Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature

Edwin D. Craun

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780271100593
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Silence, like speech, is a mode of communication that can be used strategically. In Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature, Edwin D. Craun investigates the silences in public life that punctuate talk in late Middle English literature.

Centering his study on readings of canonical texts, including the works of Thomas Hoccleve, the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger, William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Lydgate's translation of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de vie humaine, The Testimony of William Thorpe, a selection of the York cycle of passion plays, and The Book of Margery Kempes, Craun recovers the widespread moral discourse on silence developed by late medieval secular and clerical writers, who compiled materials from Roman popular morality and Stoic texts as well as Jewish wisdom books and Christian texts. These texts model how silence could play a role in effective government, respond to violent and angry antagonists, or in some cases to entirely obviate a good outcome. Through this nuanced exploration of the ethics of communication in medieval moral, narrative, and dramatic literature, Craun shows us that public silences, then as now, have strategies and consequences, dimensions that medieval imaginative writers explore subtly yet analytically in order to provoke ethical reflection and pragmatic action.

Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature offers original thematical and rhetorical insights into the written history of silence. It will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in Middle English literature, history, and political thought.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Practices, Translations, and Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reading the Riddles of Public Silences
• Chapter 1: Why Public Silences Matter: Albertano da Brescia and Clerical Texts
• Chapter 2: The Art of Political Silence: The Prudent King of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes
• Chapter 3: Corrupt Political Silences: Mum and the Sothsegger
• Chapter 4: Patient Silences Under Interrogation: Jesus in the York Cycle and William Thorpe
• Chapter 5: The Limitations of Silence in Social Life: Thomas Hoccleve’s “My Complaint” and “Dialogue”
• Chapter 6: Wise Silences in the Life of Learning: Will and the Philosophers in Piers Plowman
• Postscript: Literary Invention, Power Differentials, and Ethical Multiplicity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index