WRITING WITH THE GRAIN: FORM, FLOW, AND
THE ENVIRONMENT IN LATE MEDIEVAL POETRY
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
by
Ryan Wesley Lawrence
December 2022
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©2022 Ryan Wesley Lawrence
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WRITING WITH THE GRAIN: FORM, FLOW, AND
THE ENVIRONMENT IN LATE MEDIEVAL POETRY
Ryan Wesley Lawrence, Ph.D.
Cornell University 2022
Writing with the Grain explores moments of dynamic conceptual and formal
exchange between poetic and environmental worlds in late-medieval vernacular
literature. It traces the ways that late medieval poets envisioned the
environment as a participant in the production of poetry—a view which
challenges the notion that, in creative expression, humans “give form” to things,
as if matter were brute, subordinate, passively awaiting the agent who shapes it
(often called “hylomorphic” theories of creative expression). Examining poets
like Chaucer and Gower, I argue for a view of late-medieval poetic production
that seeks to “follow the grain” of the material world, so to speak, embracing
the material fluctuations of the environment and allowing these fluctuations to
participate in the shaping of poetry. Writing with the Grain argues that
late-medieval vernacular writers understood that our environmental contexts–in
all their materiality–have striking consequences for how we understand poetic
form.
Drawing on phenomenological understandings of creativity, Chapter One
reads Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid alongside Chaucer’s Canterbury
3
Tales to argue for a view of poetic production characterized by
human-environmental correspondences, where poets follow forms that are
latent in the environment itself. In Chapter Two, I explore the conceptual and
physical connections between poetic and environmental matter. I argue that
Chaucer’s House of Fame, with its attention to concepts of movement and
proliferation, puts forth a view that sees creativity born within the whirl of the
Aristotelian world of fluctuation. In Chapters Three and Four, I demonstrate the
ways medieval poets like John Gower and John Lydgate used literary form to
enact environmental form, from the role of poetic form in structuring
environmental concepts such as climate and pollution, to the use of fiction and
dialogue in capturing our skillful engagements with material objects such as
tools.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Ryan Lawrence was born in Gravette, Arkansas. He graduated with a B.A. from
University of Arkansas in 2016, where he majored in English Literature and
Medieval and Renaissance Studies. After graduation, he joined the Medieval
Studies Program at Cornell University, where he received his M.A. in 2019 and
his PhD in 2022, with a concentration in Old and Middle English literature. His
work has recently been published in Philological Quarterly.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am so thankful for the mentors, colleagues, and friends who have helped make
this dissertation possible. I am grateful for the support and constant
encouragement of my dissertation committee: Andrew Galloway, Kim
Haines-Eitzen, and Samantha Zacher. Andrew Galloway has introduced me to
so many wonderful texts, and I cherish the many insightful conversations we
have had throughout my graduate career. I am deeply grateful for his
intellectual curiosity, generosity, and enthusiasm at every stage of this project. I
am likewise thankful for Kim Haines-Eitzen, who nurtured my interest in
phenomenology early on and whose course on “Desert Monasticism” sparked
my interest in literature and the environment. I left every meeting with Kim
having a renewed sense of excitement for my own work. Samantha Zacher has
been supportive of my project since the beginning, through its many shapes and
iterations. Samantha’s feedback on this project has been incredibly rich and
insightful. Her scholarship has been an exemplar for me since I was an
undergraduate, and I am so thankful to have worked with her.
The Medieval Studies Program has provided me with years of support:
Sage and Avalon Fellowships, travel grants, conference funding, and many
other means of support. I am grateful to the many teachers I have had
throughout my graduate career, especially Andrew Hicks and Joshua Byron
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Smith. I would like to acknowledge the encouragement and feedback from my
fellow graduate students in Medieval Studies and The Department of
Literatures in English. I am thankful to have learned and laughed so much with
you all. I am incredibly thankful for my dissertation writing group, Austin
Lillywhite, Olivia Milroy-Evans, Seth Strickland, and Sophia D’gnazio, who
encouraged me to keep writing and always gave such generous feedback. Thank
you to the Society for the Humanities for supporting this wonderful group.
I cannot possibly express the gratitude I feel towards my friends who
have supported me throughout these years. I am particularly thankful for Brynn,
Clint, Kenny, and Caleb, whose conversations and humor are precious to me. I
am grateful for Austin and Seth, who I love, and who have been the most
wonderful companions. And Bethany, whose curiosity and encouragement
inspired me through the hardest parts of this project.
My deepest thanks goes to my Mother, Sisters, and Grandmothers.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 11
Medieval Poetry and the Environment 11
Writing with the Grain 16
Poetry and the Environment: Forms of Relation 19
Forms 24
Chapter One
Correspondences 35
Testament of Cresseid 41
Temperature Fluctuations and Poetic Form 44
Correspondence and Hylomorphism 51
Following the Grain 54
Chapter Two
The Whirl of Materials: Form and Movement in Chaucer’s House of Fame 59
Movement and Aesthetics 60
Poetry and Natural Philosophy 68
Movement in The House of Fame 79
Multiplication and the Problem of Representation 92
Chapter Three
Composing the Air: Atmosphere and Climate in Gower and Lydgate 104
The First Perifierie 110
The Second Perifierie 119
The Third Periferie 130
Chapter Four
“Is Skill Wordless?”: Poetic Making in Two Anonymous Late Medieval Poems
135
“Is Skill Wordless?” 135
A Complaint Against Blacksmiths 138
Fictionality and Entanglement 146
The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools 148
Attending to Materials 155
Conclusion 158
Bibliography 162
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Introduction
Medieval Poetry and the Environment
Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh.
Erthe other erthe to the erthe droh.
Erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh.
Tho heuede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.
[Earth took earth from earth, with woe.
Earth drew other earth to the earth.
Earth laid earth in an earthen place.
Then earth had earth enough of earth.]1
I begin with this poem to raise a set of questions that will be explored
throughout the dissertation. What forms does the environment afford human
life? How does poetry (and human creativity more generally) physically and
conceptually “form” the environment? And how does language mediate and
reveal the formal entanglements between the human and nonhuman worlds?
1 Gillian Rudd begins her seminal book, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval
English Literature, with Erthe, a “deceptively simple” four-line lyric found in Harley 2253.
Rudd explains that this lyric is “an obvious starting point for any ecocritically minded
investigation of late medieval English literature.” While I follow Rudd in beginning with
Erthe, my dissertation works to highlight features of the material world that often get left
behind by ecocritical scholars—such as movement, atmosphere, weather, and sound. For more
on the “over-emphasis” on earth and ground in studies of the environment, see Tim Ingold,
“Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13
(2007): S19–38. Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English
Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Susanna Fein, David Raybin,
and Jan Ziolkowski, eds. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 3 vols.
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015 ). Translation is my own.
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Various interpreters have puzzled over the exact meaning of Erthe, a Middle
English lyric found in Harley 2253, often suggesting that the dense poem offers
a bleak and painful vision of the human relationship to the “erthe” — a
relationship premised on connotations of death, exhaustion, and mourning, and
perhaps even apocalyptic and planetary destruction.2 The twelve occurrences of
“erthe” in the poem display the robust “semantic range of ‘earth’ in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” allowing for “connotations of soil, world,
earth as opposed to heaven, and grave to resonate through the poem.”3 Indeed,
“erthe” can refer to a range of material forms—to name a few: the spherical
world itself, the “clay” that formed humanity, the “erthene throh” of the grave,
“earthly goods,” and the “dust” to which humanity inevitably returns.4 The
multitude of available meanings for “erthe” invites the reader to hold several
interpretations in their mind at once.5 Which moments in the poem are meant to
refer to erthe as “humanity” and which moments are meant to refer to erthe as
2 For example, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
3 Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (2007), p.
22. Concerning this multitude of meanings for “erthe,” Rudd remarks: “The entries for this
short word run to several pages in dictionaries of both modern and medieval English,
indicating that not only are our relations to this word and all it signifies complicated now, but
that they have been for some time and often for the same reasons,” p. 21.
4 ē̆rthe n.(1), Middle English Dictionary (2022).
5 D. Vance Smith explains that the “most arresting effect, and meaning, of these lines is just
this production of multiple possibilities, without resolution.” Smith, “Medieval Forma: The
Logic of the Work,” in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2006), p. 74.
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“material world”? Material forms such as graves, for example, can be seen in
the poem as being formed by the material world, the personified erthe, encasing
and decomposing the human body in an “erthene throh.” But the grave is also a
type of “erthe” that exists as a cultural form, as a human-formed place (“erthene
throh”) that contains the human body (also “erthe”).  These moments of
linguistic play within the poem demonstrate the complex formal relationships
between humans and the material world. In fact, the attention to the complex
nature of form is part of the poem’s “force, verging on the unintelligible purity
of form itself. The quatrain seems almost to shape a formal exercise, arrayed on
a single rhyme and laden with the word erthe.”6 Thomas A. Prendergast and
Jessica Rosenfield explain that, for Middle English writers, “form is a site of
challenge, never a vehicle of uncomplicated translation from structure to
content, or text to context.”7 Erthe is certainly a convincing example of this
assertion in the way that the formal properties of the poem (the personification
of erthe, the compact nature of the poem, as well as the proliferation of
different meanings of “erthe”) obscure the exact meaning of the poem.
Regardless of how you interpret each instance of erthe, it seems clear
that the poem is interested in the diverse and complex material and cultural
forms (from creation to the grave) that proliferate between the human and
6 D. Vance Smith, “Medieval Forma,” p. 74.
7 “Introduction,” in Prendergast, Thomas A., and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the
Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) p. 3.
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nonhuman worlds. In the poem, the contours of human experience—from our
formation out of clay to the production of material goods to the final “erthene
throh” of the body—are all constituted, in one way or another, by the “earth.”
Concerning the form of the poem, D. Vance Smith explains:
Reminding us that we are formed of erthe, the quatrain couches the
question of our being, and its termination, in terms of form: is our form
the form of the earth, the form that the earth takes? If so, then what form
does earth take to accommodate—literally form itself to—our earth? The
haunting brilliance and morbid wit of this poem abides in its presentation
of erthe as a formal problem [. . . ]8
The poem potently captures the “formal problem” presented by the erthe, and
allows the reader to glimpse the ways in which the forms of the environment
and the forms of human life are “entangled,” each one acting upon and shaping
the other, in a knot of reciprocal interactions.9 Erthe demonstrates this
8 D. Vance Smith, “Medieval Forma,” p. 75.
9 The notion of “entanglement” follows from the work of Karen Barad and Tim Ingold,
primarily. Throughout the dissertation, I highlight the “entanglements” between human and
the environmental worlds, emphasizing a reciprocity that is foundational in the work of Barad
and Ingold. My use of “entanglement” refers to the thick formal, cultural, and physical
connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. The notion of entanglement works
against the Cartesian division of subject/object by emphasizing the ways in which subjects do
not “preexist their interactions.” As Barad explains: “To be entangled is not simply to be
intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent,
self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their
interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating .
Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that
takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and
space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each
intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between
creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there,
past and future.” Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), p. ix.
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reciprocal relationship as the line “erthe toc of erthe'' makes it difficult to
distinguish between erthe as “environment” and erthe as “human” (“clay”).
Using personification and semantic ambiguity to blur the line between
environment and human, highlights a mutual entanglement that resists a
straightforward ascription of action to either the environment or the human. As
the poem calls attention to the entanglement between the human and nonhuman
worlds, it also serves to situate “our apprehension of textual form in relation to
our living in a world of forms.”10 In other words, the poem functions to
interrogate the formal limits of poetry, with its compact and dizzying strings of
“erthe,” while also serving to question the ways in which earth and human
beings mutually inform one another. What, exactly, does erthe take of erthe?
Writing with the Grain
Writing with the Grain explores moments of dynamic conceptual and formal
exchange between poetic and environmental worlds in late-medieval vernacular
literature, such as those evinced in the Erthe lyric. It traces the ways that late
medieval poets envision the environment as a participant in the production of
poetry—a view which challenges the notion that, in creative expression,
humans “give form” to things, as though matter were brute, subordinate,
passively awaiting the agent who shapes it (often called “hylomorphic” theories
10 D. Vance Smith, “Medieval Forma,” p. 71.
13
of creative expression). I explore the conceptual and physical connections
between poetic and environmental matter to show how poets, such as Chaucer,
understand the movement and proliferation of poetic form in material terms. I
demonstrate the ways that medieval poets like John Gower and John Lydgate
used literary form to enact environmental form, from the role of poetic form in
structuring environmental concepts such as climate, to the use of fiction in
capturing our skillful engagements with material objects such as tools. In sum,
Writing with the Grain argues that late-medieval vernacular writers understood
that our environmental contexts–in all their materiality–have striking
consequences for how we understand poetic form.
To begin with, to what extent does the process of poetic production
involve the material world?11 At base level, the use of vellum, oak gall, and
minerals as the material substrate of medieval book production connects the
11 Carolyn Walker Bynum’s work has been extremely influential to studies of poetic-material
relationships in late medieval literature. See especially, "Why All the Fuss About the Body? A
Medievalist's Perspective," Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 1-33; The Resurrection of
the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Following Bynum, see Cristina Maria Cervone’s work: Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle
English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013); More recently, see Stephanie Batkie and Matthew Irvin, “Incarnational Making in Vox
Clamantis II.” In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of Robert F. Yeager, ed.
Susannah Mary Chewning (Boydell & Brewer, 2020), pp. 35–56. For landmark studies with a
more ecocritical bent, see: Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser, eds., Engaging with Nature:
Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Notre Dame, IN, 2008);
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Ecology,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner
(Oxford, 2013), 347–62; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
(Minneapolis, 2015); Sarah Stanbury, “EcoChaucer: Green Ethics and Medieval Nature,” The
Chaucer Review 39/1 (2004): 1–16.
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production of poetry to the material world.12 The fact that these three materials
span the animal-vegetable-mineral divide speaks to the dense threads between
the medieval literary and environmental spheres. At a linguistic level, the
Middle English usage of the word matere to mean both “physical matter” and
the “subject matter” of a literary work, invited medieval poets to explore
connections between the two, often imagining themselves as creators of “quasi
material-poetic worlds.”13 Influenced by the allegorical works of Martianus
Capella (c. 410-420), Bernardus Silvestris (c.1100–c.1160 [before 1178]), and
Alan de Lille (c. 1128), late medieval poets like Chaucer and Gower took up the
subject of natural science and employed poetry to raise questions concerning
the nature of the material world.14 Extended discussions of subjects ranging
from Aristotelian causation to the properties of sound waves feature
prominently in late-medieval vernacular poetry.15 Nature is personified
12 For example, see D. Vance Smith. “The Inhumane Wonder of the Book.” The Chaucer
Review 47, no. 4 (2013): 361–71; Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie, “Medieval English
Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text,” Chaucer Review 47; Elaine Treharne,
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2021).
13 Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118
(114); Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the
Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012);
14 See James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s
“Anticlaudianus” and John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).Walter Clyde, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New
York: Barnes and Noble, 1960); George Fox, The Mediaeval Sciences in the Works of John
Gower (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931); John D. North, Chaucer’s Universe
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
15 See Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the
Later Middle Ages. Minnis’s work draws connections between late-medieval vernacular
15
throughout late medieval literature, as poets work to form the material world by
giving Nature a voice and inviting her to speak.16 In texts like Gower’s
Confessio Amantis and poetic iterations of the popular pseudo-Aristotelian
Secreta Secretorum, poetry functions in an encyclopedic register, working to
explain concepts like the scale of being and the various regions of the
atmosphere. Building on recent work in medieval studies by scholars such as
Kellie Robertson, Rebecca Davis, and Mary Carruthers, my dissertation speaks
to the overlap between late medieval discourses on poetics and contemporary
medieval discourses concerning nature and the forms of the material world.17
Poetry and the Environment: Forms of Relation
How are we to understand poetry’s formal relationship to the environment?
Jonathan Bate’s The Song of The Earth has become a seminal text for a number
of recent critics negotiating the relationship between poetic form and the
prologues and Aristotelian causation. For discussions of sound, see Adin Lears, W orld of
Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Cornell, 2020).
16 See Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (UPenn
Press, 2017).
17 See Kellie Robertson, “Abusing Aristotle,” in Speculative Medievalisms: Discography, ed.
The Petropunk Collective [Eileen Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Michael
O’Rourke] (New York: Punctum Books, 2013); Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A
Manifesto.” Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118; Robertson, “Medieval Things: Materiality,
Historicity, and the Premodern Object.” Literature Compass 5 (2008); Rebecca Davis,
"Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer's House of Fame," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015):
101-32; Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford University
Press, 2013).
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environment. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling,” Bate
argues that
[. . .] poiesis in the sense of verse-making is language’s most direct path
of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself – a
quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat – is an
answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth
itself18
For Bate, poetry’s formal relationship to the environment is primarily
“eco-mimetic,” meaning that the form of the poem seeks to mimic the form of
the environment.19 For Bate, poetry, through forms such as “metre itself,” works
to tune human attention to the “rhythms” and “the song of the earth.” The
function of poetry is to enact a sense of “dwelling” and foster a sense of
environmental connection by working to mimic the rhythms of the environment
in an effort to return to “the oikos” (from the Greek meaning "dwelling" and the
origin of “ecology”). This Heideggerian strain of ecological dwelling has come
under scrutiny by a number of recent critics, such as Taylor Eggan. Eggan
18 Jonathan Bate, The Song of The Earth (Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 75-76. Author’s
italics.
19 For an interesting recent example of eco-mimetic reading, see Sonya Postmentier,
Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (2020).
Postmentier explains: “I am also interested in lyrics as ecological: that is, in how poems
sometimes mimic or approximate organic forms and processes often associated with
enclosure, preservation, self-sustainability, and internal relation, forms that can exceed their
own boundaries, and that may in turn yield new models for social and ecological relation.” p.
4. Postmentier cautions that “Cultivation and Catastrophe follows in the wake of the model of
environmental relation Glissant elaborates in Poetics of Relation, a model acknowledging the
limits of ecomimesis or the idea that the relationship between nature and culture is a
transparent one.” p. 9.
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demonstrates the overlap between these Heideggerian ecological
“homecoming” narratives of settler colonial homemaking.20 On the whole,
Bate’s view of poetry is characterized by a desire to capture an ostensibly
harmonious and rhythmic material world. This type of formal project has
sometimes been called “ecological poetry,” which “seeks to be nature, to foster
a sense of artistic creation as a natural act” and strives for formal structures that
are “indistinguishable from natural processes.”21
Bate’s attention to the ability of poetry to respond to environmental
forms accords with many late-medieval conceptions of poetic-environmental
relationships examined throughout this dissertation. For instance, in Chapter
One, I put forward the notion of correspondence, based on the poetry of Robert
Henryson and the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, as a model for
understanding the relationship between poetic form and the environment,
arguing that poetic forms emerge out of our attentive and responsive
engagement with the material world. My dissertation traces moments where
poetic production and formation are ascribed to material forces beyond the
human. For Bate, poetic form “echoes” the forms of the environment and
therefore originates in the structure of the natural world itself. This seems to
20 Taylor Eggan, Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology and the Settler Colonial
Imagination (2022), p. 13.
21 Bernard, Quetchenbach, “Illuminating the Anthropocene: Ecopoetic Explorers at the Edge
of the Naturecultures Abyss,” American Literary History 31 (2) (2019), p. 327.
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suggest that the poet, therefore, is not the originator of form but mimics forms
which originate in the environment.
However, my dissertation challenges this unidirectional relationship
between poetry and the environment. I argue that these two areas of
discourse—the poetic and the environmental—mutually inform one another. In
other words, the relationship between poetic form and environmental form is
not simply imagined as a practice of representation wherein the forms of poetry
mimic the forms of the environment—though these types of poetic
representations of the environment do occur in late medieval literature and
occasionally present themselves throughout the dissertation. Rather, I argue that
late medieval poets looked to the forms of the environment as models for
understanding the form and function of vernacular poetry while, at the same
time, employing poetry as a way of understanding and forming the very
environment in which they were enmeshed. In this way, my dissertation speaks
to recent trends in literary geography which seek to eschew the simple and
“effortless mapping of represented landscapes in literary texts” and to “raise
more complex questions about [. . .] how space and geography affect literary
forms and styles.”22 Devin Griffiths has recently advocated for an “ecology of
22 For a useful overview of trends in literary geography, see Daniel Weston, “Contemporary
Poetic Ecologies and a Return to Form” and Weston, Contemporary Literary Landscapes: The
Poetics of Experience (2019). Andrew Thacker explains that “critical literary geography” is
characterized by “the process of reading and interpreting literary texts by reference to
geographical concepts.” Thacker, “Critical Literary Geography,” p. 60.
19
forms” which emphasizes movement and relationality, explaining that “instead
of container form, we need a relational formalism, a theory of reform. To put
this differently, form is ecological; it works through wider networks of relation
and of the material, energetic, and social interactions that give it life.”23 In a
similar vein, Sarah Whatmore has advocated for “an upheaval in the binary
terms in which the question of nature has been posed and a re-cognition of the
intimate, sensible and hectic bonds through which people and plants; devices
and creatures; documents and elements take and hold their shape in relation to
each other in the fabric-ations of everyday life”24
Along with these recent calls in literary geography for more relational
models for understanding the “bonds” between “documents and elements” and
the ways in which they “take and hold their shape,” my dissertation argues that
the formal relationship between poetry and the environment looks less like a
mirror of representation and more like a knot of entangled relations. Conceived
of in a “relational way, the idea of ecology provides powerful purchase for the
recognition of humans’ entanglement in environment rather than for asserting
mastery over it.”25 I explore the ways that late medieval poets looked to enter
into, and enact, this entanglement rather than simply represent it.26 As such, this
23 Devin Griffiths, “The Ecology of Forms,” pp. 70-71.
24 Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces. (London Thousand Oaks,
2002), p. 3.
25 Daniel Weston, “Contemporary Poetic Ecologies and a Return to Form,” p. 9.
26 For another strain of phenomenological entanglement in medieval studies, see Seeta
Chaganti, who explains: “Aware of the interacting forces among bodies, texts, and other
20
dissertation is ecocritical in the sense that it “considers human and nonhuman
life as co-related in an ecological and dynamic relationship.” As Cheryll
Glotfelty explains, “all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that
human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by
it.”27
Forms
Before proceeding to explore the formal “interconnections” between poetry and
the environment, it will be helpful to clarify what I mean by “form.” Among the
multitude of ways we can think about form, Caroline Levine explains that
“‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning,
or shaping.”28 For the purposes of this dissertation, I take Levine’s general
definition of form as my baseline definition. The primary definition of “form”
in the Middle English Dictionary defines it as the “physical shape of something,
contour, outline; the figure or shape (of a person), body [. . .].”29 “Form” is the
media, medieval audiences could perceive virtual spaces that contained social meaning and the
fullness of poetic form.” Seeta Chaganti, “Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard,”
postmedieval 3 (2012): 7–26.
27 Cheryll Glotfelty, Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (UGeorgia Press,
1996), p.xix.
28 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (UPrinceton Press, 2015), p.
3.
29 “fō̆rme n.” in the Middle English Dictionary (2022). In particular, see uses 1a and 6. There
have been a number of recent volumes speaking to the nature of “form” in late medieval
literature. For example, see Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Chaucer and the Subversion of Form,
Prendergast, Thomas A., and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Cambridge Studies in Medieval
21
way things are ordered, patterned, and shaped. In reference to the literary,
Middle English writers referred to form as a “[s]tyle of writing; (b) literary
device or idea; (c) literary type or genre; (d) the exact wording of a text,
formulation.”
Late-medieval literary form has been described as “frustratingly vague,
baggy, and imprecise,” with scholars noting the fact that “governing theories are
more usually embedded than stated.”30 However “baggy” late-medieval form
may be, it is commonly conceived of “as the informing of raw materials
according to the script of some idea, as the forming of an object guided by some
thought.”31 Contributing to this lack of “stated” conceptions of form, scholars
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Eleanor Johnson, Practicing
Literary Form in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and
Hoccleve (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry, eds., Form
and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2011); Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, ed. Cristina
Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2016).
30 D. Vance Smith, “Medieval Forma,” p. 69; Christopher Cannon, “Form” in Middle English,
ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford, 2007), p.79. Christopher Cannon’s work has been influential for
thinking about late medieval literary forms. In The Grounds of English Literature (2005),
Cannon emphasizes the overlap between the human and material worlds, explaining that
“form is that which thought and things have in common” (p.5). His work makes use of
Vinsauf’s understanding of form, adding a Hegelian dialectic, and explaining that “thinking
directs labour according to a ‘subjective aim and design’, it embeds itself in the hard materials
it shapes (the ‘Iron, Wood, Stones’), thereby using that hardness to solidify and preserve an
idea” (p. 48). Based on Chaucer’s opaque reference to Vinsauf in the mouth of Pandarus,
Cannon builds an understanding of form that positions the human mind as “master” and
singular shaper of literary form. While we agree that the material world deserves more
attention in our understanding of late medieval form, my project works to diffuse the
generation of form across the human and material divide, striving to collapse the relationship
between thought and thing.
