Medieval Literature and Culture

161 Pages·2007·7.319 MB·English

by  Andrew Galloway

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE
INTRODUCTIONS TO BRITISH LITERATURE
AND CULTURE SERIES
Introductions to British Literature and Culture are practical
guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series are
designed to help introduce a new module or area of study,
providing concise information on the historical, literary and
critical contexts and acting as an initial map of the knowledge
needed to study the literature and culture of a specific period.
Each guide includes an overview of the historical period,
intellectual contexts, major genres, critical approaches and a
guide to original research and resource materials in the area,
enabling students to progress confidently to further study.
FORTHCOMING TITLES
Renaissance Literature and Culture by Lisa Hopkins and
Matthew Steggle
Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture by Jim Daems
Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Paul Goring
Romanticism by Sharon Ruston
Victorian Literature and Culture by Maureen Moran
Modernism by Leigh Wilson
Postwar British Literature and Culture 1945-1980 by
Susan Brook
Contemporary British Literature and Culture by Sean Matthews
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
AND CULTURE
Andrew Galloway
continuum
Continuum
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© Andrew Galloway 2006
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Andrew Galloway has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN 9780826486578
Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Political, Intellectual and Cultural Contexts 11
Periods, populations and social orders 11
Rulers and high politics 15
The clergy and the intellectual world 33
Those who worked 44
2 Medieval English Literature: Genres, 49
Canons and Literary Communities
Historical overview 50
Overview by genres 64
3 Critical Approaches 92
From the Renaissance through the eighteenth century 93
From the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century 103
Current issues and debates 107
4 Resources for Independent Study 114
Chronology of Key Historical and Cultural Events 114
Glossary of Selected Key Terms and Concepts 121
Historical Table of Kings and Rulers 128
References and Further Reading 132
Index 147

Introduction
Sometimes scholars say that medieval culture has no sense of
history - that its perspective is timeless, reduced to a continu-
ous 'present', lacking the dimensions and 'perspective5 said to
have emerged with the Renaissance, not to mention the sense
of an individual self, an idea of authorship, and a notion of
a unified, bureaucratic state. In fact, scholars and non-schol-
ars alike more often mention the Middle Ages in terms of
what it isn't than what it is: either the detritus of the Roman
empire, or the unassembled pieces of the modern age. A
recent essay in a respected journal on international politics -
surveying the rise of 'gang-controlled communities in
Jamaica' and other developing countries, the growth of
multinational corporations and the increasing entwining of
major cities to other international cities more closely than to
anything nearby - declares that we are entering a 'New
Middle Ages', since the integrity of the modern state, the
writer believes, is disintegrating on every side. The historical
parallel - appearing more than a few times during the last
quarter century - is provocative. But it has serious limits. One
is that the image it offers for 'the Middle Ages' easily ends up
as a luridly 'primitive' and quasi-tribal tableau: 'the
[Jamaican] gangs demonstrate, almost celebrate, their inde-
pendence and defiance of authority at raucous late-night
dances patrolled by local cadres. Such warlordism would
have been familiar to the western Europeans of a millennium
ago' (J. Rapley, 'The new Middle Ages', Foreign Affairs 85(3),
May/June 2006: 95-103 (100)).
2 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Perhaps. But perhaps our willingness to lump together
nearly a thousand years - from, say, the arrival of Christianity
to the Anglo-Saxons in 597, to the dissolution of the medieval
church in England in the 1530s - and to distill a vast and (like
all cultural configurations, includingjamaican gangs) intricate
and sophisticated number of coexisting cultural worlds into a
single moment shows that it is we who have no sense of history.
Even a slightly closer look dispels many of the generaliza-
tions about the Middle Ages that we commonly make or
imply. To start with, our view of a medieval lack of historical
vision is quite wrong. Understanding medieval literature
requires a very respectful investigation of how visions of
history bring the past and the present into complex relation-
ships with each other on anything but a simple, flat plane -
as a reading of Beowulf (? c. 800), Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
(c. 1386), or indeed any part of the vast tradition of medieval
historical literature and historical writing shows. The other
topics associated with the Renaissance and modernity just
mentioned have medieval forms too, some of which will be
noted in the following chapters. They are often different from
ours, but our inability to grasp them except as shattered or
formative versions of something that we understand better -
on their way from or to some more monumental period and
point of society (Rome, or us) - does not justify giving up in
the effort to understand them in themselves.
Divisions in history are necessary for organizing under-
standing, and there is no denying that Western culture and its
literature were profoundly different from ours in the period
between fifteen hundred and six hundred years ago in what
we now call England. Indeed, one measure of that is in the
shaping of time and of the modes of communication (always
closely related things, and both clearly important for the
nature of literature, historical understanding and many other
aspects of life). Whereas we often exist in a world of up-to-
the-minute but endlessly recycled and commercially sup-
ported global reports, in print but more often continuously
transmitted digital images, from which we step away in our
often minutely scheduled lives to consume in silence (if we do)
INTRODUCTION 3
written prose or poetry that has been reproduced in many
identical copies - or, more often, to watch and listen to hyper-
realistic enactments of stories also circulated in exact digital
replicas - in contrast, the culture in England reaching back
nearly a millennium before the age of printing, public clocks
and the crown's supreme control of the English church relied
on frequent and methodically timed collective worship, ritual
and entertainment, which followed the seasons and whose
patterns changed only rarely and usually gradually. Its stories
were uncontrollably shared, elaborated and compiled,
including historically essential ones as well as morally edify-
ing or completely unedifying ones, all of whose crafted but
ever-changing features were manifested in unwritten memory
as often as in individually hand-written documents that, vast
and deeply sophisticated, or brief and ephemeral as they
might be, were all unique, meant to be read aloud and fully
decipherable, for most of this span, by only a minority of the
population, most of whom had a lifelong religious profession.
Its features are alien indeed - and 'they' might say the
same thing about cus\ Yet that span of culture has left its
traces everywhere, certainly in university life and its innov-
ations: from how we index books and organize their parts (a
thirteenth-century invention), to how we think about 'rights',
social obligations, or political representation. The difficulty
of summing up any period may be a good thing for it, but in
this case it has tended to leave it rather a blur, a foil to every-
thing before and after, one often assumed to be somehow
lacking the sharper elements of human consciousness,
inventiveness and sense of justice and ethics (the 'flat sense of
history' again). These views are often quite ironically wrong.
There are few periods in human history, for instance, when
ethics was as intently and universally pondered and empha-
sized - not ancient Rome; arguably not the humanist
Renaissance either. Yet in modern slang and modern policy
journals, 'medieval' is generally a deeply pejorative word.
We can certainly find in medieval culture the founding
elements of the idea of 'literature' as a serious, immensely
intellectually fruitful object of vigorous commentary, applied