Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser

By R. D. Perry

In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them.

Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve’s emphatic insistence that he was “aqweyntid” with Chaucer even after Chaucer’s death, to John Lydgate’s formations of “virtual coteries” of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections.

By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781512826036

R. D. Perry

R. D. Perry is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

Book preview

Cover: Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, From Chaucer to Spenser by R. D. Perry

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Roland Betancourt, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

COTERIE POETICS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITION

From Chaucer to Spenser

R. D. Perry

Logo: University of Pennsylvania Press

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

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Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Hardback ISBN 9781512826029

eBook ISBN 9781512826036

For Leanne Perry, Sarah Bailey, and Lindsay White, and in memory of Betty Nan Head

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 272

Tradition is Peer Pressure from dead people.

—Ice-T, twitter.com, September 21, 2020

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I. Chaucer’s Coteries in the English and French Traditions

Chapter 1. Chaucer’s London Coterie

Chapter 2. The French Connection: Chaucer, Deschamps, and Granson

Theoretical Interlude I. Tradition and the Coterie Talent

Part II. Between Coterie and Tradition

Chapter 3. Traditional Exclusions: Hoccleve and Chaucer, but Not Christine de Pizan

Chapter 4. Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries

Theoretical Interlude II. On Becoming Chaucerian

Part III. Old Chaucer, New Coteries, and the English Literary Tradition

Chapter 5. The Birth of Tradition (and New Coteries): Chaucerianism After Lydgate

Chapter 6. Old Authors in New Books: Tottel’s Miscellany

Chapter 7. Spenser’s Antiquarian Coterie

Conclusion. Authors, Readers, and Literature’s Coterie Feeling

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, a poem about literary traditions if there ever was one, culminates with the poet-narrator’s journey to that titular residence, his refusal to present himself to its eponymous resident, and his subsequent visit to the House of Rumor.¹ His decision to leave one house for another rests in large part on the capriciousness of the goddess Fame, who seems to bestow her favor on individuals without any regard for their worth, political, moral, aesthetic, or otherwise.² Earlier moments in the visit of our poet-narrator, Geffrey, presage Fame’s vagaries, such as the survey of the house’s foundation of ice on which are written names, the ones in the shadow of Fame’s abode still legible, while the names exposed to the sun can no longer be read, and thus, can no longer be known. Another aspect of the house promotes the seeming permanence of Fame’s pronouncements: holding the roof aloft are several columns, composed mostly of metals, with different writers on top, each literally bearing the weight of their stories on their shoulders. Ful wonder hy on a piler / Of yren, Geffrey spies those who wrote about Troy:

… he, the gret Omer;

And with him Dares and Tytus

Before, and eke he Lollius,

And Guydo eke de Columpnis,

And Englyssh Gaufride eke, ywis. (1465–70).

The image of Homer and others standing on a pillar of iron and carrying the weight of their stories about the Trojan War is a representation of literary tradition, a kind of phantasmagoric manifestation of the way in which the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, as T. S. Eliot would famously explain.³ In the house of Fame, Geffrey encounters those existing monuments in their literal form, not just an ideal, but rather an idealized order, the iron giving the authors a sense of permanence and stability. The writers named correspond to a rough chronology, from the earliest, Homer, through Dares and Dictys—despite the fact that Chaucer would have not read the former and would give more credence than we would now to the latter. Chaucer then goes on to mention Lollius—a supposedly lost authority whose existence is derived from a misunderstanding of Horace—and Guido delle Colonne, the Italian jurist and author who wrote a history of the Trojan War in Latin in the thirteenth century.⁴ The odd inclusion is Englyssh Gaufride, English Geoffrey. There has been some scholarly speculation as to whom Chaucer could be referring here, with the safe bet purportedly being Geoffrey of Monmouth, even though that English Geoffrey’s association with the Trojan War is a bit of a stretch.⁵

