Elizaveta Strakhov begins her book about continental influence on the history of English poetry in the 14-15th centuries by discussing her personal history as a bilingual speaker of Russian, born in the Soviet Union, a nation no longer on the map, in a compelling prelude to the book’s discussion of war, national identity, and poetic creativity. She speaks in most noble words about her father, a poet and avid reader who actually introduced her to the English poet Lydgate, and who sensitized her to the importance of form. This is not mere filial piety or reminiscence. Rather, it indicates a practice on the author’s part of deeply implicating ancestral history into her scholarly understanding of art, conflict, and social change in literary history. So when Strakhov talks about “worlds we make of the ashes of our former homes” and about those homes’ “enduring cultural imprints on our new lives” (ix), and when she talks about her father’s work of drawing from the “folkloric traditions from the Ural Mountains to the Appalachians” (xi), she’s utilizing her life experiences as a framework for studying the conflicts to be depicted in her monograph. Quite poignantly she acknowledges that she has written a book about her father “and it is too late to tell him” (xi). What she learned from family history enables Strakhov to see war, division, poetry, and healing in heightened ways. If I’m spending more time on acknowledgments than one customarily does, it’s because Strakhov’s prelude provides the key to appreciating the drama that unfolds in the works of the authors from England and France during the Hundred Years War--the key to studying the formal choices of the poets, French and English, to assert the independent unity of a literary community, and thus to craft acts of healing, during a period of violent division and territorial conquest.
The introduction discusses translation theory in European and Christian cultural history and the tension between translating for “continuity” or for “displacement.” Past scholarship has emphasized, in dealing with Hundred Years War, a sense of the agonistic between the warring cultures: “rivalry, animosity, and one upmanship” (5). Strakhov, graciously honoring past critics, will take a different approach, looking at “the opposite phenomenon: poets and scribes who, unexpectedly and highly self-consciously, highlight the ties, affinities, and connections that bind Francophone Europe together despite the chaos of war” (5). So the phrase “Continental England” that titles the book indicates “an England that is looking out onto the Continent, and an England understood by the Continent as firmly a part of its history and, potentially, its destiny” (9). That’s the guiding thesis for the book, for the poets here studied “develop a secularized version of the patristic model of translation that seeks to rehabilitate the war-torn landscapes of Francophone Europe by locating a space for this aggressive yet aspirational Continental England within it” (9).
England looks for cultural inspiration and connection to the continent, while at the same time maintaining itself as a powerful, aggressive, and militarily superior force. One might say, poets didn’t go to war, so to speak, for even if engaged with the politics, warfare, or diplomacy in one way of another, poets enacted a counter program of engaged creative work that could build connections rather than emphasize aggression, antagonism, and violence. Strakhov creates a very useful term “reparative translation,” a practice that can “ground texts in a common tradition stretching beyond political regionalist divisions in order to repair them” (9), and central in these labors is the poets’ (and our) attention to form. Attending to form, that is, to “reproducible units of meaning” (13), allows writers/readers to break down divisions of language, geography, and authorship and thus to see unities that were previously occluded when the poetry here studied was “siloed by scholars into distant literary historical strands or else locked into rigorous configurations” (13). So focus on form instead of on historical divisions based on “author, language, nation” (14) forges a new history of poetry and cultural exchange. As Strakhov puts it, “iterable instantiations of lyric form promoted structure, alliance, and solidarity within institutional configurations that had become disrupted by the Hundred Years’ War” (16-17). And so her book will study spaces and acts of “community, amid--and despite--the crucible of international war” (20).
In the book’s following chapters, Strakhov explores how the formes fixes lyric, an “umbrella term” that includes “a variety formally rigid lyrics” (1), and the art of “reparative translation” play their parts in the creation of poetry independent of war. England here is ever negotiating its relationship with the Francophone continent in times of military and territorial conflict. The detailed textual arguments and close readings engage a rich variety of poets, major and minor, English and French, well-known and unknown, in familiar poems yet often in understudied manuscript contexts. These analyses defy paraphrase but will reward careful reading.
And what unfolds is not--nor claims to be--a history of the Hundred Years War or of lyric poetry in this period, but rather a sophisticated, focused exploration of an interconnectedness that transcends the formal states of war between nations. This book is designed for advanced students and scholars interested in lyric form as a lens through which to see the dynamic work of such humanist creativity. Prior arguments (or assumptions) for understanding England as an isolated island nation that progressively asserted its linguistic separateness are challenged by Strakhov to the point of dismantlement, which will lead (if we can do it, and if our field survives) to a reimagination and re-conceptualization of how we teach the history of “English” literature in these centuries.