31 Cannon, “Form,” p. 178. This conception of form traditionally follows from Aristotle: “It is
obvious then from what has been said that the thing, in the sense of form or substance, is not
22
have noted that late-medieval vernacular writers, particularly poets, “often had
few (or no) vernacular models to rely on” for conceptualizing form, resulting in
productions that are “formally unique.”32 Scholars often point to Geoffrey of
Vinsauf’s (c. 1210) Poetria Nova as a model for understanding late-medieval
vernacular conceptions of poetic form.33 While he does not use the term “form,”
Vinsauf explains that the formation of a literary text happens in the mind of the
author:
Si quis habet fundare domum, non currit ad actum
Impetuosa manus: intrinseca linea cordis
Praemetitur opus, seriemque sub ordine certo
Interior praescribit homo, totamque figurat
Ante manus cordis quam corporis; et status eius
Est prius archetypus quam sensilis.
[If a man has a house to build, his impetuous hand does not rush into
action. The measuring line of his mind first lays out the work, and he
mentally outlines the successive steps in a definite order. The mind’s
produced, but the concrete thing which gets its name from this is produced, and that in
everything which comes to be matter is present, and one part of the thing is matter and the
other form.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, 7. 1033b 15-20.
32 I want to emphasize the word “stated” in this sentence. While late-medieval vernacular
poets did not have something like a vernacular ars poetica on which to rely, Middle English
writers (in particular) did look to other vernacular forms (French, for example) for
understanding the shapes and subject matter of their own work. Cannon, “Form,” p. 178,
italics are the author’s. For a helpful critique of Cannon’s work, see Elizabeth M. Tyler,
“Where is the Ground of English Literature?” The Cambridge Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2005):
408–11.
33 See Cannon, “Form,” p. 177. Also, Cannon,
23
hand shapes the entire house before the body’s hand builds it. Its mode
of being is archetypal before it is actual.]34
While Bate emphasizes the role of the environment in supplying poetic forms,
Vinsauf completely eschews external or material influence on poetic form (even
as he uses a deeply material metaphor) and explains that form originates in the
“mind first” before the poet ever proceeds to the page. For Bate, form is shaped
externally; for Vinsauf, form is shaped internally. The popularity of drawing on
Vinsauf’s conception of form in scholarship on late medieval literature is due,
in part, to Chaucer’s use of the passage in Troilus and Criseyde to explain the
schemes of Pandarus: “Al this Pandare in his herte thoughte, | And caste his
werk ful wisely or he wroughte,” (I. 1070–1).35 I offer a critique of this view of
form in Chapter One, but my dissertation serves to challenge the purely external
and purely internal views of form put forth by Bate and Vinsauf. Instead, I
propose a relational view of late-medieval form that attends to the ways in
which poetic forms arise at the intersection between human and
more-than-human worlds. In a similar way, Caroline Levine argues that,
[. . .] in practice, we encounter so many forms that even in the most
ordinary daily experience they add up to a complex environment
composed of multiple and conflicting modes of organization—forms
34 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, rev. ed., trans. Margaret Nims (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010
). For the Latin, see Edmond Faral, Les arts poétique du xiie et du xiiie siècle: Recherches et
documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1962 ).
35 All quotations of Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, Larry Benson
(Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
24
arranging and containing us, yes, but also competing and colliding and
rerouting one another.36
I explore this proliferation of “multiple and conflicting” forms in Chaucer’s
House of Fame (Chapter Two), highlighting a late-medieval attention to
movement as a formal concept that connects the aesthetic and environmental. In
late medieval poetry, I argue, these two formal spheres (the aesthetic and
environmental) often reshape and reroute one another. For example, in Chapter
Three I argue that both Gower and Lydgate use poetic form in an attempt to
control and stabilize conceptions of the physical form of the atmosphere; a type
of formal “rerouting” that seeks to develop narratives of environmental
stability—a conceptual move akin to recent, modern notions of climate. As
such, Chapter Three, while still emphasizing reciprocal notions of form, follows
recent scholarship which works to interrogate the ways in which “multiple
forms of order [. . . ] unsettle one another.”37 This notion shares some
similarities to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which recognizes the
Other as an “aesthetic constituent” in a relationship that “senses, assumes,
opens, gathers, scatters, continues, and transforms” forms of identity and
aesthetics.38
36 Levine, p. 16.
37 Levine, p. 17.
38 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (UMichigan Press, 1990), p.29; 94-5.
25
Levine's work connects “aesthetic and political forms'' that “emerge as
comparable patterns that operate on a common plane.” Her focus is on the
“many overlapping forms'' between the aesthetic and political spheres that
structure and govern social experience, which she refers to as “a kind of event”
called “collision.” Setting aside the traditional “models of causality,” such as
Vinsauf’s, Levine’s work allows for new configurations of, and insights into,
the “work of forms.”39
My dissertation takes a similar approach. I am interested in the ways that
forms are conceived in late-medieval literature in a non-traditional mode of
causation. While Levine’s use of “collision” works well in the political and
social contexts that she explores, the relational view of form that I propose
employs terms such as correspondence, entanglement, and negotiation in order
to emphasize the reciprocal and ongoing formal relationship between poetry
and the environment.40 At the same time, this project departs from Levine by
emphasizing notions of flow and movement. Throughout the dissertation, I
argue that late-medieval poets are just as concerned with the flow and process
39 Levine, Forms, p. 19.
40 In another way, Donna Haraway’s new materialist concept of “naturecultures,” which she
defines as “the implosions of the discursive realms of nature and culture,” employs the
language of “implosion” to negotiate spaces and forms that arise at the intersection between
the human and non-human realms. Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto:
Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
26
of poetic formation as they are with notions of form as fixed or stabilized—as a
container for matter.
Outline of the Argument
I begin by arguing for an approach to late-medieval poetics that challenges the
hylomorphic model of creativity in favor of a model of correspondence, which
views poetic formation as happening in moments of human-environmental
reciprocity (Chapter One). The hylomorphic model sees the human as standing
over and above “raw” materials, shaping them into whatever form is in the
human mind. However, I argue that aesthetic forms are often latent in these
materials themselves. Akin to a carpenter cutting along the grain of a tree, I
contend that late-medieval poets, such as Chaucer and Henryson, followed
forms afforded by the environment itself. I argue that these poets envisioned
creativity as a process of “corresponding” with the material world, tracing and
joining with its fluctuations and flows.
I then chart the overlapping concerns between contemporary poetics and
physics in order to show that late-medieval poets thought about poetry in
material terms. With this in mind, I examine Chaucer’s House of Fame to argue
that the poem puts forth a view of creativity focused on entering into the
movements, proliferations, and flows of the material world (Chapter Two).
27
But what happens when the fluctuations of the material world impede
and overthrow the processes of creativity and poetic production? I consider this
question by examining Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Lydgate’s Pageant of
Knowledge (Chapter Three). I argue that both Gower and Lydgate negotiate and
work to stabilize the changing forms of the environment by attempting to
poetically “form” the material world. I focus on Gower and Lydgate’s attention
to atmospheric fluctuations, arguing that the process of  putting the atmosphere
into poetic form shares similarities with modern notions of “climate.” Drawing
on recent work in historical climatology, I conclude by demonstrating that
“climate” arises in moments of human-environmental negotiation, which is
itself a form of correspondence.
I conclude by considering skill. The process of “following the grain” is
predicated on the notion of skilled engagement with materials. Reading two
anonymous Middle English poems, The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools and A
Complaint Against Blacksmiths, I demonstrate the ways in which human and
nonhuman actors co-conspire in these poems to produce both poetic and
physical forms (Chapter Four).
The literature and forms explored throughout this dissertation take shape
in the period between the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and the later half
the 1500s, during the climatological period sometimes referred to as “The Little
Ice Age,” a period marked by environmental change and destabilization.
28
Chapter One surveys some of the devastating environmental changes that took
place during the period between 1348-1500. This period of environmental
change marks the historical boundaries for the literature that I survey
throughout the dissertation. While the texts that I survey are historically
bounded, in that they were all likely composed within the period between
1348-1500, this project does not seek an historical framing that attempts
chronological progressions of thought between sets of texts. Instead, I group
texts in conversation along the line of argumentation throughout.41
With the general contours of my argument in mind, it is worth
considering the social and educational backgrounds of the authors I have chosen
in this project. For example, Chapter Two argues that authors such as Chaucer
and Gower engage with Aristotelian concepts of matter, an engagement
predicated on knowledge of Aristotelian natural science usually gained by way
of a university education. While it’s clear that many authors throughout the
dissertation did indeed have such an education, including Chaucer and Gower,
it is less certain that the anonymous poets of Erthe, The Debate of the
Carpenter’s Tools, and A Complaint Against Blacksmiths shared the same
41 Additionally, while Middle English literature constitutes the bulk of texts that I survey,
Middle Scots poetry is also part of my inquiry. Middle Scots writers such as Gavin Douglass,
Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar were deeply influenced by Middle English literature,
from Chaucer to Gower, and saw themselves as continuators of the Chaucerian mode of poetic
makyng.
29
educational background and were attuned to such philosophical concepts and
discussions. This potential variety of education does not detract from the project
but demonstrates shared material and aesthetic considerations between poets
with varied social and educational backgrounds.
Chapter Outline
The poetic and environmental forms explored throughout this dissertation
display a range of shapes, patterns, and relations. Chapter One surveys the
formal relationship between palpable changes in weather patterns and the
influence of these changes on Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. In this
chapter, I argue that the literary form of Henryson’s poem is partially dictated
by the environmental changes of the mid-fifteenth century. I argue that
Henryson’s concept of poetic-environmental correspondence marks a departure
from traditional “hylomorphic” theories of poetic formation that privilege
human thought and unidirectional concepts of causality. Against this view, I
argue that Henryson’s Testament (following Chaucer’s model in his General
Prologue) diffuses poetic agency to the environment itself and establishes a
relational mode of poetic formation that casts the nonhuman world as a
co-creator in the production of poetry.
Drawing on the work of Kellie Robertson and Mary Carruthers, Chapter
Two investigates the formal exchange between concepts of movement in poetry
30
and in contemporary natural science. Focusing on Chaucer’s House of Fame, I
demonstrate the ways in which Aristotelian concepts of matter and movement
were aestheticized by late medieval poets and how these material models helped
shape a formal understanding of poetry based on notions of movement,
multiplication, and proliferation.
Chapter Three explores the formal relationship between atmospheric
phenomena and poetry. I show how atmospheric phenomena, even those as
seemingly mundane as dew, can unsettle human narratives of environmental
stability and highlight the ways in which environmental forms impose
themselves on human experience. I examine Gower’s Confessio Amantis and
Lydgate’s Pageant of Knowledge in order to demonstrate the ways that poetic
form can work to negotiate and restabilize the roiling and ever-changing forms
(or “impressions”) of the atmosphere. I argue that this poetic reformulation of
atmospheric matter bears similarities to modern notions of climate.
Chapter Four demonstrates the formal ability of poetry to enact human
and environmental entanglements. I focus on two anonymous Middle English
poems, The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools and The Complaint Against
Blacksmiths, exploring the ability of poetry to put human and nonhuman
entanglements into poetic form. As poems concerned with practices of labor
and the nature of craft, these works capture and comment on contemporary
skillful engagements with the more-than-human world, demonstrating the ways
31
in which human and nonhuman actors co-conspire to produce both poetic and
physical forms. In this way, like Erthe, these poems demonstrate the formal
entanglement between humans and the environment in which they are
enmeshed.
32
Chapter One
Correspondences
On October 6, 1348, at the urgent request of Philip VI, the medical faculty at
the University of Paris issued a compendium of opinion on the causes of the
Black Death.42 One of the causes cited was “the corruption of the air.” Air,
“which is pure and clear by nature,” had mixed with “evil vapors,” spreading
pestilence throughout France and England.43 The faculty held that this
corruption arose from atmospheric changes, both natural and human induced.
Unusual gusts of “thick, wild, and southerly winds,” brought corrupt vapor
from swamps, lakes, and deep valleys. The refusal to properly bury the dead
resulted in the “putrefying” of the air and water.
The early half of the fourteenth-century — a period marked by a number
of climatic changes — was the start of what is now broadly called the “Little
42 John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with
Documents (2005), pp. 48-49.
43 A version of medieval pollution: “miasma (μίασμα, Ancient Greek for "pollution"), a
noxious form of "bad air", also known as night air. The theory held that epidemics were
caused by miasma, emanating from rotting organic matter. Though miasma theory is typically
associated with the spread of contagious diseases, some academics in the early nineteenth
century suggested that the theory extended to other conditions as well, e.g. one could become
obese by inhaling the odor of food.” Suspicions about the Hidden Realities of the Air, a 17th
century text by Robert Boyle, discusses miasma theory and the “effluviams” of air. Simon
Kemp, “A Medieval Controversy About Odor,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences 33 (1997).
33
Ice Age.” The cold, along with excessive rainfall, influenced the growth of
crops; fields turned either flooded or barren, resulting in famine every fourteen
years, on average.44 By the middle of the fourteenth century, on the heels of the
long frosts of the earlier part of the century, England and France saw a rise in
temperature and further changes in the environment. Gilles li Muisis, (c. 1272 –
1352), in his Chronicle of 1349, noted the shifting of the climate:
The winter was certainly very odd, for in the four months from the
beginning of October until the beginning of February, although a hard
frost was often expected, there was not so much ice as would support the
weight of a goose. But there was instead such a lot of rain that the
Scheldt and all the rivers round about burst their banks, so that meadows
became seas, and this was so in our country and in France.45
The faculty at the University of Paris also expressed their experience of these
environmental changes, saying:
For some time the seasons have not succeeded each other in the proper
way. Last winter [1347/8] was not as cold as it should have been, with a
44 The most well known famine is the “great famine” of 1315-17, which brought many deaths
to northwestern Europe. The heavy summer rains of 1314 in England and Germany reduced
the yields of grain, followed by a severe winter. The winter of 1316 was so cold that ships
were, reportedly, frozen into the Baltic ice. Richard Hoffmann, An Environmental History of
Medieval Europe (2014), pp. 323-41. See also: Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages: Ancient and
Modern, 2 vols., 2nd edn (New York City: Routledge, 2004); Kathleen Pribyl, Richard C.
Cornes, and Christian Pfister, “Reconstructing Medieval April–July Mean Temperatures in
East Anglia, 1256–1431,” Climatic Change 113.2 (2012): pp. 393–412; David Stone, “The
Impact of Drought in Early Fourteenth-century England,” The Economic History Review 67.2
(2014): pp. 435–62; J.M. Grove, “The Onset of the Little Ice Age,” in History and Climate:
Memories of the Future?, ed. P.D. Jones, A.E.J. Ogilvie, T.D. Davies, and K. R. Briffa (New
York: Kluwer, 2001 ), 153– 86.
45 Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 1994) p. 54. Trans. from Gilles li
Muisis from J-J. de Smet (ed), Recueil des Chroniques de Flandre II, Brussels, 1841, pp.
279-82.
34
great deal of rain; the spring windy and latterly wet. Summer was late,
not as hot as it should have been, and extremely wet – the weather very
changeable from day to day, and hour to hour; the air often troubled, and
then still again, looking as if it was going to rain but then not doing so.
Autumn too was very rainy and misty.46
Taken on their own, these contemporary accounts of the environmental
conditions of the late medieval period serve as general impressions, dependent
on the memory and local context of the chronicler. However, data from ice
cores, tree rings, volcanic eruptions, records of wine harvests, and records of
solar activity and sunspot counts have contextualized these historical
impressions, allowing for a fuller picture of late medieval climate.47
Environmental historian Richard Hoffman has characterized the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries as a period of “brutal climate oscillation.”48 Hoffman
explains that “some scholars see the entire fourteenth century and through to the
mid sixteenth as characterized by irregular cycles of climatic extremes, with
concomitant regional bouts of catastrophic weather.”49 As more data become
available, historians have increasingly incorporated discussions of climate
change into economic and social history, acknowledging the important role that
climate plays in economic, social, and political changes.50 Using insights from
46 Horrox, The Black Death, p. 161.
47 Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (New York City:
Basic Books, 2000), pp. 50-55.
48 Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 323–4.
49 Ibid. p. 324.
50 Brian Fagan argues against the charge of environmental determinism that plagued
environmental historians in the 1980s and 90s. He explains, “Environmental determinism, the
35
paleoclimatology and paleogenetics, historians such as Bruce Campbell have
charted the relationship between the climatic changes of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries and disease, social changes, landscape degradation, and
economic recession.51
As in the passages above, contemporary accounts confirm these very
palpable environmental changes. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw an
increase in frequency and intensity of storms in most of the British archipelago,
a fact reflected in contemporary chronicles.52 The chronicle of Anonymous of
Canterbury explains that
on the Saturday before these jousts, namely, on the feast of St Maurus
the abbot (15 January) around the hour of vespers on that day, dreadful
storms and whirlwinds such as had never been seen or heard before
occurred in England, causing houses and buildings for the most part to
notion that climate change was a primary cause of major developments like, say, agriculture,
has been a dirty word in academia for generations. You certainly cannot argue that climate
drove history in a direct and causative way to the point of toppling governments. Nor,
however, can you contend that climate change is something that you can totally ignore.” Fagan
goes on to explain that ignoring the historical effects of climate change “is to neglect one of
the dynamic backdrops of the human experience. Consider, for instance, the food crises that
engulfed Europe during the Little Ice Age [. . .]. These crises in themselves did not threaten
the continued existence of Western civilization, but they surely played an important role in the
formation of modern Europe.” Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History
1300-1850 (New York City: Basic Books, 2000), pp. xiv-xv.
51 Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval
World (2016). Other recent examples include: Mark Bailey, After the Black Death: Economy,
Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2021); Philippa Maddern,
“Imagining the Unchanging Land: East Anglians Represent their Landscape, 1350–1500,” in
Medieval East Anglia, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005).
52 See Fagan, The Little Ice Age, pp. 61-78. See also: Andrew Richmond, Landscapes in
Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and The Natural World (Cambridge,
2021), p. 196.
36
come crashing to the ground, while some others, having had their roofs
blown off by the force of the winds, were left in that ruined state; and
fruit trees in gardens and other places, along with other trees standing in
woods and elsewhere, were wrenched from the earth by their roots with a
great crash, as if the Day of Judgement were at hand, and fear and
trembling gripped the people living in England to such an extent that no
one knew where he could safely hide, for church towers, windmills, and
many dwelling-houses collapsed to the ground, although without much
bodily injury.53
This account references the windstorm of January 15th, 1362, which leveled
church towers and ripped the trees from gardens across the south and east of
England. Along with contemporary chroniclers, poets also seemed to note the
windstorm of 1362. The storm has been linked to the “south-west wynd on
Saterday at even” referenced in Piers Plowman.54 The poem explains that
“pyries [pear trees] and plum-trees were puffed to the erthe” and “brode okes
were blowen to the grounde.”55 The ecological changes of the fourteenth
century work their way into the lines of the poem. This happens on both a
historical and formal level, as the series of alliterative plosives (“pyries,”
53 Chronicon Anonymi Cantuariensis: The Chronicle of Anonymous of Canterbury,
1346–1365, ed. and tr. Charity Scott-Stokes and Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford:  Clarendon P.,
2008), pp. 268-69.
54 William Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A
Critical Edition of the B-text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17 (London, 1978;
2nd ed. 1995), passus V, line 14, p. 62. All Piers quotes are from this edition.
55 William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on
Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, p. 424, passus V, 13-20. See Skeat’s note, p. 65. Also,
Ralph Hannah, Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman vol. 2 (2017), p. 53.
37
“plum-trees,” “puffed,” “brode,” “blowen”) in these lines enact the beating
wind of the storm of 1362.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, Rebecca Davis and Kellie Robertson
have both noted the ways that late medieval poetry was influenced by
contemporary conceptions of the material world. In particular, the ways in
which Aristotelian natural philosophy influenced late medieval poetics. In a
similar vein, Richard C. Hoffmann has encouraged medieval studies, as a field,
to recognize the reciprocal shaping power between the environment and human
society in our scholarship. He asks medievalists “to admit a nonhuman dynamic
to its story,” “to think about the interactions between medieval society and its
natural environment and to explore the ecological connections which shaped
those changes.”56 Hoffmann concludes:
Nature changes human society. Human society changes Nature.
Evidence from traditional human sources, both verbal and material, and
from the growing mass of palaeoscientific data demonstrates this
reciprocity in medieval Europe. Those who study medieval life need to
possess and contribute to this understanding.57
Andrew Richmond’s recent book, Landscape in Middle English Romance, takes
up Hoffmann’s challenge, arguing that the changing ecological contexts of late
56 Richard C. Hoffman, “Homo et Natura, Homo in Natura: Ecological Perspectives in the
European Middle Ages” in Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser. (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), p. 13.
57 Ibid. p. 13.
38
medieval England influenced environmental descriptions in Middle English
romances—from Sir Colling to Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.58 Along with
Hoffman and Richmond, this chapter focuses on the “reciprocity” between
Nature and human society. Namely, the reciprocal shaping power between late
medieval poetry and contemporary environmental changes. In this chapter, I
ask: what is the relationship between late-medieval climate change and the
production and form of poetry? And how does the material world in which we
are enmeshed influence human creative processes? In order to consider these
questions, I want to turn to Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid.
Testament of Cresseid
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, written in Middle Scots sometime between
1450 and 1470, is a narrative poem of 616 lines based on Chaucer’s own
Troilus and Criseyde. Henryson’s poem begins:
Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte
Suld correspond and be equivalent
Richt sa it wes quihen I began to wryte
The tragedie --- the wedder richt fervent,
Quhen Aries, in middis of the lent,
Schouris of haill gart fra the north descent,
That scant me fra the cauld I micht defend.
Yit nevertheles within myne oratur
58 Andrew Richmond, Landscapes in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination
and The Natural World (Cambridge, 2021).
39
I stude, quhen Titan had his bemis bricht
Withdrawin doun and sylit under cure,
And fair Venus, the bewtie of the nicht,
Uprais and set unto the west full richt
Hir goldin face, in oppositioun
Of God Phebus, direct discending doun.
Throwout the glas hir bemis brast sa fair
That I micht se on everie syde me by;
The northin wind had purifyit the air
And sched the mistie cloudis fra the sky;
The froist freisit, the blastis bitterly
Fra Pole Artick come quhisling loud and schill,
And causit me remufe aganis my will.59
(lines 1-21)
[A dismal season, a poem full of pain
Should correspond and be equivalent
Just as it was when I began to write
The tragedy --- the weather being very harsh,
When Aries, in the midst of Lent,
Made showers of hail descend from the north
In a great cold I barely could withstand.
Still, there I stood, inside my oratory
When Titan had withdrawn his beams of light
And draped and sealed the brightness of the day,
And lovely Venus, beauty of the night,
Had risen up and toward the true west set
Her golden face, direct in opposition
To the god Phoebus, straight descending down.
59 Robert Henryson: The Poems, ed. By Denton Fox (OUP, 1987). Translation adapted from
Seamus Heaney’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables (Faber, 2009).
40
Beyond the glass her beams broke out so fair
I could see away on every side of me.
The northern wind had purified the air
And hunted the cloud-cover off the sky.
The frost froze hard, the blast came bitterly
From the Arctic Pole, whistling loud and shrill,
And forced me to remove against my will.]
Henryson opens his poem with the issue of the relationship between poetic
production, mood, and the environment. He explains that the “doolie” season,
characterized by harsh weather, should “correspond” with the painful poem of
the tragic fate of Cresseid — a fate that was left untold in Chaucer’s version of
the story. Based on the Latin correspondere, the earliest reference to the
“correspond” in English, according to the OED, occurs in 1413.60 The Middle
English Dictionary lists one further use of the word in 1454 and The Middle
Scots Dictionary lists two uses of the word before 1500, one of those being
Henryson’s. The word means to "correspond, harmonize, reciprocate," from
com-, meaning "together, with (each other)" and -respondere "to answer." I
want to focus on Henryson's use of “correspond” in this passage in order to
consider the relationship between contemporary environmental changes and the
production of poetry. What is the correspondence between the climatic
conditions of the later half of the fifteenth century and Henryson’s Testament of
Cresseid?
60 "correspondence, n.". OED Online. June 2022.
41
Temperature Fluctuations and Poetic Form
As I noted above, the Paris Faculty expressed their experiences of the climactic
changes occurring in the mid-fourteenth century. According to
paleoclimatologists, this moment marks the end of the first major drop in
temperature in England during the late medieval period [figure 1, below].61 The
second major drop in temperature occurs during the period in which Henryson
would have composed the Testament, between the 1450s and 70s, a period that
saw temperatures in England and Scotland drop further than they had in
centuries. Bruce Campbell explains that “the 1450s were [. . .] the coldest
61 Figure 1: Indexed solar irradiance, global temperatures and northern hemisphere
temperatures, 1200–1500. From Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and
Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016), p. 4.