Now imagine you are a different reader, not the twenty-first century one just starting this book, and not even a typical medieval reader, say a monk somewhere around York, for whom the Geoffrey from Monmouth might be the most sensible choice amongst the various Gaufride[s].⁶ Imagine you are a particular medieval reader. Imagine you are John Gower. Gower was a writer and friend of Chaucer’s, with whom Chaucer was quite close for some time, as near as we can tell, and one with whom Chaucer was apparently trading work in progress; he was a member of that small coterie of readers who make up Chaucer’s earliest audience.⁷ As Gower, you might have recently finished readings portions of Chaucer’s latest work—or maybe even the whole thing—a long and beautiful new poem, a tragedy—itself a new genre in the English vernacular—about a doomed love affair set against the backdrop of the Trojan War based in a clever bit of primary source chicanery on the story as told by Lollius; as Gower, you have just read Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.⁸ How might the passage above look now? Differently, no doubt, as English Geoffrey has a new referent, an obvious one for Gower even though it is one that stands slightly askance from the others, but who nevertheless makes sense, kind of like the way the -ius of Lollius allows it to rhyme with the -us of Tytus even as it sonically prepares the way for the -is rhyme of the next two lines containing the next two authors: Guido and English Geoffrey, known better to Gower as Geoffrey Chaucer.⁹ Such is the difference a coterie reader makes; what was obscure to one set of eyes is clarified by another. In this passage, that coterie reading tells us something about the tradition under discussion, something more than the reassertion of a loose chronological order. Chaucer announces his intention to join this set of writers as its newest member; he hopes that through Troilus and Criseyde he will become associated with Troy as thoroughly as the other authors are. This passage, then, should be understood as a close relative of a similar announcement found at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, when Chaucer tells his litel book to kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace (V.1786, 1791–92). I will return to that famous passage—Chaucer got what he wanted after all!—because it is more complex than even the way I am treating it here, especially in its afterlife, but for the moment it is enough to point out that the ambition to be part of a tradition is palpable in both the House of Fame and in Troilus. The story of how that fulfilled desire comes to pass—in a way that Chaucer himself could not exactly anticipate—is the story this book will tell, and it begins with passages like this one: imagining Geffrey the poet-narrator staring at himself as English Geoffrey alongside Homer and all the others, a surreal image intelligible most readily to a coterie audience, that is, to you, the reader, John Gower.

Like this opening bit of role-playing, this book is about literary coteries and traditions. These two categories of the public are usually treated as if they were distinct from one another, but they are dialectically interrelated, shaping each other in new ways as they move through history. Traditions form coteries as artists seek out other artists with whom they share the same response to that tradition and to create groups with a shared sense of artistic taste. Likewise, coteries form traditions as that shared artistic response exerts its own influence on the very tradition that created it, revealing new aspects of the tradition and shaping it in different ways in response to the predilections of the coterie, perhaps even beginning a new tradition. One might think of coteries, then, not only as the products of tradition, but also as the engines that start up a tradition and that keep it running, even as traditions serve as the housings that allow coteries to keep moving; into such housings new coterie engines might even be added. While the general interaction between coteries and tradition will remain dialectical in a strict sense—it is through identification and differentiation that both concepts form one another, and that both concepts become intelligible—the development of the relationship between these two concepts will create a great deal of variability as different formations come to the fore.¹⁰ Focusing on the interaction between coteries and traditions reveals the dynamism of both concepts. The two are engaged in a continual process of creation and re-creation, as celebration and contestation, affirmation and denial, reconsideration and dismissal all work to generate new ways of belonging, especially in different kinds of coteries. Arising out of various coterie formations from the late-fourteenth to the late-sixteenth century, one such new way of belonging became the English literary tradition. What I am documenting, in some sense, is a general theory about the formation of literary traditions, but covering even more than one tradition would be an unwieldy project, a task greater than the scope of one book. I will keep my focus on the English literary tradition, even as I take occasional glances at the French tradition as a competing tradition and an influence on the development on the English one—with even more fleeting glimpses at Italian and medieval Latin—but I leave it to others to trace the way coteries work in these different traditions.

