Radical history and sacral kingship in late medieval England

In this project, I offer a new way of reading the uses of late medieval beliefs about the divine sanction of the monarchy. Middle English literary representations of a sacral kingship, by framing political agency in several distinctive ways, could be used to authorize novel royal actions, while at the same time offering to dissidents a seemingly authoritative basis for the radical rejection of fourteenth-century English feudal rulership. My exploration of narratives about the historical foundations of Plantagenet royal sovereignty offers a strong challenge to the prevailing view that innovative experimentation with techniques of political legitimation arose only with the "pre-Machiavellian moment" of the Lancastrian period.;Scholars such as Paul Strohm have focused our attention on the 1399 deposition of Richard II by the Lancastrians as a watershed moment in late medieval notions of royal legitimacy. This violent change of dynasty ushered in, and relied upon, fundamental changes in cultural notions of power and legitimacy. The work of many literary scholars, notably Lynn Staley, has lately focused on cultural production and patronage around the royal court in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, in order to map the shifting cultural imagination of power in this period. This period's notions of kingship and history have emerged as particularly important nodes of investigation. How could the radical step of deposition be pursued against the supposedly divinely-sanctioned authority of an anointed monarch? And what manipulations of historical precedent were possible, and necessary, in order to legitimize political actions beyond the scope of traditional medieval perceptions of social order?;The Lancastrians searched historical writings from the reigns of the Plantagenet dynasty they replaced, in pursuit of a language of legitimization could justify innovative political action. Yet these writings were produced in regions far from the court, and they represent perspectives that are lost or distorted when they are read (as they are now) through the problematic of the Lancastrian regime, and its attempt to legitimize a particular kind of kingship. My project recovers and explores the overlooked conflicts surrounding kingship within the historical narratives of this earlier period, which have been viewed too simplistically as affirmative of the conservative discourses of aristocratic genealogy and divine right. While the Plantagenets used historical narratives of genealogy and sacral kingship to bolster their authority, I show that these narratives also provided opportunities for revision and experimentation among those who would oppose their interests.;I thus analyze the way that a set of oppositional texts, written in the vernacular during the reign of Edward III, situate the foundations and legitimacy of kingship within a sacralized order of history: the Middle English translations of the Life of Edward the Confessor and Three Kings of Cologne, the Middle English chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, and William Langland's Piers Plowman. Far from allowing royal sacrality to stand as a transcendentalizing source of legitimacy, these narratives already conceive of sovereignty's sacral elements as immanent within the world and as a part of its conflicts. My project thus challenges what is often seen as a narrative of secularization, whereby the late Middle Ages saw a stripping-away of political sovereignty's transcendent elements in favor of a more "worldly" political imagination. It problematizes our periodizations of late medieval discourse and our often oversimple notions of secularity, by turning to the varied notions of metaphysical order underlying medieval ideas of sovereignty.