Persons in Literature and Law: Voicehood, Personhood, and Jurorship in Late Medieval England

Abstract

The dissertation argues that the Middle English poets John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer formed crucial aspects of their poetic voices around the role of the juror as understood by reference to contemporary practice in royal jurisdiction, and that the endpoint of this endeavor might be construed as approximating a literary or fictional identity structurally akin to the idea of legal personality. Juridical situations in which the issue of a speaker’s or a character’s personhood might come into play—that is, situations requiring a juror’s role, and therefore raising the question of who does or does not qualify as a common-law juror—inform the choices those poets make as they construct and reflect on the voice in which a distinctively English public poetry will speak. This project thus proposes a new approach to topics whose possibilities, the dissertation argues, were not exhausted a generation ago: the mechanics of character in later medieval poetry, and the self-consciousness of these “Ricardian” poets as they develop designs for insular poetry on a grand scale. At moments defining for their speakers and characters, these poets turn to the language and legal conditions of jury service (as developed in early common law) to confer or withhold the right to speak in a juridical capacity, or to render that right an object of reflection. The requirements determining juror qualification are those of gender and status (a juror must normally be male and a freeman or knight) and of ordinary authority communally recognized; the juror must be a “law-worthy” or “oath-worthy” member of the community. In his early Latin poem, Vox clamantis, John Gower’s speaker claims the role of juror for himself, and makes “presentment” of the rebellious peasants to the nobility, whom he commissions as judges. In The Canterbury Tales, a decade later, Chaucer brings questions of legal personhood and juror qualification to bear not only on his narrator but on his characters, including the Wife of Bath. By the usual stipulations of common-law practice, a woman would be excluded from jury service. Yet The Wife of Bath’s Tale establishes an alternative or parallel universe in which women can fulfill the role of jurors in a fictionalized version of contemporary common law, and so can become “persons” in legal function. By such fiction-making, Chaucer suggests the possibility of constructing “persons in literature” analogous to “persons in law.” A key part of the argument, developed most fully in the final chapter, examines how Chaucer’s own prose performance in The Tale of Melibee matches the Parson’s ecclesiastical “persona,” thus showing that a distinctly juridical mode of voicehood, one modeled on the voice and authority of a common-law juror, becomes the basis on which Chaucer, as pilgrim and tale-teller, claims narrative and communal personhood.