The English literary tradition, then, will serve as the concrete instantiation of the concepts just presented. Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, as the title suggests, provides a new way of understanding the English literary tradition by focusing on the essential role that coteries played in the tradition’s beginning and maintenance. A concern with tradition might strike some as passé, or even retrograde: territory that has been covered thoroughly at the very least, and perhaps even grounds to which it is best not to return, representing the most exclusionary practices of literary history. Certainly, the map with which I am dealing has been charted before—it wouldn’t be a tradition if it hadn’t—in recent history from A. C. Spearing’s Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry and Seth Lerer’s Chaucer and His Readers to William Kuskin’s Recursive Origins and Megan L. Cook’s The Poet and the Antiquaries, among others.¹¹ But coteries allow us to understand literary tradition anew; they revitalize the concept and, to extend the metaphor, give us a new map with different topographical features than what we might have seen before. Specifically, Coterie Poetics stresses the agency of the poets between Chaucer and Edmund Spenser—and beyond, as I’ll come to shortly—and shows that these poets were creating the English literary tradition by extending the intimate relationships with other poets they formed first in coteries. Looking at the essential role that sociability plays in literary creation, I trace the multiple ways that smaller, more intimate forms of community interact with larger transhistorical ones, and a large portion of this book will document this profusion of coterie forms and the way they build and shape the English literary tradition in its incipient moments.

The relationship between the English literary tradition and these coteries will play out through the different forms they take, but a general sense of the interaction can be articulated here. This book shows that coteries are both historical communities and products of rhetorical acts in which authors signal their association with one another.¹² These rhetorical performances allow coteries to promulgate a shared position on an inherited literary tradition, one around which a coterie may form in the first place. In using a shared appreciation of a tradition to create coteries, the authors also redefine what should be valued in the literary tradition, thus changing its contours. Paying attention to coterie forms will be enlivening, and a critical tool to make new sense out of old material. With a notion of coterie, we can attend to the way in which social reality revivifies literary convention and tradition, turning stock tropes and dead metaphors into something else. But such analysis will also be exclusionary, mapping out not just how a tradition came to include those prodigious creators of coteries, but also whom those formations—and the tradition that resulted—left out in the process. This ostracism need not be solely a cause for lamentation, however. By identifying coteries as a mechanism whereby literary traditions are formed and changed, one also casts light on the means by which those traditions might be altered again. That is to say, because coteries and traditions are always in the process of shaping each other new coteries can open up a literary tradition in ways more congenial to those who have been excluded in the past. Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, then, identifies not only the means by which the English literary tradition came to be, but also one of the means by which it could be otherwise.

Arguing that coteries and traditions create one another, and documenting the different coteries that allowed the English literary tradition to take shape, gives rise to certain questions about the nature of authorship, the relationship between authors and audiences, and the category of literature. Chaucer’s biography has been the object of intense scrutiny of late, from the explicitly biographical works of Paul Strohm and Marion Turner to Euan Roger’s and Sebastian Sobecki’s archival recovery illuminating Chaucer’s relationship to Cecily Chaumpaigne.¹³ Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition insists, though, that the biographical interest in Chaucer the author return to the literary realm. Throughout, I present various modes of authorial self-presentation and diverse ways authors interact with readerships, real, imagined, and anticipated. Authors write in different ways with different readerships in mind. In this way, the relationship between coterie and tradition is a historical circumstance that is formally embedded within the work of art itself. Indeed, coteries and traditions are in their very nature historical, the products of a particular biographical moment for the author or the results of the accretion of historically disparate works. In outlining a literary history, coteries are concepts that bridge the two parts of that term—the literary and the historical—as literary works encode within themselves traces of these historical formations. Authors produce works for the coterie audience they know will read them as well as for the audience they hope will receive them. In this way, authorship is revealed to be a collaborative enterprise, as readers shape what authors write. But it is collaborative in more ways than one, as coteries and their role in literary traditions disclose the fact that authors are readers too, of both the works in a tradition that came before them and the works that are created by their contemporaries, other authors either known to them only distantly or those coterie authors they know intimately.