42
decade of the fifteenth century and the coldest of the Middle Ages.”62 While the
following decades saw a slow rise in temperature, it was not until the late
fifteenth century that temperatures began to come close to the heights of those
seen in the previous centuries. Returning to Henryson, the Testament continues:
I mend the fyre and beikit me about,
Than tuik ane drink, my spreitis to comfort,
And armit me weill fra the cauld thairout.
To cut the winter nicht and mak it schort
I tuik ane quair - and left all uther sport -
Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious
Of fair Creisseid and worthie Troylus.
(lines 36-42)
[I stacked the fire and got warm at the hearth,
Then took a drink to soothe and lift my spirit
And arm myself against the bitter north.
To pass the time and kill the winter night
I chose a book---and was soon absorbed in it---
Written by Chaucer, the great and glorious,
About fair Cresseid and worthy Troilus.]
While not a contemporary of Chaucer, Henryson drew on the poet’s work and
would have known it well.63 Here he references Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
62 Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval
World (2016), p. 345. This period of low solar activity, spanning from around 1450-1550, is
commonly referred to as the Spörer Minimum. A., Fogtmann-Schulz, Kudsk, S. G. K., Trant,
P. L. K., Baittinger, C., Karoff, C., Olsen, J., & Knudsen, M. F. (2019). “Variations in solar
activity across the Spörer Minimum based on radiocarbon in Danish oak.” Geophysical
Research Letters, 46, pp. 8617– 8623.
63 Henryson’s debt to Chaucer has been discussed at length. See: Speirs, John. The Scots
Literary Tradition. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), pp. 3-67; Smith, G. Gregory. "The
Scottish Chaucerians." The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An
43
but the opening lines of Henryson’s Testament also draw on Chaucer’s Prologue
to the Canterbury Tales. Henryson sets his poem “in a dismal season [. . . ]
when Aries, in the midst of lent, made showers of hail descend from the north.
In a great cold [he] barely could withstand” (5-7). Like Chaucer’s Prologue,
Henryson sets his poem in the astrological sign of the Ram, or Aries, whose
dates fall between the middle of March and the middle of April. However, the
environments described in each of the poems are markedly different.64 We can
recall the opening lines of the General Prologue:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. Ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 2000);
Fradenburg, Louise O. "The Scottish Chaucer." Writing After Chaucer: Essential Readings in
Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century. Ed. Daniel J. Pinti. (New York: Garland, 1998), pp.
167-176.
64 A contemporary chronicle describes some of the environmental upheaval during the middle
of the fifteenth century, saying: “In the year also from the Incarnation of our Lord, 1467,  in
the month of January there  was so great an inundation of the waters, by reason of the snow
and continued rains, that  no man  living  in  our  times  could  recall  to  mind  the  like.
Throughout the  whole  of  this  country,  and  in  Hoyland  especially,  there was  scarcely  a
house  or  building,  but what the streams  of water  made  their  way  and  flowed  through  it.
Nor  must  you suppose  that this  happened  hurriedly  and  in  a  cursory  manner only :  but
continuously,  during  a  whole  month,  the  waters either  stood  there  without  flowing  off,
or  else,  being  agitated by  strong  gusts  of  wind,  swelled  and  increased  still  more  and
more  day  after  day.” H.G. Bohn, Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland: With the
Continuations by Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers (London, 1854), p. 443.
44
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
so priketh hem Nature in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages [. . .]
(lines 1-12)
Chaucer’s Prologue is set in what we might think of as a quintessential English
spring scene, with birds singing and tender crops sprouting from the ground.
Although set in the same season, Henryson calls the setting of the Testament a
“wintery night,” though it takes place in what would have been traditionally
thought of as spring in England and Scotland during the later middle ages. The
longer winters of the mid-fifteenth century have been well documented. Richard
Hoffman explains that the period was “especially characterized by the length of
its winters, which dragged on as much as two or three months longer than
before.”65 Springtime in Europe during the mid-fifteenth century came “late and
cold; autumns came early and cold.”66 Not only does Henryson evoke Chaucer
in the opening lines, he plays on Chaucer’s language in the General Prologue:
rather than April’s sweet showers that bathe every veined leaf in sweet liquor,
Henryson describes “showers of hail descend[ing] from the north” (6). Instead
of Zephirus’s “sweet breath,” the season brings “blastis bitterly” (19-20) which
come from the Arctic pole, “whistling loud and shrill” (20). Chaucer’s depiction
65 Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (2014), p. 328.
66 Hoffman, Ibid.
45
of spring is one which corresponds to the climatic conditions of the fourteenth
century, 1386, when the poem was composed, when temperatures were near
their highest of the century, a period that Bruce Campbell has called the
“Chaucerian Maximum.”67 Not only does Chaucer’s environmental depiction
correspond to what paleoclimatologists now know the climatic conditions of the
1370s-80s to have actually been (“The Chaucerian Maximum”), but it also
corresponds to the form of the poem being told: a pilgrimage narrative.
Chaucer explains that “Nature pricks'' the hearts of both the birds (to
sing) and “folk” to “long” to “go on pilgrimage.” There is a correspondence
between the conditions of the environment and the composition of tales on the
road to Canterbury. It is essential that the weather between Southwark, where
the pilgrims begin, and Canterbury be favorable in order to make the nearly 60
mile walk, taking 2-3 days. Nature “pricks'' the hearts of the pilgrims to go on
pilgrimage to Canterbury, encouraging their spirits and affording them
favorable environmental conditions for composing their tales.“Pricking” here
may also play on the pricking and ruling of the physical manuscript page. In
manuscript production, pricking and ruling of the page allowed scribes to create
and organize a template before composing a text. Manuscripts would be pricked
with a sharp object, creating little holes in the page. The pricking afforded the
scribes lines, guides on which to beautifully craft their letters. In the Prologue,
67 Campbell, The Great Transition, pp. 15, 52, 337, 341, 363.
46
Nature’s pricking guides birds to compose songs, “to make their melodies,” as
well as pilgrims to compose their tales—to go on pilgrimage. Chaucer’s
familiar lines shed light on the entanglement between contemporary
environmental conditions and the production and form of poetry.
Unlike the pilgrims of the General Prologue, being pricked by Nature
and driven out into the environment, in the Testament of Cresseid, Henryson
experiences the cold landscape from inside his oratory. Upon experiencing the
icy blasts, he explains that he was driven inside “against [his] will” (21). From
inside, the narrator gazes outside, “through the glass” (15). There he anxiously
surveys the frigid earth, the hail, the blasts of icy air beating against the
window. Scholars have argued for a parallel between the cold landscape and the
poet’s own mood in the poem. For example, Jana Matthews has argued that the
poet’s “grene” or “bitter” heart in line 24 reflects the “fervent,” (which can be
taken as “bitter”) storm that surrounds his oratory. She explains that “the
freezing wind that blasts sprouting plants is analogous to the ‘greit cald’ (27)
that deadens sexual virility; and the ‘froist’ (19) is associated with old blood
that ‘kendillis nocht sa sone as in youtheid’(30).” In this way, Mathews
explains, in gazing at the glass, “[t]he narrator in essence, looks into a mirror,
and thus at himself.”68 While Mathews’ reading captures some of the
68 Jana Mathews, “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid,”  in The Letter of
the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (2002), eds. Emily
Steiner and Candace Barrington, p. 41.
47
entanglement between the narrator and the physical landscape that I am trying
to get at, I think it goes too far to characterize the landscape as simply a mirror
or reflection of the poet’s own feeling and to suggest that his gazing over the
landscape, or being enmeshed in the materiality of the environment, is simply
looking at himself. This seems to erase the landscape as a participant in
Henryson’s poetic making. The landscape becomes voiceless and wordless,
something like a raw material to be formed and molded to the author’s own
image. On the view that Henryson’s “glas” is a mirror, the idea of
correspondence loses some of its vibrancy. As we said above, the word means
to "correspond, harmonize, reciprocate," from com-, meaning "together, with
(each other)" and -respondere "to answer." Henryson’s “glas” is not in fact a
mirror, it is a window. Rather than closing off and simply reflecting one’s own
gaze back at oneself, a window opens up onto the material world itself,
allowing for a creative process that emphasizes reciprocity between the
environment and human imagination. In this way, poetry is borne out of the
mutual entanglement between the material world and the human imagination.
Correspondence and Hylomorphism
Henryson’s idea of correspondence in this poem bears some resemblance to
Maureen McLane’s idea of “Compositionism,” adapted from Bruno Latour.
Focusing her study on ballads, McLane argues for a “compositionist poetics, a
48
poetics that registers what balladry reminds us—that poems, like people,
thoughts, plants, and ballads themselves, are cocomposed, are made and
unmade together in a contingent networking of the animate and inanimate.”69 I
want to propose that Henryson’s idea of correspondence in these opening lines
suggests a view of creativity that takes into account the material environment in
which we are enmeshed. It suggests a view of poetic production that sees poetic
forms borne out of the “contingent networking of the animate and inanimate.”
In other words, poetic forms emerge out of our various engagements with the
environment.
Interestingly, this view of poetic production seems to run counter to the
view of hylomorphic poetic production expressed by medieval medieval
grammarians like Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who says in the opening of his Poetria
Nova that
The mind’s hand shapes the entire house before the body’s hand builds it.
Its mode of being is archetypal before it is actual. [. . .] As a prudent
workman, construct the whole fabric within the mind’s citadel; let it exist
in the mind before it is on the lips.70
69 Maureen McLane, “Compositionism: Plants, Poetics, Possibilities; or, Two Cheers for
Fallacies, Especially Pathetic Ones!” Representations, No. 140, Special Issue: FALLACIES
(Fall 2017), pp. 101-120, p. 112.
70 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 2010), p. 20.
49
Vinsauf’s idea in this passage is to employ scholastic hylomorphism as the basis
for understanding the process of invention and poetic production.71 On this
view, invention, the beginning point of poetic production, begins in the mind of
the poet, as raw materials are formed “according to the script of some idea, as
the forming of an object guided by some thought.”72 According to Geoffrey of
Vinsauf, the poet imposes his will on the raw materials, shaping those materials
into whatever form he has in his mind. As Susan Schibanoff explains, “In acting
upon his raw materials, assembling stones or timbers in a house, Geoffrey’s
poet-builder traces a long history back to the father-craftsman of ancient Greek
cosmology and embryology, as do the related medieval figure of the poet as
artisan (sculptor, cointer, smith, mason, and the like).”73 However, Schibanoff
demonstrates the ways in which a number of medieval authors eschewed the
hylomorphic theory of artistic production in favor of a “queer poetics” that
offered “alternative models and metaphors of art” and “implicitly challenge[d]
hylomorphic, heterosexual art.”74
Rather than the hylomorphic model of taking brute matter and forming it
into whatever idea the author has in their head, Henryson’s idea of
correspondence brings the material world into the creative process, allowing for
71 Martin Camargo, ‘‘The Late Fourteenth-Century Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric,’’
Philosophy and Rhetoric 45 (2012): 107–33.
72 Christopher Cannon, “Form,” in Strohm, Middle English, p. 177.
73 Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics. Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press 2006), p. 19-20.
74 Ibid. pp. 22-23.
50
a theory of creativity and poetic making that seems to be more in tune with the
world. This theory of correspondence, of a reciprocity between the poet and the
material world, is more in line with phenomenological notions concerning the
actual processes of making. For example, without the use of modern methods of
splitting timber, medieval carpenters had to “[follow] the grain of the tree”
when sawing beams for the assembly of frames for timber buildings.75 Trees
often grow with slight bends and knots, which means that “the traditional
carpenter must have constantly faced the problem of making maximum use of
irregular timber.”76 In this case, the materials themselves are part of the creative
process, as the timber affords the carpenter with certain shapes and lines with
which to work. In this way, the materials themselves help dictate the shape and
form of the structure. Richard Harris suggests that “changes in the growth of
available timber” in the late medieval period may have led to changes in the
form of late medieval buildings, dictating stylistic considerations such as beam
size.77 While these architectural considerations were once thought to be a
75 Richard Harris, Discovering Timber-Framed Buildings (Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 17. Doreen
Sylvia Leach explains that medieval “[f]raming was a skilled task that necessitated dealing
with heavy timber which tended to bow and spring when sawn because it distorted as it dried
and as a consequence there were no straight lines.” Doreen Sylvia Leach, Carpenters in
Medieval London c.1240-c.1540 (University of London, 2017), p. 177.
76 Harris, Discovering, p. 18. For more on the materials and methods of medieval carpentry,
see: Jane Grenville, “Materials and competence: the practicalities of medieval building,”
Medieval Housing (Leicester Press, 1997) pp. 23-65.
77 Harris, Discovering, p. 18-20. In a similar vein, the author of the Middle English Speculum
Humanae Salvationis paints a picture of late medieval craft in which materials (in this case an
oak tree) seamlessly lend themselves to the creative processes of a monastery: “A certain
51
product of function or aesthetic choice, it is most likely the case that they are
the result of ecological changes and fluctuations in timber growth.
Following the Grain
Against the hylomorphic model of creativity, Deleuze and Guattari use the
example of splitting a log and explain that creative processes are about
“surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting
operations to a materiality, instead of imposing form upon a matter”78
Correspondence is about following the grain of the wood, joining with the
flows of the material world. As anthropologist Tim Ingold explains,
monastery had a huge oak standing in its grounds, which had to be felled and grubbed out on
account of the smallness of the site. When it had been felled, servants of the monastery
gathered there and each chose the pieces appropriate to his office. The master smith cut off the
lower trunk which he realized was suitable [for an anvil-base] in his smithy. The master of the
leatherworkers chose the bark for himself, which he crushed into powder for tanning his hides.
The master of hogs took the acorns, with which he intended to fatten his piglets. The master
builder chose the tall trunk, from which to cut beams and roofs. The master fisher chose the
curved parts, to make the ribs of ships from them. The master of the mills grubbed out the
roots, which he realized would be suitable for the mill on account of their strength. The master
baker gathered together the branches with which he afterwards heated his oven. The sacristan
carried away green leafy boughs and with them decorated his church for a feast. The scribe
picked about a hundred galls or oak-apples with which he made up ink. The master cellarer
took various pieces from which he wanted to make amphoras and other vessels. Last of all, the
master cook collected the fragments and took them away for the kitchen fire.” A. Henry, ed.,
The Mirour of Mans Saluacion[e]. A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae
Salvationis. A Critical Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illustrated from Der
Spiegel der menschen Behaltnis Speyer: Drach, c. 1475 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1986), p.
227. Translated by R. Hoffmann.
78 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 408.
52
When you take an axe (or a wedge if you are using greenwood
techniques) to split a log, you are not imposing a form on the log. What
you are doing is finding the grain; and then the axe or the wedge will
follow it. The line it follows is one that has already grown into the wood
when it was part of a living tree, as part of its process of growth. Thus
the material you are working with is not formless, nor is it homogeneous.
It already has lines of growth, it has a grain, and the maker is not
someone who is imposing form on material but is rather one who finds
the grain and then bends it to an evolving purpose. This, I think, is what
making is all about: it’s not imposing form on material but finding the
grain of the way the world is becoming and then turning it this way or
that in order to make it match what your own evolving purpose, as a
designer or maker, might be.79
Rather than “someone who is imposing form on material,” I argue that
Henryson’s use of correspondence is much closer to following the grain of the
material, as Ingold would put it, and sees poetic making as a process that is
deeply entwined with our perception and engagement with the material world.80
Ingold says this of correspondences with regard to creativity and drawing, but
we may just as effectively substitute drawing here for the process of poetic
making. Ingold explains,
I have developed this idea about drawing as a process of correspondence,
in which one thing is continually answering to another as in a
conversation. And the thing about the drawing hand is that it is both
observing something and making a trace at the same time. So that the
79 Tim Ingold, “An Ecology of Materials: a rock is a rock is a rock,” in Power of Material –
Politics of Materiality, eds. Kerstin Stakemeier and Susanne Witzgall (UChicago, 2017).
80 A. Henry, ed. The Mirour of Mans Saluacion[e]. A Middle English Translation of Speculum
Humanae Salvationis. A Critical Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illustrated from
Der Spiegel der menschen Behaltnis Speyer: Drach, c. 1475 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1986),
227. Translated by R. Hoffmann.
53
movement of your hand, and the movement of your thought that is
guiding the hand, correspond with the movement of whatever it is that
you are attending to in the world and that you are corresponding with.81
In both Chaucer’s Prologue and Henryson’s Testament, the poetic process is one
in which nature corresponds with poetic making, storytelling, and ultimately
our phenomenal being-in-the-world. Poetic making in these texts is
characterized by an attention and openness to the world—once again, the glas is
not a mirror but a window. The changing climate of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, the shifting atmosphere in two different Spring seasons, are
intertwined with the poetic process. As the environment shifts, so does poetry.
Like the General Prologue, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde begins in the
Spring, with two lovers meeting in the “the pleasant time of April,” “when the
fields are softly spread with new green leaves [. . . ] and sweetly smelling
flowers” (TC, 1.156-58). Henryson’s tale does not relate a story of spring love,
but follows the tragic fate of Cressida, which was left untold by Chaucer. The
mood of Henryson’s retelling corresponds with the turbulent atmosphere of
fifteenth century Scotland. In this way, Henryson is following the grain of the
natural world, so to speak, and his poem is formed out of the correspondence
between the maker and the material. In the words of Chaucer himself:
For it sits well---this truth is certainly plain----
81 Tim Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences (Bloomsbury Press, 2017), p. 125.
54
A woeful being should have a dreary companion,
And to a sorrowful tale, a sorrowful mood. ( TC, I 12-14)
"For wel sit it, the sothe for to seyne,
A woful wight to han a drery feere ,
And to a sorwful tale, a sory chere"
What is the relationship between late-medieval climate change and the
production and form of poetry? And how does the material world in which we
are enmeshed influence creative processes?  I think Henryson’s
phenomenologically grounded concept of correspondence helps shed some light
on these questions while also offering an alternate view of creativity to that of
the traditional hylomorphic model.
I complicate this notion of correspondence throughout the dissertation.
What happens when environmental forms work against the process of
creativity? In order to explore this question, I turn to the poetry of John Gower
and John Lydgate in Chapter Three, who use poetic form to negotiate unsettling
changes in the atmosphere. In the next chapter, I begin by situating Chaucer’s
House of Fame in larger contemporary discourses on movement. I chart some
of the ways in which natural science influenced late-medieval conceptions of
poetry. I argue that Chaucer’s House of Fame emphasizes Aristotelian natural
science and environmental forms in order to develop a poetics interested in
questions of matter and movement. Ultimately, I argue that the House of Fame
55
displays a view of creativity that encourages poetic engagement with the
“matere” of the world.
56
Chapter Two
The Whirl of Materials: Form and Movement in
Chaucer’s House of Fame
From the first line, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The House of Fame situates movement
as a central concern: “God turne us every drem to goode!” (1) The poem opens
with a meandering dubitatio on the “causes” of dreams, throughout which the
narrator wonders whether dreams have their genesis in sources ranging from
physical humors (blood, phlegm, choler, black bile), to asceticism, to “spirites”
(41). Chaucer ends his lengthy discourse on dream classification by echoing his
opening supplication, once again asking “he that mover ys of all” (81) to
“Turne us every drem to goode!” (58). As Deanne Williams explains, “Dreams
are subject to interpretation: they can be “turned” for better or worse.”82
Classifying Chaucer’s proem to The House of Fame as a “noisy opening,”
Williams argues that the first line is a “prayer” for a “goode” “interpretation that
acknowledges the difficulty of finding any stable meaning in the text.”83 Indeed,
the relationship between textual stability (both interpretive and formal) and a
world in perpetual motion, where texts “turne,” “moveth” (851), “congeal”
(1126), “multiply” (784), and “enclyne” (734), is on full display in The House
82 Deanne Williams, “Dream Visions,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer ed. Seth Lerer
(Yale University Press, 2005), p. 147.
83 Ibid. p. 147.
57
of Fame. The first part of this chapter argues for movement as an important
feature of late medieval aesthetics, and explores the overlapping discourses
between poetics and physics in the fourteenth century. After situating The
House of Fame within a late medieval aesthetics of movement, the second half
of the chapter explores the relationship between poetic form and the movement
of the natural world in The House of Fame. I conclude by exploring the
relationship between movement and Chaucer’s conception of multiplication,
concluding that the House of Fame encourages a view of poetry predicated on
engagement with the materiality of the world.
Movement and Aesthetics
Movement figures prominently as a literary trope in many late medieval texts.
The pilgrimage motif—which Chaucer comically employs in The House of
Fame—is perhaps the most obvious place where medieval literature and
movement meet. At the opening of The House of Fame, we find “Geffrey,” the
dreamer, having fallen fast into a deep sleep as if he had made a two mile
“pilgrymage” (116). As he sleeps, Geffrey dreams that he is wondering through
a temple “ymad of glas” (120). Moving “up and doune”(140) the hall of the
glass temple, he surveys images depicting scenes from Virgil’s
58
Aenied—pictorial representations that Kathryn McKinley has argued are “alive
with motion.”84
Whether it be geographical pilgrimage or “life as pilgrimage,”
movement was an essential requisite for religious pilgrimage and for closing the
gap between the human and the divine.85 Dante’s movement through the circles
of hell and the starry heavens, the spiritual and temporal movement of
Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, and the
movement of Chaucer’s pilgrims along the road to Canterbury, all exemplify an
aesthetic and formal interest in movement. In other words, these texts feature
movement as a prominent literary trope and aesthetic object. Mary Carruthers
argues that, in the later middle ages, the pilgrimage, or “journey,” functioned as
a central concept for understanding the mechanics of literary composition.
Carruthers explains,
84 Kathryn McKinley, “Ekphrasis as Aesthetic Pilgrimage in Chaucer’s House of Fame Book
1,” in Meaning in Motion: the Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art, eds. Nino
Zchomelidse and Giovanni Freni (Princeton Press, 2011), p. 223.
85 On pilgrimage as a literary motif, Dee Dyas explains, “The idea of journey was exploited by
many medieval writers, offering as it did a framework within which characters could
encounter new people and places, and explore not only new surroundings but also new levels
of understanding and self-knowledge.” Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature
700-1500 (2001), p. 2. Additionally, kinesthesis (the sense of movement) was not only an
important feature of the journey of the pilgrim, but also a critical aspect at the physical site of
pilgrimage. As Dyas explains, “in the later Middle Ages as bells rang, heavenly music filled
the air, and the scent of burning candles or the fragrant healing oil exuded by tombs such as
that of William of York surrounded pilgrims, and they themselves were moving, kneeling,
crawling, and placing themselves in niches, connecting through every form of touch with their
sacred surroundings.” Dee Dyas, The Dynamics of Pilgrimage: Christianity, Holy Places, and
Sensory Experience (Routledge, 2020), p. 30.
59
The concept that an artistic work is a journey (while certainly to be
found in ancient rhetoric) achieves a particular importance – even
ubiquity – in medieval analysis. One is said to travel through a
composition, whether of words or other materials, led on by the stylistic
qualities of its parts and their formally arranged relationships. Ductus
and its synonyms analyse the experience of artistic form as an ongoing,
dynamic process rather than as the examination of a static or completed
object. [. . . ] The art of the Middle Ages does not hold up a perfect
‘globed fruit’ but leads one in a walk along converging and diverging
paths.86
As Carruthers notes, ductus is the “quality in a work’s formal patterns” which
“sets a viewer or auditor or performer in motion with its structures,” an
“experience” more akin to “traveling through stages along a route than
perceiving a whole object.”87 As Geoffrey of Vinsauf explains in his Poetria
nova,
The poem’s progress now invites you onward. By means of your
pre-visualized image, direct your step further along the road’s course.
The way continues along two routes: there will be either a wide path or a
narrow, either a river or a brook. You may advance at a leisurely pace or
leap swiftly ahead. (lines 203-8)88
86 Mary Carruthers, “The Concept of Ductus, or, Journeying through a Work of Art” in
Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 190.
87 Ibid.
88 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova: “The material’s order may follow two possible courses:
at one time it advances along the pathway of art, at another it travels the smooth road of
nature.  Nature’s smooth road points the way when “things” and “words” follow the same
sequence, and the order of discourse does not depart from the order of occurrence. The poem
travels the pathway of art if a more effective order presents first what was later in time, and
defers the appearance of what was actually earlier (II.87-94) . . . [The artistic order is
superior.]  The air in this region of art may seem murky and the pathway rugged, the doors
60
For Geoffrey, even the phenomenal experience of reading a poem is
characterized by motion. Both readerly distraction and authorial digression can
be explained through concepts of motion where the author or the reader leaves
“the middle of the road” and, with a “leap,” “fl[ies] off to the side.” Carruthers
sums up the phenomenal experience of reading, viewing, performing, and
composing medieval art under the rubric of movement—“all medieval art
moves,” she explains, and “the characteristic values of aesthetic delight” in the
middle ages all “[imply] some movement.”89
What drives this coupling of movement and “aesthetic delight” in late
medieval literature? The aestheticization of movement owes much to the
concept of musica universalis, or the harmony of the “whirling heavens,” as
Boethius puts it.90 The Pythagorean “doctrine that the celestial bodies in their
eternal revolutions make a sweet harmony” was known to medieval writers as
the “harmony of the spheres.”91 Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, from which
locked and the theory itself entangled with knots.  Since that is so, the words that follow will
serve as physicians for that disorder.  Scan them well: here you will find a light to dispel the
darkness, safe footing to traverse rugged ground, a key to unlock the doors, a finger to loose
the knots. The way is thrown open; guide the reins of your mind as the nature of your course
demand” (II.104-112).
