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t h e c a m b r i d g e h i s t o r y o f M E D I E VA L E N G L I S H L I T E R AT U R E
This is the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors o◊er a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman Conquest and the death of Henry VIII. The volume has five sections: ‘After the Norman Conquest’, ‘Writing in the British Isles’, ‘Institutional Productions’, ‘After the Black Death’ and ‘Before the Reformation’. It provides information on a vast range of liter- ary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, which will serve both specialists and general readers, and also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book o◊ers the most extensive and vibrant account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, for historians as well as literary specialists.
D a v i d Wa l l a c e is the Judith Rodin Professor of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford University Press, 1997); Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (D. S. Brewer, 1985); Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (ed. with Barbara A. Hanawalt; University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
T H E C A M B R I D G E
H I S T O R Y O F
M E D I E V A L E N G L I S H
L I T E R A T U R E
e d i t e d b y D A V I D WA L L A C E
Contents
List of contributors x General preface.^ david wallace xi Acknowledgments xxiv List of abbreviations xxv
I
A F T E R T H E N O R M A N C O N Q U E S T
Introduction 3
Old English and its afterlife 7 seth lerer
Anglo-Norman cultures in England, 1066–1460 35 susan crane
Early Middle English 61 thomas hahn
National, world and women’s history: writers and readers in post-Conquest England 92 lesley johnson and jocelyn wogan-browne
Latinitas 122 christopher baswell
Romance in England, 1066–1400 152 rosalind field
I I
W R I T I N G I N TH E B R I T I S H I S L E S
Introduction 179
Writing in Wales 182 brynley f. roberts
Writing in Ireland 208 terence dolan
Writing in Scotland, 1058–156 0 229 r. james goldstein
Writing history in England 255 andrew galloway
London texts and literate practice 284 sheila lindenbaum
I I I
I N S T I T U T I O NA L P RO D U C T I O N S
Introduction 313
Monastic productions 316 christopher cannon
The friars and medieval English literature 349 john v. fleming
Classroom and confession 376 marjorie curry woods and rita copeland
Medieval literature and law 407 richard firth green
16.^ Vox populi and the literature of 1381 432 david aers
- Englishing the Bible, 1066–1549 454 david lawton
I V
A F T E R T H E B LAC K D E AT H
Introduction 485
- Alliterative poetry 488 ralph hanna
19.^ Piers Plowman 513 kathryn kerby-fulton
The Middle English mystics 539 nicholas watson
Geo◊rey Chaucer 566 glending olson
viii Contents
Contributors
D a v i d A e r s.^ Duke University C h r i s t o p h e r B a s w e ll.^ Barnard College J u l i a B o f f e y.^ Queen Mary and Westfield College, London C o l i n B u r r o w.^ Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge C h r i s t o p h e r C a n n o n.^ St Edmund Hall, Oxford L a w r e n c e M. C l o p p er.^ Indiana University H e l e n C o o p e r.^ University College, Oxford Ri t a C o p e l a nd.^ University of Minnesota S u s a n C r a n e.^ Rutgers University B r i a n C u m m i n g s.^ University of Sussex Te re n c e D o l a n.^ University College, Dublin Ro s a l i n d Fi e l d.^ Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London John V. Fl e m i n g.^ Princeton University A n d r e w G a l l o w a y.^ Cornell University R. Ja m e s G o l d s t e i n.^ Auburn University R i c h a r d F i r t h G r e e n.^ University of Western Ontario Th o m a s H a h n.^ University of Rochester R a l p h H a n n a III.^ Keble College, Oxford Le s l e y J o h n s o n.^ University of Leeds S t e v e n J u s t i c e.^ University of California, Berkeley Ka t h r y n Ke r b y-Fu l t o n.^ University of Victoria D a v i d L a w t o n.^ Washington University Seth Lerer.^ Stanford University S h e i l a L i n d e n b a u m.^ Indiana University Wi l l i a m P. M a r v i n.^ Colorado State University G l e n d i n g O l s o n.^ Cleveland State University B r y n l e y F. Ro b e r t s.^ National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth Pa u l S t r o h m.^ St Anne’s College, Oxford Jo h n Wa t k i n s.^ University of Minnesota N i c h o l a s Wa t s o n.^ University of Western Ontario Wi n t h r o p We t h e r b e e.^ Cornell University J o c e l y n Wo g a n-B r o w ne.^ University of Liverpool M a r j o r i e C u r r y Wo o d s.^ University of Texas at Austin
[x]
General preface
