Chaucer after the Reformation.³ Building on Chaucer’s established reputation as a man ahead of his time, a good deal of contemporary criticism discusses him as a proto-Marxist, proto-feminist, proto-environmentalist, or proto-humanitarian. Tracing the origins of ideas is the natural and admirable project of historicist scholars, but an exaggerated view of Chaucer as the herald of our modern age has significant drawbacks especially insofar as it obscures Chaucer’s inventive work within his own fourteenth-century milieu.

Langland, Gower, and Chaucer each creatively adopted prophetic language and subject positions to develop their authorial personae and speak to the problems of their own times. However, misinterpreted, proleptically added, or apocryphally attributed prognostications have influenced their reputations in deceptive ways for centuries. I call these “retrospective prophecies” – predictions that readers have ascribed to authors ex post facto. Later editors and readers have influentially misconstrued William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer as prophets of the English Reformation, the deposition of Richard II, and modern rational scepticism, respectively. Even in cases where critics have recognized aspects of these authors’ prophetic reputations to be fabrications or exaggerations of past scholarship, vestigial features of popular retrospective prophecies remain influential in subtle ways. The enduring remnants of retrospective prophecy are especially problematic insofar as they distract from the innovative ways that medieval authors actually used prophetic symbols and language. This book therefore endeavors to tell two stories, that of the retrospective prophecies that have dominated Ricardian authors’ reputations and that of the authors’ meaningful engagement with prophetic discourses and identities. Why did medieval authors seek to invoke the persona of the prophet, and what were the dangers in evoking it too well? What were the different ways in which prophetic writing gave authority to literature? Why have post-medieval readers been so willing to accept a prophetic status for medieval literature but often changed the nature of the “prophecy” in question? Why were Ricardian authors particularly susceptible to retrospective prophecy?

Coopting Political Prophecies and Authorial Identities

Political prophecy was a popular discourse in fourteenth-century England. Broadly speaking, political prophecies are predictions about political events, sometimes attributed to a famous individual, often fabricated to garner support for a particular action like entering a war or removing a monarch. Sometimes political prophecies appeared in works of literature, such as when Merlin prognosticates in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the prose Brut. Chroniclers like Adam of Usk and Thomas Walsingham cited such prophecies within their narratives of history, implying that the events that they predicted were destined to happen.⁴ In roughly two hundred extant English manuscripts, one can find political prophecies copied together in groups.⁵ The grouped prophecies often share similar messages, but in some cases, it seems that people were compelled simply to collect predictions.

Rupert Taylor first identified medieval English political prophecy as a type of literature in 1911. He identified several recurring features of the form, especially symbols that stand in for people and places, which he calls “prophetic disguise.”⁶ Taylor notes that Sibyllic prophecies, so named because they derive from the Oracula Sibyla, usually employ letters to refer to individuals and that Galfridian prophecies, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlinii, use animal symbols instead.⁷ As Lesley Coote has observed, these “disguises” were intentionally recognizable to their intended audiences.⁸ For instance, the fleur de lis might stand in for the King of France. Presumably, this kind of symbolism was designed to make predictions appear to be authentic. If verses attributed to the Sibyl spoke directly of the war victories of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, everyone would understand the verses to have been fabricated after the fact, but if the key figures of the prophecy were represented with “prophetic disguise,” readers might believe that the Sibyl had accurately foretold something that she did not completely understand. Essentially, the ambiguity offers an air of verisimilitude to an unrealistic form of writing.

This element of “prophetic disguise” made political prophecies remarkably easy to adapt to new circumstances. People who recopied political prophecies could simply revise the symbolism to change the subject of a prediction without altering the overall message. Lesley A. Coote and Laura Chuhan Campbell have both underscored the extent to which the same political prophecies were appropriated and adapted for a variety of causes in medieval England.⁹ A similar kind of appropriation took place in the reception of works written by or attributed to famed English authors of the fourteenth century. Langland, Gower, and Chaucer had vastly different approaches to political prophecies. Langland teasingly invoked and ridiculed them, Gower actively adopted them, and Chaucer avoided them entirely. Nevertheless, regardless of their approaches, later audiences retrospectively imbued each author with the reputation of a political prophet, championing a particular cause. Like the voices of the Sibyl and Merlin, the voices of canonical medieval authors proved to be famous, distant, and nationally significant enough to coopt.

