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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Cultural History of Literature
- Sprache: Englisch
This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function.
This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work.
Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.
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Seitenzahl: 502
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Illustrations
Abbreviations
A Note on Texts and Quotations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Technology
Romance
Confession
Printing
2 Insurgency
Complaint
Satire
The rise of English
3 Statecraft
Censorship
Propaganda
Counsel
4 Place
The schoolroom
Religious communities
The household
Cities and towns
The way or the street
5 Jurisdiction
The church
Laughter
The aesthetic
Resources for the Study of Middle English Literature
Chronology
References
Index
Copyright © Christopher Cannon 2008
The right of Christopher Cannon to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2008 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-07456-2441-9
ISBN-13: 978-07456-2442-6 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-07456-5477-5 (Single-user ebook)
ISBN-13: 978-07456-5476-8 (Multi-user ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk
Illustrations
Abbreviations
A Note on Texts and Quotations
Throughout I have replaced obsolete letters with their modern equivalents. Thorn (þ) is replaced with th, yogh (3) is rendered as gh, g, y or z as modern spelling dictates. The letters i/j and u/v are normalized. Ampersands have been changed to and.
I have provided full translations for early Middle English texts (which, unless otherwise indicated, are my own) and marginal glosses for difficult vocabulary and syntax in later texts.
Although my general preference is for the critical and standard edition of a Middle English text, where such an edition is difficult to obtain I have often turned to more widely available editions; where later texts still employ a difficult Middle English (as in the case, say, of the poems of the Gawain-poet) I have turned to an edition that normalizes spelling according to the conventions described above.
All quotations from The Canterbury Tales are from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann, London: Penguin, 2005. All quotations from Troilus and Criseyde are from Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barry Windeatt, London: Penguin, 2003. All quotations from other poems by Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Piers Plowman are taken from William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn, London: J. M. Dent, 1995 (first pubd 1978). All quotations from the C-text are taken from William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall, London: Edward Arnold, 1978, and marked as ‘C’ in the text.
Acknowledgements
It was a great comfort to have the extraordinary literary histories by Derek Pearsall and James Simpson always to hand as I was writing this book, but I was even more fortunate, when I had nearly finished it, to find both of these fine scholars willing to read all that I had written and offer many improving suggestions. James was also instrumental in helping me craft a proposal for this volume many years ago. I owe Jill Mann an enormous debt for agreeing, as ever, to read my work in its penultimate form, as ever, too, catching errors both minute and major, often understanding what I was trying to say better than I had as yet understood it myself. I owe thanks too to the anonymous reader commissioned by Polity Press for saving me from a number of errors and challenging me to rethink key points. For help with historical details and bibliography I owe particular thanks to Richard Beadle and Miri Rubin. For the brilliance of their thought as well as the quality of their friendship I also thank Sarah Kay and Nicolette Zeeman. I have often had cause to be grateful to Sarah McNamer for the attention she is willing to give my work, but I am particularly in her debt for rescuing the introduction to this book from a variety of confusions. A term of sabbatical leave from the Faculty of English in Cambridge and Girton College combined with another term funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Research Leave Scheme allowed me to finish this project. Colleagues in both institutions (particularly Helen Cooper, Barry Windeatt, Sinead Garrigan-Mattar and Deana Rankin) graciously spared me during this time, even though it meant more work for them. Throughout the writing of this I often felt guided by – and, therefore, immensely grateful to – those many generations of Girton women whose vision and learning ensured that the college library was so deeply provisioned; Frances Gandy, the current librarian, and her staff were also unfailing in their generosity in the face of my voluminous demands on this collection. I would also like to thank my fine editors at Polity Press, Lynn Dunlop (who commissioned this book), Sally-Ann Spencer (who was patient while I spent four years writing something else) and Andrea Drugan (who, with unparalleled efficiency, good humour and tact has shepherded my manuscript into print). I am very grateful, too, to Caroline Richmond, whose keen eye smoothed out so many of the book’s rough edges. I can only hope that Anne Piehl, my consigliere, and Simon Gaunt, my soul mate to the stars, know just how much and how often they have helped.
