Lists can suggest both a complete written account and the open-ended accumulation of terms. In this, their frequent appearance in apocalyptic texts formally mirrors apocalypticism's combination of divinely created order and the chaotic description of catastrophic events. Medieval and early modern poetic prophecies often list local manifestations of disorder and exclude the cosmic frame of divine order, making poems like Wynnere and Wastoure, which draws heavily on the tradition of poetic prophecy, seem not particularly apocalyptic. But the list-like passages in Wynnere and Wastoure join its focus on economics to the implicit apocalypticism of its prophetic passages. The sense that lists can appear as both an ordered account and a disordered accumulation allows the lists of Wynnere and Wastoure to suggest the comforting bounds of an apocalyptic framework while performing its dissolution by a vision of political economy based on endless cycles of winning and wasting.
Wynnere and Wastoure, a mid-fourteenth-century debate poem, begins under the threat of the end: signs abound, we are told, that “dredfull domesdaye it draweth neghe aftir” [dreadful Doomsday draws near].1 Apocalypticism grips the poem's prologue, and recent scholarship has sharpened our understanding of the importance of political prophecy for its form and for its socially critical engagement with the times.2 But the topic of the debate that follows—the relative merits of production and accumulation (i.e., winning) as opposed to consumption and expenditure (i.e., wasting)—pulls away from the grand apocalyptic patterns with which the poem begins, as befits a work scholars largely agree is marked by generic discontinuity.3 An unbridgeable gap emerges in both the poem itself and its scholarly reception between transcendent apocalypticism and immanent political economy. Even the poem's deployment of political prophecy, Victoria Flood argues, eschews the implicit cosmic order that makes the future legible:
the English political prophetic tradition cultivates a decidedly secularized schema, which stops short of full eschatological development: the Last Judgment is always deferred. In its use of political prophecy, Wynnere and Wastoure is no exception. Although it opens with an allusion to Doomsday, it is unlikely that the complete poem would actually have continued that far.4
In this lucid explanation of Wynnere and Wastoure's incomplete eschatology, the often vague distinction between apocalypse and prophecy sharpens, as the latter turns from cosmic to national order and implicitly conflates the two, thereby obviating the need to close the prologue's apocalyptic frame at the poem's conclusion. Flood is in good company with critics who emphasize Wynnere and Wastoure's insular satirical targets and topical economic orientation, all of which combine to turn the poem away from considerations of the final doom.5 After all, as a brief summary of the poem will show, Wynnere and Wastoure is not a blatantly apocalyptic text. It begins with apocalyptic signs before the narrator moves on to describe a dream in which two armies stand opposed in a large field, observed by a king who sits on a hill above them all. But no apocalyptic confrontation takes place: the king prevents the fight and sends a herald to invite the leaders of each side to present their cases before him, to which they readily agree as members of the king's household. The bulk of the poem consists of these two representatives, Wynnere and Wastoure, trading accusations and defenses until the king resolves the conflict by sending Wynnere to the papal curia and Wastoure to Cheapside. The debate between these two personifications remains focused on matters of economic ethics in a way that avoids the explicit apocalypticism of the poem's prologue. Nevertheless, despite the gap between the cosmic concerns of the prologue and the worldly political economy of the debate proper, I argue that the poem remains pervasively apocalyptic throughout. Its formal strategies are apocalyptic even as it imagines a world shorn of teleological boundaries by the open-ended interplay of profit and loss. The frame of eschatological expectation might be broken, but it remains as a ruined presence that is most visible in poetic forms of verbal accumulation and listing.
Apocalypticism is fundamentally concerned with order—both the temporal order of history's pre-scripted unfolding and the spatial order of a divinely made cosmos.6 In apocalyptic texts, this spatio-temporal order is often obscurely suggested in the form of lists and images of the written medium of lists, like the Book of Life, that offer the hope of a complete accounting that captures a cosmic whole. The list, however, is a textual form that also seeks to impose order on the proliferations of things and relations that are the fundamental impetus to economic thought.7Wynnere and Wastoure, in its combination of cosmic doom and economic controversy, uses lists to formally link apocalypticism and political economy. The poem repeatedly seeks to enumerate and enlist as it strives for an all-encompassing, revelatory social scope, using the alliterative tradition's love of description and verbal accumulation to mediate its vision of economic disorder and a partially occluded cosmic order.8 By employing a political-prophetic forma tractandi, as Eric Weiskott describes it, which consists in part of the “apposition of equivalent representations of a singular problem,” Wynnere and Wastoure neither resolves nor unifies its two opposing principles, but instead subjects them to an eschatological perspective that makes political economic discourses of quantity into a kind of apocalyptic accounting.9Wynnere and Wastoure emphasizes the interplay of countable and uncountable quantities in list-like passages that at once suggest full reckonings and empty processes of proliferation and depletion. Lists formally enact the contradiction that Wynnere and Wastoure explores between the comforting bounds of an apocalyptic telos and their shattering by threateningly open forms of socioeconomic organization.
An apocalyptic theory of the list
Apocalypticism provides an idea of order that can be translated into aesthetic experience via a variety of different formal techniques in architecture, poetry, and music.10 The formal ideals of wholeness, perfection, and completion bear an indelibly apocalyptic sense, as the universal ordo of both space and time ensures not only the perfect synchronic relationships within the natural and supernatural worlds but also the rhythmic unfolding of history from beginning to end. This cosmic order is precisely what is revealed in the apocalyptic vision. The bounded and ordered totality of the universe is fundamental to apocalyptic thought, resulting in a sense that one lives through history as a tightly scripted drama.11 As Marjorie Reeves puts it succinctly in her summary of medieval apocalypticism, “There was no prospect of endless progressive change, only of the acts of a drama tightly bound to its final climax.”12 The catastrophe, in its classically dramatic sense as the final dénouement of a play, gives form to all history.
