Having helped to steer the Eastman vessel into calmer waters, I thought I had completed my duties in academic governance. That however turned out to be an illusion. At the end of the 1972-73 school year, Wayne Barlow wanted to retire, and I was appointed chairman of the composition department. This was at first to be a three-year term, but my “dear” colleagues voted to extend my tenure in that position until I retired in 1994, and then I stayed at Eastman for one more year since my replacement, Augusta Reed Thomas, wanted to extend her tenure at Harvard for one year before coming to Eastman. I had no prob¬lem with the chairmanship because we had the most terrific faculty and, even though our compositions were very different one from one another, we had the closest personal relationship, with mutual respect and love for one another. Though there were some heated arguments about policy and students, we were always able to solve everything amicably. During my time as chairman, the department consisted of Warren Benson, Joseph Schwantner, Allen Schindler (who taught electronic music), Robert Morris, Sydney Hodkinson (who mostly conducted the Musica Nova Ensemble), and, a little later, Christopher Rouse and David Liptak.2 Building this department was a great joy for all of us, and we were able to attract some of the finest talents in the world to come and study with us. Early on, we came to agree that the more varied points of views the students could get, the better off they would be. Thus, we decided that every student should study for one year only with a certain teacher. This would mean that every undergraduate would have four different teachers in the four years of his or her Eastman matriculation. Some composers outside the school felt that this was too extreme a system, and that students would get confused by the dif¬ferent styles of instruction. But this never became a problem, and many of the Eastman students who have become distinguished members of composition departments in schools all over the world have carried on that tradition.

Every department in the school was strengthened even during the first few years of Bob Freeman's directorship. The names are too numerous to mention, but I want to mention a few who completely revitalized the School. Jan DeGaetani brought a whole new outlook to the voice department.

London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i contains an early eleventh century copy of the Old English Orosius (fols. 3r–111v) which was joined, c. 1045, with the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) (fols. 115v–164r). The C Chronicle is prefaced by two Old English poems known as the Menologium (fols. 112r–114v), a calendar poem and Maxims II (fols. 115r–115v), a collection of precepts offering proverbial wisdom. The aim of this chapter is to open up the political and intellectual impetuses behind this mid eleventh century act of compilation. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, the most recent editor of C, incisively characterized the product of this compiling as ‘a book of histories’. Tiberius B. i, although produced in England and in the vernacular, will emerge as poised on the cutting edge of wider developments in eleventhand twelfth-century European historiography – and in particular in relation to developments in universal history, which we more readily associate with Latin history-writers of the German Empire.

The methodology of this chapter entails the tight integration of codicological and textual analysis with evidence of the political and intellectual engagements of the compiler of Tiberius B. i to argue that the additions of poetry and chronicle to the Orosius c. 1045 produced a coherent and unified text. I will build on Stephen Baxter's persuasive study of how ASC C promoted the interests of Earl Leofric of Mercia and his family amidst the bitter factionalism of the mid eleventh century to consider very precisely how the whole Orosius–poetry–ASC compilation, and not just C, aimed to intervene directly in politics on behalf of Leofric in the specific context of the Anglo-Saxon court of the mid 1040s. That innovative and intellectually demanding history-writing, such as Tiberius B. i's creation of a vernacular universal chronicle, was an active and effective political discourse has much to tell us about pre-Conquest English literary culture and its place within a wider European context.

Within that wider European context, Tiberius B. i does not lose relevance as a result of its vernacularity. Set alongside contemporary German Imperial texts, it brings insight into the relationship of universal chronicles to the politics of empire and the place of compilation in the writing of history.

Medieval writers, even the philosophers, delighted in playing with the twists and turns of cognition. The very foundation of empirical thought rested upon speculation through suppositional logic and the relativities of perspectivist theory. Philosophers—from Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and Duns Scotus to William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine, Robert Holcot, and Chaucer's “philosophical” Strode––experimented with the logic of possibilities. Cognition is a thought-process, a dialectica with a plotable narrative, what Hugh of St. Victor refers to in the Didascalicon as narrationis processus (a narrative drama), a series saeculi (a cognitive sequence within a grammatical time frame). All the philosophers share the same brain model that originated with Galen. And so do Gower, Chaucer, Langland, and Lydgate, who commonly refer directly or indirectly to Galen and his three-ventricular theory of the brain, with its capacity to speculate on meaning within the pathways of supposition as it attempts to construct meaning out of experience. The abstraction of ideas from the senses in conjunction with memory and desire leads to what the philosophers refer to as the “multiplication of species.” This mental interplay of possibilities sets the stage for fictive literature of the sort especially dear to Gower. The brain is the writer's staging arena. As we will see in the second part of this essay, the same is true for his characters, who voice and act out their choices within the diegesis of their own minds.

