Despite the great literary achievements of Chaucer, Langland, and the
Pearl Poet, Ricardian English books were still a niche market in 1400.
As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton shows, however, their generation was
transformational in nurturing the resurgence of English writing, in part
as a result of the mass underemployment of clerks originally trained for
the church but unable to find steady positions in it. Surviving instead
as ecclesiastical or choral piece workers, or in secular jobs in
government or private households, this clerical proletariat lived and
worked in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay world. And
there the most enterprising found new material--and new audiences--for
poetry in English.
Since English book production in London prior to 1380 was rare,
Kerby-Fulton's study begins in the prior century with great regional
poets, revealing their early experimentation with a new poetics of
vocational crisis. Preoccupied with underemployment, patronage,
careerist ambition, alienation, and changing literary fashion, these
thirteenth-century writers were choosing the more avant garde option
of writing in English while feeling backwards to earlier tradition in
works such as Laȝamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale. These
early experimenters invoked semi-remembered literary forms in a still
evolving written vernacular, breaking ground for Ricardian writers, who
turned to these conventions during the massive clerical unemployment of
the Great Schism era. Kerby-Fulton's is the first study of Langland's
legacy of articulating an authorial employment crisis, and its echoes in
Hoccleve and Audelay. It also uses new tools for uncovering proletarian
writers in unattributed Middle English works, including the famous
Harley 2253 lyrics, the York Realist's Second Trial from the York
Cycle, St. Erkenwald, and Wynnere and Wastour. Taking in proletarian
themes, including class, meritocracy, the abuse of children (Choristers'
Lament), the gig economy, precarity, and the breaking of intellectual
elites (Book of Margery Kempe), The Clerical Proletariat and the
Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry speaks to both past and present
employment urgencies.