Authorship, then, is essentially a public-facing enterprise as well as constituting a kind of demi-public within itself, and coteries and traditions are two of the most prominent literary publics in which authors find themselves. Defining coteries and traditions as forms of the public, though, might strike an odd note with some. Coteries in particular are often defined by their private interactions, not their public ones. And yet, their rhetorical aspect, the fact that in this instance especially they are comingled with authorship—not to mention that they require the membership of more than one person—gives coteries a decidedly communal cast. Coteries are a form of public that retain a sense of the private, existing at the border of the two spheres, blurring the lines between them. They therefore give us a sense of the ways in which literature traverses those categorical boundaries. Coterie authorship reveals the secrecy and exclusivity inherent in the concept of the literary as such, as well as the way those qualities can, paradoxically, become communal. Because such a notion of authorship commingles the concepts of author and reader so thoroughly, it gives us a sense of the way that readers, too, exist at the border of the public and the private. Reading allows for the private engagement with a public production; even when something is read aloud in a group, the individual listener will have their own idiosyncratic take on the work, even if that take is also influenced by other audience members. Indeed, literature is designed precisely for this: the pleasure one takes in literature comes both from the private meaning with which one imbues it as well as the way that meaning can be shared in public, with others.

Traditions are more obviously a construct of the public sphere, both produced by a community and evaluated communally as an object. Changes made to a tradition are made collectively, by the consensus of the community that partakes in it, as the changes made to the literary canon from the 1980s to the present attest.¹⁴ Even so, we are still unaccustomed to discussing literary tradition as the concern of multiple artists at the same time and in the same way, that is, as a purview of coteries. More often, we take the relationship to tradition to be a concern for the lone artist, the singular creator of Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. Coterie authorship complicates this picture enormously, and allows us to think through authorship and audience in a way that reveals both their intermingled nature as well as their communal qualities. It will be the work of this introduction, then, to elucidate the nature of coteries and traditions, to explain just what kind of public they represent and by which mechanisms they go public, as it were. Those same mechanisms—and I will specify them now as the use of allusions and proper names—will also be the ones that allow coteries and traditions their dynamic interaction. As coterie, though, is the less commonplace term, and the one less obviously public in its nature, starting with it, detailing its operations and defining characteristics, will allow traditions to come more clearly into the picture as well.

Coterie and Its Publics

The primary stumbling block for recognizing the important role that coteries play in the creation and maintenance of a literary tradition is the assumption that coteries have no relationship to the public. This assumption stems from the pejorative connotations that historically have come to accrue around the concept.¹⁵ Coteries, so the criticism holds, are little more than secretive cliques that work in the shadows, away from the public eye, in order to covertly affect society or the government. However, undermining these assumptions, the term coterie relies on a simple fact of life, the basic observation that artists live and talk to other people—and my concern will be with art and artists here, though the discussion will have implicit connotations for the political nature of coteries. Art has an audience and at times that audience consists of people that the artists know. Sometimes, that audience of known individuals includes other artists, who might talk to each other about their artistic creations. The fact that coteries are dependent on a basic feature of the way people socialize with one another should stave off any charges of anachronism about my use of the term, but as I will discuss eventually (in the first theoretical interlude) late medieval England was a place perhaps more given to coterie productions than even our own, due in no small part to the particular material conditions of working in a manuscript culture. Then, as now, it might occur to the artist that this kind of socializing provides some real benefits. The coterie allows the artists a vantage point from which to understand their productions in relation to their present moment, to the time of the now rather than in relation to the past (an especially prominent understanding of medieval literary production) or to the future. Such a perspective likewise allows for a robust response from the coterie artist’s peers, even a little friendly competition, that can shape the work as the artist produces it. That response to one’s contemporaries means that the coterie artist can make use of productive ambiguities between author and audience, the private and the public sphere, promoting a kind of intimacy with—in this case—a literary work.

