The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry

What a pleasure to pick up a book so attentive to issues of unemployment and precarity—realities that seem to never go away for working people. Kerby-Fulton does this by exploring a subsection of medieval workers—variously understudied, invisible, neglected, or never properly contextualized—for their importance in literary history…The book really makes us think about merit, exclusion, education, ambition, vocation, resiliency, spirituality, inspiration, satire, critique, imagination, independence, hegemony, and how we personally, artistically, and professionally react to it all. Kerby-Fulton humbly makes clear that there is more work to be done. * Modern Philology *
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s most recent monograph advances an argument of such elegant explanatory power that it seems almost intuitive by the time you finish reading. At its heart is a straightforward account of a structural late-medieval labor crisis. * The Medieval Review *
Examining the English writings of clerics in minor orders without benefices or established positions, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton brings to notice a cohort of 'submerged' authors whose existence and writings have been overlooked. She illuminates in rewarding detail the contexts in which these men wrote and the attitudes they may have shared with contemporaries whose names are better known to modern readers. * Julia Boffey, Queen Mary College, University of London *
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's arresting thesis is that the explosion of creativity and innovation that marked late medieval English literature resulted from the precarious working conditions of an underemployed yet overeducated elite: the clerks breaking their backs toiling away for Church and State. The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry is a powerful and provocative book written against the grain of established accounts of literary and social history. * Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen *
In this rigorously argued book about the literary works produced by underemployed clerics toiling in the professional circles of medieval England, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton offers a riveting account of a generative poetics of vocational crisis. A rare feat that combines the skills of a meticulous literary historian and an ethically committed teacher, the book speaks poignantly and powerfully about lesser-known medieval poets in ways that resonate with the modern precarity of the adjunct or untenured academic laboring for the love of letters. * Arvind Thomas, University of California, Los Angeles *
With a masterful blend of critical rigor, empathetic engagement, and deep familiarity with manuscripts and archives, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton offers us a new explanation for the resurgence of English literary writing in the later Middle Ages. Career disappointment, she argues, prompted unbeneficed clerics to bring their training and talent to new audiences in new ways and to do so with inventive and impassioned attention to human suffering and injustice. This is literary history at its best-and a timely and resonant meditation on the uses of adversity. * Sarah McNamer, Georgetown University *
Confidently melding social history, labor theory, and literary formalism, this vigorous book is a stunning feat of scholarship that delivers stark new insights about the making of English literature from 1200 to the Reformation. Kerby-Fulton shows us an England brimming with highly educated yet woefully underemployed men-the unbeneficed clerical proletariat-who labored in the liminal space between ecclesiastical and lay worlds, and bared the scars of their vocational struggle in vernacular writings. * Susanna Fein, Kent State University *