generation.80 Carpenter’s relative, the future bishop of Worcester, John Carpenter, receives a book on architecture.81 William Byngham, rector of St. John Zachary and founder of a school at Cambridge (later Christ’s College) meant to remedy the “grete scarstee of maistres of Gramer,” receives Roger Dymock’s response to the Lollard “Twelve Conclusions,” with its careful defense of the theology of the almshouse. John Neel, master of the hospital of St. Thomas of Acres in Cheapside, receives one of two copies of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum and Innocent III’s De miseria conditionis humanae: these contrasting but (in a hospital context) equally useful books on bodily and moral regimes, the first remedial, the second ascetic, had been, with “other notable things,” left to Carpenter by his own predecessor at the Guildhall, John Marchaunt.82 Pecock, Litchfield, Carpenter, Byngham, and Neel were all involved in initiatives to establish and staff choir and grammar schools, with a particular eye to raising the level of liturgical training of London’s choristers and lay clerks, many of whom sang in chantry chapels like the one Carpenter endowed at the Guildhall for the salvation of his own soul, with four choristers (“Carpenter’s children”) under a tutor.83 Like many of Carpenter’s labors for the Whittington foundations, especially the almshouse and the chantry chapel at the St. Paul’s charnel, the networks suggested by these names and gifts speak to an interest in the educational and liturgical life of the city: a concern to promote religious orthodoxy, the correct performance of the divine cultus, and the prayerful commemoration of the city’s dead that both parallels and supplements the concern for civic ceremonial displayed in the Liber albus.
The gifts to clerks, which provide a unique glimpse into the reading culture of the educated laymen in charge of London’s legal, financial, and textual resources, go to nine members of the offices of the common clerk and the city chamberlain, households long closely associated with one another. For the most part, these are works of moral philosophy and theology, in some cases written within the genre of the Fürstenspiegel or Mirror for Princes tradition, including several dating from the previous seventy-five years. Two chamberlain clerks, William Chedworth (brother to the bishop of Lincoln and one of Carpenter’s executors) and Robert Langford (Chedworth’s successor),84 respectively receive copies of Julianus Pomerius’s fifth-century De vita contemplativa, on the relationship between teaching, contemplation, and the practice of virtue, and “a book of mine called Speculum morale regium made for a sometime king of France.” This is probably the mirror for princes written for Charles VI in the 1380s by the late fourteenth-century Dominican archbishop of Sens, Robert Gervais, “useful for observing how a king or governor may be excellent and famous and virtuous and glorious and for contemplating the summit of the rule of kingly majesty and its function and reward.”85 Like Alain de Lille’s late twelfth-century Anticlaudianus, left to Carpenter’s former clerk and family friend Richard Mordan, and Christine de Pizan’s Livre du corps de policie, with its vigorous interest in the role of the merchant class in the calamitous politics of early fifteenth-century France, left to another former clerk, Richard Lovell, these texts are in different ways concerned with the place of virtues in the ordered polity and in “imagining the perfect ruler.”86 Accordingly, they suggest in general terms the moral seriousness with which Carpenter and his fellow clerks understood the theological theory of civic authority displayed iconographically on the south porch of the Guildhall, with its positioning of Learning and Law between the cardinal virtues below and Christ above, and the claims for the religious role of city government this iconography implies.
The books given to a third chamberlain’s clerk, Richard Blount, are suggestive in more specific ways, since they include not only more works broadly in the “advice to rulers” tradition—Carpenter’s other Secreta secretorum, bound with Petrus Alfonsi’s exempla collection Disciplina clericalis—and a set of practical civic texts but also a book of ethical writings whose focus is as much on the self as on the civic. Blount is offered lifetime use of “all my books or quartos of the modes of entry and engrossing of the acts and records as well according to the common law of the realm as the custom of the city of London”—a loose gathering of texts like those Carpenter had shaped into the Liber albus—provided these books revert to the “chamber of the Guildhall of London, for the information of the clerks there” after his decease.87 But he is also given outright another book, “my little book De Parabolis Solamonis, Ecclesiasticus, Seneca ad Callionum, De remediis utriusque fortunae, and De quatuor virtutibus cardinalibus”: perhaps a compilation containing glossed copies of two biblical wisdom books, Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and a cluster of three closely related works of moral theology or philosophy, two ancient, one modern.88 The ancient works, Martin of Braga’s brief account of the role of the cardinal virtues in the life of the ruler, Formula vitae honestae, and the De remediis fortuitorum bonorum, were widely assumed to be by Seneca. The modern work, by far the longest text in the book, is the De remediis utriusque fortunae: the most widely circulated of the writings of Francis Petrarch, of special interest here for its explicitly theological deployment of the concept of fortune to structure a set of reflections on ethical living in the face of change and death.89
Represented as a response to the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitorum bonorum and its failure to consider remedies for anything other than the “bad face” of fortune, Petrarch’s De remediis was written for the once powerful and still wealthy Azzo da Correggio, deposed lord of Parma and governor of Verona, whose “very circumstances … illustrate abundantly the ups and downs of Fortune,” as well as for the “many strung up on the rack of Fortune, many showered with riches, and many being whirled around on her wheel with great force.”90 The treatise, a long series of brief dialogues between Reason and Joy and Hope on the one hand, Sorrow and Fear on the other, is in two parts, both of which represent the “unpredictable and sudden changes” of human affairs as an “ever present war with Fortuna, in which only virtue can make us victorious.”91 The first, in which Reason counters Joy and Hope’s expressions of pleasure in beauty, long life, wealth, position, health, prestige, political success, and so on with the Stoic reminder that all such worldly goods are passing, focuses intently on the spiritual and existential problems attendant on good fortune. Many have “endured losses, poverty, exile, imprisonment, torture, death, and grave illnesses worse than death,” but Petrarch has “yet to see one who could bear well riches, honors, and power.”92 The second, in which Reason seeks to dissuade Sorrow and Fear from reacting negatively to various misfortunes—from loss of social standing, poverty, and sickness to cramped quarters in which some are forced to live—with variations of the same reminder that lack of worldly goods is in reality lack of nothing, focuses on the myriad ways in which good fortune is subject to natural decline, sudden reversal, and a constant sense of insufficiency.93 As a whole, the work, which we might understand as a humanist extension of the mirror for princes tradition, aims to teach those who are in any number of senses rulers to keep themselves at an emotional remove from the world, arguing that such a steadfast rational and virtuous attitude to fortune is what makes good government possible.
The De remediis culminates in an extended memento mori, which is presented as an antidote to both unreasonable pleasure in prosperity and unreasonable pain in misfortune at once.94 This resolution to the problem of fortune is influenced not only by Stoics such as Seneca and Cicero, who encouraged melete thanatou as a means to detach from the external world, but also by the early writings of Augustine, for whom meditatio mortis is similarly the key to attaining virtue, the reorientation of cognition from self and world toward the true apprehension of God.95 In Petrarch’s treatise, Reason argues that “death calls not for fear but for contemplation,” because only in constant meditation on mortality can humans know themselves as temporal, created beings: “The most harmful of all human ills is to forget about God, yourself, and death. These three are so intimately connected that one can hardly consider them separately.”96 Meditation on death encourages a religiously correct and philosophically dispassionate attitude toward wealth and prosperity, as borrowed, not owned—the status, as we have seen, of merchant wealth in particular, according to Dives and Pauper.97
