Academic literature on the topic 'George Ashby'

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticize them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of the most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words capt

Chapter 5 identifies the autograph hand of the signet clerk and poet George Ashby across twelve documents, five of which bear his scribal signature. I also demonstrate that the Cambridge manuscript of his Active Policy of a Prince, Cambridge University Library, Mm.IV.42, is a holograph intended for Prince Edward of Westminster. At the same time, this work marks Ashby’s withdrawal from public life, and I date the poem to 1461–2. I also show that Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflection was composed between Michaelmas 1463 and 24 March 1464. Ashby’s narrative self dominates the Prisoner’s Reflection, and his defining context is that of the signet clerk, constantly attached to the person of the king or queen. The exile from this situation in 1461 triggers the poetic impulse that leads to his two known works—narratives that signal the uprootedness of his sociocentric self in an attempt to realign himself with his environment.

Perhaps one way of understanding the textual ‘I’ in late medieval narratives is to think of it as the pragmatic self of the author. Never quite divorced from the porous indexical self of the writer, the textual ‘I’ is the authentic guise sociocentric persons assume in public contexts. To some extent, the public selves we ourselves project are real and certainly reliable, yet they are rarely exact extensions of our private selves. But unlike medieval persons, we can actively construct and use our public selves as means through which we influence and control our environment. For the indexical self such an operation is fraught with danger. Their identity is not self-contained or even clearly separated from the environment: they are at the mercy of the spiritual and politicized forces exerting pressure on them. Such persons construct pragmatic selves much less consciously than we do, and their textual selves are closely tied to themselves, so closely, in fact, that they are exposed to their surroundings, just as their authors were. To effect change through the textual ‘I’ asked of the premodern writer to invest much of their personal reality in their textual reflection. The thinner the membrane separating the respective personae of Thomas, George, and Geoffrey from those of Hoccleve, Ashby, and Chaucer, the more propitious the likely public consequences of their creative efforts....