The Roman poet Virgil was subject to this kind of appropriation in the medieval period. In De civitate Dei, St. Augustine quotes Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, written from the perspective of a prophetic narrator foretelling the birth of an important child. Augustine argues that Virgil’s source is the divinely inspired Cumaean Sibyl, who foretold the coming of Christ. Augustine did not believe that Virgil understood the prophecy himself, but in the famous Oration of Constantine to the Assembly of the Saints, recorded in Eusebius’s Vita Constantini, the Roman emperor points out what he believes to be an acrostic in the fourth Eclogue spelling out “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross” and insists that the proto-Roman Catholic Virgil made his prophecy intentionally vague in order to escape persecution from pagan rulers.¹⁰ By the twelfth century, Virgil’s ostensibly real prophetic powers were even more amplified. The classical poet began to appear among the ranks of Moses, Daniel, Ezekiel, and other biblical prophet-authors in the Laon and Limoges Ordo Prophetarum (plays consisting of monologues by a series of prophets). Around this time, Virgil also began to be portrayed as a magician, most notably in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, in which Virgil offers talismans to travelers who later return to seek his bones as relics for France.¹¹ Augustine’s interpretation of the fourth Eclogue no longer exerts undue influence over Virgil’s authorial reputation because readers have had centuries to reexamine it. This book aims to give Langland, Gower, and Chaucer their own prophetic reexamination by simultaneously debunking retrospective prophecies and uncovering the more overlooked prophetic approaches that these authors took.

Chapter 1 traces the history of the two most cited political prophets, the Sibyl and Merlin, to illuminate just why Ricardian poets had such a strained relationship with political prophecy. Versions of the Sibyl’s Last Emperor prophecy that were written about the Valois kings flourished in France, and Charles V and Charles VI tolerated the adaptation of these political prophecies in the works of authors like Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan. Even though the Last Emperor prophecy politically pressured the French monarchy, it was ultimately flattering and rarely threatening. Far from merely repeating political propaganda, Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan developed new ways to inhabit the role of the Sibyl to comment on the nature of their own creative authority. In contrast, the British Isles’ Galfridian or Merlinic tradition of prophecies was threatening to those on the throne from its inception. The prophecies’ volatility became elevated during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II after Edward II had already been deposed. English authors were not patronized to write political prophecies until the reign of Henry IV. Nevertheless, Ricardian authors adopted other prophetic identities, especially within dream visions, to elaborate upon their sources of inspiration and authority.

Chapter 2 examines the unusual parodic function of the political prophecies within Piers Plowman and how it has been overshadowed by the famous sixteenth-century Protestant appropriation of one of these prophecies, attributed to Clergy, to claim that Langland had foretold the monastic disendowment. The prognostications within Piers Plowman imitate several popular fourteenth-century political prophecies in order to illuminate the greed that motivated them. Yet, beyond merely criticizing political prophecies, Langland repurposes them to propose practical moral actions in place of corrupt ones. This chapter traces the history of misunderstanding the prophecies in Piers Plowman. Initially, Langland’s parodies were so convincing that they inspired several different iterations of political appropriation, undermining the prophecies’ original messages of personal reform. Now that we no longer see Langland as a Wycliffite or proto-Protestant, contemporary criticism has shifted to interpreting the prophecies’ apocalyptic spiritual messages only, overlooking their satirical political contexts. By reexamining the prophecies’ reception, this chapter seeks to recover both the moral and political layers of Langland’s creative work with prophetic satire.

Revisiting manuscript evidence, chapter 3 posits that Gower’s prediction of Richard II’s undesirable sors (meaning “fate” or “destiny”) and other seemingly prescient observations about the monarch were added to the Vox clamantis after 1400, when Gower appended the Cronica Tripertita to the work. In contrast, Lancastrian supporters rather than Gower himself are likely responsible for amplifying Gower’s prophetic reputation in the Confessio Amantis. They copyed more versions of the first recension of the work, dedicated to Richard II, in order to make it appear as if Gower had predicted his deposition. Gower’s self-cultivated prophetic reputation, rooted in the vox populi and the biblical Daniel would have made his authorial voice a particularly appealing one to coopt for Lancastrian apologism. Making it look as if a prophetic Gower had foreseen Richard II’s downfall helped make it look as if Richard II’s deposition was not only deserved but ordained by God. Gower is a rare example of a fourteenth-century English author who incorporated political prophecies into his works. However, he only did so after Henry IV took the throne. Because Gower himself was complicit in the revisions to his own work, this perception of a prophetic Gower persists in contemporary criticism.

