Kimberly Fonzo - Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship

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

Modern readers have focused on medieval authors supposed predictions of historical events with similar enthusiasm. In 1968, Russell Peck wrote of the dedications to Henry of Lancaster in the Prologue of John Gowers Confessio Amantis, That he sees hope for England residing in a man like Henry of Lancaster even as much as seven years before Henry would become king, is indeed clairvoyant. is advancing a comforting view of history by touting Gowers clairvoyance. The notion that Gower predicted Henry IVs rise to power does not do much to affirm the present day, but it does imply that destiny and justice have guided Englands past.

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

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