The Claims of Poverty

Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England

Kate Crassons

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In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons explores a widespread ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in the aftermath of the plague in late medieval England. She identifies poverty as a central preoccupation in texts ranging from Piers Plowman and Wycliffite writings to The Book of Margery Kempe and the York cycle plays. Crassons shows that these and other works form a complex body of writing in which poets, dramatists, and preachers anxiously wrestled with the status of poverty as a force that is at once a sacred imitation of Christ and a social stigma; a voluntary form of life and an unwelcome hardship; an economic reality and a spiritual disposition.

Crassons argues that literary texts significantly influenced the cultural conversation about poverty, deepening our understanding of its urgency as a social, economic, and religious issue. These texts not only record debates about the nature of poverty as a form of either vice or virtue, but explore epistemological and ethical aspects of the debates. When faced with a claim of poverty, people effectively become readers interpreting the signs of need in the body and speech of their fellow human beings. The literary and dramatic texts of late medieval England embodied the complexity of such interaction with particular acuteness, revealing the ethical stakes of interpretation as an act with direct material consequences. As The Claims of Poverty demonstrates, medieval literature shaped perceptions about who is defined as “poor,” and in so doing it emerged as a powerful cultural force that promoted competing models of community, sanctity, and justice.

KATE CRASSONS is assistant professor of English at Lehigh University.

Advance Praise: “With The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons has written a far-ranging and important study of literary representations of poverty in the Middle Ages. She not only sensitively treats a wide variety of literary sources from allegory to dream vision to sermon to autobiography to drama, but she also carefully places them within significant historical contexts, from changing labor practices and legislation to antifraternalism to heretical movements. Crassons’s analysis of literary texts within the context of these crucially important developments in attitudes towards poverty—whose consequences still remain—demonstrates the profoundly difficult hermeneutic difficulties poverty poses then and now.” — Elizabeth A. Robertson, University of Colorado at Boulder

Reviews

“Everyone interested in how literature represents bodily need and economic relations should read this probing study of the epistemology of poverty in English narratives, plays and reformist prose from the 1370s through the fifteenth century. The Claims of Poverty achieves so much as a literary and cultural study, in part, because Crassons astutely refuses to rehash the extensive scholarship on the late-medieval debates about poverty.” — The Review of English Studies

“Crassons’s debut text . . . is a lively and original survey of medieval accounts and understandings of poverty from the 1300s to the fifteenth century. Fascinatingly, the book is also contemporary in its emphasis. Crassons leaps into this theme, asserting from the outset that the ambiguity in both defining and judging poverty is as salient to medieval England as it is to the twentieth-first century.” — Parergon