Chapter 1 explores the formes fixes lyric in detail, exploring “its practitioners’ understanding of form as a sociocultural tool that leaves its mark on the construction of historical movements and periods” (22). Central here is the work of Deschamps (and his followers) in establishing both practice and also theory, in his Art de dictier (1392); a key here is “the practice of combining discrete textual units in a manner analogous to musical composition” (23); the inherent musicality helps the formes fixes lyric become “a vital tool for articulating the self” (28). The chapter then examines the organization of an understudied collection of lyrics (Univ. of Pennsylvania MS codex 902), which also contains the poems of “Ch.” But the poems sometimes attributed to Chaucer cannot be by him because they have a different role in formal history, for their placement in the anthology helps to achieve “a metapoetic meditation on the history of the formes fixes development,” so “whatever Ch may stand for initially,” for Strakhov it signifies “change” (45). Focus on form over content as an analytical method, we also learn, does not render lyric form as “ahistorical, ornamental or hermetic,” for form helps poets locate themselves regionally, in relation to a “particular literary community,” “to a particular political moment,” and in the context of a “monumentalizing literary historical narrative” (46), all of which the following chapters will explore. So the poets studied throughout the book, and Strakhov’s historical contextualization of them, are ever attentive to the state of violence and trauma brought by war, which state the poets self-consciously try to counter with acts of “reparative translation.”
Chapter 2, “Continental Conversations about War, Poetry, and the Place of England in Francophone Europe,” traces how the formes fixes comes to “offer poets an excellent medium for thinking about England’s cultural proximity yet political aggression toward the rest of Francophone Europe and the resulting threat posed by its stance to Francophone cultural unity” (48). Featured here are two triads of French poets in dialogue about England as, alternately, politically hostile and yet unified to its continental neighbor. The first involves an anonymous poet of Picardy, Deschamps, and Froissart--an exchange that traces how the poets’ renderings of their pastourelles “map a politically contested space hard hit by the war” (54). The second triad are Phillippe de Vitry, Jean Campion, and Jean de le Mote, in a debate concerning, in part, “opposing formulations of classicizing poetry’s potential to repair the divisions of war” (92). Both exchanges/debates display, variously, responses to that eternal question, “does one’s political service affect one’s poetic craft? (49). However, conflicted in their perspectives on England and the continent in a time of war, the exchanges demonstrate how “both sets of poets are preoccupied with the porousness of the boundary between England and the Francophone Continent,” and see “iterable instantiations of lyric form as building blocks for pan-European community in a secularized vision of a world united beyond language, geography, and political factionalism” (93).
If chapter 2 “examined poets attending to form to think through the politics behind composing poetry in French while working in an England encroaching upon the Francophone continent” (94), chapter 3, “The Monolingualism of the Other,” turns to Deschamps’s Ballad to Chaucer and to Chaucer’s own Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Addressing composition in English, Strakhov will wonder whether this “newfound linguistic alterity” will sever such poems “irreparably from their Continental counterparts” (94) and again the larger issue concerns England’s place “within a Francophone European poetic tradition” (95). The chapter is driven by an interesting tension: “what is more significant to the medieval construction of a shared literary culture: a common language or a common set of certain cultural bedrocks legible as literary forms?” (95). Deschamps’s famous reference to Chaucer as “grant translateur” is “not to deride nor dismiss him but to bring him into Continental conversation about reparative translation and the Hundred Years’ War” (102).
Chaucer wrote in English without asserting linguistic separatism, and Strakhov wants to question that potentially facile paradigm. In the F version of thePrologue Chaucer displays a certain continuity with the Continental influences, which “presents the English poet as a prime practitioner of reparative translation” (96), but the G version of that Prologue rather suggests “that England’s linguistic alterity does create a decisive break between England and the Continent” (96); looking at both prologues therefore “testifies to the crisis engendered by England’s aggressive role in the Hundred Years’ War” as displayed by these “radically conflicting versions of that relationship” (96). The chapter ends with dramatic paragraph about war and Henry’s usurpation of Richard in 1399, which “reactivated England’s political designs on the French throne,” and in this context “English poetry, political and otherwise, spread under Lancastrian patronage” (128).