89 Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, (2013), p. 169.
90 4 Cons. phil. 1.m5.1–4: O stelliferi conditor orbis, / qui perpetuo nixus solio / rapido caelum
turbine uersas / legemque pati sidera cogis.
91 Andrew Hicks, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (Oxford,
2017), p. 20.
61
Chaucer drew inspiration for the opening lines of The House of Fame, explains
the concept of musica universalis in this way:92
“Hic est” inquit “ille qui interuallis coniunctus inparibus, sed tamen
pro rata parte ratione distinctis, inpulsu et motu ipsorum orbium
efficitur, et acuta cum grauibus temperans uarios aequabiliter
concentus efficit; nec enim silentio tanti motus incitari possunt, et
natura fert ut extrema ex altera grauiter, ex altera autem acute sonent.
(88-89)
[That is a concord of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless
carefully proportioned intervals, caused by the rapid motion of the
spheres themselves. The high and low tones blended together produce
different harmonies. Of course such swift motions could not be
accomplished in silence and, as nature requires, the spheres at one
extreme produce the low tones and at the other extreme the high
tones.] (73)
While medieval commentators held that the harmony caused by the rotation
of the spheres could not be heard by human ears, nonetheless the relationship
between rotation and harmony in the musica universalis led medieval writers
to equate motion with beauty. As Boethius explains:
Hic si frena remiserit,
quicquid nunc amat invicem
bellum continuo geret
et quam nunc socia fide
92 Chaucer knew the Somnium Scipionis through Macrobius’s commentary on the work. In his
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, which Chaucer references in PF, HoF, and BD,
Macrobius dedicates several chapters to the mathematical qualities of music and an
explanation of musica universalis. Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentary on the
Dream of Scipio. ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl (NY: Columbia UP, 1952).
62
pulchris motibus incitant
certent solvere machinam.
[If love’s rein slackened
All things now held by mutual love
At once would fall to warring with each other
Striving to wreck that engine (machina) of the world.
Which now they drive
In mutual trust with motion beautiful.]93
This celestial harmony is driven by divine love while also being “grounded in
material interactions and intermaterial relations” (the planets themselves) and,
as Andrew Hicks has argued, “serves not just as the foregrounded subject of
discourse about the world but even as the unarticulated ground for thinking
and theorizing the world at all.”94 It is important to draw attention to the
essential role that movement plays in Boethius’s conception of cosmic
harmony and to also note the aestheticization of movement in his reference to
the pulchris motibus “motion beautiful” that drives the engine of the world.95
In his Middle English translation of the Consolation, Chaucer translates
Boethius’s pulchris motibus as “fayre moevyngs,” saying:
And yif this love slakede the bridelis, alle thynges that now loven hem
togidres wolden make batayle contynuely, and stryven to fordo the
93 Boethius (2.m8.16–21)
94 Andrew Hicks, Composing the World, p. 5.
95 (Par. XXXIII, 143-45) “But already my desire and will were turned, like a wheel that spins
with even motion, by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Dante’s lines closing
paradiso.
63
fasoun of this world, the which they now leden in accordable feith by
fayre moevynges.96
Averroës, writing in the twelfth century, illustrates the close relationship
between motion and harmony by explaining that “if motion were destroyed,
so would the heaven itself. Indeed, the heaven exists because of its motion;
and if celestial motion were destroyed, the motion of all inferior beings would
be destroyed and so also would the world.”97
By the fourteenth century, movement played a central role in the study
of natural philosophy, particularly in the work of writers such as John
Buridan, Thomas Bradwardine, and Nicole Oresme.98 William of Ockham
(1287-1347) devotes ample time to the discussion of motion and mobility,
starting book three of his Brevis Summa Libri Physicorum by quoting
Aristotle, saying, “Since nature is a principle of motion or of change and our
inquiry is about nature, we should not neglect to inquire what a motion is, for
if we are ignorant of what a motion is, we are of necessity ignorant of what
96 Chaucer, Boece, Book II, Met. 8. p. 420.
97 Edward Grant, History of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 174–75.
98 John Buridan, “The impetus theory of projectile motion, from ‘Questions on the Eight
Books of the Physics of Aristotle’” (translated by M. Clagett), in A Source Book in Medieval
Science, edited by Edward Grant (Harvard University Press, 1974); Nicole Oresme, Nicole
Oresme and the Kinematics of Circular Motion: Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel
incommensurabilitate motuum celi. Translated by Edward Grant (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1971); Thomas Bradwardine, Thomas of Bradwardine: His Tractatus de
proportionibus; Its Significance for the Development of Mathematical Physics. Translated by
H. Lamar Crosby (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955).
64
nature is.”99Anneliese Maier has argued that motion was the “first and
foremost problem of scholastic physics” explaining that its “importance to
scholastic thinking is far greater than the corresponding concept of motion in
Galilean and post-Galilean mechanics, and it in fact amounts to a generalized
concept of physical process.”100 As Matthew Boyd Goldie explains, “In the
Middle Ages, motion was not as it is today, a subfield of the larger discipline
of physics. It was central to virtually all understandings of the natural
world.”101 The study of motion and the study of the physical world were
virtually synonymous in the later middle ages. Concepts such as generation,
corruption, alteration, change, and multiplication all belong to the study of
movement in late medieval natural philosophy. These concepts within natural
philosophy, concerning the nature of movement, worked their way into the
vernacular poetry of England and Scotland in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Aristotelian science supplied forms and concepts that, in turn,
influenced the form and production of poetry, particularly for poets such as
99 Ockham on Aristotle's Physics: A Translation of Ockham's Brevis Summa Libri Physicorum,
translated by Julian Davies, (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1989) p. 39. From
Aristotle, Physics 3.1. William of Ockham, Opera philosophica, vol. VI: Brevis summa libri
physicorum, Summula philosophiae naturalis, et Quaestiones in libros physicorum aristotelis
(St. Bonaventure: Editiones Instituti Franciscani Universitatis S. Bonaventurae, 1974), 39
100 Anneliese Maier, “The Nature of Motion,” On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected
Writings of Anneliese Meier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 22.
101 Goldie, Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science
(Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 123. Goldie presents a helpful overview of motion and
space in the later middle ages.
65
Chaucer and Gower.
Poetry and Natural Philosophy
Alongside geographic and internal pilgrimage and the musica universalis, the
idea of movement as an aesthetic concepts also derives from the late medieval
coupling of natural philosophy and poetry. For example, in his prologue to the
Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Osbern Bokenham (1393-1464) describes the
material and formal causes of his poetic work using the Aristotelian language of
causation. He explains that there are “Two thyngys owyth every clerk/ To
advertysn, begnnyng a werk”: the “what” and the “why.” These two words
correspond to Aristotle’s four causes (“The foure causys combrehendyd be”)
and must be parsed out at the beginning of “of every book.” Bokenham begins
with the “what,” explaining:
The fyrst is clepyd cause efficyent,
The secunde they clepe cause materyal,
Formal the thrydde, the fourte fynal.
The efficyent cause is the auctour,
Wych aftyr his cunnyng doth hys labour
To acomplyse the begunne matere,
Which cause is secunde; and the more clere
That it maye be, the formal cause
Settyth in dew ordre clause be clause.
And these thre thyngys longyn to “what”:
Auctour, matere, and forme ordinat. (Lines 1-20)
[The first is called the efficient cause
66
The second they call the material cause,
Formal the third, the fourth final.
The efficient cause is the author,
Which, according to his skill, is his labor
To finish the matter he has begun,
Which is the second cause; and the more clear
That is may be, the formal cause
Sits in due order clause by clause.
And these three things belong to “what”
Author, matter, and form properly ordered.]102
Bokenham’s lines refer to what A.J. Minnis has termed the “Aristotelian
Prologue.”103 The Aristotelian Prologue draws on Aristotle’s theory of causality
to make sense of auctorite and the composition of literature. The theory goes
that, based on the Aristotelian scheme, the efficient cause (causa efficiens) was
the auctor, the material cause (causa materialis) was the subject matter or the
source materials of the author’s work, the formal cause (causa formalis) was the
organizational structure of the work, and the final cause (causa formalis) was
the purpose of the work, the end (finis) or justification for “why,” to quote
Bokenham, the work exists.
This four-fold system of causation made its way into the prologues and
writings of both Latin and English authors in the fourteenth century. By
implementing this system of causation, fourteenth-century writers bridged the
102 Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen in The Idea of the Vernacular: An
Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne,
Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University of Penn State Press, 1999).
103 Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 28.
67
gap between contemporary understandings of materiality—based in scholastic
commentaries on Aristotle’s Physica and Metaphysica—and literary theory.
The entwining of contemporary understandings of materiality and
literary theory, and the framework of the Aristotelian prologue, owes much to
the popularization of Aristotle's writings in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. In 1255, the faculty at The University of Paris formally prescribed
Aristotle’s scientific works on the material world for study and public
discussion---including the Physics, which was devoted to the principles of
change and motion; Metaphysics, which was concerned with questions of being,
causation, form and matter; On the Heavens, which was concerned with the
motions and the heavenly and terrestrial bodies; On Meteorology, which
described things like wind, thunder, lighting, rain, and other upper-terrestrial
phenomena; On Animals, which considered animal behavior and the complex
cognitive process of animal life; and On Generation and Corruption, which was
concerned with transformation, alteration, growth, chemical change, and
transmutation of the four basic elements.104 By the middle of the thirteenth
century, Aristotle’s works on logic and science made up the core curriculum of
study for the Master of Arts degree at Oxford and Paris. It is hard to overstate
104 “The Natural Books of Aristotle in the Arts Curriculum at The University of Paris in
1255,” letter from the Paris Faculty of the Arts. Trans. Lynn Thorndike in Grant, Edward. A
Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp.
44-45.
68
the importance of Aristotle’s scientific works on late medieval higher
education.105 Virtually all beginning arts students were required to learn these
scientific texts before advancing to higher degrees in canon and civil law,
medicine, and theology.106 In The General Prologue, Chaucer’s portrait of the
Oxford clerk who remarks on “Twenty books, clad in blak or reed,/ Of Aristotle
and his philosophie” (I. 294-5) is a direct reference to Aristotle’s libri naturales
(natural books) and demonstrates the centrality of natural philosophy to all
university students, even ecclesiastical students such as the Clerk.
105 While Aristotle’s scientific works were formally prescribed at Oxford and Paris, they were
not accepted uncritically. Most famously, in 1277, Stephen Tempier, the Bishop of Paris,
prohibited the teaching of 219 philosophical theses being discussed at the University of Paris.
Tempier’s condemnation of many tenets of Aristotelian science raised questions, both inside
and outside of the university, about the status of Aristotle’s philosophy and whether or not
parts of it were heretical. Parts of this expansive condemnation included questions of the
physics of motion—in particular, rectilinear motion. While natural philosophers in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries acknowledged the importance of motion, debates about the
finer points concerning the physics of movement were prevalent. For a helpful overview of the
condemnations of 1277 and the subsequent questioning of medieval natural philosophy, see:
Thijssen, J. M. M. H., Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400
(Philadelphia, 1998); Aertsen, Jan A., Emery, Kent and Speer, Andreas. After the
Condemnation of 1277: Philosophy and Theology at the University of Paris in the Last
Quarter of the Thirteenth Century. (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2013). Concerning early
tensions at the University of Paris, see: Spencer E. Young, Scholarly Community at the Early
University of Paris: Theologians, Education, and Society, 1215-1248 (Cambridge, 2014). For
a study of debates surrounding Ockham’s work (an important figure in the history of the
physics of motion), see: William J. Courtenay, “The Academic and Intellectual Worlds of
Ockham,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
106 Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971), pp. 21-22.
69
Chaucer takes Aristotelian natural philosophy as his subject in Book II of
The House of Fame. In the poem, Geffrey is carried up into the atmosphere by
an eagle who has been tasked with guiding the poet to Fame’s house. Along
their journey through the air, the eagle gives the poet a lesson on Aristotle’s
principle of motion. The eagle explains,
Geffrey, thou wost ryght wel this,
That every kyndely thyng that is
Hath a kyndely stede ther he
May best in hyt conserved be;
Unto which place every thyng
Thorgh his kyndely enclynyng
Moveth for to come to
Whan that hyt is awey therfro
(729-36)
Geffrey, you know this quite well,
That every natural thing that is
Has a natural place where
It will be most well suited;
Towards which place every thing
Through its natural inclination
Moves so as to come there
When it is far from that place107
The eagle explains that “every kindly thing” has a place to which it moves. The
eagle puts forth this theory of motion in order to explain the process by which
107 See Aristotle, especially Physics, VIII: “And yet this is what is being inquired into, namely,
why it is that the light and the heavy do move to their own place. And the cause is that it is
natural for them to be somewhere, and this is the being for the light and the heavy, the one
being determined by up and the other by down.” Physics, VIII.4.
70
all sound, both poetry and noise, arrives at the House of Fame or the House of
Rumor. The notion that everything has its proper place, or “stede,” derives from
Aristotle’s Physics—where physical things like stones and smoke move either
upwards or downwards according to their natural inclination.108 Questions of
natural philosophy in general and motion in particular were equally at home in
late medieval poetry as they were in philosophical commentaries or the
Aristotelian questiones in which university students were engaged. Kellie
Robertson has argued for the importance of natural science to late medieval
poets, including Chaucer, Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Deguileville, and John
Lydgate. In particular, Robertson focuses on late medieval poetry which
features the allegorical figure of Nature. She explains, “Aristotelian science was
a [. . .] significant influence on certain medieval poets, who found in natural
philosophical texts sources of formal and generic distinction that, in turn,
shaped the literary field.”109 Aristotelian notions of movement and motion
influenced the formal properties of The House of Fame and provided concepts
108 Chaucer was exposed to many sources through which he would have encountered
Aristotle’s notion of natural inclination, including Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.
Chaucer’s translation of the Consolation states, ‘‘Alle thynges seken ayen to hir propre cours,
and alle thynges rejoysen hem of hir retornynge ayen to hir nature. Ne noon ordenaunce is
bytaken to thynges, but that that hath joyned the endynge to the bygynnynge, and hath maked
the cours of itself stable (that it chaunge nat from his propre kynde).’’See Rebecca Davis,
“Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” pp. 108-110.
109 Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks, p. 15.
71
through which Chaucer theorized the way in which poetry moves, circulates,
multiplies, and corresponds with the natural world.
It was not just Chaucer that took interest in questions of natural
philosophy; contemporary poets such as John Gower and Thomas Usk appealed
to Aristotelian terms in order to reckon with their own poetic projects. For
example, Gower explains,
And forto speke of this matiere
Touchende love and his Supplant,
A tale which is acordant
Unto thin Ere I thenke enforme.
Now herkne, for this is the forme.
(Confessio Amantis, 11.2496-500)110
Genius, the lover’s guide, desires to put his “matiere” into a “forme.”111 The
pairing of matter and form in this passage is standard to Aristotelian natural
science. Just as the Aristotelian Prologue drew on Aristotle’s theory of
causation, examining the material and conceptual causes of a work, Gower here
appeals to “hylomorphism,” another, related, facet of Aristotelian philosophy
(see Chapter One).
110 John Gower, Confessio Amantis edition from Gower’s Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck,
with Latin Translations by Andrew Galloway. 3vols. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute
Publications, 2000-2005 (vol. 1 revd. 2006;vol. 2 revd 2013; translations revised 2021 [online
only]). All Gower citations from this edition.
111 James Simpson has noted the “standard philosophical pairing (of form and matter)” in this
passage. See Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s
Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1995), p. 4.
72
Late medieval poets did not use Aristotle’s work uncritically. Chaucer
and Gower elaborated upon and broke from a number of Aristotelian concepts
widely accepted in medieval natural philosophy. For example, Gower
problematizes the same notion of matter and form that he appeals to in the
passage above. Gower posits a matter called “Ylem,” a Middle English
rendering of the Aristotelian Greek term “hyle,” for primordial matter. Gower
says,
For yit withouten eny forme
Was that matiere universal,
Which hihte Ylem in special.
Of Ylem, as I am enformed,
These elementz ben mad and formed,
Of Ylem elementz they hote
After the Scole of Aristote,
Of whiche if more I schal reherce,
Foure elementz ther ben diverse.112
Not only does Gower coin an English term for Aristotle’s prime matter, putting
formless matter into linguistic form, he also challenges Aristotle’s conception of
hyle.113 Gower explains that “ylem” was “withouten eny forme.” This statement
is an impossibility in Aristotelian hylomorphism, as even prime matter cannot
exist apart from form. Furthermore, Gower plays on the meaning of “form” in
this passage, explaining “Of ylem, as I am enformed.” On one level, Gower is
112 John Gower, Confessio Amantis VII.214–22 [239].
113 For a helpful overview of Gower’s concept of Ylem, see: J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming
Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minn. Press, 2014), pp. 52-55.
73
formed from the primordial matter that he is referencing, and at the same time
he is informed from his studies, after the “Scole of Aristotle,” in that same
matter. The formation of elements in this passage and Gower’s poetic informing
and reformation of his matiere extend Aristotle’s hylomorphism into the realm
of late medieval literary theory.
We should note the relationship between medieval poetry and materiality
is evidenced in the multiple meanings of the word matere. Gower uses the term
in the passage above to refer to the subject matter that he will be writing about,
but the play between the subject matter of a work and the material matter of the
world was not lost on medieval authors. Rather than a dead metaphor, the
relationship between physical matter and poetic matter was very much alive for
late medieval poets. Instead of a separation between scientific discourse and
poetics, as is imagined today, medieval poetry assumed knowledge of the
material world and was considered a standard forum for asking questions about
the nature of the material world and its relation to the human.114
Critics such as Kathryn L. Lynch, Mark Miller, J. Allen Mitchell, and
James Simpson, have noted the ways in which late medieval poets such as
Chaucer and Gower were interested in contemporary philosophical questions.
Though they were not interested in philosophy in a technical sense, and they
most often refused to take particular positions on any one philosophical issue,
114 See Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” p. 114.
74
Chaucer and Gower were both familiar with contemporary philosophical
debates on a range of subjects. Kathryn L. Lynch has argued that Chaucer was
deeply acquainted with thirteenth century scholasticism and, in the tradition of
the Boethian consolation, drew on scholastic discussions in his dream visions in
order to raise philosophical problems concerning morality, logic, and
epistemology.115 Indeed, even Chaucer’s contemporaries and predecessors
lauded him as a great “philosophical poete.”116 Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426)
praises Chaucer as “hier in philosophie/ To Aristotle.”117 In his Testament of
Love, Thomas Usk (d. 1388) praises Geoffrey Chaucer as “the noble
philosophical poete in Englissh speche.”118 What did these poets and
commentators mean when they called Chaucer a philosophical poet? It is often
assumed that, in the later middle ages, references to philosophy—or
“philosophie” in middle english—primarily referred to questions of moral
philosophy.119 While critics such Kathryn Lynch, Diane Watt, and Mark Miller
have shown that moral philosophy figured heavily in Chaucer and Gower’s
poetry, it is hardly the case that references to “philosophie” in late medieval
115 Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000).
116 Thomas Usk refers to Chaucer as “the noble philosophical poete in Englissh speche.” The
Testament of Love, ed. R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998),
3.4.231.
117 Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, 2087-88.
118 Thomas Usk, Testament of Love, 3.4.231. William Caxton, writing nearly a century after
Usk, praises “that noble & grete philosopher Gefferey chaucer the which for his ornate
wrytyng in our tongue maye wel haue the name of a laureate poete.”
119 For an excellent overview of the term “philosophie,” see Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks
(2017), pp. 11-16.
75
poetry were confined to the moral or ethical. As we have seen, a university
education in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have primarily
consisted of work in natural philosophy. Furthermore, Aristotle’s Ethics was not
adopted into the university curriculum at Paris and Oxford until the middle of
the fourteenth century, nearly a century after the libri naturales (Aristotle’s
books on natural science), and it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that it began
to be intensely studied.120 With this in mind, it is not a stretch to suggest that
Hoccleve and Usk most likely had natural philosophy in mind when they lauded
Chaucer as a great philosophical poet.121 I do not mean to suggest that the term
“philosophie” can be strictly relegated to either natural philosophy or ethics in
late medieval literature. In fact, as Kellie Robertson argues, pre-Enlightenment
culture had a “philosophical ambidexterity” that was “broad enough to render a
writer’s physics inseparable from his or her ethics.”122 This dynamic
understanding of philosophy emphasizes the importance of examining
pre-Enlightenment notions of materiality, as “the theories of material substance
a society embraces (or chooses to reject) have a profound influence on the
narratives that it can use to explain its own cultural values to itself.”123 In The
120 Georg Wieland, “The Reception and Interpretation of Aristotle’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge
History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg,
and Eleonore Stump, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 657–72.
121 After the general sense of “knowledge, learning, scholarship,” the MED lists “natural
science” as the most common definition of “philosophie.” The relationship between medieval
ethics and physics is the subject of Kellie Robertson’s Nature Speaks (2017).
122 Robertson, Nature Speaks, p. 15.
123 Ibid.
76
House of Fame, the physical world of flux and motion set out by Aristotelian
philosophy provides a template for Chaucer’s understanding of poetics.
In its obsession with motion, medieval art (and poetry in particular) is in
tune with the physical world that it seeks to represent. As Mary Carruthers
explains, “[t]he biophysical world of compounds, mixtures, flux, affect, and
continuous movement among opposites is also the realm of medieval aesthetic
experience, embracing all that responds to human-created arts and their
artefacts.”124 The relationship between poetry and the environment (or art and
nature) cuts to the heart of a larger argument running throughout the
dissertation: that medieval poetry not only looks to the “biophysical world” in
order to faithfully represent that world, but also looks to the environment for the
forms through which it may represent that world. I argue that this idea, that
poetry looks to nature for its own forms, is one that Chaucer engages with
throughout The House of Fame.
Movement in The House of Fame
Many scholars have noted Chaucer’s concern with movement in The House of
Fame.125 Steven Kruger has argued that the poem “is held together not so much
124 Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (2013), pp. 34-5.
125 Thomas R. Schnieder, "Chaucer's Physics: Motion in The House of Fame." In The
Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits. Ed. James Smith (New York: Punctum Books, 2017);
Matthew Boyd Goldie, “Motion in Literature: Place and Movement in The House of Fame,” in
Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science (2019);
77
by central themes or unities as by a consistent, if complicated pattern of
movement,” noting the relationship between movement and the poem's
self-conscious examination of “its own status as a poetic construct.”126
However, as Kruger notes, in its self-examination, the poem is “not
self-enclosed,” but rather explores the process of poetic production with gentle
attention to the “forces beyond the self that shape the poem and even the self
itself,” one of these “forces” being movement. Exploring the relationship
between form and motion, Rebecca Davis has argued for what she terms a
“fugitive poetics” in The House of Fame, where poetic form accommodates the
dynamism of the material world of flux and “transit.”127 Davis explains,
In The House of Fame, physics works against notions of form as a fixed
structure, a container for matter, or an ordered arrangement of parts, but
Chaucer does not give up on form. Instead the poem asks us to
reconceive form’s relationship to matter, and to think of poetic form not
as an end point but as a conduit through which dynamic matter takes
shape.128
Along with Kruger and Davis, this chapter explores the ways in which the poem
“moves out into the natural world” in order to negotiate the relationship
Alexander N. Gabrovsky, “Thought Experiments in Geffrey’s Dream: The Poetics of Motus
Localis, Measurement, and Relativity in the House of Fame,” in Chaucer the Alchemist
(Palgrave, 2016), pp. 27–64.
126 Steven Kruger, “Imagination and the Complex Movement of Chaucer’s House of Fame,”
The Chaucer Review 28, no. 2 (1993): 117–34, at 117.
127 Rebecca Davis, “Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame” p. 102.
128 Ibid. pp. 103-4.
78
between form and an Aristotelian world where matter moves, congeals,
multiplies, and inclines.129 Similar to the notion of correspondence in the
previous chapter, I argue that Chaucer follows along the affordances of the
natural world. In this case, the vigorous and motile nature of the material world.
The movement, proliferation, and generation presented by the natural world
supply Chaucer with the very forms that allow him to represent that same
world. Chaucer develops a poetics that follows along the dynamic lines of
movement afforded by the environment, participating in the same process of
correspondence that we saw in Henryson’s poetry.
