UC Berkeley

Late medieval English writers confronted what they saw as a crisis of false display. Across genres, the relationship between the inner self and the outer world was depicted as one prone to deception and hypocrisy. Speech was the privileged site for this concern. For religious writers, the solution was stringent verbal and emotional honesty. Poets, by contrast, exploited this perceived disjunction for the purposes of their art. But both drew on a vocabulary that linked speech and emotion, first developed in fourteenth-century instruction on the “sins of the tongue.” This lexicon included words like “scorn” and “shame” as well as those less recognizable today: “sclaundren,” for example, meant “to induce shame,” while “boistous” speech was honest, rude, and affectively harsh. As the first chapter of Discplining the Tongue shows, this vocabulary initially provided a devout reading public with a sense of belonging and a language for itself. “Boistous” texts fostered scorn, anger, and shame: emotions invariably identified with speech acts, each capable of binding a community of strangers together.

This lexicon proved portable, and subsequent chapters turn to its place in foundational works of English poetry. William Langland’s Piers Plowman repeatedly invokes shame, but its shame does not create a sense of virtue or belonging, as contemporary religious writing would suggest. Instead, its scenes of misspeaking link shame with learning; as the poem repeats these scenes, the act of poetic making itself comes to seem a shameful but licit act of discovery. Chaucer makes mirth, comfort, and pleasure––words that elsewhere describe the act of prayer––the emotional norm that governs the telling of the Canterbury Tales: sacred pleasure becomes the pleasure of idle fiction. The fourth chapter turns from the lexis of medieval emotion to its physiology. In Mum and the Sothsegger and Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, cautionary images that depict affect swelling and bursting out as intemperate speech become self-reflexive figures for poetic making. These reinvented metaphors suggest how elements of truth-telling satire and religious instruction become incorporated into poetic self-presentation.

Rather than offering a narrative of secularization, however, the project as a whole points to the common ground where literature and prescriptive religious writing meet. Antinomies of ethics and aesthetics resolve in a shared understanding of the speaking self, its inward feelings realized only in intersubjective exchange.