Apocalypticism both emerges from and generates aesthetic ideals of wholeness, symmetry, fullness, and completion, which can then be used as principles for the interpretation of current events and the scripting of revealed future events. The contemporary moment might appear as fragmentary, imbalanced, or incomplete to those who have not been granted a transcendent vision, but current events can take their place in the composed temporal sequences of prophecy. This is how political prophetic texts and “vernacular prophecy of the folklore variety” partake of apocalyptic aesthetics even if they evince little interest in the grand battles between good and evil played out amongst God's ultimate representatives and adversaries.13 The making of forms, in art as in politics, is to make “composed relationality,” and the artist's making can at once intimate a likeness with the creator and participate in the modeling of political forms for ordering society in harmony with cosmic hierarchies.14 An apocalyptically oriented satire like Wynnere and Wastoure depends upon this mutual implication of an ideal cosmic order with the imagination of political order, because it builds its critical model of a disordered society upon its assumption of divine ordo. The conflicts and agents might be local, but they form part of a much larger temporal and spatial order, which offers the implicit syntax that makes the signs of the times legible. As Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin put it, “Apocalypse demands an encounter between the local experience of cataclysm and its global—even cosmic—provenance.”15
Mediating the encounter between the local and the cosmic presents formal challenges that the list navigates in unique ways. Sarah Chihaya, in her study of contemporary apocalyptic art and literature, writes of lists as “haunted inventories of absences foretold,” while Joanna Demmers sees lists as an attempt “to capture some portion of everything, before everything vanishes.”16 But the apocalypticism of the list inheres not only in the dynamic of linguistic plentitude clashing with imminent absence in a move of preemptive memorializing, but also in the technology of listing itself as a means of achieving both a complete, delimited account, and a proliferation of words that can in principle always be lengthened. Apocalypticism finds in the list a way to exploit the tension between Jack Goody's account of the list as a written form of bounded, ordered wholes with “a clear cut beginning and a precise end” and what Leo Spitzer calls “chaotic enumeration” or Umberto Eco calls “the infinity of lists”: their tendency toward disorder, wild juxtaposition, and boundlessness.17
The technologies of sociopolitical order, especially the written management of political and economic relations, can evoke the fantasy of a complete record of a polity. William the Conqueror's alleged ambition to have “the entire English nation surveyed and reduced to writing” explains the epithet for the resulting document, “Domesday Book,” via an analogy with the Book of Life in John's Apocalypse.18 The list as a figure for complete political accounting, a totalizing figure of “kingdom as text,” is the strongest manifestation of a tendency to associate knowable and graphically reduced social units with divine power and to associate with hell the uncountable hordes that cannot be fixed in place socially, spatially, or graphically.19 Thomas Wimbledon's apocalyptic sermon Redde rationem villicationis tue joins the socioeconomic order of class to celestial and infernal cosmic order: “as he was here lyuynge aftir noon staat ne ordre, so he shal be put þanne ‘in þat place þat noon ordre is inne, but euerlastynge horrour’ and sorwe þat is in helle” [as he was here living within neither estate nor order, so he shall be put then “in that place where there is no order, but everlasting horror” and sorrow that is in hell].20 Quoting Job 10:22, Wimbledon sees infernal resonances in the breakdown of locatable and countable social persons. If they can be found in their proper “staat” and “ordre,” then they can be enlisted in this world and in the world to come. But if they escape this order, then “euerlastynge horrour” awaits. The fantasy of a total written account of a collective order invites consideration of what does not fit.21
The apocalyptic list attempts to suggest divine omniscience through the textual management of diverse but ultimately countable entities, but lists as a form hover between completion and openness. Are lists, as Goody would have it, defined by their written form as discrete and discontinuous elements isolated from the open-ended flow of speech, and therefore amenable to an ideal of total accounting?22 Or are lists defined by their potential endlessness? Unlike the utilitarian lists of Goody's analysis, which depend upon textual rather than oral form in order to achieve, as Walter J. Ong puts it, “the visual presentation of verbalized material in space,” poetic lists can maintain a sense of improvisatory continuation rather than a closed account.23 The visionary list that Stephen Barney describes in Chaucer's work depends upon this sense that the poet is “presenting rather than representing” a succession of moments that could go on and on.24 But even if we restrict our consideration of the list to the strictly textual affordance of graphically organized information, there is a contradiction between the list's distinct and isolable appearance and its capacity to be integrated with other textual units in potentially endless combinations. As the editors of a recent volume on the appearance and use of lists in medieval manuscripts put it, “[The list] offers, more than other forms of texts, the perspective of the integration of incremental knowledge, of seeing the pure and simple recomposition of items that can be disassociated and reassociated following novel heuristic or pragmatic aims. The list leads to the list.”25
The aesthetic antinomies of the list parallel apocalypticism's ambivalent embrace of hiddenness and revelation, completion and destruction, linear emplotment and chaotic simultaneity. For Madeleine Jeay, “the list places us at the heart of the paradox that founds our relation to language,” which, in nomination, seeks “to solicit the thing and evacuate it at the same time”; verbal accumulation heightens the paradox of presence and absence, “as if quantity would allow us to exceed the angst of the word as sign of absence of the thing.”26 The list sharpens the contradictions that are inescapable in apocalyptic texts between writing as a revelation of a complete spatio-temporal cosmic order and writing as a proliferation of signs that can never transcend their materiality, even as the visionary text seeks images of fullness, perfection, and order. As such, the list is a formal device that lends apocalyptic ambivalence to descriptions of political and economic (dis)order by virtue of its simultaneous evocation of plenty and absence, in which linguistic proliferation strives for comprehensiveness only to realize its futility.
For Leo Spitzer, the fundamental clash between a harmoniously formed universe and language's imperfect effulgence is best captured in what he calls “chaotic enumeration,” exemplified in the lists of Walt Whitman. Despite Spitzer's emphasis on chaotic enumeration as a feature of modern verse, he nevertheless sees these lists as part of the “eternal fight” between “the principle of order and that of autonomy,” which reveals Whitman's affinity with “a Christian tradition of more than a thousand years.”27 Chaotic enumeration is central to the apocalyptic aesthetic of the list because it names the generative contradiction between a cosmic order revealing itself in history and a disorderly linguistic profligacy that attempts to capture the fullness of the created universe. It is clear that the Christian poetics Spitzer references in his theory of chaotic enumeration relates to his account of Ambrosian and Augustinian evocations of spatial and temporal order as cosmic totality in his study of the idea of world harmony.28 This totalizing sense of order is the foundation of any apocalyptic view of history, and its vital aesthetic corollary is that arts like architecture, poetry, and music have the capacity, via their numerical principles of composition, to echo creation's completion.29 Nevertheless, as Wynnere and Wastoure exemplifies in its grim satirical humor, poetry's capacity to evoke an illusion of fullness can easily tip into the “surefeited language of abused plenitude.”30
In Wynnere and Wastoure, the enumeration of tokens of the coming Doomsday introduces an apocalyptic order that hovers over the poem's totalizing social vision, but the subsequent list-like forms in the poem revel in the disorder of linguistic accumulation as the formal corollary to an inescapably wasteful economy. Wynnere and Wastoure's “poetics of waste,” in Eleanor Johnson's terms, draw out the fact that one of waste's primary meanings in the Middle Ages is “land being despoliated, emptied of its contents.”31 The list in Wynnere and Wastoure makes this emptying more than an economic crime, and imbues it with an apocalyptic significance that associates the very instabilities of collective production and consumption with a cosmic dissolution of order, especially when the poem strives for an exhaustive socioeconomic reach in the lists of Wynnere's followers and of Wastoure's feast.