This volume o◊ers a collaborative account of literature composed or trans- mitted in the British Isles between 1066 and 1547. It may be read selec- tively (from the Index), but it is designed as a continuous narrative, extending through thirty-one chapters in five Parts: ‘After the Norman Conquest’, ‘Writing in the British Isles’, ‘Institutional productions’, ‘After the Black Death’ and ‘Before the Reformation’. Our framing dates, 1066 and 1547, acknowledge the death of kings – Harold I and Henry VIII – by way of denoting periods of profound, far-reaching and long-lasting change for literary cultures. William of Normandy’s conquest, extended and reg- ularized through documentary Latin, erodes the authority of one presti- gious vernacular – Old English – encourages another – French – and initiates hybridizations, movements between dialects and experimental orthographies that make for highly complex manuscript pages. Henry VIII, in making himself head of the Church of England, inevitably assumes close and controlling interest in all writings on religion in English, past and present. The suppression of monasteries, carried out in two waves between 1525 and 1539, destroys the single most important institutional framing for the collection, copying and preservation of medieval texts. Our account of such texts therefore extends forward to the sixteenth cen- tury: to their disassembly, obliteration or reconfiguration within new cul- tures of religion, print and nationalism. This volume is a history, not a handbook: it does not replicate the func- tion of Severs and Hartung, eds., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500. It does, however, provide basic information on a vast range of literary texts while developing particular lines of argument. Contributors sometimes have occasion to question the terms that they have been asked to work with – early Middle English, romance, mystics, alliterative poetry
- but particular critical and theoretical orientations remain, for the most part, implicit in the choosing and arrangement ( inventio and dispositio ) of the medieval texts discussed. Such an approach hopes to secure a reason- able shelf-life for this volume, although it can scarcely hope to outlast its immediate predecessor: The Cambridge History of English Literature , initi- ated by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller in 1907, completed twenty years later, and in print until the 1970s. But it should, we hope, encourage new
[xi]
Such awkwardness is clearly shared by the editors of the Cambridge History of English Literature. The first volume, published in 1907, moves rapidly from ‘The Beginnings’ in chapter 1 (with the retreat of the Romans) to ‘Runes and Manuscripts’ in chapter 2 to ‘Early National Poetry’ in chapter 3. Posited origins of a national poetry are thus planted absurdly early, long before any line of verse actually appears on the page. Citations of Old English verse are in fact given from Stopford Brooke’s verse translations, which exert a comfortably dealienating e◊ect. Authors of these early chapters, who comprise something of a philological hall of fame, o◊er generalized accounts of development and transition that keep philology – sensitive to clashes of linguistic di◊erence, hybridization, cre- olization – strangely at bay. But if the future comes too early, in this account of national development, the past hangs on remarkably late: vol- ume after volume, in this History , returns to capture medieval points of ori- gin. Medieval education is discussed in ‘English and Scottish Education. Universities and Public Schools to the Time of Colet’ in volume 2, chapter
- ‘Canute Song’ ( c. 1200) also appears after 2.13, the watershed chapter on printing, along with discussion of outlaw ballads, Robin Hood, and the Hardycanute of Lady Wardlaw, ‘that famous forgery’ (2.17, p. 417). Discus- sion of John Scotus Erigena, Scotus and Ockham is deferred until 4.14, ‘The Beginnings of English Philosophy’; Walter of Henly and other medieval estates managers must wait until the following chapter, ‘Early Writings on Politics and Economics’, which is described as an essay on ‘national life as reflected in literature’. The most striking forward transfer of medieval material in the Cam- bridge History of English Literature comes in volume 5, where three chapters on medieval drama (5.1–3) preface five chapters on Shakespeare (5.8–12). University plays track medieval origins in 6.12, medieval classrooms are briefly glimpsed in an account of ‘English Grammar Schools’ (7.14) and legal literature moves back to Ethelbert of Kent before moving forward again through Glanvil, Bracton and Fortescue (8.13). Such recursive move- ment finds its most sustained expression as late as 10.10, a chapter by W. P. Ker on ‘The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages’. Earlier chapters, how- ever, also highlight the carrying forward of medieval textual fragments through accounts of antiquarianism (3.15, 7.10, 9.13). Medieval monastic and cathedral libraries are also sighted late, in 4.19, ‘The Foundation of Libraries’. The crucial role of these institutions in the housing and order- ing of medieval writing is thus downplayed in favour of a developmental narrative leading inexorably to Archbishop Parker and Sir Thomas Bodley. The result of such systematic forward movement of early material, this
