In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of
narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on
the roles and functions of the "I" as a shifting textual phenomenon, not
to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional
speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously
unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it
"autography." He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth
century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first
person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries
on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of
French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of
liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained
conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived
experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies.
Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics
including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced,
a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing
and textuality.
Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative
in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of
the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer's Wife of
Bath's Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters
to detailed readings of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes prologue, his
Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern
Bokenham's legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further
applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the
intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and
Criseyde and Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine.