In Wynnere and Wastoure, the list exceeds, even as it recalls, its controlling and enumerative function by partaking of the linguistic exuberance that seeks to capture catastrophe. On the one hand, the poem's concern with the economics of household and kingdom invites a bureaucratic poetic that seeks to reduce to a standard written form data about the material assets of the realm.32 On the other hand, the conflict between Wynnere and Wastoure takes the form of a verbally copious exchange that joins visions of material excess and dearth to visions of eschatological reckoning. The apocalyptic aesthetic of the list performs the poem's contradictory embrace of both prophetic material that implies an eschatological ordo and a vision of political economy that ignores such cosmic boundaries in its chaotic cycle of production and consumption.
Wynnere and Wastoure and the breaking of the apocalyptic frame
Wynnere and Wastoure begins with a series of allusions to legendary and prophetic material that creates an ominous mood of significant historical correspondences. From the opening invocation of Britain's legendary founding, the poem activates a grand, teleological framework:
[Since Britain was founded and Brutus conquered it after Troy was taken by treason within, marvels have been seen in several kings’ times, but never so many as now by the ninth part.]
Britain's origins in violence and treachery are bearing fruit in the present day in this distinctive use of an otherwise common introductory allusion.33 This sense of historical symmetry introduces an apocalyptic ordo to history that informs the first thirty lines of the poem and provokes the poem's first list. Marvels (“selcouthes”) now appear with unprecedented frequency, and these telling signs that saturate the “now” of the poem find their fullest meaning in harmony with Britain's unstable origins, just as they presage future events. The narrator reports from the “sawe [saying] of Salomon the wyse”:
[It is coming soon, I don't expect otherwise: when waves shall grow wild and walls fall down and hares upon hearthstones shall huddle in their burrows and also commoners with boasts and pride shall wed noble ladies of property and marry them at will, then dreadful Doomsday draws near after. But whoever soberly sees this and tells the truth says that it soon will approach or is nearly here.]
The list of portentous signs accumulates natural, institutional, and social disorders, and the narrator thrice emphasizes that the promised doom approaches very soon (11, 16, 18). Wild waves, possibly caused by storms or earthquakes that bring down walls, join with the ominous image of hares huddling on hearthstones in homes now ruined or emptied of human inhabitants. Meanwhile, the hierarchical social order that secures its future existence by managing regimes of reproduction through marriage is falling apart. In this exemplary instance of a familiar form, the “world turned upside down” complaint, Wynnere and Wastoure bridges the gap between the local and the cosmic through a form of verbal accumulation that turns a chaotic succession of images into an orderly shape defined by the ultimate historical boundary of “dredfull domesday.”34
Apocalypticism holds together the revelation of order with the eruption of chaos in textual forms that frequently eschew action-oriented narration in favor of what Stephen Barney calls “serial seeing.”35 The affinity of apocalypticism with such visionary forms of dream lists is evident in early Christian examples of the Tiburtine Sybil, who interprets a dream of nine suns as nine generations after one hundred Roman judges list their salient properties: “The first sun was many-colored. . . . The second sun was exceedingly bright. . . . The third sun was bloodlike . . . ” and so on.36 This tendency to list rather than narrate continues in the later medieval tradition of the “Fifteen Signs of Doomsday” and the potentially endless “When . . . Then . . . ” formula of vernacular political prophecies.37 The list of portents at the beginning of Wynnere and Wastoure exemplifies this tradition, as it prefaces a poem that itself favors the relatively static form of the dialogue rather than continuous narration. The list of signs orients the poem's diagnosis of contemporary disorder toward a descriptive copiousness that seeks to perform social dissolution by accumulating phenomena rather than relying on illustrative stories. The poem's lists create the sense that troubling events and uncountable things just keep adding up, which vitiates the promises of order and completion that the written list might otherwise offer.
In this context, the seeming digression on the decline of lordly interest in good poetry continues the prologue's focus on signs of decline communicated through or associated with formalized textual procedures, including both the composition of poetry and the apocalyptic record of the Book of Life. Where once lords enjoyed “To here makers of myrthes þat matirs couthe fynde” [To hear makers of mirth that could compose fit material] (20), now
[a youth with a beardless face that never composed through wit these words together shall, because he can jangle as a jay and tell jokes, be listened to and loved and regarded much more than the man who made the poem himself.]
Even this political-social-poetic decline finds its significance summed up in an apocalyptic frame: “Bot neuer þe lattere at the laste when ledys bene knawen; / Werke wittnesse will bere who wirche kane beste” [But at the end, when men are known, work will bear witness of who can work best] (29–30). In the end, when people are known fully on the Day of Judgment, the poetic work will be the witness that reveals who is truly the best maker. At this point, as Katharine Breen argues, Wynnere and Wastoure makes explicit the connection between aesthetic and social form via an apocalyptic parallel between the writing of poetry and the writing of the Book of Life.38 The introductory enumeration of strange signs, along with complaints about social disorder and the decline of poetry, coordinates a sense of sociopolitical decay with an aesthetic sensitivity to the dangers of the uncountable and the uncounted in both art and social life that undergirds the poem's critique of political economy as a dissolving force of unaccountable profusion.
After the explicitly apocalyptic material of the prologue, the narrator turns to an account of the dream in which the allegorical debate takes place. The dream begins with a vision of the simplest of orders: the opposition of two armies on a broad plain, a setting which, as Thomas Bestul notes, resembles that of Huon de Méry's Le tournoi de l'Antéchrist.39 At this point, it is worth noting the etymology of list in relation to the spatial organization of tournaments, where it refers to the boundary around a site of ritualized display and violence.40 But as with the poem's written lists, the formally contained opposition of two distinct sides within the spatial list of the imminent mêlée gives way to copious indeterminacy once the description of the armies becomes more detailed.
At this point, Wynnere and Wastoure veers away from the certainties of bilateral conflict into more unstable formal possibilities. As the king presides over the display of incipient combat, he sends down a herald to warn them not to fight. The herald addresses the opposed armies and attempts to describe all that he sees:
[Full wide have I walked among these people, but never have I seen such a sight with my own eyes, for here are all the folk of France assembled beside those of Lorraine, of Lombardy, and of Low Spain, people of Westphalia that dwell in war, of England, of Ireland, and Hanseatic merchants full many that are stuffed in steel, blows to deal.]