As I noted above, Book II of The House of Fame begins with “Geffrey”
stepping outside of the Temple of Glass and being snatched up in the eagle’s
talons. He is then led through the air into the atmosphere, moving from standing
in a “large felde [. . . ] withouten toun or hous or  tree” (482-84) to “See yonder,
lo, [ . . . ] the Milky Wey” (936-37). While journeying upwards, the eagle’s
physics lesson centers on issues of sound and movement. The eagle explains,
That every speche of every man,
As I thee telle first began,
Moveth up on high to pace
Kindely to Fames place. (849-52)
All “speche,” indeed every sound, moves towards “Fames place.” This
movement can be taken in the physical sense of moved air, as Priscian explains
129 Steven Kruger, “Imagination,” p. 117.
79
in his Institutiones  grammaticae that vox is “aerem tenuissimum ictum vel
suum sensibile aurium” “thin  struck air or its sensible effect on the ears”
(1.1.1). The eagle draws on Priscian:
Soun is nought but air y-broken,
And every speche that is spoken,
Loud or privee, foul or fair,
In his substaunce is but air; (765-68)
The eagle also says that speech “ys but air” (768), and “Enclyned ys
upward to  meve” (824-25). Chaucer is commenting here on the long
grammatical tradition that classifies the nature of vox as “spoken utterances
[that] have a corporeal substance — air.” The relationship between sound
and poetry in this passage has been noted by a number of scholars.130 As
Stephen Kruger explains, the “fate of sound and tidings in the realm of
Fame is clearly related to the poet’s craft. After all, the pillars of the poets
130 See Katherine Zieman, "Chaucer's Voys." Representations 60 (1997): 70-91. Zieman
explains: “Within a culture that was in many ways sustained by performative speech acts, a
peasant's "voice" (rather than his "speech" or "talk") would not inevitably suggest access to a
peasant consciousness. Nor would a "voice" necessarily imply "orality" (in its current and
inaccurate usage as "not related to writing"). Given the scripted, self-consciously textualized
nature of such speech acts and their frequently intimate connection with written texts, the
presence of a "voice" would not immediately signal opposition to, or exclusion from, literate
discourse,” p. 72. See also: Martin Irvine, “Medieval Grammatical Theory and Chaucer’s
House of Fame.” Speculum 60, no. 4 (1985): 850–76. For the most thorough study of sound in
The House of Fame see: Adin Lears, World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval
England (2020). Lears’s chapter on noise in the poem is “interested in the fluid movement of
information and of meaning in the poem and in the ways that Chaucer evokes this flux through
the poem’s form.” World of Echo, p. 130.
80
are set up in Fame’s hall. And the dreamer’s journey to the Houses of Fame
and Tidings depends on his own status as a poet.”131 Therefore, in speaking
of how articulate sound (vox) moves, the eagle is teaching Geffrey about
poetry as well as the “communicative and memorializing processes upon
which poetry depends.”132 The close relationship between vox and air
underscores, at the most basic level, the ways in which poetic form is
indebted to the material forms of the environment. Ingrid Nelson comments
on the importance of air in this passage, explaining:
Air in this passage acts as the physical medium through which
speech is transmitted, like a premodern radio: it “up bereth” speech,
or indeed any sound. The eagle’s explanation emphasizes the
materiality of air, its status as a “body,” as Aristotelian science has it,
equivalent to the human body in its capacity to represent and to
mediate, as well as its hypermediacy in the “multiplicacioun” of
sounds.133
The relationship between air and poetry is emphasized again later in the
poem as Eolus, the god of the winds, acts as Fame’s laborer. In Book III,
groups of individuals stand before Fame where she decides if their
“werkes” (1666) should be lost and forgotten or remembered forever
throughout the world. After Fame hears the plees of each group, she
131 Kruger, “Imagination and the Complex Movement of Chaucer’s House of Fame”p. 119.
132 Ibid. p. 120.
133 Ingrid Nelson, “Ambient Media and Chaucer’s House of Fame,” p. 571.
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commands Eolus to blow their “werkes and [. . .] name” (1696) all “thurgh
the world” (1674) or to the depths and hidden places of the earth to be
forgotten. Eolus, and by extension the air itself, mediates the poetry that
arrives at the Fame’s house, distributing to its “ kyndely stede” (731).
In order to explain the way in which every “speche, or noyse, or
soun” (783) — even those “piped of a mous” — is carried to the House of
Fame, the eagle employs a phenomenological example, drawing on one’s
perception of a stone dropping into a body of water. The eagle explains,
I preve hyt thus -- take hede now --
Be experience; for yf that thow
Throwe on water now a stoon,
Wel wost thou, hyt wol make anoon 790
A litel roundell as a sercle,
Paraunter brod as a covercle;
And ryght anoon thow shalt see wel,
That whel wol cause another whel,
And that the thridde, and so forth, brother, 795
Every sercle causynge other
Wydder than hymselve was;
And thus fro roundel to compas,
Ech aboute other goynge
Causeth of othres sterynge 800
And multiplyinge ever moo,
Til that hyt be so fer ygoo,
That hyt at bothe brynkes bee.
By appealing to Geffrey’s phenomenological experience of rippling water,
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the eagle literally asks Geffrey to look to the physical forms of the
environment in order to understand how vox moves and therefore how
poetry moves and is shaped. The form of the passage takes the rippling
effect of the water as its model. The ripples “multiplying ever moo” (801) is
captured in the proliferation of words containing the letter “W” that proceed
after the introduction of “water” at the beginning of the passage: “Wel,”
“wol” (790); “wel” (793); “whel,” “wol,” “whel”(794). These terms follow
one another and multiply in quick succession, just as the movement of one
“sercle” in water causes the next in the eagle’s example. We see another
example of movement and the multiplication of form later in the poem, as
Geffrey approaches the House of Rumor.
The House of Rumor is the destination originally promised by the
eagle (2000-01), the place where Geffrey will hear some “newe tydynges”
from which he will create poetry. Geffrey describes the House of Rumor as
a whirling wicker structure that
Was mad of twigges, falwe, rede,
And grene eke, and somme weren white,
Switch as men to these cages thwite,
Or maken of these panyers,
Or elles hottes or dossers;
That, for the swough and for the twygges,
This house was also ful of gygges,
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And also ful eke of chirkynges,
And of many other workings;
And eke this hous hath of entrees
As fele as of leves ben in trees
In somer, what they grene been;
And on the roof men may yet seen
A thousand holes, and wel moo,
To leten wel the soun out goo.
(1936-50)
The whirling structure contains all of the sounds that have traveled upwards
before they are processed by Fame. The promise of entering the House of
Rumor and hearing “newe tydynges” is the “promise of locating the raw
materials of vernacular poetry.”134 Interestingly, the raw materials of poetry
are housed within a structure woven of “twigges” (1936). These twigs are
described as being vibrantly multi-colored, appearing as “falwe,” “rede,”
“grene,” and “white.” This description bears a striking resemblance to the
figure of Nature herself in Alan de Lille’s De planctu naturae. Alan
describes the dress of Nature, saying:
[Nature’s] dress, woven from silk-smooth wool, kaleidoscopic in its
various colours, served the purpose of a robe of office for the
maiden. Changing circumstances, which substituted one hue for
another, altered the garment with a varied display of colour. At first
whitened to the brightness of the lily, it dazzled the eyes. Secondly,
134 Katherine Zieman, “Chaucer’s Voys” p. 84. Zieman concludes that what Geffrey ultimately
finds in the House of Rumor is “chaos.”
84
as though moved to repentance and struggling to amend, it shone
forth in a blood-red colour. Thirdly, at the peak of perfection, it
gladdened the eyes with an emerald green. This garment, however,
was woven so exceedingly fine that it evaded the searching eyes and
its material reached such a degree of fineness that it and air shared
the same nature.135
Chaucer directly references this passage in The Parliament of Fowls: “And
right as Aleyn in the Pleynt of Kinde/ Devyseth Nature of aray and face”
(316-17). Like the multi-colored twigs that make up the House of Rumor,
Nature’s dress is described as “kaleidoscopic in its various colours.”
Additionally, the dress seems to move in this passage, changing color and
undergoing alterations, evoking a similar (albeit less intense) sense of
movement as that of the House of Rumor. The connection between these
two passages underscores the relationship between poetry and the forms of
Nature, as the House of Rumor, dressed in the garments of Nature, contains
the “raw materials of vernacular poetry.” Rather than advocating for a view
wherein these raw materials are formed according to some internal structure
first generated in the mind, Geffrey instead enters into the whirling structure
and is enmeshed in the mass of raw materials. In the midst of this whirling
structure, Geffrey describes the “tydynges” that he experiences. He
135 Alan de Lille, De planctu naturae Prose I, pp. 85-6.
85
explains,
And over alle the houses angles
Is ful of rounynges and of jangles
Of werres, of pees, of mariages,
Of reste, of labour, of viages,
Of abood, of deeth, of lyfe,
Of love, of hate, acord, of stryf,
Of loos, of lore, and of wynnynges,
Of hele, of seknesse, of bildynges,
Of faire wyndes, and of tempestes,
Of qwalm of folk, and ek of bestes;
Of dyvers transmutacions
Of estats, and eke of regiouns;
Of trust, of drede, of jelousye,
Of wit, of wynnynge, of folye;
Of plente, and of gret famyne,
Of chepe, of derth, and of ruyne;
Of good or mys governement,
Of fyr, and of dyvers accident.
(1959–76)
As with the ripples of water in the eagle’s physics lesson, the “tydynges” in
this passage proliferate and multiply. The position of “O” at the beginning
of each line mimics the effect of the “litel roundel[s] as a sercle” (791,
“little ripples shaped like a circle”) in the eagle’s physics lesson, with the
beginning of each line initiating a new “roundel.”136 Eleanor Johnson argues
136 Concerning these lines, Rebecca Davis argues that the series of “O”s mimic the form of the
House of Rumor itself. She explains: “Visually the anaphora ‘‘pokes holes’’ in the text. Its
vertical line of capital ‘‘O’’s conjures the form of Rumor’s ventilated edifice upon the
perforated manuscript page. Aurally the repetition of ‘‘O’’ (not only in the initial genitive
‘‘Of,’’ but in the ‘‘O’’s that proliferate along each horizontal line) echoes the assonant
description of the roof’s ‘‘thousand holes, and wel moo,’’ rounded apertures designed to let the
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that “the very grammar of this passage reinforces its lack of logical
causality and necessity,” suggestion that
This wicker house of tidings figures architecturally what the poem
has been suggesting narratively all along: there is no one single,
natural, necessary, or inevitable path for knowledge to travel down;
instead, a plethora of apertures, none with logical or causal relation
to another, form conduits for the pushiest or most urgent bits of
tidings to escape from and return to.137
The lack of causal relations between the multitude of tidings returns us to
the beginning of the poem, where Chaucer asks “what causeth swevenes”
(3, “what causes dreams”). Indeed, The House of Fame displays a sustained
interest in the nature of causation, from dreams to ripples to tidings, and the
“unpredictabilities of a universe not governed by causality in any useful or
stable way.”138 The lack of a final cause or end goal throughout the poem, as
well as the fact that the poem itself is unfinished, underscores the attention
to movement in the poem and concern with poetry as process. Rather than
searching for some sense of formal stability, The House of Fame eschews
‘‘soun out goo’’. As the catalogue enumerates its contents, it simultaneously disperses them. It
also draws attention to the speaking mouth as orifice of outgoing sound, framing the poet’s (or
any reader’s) own body as the material passageway of ‘‘tydynges.’’”Adin Lears argues: “In
oral recitation, these lines produce the same result in the mouth as it shapes itself into a circle
pronouncing the repeated “Of ”s. In effect, the poem’s form at this moment turns both the page
and the body into a porous and resonant echo chamber like the House of Rumor itself.” World
of Echo, p. 159.
137 Eleanor Johnson, “Against Order,” in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge
University Press, 2018), p. 68.
138 Ibid. p. 70.
87
neat, anthropocentric (or internal) approaches to literary creation in order to
embrace the Aristotelian world of flux and movement. Just as a carpenter
engages with the materials of the environment and follows along the grain
of the wood, poetic makyng is about entering into the chaotic whirl of poetic
“matiere” and following the forms afforded by that matter. In The House of
Fame, the world of motion, flux, and non-linear causality constitute what
Rebecca Davis has called a “fugative poetics.” As Davis explains, in The
House of Fame, “fugitive poetics discovers in motion not an antithesis to
form but its condition of possibility.”139 Indeed, rather than finding stability
in a world of movement, it is the poem itself that enacts connectivity and
provides structure. Like the House of Rumor, the passage above provides a
“propre mansyon” (754, “dwelling place”) in its ability to collect and
contain the ever proliferating list of “newe tydyngs.” As Tom Griffiths
explains, “narrative is not just a means, it is a method, and a rigorous and
demanding one. The conventional scientific method separates causes from
one another, it isolates each one and tests them individually in turn.
Narrative, by contrast, carries multiple causes along together, it enacts
connectivity.”140 This type of poetic formation and enactment stands in stark
139 Davis, “Fugitive Poetics,” p. 132.
140 Tom Griffiths, “The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia,” Australian
Humanities Review 43 (2007). Interestingly, the one place in the poem where movement
seems to stop is when Geffrey is standing at the center of the House of Rumor. Standing in the
midst of a house whirling with the “raw material of vernacular poetry,” Geffrey explains,
88
contrast to the view of representation espoused by Jonathan Bate and other
“ecopoetry” advocates. The House of Fame does not represent the material
world as rythmic, harmonious, or static; it does not seek to represent the
environment as a calcified backdrop or stable material awaiting
human-guided creativity (as with Vinsauf). Instead, the poem captures and
enacts an Aristotelian world of vibrant material movement, charged with
poetic materials (“tydyngs”) that are all “enclyning,” mingling, and moving
in their own ways. For Chaucer, the task of the poet is to enter into the
whirling mass of materials and follow along with their movements.
Fittingly, the only moment in the poem that Geffrey experiences any form
of stability occurs as he stands in the middle of the whirl of raw materials.
After entering the House of Rumour, Geffrey explains:
And at a wyndowe yn me brought,
That in this hous was, as me thoghte—
And therwithalle, me thought hit stent,
And nothing hyt about wente —
And me sette in the flor adoun.
(2029-33)
And I was brought in through a window,
And at a wyndowe yn me brought,
That in this hous was, as me thought —
And therwithalle, me thought hit stent,
And nothing hyt about wente —
And me sette in the flor adoun.
(2029-33)
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That was in this house, as I thought—
And at that point, it seemed to stand still,
And nothing moved about it —
And I sat down on the floor.
Multiplication and the Problem of Representation
Upon arriving to Fame’s house, the narrator sees “all maner of mynstralles”
“stonden” all around the “castle,” “[. . .] tellen tales/ Both of wepinge and of
game, /Of al that longeth unto Fame” (1195-1200). As he proceeds closer, the
first sound he hears before entering Fame’s house is Orpheus and a host of
harpists playing their instruments “ful craftely”:
Ther herde I pleyen on an harpe,
That sowned bothe wel and sharpe,
Orpheus ful craftely,
And on his syde, faste by,
Sat the harper Orion,
Chiron, and other harper many oon,
And the Bret Glascurion;
And smale harpers with her glees
Sate under hem in dyvers sees,
And gunne on hem upward to gape,
And countrefete hem as an ape,
Or as craft countrefeteth kynde.
(1201-1212)
90
Chaucer comments on the “smale harpers” (1208) who sit under Orpheus and
the other masters and gaze fixedly with open mouths at their skill. These lesser
harpists spend their time attempting to mimic the master harpists, or
“countrefete hem as an ape” (1211). Chaucer goes on to liken this mimicry to
the way that “craft countrefeteth kynde” (1212), or “(artistic) craft imitates
nature.” Alongside movement and causation, the medieval idea that art imitates
nature, ars imitatur naturam, also has its roots in Aristotle’s Physics, where the
task of art is to follow nature, picking up where nature has left off. As Hans
Blumenberg explains,
This interchangeability of art for nature extends so far that Aristotle can
say that the builder of a house only does exactly what nature would do, if
it were able, so to speak, to "grow" houses. Nature and "art" are
structurally identical: The immanent characteristics of one sphere can be
transposed into the other.141
This transposition, or mimicry, calls to mind the eagle’s physics lesson in Book
II, where sound ripples outward, amplifying and resulting in physical
“multiplicacioun” (784). As the “smale harpers” in the passage above
“countrefete” the craft of Orpheus and the other harpists, they partake in the
same process of “multiplicacioun” (820) central to Aristotelian physics, as
141 Hans Blumenberg, “Imitation of Nature: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative
Being,” trans. by Anna Wertz, Qui Parle, Spring/Summer 2000, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 17-54.
91
described by the eagle. The persistent duplication of artistic forms is similar to
the proliferation of sound in the eagle’s physics lesson.142
What is nature’s authority over art in The House of Fame? What do
environmental forms afford poetry? In the passage above, the line between art
and nature is blurred: instead of the goddess Nature, Orpheus is the figure at
which the “smale harpers” gape. Susanne Akbari goes so far as to argue that
“the distinction between nature and art [. . .] is completely dissolved in The
House of Fame.” While I do not understand the poem to be advocating for a
complete transparency between the human and material world, or that the lines
between nature and art are completely dissolved, it is clear that Chaucer is
playing on the porous and intertwined categories of artistic/natural production
and formation. I think a more apt formulation would be to say that Chaucer is
drawing attention to ways that nature and art correspond, or follow along the
same lines in the shaping of matere, so that at times it is unclear whether we are
gaping at Orpheus or goddess Nature. In this correspondence between nature
and poetry, aesthetic categories such as movement, balance, harmony, and
rhythm are formed from art’s tendency to follow the forms present in the natural
world, from the circulation of the heavenly spheres to the ripples that form
142 Stephen Kruger argues for the relationship between sound and the generation of new texts
in The House of Fame, saying that “In Chaucer’s fiction about sound, at each reading every
written work is made new, mixed up with every other kind of sound, and resubmitted to the
memorializing, distorting, and obliterating actions of Fame.” Kruger, p. 133.
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when a pebble is tossed into a still pond. Imitation itself, the following or
tracing along the artistic forms afforded by the natural processes of nature, is
also part of the aesthetics of movement.
Interestingly, Chaucer’s porous formation between art and nature veers
from that of The Romance of the Rose. The poem explains,
Art makes her models, but she does not make her forms as true.
However, with very attentive care, she kneels before Nature and like a
truant beggar, poor in knowledge and force, she begs and requests and
asks of her. She struggles to follow her so that Nature may wish to teach
her how with her ability she may properly subsume all creatures in her
figures. She also watches how Nature works, for she would like very
much to perform such a work, and she imitates her like a monkey.143
Just as the “smale harpers” sit beneath Orpheus and the other harpists to
“countrefete hem as an ape,” Art “kneels before Nature” in The Romance of the
Rose, imitating “her like a monkey.” The poem goes on to explain that “Art, no
matter how hard she tries, with great study and great effort, [. . .] for all her
representations and skillful touches, will never make them go by themselves,
love, move, feel, and talk.” The poem makes clear that Art cannot “countrefete”
Nature. While Chaucer most likely had this passage in mind when he wrote
Orpheus and the harpists into The House of Fame, his view on the capacity for
Art to counterfeit Nature is more complicated than that of The Romance of the
Rose. In Book II, as the eagle is carrying Geffrey further and further into the
143 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, 16020-16033.
93
atmosphere, the “hevenes region” (988), the eagle criticizes Geffrey’s lack of
experience of the world outside of his “house” (655), where, “In stede of reste
and newe thynges” (654) he sits “domb as any stoon,/ [. . .] at another book.”
The eagle explains,
Domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully daswed ys thy look;
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,
Although thyn abstynence ys lyte. (655-60)
[Dumb as any stone,
You sit at another book
Until full dazed is your look;
And thus live as a hermite,
Although your abstinence is little.]
The eagle critiques Geffrey’s stationary lifestyle and lack of experience outside
of his “studye” (633). As they ascend further, the eagle encourages Geffrey to
cast up his eye to see “yonder, loo, the Galaxie,/ Which men clepeth [“call”] the
Milky Wey” (935-37). He explains that he “beheld”
Clouds, mistes, and tempestes,
Snowes, hailes, raines, windes,
And th’engendring in hir kindes,
And al the wey through which I cam.
(966-68)
[Clouds, mists, and storms,
Snows, hail, rain, wind,
And the formation of their kinds,
94
And all the way through which I came.]
Geffrey goes on to explain that upon seeing the stars and other natural
phenomena, he thought on “Marcian,/ and eek on Anteclaudian” (Martianus
Capella and Alain de Lille) and how their poetic “descripcioun/ Of al the
hevenes regioun” was “sooth,” “true” (985-90).144 In other words, Chaucer’s
experience of the natural world simply confirmed what he had read in the
poetry of Martianus Capella and Alain de Lille. He explains that in this moment
he had been sent “clere entendement” (983), meaning both “understanding (as
distinguished from fantasy or imagination)” as well as “interpretation of a word
or a discourse.”145 In this passage, we begin to see the same blurring between art
and nature that was present in the “smale harpers” scene, as the line between
reading nature and reading poetry becomes increasingly thin. At this point in
the poem Geffrey is interrupted by the “crye” of the eagle (991). The eagle
interrupts, “‘Lat be,’ quod he, ‘thy fantasye,’” suggesting that the narrator is
still in some deluded state, still grounded in the realm of books and imagination
(“fantasye”) rather than attuned to reading, and observing, the physical world.
The eagle goes on to explain,
For whan thou redest poetrye,
144 The reference here specifically refers to Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and
Philology and Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus.
145 MED, “entendement.”
95
How goddes gonne stellifye
Briddes, fissh, beste, or him or here,
As the Raven or either Bere,
Or Ariones harp fyne,
Castor, Pollux, or Delphyne,
Or Athalantes doughtres sevene,
For though thou have hem ofte on honde,
Yet nostow nat wher that they stonde. (1001-10)
The eagle explains that though the narrator has the names of stars “on honde,”
he still  does not know where they “stonde.” In other words, similar to the view
expressed in The Romance of the Rose, “poetry” is, at best, a feeble imitation
of nature. The eagle’s charge that poetry cannot convey the place where “that
they stonde” also serves as a critique of art’s ability to put things into forms.
For the eagle, poetic forms will always be poor representations, dim and
misplaced, when trying to counterfeit the forms afforded by nature. This
critique likely stems from the eagle’s formulation of the relationship between
movement and poetry expressed earlier in the poem. Drawing on Prinscian’s
Institutiones grammaticae, the eagle explains that “Soun,” and poetry by
extension, “is nought but air y-broken” and therefore in its “substaunce is but
air” (765-68). The close relationship between poetry and air suggests that, like
both air and sound, poetry is continually in motion, fluctuating, and
96
ungrounded, making its ability to put matter into form (convey where things
“stonde”) questionable. While the eagle’s view on the relationship between art
and nature is clear, the narrator seems to disagree. In reply, Geffrey explains,
“No fors,” quod I, “it is no nede;
I leve as wel, so God me spede,
Hem that wryte of this matere,
As though I knew her places here;
And eek they shynen here so bryghte,
It shulde shenden al my sight
To look on hem.” (1011-17)
“So what,” I said, “there is no need;
I believe as well, so God help me,
Those that write of this matter,
As though I knew their places here;
And also they shine here so bright,
It would ruin all my sight
To look at them.”
Geffrey says “No fors” in reply to the eagle’s argument that, because he has
only experienced the stars through the mediation of poetry, Geffrey “nostow nat
wher that they stonde” (1010). Chaucer plays with the relationship between
poetic matere and physical matter in this line. In believing (“leve”) those “that
wryte of this matere,” the Dreamer is saying that he trusts the ability of poetry
to shape the natural world in a way that is faithful to the forms that nature
affords, equating the physical matter of the stars with the poetic matere of
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Martianus and Alan de Lille. Kathryn Lynch glosses “as though I knew” (1014)
as “had direct knowledge of,” further emphasizing the porousness of the
Dreamer’s experience of poetry and nature.146 For the Dreamer, reading poetry
is equated with having direct knowledge of the stars.
This passage suggests that poetry has the ability to represent the natural
world in such a way that one’s phenomenological experience while reading
poetry is similar to the phenomenological experience that one has while
“actually” being present. Mary Carruthers argues for this exact concept,
contending that “[a]ll medieval art moves, not only emotionally but
directionally. It conveys one to some (other) place or some other feeling or
sensation.”147 (169) This sense of movement is captured in this scene from The
House of Fame, but also in the early fourteenth-century Bestiaire d’amours of
Richard de Fournival. The imagination, he declares, “makes what is past seem
as if it were present. And to this same end, one can come either by painting or
by speech. For when one sees a story painted, whether a story of Troy or of
some other thing, one sees the deeds of the brave men who were there in past
times as if they were present. And so it is with speech,” Richard goes on to say,
“For when one hears a tale read, one perceives the wondrous deeds as if one
were to see them taking place.” In this way, he explains, through literature “one
146 Kathryn Lynch, Chaucer Dream Visions.
147 Carruthers, Experience of Beauty, p. 169.
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is converting the past into the present.”148 Just like the physical
“multiplicacioun” (784) of form in the ripples of water that proliferate outward
when a stone is dropped in a pool of water, so too the form of nature itself
proliferates outward in the production of poetry.
