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 Lazamon'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.
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