The mirror in the marketplace: Subjectivity in late-Medieval English culture (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve)

The privileged place of individualism in medieval literary and cultural criticism has obscured some of the most distinctive features of fifteenth-century culture. Chaucer and his early fifteenth-century imitators John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve insistently problematize the individualist ethics that historicist criticism presents as exemplary of the interest and value of late medieval English literature. For all three writers, the mobility and autonomy created by economic growth were sources not of liberation but of profound anxiety. Though they write in a variety of genres, all three address what they see as a crisis precipitated by the collapse of individual identity and social relations structured by the feudal ideology of sovereignty. They see the marketplace not in terms of the autonomy it made possible but in terms of the new problems of defining the nature of relations between autonomous individuals, the archetype of which has become economic exchange. The poets' response to this crisis was not to affirm a conservative social vision, a return to an imagined golden age of feudalism, but to redefine sovereignty itself, displacing it from the body of the king to a “grammar” of social and economic relations in the public sphere. Self-invention, while it was in some sense a liberating force, was for the fifteenth century primarily a mode of self-governance, a necessary way of preserving collective existence in an age of nascent economic individualism. The New Historicist tendency to celebrate this individualism distorts the fifteenth-century sense that the problem of subjectivity is precisely that of locating an authority in relation to which individuals can be subjects, and thus distorts the important ways in which the fifteenth century speaks to our own post-industrial anxieties about the nature of the individual.