Ex Libris: John Gower's Vox Clamantis

Before we tackle the first millenium and a half of our National Literature, we must start in medias res with the 14th century. Time was, a critics' generation or so ago, when the main English authors of the late Middle English period were accounted Chaucer and Gower. It has now become fashionable, for obscure reasons,** to drop Gower and substitute the poet of the Sir Gawain piece in our critical estimation.

** Can you say suppression of an ethnic and linguistic tradition? I knew you could. Poets who write in French and Latin against the horrors of a Peasant Revolt have too much of Them against Us about them, for the modern Marxist-Lollard English Prof. But Arthurian legend is safely enough tucked away in the Distant Mirror, as opposed to some other rather closer and more subversive Mirrour.

Here, in any event, is what the CHEAL has to say--all it has to say--about Gower's 10,000 line achievement, a classic of the Anglo-Latin tradition and far the largest production of the late Medieval period, the Vox Clamantis:

http://www.bartleby.com/212/0605.html

And here are Gower's works online (including about 1% of the Vox Clamantis that has been transcribed):

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/gowerbib.htm

Now, name a National Tradition of the English, with an epic 10,000 line work, by a poet of the critical stature of Chaucer, that gets Anglo-Latin Tradtion, the Tradition That Must Not Be Named, lest the ghosts of the Desdichados haunt us (not that Saxons are superstitious about things like that). Hey, it got its 5 column inches of CHEAL. What more can you ask?

Me, I think we should make our Graduate students read it before given them a Philosophiae Doctor, Barbi Causa.

The first 20%, or some 2000 lines, is a thinly-veiled description of the peasant's revolt of 1381. It was, perhaps, pre-pended to the rest of the text after the fact. In the CHEAL's majestic two paragraphs, they manage to quote not a single of the offending lines. Hey, Winston, we got another one for the Memory Hole. What is Latin for Double plus refs un-persons?

Ex Libris: The Cambridge History of English and American Literatures

In 18 vols., online courtesy to Bartleby.com, advertises:

http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/

"Considered the most important work of literary history and criticism ever published, the Cambridge History contains over 303 chapters and 11,000 pages, with essay topics ranging from poetry, fiction, drama and essays to history, theology and political writing. The set encompasses a wide selection of writing on orators, humorists, poets, newspaper columnists, religious leaders, economists, Native Americans, song writers, and even non-English writing, such as Yiddish and Creole."

And, one hopes, Latin. For while the multi-ethnic chic sub-classical liberal may delight at the thought of how Yiddish, Creole, Gullah, Ebonics, or Zuni might have contributed to Our National Literature, the fact remains that 90% at least of the first two volumes of this patently hijacked Anglo-Latinity and a fair fraction of the next few, should be (and to some extent are, oddly enough) devoted to Latin.

In this Ex Libris series, we will be examining the Majestic-12 or so volumes of the CHEAL chapter by chapter, volume by volume, sometimes line by line, as it traces the true history of Our People. We won't take very long at it, for most of The Truth is tucked away in about 1% the majestic 18 volumes, which must warm the Barbarian Heart and, if he remembers he has one, Soul. More generally, Ex Libris will delve, from time to time, into the books written about us by the Enemy. By Academics, by Conservatives, by Liberals, Socialists if they even bother, by our Pogo-challenged selves, when we forget our own past or worse never bother to check the Truth of what we are told.

As a preview of the feast of bilingualism and multiform ethnicity that lies before us, the first two volumes cover a half millenium or so each, and the remaining 16 volumes what Noam Chomsky has so conveniently for us denominated the last 500 years. English, as if cultures had to do with languages (race) and territories, rather than religions or civilizations, gamely starts 500 years along into the History of Britain. Thus we have the inconvenient fact that the first 500 years of Roman Civilization, and with it the first 400 years of Christian culture in Britain, must be more or less chucked altogether, Constantine of York notwithstanding, so we can wait for the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, to show up with their beloved Aryan gene-pool and we can finally have a Civilization capable of speech, if not right off of writing. Not to be de-terred, Ex Libris will consider what the saeson has to say about the populi ab origines, bless his little Freia-worshiping heart.

In truth, we don't quite get the whole English-speaking Christian act together until Anno 600 or so, since the Saxon shows up in 450, but doesn't bother to get Christianized for 150 years. Even so, we still have a millenium to cover when mixing English + Christian is not the guaranteed [latish Norman word, that], um, warranted start of a nasty brawl, and we only have two volumes to do it. The first volume is nice enough. One can hardly talk about Anglo-Saxons without talking about Latin, since those who wrote Saxon beyond a few scratchings on rocks here and there were, almost to the man, (1) Christians, hence oddly enough involved with the Church; (2) Latinate, since they didn't write with runes; (3) interested in making everyone in sight Latinate and Christian, to the extent it seemed appropriate to them. In short, they were as much us (Christian, Civilized, culturally Roman, living in or coming from, Britain), as us ever gets these days.

We are instructed, sensibly enough, that Anglo-Saxon means "a Saxon living in England", much as West Indian, American Indian, and East Indian all mean different peoples. The myth has been gotten up that Anglo + Saxon means a fusion of the Angles and Saxon, but it isn't so. This usage of the word was taken up after the Anglo-Latins had ceased to be even a hidden and proscribed tradition, and their scholars (such as the Non-Juror Hickes), had passed on the baton, if not precisely the racial barre sinistre to the Anglo-Saxon race however you care to construe it.

The Angles live one place, have their own kingdoms, and the Saxons live another place, have their own dialect, their own kings. Ditto Jutes. We also learn that "Old English" is a term invented by Prussian philologists in the 19th century, in analogy to Middle English and Modern English and the same terminology applied to other Germanic languages. But that is Them, this is Us, so we will eschew "Old English" and use it in the sense everyone not over-educated does, for any archaic ("early modern") dialect that looks funny.

We will learn, in the next few articles, that Our National Literature (in the high culture sense of more than deeds, chronicles, or a couple laws about scratching peoples eyes out) consists, in this period, mostly of:

1. The works of British (Welsh) authors in Latin, mainly Gildas and his school.
   

   
   Insert here some "hisperic" stuff that might have happened on British soil. It is hard to separate out the individual achievements of insular Christians in their native Roman culture and Civilization back when ut unum sint was not a subjunctive contrary to fact.
   
   

2. The works of monks in the Irish mission to Northumbria.


3. The Greek (!) school of the Kentish mission, led by a Turkish (natch), Theodore of Tarsus, and an African Archbishop, Adrian, from the eastern, Greek-speaking portion of Roman Africa, Libya.


4. The contents of one book, the Exeter book, in (anachronistically Anglo-) Saxon.


5. Aldhelm, and his school


6. Alcuin, who gets the Carolingian Re-Nascence going


7. Do we get to count Eriugena?




All of which is pretty much destroyed by Vikings so we hit the reset button and start over with:



8. Translations by Alfred, etc.


9. more stuff for another post.

Not bad: it's a start. Greek, Latin, and teach the Rune-boys a thing or two. Sort of what we are up against today, come to think of it. And what little civilization we have we import from Asia Minor and Libya, with help from the monks. Sounds like the start of a plan to me.