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theses

This project critically examines England’s late medieval bureaucratic culture by seeking its origins in political and administrative literature penned in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Late medieval royal government administrators inherited a constellation of anxieties, perceptions, and motivations implicated in the joint processes of documentary production and self-construction. From the earliest days of England’s bureaucracy civil servants labored to develop, implement, and maintain record-keeping technologies in a high-pressure atmosphere that inspired them to write beyond their official duties. Such texts, including letters, governance treatises, procedural manuals, and poetry, respond to persistent concerns over financial and social insecurity. They contemplate the nature of knowledge and its potential loss, metonymically reflecting on the boundaries of selfhood and loss of self. This dissertation explores how administrative employees from varied backgrounds—clergyman and lay, wealthy and middling, schoolman and nobleman—constructed a socially enfranchised bureaucratic culture and identity that cut across traditionally rigid social categories by variously accentuating the indispensability of their spiritual, scribal, legal, and fiscal skill-sets. It questions, in particular, why administrators persistently wrote about the dangers and destructive potential of writing. The dissertation’s title refers to duties that took administrators “on the road, in chambers, and in chapel” to serve England’s king. This phrase comes from a letter written around 1182 by clergyman and statesman Peter of Blois, who faced what is called the “clerical dilemma”—he and many of his fellow school graduates wished to deploy their advanced education in the world as administrators and royal advisors, but conservative colleagues insisted that doing so betrayed their clerical oaths. I argue in Chapter One that Peter and contemporaries reimagined the genre of court criticism in order to assert their professional worth, insisting in political writing on the great need for Christian men of wisdom at the royal court. In Chapter Two, I show how in the final quarter of the twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth, authors of the manual Dialogue of the Exchequer and law compendia Glanvill and Bracton similarly reflected on the conflicted nature of administrative writing and the great need accurately to record and preserve knowledge. The process of crafting novel genres led these authors to undertake an assessment and categorization of both personal and professional knowledge, intertwining them textually. Echoing this sentiment near the end of the Middle Ages, the subject of Chapter 3, Privy Seal scribe Thomas Hoccleve focused his poetic oeuvre on the material and spiritual risks posed by writing, including madness, social alienation, and poverty. He laments bureaucratic breakdown and asserts that poet-administrators are ideal confederates for the proper maintenance of royal communication networks. Ultimately, I argue, administrative writers stressed the dangers and difficulties of writing because through exaggerated complaints they could insist that their scribal and poetic duties performed burdensome yet critical social, political, and cultural labor including maintaining collegial networks and safeguarding and transmitting collective knowledge.

ETD_8643

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Danielle Frost Bradley

doi:10.7282/T3W380JD

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.