General preface xiii
archaeologizing of medieval text, is that the Middle Ages becomes some- thing of an emptied or elided space. Linguistic and cultural conflicts that play out through medieval manuscripts – including many moments of polyvocal unintelligibility and scribal confusion – are rendered mute or smoothed away; selective realignments of material lead, through discrete teleological trajectories, to unified accounts of English law, nationhood, education or Shakespeare. The present volume, by contrast, resists this impulse to stabilize and homogenize medieval textuality through selective forward transfer. Part i, in particular, evokes cultural, linguistic and orthographic conditions of dizzying complexity: but later Parts, too, refuse to settle. Compositions after the Black Death, many of them in an English far from Chancery stan- dard, generate meanings that will be changed through the collecting and anthologizing impulses of the fifteenth century, the impact of print, and institutional relocation. Such changes are duly noted: this volume pushes forward from the study of medieval textuality as insistently as the earlier volume reaches back. The aim here is to defamiliarize the present, includ- ing present accounts of medieval and Renaissance culture, by achieving some sense of the strangeness, the unlikeliness, the historical peculiarity, of medieval compositional processes. Such an approach might be summa- rized as a challenge to current English Heritage paradigms – clearly derived from teleological proclivities informing the old Cambridge History
- that would seek to find in the past, first and foremost, a single pathway to the present. A second striking feature of the Cambridge History of English Literature is the generous promotion of writing in Scotland and the neglect or submer- sion of Ireland and Wales. As early as 2.4 we have a chapter on ‘The Scottish Language’; this considers ‘southern’ (i.e. English), Latin and French con- tributions to Middle Scots while dismissing Scandinavian influences entirely and miminizing ‘alleged contributions from Celtic’ (p. 99). The same volume also includes chapters entitled ‘The Earliest Scottish Litera- ture’ (2.5), ‘The Scottish Chaucerians’ (2.10) and ‘The Middle Scots Anthologies’ (2.11); ‘English and Scottish Education’, we have noted, is the joint subject of 2.15. ‘Sir David Lyndsay and the Later Scottish “Makaris”’ are the subject of 3.6; the chapter following is devoted to ‘Reformation and Renascence in Scotland’. Ireland and Wales are nowhere accorded such independent or free-standing status. Some account of medieval Welsh writing, with heavy emphasis upon the bardic and vatic, may be found in 1.12. The centrality of writing in Wales to this chapter is disguised both by its title, ‘The Arthurian Legend’, and (disquietingly,
xiv General preface
The fourth chapter of Part ii ‘Writing history in England’, reminds us that history – as it informed the medieval English about the Welsh, Irish, Scots and English – is the written product of particular times and spaces. The chapter which follows, on London, furthers this investigation of specific locales. This chapter must stand in, methodologically, for accounts of other places that have yet to be written, cannot yet be written, or have found no space for inclusion here: Cornwall, East Anglia, York and York- shire... Such accounts will restore neglected or forgotten texts: for exam- ple, the writings and public inscriptions of Jews – excavated from places such as Bristol, Cambridge and Norwich – that formed part of cultural experience in Britain up to and after the expulsions of 1290. In one important respect, the earlier Cambridge History proves prescient of our own concerns and predilections: it takes a broad and inclusive view of what ‘literature’ might mean. Penitential manuals, Latin chronicles, administrative handbooks, narratives of travel and seafaring, economic treatises and religious tracts, map-making and topography, letters and broadsides all find a place among and between accounts of canonical plays and poems. Such breadth of emphasis narrowed considerably with the advent of New Criticism (in the USA) and Practical Criticism (UK) as medievalists sought to demonstrate that certain early texts met criteria of literary and aesthetic excellence exemplified by later works of genius. Some medieval texts survived such demonstrations and others – most notably edited collections of lyrics – achieved new (albeit short-lived) prominence in print. However, much medieval writing – found lacking in qualities newly defined as constitutive of ‘literature’ – fell into deeper neglect. It was during the latter days of such highly formalist approaches that Derek Pearsall wrote the first volume of the Routledge History of English Poetry. Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977) marks the most impor- tant contribution to the literary history of Middle English since the 1907–27 Cambridge History. It is characteristic of the period that Pearsall was asked to write a history of English poetry. Pearsall early signals his intention to treat poetry ‘as a social phenomenon as well as an artistic one’ (p. xi), a dual commitment that extends to duelling Appendices: ‘Technical terms, mainly metrical’ (pp. 284–90); ‘Chronological table’ (pp. 291–302). The second Appendix opens out into a pan-European framework of refer- ence (as space allows) while maintaining the crucial distinction between a poem’s putative date of composition and its earliest surviving appearance in manuscript. Such concern with the materialities of textual production, preservation and circulation – a determination to ‘return poems from the
xvi General preface
antiseptic conditions of the modern critical edition to their original contexts in manuscript books’ (p. xi) – represents one of Pearsall’s most important contributions to the present undertaking. Our Part iii, ‘Institu- tional Productions’, extends the logic of this enterprise by returning (to invent a prototypical example) a lyric from its modern edition to the medieval manuscript sermon or miscellany from which it was lifted; attempts may then be made to situate this text within the social system that produced it (and which it, in turn, produced). Friaries and monaster- ies, courts of law, classrooms and sites of confession may thus be studied as knowledge-producing systems with designs on particular human subjects; anti-systemic resistance may also be sought in those who would speak for the ‘true commons’, English the Bible, embroider narratives of sinful doings or misbehave in class. The last two Parts of our History are organized by explicit divisions of time (1348–99; 1399–1547). This does not imply that concern with tempo- rality is activated only by the approach of ‘Renaissance’ paradigms; the repertoires of medieval textuality, on the evidence of earlier chapters, are not essentially unchanging. It does imply, or simply recognize, that the density of surviving material in the later period makes it easier to read changes in the greater public sphere, from decade to decade, in association with shifting strategies of writing: from the 1370s to 1380s, 1390s to 1400s, 1530s to 1540s. At the same time (and this is a phenomenon of pecu- liar importance for studies of literary culture before the Henrician revolu- tion) the accumulated textual corpus of past centuries – recopied, reconfigured, stored and recirculated – continues to exert shaping influence. To say this is not to argue for a grand and glacial récit of medieval textuality, bearing down to bury the actualité of any medieval moment beneath an authoritative weight of prior meaning. It is to acknowledge, rather, that in the transmission of medieval literature much indeed gets lost, but much survives (in new textual configurations, generative of mean- ings undreamed of at the moment of first composition). All of our first three Parts, then, actively subtend, and often extend into, our last two. Distaste for grand récit is a distinctive trait of New Historicism, a critical movement originating in the USA which essayed a return to historical study cognizant of developments in literary theory (particularly decon- struction). Renaissance practitioners, most famously Stephen Greenblatt, have preferred thick elaborations of petites histoires to the claims of grand narrative. Similar preferences inform A New History of French Literature , ed. Denis Hollier (1989). This volume, the most radically innovative literary history of recent years, ostensibly o◊ers the all-inclusive simplicity of a
General preface xvii
versities, for example, diminished educational opportunities for women (of a certain social rank) while expanding them for men. The possibilities of such multiple diachronic narration – exploited, we have noted, by the old Cambridge Histories under the sheltering canopy of its one big story, the triumph of Britain – are lost to Hollier’s New History (where each new cap- sule-chapter can but bang on the windows of its designated timebite). But such possibilities are fully exploited here: indeed, they represent one of the most distinctive features of this volume. Chapters are located where they find their centre of gravity (although, to vex the metaphor, such centres often multiply). Latinitas, for example, comes early by way of recognizing extraordinary achievements in the twelfth century (that establish vital linkages with continental writing). It could have