The wide range of places from which fighters have traveled suggests that the herald is striving for a kind of comprehensive account of the scene that will identify, label, and sort everyone spread out before him. He moves from geography to social, political, and religious institutions as he surveys the banners and interprets their heraldic signs to find representatives of the pope, lawyers, and the four fraternal orders (143–87). These are relatively stable and identifiable categories, but the herald's ambition to label and sort falters when he turns his attention to those “other synes . . . sett appon lofte” [other signs held up high]:
[Some witness of wool, and some of wine casks, some of merchants’ marks so many and so thick that I don't know for all this rich world what person under the sun can reckon the sum.]
The herald's turn to the mercantile world anticipates the disintegration of the binary form of the conflict between Wynnere and Wastoure. As the subsequent debate reveals, production, consumption, and exchange destabilize fixed forms of social relation and invite a poetics of chaotic enumeration. The innumerability of the merchants’ marks could be a convenient way to close this section of the poem with a familiar trope of ineffability, but the description of the Franciscan banner a few lines earlier suggests it is something more. When the herald identifies the Franciscan banner, he cannot resist some conventional antifraternalism, noting their unwillingness to do anything except for financial gain (159–62). Their avarice forms part of a widespread antifraternal discourse that, as Penn Szittya shows, is rooted in apocalyptic warnings of Antichrist's uncountable followers. During the Parisian controversies over the new mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, in which quantitative disorder figures prominently in interpretations of the friars’ apocalyptic threat to the church.41 The proliferation of commodities and traders in the mercantile world, which exceeds anyone's ability to sum up, makes the incipient mercantile capitalism that the poem gestures toward an apocalyptic sign comparable to the friars without number. They are like the followers of Antichrist destined for the place without order, as Conscience warns in passus 20 of Piers Plowman. There, the relationship between quotidian accounting and apocalyptic (in)numerability is explicit, since, as Conscience succinctly declares: “Hevene hath evene noumbre, and helle is withoute noumbre” [Heaven has even number, and hell is without number].42 The innumerable friars evade enlistment and represent the potential for creeping lawlessness and disorder:
[Monks and nuns and all men of religion—their order and their rule require a definite number; of unlearned and learned the law requires and asks a certain for a certain—except for the friars!]
Conscience emphasizes the relationships between quantity and institutional discipline: order, rule, and number go together, with a certain number of religious and lay members set for a certain number of religious houses. As the passage continues, Conscience speaks of the written instruments of such institutional discipline: the “registre” and “notarie sygne” under which the certain numbers of religious can be recorded and authorized (XX.271, 272). The friars who “wexen out of number” [grow out of number] (XX.269) and are not confined to religious houses do more than just break the social structures and literate technologies for maintaining order; they align themselves with and perpetuate the forces of a hell “withoute noumbre” (XX.270), which is to say without a place in the final, eschatological ordo of the saved at the end of history.43 In the description of Wynnere's army, merchants join friars as figures for the innumerable in the eschatological distinction between the saved (counted) and damned (uncountable). Wynnere's army ironically stymies any attempt to sum up the extent of all those people and goods whose movement and activity depend upon the writing and reckoning of sums. For the king's herald to be unable to “rekken” the “sowme” of his subjects who fight for two members of his own royal household exemplifies the poem's critique of political and economic disorder through figures of the uncountable.44
As if to confirm the list's dubious ability to contain the uncertainties of quantification, the poem follows the nearly fifty lines of description of Wynnere's followers with a description of Wastoure's army that goes by in a mere four lines:
[And sure on that other side are serious men of arms, bold squires of blood, archers many, that if they strike one stroke, they don't think of stopping until either army on the field is cut to death.]
Curiously, this is all the description Wastoure's side gets, but rather than providing some clue to the author's sympathies for either Wynnere or Wastoure, this brevity immediately following copiousness is fitting.45 The one strategy illuminates the other, just as the values that Wynnere and Wastoure respectively represent are repeatedly shown to be complementary aspects of “the madness of economic reason,” to borrow David Harvey's phrase, where producing excess and consuming excess go together and never settle into a comfortable mean of sufficiency for all.46 The poet has arranged it so that the introductory descriptions of the representatives of Winning and Wasting are defined by a jarring juxtaposition of too much and too little. Of course Wynnere's army would produce a potentially endless amount of followers selling who knows how many commodities beyond mere wine and wool, just as it is fitting that Wastoure's army would not signify the creation of innumerable new social persons, commodities, and institutions, but rather appear as a limited number of martial elites.47 The shock of brevity here formally emphasizes the social contrast between the closed, ordered ranks of the aristocracy and the uncountable multitudes of interconnected buyers and sellers from across Europe that compose Wynnere's army.
After the possibility of physical combat has been forestalled, the king allows Wynnere and Wastoure to present their mutual grievances so that he might pass judgment upon them. When the debate begins, Wynnere speaks first against Wastoure in a way that immediately foregrounds an agrarian landscape defined by the absence of sufficient labor:
[All that I win through wit, he wastes through pride. I gather, I glean, and he immediately lets go. I pin and sew up and he the purse opens. Why has this wretch no care for how men sell corn? His lands lie fallow, his looms are sold, down have been his dovecotes, and dry his ponds. The devil knows the wealth he enjoys at home but hunger and high houses and fierce hounds.]
The first four lines of this speech almost make the debate unnecessary: Wynnere needs Wastoure and Wastoure needs Wynnere, because earning and expenditure are interdependent parts of a total socio-ecological-political-economic process that unites king, household, arable fields, agrarian infrastructure, and mercantile circulation. But Wynnere's description of Wastoure's estate carries the charge that a cyclical and regenerative process of agrarian production, along with the social order that it supports, has been broken, and we are left with a linear, secular decline into depletion, depopulation, and hunger. The list of lands, looms, dovecotes, and ponds evokes the productive interactions of different components of the manorial demesne even as it catalogues the material evidence for the dissolution of such an estate that now holds nothing but hunger and the nongenerative luxuries of tall buildings and hunting dogs.48
Wastoure responds to Wynnere's initial attack by making Wynnere an avaricious hoarder, balancing the picture of Wastoure's empty and abandoned lands with Wynnere's overstuffed houses:
[When you . . . have filled your wide houses full of wool sacks, the beams bend at the roof, such bacon there hangs, stuffed are silver pennies under steel bands. What should become of that wealth if no waste comes? Some of it rots, some rusts, and some feeds rats.]
