Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers Benjamin Hoover Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 164 pp. Old men hold a prevalent presence in the span of Middle English narrative, however unexpected that presence might be. In a literary milieu wherein one might expect young men and their adventures to predominate, as is the case of the chivalric romance, the aged maintain a high degree of textual visibility, especially given the tendency of medieval narratives to draw attention to visual indicators of their embodied age. Readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales recall that the opening narrative of the pilgrims’ story competition—The Knight’s Tale—begins with an invocation of antiquity “Whilom as olden stories tellen us.” Such an acknowledgement of the story’s age, Rogers notes, complicates any totalizing understandings of the later part of the lifespan; oldness is as much a site of authoritative veneration as it is of debility. It is to this pattern of citing narrative antiquity that Will Rogers’s monograph Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England first draws our attention. Rogers’s volume reviews a wide range of later medieval English canonical texts and authors from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Each chapter takes a different author or range of texts as its subject, demonstrating the array of perspectives concerning representations of age in Ricardian and Henrician England. This critical selection includes: the alliterative poems Wynere and Wastoure and Parlement of the Thre Ages, Chaucer’s later lyrics and The Reeve’s [End Page 260] Tale, the reception of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes in the early era of incunabula print by William Caxton, and citation of John Gower and his Confessio Amantis in Shakespeare’s Pericles. Rogers further articulates how, among these texts, age and its correlating debility are used as narrative prosthetics. Though the texts’ treatment of this metaphor vary, Rogers finds that “speakers and authors alike use narratives of age-related impairments to highlight and supplement these areas of debility, inability, or infirmity, turning impairment into a prosthetic that challenges the disabling notions of old age” (7). Such is the approach that Rogers lays out in his introduction, noting the several ways in which these texts produce a set of practices regarding the depiction of old age, ranging from critique of youthfulness within the Ricardian context of the fourteenth century to the supplementary role that medieval texts come to embody for early modern writers. The first two chapters, as Rogers notes, offer a focused examination of how Middle English narratives produce old age and how the narrators of these texts utilize narrative as a type of prosthesis, in which they define old age by lack and debility, using narrative to paper over such impairments. Chapter 1 offers a comparative reading of the alliterative poems The Parlement of Thre Ages and Wynnere and Wastoure, suggesting that both texts, in their depiction of personified aged narrators, demonstrate the centrality of storytelling to old speakers. Similarly, chapter 2, turning to Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and some of his lyrics, demonstrates the continual linkage of old age and narration that permeates Chaucer’s literary corpus. As the chapter indicates, the Reeve uses aggressive and violent language to substitute for the impairments brought about his old age—a threatening language that finds parallels in other of Chaucer’s poems, namely Adam Scryveyn and Envoy to Scogan. The brutality of The Reeve’s Tale helps to demonstrate a continual perspective regarding age in fragment 1 of the Canterbury Tales, wherein both The Knight’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale, it is the elderly who maintain power and agency within their narratives. In chapter 3 the direction of the discussion begins to pivot from prosthesis within narrative to a notion of prosthesis more akin to sixteenth-century usages, wherein additions to a text change understandings of the material they supplement. The archaic becomes positioned in the more paratextual place of the prologue, recalling “that the past is both prologue and prosthesis for these authors as they mine the past—either works or authors—to...