Recognition of the isolated conditions in which many later medieval authors wrote provided the point of entry for the first scholarly attempts to describe the literary culture of the period. The medieval author, wrote H. S. Bennett, “only knew by accident what was being written elsewhere, and had no certain means of any kind whereby he could find out if the work which he proposed to do was already done, or in process of composition.” He was, so Bennett continued, working “in the dark.” The small audiences for which Bennett imagined medieval writers producing their work have since come into clearer focus. We might think, for example, of Paul Strohm's account of Chaucer's “London circle,” of Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice's work on Langland's London and Dublin readerships, or of Watt's study of Hoccleve's readership at London and Westminster, discussed in Chapter One. The overlap between these readerships has also been highlighted. Textual allusions in Hoccleve's work suggest that he belonged to the first audience of Langland as well as of Chaucer, for instance. Most recently, Mooney and Stubbs's identification of the London Guildhall as a “central London clearing house for Middle English literature” has provided clear evidence for the sharing of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower across the metropolitan bureaucratic milieu from the turn of the fifteenth century. The conditions under which texts and readerships were shared amongst medieval authors and scribes in extra-metropolitan contexts are also becoming clearer.

Nevertheless, the impression remains of a literary culture that was often experienced in a fragmentary fashion; on this “prenational” literary scene, the overview of late medieval English literature constructed via modern scholarship will have been unavailable to writers as well as to readers. Thus while Charles clearly knew the poetry of his predecessors Gower and Chaucer, his writing contains little to suggest that he was familiar with Hoccleve's oeuvre, which comprises devotional and satirical verses of the kind likely to appeal to him as well as the personal and political writing addressed in Chapter One. In this regard, Middle English literature seems to share in the “gret diversite” of the vernacular in which it is written and that Chaucer feared might hamper the transmission of Troilus and Criseyde.