The overfullness of material goods—wool sacks, hanging bacon, chests jammed with silver—recalls the herald's description of the uncountable proliferation of merchants in Wynnere's army. Once again, Wynnere is associated with the dangerous accumulation of material goods, in which a flourish of verbal plenty in the form of a list only enables the recognition of material loss. The workings of rot, rust, and rats metonymically signal the precariousness of any attempt to shore up and preserve the things of this world. The poem here exemplifies what Sarah Chihaya sees in the lists of A. S. Byatt's Ragnarök: “The flip side or consequence of the list's formal provocation to creation is the negated list's equal and opposite provocation to annihilation.”49
The description of Wastoure's feast shows the close embrace of creation and annihilation in the composition of apocalyptic lists. Wynnere's account of the feast represents the confrontation of political economic order with the entropic force of consumptive desire. The list of foods is preceded by charges of political malfeasance that establish the feast's status as a travesty of procedures of political and bureaucratic ordering. The lexical accumulation of the procession of dishes might, in another, more stable social context, confirm an accepted order, as in the feast of the poem Cleanness and its clear sorting of the social hierarchy.50 Instead, Wastoure's feast does not function as a performative affirmation of political order. Rather, it is framed by the accusation that Wastoure fails to inspire and uphold the faith that ought to bind various aristocratic ranks to one another:
[Lo! This wretched Waster that is known all over. There is neither emperor, nor king, nor knight that follows you, baron nor bachelor nor knight that you love, but four fellows or five that owe you allegiance. And he shall summon them to dine with delicacies so many that every person in this world may weep for sorrow.]
Before Wynnere even turns to the excess of the feast itself, he accuses Wastoure of giving the precious store of his faith to an indeterminate number of friends while also failing to attract similar pledges from other lords. Wastoure both lacks aristocratic, sovereign allies and has an excessive attachment to some “four or five” friends, upon whom he lavishes extravagant foods. This feast does not confirm the integrity of a political ordo that mirrors cosmic hierarchies, but rather performs its dissolution when the “fayth” owed amongst the nobility is subjected to the paradoxical economic logic of profligacy and scarcity.
The feast description captures the tension that Anke Bernau identifies in “the list's ability to signal plenitude as well as the strictly ‘needful,’ to be both ornament and ‘naked lexicality,’ to articulate disciplinary as well as pleasurable potential.”51 Here, the lexical form of a list of different foods suggests the disciplinary potential of a household account geared toward the careful management of resources, but Wynnere's description of this feast expresses disgust at the absence of such careful enumeration. The effect of the list is not one of counting out and assigning a future time of consumption for each person's “dole” (337), but the simultaneous and chaotic accumulation of a number of different, formerly living creatures, into one gluttonous display of consumable flesh:
[The boar's head shall be brought with vegetables on top, buck's hindquarters full broad in soups there beside, venison with sweetened grain soup and pheasants full rich, roasted meat set on the board thereby, meat pies of chopped flesh and grilled birds, and each man that I see has six men's shares. And if this were an excessive business, another comes after, roast meat with rich soups and rare spices, kids cloven along the back, quartered swans, tarts of ten inches such that it annoys my heart to see the board overloaded with blazing dishes as if it were a cross adorned with rings and stones. The third course to me was a marvel to reckon, for all I deal with is Martinmas meat, nothing but vegetables with the salted flesh and without wildfowl save for a hen for him that owns the house. Yet he will have birds prepared on a lavish spit—wild geese, bitterns, and many billed snipes, larks and linnets glazed in sugar, woodcocks and woodpeckers burning hot, teals and titmouses to take what he likes, stews of rabbits and custards sweet, pastries and pies that cost full dear, a dish of mincemeat that men call to fill your maws. Each course costs a mark between two men that only burns for misery your bowels within.]
The linguistic pleasure of the list of dishes exceeds any disciplinary standard that might restrict one person's ability to consume the shares of six (337). The board laden with a pile of birds and tarts travesties the aesthetic order of a decorated cross that ostensibly points toward transcendence with its array of rings and jewels (343). The obliteration of a quantitative limit to consumption here echoes the herald's dizziness at the countless members of Wynnere's army, with Wynnere now too dazzled to reckon the extent of the waste on display. Even the emphasis on number in several of the lines (“sexe mens dole,” “another,” “quarterd swannes,” “Tartes of ten ynche,” “thirde mese”) gives way to a sense of innumerable excess as Wynnere details the many birds that Wastoure consumes at his feast. Pheasants, geese, bitterns, snipes, larks, linnets, woodcocks, woodpeckers, teals, and titmice take their place on the overfull table before the emphasis shifts to questions of cost.52 Descriptions of feasts are common enough in alliterative poetry, and Ralph Hanna has described the mournful mood in these moments, in which the ordered community created and sustained by God, lord, and poet in the great hall is threatened by an “uncreating impulse,” represented in the figures of the outsider and the ruin.53 Wynnere's description deploys this melancholia of disorder by implicitly linking Wastoure's feast to his depopulated estates and woodlands, making the landscape itself a ruin wrought by this feast. The fundamental tension in the poem between excess and loss here reveals its indelible link to a plague that made the threat of a rural world emptied of life palpably real, despite the absence of explicit references to the plague in the poem.54 While the victims of the midcentury outbreak of bubonic plague did not directly include game birds, the list of foods evokes the same kind of disorder that afflicts the social realm in the herald's description of the armies. These two moments of descriptive listing conjure the inseparability of flourishing and destruction in an agrarian ecosystem and economy that had undergone severe crises since the crop failures and livestock diseases of 1315–31 and the overwhelming shock of the bubonic plague outbreak of 1349, just three years before the earliest possible date of composition of the poem (1352).55 To again quote Chihaya on Byatt, the list of foods at Wastoure's feast exemplifies “an aesthetic strategy of inordinate proliferation [that] paradoxically demonstrates the inevitable depletion of a transient natural world.”56 The feast gives a glimpse of a woodland emptied of its game species, and the sense of wasted labor in such squander—the labor of foresters, hunters, kennel masters, cooks, and servants—recalls Wynnere's initial charge that Wastoure lets his estates decay by not populating them with people who might work to maintain them.
