clerkliness

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.

2000, Debora B. Schwartz, “Par Bel Mentir:Chrétien's Hermits and Clerkly Responsibility”, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, editor, Translatio Studii, page 290

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.

2005, Corinne J. Saunders, Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, page 139

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.

1854, Herman Melville, The Encantadas

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.

1925, Warwick Deeping, Sorrell and Son: Family Tale