Abstract
This essay considers the imagery of women spinners and spinning as an ideological trope, its relation to historical women’s experience, and its deployment in Hoccleve’s poetry.
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Notes
Albert B. Friedman, “‘When Adam Delved….’: Contexts of an Historic Proverb,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 213–30 (pp. 213–14; 222).
See, for example, Sylvia Resnikow, “The Cultural History of a Democratic Proverb,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 36 (1937): 391–405.
Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 59–71 (p. 66).
J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 102: “[…] as soon as we produce a dualism incorporating two related terms, gender may operate to sustain meanings of wholeness […] dominance, […] and subjectivity […] for the first term and incompleteness […] subordination […] and objectification for the second.” My thanks to the editors of this essay for directing me to this text and other bibliography that contributes to the theoretical underpinning of my argument.
Frances M. Biscoglio, “‘Unspun’ heroes: iconography of the spinning woman in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25:2 (1995): 163–84 (163, 166).
Laura F. Hodges, “Noe’s Wife: Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner,” in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 30–39.
Marbod of Rennes, Liber Decem Capitulorum, trans. C.W. Marx, in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C.W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 228–32 (p. 230).
“The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” in The Riverside Chaucer, general ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. 401–02. Future references to Chaucer’s works are to this edition, by line number, in the text.
The notes in the Riverside edition (p. 868) reveal that “many” manuscripts contain, as gloss to these lines, the Latin tag: “Lying and weeping, God gave unto woman,” but the full version of the proverb is also current in Latin: “fallere, flere, nere, statuit deus in muliere.” For Reason’s defense of women, see Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), pp. 26–28 (p. 28).
Slavoj Žižek, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 296–331 (p. 326).
David Herlihy gives a survey of women’s contribution in these fields from the Carolingian to the late medieval period in his Opera muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), chapter four, “Spinners, Weavers, Dyers,” pp. 75–102.
See Stephen Knight’s survey of “The Voice of Labour in Fourteenth-Century English Literature,” in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. James Bothwell, PJ.P. Goldberg, and WM. Ormrod (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 101–22.
Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 153–57.
Abelard, Historia calamitatum, in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 71.
Chronicle of the Third Crusade: A Translation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, trans. Helen J. Nicholson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), p. 48. The two essays in Gendering the Crusades, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), that cite this passage, contextualize it slightly differently, but both argue that it demonstrates how the text genders crusade as “male”; Sarah Lambert, “Crusading or Spinning,” pp. 1–15 (pp. 3–4); Michael R. Evans, “‘Unfit to Bear Arms’: The Gendering of Arms and Armour in Accounts of Women on Crusade,” pp. 45–58 (p. 55).
See my “Hoccleve and … Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in The Regiment of Princes,” in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 55–84.
For Oldcastle, see K.B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London: English Universities Press, 1952), pp. 160–85. For a brief contextualization of Lollard activity in this period, see Jeremy Catto, “Religious Change under Henry V,” in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G.L. Harriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 97–115. On the “Oldcastle Rebellion”’s relation to Lancastrian propaganda strategies, see Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 65–86. On the interpretive implications of the timing of the poem’s authorship, see Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 137–46.
Ruth Nissé, “‘Oure Fadres Olde and Modres’: Gender, Heresy, and Hoccleve’s Literary Politics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 275–99.
On the link between loose talk and sexuality, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), especially pp. 40, 123.
“Address to Sir John Oldcastle,” edited as “The Remonstrance Against Oldcastle” in Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M.C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 61–74, ll. 145–49. Future references are by line number, in the text.
Bodley MS 649, fol. 98r–v, reproduced in R.M. Haines, “‘Wilde wittes and wilfulnes’: John Swetstock’s attack on those ‘poyswunmongeres’, the Lollards,” Studies in Church History 8 (1972): 143–53 (152). See also Margaret Aston’s discussion, “Lollard Women Priests?”, in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 49–70 (p. 65). For the longevity of the “obedient woman spinner” trope in these contexts, see Keith A. Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present 13 (1958): 42–62 (52, 60–61, n. 70).
See Sylvia Federico’s discussion of this passage, in the context of women’s participation in the Uprising: “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381,” Journal of British Studies 40 (2000): 159–83 (174–77).
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 258–59. Helen Barr, in her recent discussion of Hoccleve in Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 30, also directs us to the Margery Kempe analogue, but for her, Hoccleve here (if anxiously) uncritically endorses and is complicit with, Lancastrian modes of legitimization: “There are no grey areas in this poem” (p. 31).
On women’s roles in their children’s learning to read, see Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, eds. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 149–87. On the difficulties of recovering specific evidence for women’s writing, see V.M. O’Mara, “Female Scribal Ability and Scribal Activity in Late Medieval England: The Evidence?” Leeds Studies in English 27 (1996): 87–130.
Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64 (849).
See my Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 131–32.
Margarita Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 15. Anne Squires examines how one Middle English author attempts to defuse the tensions inherent in representing “one who is redeemer by being seducer,” and her implicit threat to male authority, in “The Treatment of the Figure of Judith in the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97 (1996): 187–200 (188). See also Leslie Abend Callahan, “Ambiguity and Appropriation: The Story of Judith in Medieval Narrative and Iconographic Traditions,” in Telling Tales: Medieval Narratives and the Folk Tradition, ed. and intro. Francesca Sautman Canadé, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe Carlo Di Scipio (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 79–93.
Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles Blyth (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), 11. 3858–59. Future references are by line number, in the text.
The Holy Bible […] Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), 1:35.
See, respectively, Antony J. Hasler, “Hoccleve’s Unregimented Body,” Paragraph 13 (1990): 164–83; Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 83–93; Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2001), pp. 143–50.
For the proverb, see Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases From English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1968), entry T432. A version is still current in the Renaissance and later: Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), entry T450.
The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1:142, ll. 562–63.
Henry Thomas Riley, Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, Rolls Series 12, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859–62), 1:459. Translation at 3:181. Carter Revard, “The Tow on Absalom’s Distaff and the Punishment of Lechers in Medieval London,” English Language Notes 17 (1980): 168–70 (168). See also Biscoglio, “‘Unspun’ heroes,” 174.
Revard, “Tow,” 169; The Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. William Rothwell, Louise W. Stone, and T.B.W. Reid (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1992), p. 778.
Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries […] A.D. 1276–1419, trans, and ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), pp. 484–86; 566.
On the late fifteenth-century manuscript, Lambeth MS 306, and for a historical contextualization of this story, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Separation Anxieties in Late Medieval London: Gender in The Wright’s Chaste Wife,” Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996): 23–41 (31).
Perceforest: quatrième partie, ed. Gilles Roussineau, 2 vols. (Droz: Geneva, 1987), 1: 327–85.
The Wright’s Chaste Wife, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS O.S. 12 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1865), 1. 530.
Dialogue, 11. 739–42, in Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. J.A. Burrow, EETS o.s. 313 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
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© 2004 Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel
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Batt, C. (2004). The Idioms of Women’s Work and Thomas Hoccleve’s Travails. In: Robertson, K., Uebel, M. (eds) The Middle Ages at Work. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07552-9_2
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