The term coterie, which is very seldom used by the artists themselves, is simply a way to talk about this form of association. On one level, coterie is a sociological term denoting a gathering of like-minded individuals of the same class, actual historical persons in relation with one another. The word derives from medieval Latin cotārius, coterius, meaning a tenant of a cot.¹⁶ Such feudal origins are still clear in the early French meaning, which involves a group of peasants who come together to work the land of a lord.¹⁷ As it enters into English in the eighteenth century, coterie sheds its association with peasants but retains the connotation that such groups are drawn from one class of people, which is now understood to be the cultural elite. Its most general and benign definition—OED, coterie, n. 2, which is a circle of persons associated together and distinguished from ‘outsiders,’ a ‘set’ —is belied by the two associated sub-definitions: 2.a, a select or exclusive circle in Society; the select ‘set’ who have the entrée to some house, as ‘the Holland House coterie’, and 2.b, A ‘set’ associated by certain exclusive interests, pursuits, or aims; a clique. When one uses the term coterie now, most often this refers to a group of individuals from an upper class, a group characterized by a quality mentioned in both sub-definitions—exclusivity. I will discuss one such coterie that closely fits these qualifications in Chapter 6, with Surrey and Wyatt. This exclusivity creates a pejorative connotation to coterie. Lytle Shaw explains that a coterie poet is in common usage, someone whose writing depends upon a small and implicitly anti-democratic model of audience.¹⁸ This pejorative sense of the term is a critique aimed at coterie authors, a complaint about their decision to foreclose on a potentially broad audience by cultivating an insider style.¹⁹

However, coteries are more than a historical and sociological phenomenon; they also depend upon a rhetorical pose involving distinct literary features. Criticism about the small audience of a coterie amounts to an assertion about the public nature of poetic writing, a normative claim that poetry must be a public, and not a private, discourse. Such criticism mistakes the rhetorical for the historical, and sees only biographical detail when the coterie is in fact also engaged in literary art for a wider public. For Shaw, whose discussion centered on Frank O’Hara but who also draws out coterie’s general rhetorical aspects, coterie functions less as a pejorative charge or as an occasion for biographical detail than as a code of reading that emerges at and helps to articulate the seam between biographical, historical particulars and modes of rhetoric, between archival facts and theoretical models.²⁰ Coteries occur at the intersection of the public and the private. They are both a code of reading that can be shared as a literary and rhetorical strategy and biographical, historical particulars, composed of specific individuals at particular historical moments. Although Shaw wants to stress the rhetoric of coterie, he also points out that this will not mean that coterie is ever a purely textual phenomenon. A coterie has to be both historical and rhetorical: "it is central to the strangeness and compellingness of the term that it involves both a mode of address and an actual context for that address, both a range of rhetorical, formal strategies and a staging ground for these strategies in empirical life.²¹ The rhetoric cannot exist without a concrete historical situation, but the fact of intimacy among historical individuals alone is not enough to produce a coterie, which requires certain rhetorical, formal strategies. Ultimately, then, a coterie is as much an idea about the social possibilities of affinity as it is a concrete sociological fact."²² In order to be a coterie, a group has to act like one and, in doing so, signals that the coterie belongs to the public at large. Coteries exist on the border of the public and the private partially because they are made up of more than one individual and so constitute a small public of their own, and also because they are composed of public individuals and have a public-facing performance.

The performance of coterie will change in different historical circumstances, and especially through distinct modes of engagement and means of communication—for long-distance communication, O’Hara can pick up a phone and call someone, whereas Chaucer might write by hand on expensive parchment.²³ That said, there are two general means by which a literary work may signal its involvement in a coterie: specific forms of allusion and a particular way of using proper names. These literary gestures are only potentially a signal of a coterie performance as they can also signal other things—like belonging in a tradition, as I will discuss throughout—but each chapter in this book will address the specific ways that different coterie performances use allusions and proper names to indicate modes of association. The use of allusions to represent a coterie affiliation makes a certain amount of obvious sense. Inhabiting the same social world, the coterie members have ample opportunity to develop the same preferences for certain literary styles or specific works—the clearest point of connection between coterie and tradition—but members can also meet through other means and gravitate toward one another based on shared taste, or develop such preference together.²⁴ Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey may have come from similar backgrounds—albeit with Surrey’s family as the more prominent one—and developed certain predilections that way (Chapter 6), whereas Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps (the French poet) probably met as diplomats and discovered a mutual appreciation for the Roman de la Rose, solidifying their bond over a preexisting disposition (Chapter 2). Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser probably met at Cambridge and developed a shared literary range of reference—or built on an already existing one—from there (Chapter 7). To take a more recent example, the fact that Patience Agbabi wrote a homage to Chaucer (Telling Tales) and that she is also a part of the Refugee Tales project—a project that is clearly an effort by interconnected individuals—suggests that it is a contemporary instance of a coterie making its own use of a literary tradition.²⁵ In the Refugee Tales, despite different styles and different backgrounds, the shared allusions to the Canterbury Tales announce the coterie affiliations, as do the fact that the tales make similar use of Chaucer’s work: rather than a poet of nationalism, as the nineteenth century might have saw him, the Chaucer in Refugee Tales is a poet of movement and inclusion, a champion of migration and the refugee.²⁶ As the various authors construct their own versions of Chaucer, they teach readers how to see him anew at the same time, changing the nature of the English literary tradition in their wake, a phenomenon I discuss in more detail in later sections of this introduction.