Medieval Conceptions of the Brain and Cognition

Medieval brain diagrams, based on Galen, depict an interplay between intuitive and abstractive cognition. In preparation for discussion of cognition and the brain's staging of evidence in the Confessio Amantis, I have assembled a primer on cognition based upon medical diagrams of the brain and human body found in medieval and early Renaissance medical texts or philosophical arguments. Ultimately, the drawings derive from Galen (or Aristotle through Galen), as conveyed by Arabic translations and adaptations of Alhazan, Averroes, and Avicenna, and modified further by subsequent Latin translators. Such drawings, along with their commentaries, are second nature to Gower and his audience. They demonstrate how vision, hearing, and one's experience of the outside world pass through the senses, especially the eye and ear (CA I.iv.289–302), into one's thought-processing intellect, there by illustrating the operative formulations of cognition.

What's the matter with John Gower? I ask this intentionally playful question to ponder two things: first, how does Gower employ literal and metaphorical discussions of the material in his great English poem, the Confessio Amantis? Second, how does matter itself—both real and literary—affect readers’ ability to interpret their environment? In short, how does stuff inhibit or encourage our understanding of the natural world? As numerous scholars have observed, the Confessio is studded with descriptions of crafted things. They are often read either as “object models,” to quote Robert F. Yeager, and thus function primarily as narrative symbols, or are part of Gower's political and economic narrative, as the work of Brian Gastle and Roger Ladd has shown. But what joins many of these references to the material and crafted world—artificial to use Aristotle's term—is an anxiety about the ways in which such goods are both produced and used. In the “Trump of Death,” in Book I, a king orders made a particular “trompe of bras” to be sounded with a “with a sterne breth” in order to trick his brother into believing that he has been condemned to death by a whim. Likewise, Gower deploys the classic tale of the Trojan Horse to demonstrate that manufactured goods have the potential for danger. The reason we should not trust Greeks bearing gifts is not abstract; it is a giant beautiful “hors of bras thei let do forge” (CA I.1087), skillfully designed by the “crafti werkman Epius” (CA I.1091), and soon to be filled with marauding soldiers. In both examples, the rich materials and fine craftsmanship overpower reason through the gates of the senses. Objects do not just appear in Gower's reworked exempla; they are ordered by kings and patrons and made by the hands of skilled artisans. As a result, Gower compels us not only to consider the symbolic or economic value of things, but also encourages us to read the matter and craft used to produce such goods.

As I will argue in this essay, debates about matter and form illustrate different anxieties about the power that crafted goods can have over human observers and handlers.

In the summer of 1380, John de Hawkeswick and John de Clynt oversaw the casting of a new bell for Ripon Minster. The minster was a large and ancient church situated above the meeting-point of the rivers Ure and Skell in the north-west part of Yorkshire. Long ago, in the seventh century, a holy man named Wilfrid had driven out Ripon's first group of monks and founded his own new monastery. The original monks followed the customs of the Irish Church, but Wilfrid replaced them with a monastery aligned with Roman customs, loyalty to which was a defining feature of his career. Wilfrid's most famous achievement was to introduce the Roman system for calculating the date of Easter at the Synod of Whitby. Among the many churches that he founded, Ripon was one of Wilfrid's favourites and he was buried there after his death in 710. He then became the posthumous protector of his followers, proving his sanctity through miracles. The archbishops of York had high esteem for Wilfrid, who as bishop of Northumbria was one of their predecessors. They rebuilt the minster in the late twelfth century in order to provide a more suitable architectural setting for his shrine. The seven canons of Ripon, who eventually succeeded Wilfrid's monks, continued to prize his relics until the Reformation under Henry viii.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Ripon was a regionally important ecclesiastical centre and a relatively large market town. It ranked alongside Pontefract, Doncaster, Whitby and Selby, yet still below the leading Yorkshire towns of York, Beverley, Hull and Scarborough. The minster's economic influence was also considerable and extended well beyond the town itself and into the surrounding area. Specialists such as goldsmiths, glaziers and masons resided in Ripon in part because of the minster's demand for their skills. Carpenters, who were the most important category of medieval craftsmen, also found plenty of opportunities to work at the minster. Two of the carpenters who worked on installing the new bell and making its frame in 1380 were from nearby villages: Lawrence Carpenter was listed in the 1379 poll tax as a resident of Skelton, and Richard Wright as a resident of Thornton.