Grad - Pangilinan

Abstract

In late-medieval London, citizenship was often earned and sometimes simply purchased. The status of citizen-accompanied by the right to own property, to participate in elections, to practice a profession, and to participate in wholesale trade-was achieved after a period of apprenticeship which usually culminated in membership in a city guild.  But the fourteenth-century professional scrivener Thomas Usk invokes the idea of native citizenship in his allegorical political apology The Testament of Love (1385). Native citizenship and an accompanying sense of inalienable rights are invented through the discourse of "kynde," of the natural affection and affiliation. More surprisingly, Thomas Usk also invents a natural relationship between citizenship and learning and imagines, in the course of justifying his political misdeeds, the possibility of native London intellectual formation.