Lists give form to the catastrophic collapse of social order, economic reciprocity, and the networks that link field and wood, manor and city by emphasizing the paradox of order itself within the apocalyptic paradigm that Wynnere and Wastoure assumes at the outset. Even as the prophetic poet seeks to build forms capable of reflecting the overarching order of history, any attempt to capture such a totality requires a corresponding plenitude of words that must also evoke absence. The potentially endless proliferation of words cannot match the material finitude of the things being destroyed in Wastoure's feast, just as a proliferation of words cannot reach a full and stable accounting of all that has been won and wasted in the poem's totalizing social ambition. The list form of the feast manifests the apocalyptic mood of the poem's introduction by making excess a revelation of absence. In pitting the profligacy of chaotic enumeration against the fundamental scarcity that haunts every act of consumption, Wynnere and Wastoure gives form to the fear that after “a mery nyghte,” there will be nothing left for “meles many” (365).
Wynnere and Wastoure confronts the troubling economic possibility that the actions of its personified adversaries cannot be brought into a static symmetry. The potentially endless lists of Wynnere's followers, the things they buy and sell, and the foods Wastoure consumes all formally enact the loss of the ordering container of the apocalyptic frame, in which history and the actions that make history become meaningful. Especially resonant here is Cara Hersh's reading of the respective attitudes of Wynnere and Wastoure to the “bounded or unbounded state of wealth” in terms of the distinction between “wealth-as-treasure,” that is, something to be enclosed and hoarded, and “wealth-as-tool,” that is, as something only realized in circulation.57 The figures of Wynnere and Wastoure must continue to create and consume, locked in a potentially endless process of unbounded accumulation and squandering. The poem registers an early instance of the dream (or nightmare) of endless economic growth, which breaks through the surprisingly comforting cosmic barrier of an apocalyptic end, even as it reveals the grim consequences of such an economy for nonhuman beings and their habitats. We are left at the poem's (truncated) conclusion with the queasy churn of excessive appetites not curbed but instrumentalized for national gain.
Before we get to the king's concluding judgment, Wastoure and Wynnere have another exchange. This turn in the debate sees Wastoure offer a prophecy of Wynnere's death after his ability to price gouge is curtailed by a year of abundant harvest, which drives him to suicide. While Wynnere had decried Wastoure's extravagant consumption as a kind of natural disaster in its own right, Wastoure argues that his own treatment of plant and animal life as cheap helps keep it dear for the benefit of people like Wynnere; Wastoure's extravagant consumption creates scarcity that keeps prices high, forces people to work, and maintains social stratification. That stratification is captured in the alliterative balance of Wastoure's lines that contrast poles of the socioeconomic hierarchy across the regular medial caesura in a kind of list that hopes to create a sense of symmetrical social holism:
[Let lords have as they please, commoners as it falls to them; they the bacon and beef, they the bitterns and swans; they the husk of the rye, they the fine wheat; they the gray gruel and they the good soups.]
This delicate social symmetry, crafted into a list of foods that suggests more discipline than decadence, depends, however, upon the immoderate consumption of lords. Wastoure does not bother denying his profligacy, but rather asserts that the homeostasis of a hierarchical social order depends upon his role as a kind of apex predator:
[If fowls should fly forth and never be caught, and wild beasts in the wood live all their lives and fish swim in the flood and eat each other, a hen will be a halfpenny by a half year's end; there would not be a lowborn man in the land who would serve a lord.]
This striking analysis of his own place in the order of things sets up Wastoure's clinching aphorism that makes the case for a social holism in which antagonism is reconciled in the circulation of wealth: “Whoso wele schal wyn a wastour moste he fynde / For if it greues one gome it gladdes anoþer” [Whoever shall win wealth, a waster must he find, for if it grieves one person, it gladdens another] (390–91). As the poem approaches its conclusion, the sublimity of a cosmic order that supports apocalyptic interpretation of the signs of the times gives way to a different kind of deterministic totality. Instead of Doomsday, Wastoure leaves the reader with the equally inescapable fate of class antagonism, where plenty depends on poverty, and winning immediately becomes waste.
Wastoure articulates this ethical defense of his consumption in balanced and concise forms, in contrast to the apocalyptic proliferations of Wynnere's description of the feast or the herald's description of the opposed ranks of would-be fighters. In a kind of formal paradox, Wastoure celebrates the unbounded persistence of winning and wasting in a tightly bounded, aphoristic form that, like the antithetical lists across lines 378–81, offers a comfortingly naturalized, symmetrical container for a description of material proliferation and decay. But this contradiction between what Wastoure champions here and the form in which he does so belies the poem's seemingly uncritical depiction of a national political economy. At the conclusion, the list-like response to social disorder that reveals an underlying belief in cosmic order gives way to an attempt to put a tight poetic order around the chaos of unbounded accumulation and expense. But Wastoure's winning lines are no more or less convincing than Wynnere's verbally profligate accounts of Wastoure's gluttonous disorder, and it remains for the king to offer a final judgment on these matters.
The king, however, declines to resolve the constitutive contradictions of society by rebalancing them within a cosmically ordered perspective, as we would expect of a figure of apocalyptic judgment. The king does impose order of a different sort, separating Wynnere and Wastoure and sending them, respectively, to the papal curia and Cheapside, where they are ordered to perform the surprisingly similar service for their king of winning as much money as possible. This is no return to the prophetic frame of British history with which the poem began. Instead, the king's solution finds ways to turn the greed and cupidity of the denizens of each city to royal advantage. The ultimate conflict between the forces arrayed on the field of battle never occurs because the two sides are, finally, not so different, as a seemingly all-important moral distinction is sublated into the amoral totality that is the national political economy. In this, I agree with Flood's assessment that “[t]he conclusion of Wynnere and Wastoure (as it stands) draws Wynnere into a new positive and nationally productive context, reconciling investment with reward,” but the absence of a cosmic frame that could impose some order on this process makes this a less optimistic and morally neutral outcome than it might seem.58 If, as Robert Lerner observes, apocalyptic frameworks helped guide people through the catastrophe of the Black Plague, then the cancellation in Wynnere and Wastoure of a familiar apocalyptic form of bilateral confrontation followed by judgment offers only the prospect of an unbounded future of chaotic accumulation and expenditure.59 The poem's opening apocalypticism, which invokes an imminent Doomsday by enumerating the signs of its approach, gives way to a conclusion in which the result of social dissolution is not the transcendent revelation of a final cosmic order but ceaseless production and waste. Instead of the apocalyptic list as Conscience's complete “registre,” Wynnere and Wastoure offers “chaotic enumeration” as the formal corollary to the uncountable quantities of production, consumption, and exchange extending into an indefinite future, which must then be justified by new political and poetic forms that lack cosmic foundation. The poem's prescient grasp of these political economic dynamics is enabled by an apocalyptic focus on the textual enlisting of quantities that can either be counted or escape accounting. This focus on quantity that apocalypticism shares with political economy casts a shadow over the seemingly neutral acceptance of a new order of economic nationalism at the poem's end.60 The thought that Doomsday might not come, and that the poetics of wasteful excess might be a truer response to the catastrophe of history than the aesthetic balance that falsely mirrors cosmic harmony, is more troubling than Doomsday itself.
