Francis Drake's return from his circumnavigation in 1580 left surprisingly few marks in the writings of his contemporaries, but an early and generally overlooked religious allegory, the Wandering Knight (1581), contains a dedication to Drake. The dedication assimilates Drake to the questing knight who is the main character of the allegory, but also imagines him as the protagonist of a classical heroic epic and as a Christian pilgrim. However, for the translator of the work and the author of the preface, respectively a merchant and instrument-maker, Drake's spiritual-chivalric quest also becomes an emblem of a social climb. Drake's knighting by the Queen acts as a consecration of the aspirations of a newly emergent social group of merchant-adventurers, and his voyage becomes a symbol for the possibilities for social, economic as well as spiritual transformation offered by the voyages of exploration. The richly significant interdependence of spiritual and socio-economic factors constructed by the dedication anticipates later arguments advanced by the likes of Hakluyt and Purchas. Thus, the Wandering Knight becomes a revealing and important work not only for assessing contemporary popular reception of Drake's achievements, but may be seen as introducing a number of conceptions and images that were to shape England's later experience of exploration and colonization.
This article discusses one of Lewkenor's more obscure works, The Resolved Gentleman (1594 – STC 15139), in the context of Elizabethan court politics in the 1590s, with a particular emphasis on the author's own experience of dissent, exile to Catholic Spain in the 1580s and return to England in the early 1590s. A translation of Hernando de Acuña's El Caballero Determinado, itself a reworking of Olivier de la Marche's Chevalier Délibéré (1483), the Resolved Gentleman bends the conventions of medieval chivalric allegory to articulate Lewkenor's own experience of alienation and dissent in the specific context of the factionalism of the 1590s. Beneath Lewkenor's seemingly self‐effacing, ‘humanist’ translation it is in fact possible to discern a complex set of criticisms of Elizabeth's court. The knight's ‘wandering’ and ‘errance’ thus becomes a complex, multivalent figure that reverberates with a number of autobiographical meanings: the knight's exile becomes in Lewkenor's hands a figure of his own forced exile to Catholic Spain, and the account of the knight's quest functions as an oblique allusion to his own efforts to make his way back to Elizabeth's court. More importantly, however, these ‘personal’ meanings acquire a wider, political valence in the context of the allegory, and the narrative as a whole thus becomes a subtle, perceptive but scathing criticism of the Elizabethan court in the 1590's and the ‘contraction’ of royal favour that resulted in particular in the exclusion of capable, experienced but Catholic counsellors like Lewkenor himself. Articulating the frustration of this younger generation of alienated but fundamentally loyalist Catholics, Lewkenor paints a picture of a failed quest for favour, where the questing knight is finally forced to retire from the active life and withdraw to a rustic hermitage that is not only incompatible with his own ideal of the vita activa, but also dangerously smacks of unregenerate, and potentially seditious Catholicism.
This article explores the poem's problematic use of holy war rhetoric, arguing for an engagement with contemporary debates on the transformation, revival and decline of the crusading ideal within the framework of the Papal Schism and the Hundred Years War. More specifically I suggest that through its skillful use of religious vocabulary the poem highlights the manipulative potential of the language of holy war, and in doing so asks the reader to reflect critically on the crusading revival under Richard II. Yet rather than merely denouncing the simple appropriation of religious language to justify a continued war of conquest, the poem stresses the potential for a genuine blurring of motives—political, spiritual, economic, imperialistic, self-glorifying—which may ultimately result in the pursuit of those delirious messianic ambitions that the poem's Arthur seems to share with Richard II.
This chapter examines the overarching didactic objectives of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine (two versions, 1331/1355), with particular attention to the poem’s interest in the relations between of language, signification, knowledge, truth, and salvation. The central claim of this chapter is that the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine ought to be read as a poem exposing the principles of correct textual interpretation as the author understood them, as part of a wider attempt to develop a salvific allegorical poetics. The chapter begins by examining Deguileville’s ambivalent and unresolved attitude to his poem’s main source of inspiration, the Roman de la Rose: while the Rose is invoked as a literary model, Deguileville rewrites an allegory of erotic desire as a quest for spiritual truth, imitating the formal, stylistic, and representational strategies of the earlier poem while also condemning it for its subversive, slippery, and ultimately ‘carnal’ allegorical poetics. The chapter then identifies the thought of Augustine, especially in the De doctrina christiana, as a central touchstone for the semiotics, hermeneutics, and epistemology of Deguileville’s own allegorical poetics. The chapter finally examines Deguileville’s twofold engagement with more recent discussions of linguistic signs as found in scholastic treatises of logic and semantics, on the one hand, and with the rise of logic within Universities during the thirteenth century on the other. Here too Deguileville’s attitude is deeply ambivalent, as he simultaneously critiques the frivolousness of academic intellectual pursuits while attempting to appropriate contemporary scholastic learning to foster the salvific objectives of his own poem.
The chapter begins with an overview of scholarly work on Langland and the French allegorical tradition, and suggests important modifications of our approach to Langland’s use of such ‘sources’. The chapter then moves on to discuss how what arguably is the central event of the poem—Will’s crisis in the third vision, culminating with the first inner dream in B passus XI—grows out of Langland’s protracted and reiterated engagement with Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine and its own internal tensions and contradictions. Langland’s anxious exploration of the salvific potential of learning in particular, as well as his treatment of Will’s ‘conversion’ in this section, must be read as elaborate responses to the aporias of the French poem. I begin by considering the events in passus XIII and XIV, which may be read as an extended rewriting, renegotiation, and ultimately disavowal of the closing sections of Deguileville’s poem, where the pilgrim abandons his quest and seeks refuge in a monastic enclosure. Indeed, the sustained development of the alimentary metaphors during the Feast of Patience suggest that Langland is here refashioning the ending of Deguileville’s poem: there, the pilgrim is converted to a radically contemplative life of monastic devotion, oration, and liturgical performance, characterized by a new, sapiential understanding of the inner Word. Langland, by contrast, once more exposes the limitations of institutional structures in preserving the living Word made flesh, and concludes this extended section with the departure of Conscience, signalling a transition to yet another stage in Will’s wanderings.
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