Allusion is only one of the tools with which coteries can engage with literary traditions; a more overt one is the use of proper names through which coteries are able to explore the performative power of canonization.²⁷ In other words, the use of proper names becomes a powerful rhetorical device that allows coteries not only to disclose their own memberships, but also to construct and shape literary canons, in local to inherited transnational contexts. Chaucer and his followers recognize this capacity, allowing them to negotiate their positions against one another—as Chaucer and Deschamps both affirm that each of them is the true inheritor of the Roman de la Rose—or to place Chaucer or themselves in a literary tradition—a process Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate begin, and John Skelton and William Dunbar finish. Proper names deployed in a more local and coterie context, though, participate in the broader range of complex naming processes current in late-medieval England, and that context serves as an important reminder that coteries will look and behave differently in different times and places. Names designate a variety of things in the late Middle Ages. Place—especially of origin—is, of course, the most obvious and common descriptor in medieval names, and here one may think of almost innumerable examples, like Gerald of Wales or Marie de France. Names like Johnson or Richardson contain reference to familial relation, as at one point some ancestor was John’s son or Richard’s son. Chaucer’s name is an example of one denoting a profession; at one point he must have had an ancestor who was a shoemaker. Chaucer’s name, though, also discloses another feature of medieval naming practices: surnames were in the process of becoming hereditary rather than just descriptive. Chaucer’s father was not a shoemaker, but rather a vintner, yet we do not call the poet of the Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Vintner. One must not take the hereditary aspect too far, however. Even as surnames were increasingly becoming hereditary, medieval naming, as Emily Steiner says, "amounted to nothing more than a provisional distinctiveness."²⁸ Names, therefore, are emphatically local and require continual reinforcement in order to maintain their ability to refer to distinct individuals.

The need for continual reinforcement is what allows for the complex coterie use of names, what frees coterie members to construct identities and to name them as they see fit, especially in the Middle Ages when naming is more clearly open to change, but also in modernity when coterie names can be reinscribed over an individual’s inherited name. In late medieval England, the playful use and appropriation of names in coteries is a less socially destabilizing feature of what Anne Middleton calls a late fourteenth-century crisis of the proper in which one’s name, in effect, becomes one’s own convention for an identity that coheres around one’s voluntary acts and oath-bound confederates, rather than around stability of seisin and lineal status: as an instrument for claiming rights, its ‘propriety,’ the integrity it proclaims, is less paternal than personal; the unit it stabilizes and defends is not the holding but the life, and a community restored to self-presence by constitutively ‘memorial’ acts and rituals.²⁹ One had, in other words, quite a bit of leeway to define oneself. Coteries form explicitly through one’s voluntary acts with oath-bound or otherwise associated confederates. In coteries, one creates communities via constitutively ‘memorial’ acts and rituals that include the naming of other authors. Middleton is more concerned with authorial self-naming, especially as it relates to William Langland’s tendency to hide his name in figurative or allegorical locutions. However, such anagrammatic naming practices, Middleton points out, are typical of coterie poets.³⁰ These naming practices are special instances of a generalizable rule, in which acts of authorial self-naming have more than an occasional function as momentary evocations of actual or fictive social intimacy with an audience.³¹ Such acts conferred an extraordinary amount of power on the author naming himself, or on others naming the author—again, a real sense of agency that coteries had the ability to exploit—power wielded in their own ways by writers like Langland or the individuals associated with the Peasant’s Revolt. As Middleton explains, such naming attests to the fact that individuals and groups were suddenly able to constitute and publish themselves at will as something new and credible, to coin and circulate social redefinitions of the self and the community—fictions, if you will—as operative fact.³² Chaucerian coteries made use of this capacity for self-naming, and so, as with allusions, each chapter will also feature a discussion on the different ways in which names are used in different coterie contexts. This capacity for naming as a form of self-definition, moreover, can help us distinguish various forms of coterie from one another.