Agency after apocalyptic order
Apocalyptic prophecies, with their formal tension between list and narrative, mirror the tension within Christian apocalyptic eschatology itself between the sense of an unfolding historical time in which human agency still has a role to play and the sense of a closed and determined end for which humanity must passively wait. The interplay of agency and pre-scripted determination is central to literary responses to catastrophe, in which a poem like Wynnere and Wastoure implicitly asks to what extent doing or refraining from any of the behaviors the two antagonists accuse one another of doing could actually change the present disorder described at the poem's beginning.
The list itself manifests a tension, as we have seen, between order and disorder since it potentially represents both a complete “registre” and an incompletable enumeration of disparate elements. This is another way that lists formally echo the contradiction within apocalypticism between the holism of apocalyptic teleology, in which God has already scripted everything beforehand, and the immanence of the prophetic moment, in which the agency of the individual or enlightened community can still bring about or prevent the apocalyptic events that one day must nevertheless arise.61 For Richard K. Emmerson, this tension marks one of the key distinctions between the close, sometimes indistinguishable genres of apocalypse and prophecy; in the former, patience is called for; in the latter, action is exhorted.62 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton expresses this dynamic succinctly: “Traditionally, the apocalyptic mentality has always differed from the prophetic mentality in that the former is deterministic.”63 This apt distinction nevertheless admits of a large gray area where apocalyptic visions and the traditions to which they give rise include characters that act in order to bring about the necessary end, blurring the distinction between hortatory prophecy and deterministic apocalypse. The tension between determinism and action in apocalypse and prophecy suggests something endemic to responses to catastrophe: the difficulty of relating perception to action. For Wynnere and Wastoure, the catastrophe of the Black Plague creates new economic realities that crack open old containers of socioeconomic identity. The personification allegory ironically makes personal what the poem actually reveals to be an interlocking series of impersonal processes, from the spread of the plague to its effects on the political economy. These processes result in a state of affairs where it remains unclear if society can or even should respond to the prophetic voice of the poem's opening by changing its ways, or if instead the poem imagines a paradoxically postapocalyptic determinism in which no one can do much to change things, because the catastrophe has already happened.64 After this end of history, the poem's political formalism leaves behind the bounded frame of apocalyptic prophecy for the open-ended (and accidentally unfinished) image of a world dominated by the endless accumulation and circulation of wealth for the purposes of national political ambition.
Notes
Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Stephanie Trigg, Early English Text Society o.s., vol. 297 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), line 16. Further citations of the poem are given by line number in text. Translations throughout the article are my own.
Thomas Bestul, Satire and Allegory in “Wynnere and Wastoure” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 43; Britton J. Harwood, “The Displacement of Labor in Winner and Waster,” in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 157–77, at 158; Victoria Flood, “Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy,” Chaucer Review 49, no. 4 (2015): 427–48, at 439; Cara Hersh, “ ‘Wyse wordes withinn’: Private Property and Public Knowledge in Wynnere and Wastoure,” Modern Philology 107, no. 4 (2010): 507–27, at 514–15; Eric Weiskott, “Political Prophecy and the Form of Piers Plowman,” Viator 50, no. 1 (2019): 207–47, at 219–23.
On generic discontinuity, see Maura Nolan, “ ‘With tresone withinn’: Wynnere and Wastoure, Chivalric Self-Representation, and the Law,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 1 (1996): 1–28, at 5; Hersh, “ ‘Wyse wordes withinn,’ ” 507; Harwood, “Displacement of Labor in Winner and Waster,” 160.
Victoria Flood, “Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy,” Chaucer Review 49. no. 4 (2015): 427–48, at 440–41.
Lois Roney, “Winner and Waster's ‘Wyse Wordes’: Teaching Economics and Nationalism in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 69, no. 4 (1994): 1070–1100; Brantley Bryant, “Talking with the Taxman about Poetry: England's Economy in ‘Against the King's Taxes’ and Wynnere and Wastoure,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3, no. 5 (2008): 219–48; James Simpson, Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 224; Kellie Robertson, The Laborer's Two Bodies: Literary and Legal Productions in Britain, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 40–46; Nolan, “ ‘With tresonne withinn’ ”; Hersh, “ ‘Wyse wordes withinn’ ”; D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 72–107; John Scattergood, “Winner and Waster and the Mid-Fourteenth-Century Economy,” in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 39–57.
Robert Bjork describes these complementary orders as, respectively, “horizontal” and “vertical” models of apocalypse. See his introduction to Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Bjork (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2019), vii–xii, at vii.
As Andrew Cole details, lists were an ubiquitous form in “archival genres concerned with labor, materials, and productive processes,” in particular “ordinances, statutes, guild returns, and inquisitions.” See Cole, “Scribal Hermeneutics and the Genres of Social Organization in Piers Plowman,” in The Middle Ages at Work, ed. Robertson and Uebel, 179–206, at 180, 184.
On amplificatio and related figures in the poem, see Stephanie Trigg, “The Rhetoric of Excess in Winner and Waster,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 3 (1989): 91–108, at 105. S. S. Hussey notes Wynnere and Wastoure's tendency to pause for description, in “Langland's Reading of Alliterative Poetry,” Modern Language Review 60, no. 2 (1965): 163–70, at 167–68. The general prominence of descriptive passages in alliterative poetry has recently been given book-length study by Thorlac Turville-Petre in Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018).
Weiskott, “Political Prophecy and the Form of Piers Plowman,” 220, 229.
See Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963).
The classic study of this dynamic and its impact on the theory and practice of narrative form is Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Marjorie Reeves, “The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 40–72, at 49.
Kathryn-Kerby Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15.
Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4.
Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin, “Apocalypse: Introduction,” ASAP/Journal 3, no. 3 (2018): 451–66, at 457.
Sarah Chihaya, “What Is Missing: Cataloguing the End,” ASAP/Journal 3, no. 3 (2018): 571–93, at 577; Joanna Demmers, Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World (Alresford, Hampshire: Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing, 2015), 40.
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 80–81; Leo Spitzer, “La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna,” trans. Raimundo Lida, in Lingüistica e Historia Literaria (Madrid: Biblioteca Romanica Hispanica, 1955), 295–355; Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2009).
Penn Szittya, “Domesday Bokes: The Apocalypse in Medieval English Literary Culture,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 374–97, at 374.
