Clerkliness

And yet here in this Sermon of Jonah is no great curiousness, not great clerkliness, no great affectation of words, nor painted eloquence; it was none other but, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed;" it was no more.

I would argue that Ogrin is significant preciesly for the way in which these two aspects of clerkliness are intertwined: his moral guidance falters at the very moment when his literary skill is most apparent, when he rewrites the story of Tristan and Iseut in a letter designed to reconcile the lovers with King Marc.

The posture of 'clerkliness' adopted at the beginning of Sir Gowther might be read as the poet's attempt to clothe himself in a similarly ' scientific ' , Hippocratic aura . Learned Latin discourse on demons itself often insists on its own 'clerkliness' in this context — its own indebtedness to a distinctively bookish tradition of intellectual investigation —in very much the same way the Sir Gowther does, and for much the same reasons.

The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different, for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which does not adequately appear in Porter's version.

And these months of waiting, of trailing about wards and corridors, this pen and paper game, the clerkliness, while the real work went on about him, and he envied the men who did it, and sometimes came near hating them.

Some other images of the contracts […] take this verisimilitude one step further and illustrate with their neat rows and columns the very idea of clerkliness, order, accountability.