Chapter 4 illuminates Chaucer’s work with a classical practice that I term prophetic citation in several of his dream visions and explores Chaucer’s cultivation of a prophetic role in The House of Fame. Inspired in part by Dante, Chaucer adopts the moral role of Enoch and Eli, the prophets tasked with quelling and quieting a slanderous crowd. This chapter argues that Chaucer’s reputation as a secular, rational sceptic has bolstered nationalist misreadings of The House of Fame as a text that mocks the supposedly superstitious and hopelessly Catholic Dante. The chapter traces the various editorial missteps and intentional deceptions that allowed the apocryphal “Chaucer’s Prophecy” to become a prominent threshold work within collections dedicated to Chaucer, helping to define him as a man ahead of his time.

Retrospective Historicism

A historicist approach to literary criticism naturally involves some amount of educated speculation, and this book is no exception. Scholars consider literary works in their historical contexts in order to illuminate meanings that would not otherwise be apparent to a contemporary audience. However, analysing early literature through a historicist lens can lead to mistaking hindsight for insight. Readers should be reluctant to claim that a text anticipated a future historical event or movement, especially insofar as they may perpetuate myths of an always-improving historical timeline. As Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant have observed, despite the fact that the term “Dark Ages” has fallen out of favour, “the concept persists, in part, because the idea of a time so much worse than our own allows us to feel superior.”¹² Readers who perceive the Middle Ages as an especially backward time, whose ills were amended by subsequent early modern advances, are likely to read medieval authors’ enlightened observations and criticisms of their surroundings as prophecies of a considerably better future. Yet, for reasons that Kaufman and Sturtevant have enumerated, this future was not innately better:

The Protestant Reformation, for instance, may have resulted in a more accessible faith, but it was also a violent and destructive revolution. People were executed over minor theological disagreements like the doctrine of transubstantiation, monasteries were raided and burned, churches were whitewashed, wiping centuries-old art off their walls, and sculptures and artifacts were smashed in systematic raids – not unlike the path of historical devastation ISIS wages against art and architecture in the Middle East. Moreover, the Renaissance saw the beginning of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Explorers like Christopher Columbus devastated and enslaved whole populations in search of plunder, not to prove anyone wrong about the earth being flat.¹³

Belief in an inferior Middle Ages and linear historical progress is one of the dominant factors that inspires readers to create and perpetuate retrospective prophecies. Those retrospective prophecies, in turn, reinforce this oversimplified narrative of gradually improving stages of humanity.

Early modern editors and critics were especially apt to portray the medieval world as a backwards one, making medieval authors a special target for retrospective prophecy. The Gawain-poet is notably absent from this study for this very reason. The Gawain-poet did not inspire the same kind of Renaissance antiquarian interest that Langland, Gower, or Chaucer did and has therefore been largely exempt from retrospective prophecy. The four poems of Cotton Nero A.x (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) did not even appear in print until the early nineteenth century.¹⁴ Furthermore, although most scholars consider the manuscript to be the work of one author, no one’s name or identity has been consistently attached to the poems. The Gawain-poet makes ample use of prophetic figures in the four poems in a manner that reflects back on the poet’s own message of accountability to God. Jonah in Patience and Daniel in Cleanness are both biblical prophets who echo the anonymous poet’s admonitory voice. The maiden in Pearl, citing Revelation and revealing heaven to both narrator and reader, also functions as a prophetic memento mori. Even the Green Knight has a somewhat similar prophetic function, reminding the members of Arthur’s court of their own mortality. Although the author does not promote a recognizable identity, the prophets within the manuscript provide the closest thing to a consistent authorial persona. Prophecy serves a powerful function in the Gawain manuscript as it does in the works of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, but it was never misconstrued in the same manner because early audiences never had the chance to coopt the persona of the Gawain-poet and establish a prophetic reputation. This is not to say that the poems, or any famed work for that matter, are not potentially vulnerable to such manipulation.¹⁵