Szittya, 377.
Thomas Wimbledon, Wimbledon's Sermon: “Redde rationem villicationis tue”; A Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Ione Kemp Knight (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967), 66.
Lists, as Anke Bernau argues of the affective intensities that permeate the many catalogues of Gavin Douglas's Palis of Honoure, always suggest the limitations of their form and “are used to remind us of that which cannot be named, enumerated, or itemized.” See Bernau, “Affecting Forms: Theorizing with the Palis of Honoure,” in Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, ed. Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 181–202, at 196–67. Cole similarly observes in Piers Plowman the ways in which the list at the end of the prologue concludes abruptly as “a stopping that only reminds one of the potential to list more” (“Scribal Hermeneutics,” 185).
Goody, Domestication of the Savage Mind, 81.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2012), 98.
Stephen Barney, “Chaucer's Lists,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 189–223, at 205.
Le pouvoir des listes au moyen âge—I: Écritures de la liste, ed. Claire Angotti, Pierre Chastang, Vincent Debiais, Laura Kendrick (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2019), 8: “[(La liste) offre, plus que d'autres formes de textes, la perspective de l'intégration d'une connaisance incrémentale, voire de la recomposition pure et simple des items qui peuvent être dissociés et réassociés selon des visées heuristiques ou pragmatiques renouvelées. La liste mène à la liste.”
Madaleine Jeay, Le commerce des mots: L'usage des listes dans la littérature médiévale (XIIe–Xve siècles) (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2006), 30, 32: “la liste nous place au coeur du paradoxe qui fonde notre rapport au langage,” [which seeks] “de solliciter la chose et de l’évacuer tout à la fois”; “C'est comme si la quantité permettait de dépasser l'angoisse du mot comme signe de l'absence de la chose.”
Spitzer, “Enumeración caótica,” 344: “lucha eterna” [between] “el principio del orden y el de la autonomía,” [which reveals Whitman's affinity with] “una tradición más que milenaria, cristiana.”
Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, 26, 32, 36.
Maren-Sofie Røstvig, “Structure as Prophecy: The Influence of Biblical Exegesis upon Theories of Literary Structure,” in Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis, ed.Alastair Fowler (New York: Routledge, 1970), 32–72; Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 21–50.
Barney, “Chaucer's Lists,” 217.
Eleanor Johnson, “The Poetics of Waste: Medieval English Ecocriticism,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (2012): 460–76, at 461.
Hersh, “ ‘Wyse wordes withinn,’ ” 510–11.
Trigg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure, 18.
On the “world turned upside down” complaint, see Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 55.
Barney, “Chaucer's Lists,” 205–6.
Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 45–46.
Most recently, Shannon Gayk offers a thorough survey and compelling reading of the “Fifteen Signs” tradition, in “Apocalyptic Ecologies: Eschatology, the Ethics of Care, and the Fifteen Signs of Doom in Early England,” Speculum 96, no. 1 (2021), 1–37. For a Middle English example of the “Fifteen Signs,” see Adam Davy's Five Dreams about Edward III, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society o.s., vol. 69 (London, 1878), 92. For examples of the widespread “When . . . Then . . . ” structure of English prophecies, see Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), 1–15. For a summary of English political prophecy, see Eric Weiskott, “English Political Prophecy and the Problem of Modernity,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 10, no. 1 (2019): 8–21, esp. 11–15.
Katharine Breen, “The Need for Allegory: Wynnere and Wastoure as an Ars Poetica,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 26 (2012): 187–229, at 198.
Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 37–39.
Goody, Domestication of the Savage Mind, 80; David Matthews, “Enlisting the Poet: The List and the Late Medieval Dream Vision,” Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 280–95, at 285.
See Penn Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 221–30.
William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), XX.270. Further references are given in the text by passus and line numbers.
As Morton Bloomfield says of this passage, “The excesses of mankind, especially those of the friars . . . tend to destroy the very basis of intellectual and ontological existence. They are turning the world into an undifferentiated hell which is the model for nothingness and infinite confusion.” See Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 146.
Hersh, “ ‘Wyse wordes withinn,’ ” 522.
On attempts to discern sympathies or disapproval in description of the armies, see Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, 30.
David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
The social composition of Wastoure's army has occasioned some debate. I follow the argument that they represent a military aristocracy of greater or lesser prestige and wealth. See Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 223, for example, on “Winner the retentive merchant and Waster the spending noble.”
In this sense, this moment represents a negative version of the “anticlosural” listing that Ryan Netzley discusses in the English country house poem; see “Managed Catastrophe: Problem-Solving and Rhyming Couplets in the Seventeenth-Century Country House Poem,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 52, no. 1 (2022): 147–73. It also suggests some of the negative affects associated with estate management that Brantley Bryan identifies, in “Accounting for Affect in the Reeve's Tale,” in Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, ed. Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118–38.
Chihaya, “What Is Missing,” 582.
Cleanness, lines 113–18 and 137–60, in The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London: Penguin Books, 2014).
Anke Bernau, “Enlisting Truth,” Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 261–79, at 275–76.
I am grateful to Anke Bernau for suggesting this point.
Ralph Hanna, “Feasting in Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” in New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron, ed. Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 31–41, at 32–34.
David K. Coley refers to Wynnere and Wastoure's general gestures toward the catastrophe, in Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019), 167. Kellie Robertson situates the poem within “differing views of how to handle the post-plague labor shortage,” in The Laborer's Two Bodies, 41.
Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 191–92.
Chihaya, “What Is Missing,” 577.
Hersh, “ ‘Wyse wordes withinn,’ ” 517–18.
Flood, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” 437. See also Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 224: “seen from the perspective of national policy ethics are irrelevant.”
Robert E. Lerner, “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities,” American Historical Review 86, no. 3 (1981): 533–52, at 550.
On the poem as an expression of economic nationalism, see Roney, “Winner and Waster's ‘Wyse Wordes,’ ” 1071; and Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 224.
R. W. Southern, “History as Prophecy,” in History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern, ed. R. J. Bartlett (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 48–65, at 50.
Richard K. Emmerson, “The Prophetic, the Apocalyptic, and the Study of Medieval Literature,” in Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, ed. Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 40–55, at 43.
Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 6.
In this sense, Wynnere and Wastoure's lists capture a sense of futility that also haunts the litanies of new materialist theory, which Katherine Little has recently argued emphasize the agency of nonhuman things while diminishing the capacity of humans to affect the social relations that give those things meaning and power over people's lives. Katherine C. Little, “The Politics of Lists,” Exemplaria 31, no. 2 (2019): 117–28, at 126.
