Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2022
Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Source Publication
Huntington Library Quarterly
Source ISSN
0018-7895
Original Item ID
DOI: 10.1353/hlq.2022.a920286
Abstract
In Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.20, John Shirley offers a famously enigmatic rubric to his copy of Chaucer's Complaint of Venus. He cites Chaucer as the translator of the piece and notes, correctly, that Oton de Granson composed the English poem's original. He then claims that Chaucer's poem is describing a court scandal: an adulterous affair between John Holland, Earl of Huntington, and Isabel of York, daughter of King Pedro of Castile and sister-in-law to John of Gaunt. Shirley's rubrics thus appear to construct a very loose Anglo-Iberian connection for Chaucer's translation of Granson from French to English, so loose as to be generally dismissed by scholars as Shirley's gossipy invention. As it happens, however, Oton de Granson was imprisoned in Castile in 1372, in the same year that Isabel came from Castile to England to marry Edmund Langley, Duke of York. This actual Iberian connection is strengthened by the existence of a fifteenth-century Catalan miscellany that anthologizes Catalan poets with Granson, including the ballades that form Chaucer's source as well as poetry written by one of Granson's fellow captives from 1372. From this perspective, Shirley's shadowy evocation of Castile starts to look less like gossip and more like an attempt to make sense of lyric's transregional movements while underscoring Chaucer's internationalism. What is at stake for Shirley in insisting on this disorientingly transregional moment? What is at stake—for both Shirley and the Catalan compiler—in collecting lyric that moves so porously across geographic boundaries for the purposes of a canonizing project? How, in short, might these lyric miscellanies challenge our idea of nationalizing canon construction?
Recommended Citation
Strakhov, Elizaveta, "Anthology versus Miscellany: John Shirley's Scribal Agency and the Fantasy of Origins in the Medieval Compilation" (2022). English Faculty Research and Publications. 643.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac/643
Comments
Accepted version. Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Winter 2022): 603-620. DOI. © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press. Used with permission.