Stereotypes of the Middle Ages as a backward time, the prophetic content of medieval works, and the exultation of famed authors all combine to shape the retrospective prophetic reputations of medieval authors. Yet, retrospective prophecy can apply to any work of note, including those in the present day. In 2015, African American playwright Lynn Nottage wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, which highlights working-class Americans’ resentment of bourgeois globalism.¹⁶ Within the play, the white factory workers end up turning their anger with class exploitation on the people of colour in their lives, including close friends. The action of the play alternately takes place between two different years, 2000 and 2008, which illustrates just how long frustrations with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were brewing. Yet, because Sweat debuted in 2015 and because it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017, when many people were reflecting on the surprising outcome of the 2016 American election, critics began to refer to Lynn Nottage’s play as a prophecy of Donald Trump’s presidency. For instance, theatre critic David Cote writes, “Prophetic before the 2016 election, the piece now reads as a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t know how to resist.”¹⁷ Critic Susan Saccoccio similarly claims, “Lynn Nottage’s prophetic 2015 play, Sweat could have been a bellwether of the 2016 election.”¹⁸ Alexis Soloski refers to Nottage as “the writer who foresaw the Trump era.”¹⁹ Nottage herself has been reluctant to agree that she could foresee some kind of inevitable future. When asked if she was surprised when Trump became President, Nottage explains, “All of us were shocked. But in some ways I understand how it happened.”²⁰ Despite Nottage’s more nuanced perspective about the relationship between her play and the 2016 election, critics have used the play and playwright’s noteriety to advance a particular view of recent history.

Sweat insightfully depicts class and race resentments that had been developing in the United States for decades. Yet, to claim that Nottage’s apt observation of these cultural issues was prophetic of the election of Donald Trump advances a problematic view of cause and effect. The election of Trump was not the sole natural outcome of resentment for NAFTA and indeed may have had far less to do with class disparity than with other cultural and political factors. Working-class voters were not even Trump’s dominant voting base.²¹ The kind of labour exploitation seen in Sweat was also not the only inspiration for the racism that propped up Trump’s candidacy. For instance, it is doubtful that economic hardship motivated all or even most of the people who supported the “Birther Movement,” which purported that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. Furthermore, more than half of Sweat’s exploited working-class characters are Black or Hispanic Americans, groups who overwhelmingly voted against Trump in the 2016 election.²² Claiming that this is a play about future Trump voters, as many headlines have, ignores several of its major characters and a wide swathe of working-class American voters.²³ The portrayal of Sweat as a predictor of Trump’s presidency is part of a larger, oversimplified narrative that attempts to pin the responsibility for Trump’s victory on economically disadvantaged Americans. It also explains away the racism that propelled Trump to victory as something that is specific to the poor. The result is that a play that looks thoughtfully at race alongside widespread, long-spanning, and persisting problems with the treatment of working-class people in America becomes a play about one election.

Similarly, when a medieval author like William Langland complains about ecclesiastical corruption (amid numerous other kinds of societal and governmental corruption), some later readers see the work as a prophecy of the Protestant Reformation. Although such ecclesiastical corruption undoubtedly inspired many Protestant reforms, those reforms were not the natural outcome of Langland’s complaints any more than the Trump presidency was the logical consequence of Nottage’s characters’ criticisms of NAFTA. Pretending otherwise implies that the English Reformation successfully rectified all of Langland’s grievances, some of which (like the treatment of the working poor) remain relevant. It also ignores the other factors that led to the English Reformation, some of which had little to do with amending ecclesiastical corruption (namely, the monarchy’s power struggles with the papacy). Framing every criticism of the Church as a precursor to Protestantism erases the myriad ways that medieval people, including Langland, addressed religious reform. In addition to oversimplifying history, retrospective prophecy robs works of their more timeless messages. Ironically, by calling authors prophets (or their works prophetic), we fix them squarely in the past. A work that contains valuable advice for those of us living in the present day becomes a work that predicted something that already happened years ago. This book undertakes the excavation of the critical traditions of reading Langland, Gower, and Chaucer as prophetic in order to recover the complex and creative prophetic personae that they themselves sought to cultivate, often in defiance of rather than compliance with the discourse of political prophecy.