been placed (or be read) later; it might also find a home among ‘Institutional Productions’. Similar scenarios may be imagined for other multi-centred, long-reaching chap- ters: which is to say, for most contributions to this book. One heading in Hollier’s New History suggests a striking di◊erence between his volume and ours: ‘1215, November. The Impact of Christian Doctrine on Medieval Literature’ (p. 82). Such a clean distinction between Christian doctrine on the one hand and medieval literature on the other implies a separation of conceptual spheres that, in this volume, proves hard to find. Attempts are made to distinguish, say, saints’ lives from secu- lar romances, but such distinctions continually founder as would-be ‘gen- res’ bleed into one another. It is possible to separate out specific issues and questions, considered to be of pre-eminent concern for today’s readers, from the religion-mindedness pervading the greater medieval textual cor- pus: such a procedure is articulated by Norman Kretzmann in The Cam- bridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (1982). Contributions to our volume are certainly coloured by personal interests: but there is little sense here of a medieval textuality that can withhold itself from, or even pre- exist, the impress of religious consciousness. (There is little sense, con- versely, that religious consciousness holds itself wholly apart from ‘secular’ concern with social hierarchy, degrees of precedence, territorial ambition or commercial calculation.) The jibe that medieval clergy con- cerned themselves too narrowly with the abstruse and abstract, ‘thyngys invysyble’, needs to be evaluated as part of sixteenth-century anti-Catholic propaganda (chapter 29). Medieval professional religious, following the broadest imperatives of canon law, show extraordinary ingenuity in enter- ing every imaginative nook and cranny of everyday life. Layfolks are thus interpellated as Christian believers by every textual means available: song, lyric, anecdote, romance, history or epistle.
General preface xix
There is no single chapter on religious writing in this volume, then, because religion is everywhere at work. So too with women. A single chap- ter on medieval women writers might be disproportionately brief, since nothing by a female mendicant or nun (so far as we know for sure) survives in Middle English. The influence and experience of women, none the less, may be discerned throughout the corpus of medieval English writing. Nuns and female disciples often supplied the strongest rationales for the Englishing of religious works (chapters 12, 20). Women often become vis- ible through the commissioning, owning and reading – if not the writing – of particular books; female reading communities, real and imagined, are considered in many chapters here (most intensively, perhaps, in chapter 4). Female figures, such as Albina and her sisters (chapter 4) and Scota (chap- ters 9, 26) feature prominently in myths of national foundation; female lives are adumbrated through reflections on women’s work (chapter 19) or conduct (chapter 11). Feminine aspirations to literacy may be deduced from negative (masculine) prescriptions. Female would-be readers are equated with children (chapter 14) or with husbandmen and labourers (chapter 31); only noblewomen and gentlewomen are permitted, by a 1543 Act of Parliament, to read (and then only to themselves, avoiding all com- pany). The cross-hatching of gender with class suggested by this last example recurs throughout this volume. Literacy was a masculine near-monopoly from which agricultural workers, the great majority of men, were excluded. And not all men who were literate shared in the powers and priv- ileges that literacy might confer: 80 per cent of medieval clerics were unbeneficed (chapter 19). At critical moments, as in 1381, such men might align with peasants rather than with aristocrats; and even men plainly terrified by the spectacle of a militant peasantry might still critique violent or anti-feminist aspects of knightly schooling (chapters 16, 22). Some men found common cause with women through support of oppositional litera- cies: Margery Baxter, tried for heresy at Norwich in 1428–9, carried a Lol- lard preacher’s books from Yarmouth to her home village of Martham; Hawisia Mone of Loddon, also tried at Norwich, often opened her house to ‘scoles of heresie’ (chapters 16, 25). It is perhaps through resisting the divorce of literature from history in literary history – a divorce implied by tired organizational binomes such as text and context, writer and background – that this volume makes its most distinctive contribution. The Well Wrought Urn of Cleanth Brooks (1947,
- famously envisioned the literary text as a self-su√cient artefact miraculously riding the currents of history to wash up at our feet. But
xx General preface