Interestingly, Geffrey goes on to say that the stars in the sky are too
bright to look at anyway, saying that it would “shenden” his “sight” to “look on
hem” (1016-17). This curious statement further complicates the ability for
poetry to represent the material world. Is Geffrey suggesting some type of
superiority that poetry has over direct experience of the natural world? When in
poetic form, Geffrey is able to gaze at the stars in the sky without blinding his
eyes. At the same time, however, this passage also suggests that something is
lost in the poetic representation of environmental forms. The blinding
immediacy of the physical world is defracted by the lines of poetry. I do not
mean to suggest that Chaucer holds any neat view about the ability of poetic
form to represent environmental form. Instead, I want to draw attention to the
ways in which Chaucer complicates the representational view, refusing to
clearly ally himself with the type of “ecopoetry” view wherein poetry simply
148 Le Bestiaires d’amours, from V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: the first
five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), p. 25. Richard de Fournival. Li Bestiaires d'amours di
Maistre Richart de Fornival e Li Response du Bestiaire. Ed. Cesare Segre.( Milan: Riccardo
Ricciardi), 1957.
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mimics environmental forms, while also refusing a view of poetry that has no
room for representational power.
Chaucer’s focus on movement throughout The House of Fame is
influenced by larger aesthetic considerations of movement, drawn from
Aristotle to Boethius. The emphasis on movement, a world in flux, perpetual
multipication, and the proliferation of forms, gives way to an understanding of
poetry that is marked by movement and relationality. In The House of Fame, the
task of the poet is to enter into the whirl of the material world and become
caught up in the proliferation of “tydynges,” the “raw material” of poetry. In
this way, the poet discovers new poetic forms by entering into the flow of the
material world.
In the next chapter, I turn to the poetry of Gower and Lydgate in order to
explore the formal relationship between poetry and the constantly shifting
atmospheric “impressions” of the air. I demonstrate the ways in which poetic
form once again fails to transparently represent environmental forms, showing
how even the most mundane atmospheric phenomena work to upset the formal
logic of Gower’s poetry. I argue that both poets see poetic form as a tool for
negotiation between the roiling atmospheric forms that unsettle and destable
human experience. While this project of formal negotiation challenges the idea
of correspondence, I conclude that negotiation is ultimately characterized by the
100
same attentiveness and reciprocity essential to my formulation of
correspondence in Chapter One.
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Chapter Three
Composing the Air: Atmosphere and Climate in
Gower and Lydgate
This chapter explores the ways that John Gower (c. 1330 – October 1408) and
John Lydgate (c. 1370 – c. 1451) conceptualize the roiling atmosphere and
attempt to poetically shape it into a sustainable form. The process of
conceptualizing and climatizing the atmosphere shares some similarity to
Doreen Massey’s insistence that “we recognize space as always under
construction [. . .] always in the process of being made.”149 This chapter
explores the ways that atmospheric forms, ever shifting, fluctuating, and
“always in the process of being made,” present a formal problem to medieval
poets.
How can poetry capture such ephemeral and fleeting forms? Or, as
Lydgate asks, in light of the ever-changing nature of the atmosphere: “How
shuld man than be stable in lyvyng?”150 In his De Proprietatibus Rerum, John
Trevisa comments on the multitude of atmospheric figurations, saying:
Eyre bryngiþ forth of hitsilf dyers kyndes of þinges. [. . .] eyre strongly
imeued makeþ wyndis, lyȝtnynge, and þondringe; idrawe togidre it
149 Doreen Massey, For Space (SAGE, 2005), p. 9.
150 Lydgate, Pageant of Knowledge, in Henry Noble MacCracken,, ed and Sherwood,
Merriam, ed., Minor Poems of John Lydgate (Early English Text Society Extra Series 107 and
Original Series 192, 1911-1934).
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makeþ clowdis þicke and reyny; and whenne it is congelid to makeþ
snowe and hayle [. . .].151
[Air brings forth of itself many diverse kinds of things [. . .] air strongly
moved makes winds, lightning, and thundering; drawn together it makes
clouds thick and rainy; and when it is congealed makes snow and hail]
The meteorological phenomena of the air are “moved,” “drawn together,” and
“congealed.” Distinct from climate, these atmospheric changes are what we
generally refer to as weather. Weather captures the “atmospheric conditions in
which sentient creatures live, sense, imagine and build.”152 Human life is caught
up in the fluctuations of the weather.
While attention to ground and landscape have traditionally occupied a
privileged position in ecocritical studies, scholars in the last few decades
(particular in light of climate change and the Anthropocene) have drawn
attention to weather as an essential feature of the material world and have
worked to “place” weather in ecocritical discourses.153 As Tonino Griffero asks,
“Why on earth, in fact, should solid and contoured bodies be more real than
151 Trevisa, p. 566. (12-15).
152 Mike Hulme, Weathered: Cultures of Climate (SAGE, 2016), p. 3.
153 Louise Westling, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Johannes Ungelenk, Literature and Weather:
Shakespeare - Goethe - Zola (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018); .J. Hamilton, “Weathers of
Body and World: Reading Difference in Literary Atmospheres before Climate Change.” In A.
Johns-Putra & K. Sultzbach (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
(Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 55-68) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2022);  R. R. Boyson, “Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and
ecocriticism.” Literature Compass, 19 ( 1–2) (2022).
103
vague entities, which we experience without referring them to solidity, such as
fluids, gas processes or even quasi-things like atmospheres?”154 As Tim Ingold
explains:
The equation of materiality with the solid substance of the earth creates
the impression that life goes on upon the outer surface of a world that
has already congealed into its final form, rather than in the midst of a
world of perpetual flux. Between mind and nature, persons and things,
and agency and materiality, there is no conceptual space for those very
real phenomena and transformations of the medium that generally goes
by the name of weather.155
As we will see, poetry affords a space for Gower and Lydgate to negotiate the
interactions between the world of human experience and the world of weather.
How might we term this project of formal negotiation?
Climate is normally conceived of as “a statistical description in terms of
the mean and variability of relevant quantities of certain variables (such as
temperature, precipitation or wind) over a period of time ranging from months
to thousands or millions of years.”156 This scientific definition captures the
154 Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, p. 10. For recent theoretical
work on atmospheres, see: Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (London:
Routledge, 2017); Sumartojo Shanti, Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and
Methods (London: Routledge,  2019).
155 Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought,” p. 16 Along the same lines,
Dora Zhang explains that “[atmospheres] alter the kinds of things that can be said in a space,
the kinds of actions that are thinkable, and the modes of sociality that are possible, and I want
to suggest that we have still yet to fully recognize and attend to their importance as social and
political phenomena of everyday life.” Dora Zhang, “Notes on Atmosphere,” Qui Parle:
Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 27, Number 1, June 2018: 121-155. p. 121.
156 World Meteorological Organization (WMO)(n.d.) “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs),”
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/ccl/faqs.php. See also: David Archer and Stefan
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evolving interactions between “the atmosphere, hydrosphere, the cryosphere,
the lithosphere and the biosphere,” but does not do “justice to the deep material
and symbolic interactions which occur between weather and cultures in
places.”157 Literature is one avenue through which to negotiate and shape the
phenomenal interactions between the ever-changing weather and localized
human cultures. Recent scholarship has explored the role of literature in
describing and stabilizing relationships and patterns between the atmosphere
and humans. As Adeline Johns-Putra explains:
The discourse of climate is not simply the kind of studiously ‘objective’
observation and measurement one tends to associate with climatological
data; it encompasses the history, possibly as old as human civilisation, of
attempts to apprehend and describe patterns in the weather. These
attempts include, then, both ostensibly neutral observation and the
embellished, affectively charged descriptions one might call literature
–along with all the forms of description in between. Climate, as weather
documented, necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with
language, and through language, to literature.158
Rahmstorf, The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010); H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World,
(London: Routledge, 1997).
157 Mike Hulme, Weathered: Cultures of Climate, p. 2. See also: James Graham, ed. Climates:
Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (New York: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016); Smith,
Tyszczuk, Butler, Culture and Climate Change: Narratives (2014); Bristow and Ford, A
Cultural History of Climate Change (2016).
158 Johns-Putra, Adeline. “Introduction,” in Climate and Literature, edited by Adeline
Johns-Putra, 1–12. Cambridge Critical Concepts. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019), pp. 3-4. See also  Dipesh Chakrabarty,  “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical
Inquiry, 35 (Winter 2008).
105
Jesse Oak Taylor’s recent work on climate in the nineteenth-century novel
explores how, in this period, the “work of art [. . .] becomes not merely a
representation of climate but an active constituent of it.”159 Indeed, “[o]nce
climate is understood to be at least in part a consequence of human handiwork,
it becomes a construction, open to interpretation with the rubric of human
endeavor.”160 But climate does not appear wholesale from the human mind,
climate takes form as a response to atmospheric phenomena. As Dora Zhang
explains, “ one cannot help but be affected by [the atmosphere] regardless of
who one is, and that one’s being affected—and subsequent ways of being in the
world—affects the atmosphere in turn.”161 To be sure, climate is the
“consequence of human handiwork,” but it exists as a mode of negotiation and
reciprocity between the human and the nonhuman. Even the simple portioning
off of the air into different regions (as Gower and many other medieval writers
do) is a way of forming and controlling the atmosphere.162 Climate exists as a
narrative form that must be constantly composed and recomposed to make
sense of the unpredictable patterns of weather. It is formed as a response to the
159 Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture (2016), p. 1.
160 Ibid.
161 Dora Zhang, “Notes on Atmosphere,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences,
Volume 27, Number 1, June 2018: 121-155. p. 121.
162 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Reading and Writing the Weather.” Theory, Culture & Society 27,
no. 2–3 (March 2010): 9–30. Also Nerlich, Brigitte and Rusi Jaspal “Metaphors we die by?
Geoengineering, metaphors and the argument from catastrophe,” Metaphor and symbol
(2012): 131-147.
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multitude of atmospheric forms that present themselves and bear upon human
experience. At the same time, as human induced fluctuations of the weather
appear more steadily in the emergence of the Anthropocene, we must recognize
the ways that this loop of reciprocity has been altered. Taylor, along with others,
have commented on the receding forms of nature, proposing an idea of
“Abnatural ecology,” which “attempts to capture the experience of dwelling in a
manufactured environment, wherein everything from the bloodstream to the
weather bears the traces of human action.”163 The changing reality of what we
call “nature” in the Anthropocene makes it all the more important to interrogate
the ways that humans have historically negotiated and formed their
environments.
This chapter takes its structure from Gower’s three “periferies” (or
regions) of the atmosphere. Each section explores one of these atmospheric
regions to interrogate the ways that forms of weather are stabilized and
negotiated by poetic forms. Commenting on the various “impressions”
(atmospheric forms) of each region and examining the ways that these
environmental forms are situated, I demonstrate that even the most mundane
atmospheric forms sometimes elude formal containment. Atmosphere’s
propensity to challenge formal containment provides a helpful example wherein
poetic-environmental relationships exist in tension rather than correspond (as I
163Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture, p. 5.
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argue in Chapter One). That said, this tension still operates in a reciprocal way,
as poetic and environmental forms are composed at the intersection between
human experience and atmospheric change.  I show that, in the midst of the
extreme atmospheric changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Chapter
One), Gower and Lydgate employ poetic form as a means of coping with such
fluxuations.
The First Perifierie
Although the first recorded use of the term atmosphere does not occur in
English until the seventeenth century, in the form of “Atmo-sphæra” to refer to
an “orbe of grosse vaporous aire,”164 the concept itself was present throughout
the late medieval period. John Trevisa explains that“þe eyr strecchiþ hym
kyndely al aboute fro þe ouer partye of þe erþ and of watir anon to þe spere of
fire.”165 The gaseous sphere of air that encircles the earth was commented on by
Isidore of Seville and Bede in the early medieval period, both influential
sources for Trevisa. In his Confessio Amantis, Gower uses the term “periferies”
to denote the “thre” atmospheres that encircle the earth. Gower explains,
This air in periferies thre
Divided is of such degré,
Benethe is on and on amidde,
To whiche above is set the thridde,
164 "atmosphere, n.". OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press.
165 John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, 133.
108
And upon the divisions
There ben diverse impressions
Of moist and ek of drye also,
Whiche of the sonne bothe tuo
Ben drawe and haled upon hy,
And maken cloudes in the sky,
As schewed is at mannes sihte;
(CA, 7.265-75)
While “periferies” did not take hold in the English language—Gower’s use of
the word being both the first and last occurrences in English—nonetheless,
Gower’s use of “periferie” to describe the concept of atmosphere in English
demonstrates an interest in developing the concept within a vernacular poetic
context. As a wisdom text, meant for the instruction of a king, Gower positions
himself in the role of an encyclopedist and natural philosopher.166 His
predisposition towards coining terms associated with natural science is evident
in his usage of ylem, as we saw in Chapter Two, and is present again with
periferies in the passage above. Gower proceeds to explain the features of the
three divisions of the atmosphere. He begins:
The ferste periferie of alle
Engendreth myst and overmore
The dewes and the frostes hore,
After thilke intersticion
166 For more on the structure of Book VII, see George R. Coffman, "John Gower in His Most
Significant Role," in Elizabethan Studies in Honor of George F. Reynolds (University Press of
Colorado: 1945), pp. 52–61; Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of
Counsel in Late Medieval England. (Philadelphia: 1996); Derek Pearsall, Gower and Lydgate
(Harlow: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1969); Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in
Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1978).
109
In whiche thei take impression.
(CA, 7.280-84)
The first “periferie” of the sky generates such atmospheric phenomena as mist,
dew, and frost. These phenomena “take impression” (284) within the periferie
of the air. Alongside atmosphere as a vaporous sphere, we also see the
development of the concept of atmosphere as it is related to mood and
psychological states. Late medieval poets used “impression” to mean both
“something formed or produced by forces in the air” as well as “an image, a
sensation, or an emotion produced in the mind, heart, soul, or senses.”167 The
overlapping atmospheric and psychological connotations of “impression”
underline the relationship between weather and mood that we saw with
Henryson’s notion of correspondence in Chapter One. Notably, Gower is also
the first writer to use both “intersticion” and “impression,” respectively, in
English to refer to atmospheric phenomena.168 Medieval poets and
encyclopedists were deeply interested in the machinations and influences of
atmospheric “impressions” formed in the lowest “periferie” of the air. The
anonymous author of the fifteenth-century treatise entitled For knowlege of the
inpressions concerning þe wedur, comments on the nature of dew and its
adverse effects, saying:
167 impressiǒun n., Middle English Dictionary Online (2022).
168 Ibid.; intersticiọ̄n n., Middle English Dictionary Online (2022).
110
[. . .] wherfor the mater of dewe ys a watyry vapor assendyng þe fyrst
regyon of the eyer, or evyr it may come to þe seconde region taken with
colde, the whyche colde takeþe awey the hete of the seyde vapor and so
causethe it to fall doun. And so þer apperithe upponn the herbis a stilled
water, whyche water, when it ys dry, apperythe lyyng uppon herbis like
flour; of þe whyche schepe yf they ete, þey dey sone after of þe rott, for
it is ovyr-swete and causethe them to have þe flyx. And thys is kalled
myldewe. (lines 37-46)
[wherefore the matter of dew is a watery vapor ascending the first region
of the air, or it may come to the second region taken with cold, wherein
cold takes away the heat of the said vapor and so causes it to fall down.
And so there appears upon the plants a stilled water, which water, when
it is dry, appears lying upon plants such as flowers; which sheep, if they
eat it, they die soon after the rott, for it is over-sweet and causes them to
have the flyx. And this is called myldewe.]169
The treatise agrees with Gower that “dewe” belongs in the “fyrst regyon” of the
air, but it also suggests that the formation of dew primarily occurs in the
“seconde region” of the air. While both texts follow the traditional division of
the air into three distinct regions, the fact that dew does not sit comfortably
within either region demonstrates the porous nature of such attempts to form the
atmosphere into discrete categories. In this way, the atmosphere resists Gower’s
poetic form. In another way, Chaucer’s anxiety, throughout the House of Fame,
over how to poetically form a material world that is constantly in flux is
affirmed in this passage. Even in the hands of a skilled poet such as Gower, the
169 Edition of the text is from Auvo Kurvinen, “Inpressions Concerning Þe Weduryng,”
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 58, no. 2 (1957): 49–69. Translation is my own.
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atmospheric matere of this passage does not sit neatly into the form of his verse.
The poem itself hints at this fact as the divisions of the “periferies” overlap
within Gower’s octosyllabic couplets. For example, the poem explains,
After the times of the yer
Among ous upon erthe her
In sondri wise thinges falle.
The ferste periferie of alle
Engendreth myst and overmore
The dewes and the frostes hore,
(7.279-282)
The rhyming couplet is formed in this passage across the conceptual divisions
of the atmosphere into periferies, as the pairing of “falle/alle'' blends the first
section (describing the properties of air) with the second section (describing the
“ferste periferie”). In other words, the form of the poem fails to hold the subject
matter in discrete sections.170
The treatise explains that “dewe” is a “stilled water” that “apperithe
upponn the herbis” and is volatile to “schepe” (sheep) due to its “ovyr-swete”
nature. This sweetness is captured in the word “myldewe,” the first part of the
170 While this section explores the inability of Gower’s form to contain the atmospheric subject
matere, I am not making any larger claims about the formal unity or disunity of the poem as a
whole, a subject long debated in scholarship on the Confessio Amantis. See Hugh White,
“Division and Failure in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” Neophilologus, Vol. 72, Iss. 4,  (Oct 1,
1988); Lewis Beer, “The Tactful Genius: Abiding the End in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies
in Philology, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Spring, 2015), pp. 234-263; Kathryn L. Lynch, The High
Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1988); R. F. Yeager, John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990). J. Allen Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in
Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004).
112
word deriving from the Latin mell-, meaning “honey.”171 Overconsumption of
dew results in “flyx,” a symptom of “rott,” a sickness which John Trevisa
explains is caused from a humoral imbalance as a result of “to moche moisture
[. . .] comeþ to þe stomak [. . . ] and brediþ diariam, þat is, þe flux of þe
wombe” (“too much moisture [. . .] entering the stomach [. . .] and breading
diarrhea, that is, the flux of the womb”). 172 As this passage demonstrates, in the
medieval imagination even the most seemingly mundane impressions of the
atmosphere, such a dew, can have drastic environmental effects for animals and
humans alike.
Medieval writers often use dew as a feature of an idyllic setting, as with
Lydgate’s opening to The Testament: “Aurora, hir licour distyllyng, Sent on
herbes the perely dropis shene Of siluer dewes,” suggesting a sense of
untouched newness and a gift from the heavens.173 Trevisa explains that
rainbows take shape when beams of light shine through “a litil dewinge,” and
pearls (“margarite”) form when “oystres” are “y gendred of dewe.”174 Dew also
171 "mildew, n.". OED Online. June 2022. Oxford University Press. Also the origin of the word
“honeydew.”
172 John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa's Translation of Bartholomaeus
Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, a Critical Text, eds. M. C. Seymour, et al., vols. 1 and 2
(1975); vol. 3 (1988). 47a/b.
173 The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken, vol. 1, Early English Text
Society, Extra Series 107 (1911; reprint 1961). Line 288.
174 Also see: “Þerof comeþ a litil dewinge in þe whiche schyneþ þe beme þat is þere afore and
so þe raynebowe is I schape.” Trevisa, 137a/a; 202a/a : In plato it is y seide þat margarites ben
y gendred of dewe. þe more dewynge is y founde, þe more and þe gretter þe margarite is y
gendred of þe dewe; In springinge tyme oystres openeþ hemsilf aʒaynes dewe & fongiþ
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features prominently in late medieval religious imagery. Underlining the
connection between weather and humoral theory, dew is often used to refer to
blood. Lydgate writes of an open wound with “blood dystellyng doun As deuhy
dropis,” and the The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode invites readers to
imagine the “blood with which thilke cros was bi dewed and spreynt.”175 The
close humoral association of dew and blood is perhaps most famously
employed by Julian of Norwich in her Shewings where she describes her vision
of Christ’s “plentious bledeing” (242), which she likens “to the dropys of water
that fallen of the evys after a greate showre of reyne that fall so thick that no
man may numbre them with bodily witte.”176 The relationship between dew and
religious imagery is further enhanced by Richard Rolle, who explains that “ters
& sighynge” (“tears and sighing”) are a type of “heuenly dewynge” coming
“fro a-bofe to soft þat saule þat langes in lufe.”177 Rather than being formed in
the first or second “periferies” of the air, this spiritual “dewyng of heuenly
swetnes” is seemingly formed in the dwelling place of God, which is beyond
dew..þat dew so I-holde and I-kept fediþ þe fissche..and by his incorporacioun wiþ þe inner
partyes of þe fissche brediþ..a stone þat hatte margarite.” 137 b/a.
175 St. Giles, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken, vol. 1, Early
English Text Society, Extra Series 107 (1911; reprint 1961), 159; The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of
the Manhode, ed. W. A. Wright, Roxburghe Club Publications 91 (1869), line 42.
176 Julian of Norwich, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton
(Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), p. 47.
177 Richard Rolle, Richard Rolle and the Holy Boke Gratia Dei, ed. M. L. Arntz (1981), 76.
114
the highest atmosphere, further troubling the place of dew within the three
regions of the air.
Though dew presents an example where the conceptual regions of the air
are unable to hold its numerous fluctuations, Gower’s tripartite division of the
air is demonstrative of the wide range of ways in which poetry is used to shape
conceptions of the natural world. Not only does the environment shape the
forms of late medieval poetry, from correspondence to movement, but the
entwining of poetry and the environment means that poetry can also shape the
natural world. In other words, regardless of whether the three discrete
“periferies” of the air exist in any objectively measured, “scientific” sense, the
poetic division of the air in Gower’s Confessio bears on contemporary
phenomenological experiences of the atmosphere.178 The contours of the
environment take shape under the weight of Gower’s pen. Just as paths form
out of the repeated traversal of humans through a given environment, thereby
becoming part of that environment, so too the sky becomes divided within a
poetic tradition that repeatedly draws lines in that sky. This poetic shaping of
matere becomes part of the late medieval phenomenal experience of the world.
In this way, Gower’s portioning of the sky contributes to the late
medieval conception of what we now call “climate.” As the phenomenologist
178 Russell A. Peck has also argued for a phenomenologically concerned practice of poetics in
Gower. See Russell A. Peck, “The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower’s Confessio
Amantis,” Studies in Philology 91 (1994), pp. 215-38.
115
Julien Knebusch explains, climate is a “multidimensional phenomenon in which
are combined the contributions of nature, culture, history and geography, but
also the imaginary and the symbolic.”179 Not only do measurable factors such as
temperature, air pressure, wind, and humidity contribute to a historical
understanding of climate, but our phenomenological perceptions of
meteorological fluxuations also contribute to an understanding of climate.
Gower’s perception of climate in the Confessio Amantis operates as “the
perception of an arrangement, a configuration of the real by the subject; this
perception is a certain presentation (and presentification) of an ensemble of
natural atmospheric facts embraced and expressed by a sensitive being.”180
While atmospheric phenomena like “dewe” may continually dissipate beyond
the boundaries of Gower’s “periferies,” his portioning of the sky functions as a
subjective “configuration of the real.” In other words, Gower’s poetic
“periferies” can be understood as an articulation of climate. Furthermore, styled
in the form of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum, which was widely
read in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, book VII of Gower’s Confessio is
structured as a wisdom text for the instruction of a king. As such, Gower’s
articulation of climate is a social one, demonstrating that our formal
179 Julien Knebusch, “The Perception of Climate Change,” Leonardo, Volume 40, Number 2
(MIT Press: April 2007), p. 113.
180 Julien Knebusch, “Art and climate (change) perception: Outline of a phenomenology of
climate,” in Sacha Kagan and Volker Kirchberg (ed.), Sustainability: a new frontier for the
arts and cultures, (Frankfurt: 2008), p. 5.
116
configurations of the environment diffuse into the realms of the social and
political.
The Second Perifierie
The Confessio goes on to explain the features of the second “periferie” of air,
where meteorological phenomena such as rain, snow, and hail “take
impression.”
Fro the seconde, as bokes sein,
The moiste dropes of the reyn
Descenden into middilerthe,
And tempreth it to sed and erthe,
And doth to springe grass and flour.
And ofte also the grete schour
Out of such place it mai be take,
That it the forme schal forsake
Of reyn, and into snow be torned;
And ek it mai be so sojorned
In sondri places up alofte,
That into hail it torneth ofte.
Characterized by the persistent changing of “forme,” this region of the
atmosphere is the place where meteorological phenomena such as rain, snow,
and hail “take impression” and are persistently “torned” from one atmospheric
impression to another. The language of this passage hints at some recognition of
the formal problems presented by the turbulent weather, even as they escape the
bounds of the poem’s atmospheric divisions. I want to further explore the
117
problem of atmospheric instability and poetic formation by turning to the poetry
of John Lydgate.