To summarize and shore up a definition, then, coteries are a specific type of literary public. In their most basic guise, they consist of small groups of writers—as small as two individuals—who serve as a primary audience for one another. These poets, in other words, write with one another in mind. They will produce one or more works that in some way address the other coterie members, sometimes explicitly by name, or, occasionally, by more subtle forms of allusion. Under this definition, coteries are historical and social, that is they involve real individuals who are related to one another in specific historically and socially determined ways. But coteries are also rhetorical; writers perform the fact that they belong to a coterie through a variety of literary techniques, most often by the modes of address already mentioned—using the proper names of other coterie members or via alluding to each other’s works—or by demonstrating a shared aesthetic sensibility. They often use all of these techniques. The important point is that coteries never refer simply to some historical confluence of authors living in close social proximity. They instead are a manifestation of audience that is incorporated formally into the work itself.

Coterie’s Forms

Because coteries describe something more than historical fact, and because they give rise to different rhetorical and literary techniques, coteries are a more flexible concept than their pejorative connotations let on. I have already mentioned that coteries are usually assumed to be both temporally and geographically restricted, and some of Chaucer’s coteries will exhibit a similar close association with location and time, as Sebastian Sobecki’s work on Chaucer and Gower in 1380s Southwark demonstrates.³³ Chaucer’s biography and his historical situation, though, will also provide for different sorts of coteries, ones not bound to specific locations. His continental travel and extensive dealing with French writers both abroad and at the English court, occasioned by England’s extended engagement with France during the Hundred Years War, allowed Chaucer to form a coterie with Deschamps and Oton de Granson, as when, in the Complaint of Venus, Chaucer names Granson the flour of hem that make in Fraunce (82). More radical still are the alterations Hoccleve makes to the coterie form. Whereas Chaucer extends the geographic possibilities for coteries, Hoccleve extends their temporal boundaries by emphasizing his coterie relationship with Chaucer even after the older poet’s death, as when Hoccleve reveals that was aqweyntid with Chaucer.³⁴ The ways these authors use these names thus construct different kinds of coteries, and, with Hoccleve, the rhetorical side of coterie relationships begins to predominate, exceeding the limitations placed on coteries by their historical origins.

But it was Lydgate who really exploited the potential inherent in the rhetorical aspects of coterie poetics by creating virtual coteries, consisting of both living and dead poets, as well as individuals associated with other aspects of the poem’s production such as patrons or scribes. The relationship between these individuals occurs primarily on the page, but virtual coteries are not simply a form of intertextuality. Instead, they refer to the interaction between complexly interconnected webs of individuals. Intertextuality in contemporary discussions is something of a confused category.³⁵ As the editors of a collection on intertextuality in medieval texts write, intertextuality has frequently been used as a synonym of quotation, allusion, parody, source, and even context.³⁶ Insofar as intertextuality refers to something as foundational to Lydgate’s poetry, or medieval poetry in general, as allusion or citation, then certainly virtual coteries will display the marks of that technique.³⁷ The aspect of virtual coteries that intertextuality does not cover, however, is the space exterior to texts, which is to say, Lydgate’s relationship to people, to the Chaucer family more specifically, a relationship mediated by texts, to be sure, but one that is not solely contained by textuality. Virtual coteries, in short, mediate the relationship between people as a relationship between texts, and vice versa. Lydgate’s relationship to Chaucer’s granddaughter, Alice, is partially constituted through his relationship to Chaucer’s texts and Lydgate’s relationship to Chaucer’s texts is partially informed by his relationship with Alice and her husbands.