Chapter 3 studies a tension in Chaucer’s writing between his embrace of continental form and his explicit use of the English language. For while language asserts Englishness, form brings the English poets closer to the continent, so there is no clear binary serving separation or proto-nationalism. With this Chaucerian paradigm in mind, Strakhov turns to the Lancastrian 15th century to see how the assertion of land holdings in France affects those writing in English: will their poetry witness a greater effort to connect to the Continent through formal choices, or will it retrench into an assertion of “English” to assert division? The stars are Gower and his Trentham manuscript which contains his Cinkante balades, the ballades of his Traitié and In Praise of Peace; and then Hoccleve’s Huntington Holographs, two collections of formes fixes lyrics. Hoccleve is not normally paired with Gower and is considered the “veritable epitome of Englishness,” even though his life reveals a “broad interest in contemporary Francophone culture” (131). All this unfolds before the backdrop of “an aggressive England with new military designs on France” (130). Strakhov here works towards the conclusion that “the final years of Gower’s [d. 1408] and in Hoccleve’s [d. 1426] lives bookend a new political period in Anglo-French cultural and political relations” during a time of “renewed military incursion into the Francophone Continent” (169). For the “multilingual anthologies” that these poets composed during this period of English aggression “belie the well-worn narrative of an inward gazing Lancastrian England invested in emphatically monolingual English literary culture” (169). Highlights here are how each poet addresses his sovereign’s role in warfare: Gower displays a multilingual struggle to determine how best to address a king, in dedicatory verses designed to “warn Henry IV against open war with France”; while Hoccleve crafts verses that “portray an effective dual-language poet for a new dual-language conquering Lancastrian age reigning over a newly Continental England” (152). For Hoccleve’s anthology is produced during the time of Henry V’s “meteoric conquest of northern France and untimely death in 1422” (132), and the poet’s “retrospective overview of Henry V’s reign” is woven together with “an equally retrospective overview of Hoccleve’s literary career” (159).
The final chapter engages further with what Strakhov calls the “Chaucer figure”--Chaucer as the “grant translateur,” essentially as a “cultural shorthand” for the practice of a monolingualism that nonetheless “can successfully culturally link politically divided regions in reparative translation work” (168-169)--as employed in the (understudied) formes fixes anthologizes of John Shirley and in the works of John Lydgate, at a time in which “England militarily dominated the Francophone Continent while importing reams of Francophone literary material back across the Channel” (170). Ultimately for Shirley and Lydgate, “both writing and working squarely during this Continental Lancastrian age, English can newly stand on its own. But it can stand on its own not due to its unalienable distinction from other European languages, but because it has become comparable to French as a medium of translation from Latin, without ever completely displacing French” (214). In a very well-earned conclusion, Strakhov writes that both Shirley and Lydgate “insist that England’s national literary arena is defined not by the homespun isolationism of a bounded island but by its openness to other languages and literatures, which will elevate it to posterity” (214). We see how rigorously Strakhov has demythologized the triumph of English, for such triumph is never separate from England’s “close cultural relationship to the Francophone Continent” and is therefore the “triumph of a Continental England” (214). By book’s end we have a full understanding of title and concept, which have been proved in magisterial detail. A highlight in this chapter is the close study of Lydgate’s prologue to the Fall of Princes and its debt not just to Boccaccio’s text but to the Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of the Italian original. As Strakhov writes: Lydgate’s treatment of Laurent’s ideas about translation across cultures “confirms his recognition of Laurent’s translational practices as reparative and informs his final presentation of Chaucer as the “grant translateur.” (205). There is some beautiful exposition here on the image of the translator as a potter who can break but reshape the past--with lovely reference to imagery in Jeremiah 18: 3-4 and Isiah 64:8.
A “coda” reflects on the previous chapter and looks at George Ashby, “the final Lancastrian poet,” whose works, the Active Policies of a Prince (a narrative in rhyme royal), and the Dicta et opiniones (a collection of aphorisms), exist in a “cross-Chanell, multilingual space” (223), further witnessing the book’s multilingual paradigm. Each work has a Latin preface, and in calling the Active a book that has been “anglicatus” in ballade form, Ashby “reminds us that working in English continues to be but one available choice among others” (221).
At book’s end, Strakhov acknowledges humbly that her theories about reparative translation are “not the only model for translation in this period” (223), and yet when one reviews the arguments that she’s made, the result is stunning. If we were to accept these detailed, and historically grounded arguments, it would necessitate a reimagination of how we anthologize works for students. Under the pressures of a semester-long survey (and grateful that any medieval literature whatsoever is being taught), one tends to teach Marie De France, then move on to Chaucer and Langland, etc., with the implication that English just won out somehow. We would have to present a more nuanced, intercontinental awareness of “English” literature and attend to its dynamic and evolving Francophone elements. This would help us to dramatize Strakhov’s stirring and well-earned conclusion about literary movements as markers of history: “Literature rebinds what war and conflict tear apart” (225). With medieval studies struggling for survival, this adjustment may be difficult to enact, but Strakhov has nonetheless reminded us, with the most rigorous textual analysis, of people and places that may no longer be on the map, so to speak, but which played their critical part in poetic and political histories of violence and healing. Last note: the index is uncommonly detailed; the non-English quotations are dutifully translated; and chapters begin and end with thoughtful transitions about what we’ve learned and what we’re about to learn, adding coherence, clarity, and direction to the scaffolded arguments.