In the tradition of Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia, Lydgate’s Pageant
of Knowledge draws a connection between the persistent macrocosmic changes
of the natural environment and the microcosmic mutability of humanity.181 In
the poem, Lydgate appeals to the changeability of the second region of the
atmosphere to consider, in light of this constant mutilibility, “How shuld man
than be stable in lyvyng?” (“How, then, can humanity be stable in living?”).
This refrain occurs at the end of each stanza, in various forms, throughout the
entirety of the poem, as Lydgate compares the instability of humanity to the
“ayre” that is “so remevable” (160).  For example, Lydgate explains,
The monthes vary, everyche hath his sygne
And harde hit ys all wedyrs for to know,
The tyme somewhyle ys gracious and benygne,
And uppon hilles and valeys that ben low
The foure wyndes contrariosly do blow
In every storme man ys here abydyng,
Som to release, and som to overthrow,
How shuld man than be stedfast of lyvyng?
(248-255)
We are reminded that Lydgate lived during a period “characterized by irregular
cycles of climatic extremes, with concomitant regional bouts of catastrophic
181 See Kellie Robertson,“Scaling Nature: Microcosm and Macrocosm in Later Medieval
Thought” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (September 2019); 49 (3): 609–631.
Bernardus Silvestris, Poetic Works, ed. Winthrop Wetherbee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval
Library, 38. (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2015).
118
weather,” making the poem’s central question of how to live with any sense of
stability when “[t]he months vary” and “harde hit ys all wedyrs for to know”
even more appropriate.182 Lydgate asks how humanity can live when the
seasons endlessly shift and the weather is so unpredictable. Amitav Ghosh
explains the jarring effect that this awareness of environmental “interventions”
can have, arguing “[. . . ] that non-human forces have the ability to intervene
directly in human thought. And to be alerted to such interventions is also to
become uncannily aware that conversations among ourselves have always had
other participants: it is like finding out that one’s telephone has been tapped for
years, or that the neighbors have long been eavesdropping on family
discussions.”183 These atmospheric changes unsettle narratives of human
independence, at the level of experience as well as in our creative endeavors.
Lydgate ultimately employs the contemporary, ever-shifting climate for a
didactic purpose. The poem concludes by encouraging readers to “lyft up thyne
ey unto hevyn” (“lift up your eye unto heaven”), the only place that is
immutable. The constant changing of “forme” and shifting of weather,
ultimately inspires the didactic form of the poem. The idea of the atmosphere as
a creatively inspirational force is present in the poem itself. Lydgate explains
that “Ayre of kynde yeueþ inspiracion/ To mannys hert” (“Air, the normal kind,
182 Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (2014), p. 324.
183 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University
of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 31.
119
gives inspiration to man’s heart,” 181-2). Seasonal air provides “inspiracion,”
both in the sense of “breath” but also in the sense of “a creative impulse,” a
meaning often used in a religious context to refer to the Holy Spirit’s generative
influence in the composition of Scripture.184 This later sense of “inspiracion”
accords nicely with Lydgate’s didactic encouragement to look towards the
heavens.
Ultimately, for Lydgate, the troubling part of the atmosphere is that we
cannot free ourselves from it (at least in this life), and it remains a force that
dictates, upholds, and even works against our phenomenal engagements with
the world—our life is woven in the atmosphere.185 As Julien Knebusch
explains, “[i]t is impossible to extract ourselves of climate [. . . ] to turn around
climate, so much climate is supporting and bathing us at the same time.”186 This
statement captures Lydgate’s predicament. How do we contend with such a
formative environmental force from which we cannot escape? Lydgate goes on
to express the entanglement between humans and the atmosphere:
Man hath in somer drynesse and hete,
In theyr bok as auctors lyst expresse,
And when Phebus entreth the Ariete
Dygest humours upward done hem dresse,
184 “inspīrāciǒun n.,” Middle English Dictionary Online (2022).
185 See Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (2010), S121 - S139.
186 Knebusch “Art and climate (change) perception: Outline of a phenomenology of climate,”
(2008), p. 7. See also: Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet
(SAGE, 2011).
120
Porys opyn that seson, of swetnesse
And exaltacions, diverse wyrkyng,
How shuld man than be stable in lyvyng?
The poem conveys the complete immersion and dependance we have on the
atmosphere, as seasonal weather “opyn[s]” the “Porys” of the human body,
influencing the bodily “humours” in its “diverse wyrkyng.” Conversely, while
the “somer” weather tends to open the pores to “swetnesse” and “exaltacions,”
autumn weather is explained as opening the body up “To many uncouthe
straunge infirmitees.” Winter weather “Closeth” and “constreyneth, the poores,”
preserving the “workyng” of heat that has been trapped inside the body.
Structurally, Lydgate couples his section on the times of the year with a section
on the “disposicion of the complexyons” (lines 196-219), a group of lines
devoted to the machinations of the bodily humours. In medieval humoral
theory, the weather gets inside the human body and has profound psychological
and physiological effects. Jeffery Jerome Cohen explores the porous
interchange between the atmosphere and the humoral body in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, explaining,
The four humours do their work within skin that offers a permeable
membrane rather than a barrier. This open, fleshly system enmeshes the
gravity of the moon, the impress of place, the agency of matter and the
density and humidity of atmosphere, creating what Gail Paster has called
121
‘an ecology of passions’ and ‘the body’s weather’, which may be both
shared with the environment and heavy.187
The influence of weather on the inner workings of the body lends itself to the
macrocosmic/microcosmic conception of the world. Cohen points to Gower’s
figuration of the macro/microcosmic scale in his Confessio Amantis in order to
argue that when “human society is divided against itself, turbulent and divisive,
the world likewise becomes unstable, stormy.”188 In his poem, Gower explains
that,
The man, as telleth the clergie,
Is as a world in his partie,
And whan this litel world mistorneth,
The grete world al overtorneth.
The lond, the see, the firmament,
Thei axen alle jugement
Agein the man and make him werre.
(CA, 994-961)
Gower argues that “man” is a “litel world,” a little form of the environment
itself, or the “grete world.” The close interrelation between the environment and
the body meant that disruptions in one had resulting effects for the other.
187 Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “Heavy Atmosphere,” in Contemporary Chaucer Across the
Centuries, edited by Anne McKendry, et al. (Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 93. For
more on the medieval macro/microcosmic conception of the world, see Kellie Robertson
“Scaling Nature: Microcosm and Macrocosm in Later Medieval Thought,” Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1 September 2019; 49 (3): 609–631. Greta LaFleur, “Ch.
1 - The Natural History of Sexuality” in The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America
(Johns Hopkins, 2020) for a review of climate/humoral theories of sexuality.
188 Ibid. p. 97.
122
While Gower firmly establishes that, due to the sinful nature of humans,
the “lond,” “see,” and “firmament” are thrown into “jugement” against
humanity, Lydgate suggests the opposite. For Lydgate, the “overturned” nature
of the atmosphere is not a result of man’s instability, but is the ground and cause
of such instability. Gower blames humanity for the chaotic upheaval in the
“firmament,” saying that “The purest Eir for Senne alofte / Hath ben and is
corrupt fulofte” (Pr. 921–2). For Gower, under the curse of human sin, the
atmosphere “becomes unstable, stormy.”189 This conceit is demonstrative of the
range of discourses that contribute to historical conceptions of climate, from
theological to the political, each one working to create a narrative about the
fluctuating air.
In a number of Lydgate’s poems, the air is figured as an oppressive and
untamed force that consistently works against humanity. In his short poem,
Stella Celi Extirpauit, Lydgate prays to heaven for protection against “al wedrys
of corrupt pestilence” (13) and asks the “heuenly queen” (1) to “retreyne” (13)
the “mystis blake” (25). In The World is Variable, Lydgate looks toward the sky
at dawn in “contemplacioun” (2), which calls “to mynde worldly variacioun”
(4). A few lines later, Lydgate concludes that such an “Exsperience shewith the
world is variable” (8). In each of these works, the blame for the variability and
instability of the world is placed on the atmosphere itself, where “[t]empest in
189 Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “Heavy Atmosphere,” p. 97.
123
see and wyndes sturdynes maketh men unstable and ferefull of lyuyng”
(Pageant, 262-3).190
As we have seen, one avenue for gaining some control over the
atmospheric fluctuations and disruptions is to put the roiling air into poetic
form. Though Lydgate’s vision of the atmosphere is characterized by instability,
pessimism, and fear, poetic form offers a way of containing and interpreting the
chaotic matter of the air, even if it cannot completely tame it. Poetry’s didactic
function in these poems works to assure the reader that although the turbulent
air surrounds them, there is a heavenly “paleys moost imperial” that sits “so
ferre above the sterrys sevene” to which one should “left up thyn eye”
(137-140). Mike Hulme explains that any attempt, however slight, to “[mediate]
between the human experience of ephemeral weather and the cultural ways of
living which are animated by this experience” may be understood as
“climate.”191 In this way, “[c]limate offers an ordered container, a linguistic,
numerical or sensory repertoire, through which the unsettling arbitrariness of
the restless weather is interpreted and tamed.”192 As it attempts to order and
contain the air, Lydgate’s poetry also verges on climate pessimism, casting the
190 For more on climate blame see  Renzo Taddei, “Blame: the hidden (and difficult) side of
the climate change debate” Anthropology News 49 (8):45–46. 2008;  Mike Hulme, Why we
disagree about climate change: understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
191 Hulme, Weathered, p. 4.
192 Ibid., p. 5.
124
atmosphere as an eternally corrupted and unsettled force.193 In light of the brutal
climate oscillations of the fifteenth century, it is easy to see why Lydgate places
the blame for societal and psychological unrest on the atmosphere itself, and
why the poem functions to provide some form to that instability.
Both Gower and Lydgate use poetry to establish a narrative about the
atmosphere, one that is similar to modern notions of climate. Their poetic forms
work to control, tame, and interpret the atmosphere. Gower’s Confessio
Amantis works to portion out the atmosphere into three manageable periferies.
Though atmospheric phenomena, such as dew, diffuse beyond the bounds of
Gower’s form, nevertheless, the divisions of the air remain. In this way,
Gower’s poem functions to mediate the phenomenal relationship between
human experience and the air.
For both Gower and Lydgate, this mediation is social—Gower’s poem is
in the form of advice to a king and Lydgate’s poem publicly addresses his
readers. Both the Confessio and the Pageant of Knowledge seek to mediate the
social perception of climate rather than a merely personal one, though these
categories are closely related.  Climate is an idea that we compose in order to
make our social perceptions of the torrid and ever-changing atmosphere more
193 Climate pessimism has been a concern of recent ecocritical studies. As of yet, little work
has been done in medieval studies to address climate pessimism in the period. For an overview
of climate pessimism in ecocritical studies, see: Patrick D. Murphy, Persuasive Aesthetic
Ecocritical Praxis: Climate Change, Subsistence, and Questionable Futures (Lanham,
Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015).
125
palpable. When climate change occurs, and disrupts our social perceptions of
the atmosphere, new stories are forged in order to explain the relationship
between human beings and the atmosphere. As with Henryson’s idea of
correspondence, the notion of climate is most often formed as a response to
atmospheric phenomena, rather than simply originating in the mind of the
composer. As the atmosphere changes and our cultural understandings no
longer support the shifting forms of the air, our notion of climate must be
reconfigured and recomposed to make sense of those changes. The atmosphere,
as the most movable and changeable form of matere, calls for continual
recomposition. This composition and recomposition of climate was present in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and continues today. As Mike Hulme
explains,
Through cultural imaginaries driven by metaphors such as ‘tipping
points’, narratives such as the Anthropocene and technologies such as
Google Earth, the climatic future is already being composed. Before
predicted climates come to pass, the imaginative contours of their form
will already have changed. And will do so again. And again. 194
Although more work needs to be done concerning medieval conceptions of
climate as a stabilizing and mediating idea between humans and the air, this
chapter argues for the place of poetry, in its various forms, as a rich and potent
producer of “climate” in the late medieval period.
194 Mike Hulme, Weathered, p. 153.
126
The Third Periferie
I want to begin by briefly explaining the ways that Gower characterizes the
final, highest region of the atmosphere, and then conclude by turning to Emily
Steiner’s work on John Trevisa’s (d. 1402) Middle English translation of
Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (c. 1240). I turn to Steiner’s
work on Trevisa to demonstrate the overlap between literary form and
environmental form in a non-poetic context. I discuss the ways that
“ornamentation” of the atmosphere is used by Trevisa to describe his own
encyclopedic form.
The third “periferie” takes us into the region of the atmosphere where the
sonic impressions of thunder and the fiery emanations of lightning and
meteorites occur. Gower draws attention to the shifting forms of  “fyr” (“fire”)
in this region of the atmosphere, one of which he explains is
Fyr kinled of the same kinde,
Bot it is of another forme;
Whereof, if that I schal conforme
The figure unto that it is
(7.340-343)
The play on “forme” and Gower’s ability to “conforme” the fiery “figure” in
question to the name and region with which it corresponds, operates as a
moment of poetic self-reflection. In other words, Gower’s language plays on the
relationship between atmospheric forms and the ability of poetry to “conforme”
127
these phenomena to figures which accord with natural science, the writings of
“olde clerkes” (line 344) and those that “The wise Philosopher tolde” (line 366,
most likely referring to Aristotle). Gower begins his explanation of the third
region of the air:
The thridde of th'air after the lawe
Thurgh such matiere as up is drawe
Of dreie thing, as it is ofte,
Among the cloudes upon lofte,
And is so clos, it may noght oute;
Thanne is it chased sore aboute,
Til it to fyr and leyt be falle,
And thanne it brekth the cloudes alle,
The whiche of so gret noyse craken,
That thei the feerful thonder maken.
The thonderstrok smit er it leyte,
And yit men sen the fyr and leyte,
The thonderstrok er that men hiere [. . .]
(7.297-318)
Marked by impressions of thunder, fire, and lightning, John Trevisa explains
that this region of the air is characterized by “liʒt and ornaments [. . . ] of fury
kynde” (“light and ornaments . . . of a fiery nature”).195 Indeed, “ornamentation”
is an important aesthetic word for Trevisa throughout his De proprietatibus
rerum. As Emily Steiner explains,
In a larger framework, all created things bear an aesthetic charge because
they adorn the earth and inspire praise for the Creator. Insofar as natural
encyclopedias take God’s creation as their subject, they are formally and
195 John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, p, 498. Line 19.
128
materially invested in the relationship between information and beauty.
Bartholomaeus’s keyword for the aesthetic property of creation is the
verb ornatare, along with cognates ornatus and ornamentum and
synonyms adornare, vestire, and insignare.196
As Steiner argues, the aesthetic properties of the environment are compared to
the aesthetic properties of Trevisa’s text. Just as creation is “ornamented” with
beauty, so too Trevisa aims to ornament his text in a similar way. In this way,
Trevisa’s “encyclopedic form is the aesthetic counterpart to those created things
that testify to the earth’s special beauty.”197
Steiner identifies a range of words throughout Trevisa’s encyclopedia
that operate as aesthetic markers. For example, she explains that Trevisa coined
the term “hightness,”in Middle English to refer to“the quality of adornment,
ornamentation, or embellishment,”198 constructing a type of “vernacular
textuality by inventing a vocabulary for vernacular aesthetics.”199 Trevisa
explains,
And as they ben naughte ydel of worchyng, so they beth nat bare ne
voyde of hightynge nothir ournament. For everyche element his
hightenesse hath an ornament: the fuyre hath sterrys, the eire hath
briddes and fowles, the water hath fischis and bestis that swymmen
196 Emily Steiner, John Trevisa’s Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p.
151.
197 Ibid., p. 153.
198 Ibid.
199 Ibid.
129
therinne, the erthe hath bestis that move thand gooth therinne, as Beda
seith.200
Trevisa draws a parallel between the elemental ornamentation of the world and
the rhetorical forms of ornamentation and “hightenesse” in his encyclopedia.
Throughout his sections on “aire” and “fuyre,” Trevisa often uses this same set
of aesthetic words to describe the properties of the regions of the air
(“hightness, fairness, and ournament,” “the ournament of the eire”), which
makes up a large portion of his text. Building off of this aesthetic language,
Steiner explains that, “[a]s Trevisa shows, if natural properties can be described
as ornaments, the ornamental quality of natural properties can help generate an
accomplished English prose.”201 She uses the term “accumulation” (an
atmospheric term) to refer to the generation and proliferation of Trevisa’s
“ornaments,” particularly in the way that Trevisa’s translation expands the
original Latin text with rhetorical and poetic language. 202
I draw attention to Emily Steiner’s work to demonstrate the shared
language between environmental ornamentation (stars, birds, lighting) and
poetic ornamentation (linguistic accumulation, expansion of translation) in
Trevisa’s translation. Trevisa figures the formal properties of his text in the
same language of “hightness” that he terms the properties of the atmosphere.
200 Trevisa, p. 498.
201 Steiner, Information Age, p. 155.
202 Ibid.
130
While Steiner does not discuss the atmospheric tones in Trevisa’s aesthetics at
any length, the importance of “ornamentation,”“accumulation,” and “hightness”
to Trevisa’s work demonstrates a conceptual and formal reciprocity between
text and environment in a late-medieval prose context. Steiner’s work invites
more exploration of the formal relationship between late-medieval prose and
the environment.
The next chapter turns to consider the question of skillful engagement
with the material world. “Skill” refers to the ability of a craftsperson to respond
to the material conditions of their working environement in a way that works
towards their creative goal. Skill is about “following the grain” of the materials
in the process of ones creative endeavors. In Chapter Four, I explore two
anonymous Middle English poems, The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools and A
Complaint Against Blacksmiths, to consider the ability of poetry to capture such
skilled engagement with the world.
131
Chapter Four
“Is Skill Wordless?”: Poetic Making in Two
Anonymous Late Medieval Poems
“Is Skill Wordless?”
How might we think of skill? Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate what I mean
by skill is to return to the idea of correspondence that runs throughout this
dissertation. In Chapter One, I argue that Henryson’s notion of poetic making in
the Testament is closer to a view that understands creativity as a process of
“following the grain” than it is to the hylomorphic model of poetic production
put forward by Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Skill is the way that we work with, bend,
attend to, and respond to materials for our own creative purposes. This
definition of skill is not synonymous with habit. Skill is often thought of as
referring to a type of habitual engagement or practice that, over time, allows the
practitioner to become so adept at the task at hand that it becomes an almost
unconscious routine. Thought of in this way, skill refers to “bodily
automatisms, acquired through years of practice in carrying out identical
operations” resulting in unreflective “and even automatic” flows of “habitual
132
action.”203 However, a definition of skill that simply equates it with habitual
operations loses the attention and “sensitivity with which these operations can
be adjusted to a close perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds.” Skill is
characterized by conscious “variation in response to the conditions at hand,”
“concentration,” and a level of reflexivity and reciprocity.204 As the carpenter
works to split a piece of wood, they follow the grain of the wood, adjusting
their tools with sensitivity in response to the form that the wood affords them.
These lines of formation are latent in the materials themselves. Carpentry,
cooking, sewing, dancing, and even the art of poetry all require careful attention
and engagement with the material world.
Can this practice of skillful engagement be put into words? Or, as Tim
Ingold asks: “Is skill wordless?”205 Ingold explains,
[. . .] there is skill in the practice of the verbal arts – in poetry and song,
in storytelling, in handwriting or calligraphy – just as in the practice of
any other craft. Many craftsmen are renowned for waxing lyrical about
their practice, and feel no inhibition in doing so. Their words, in
performance, can be as full of movement and of feeling as a musical
phrase or a knitted pattern. To speak is to feel them welling up in the
cavity of the mouth; to write is to feel them taking shape in the
inflections of the hand. If we think skill is wordless, it is only because
we start from a notion of the word already divested of all traces of vocal
and manual performance, that is, of affect.206
203 Tim Ingold, “Five Questions of Skill.” Cultural Geographies 25, no. 1 (January 2018):
159–63.
204 Ibid., p. 161.
205 Ibid., p. 160.
206 Ibid., p. 160.
133
This chapter explores two anonymous late-medieval poems concerned with
skillful practice: A Complaint Against Blacksmiths and The Debate of the
Carpenter’s Tools. As these poems demonstrate, skillful practice is not
“wordless,” but can be put into poetic form. I have chosen these poems in
particular because they both demonstrate moments of skill, while, at the same
time, also serve to highlight moments where skillful practice breaks down. In
the Complaint Against Blacksmiths, poetic skill is interrupted by the pollution
and noise produced by a group of blacksmiths, even as skillful labor is captured
in the poem itself. But, as the poet skillfully attends to the pollution and noise
caused by the blacksmiths, the poem takes shape, demonstrating that even a
“Complaint” can operate as a form of reciprocity. In The Debate of the
Carpenter’s Tools, twenty-seven tools debate the lifestyle of their absent
“master,” a carpenter, who they criticize for spending more time consuming
alcohol than engaging in skilled labor. The speaking tools in the poem serve as
an example of the ways in which fictionality can highlight human and
nonhuman entanglements. In the end, both poems demonstrate skillful
engagement while also serving to highlight moments where skill breaks down
and poets and artisans struggle to correspond with their materials.
134
A Complaint Against Blacksmiths
This section begins by moving from Gower and Lydgate’s large-scale
atmospheric forms to a poem that describes a more localized but no less vibrant
atmosphere. A Complaint Against Blacksmiths, a fourteenth-century alliterative
poem found uniquely in MS Arundel 292 (a devotional miscellany, including a
bestiary, ), describes an atmosphere of labor that resounds with the sounds of
metal work and thick, smoky expulsions of the forge.207 Parallels between
poetic creation, harmony, and blacksmithing were common throughout the
middle ages. For example, returning to Lydgate’s Pageant of Knowledge, the
poem explains:
Jubal was fadyr and fynder of song,
Of consonantes, and of armony,
By noyse and strooke of hamors that were strong.
Fro Jubal came furst the melody
Of sugryd musyk, and of mynstralsy,
So procedyng down fro man to man
Practyce of concorde, as I have told, began
207 For studies focused on A Complaint Against Blacksmiths, see: Elizabeth Salter, "A
Complaint against Blacksmiths," in English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art
and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 19. Deborah Thorpe, "Heated Words: The Politics and
Poetics of Work in 'A Complaint against Blacksmiths,'" Parergon 32 (2015): 77-101; Richard
J. Schrader, "The Inharmonious Choristers and Blacksmiths of MS Arundel 292," Studies in
Philology (2007): 1-12; Nicola Masciandaro, The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work
in Middle English Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
135
(Lines 66-72)
The close relationship between poetry and blacksmithing invites readers to
reflect on the nature of poetic formation in the poem. Kept awake by the
blacksmiths’ late-night work and disturbed by the air and noise pollution
produced by their work, the anonymous poet issues a complaint, saying:
Swarte smekyd smeþes smateryd wyth smoke.
dryue me to deth wyth den of here dyntes.
Swech noys on nyghtes ne herd men neuer.
what knauene cry and clateryng of knockes.
þe cammede kongons cryen after col col.                      5
And blowen here bellewys þat al here brayn brestes.
huf puf seyth þat on haf paf þat oþer.
þei spyttyn and spraulyn and spellyn many spelles.
þei gnauen and gnacchen þei gronys to gyder.
and holdyn hem hote wyth here hard hamers.                10
of a bole hyde ben here barm fellys.
her schankes ben chakeled for þe fere flunderys.
heuy hamerys þei han þat hard ben handled.
stark strokes þei stryken on a stelyd stokke.
lus. dus. las. das. rowtyn be rowe.                                  15
sweche doleful a dreme þe deuyl it to dryue.
þe mayster longith a lityl and lascheth a lesse.
twyneth hem tweyn and towchith a treble.
tik. tak. hic. hac. tiket. taket. tyk. tak.
lus. bus. lus. das. swych lyf þei ledyn.                           20
All cloye merys cryst hem gyue sorwe.
may no man for brenwaterys on nyght han hys rest.208
208 Elizabeth Salter, "A Complaint against Blacksmiths," in English and International: Studies
in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette
Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 19.
136
[Sooty, smoked smiths smattered with smoke.
Drive me to death with the din of their blows.
Such a noise at night men have never heard
With the knaves shouting and the clatter of blows!
The crooked connivers cry “Coal! Coal!”
And blow their bellows till their brains near burst,
“Huff, puff”, says one and “Haff, paff” the other.
They spit and sprawl and spin tall stories,
They gnaw and gnash and groan together,
Are kept hot heaving hard heavy hammers.
Their aprons are of bull hide,
Their shanks are sheathed against the sparks.
Huge hammers are handled hard,
Strong strokes struck on steel stock.
“Lus, bus, las, das”, tapping in turn.
Oh the Devil end this dreadful din.
The master lengthens pieces of iron,
Twining and twisting them with terrible twanging,
“Tik, tak, hic, hac, tiket, taket, tik, tak
Lus, bus, lus, das”. Such a life they lead,
Christ punish these horse-shoe benders,
Who cake our clothes and ruin our night’s sleep.
No one, because of these sizzling-waters, may rest a night.]