What virtual coteries add to a notion of Lydgate’s public, then, is a sense of intimacy and, to a certain extent, a concomitant leveling of social hierarchies. In this construction of intimate poetic communities that involve even his patrons, Lydgate practices something akin to what scholars have identified as a type of poetic community common in late-medieval France. Jane H. M. Taylor focuses on poetic anthologies to read the late medieval lyric as a product of a complex network of people, materials, and events in which both a poet and patron can accrue cultural capital through their collaboration.³⁸ Emma Cayley describes the situation succinctly by claiming that the literary production of the later Middle Ages in France is characterized by a participatory culture that is essentially competitive.³⁹ Drawing on the work of both Cayley and Taylor, Adrian Armstrong has detailed what such an atmosphere means for poets: the twin mechanisms of collaboration and competition foster ongoing development and innovation, so that the formal and rhetorical intricacy of French poetry steadily increases.⁴⁰ As the works of these scholars show, poetic communities can be highly competitive organizations, ones that pit the prowess of their members against one another, and that competition is a sign of their strength and an explanation for their tendency toward formal innovations. Lydgate’s virtual coteries work in a similar manner: they showcase the way that competing agencies come together to form a poem, in that Lydgate’s alterations and innovations to his source material, including Chaucer, are a product of pitting his agency against that of his patron. But, as Armstrong’s discussion of Charles d’Orléans’s coterie makes clear, these French communities are still made up of different poets and writers, even if some of them are members of the nobility. In virtual coteries, because they exist solely on the page—rather than coming together to write the page, as the case in France—anyone can join, living, dead, or just potential.⁴¹

In describing Lydgate’s relationship to Chaucer as a coterie relationship, I raise once again the specter of tradition, the building of which virtual coteries represent a crucial step. Each of the members of a coterie will have an individual relationship to the literary traditions they have inherited. The way they understand these traditions—the preference for Ovid over Virgil or the relative emphasis on some aspect of the Roman de la Rose, for instance—is an important element of the coterie relationship, a sensibility the members share and one of the reasons they may have formed a coterie together in the first place. Thus do traditions shape coteries. Coteries, however, can also shape traditions. They can do so, in part, because, while coteries describe an author’s relationship to their primary audience, that does not mean that the author has a relationship only to that audience. An author will have a relationship with those writers who have preceded them as well as those writers that will succeed them at the same time as they have a relationship with their primary audience. In other words, an author will have a relationship to both a coterie and to a tradition, and those relationships will influence one another. But they also influence the creation of the work of art, albeit in different ways. Chaucer’s work is shaped by literary tradition, by the influence of Jean de Meun or by Chaucer’s own expectations about what those who read his work will learn from it; and it is also shaped by his coteries, by the way that his relationship to Granson influences how he translates the French poet’s work. Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the poets who come after them will have their own set of relationships, sometime placing Chaucer in a coterie role and sometimes in a role determined by tradition. In addition to describing the different forms of coterie poetics the Chaucerian tradition practiced, this book explains how those different coterie forms help create the Chaucerian tradition as Chaucer moves from the role of intimate coterie member to a distant guarantor of the coterie’s aesthetic value—the role Jean de Meun played for Deschamps, Granson, and Chaucer himself—even as that tradition becomes the English literary tradition more broadly. Coteries continue to shape the tradition, in part because they keep being made, so even as Chaucer becomes the head of a literary tradition that appropriates and responds to his work, he assumes a fresh role in the internal dynamics of new coteries created by people like Richard Tottel and Edmund Spenser. It is not that these new coteries mindlessly inherit Chaucer as an integral part of their tradition; it is that they reaffirm his status and take it to mean new things, altering the English literary tradition as they do. Given the essential role coteries play in the creation and maintenance of a tradition, and especially in the English literary tradition that serves as my exemplar, it is necessary to consider more generally the nature of literary traditions.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Literary Tradition

It is time to think once again about literary traditions. The timing is propitious, in part, because critics have taken up questions of literary form with a vigor seldom seen since the first half of the twentieth century.⁴² Tradition as a concept of inquiry, after all, was closely associated with the