The poem opens by describing the blacksmiths as “Swarte smekyd smeþes
smateryd wyth smoke,” signaling, from the first line, the poem’s interest in the
material influences of the environment. The blacksmiths’ form is altered by
their skillful engagement with the material world. They take on a “Swarte
smekyd” appearance and, “smateryd wyth smoke,” their human form is altered
by their engagement with the thick smoky air produced by the smithing forge.
137
The poetic line itself is thick with alliteration. The string of sibilants along with
the doubling of “smekyd” and “smoke,” draw attention to the forge’s
proliferation of smoke and the breathtaking atmosphere that envelopes the
“smeþes.” The blacksmiths emerge as an entanglement of forms. Unlike recent
notions of ecopoetry wherein the forms of the environment are represented as
static and “complacent,” the Complaint Against Blacksmiths works to express
relationality, becoming, and dynamic reciprocity between human and
nonhuman forces.209 Here poetry operates as “a domain of entanglement,” or
what Tim Ingold has called a “meshwork,” “a tangled mesh of interwoven and
complexly knotted strands.”210 The forms of pollution, both of air and noise,
take shape as a result of the blacksmiths’ skillful engagements with the world.
The Complaint Against Blacksmiths emphasizes the process of skillful
engagement rather than the material products of that engagement. The poem
refuses any recognition of the material goods produced from the blacksmiths’
work, a refusal which may be attributed to the poet’s disdain for the forms of
pollution that result from night work. The refusal to acknowledge the ways in
which blacksmithing economically contributes to society serves as a critique of
their night labor. At the same time, the text does emphasize a type production as
it traces the variety of new forms that arise out the process of labor, including
209 See Introduction.
210 Ingold, The Life of Lines (Routledge, 2015), p. 151.
138
the smoke smattered smiths (1), the sonic “tik. tak. hic. hac.” (19) of the
hammers, and the “spyttyn and spraulyn and spellyn” of “many spelles” (8).
These new forms that arise from the process of skillful engagement impose
themselves on the poet, introducing material forms that challenge and
destabilize the process of scribal and poetic production. As Katherine Jager
explains, “the clerical poet cannot do scribal work at night without serious
consequence. His labor—copying, scraping, blotting, correcting, reading,
blotting— depends on daylight, silence, and decent sleep.”211 The poet
negotiates and employs these material interruptions for creative ends. As
Deborah Thorpe explains, the “dints and clattering of the smith” are
“transmuted into the music of poetry.”212 In this way, the “Complaint” displays
a level of formal reciprocity. The poem operates as a response to the
blacksmiths, but also operates as a response to their pollutive forms, as the poet
employs those forms for their own type of material production: the makyng of
poetry. Confronted with these imposing environmental forms, the poem works,
on the one hand, as a “Complaint” and rejection of those forms, while on the
211 Katharine Jager,“‘A Clateryng of Knokkes’: Multimodality and Performativity in ‘The
Blacksmith’s Lament,” Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog,
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/05/02/a-clateryng-of-knokkes-multimodality-and-performa
tivity-in-the-blacksmiths-lament/.
212 Deborah Thorpe, "Heated Words: The Politics and Poetics of Work in 'A Complaint against
Blacksmiths,'" Parergon 32 (2015): 77-101.
139
other hand incorporating “smoke” (1), “dyntes” (2), “knockes” (4), and “lus.
bus. lus. das.” (20) as formal properties of the poem.
The intricate processes of blacksmithing are highlighted in the
onomatopoeic forms of the poem and attention to subtle details regarding the
blacksmiths’ skillful engagement with their materials. Scholars have argued that
the poem offers readers a crude and cacophonous vision of blacksmithing.213
However, I want to suggest that the poem, even as it complains about the
blacksmiths, attends to the skillful engagement between the blacksmiths and
their materials. For example, the poem explains that “þe mayster longith a lityl
and lascheth a lesse,| twyneth hem tweyn and towchith a treble,” this is a dense
pair of lines that Elizabeth Salter translates as “The master-smith beats out a
small piece of metal, and flattens an (even) smaller piece, (hammers) the two
together, turning them edgewise.’’214 Salter’s translation captures the poem’s
attention to the complexities of blacksmithing. The poem explains that the
“mayster” smith lengthens a “small piece of metal” and “flattens” another “(even)
smaller piece,” capturing a skillful attention to the materials themselves. Rather
than brutally hammering on anvils, these lines convey a sensitivity to the materials
themselves; these pieces of metal are small, requiring a delicate touch and
appropriate amounts of heat so as not to completely melt the small pieces of metal.
213 For a helpful overview, see Richard J. Schrader, "The Inharmonious Choristers and
Blacksmiths of MS Arundel 292," Studies in Philology (2007): 1-12.
214 Salter, "A Complaint against Blacksmiths," pp. 333-34.
140
The poem explains that the blacksmith then proceeds to “twyneth” the pieces
together, twisting and fusing the forms together. The phrase “longith a lityl”
evokes an image of the blacksmith surveying the current shape of the metal,
attending to the other piece of metal, and then gently lengthening the one in
order to appropriately entwine it with the other.
Such skilled engagement is also represented in the onomatopoeic form of
the poem. The long string of “tik. tak. hic. hac. tiket. taket. tyk. tak. |lus. bus.
lus. das.” does not convey a mindless clamoring of hammers on metal, but the
various sounds convey lighter and heavier strokes of the hammer, with each
stroke also suggesting different placements of the hammer on metal. Such
material attention is also conveyed by the cries for “col col,” suggesting a sense
of urgency as the blacksmiths adjust the temperature and tend the furnace. This
is markedly different from a mechanistic view of labor, where machines convey
no sense of urgency in completing their programmed tasks. Similarly, the poem
explains that the blacksmiths’ have the ability to “blowen here bellewys þat al
here brayn brestes.” This line conveys the idea of habit that I discussed at the
beginning of this chapter. Due to years of practice, the blacksmiths have the
ability to fill their lungs so deeply and blow with such force that it seems their
brains will burst. Certainly, habit is not divorced from skill. Many of our skillful
engagements with the world are aided by habitual actions that allow us to
respond to materials in a more skillful manner. But the line also conveys the
141
same continual tending of the forge captured in “col col,” and creates an
atmosphere of constant breathing and a swirling chorus of skilled engagement.
A Complaint Against Blacksmiths puts skillful engagement with the
material world into words. The material byproducts of the forge, the atmosphere
of smoke and noise of hammers and air, are recycled into the forms of the
poem. The poem, even as it complains, responds to the human-environmental
reciprocity that is characteristic of artisanal labor. Beyond just habit, the poem
captures the skillful engagements of the blacksmiths, engagements marked by
sensitivity to the material world. In the next section, I want to explore the
relationship between fictionality and human-environmental entanglement in
another anonymous poem entitled The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools.
Fictionality and Entanglement
How does fiction help reveal human and nonhuman entanglements? Recent
scholarship, operating in, or adjacent to, the field of new materialism, has
drawn on fiction in order to explore matter in a way that attempts to move
beyond “anthropocentric regimes of truth.”215 For example, Jane Bennett
employs Kafka’s “Cares of a Family Man'' in order to articulate her notion of
215 Tobias Skiveren, “Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter.” Theory, Culture
& Society 39, no. 3 (May 2022): 187–202; p. 189.
142
vitality, which she explains is “beyond our comprehension.”216 Bennett asks the
question, “is it really possible to theorize this vibrancy?,” and explains that
works of fiction, like Kafka’s, may help to cultivate and induce an attentiveness
to the material forces, things and their movements, that operate in and around
the human body. Bennett is just one example; we could as easily look to the
work of Stacy Alaimo or Donna Haraway for examples of the use of fiction in
new materialism.217
But what role does fiction play in helping us understand our
environmental entanglement? What does a text like The Debate of the
Carpenter’s Tools, which explicitly fabricates and makes stuff up, afford
scholars that more traditional modes of academic writing do not?  As Tobias
Skiveren asks, “In short, why fictionalize matter?”218 Jane Bennett notes the
ways that Anthropomorphism can do this, saying,
A touch of anthropomorphism [. . .] can catalyze a sensibility that finds a
world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects
and objects) but with variously composed materiality that form
confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and
lighting up parallels between material forms in “nature” and those in
216 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010),
p. xvii.
217 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2010). Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016).
218 Tobias Skiveren, “Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter,” p. 188.
143
“culture,” anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphism.219
Certainly, anthropomorphism was used by medieval writers to use nonhuman
entities to reflect human concerns, as Alan de Lille says, “Every creature of the
world is like a book, a picture, and a mirror for us.”220 But, anthropomorphism
can operate in the other direction too, “rendering human traits a mirror
reflecting hitherto unnoticed activities and processes of the nonhuman.”221
These activities and processes are revealed through the fictionalization of
human and nonhuman entanglements. As a poem with talking tools, The Debate
of the Carpenter’s Tools uses fiction to highlight human-environmental
entanglements in the medieval household.
The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools
The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools is preserved uniquely in Bodleian MS
Ashmole 61, a miscellany of 41 items comprising comedic poems, religious and
moral texts, and a number of romances. The 289 line poem is a debate between
27 tools who argue about their master, a carpenter. The debate breaks into
roughly two sides, with one group criticizing the carpenter for excessive
drinking and negligence and the other side arguing in the master’s defense.
219 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 99.
220 Alan de Lille, “Omnis mundi creatura.” in Literary Works, ed. and trans. by Winthrop
Wetherbee, p. 544.
221 Tobias Skiveren, “Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter,” p. 190.
144
Previous scholarship has drawn attention to the ways in which the manuscript
that contains the poem, Ashmole 61, is concerned with the household and
domestic relationships. R. K. Ginn described the manuscript as “an anthology
of domestitia,” concerned with “middle-class domesticity” and relationships
between members of the household community.222 While Ginn does not focus
on The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools, scholars have argued that her
observations extend to the poem. For example, Edward Wilson suggests that
“the intervention of the carpenter’s wife” provides a marital context in which
domestic concerns around labor and economic prosperity are “registered.”223
While the appearance of the carpenter’s wife in the poem is interesting for
thinking about the relationship between gender and labor in the household,
appealing to the one human voice in the poem in order to give context to its role
in the manuscript is symptomatic of a general trend to interpret the household
book through the human actors in the text and to “assume a central human
subject whose transformation is the text’s purpose.”224 The Debate of the
Carpenter’s Tools resists this trend by foregoing any transformation on the part
of the carpenter, who is absent in the poem itself—he has no voice throughout
222 R. K. G. Ginn, 'A Critical Edition of the two Texts of "Sir Cleges"', unpublished MA thesis,
Queen's University of Belfast (1967), pp. 82,
223 Edward Wilson, "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools" The Review of English Studies,
New Series, 38, no. 152 (1987): p. 446.
224 Myra Seaman, Objects of Affection: The book and the household in late medieval England
(Manchester University Press, 2021), p. 22.
145
the poem and, as an absentee, he is made present only through how the tools
imagine him, and the question of how to imagine him is a site of contention
rather than consent.
Recently, Myra Seaman has drawn attention to the various ways that
Ashmole 61 highlights the role of the nonhuman in the late medieval
household. She explains that the household did not simply consist of the life
and activities of human actors, but was “rather an ecology of inhabitants,” both
“human and nonhuman, whose shared occupancy includes entanglement in
collective habits and expectations.”225 Focusing on the manuscript as a
pedagogical tool and the ways that this entanglement serves moral and spiritual
ends, Seaman highlights the role of nonhuman agents (including the book itself)
in modeling exemplary moral and spiritual behavior. I want to join with Seaman
in extending concerns about domestic life to the role of the nonhuman in this
poem and argue that the poem, particularly in its dialogue form, is concerned
with the breakdown of skillful engagement and reciprocity between human and
nonhuman entities.
Highlighting this breakdown of creative reciprocity, the poem
demonstrates the ways in which the household exists as a “meshwork” of
human and nonhuman forces whose economic and social success depends on
human-environmental correspondence. In the poem, for example, the
225 Seaman, Objects of Affection, p. 34.
146
Groping-Iron (a concave-bladed chisel or possibly a grooving plane) and the
Drill, both defenders of the carpenter, speak. The Groping-Iron explains,
‘I suere thee . . .  by the rode, /
Wyrke I schall bothe nyght and dey;
To gete hym gode I schall assey [try]’
(36– 8).
[“I swear, by the Cross,
I shall work both night and day,
to get him wealth, I shall try”]
The Drill says:
“My maysters werke I wyll remembyr;
I schall crepe fast into the tymbyr,
And help my mayster within a stounde
To store his cofer with twenti pounde.”
(19-22)
[“My masters work I will remember;
I shall creep fast into the timber,
And help my master within a moment
To fill his coffer with twenty pounds.”]
Both the Groping-Iron and the Drill explain that they have an integral part in
the labor and economic success of the household. Fiction here,
anthropomorphism, gives voice to these tools, demonstrating the ways that
nonhuman entities are entangled in the process of craft. As Myra Seaman
explains, “these tools – who know of what they speak, given their total
immersion in the labouring world, and without whom the carpenter literally
147
could not practise his craft – address concerns of commitment, responsibility,
and authority.”226 I agree with Seaman and would add reciprocity and
correspondence to these issues. Seaman goes on to explain, “[. . .] nonhuman
objects that share the household community with the readers of [the poem]
provide their insights and encourage judgement and behaviour adaptation based
on their shared investment in and dependence on the health of the
household.”227 The Chip-Axe said to the Carpenter,
“Mete and drynke I schall thee plyght;
Clene hose and clene schone,
Gete them wheresoever thou kane.
Bot for all that ever thou kane,
Thall never be thryfty man,
Ne none that longys the crafte unto,
For nothyng that thou kane do.”
(2-8)
[“Meat and drink I shall promise you;
Clean stockings and shoes,
You must earn on your own.
But for all that you can ever do,
You shall never be a prosperous man,
Nor anyone that longs for this craft,
For anything that you can do.”]
In these lines, the Chip-Axe is promising to get the carpenter “mete and
drynke,” while at the same time explaining that the carpenter play his part and
must work hard in order to procure clothing (“Clene hose and clene schone”)/
226 Seaman, Objects of Affection, p. 140.
227 Ibid., p. 140.
148
These lines further the notion that the household operates as a cooperative
entity in which human and nonhuman are intertwined and must strive together
in order to achieve economic prosperity in its fullness. The Chip-Axe begins the
poem with a balanced view of labor in the domestic household. Neither the
tools nor the carpenter alone can achieve a viable level of economic success,
but both are dependent on one another in order to create a sustainable domestic
environment. In this way, fictional narratives, such as The Debate of the
Carpenter’s Tools, upset the notion that the human is alive and active while the
nonhuman, conversely, is dead and passive.
Skillful practice is sometimes thought of as unreflective and therefore
unconscious and even automatic. We rely on skill everyday in order to
accomplish practical and creative tasks, the operations of which are usually
thought of as “wordless,” or unable to be spelled out in formal, propositional
terms. Skill requires constant correspondence, sensitivity, and perhaps even a
type of “dialogue” with the tools and the materials around the skilled carpenter.
It involves responding to the conditions at hand, adjusting to the slightest
environmental perturbations. Here we see that in order to accomplish a skilled
task, one must have a sensitivity to the materials around them. In a sense, listen
to them, enter into a dialogue with them. The “Twybyll” explains,
“Ye, ye,” seyd the Twybyll,
“Thou spekys ever ageyn skyll.
Iwys, iwys, it wyll not bene,
149
Ne never I thinke that he wyll then.”
(13-16)
[“Yeah, yeah,” said the Double-edged Ax,
“You speak habitually against skill,
Surely, surely, it will not be so,
Nor never I think that he will prosper then.” ]
The Double-edged Axe disagrees with The Mallet (who spoke before him) here,
saying that they speak “ageyn skyll,” The primary definition of “skyll” here is
“reason,” meaning that The Mallet speaks “contrary to reason,” failing to
recognize that, without the carpenter’s participation, work will not be
accomplished.228 Though not the primary definition, the failure to recognize the
place of both the human and the nonhuman in the accomplishment of labor
within the household also speaks “against skill,” in the sense that it fails to
recognize that neither the tools alone nor the carpenter alone can accomplish the
tasks at hand. The carpenter’s general absence and failure to listen and be
attuned to the tools and the material environment means that skilled labor will
not be accomplished. The Double-edged Axe recognizes this fact, “Surely,
surely, it will not be so.” Regardless of how passionately The Mallet wishes to
“pelte” (10) on behalf of the carpenter, skilled labor will never be realized
without the participation of both the human and nonhuman actors in the
228 “skil .n,” Middle English Dictionary Online (March 2020).
150
household; economic prosperity will never be accomplished—the master will
never “prosper.”
The carpenter is unresponsive, he does not take into account the
resistance or support of the tools and materials at hand and, therefore, tasks are
not completed. He is a skill-less carpenter. But skill is not wordless here, in this
case, fiction helps us glimpse the type of human-environmental reciprocity that
constitutes skill and that is sometimes difficult to put into words. In this way, as
Tobias Skiveren explains, fiction allows us to “imaginatively and affectively
sense a world in which the nonhuman is partly human, and the human is partly
nonhuman,” without having to believe that something like a group of tools can
have an audible debate in any literal sense.229 Fiction allows us to capture
intangible relational interdependencies and glimpse the ways in which the
human and the material are entwined.
Attending to Materials
What little scholarship is available concerning The Debate of the Carpenter’s
Tools has focused on humanizing the twenty seven tools that engage with one
another concerning the labor of their master, the carpenter. John Conlee opens
his critical edition of the text by explaining that the poem “depicts an altercation
between two factions of personified tools who are portrayed as carpenter’s
229 Tobias Skiveren, “Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter,” p. 192.
151
apprentices.”230 Rather than tools, these figures are made sense of by suggesting
that they are the carpenter’s “twenty-seven comrades.”231 In other words, rather
than reading them as material objects, they must be read as allegorical, bringing
to mind human apprentices or “the rebellious journeymen associations of the
post-plague years.”232 This allegorical reading of The Debate of the Carpenter’s
Tools suggests that the debate “operates [. . .] as an animation of and reflection
upon the kind of internal strife [. . .] of so many guilds.”233 In this reading, the
poem ultimately serves a moral purpose, encouraging laborers to treat their
apprentices with more respect and outlining the economic consequences of
drunkenness. The poem ends with an entreatment to “take hede of þis”:
Therfor, wryghtys, take hede of this,
That ye may mend that is amysse,
And treuly that ye do your labore,
For that wyll be to your honour.
And greve you nothing at this song,
Bot ever make mery yourselve amonge,
Ne gest at hym that it dud make,
Ne envy at hym ye take,
Ne non of you do hym blame.
(273-281)
[Therefore, carpenters, take heed of this,
That you may mend what is amiss,
230 John W. Conlee, ed. Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology. (East Lansing,
Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1991), p. 222.
231 Lisa Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge
University Press, 2011), p. 85.
232 Ibid., p. 85.
233 Ibid., p. 87.
152
And truly that you do your labor,
For that will be to your honour.
And grieve you nothing at this song,
But ever make merry yourself among,
Nor scoff at him that did make it,
Nor take envy at him (be envious of him)
Nor any of you do him blame.]
Based on these lines, some scholars have read the DBCT as a “material
metaphor” for contemporary moral, social, and economic issues.234 Indeed,
these final lines do suggest a moral lesson that “wryghtys” should take from
this poem, but this need not mean that we should simply see past or forego the
material dimensions of the poem in order to get at a “deeper meaning” behind
the text. Jeffery Jerome Cohen has explained that this “segregation of human
and inhuman, nature and culture belies a complicated reality, an intertwined
environmentality. Inhuman forces and objects ultimately refuse domestication,
refuse reduction into familiar tales as ancillaries and props (even as they
domesticate—ecologize—themselves, each other, us).”
Readings that ignore the material realities of the text or figure the
environment as a simple backdrop for human activity are symptomatic of what
Mary Carruthers has called the “over-theologized and over-moralized” nature of
medieval literary criticism, where “every flourish, every joke, every colour and
ornament is said to conceal a lesson for the improvement of the viewer or
234 Lisa Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England.
153
listener.”235 Literary criticism has long viewed the medieval production of
poetry as informed by and “seamlessly integrated” within medieval pastoral and
theological values.236 These values lurk behind the material and environmental
aspects of medieval poetry and the spiritual and moral must be wrestled from
the physical. I certainly do not mean to suggest that the spiritual and moral be
relegated to the peripheries of medieval literary criticism. But, as I have argued
in this dissertation, medieval poetry also drew inspiration from concepts of
matter and materiality, so that always reading the material dimensions of a
poem as allegory or metaphor for something spiritual obscures the impact of
these conversations on late medieval poetics and aesthetics.
235 Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, p. 8.
236 Ibid.
154
Conclusion
The poems in the previous chapter demonstrate the conceptual overlap between
late-medieval views of poetics and artisan craft. The relationship between late
medieval poetry and artisan craft has long been recognized since Glending
Olson’s distinction between the terms “poete” and “makere” in the terminology
of Chaucer and his contemporaries.237 Andrew Galloway has drawn attention to
Chaucer’s “heavy burden of technical and vocational knowledge” that he shares
in common with contemporary artisans and bureaucrats.238 The gerund, makyng,
that Chaucer continually uses for his poetic activity can refer to both “poetic
composition” as well as the type of skillful engagement exemplified by
blacksmiths and carpenters. Chaucer’s use of the term attests to his “willingness
to recognize and welcome the improvised and the arbitrary” and “work[s]
against that claim of perfection, of being at, or past, the end and able to look
back.”239 Makyng emphasizes process, reciprocity, becoming. Claire M. Waters
argues that Chaucer’s interest in makyng helps make sense of his substantial
amount of “un-ended” poems, thinking of him as a poet “who is always still in
237Glending Olson,“Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 31
(1979) (3): 272–290.
238 Andrew Galloway, “Chaucer's "Former Age" and the Fourteenth-Century Anthropology of
Craft: The Social Logic of a Premodernist Lyric,” p. 538.
239 A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 122; Claire M. Waters, “Makyng and Middles in Chaucer’s
Poetry” p. 32.
155
the process of making” and concerned more with “life as it is experienced'' than
with perfection in the etymological sense, “thoroughly made,” per-factus.240 As
Noëlle Phillips explains, “Medieval vernacular literary makynge offers an
aesthetic model based upon process, conversion, and transformation, rather than
the more opaque ideas of creation and inspiration that result in a polished,
beautiful product.”241 In other words, late medieval poetry is concerned with the
process of production rather than some ideal finished product. Chaucer’s view
of himself as a makere, with its association to artisanal craft and material
production, is due in part to his view of poetry as “the skillful integration of
other works into a new one.”242 The late-medieval view of poetry as makyng, a
view suggested by Chaucer and, in particular, his successors (such as Lydgate
and Henryson) sees the process of literary production as “one that assimilates
divergent information or texts and converts them into something else.”243
Katherine Jager calls this type of “assimilation” a “doing, a perpetration, a way
240 Claire Waters, “Makyng and Middles in Chaucer’s Poetry,” p. 31.
241 Noëlle Phillips, “Vernacular Makynge, Jack Upland, and the Aesthetics of
Antifraternalism,” p. 238.
242 Noëlle Phillips, “Vernacular Makynge,” p. 241. A number of Chaucer’s works are retellings
and all lean heavily on classical, biblical, Italian, and French sources---these are the writers
that Chaucer would call “poets,” rather than “makers.”
243 Noëlle Phillips, “Vernacular Makynge,” p. 243.
156
of being in the world.”244 Drawing on Tim Ingold, and along with Robert
Henryson, I call this type of assimilation “correspondence.”
There are many interesting intersections with this project that have been
left unexplored. Where do vernacular theological movements such as
mysticism, charged with concrete, material language meant to express a
formless being, fit into this configuration of creativity and the environment?
Where does the human body fit in the theory of correspondence? How do our
sensory perceptions of the world help mediate and even fabricate these formal
environmental engagements? Where do racial considerations fit in our
understandings of literary and environmental forms, particularly in light of
environmental humoralism and climate theories of race? While many important
concerns remain, this project has worked to reopen questions of literary
formation and late-medieval vernacular conceptions of creativity, reevaluating
the formal relationships between literature and the material world.
I have argued that human and nonhuman entanglements are at the heart
of the production of late-medieval poetry, contending that poetic forms (and
acts of creativity, more generally) are borne out of correspondences and
moments of reciprocal interchange between humans and the environment. Late
244 Katharine Woodason Jager, “The Practice of Makyngee: Masculine Poetic Identity inLate
Medieval English Poetry” (PhD diss, City University of New York, 2007), p. 22.
157
medieval poets were acutely aware of the ways in which our environmental
surroundings have implications for poetic form. The material world not only
supplied poets with conceptual metaphors for understanding their own creative
process, but was figured as a co-creator in that process. Even as environmental
forms such as noise, pollution, and the roiling atmosphere unsettle and
destabilize human life, they also present moments for formal negotiation
between the poetic and environmental worlds, giving birth to opportunities for
creativity and the proliferation of new forms. Writing with the Grain argues for
a late-medieval vernacular poetics that reconceives the ways in which human
creative processes are indebted to the material world.
158
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