Introduction
The word ‘culture’ has extremely wide reference, and this history of Middle English literature relies on what are usually taken to be two very different definitions of the term. The first derives from the theories of Karl Marx (1818–83) and, in particular, his insistence that ‘the economic structure of society’ produced all other ‘forms of social consciousness’ and the ‘intellectual life process in general’.1 ‘Culture’ in this sense is all the ‘legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic … forms’ projected out of this economic foundation, so much ‘superstructure’, which, whatever importance may be attributed to it by individuals or society, is fully determined by – and only ever completely explained in terms of – this ‘material’ base.2 The second theory of ‘culture’ I subscribe to in these pages seems the near inverse of this view, and it was articulated with particular clarity by a contemporary of Marx, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88). For Arnold, ‘culture’ was not the product of an economic structure or even the whole of a society, but, rather, the creation of some unitary and magnificent ‘individual’ and his capacities of ‘right reason’.3 This ‘culture’ is neither basic nor material but, rather, the ‘perfection’ achieved by a truly unique person who, in his turn, has helped to perfect a larger world; it is ‘an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not an outward set of circumstances’ – to rephrase the view in Marxist terms – an element of the superstructure with sufficient productive power to alter the base.4
Since there is nothing obvious about how such diametrically opposed definitions may be either mutually illuminating or useful in a history of Middle English literature, I want to begin with a practical example that generates the necessary common ground. This example will also be useful for surveying some of the particular interpretative and methodological problems involved in relating literature to culture, however the latter term is defined. My text is a short love lyric by Chaucer, usually called To Rosemounde after the woman it addresses. It is a straightforward ballade (in eight-line stanzas, rhyming ababbcbc, of which the last line is a refrain), accomplished in every way, but perhaps most striking for the image of the lover with which its third stanza begins:
The comparison of a lover to something as mundane and messy as a fish covered in sauce is imaginatively daring, but time has also rendered the image obscure, since few modern readers will know what Chaucer meant by ‘galentyne’.5 It is easy to find help in contemporaneous documents, however, and London, British Library, MS Harley 4016, a cookbook compiled around 1450, gives the following recipe for ‘pike … in galentyne’:
Take browne brede, and stepe it in a quarte of vinegre, and a pece of wyne for a pike, and quarteren of pouder canell and drawe it thorgh a streynour skilfully thik, and cast it in a potte, and lete boyle; and cast there-to pouder peper, or ginger, or of clowes, and lete kele. And then take a pike, and seth him in good sauce, and take him up, and lete him kele a litul; and ley him in a boll for to cary him yn; and cast the sauce under him and above him, that he be al y-hidde in the sauce; and cary him whether ever thou wolt.6
[pece: cup quarteren: quart kele: cool seth: boil]
This would at first seem a happy association for the definition of ‘culture’ I cited from Marx, since it appears to return the poem at its most extravagantly literary (the point of its most unusual image) directly to its base: to place this recipe next to Chaucer’s poem is to work back, along the chain of production, from one of the more striking poetic thoughts Chaucer ever had to the kind of food that would have inspired such thought because Chaucer ate it. Less happy for this association, however, is the date of this cookbook, since, at fifty years’ remove, it cannot itself count as a witness to the methods of food production that inspired To Rosemounde. There is in fact a recipe for ‘lampray in galentyne’, very like the one I have just quoted for a ‘pike’, in a cookbook whose compilation almost certainly preceded To Rosemounde, the Diversa Servicia (c.1381).7 And yet, even if this recipe makes it clear that the kind of ‘galentyne’ Chaucer imagines was certainly being produced by kitchens in his day, things remain untidy since the earliest evidence we have of the material practice in which we have sought to root Chaucer’s image – that is, the saucing of a pike in a ‘galentyne’ – turns out to be that image. We could say that such untidiness is no more than a side-effect of the impoverished record of culinary practice in fourteenth-century England, but we must then also recognize that surviving recipes are part and parcel of that poverty, texts designed to guide preparation rather than descriptions of actual practice, no matter how faithfully followed at least one level removed from actual cooking in a kitchen. In fact, what the association of To Rosemounde and these cookbooks shows best of all is that literature is not only as close to the base as any recipe, but, for that very reason, there is no reason whatsoever that literature could not guide cooking practice – that someone accustomed to saucing only ‘lampray in galentyne’, as suggested in the Diversa Servicia, might wish to sauce a ‘pike’ in a ‘galentyne’ because he or she had read To Rosemounde.
The importance of such untidy relationships was in fact quickly evident to Marx himself and, not long after he made the stark distinction between superstructure and base that I quoted above, he recognized that ideas and imagination were necessarily a part of material production (‘At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence had already existed ideally’).8 Marxist thinkers particularly concerned with literature have further troubled this distinction by noticing that language is fundamental to both superstructure and base, for it is, at once, the vehicle for all ideas and a form ‘conditioned … by the social organization of the participants involved and … the immediate conditions of their interaction’.9 It is therefore also a Marxist view that ideology ‘may not be divorced from … material reality’.10 This is also true, as Louis Althusser explained, because ideology, or the ‘representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’,11 necessarily resides in concrete ‘practices’ and ‘rituals’, in the institutions, or, as he termed them, ‘ideological apparatuses’, such as the church, school, family, or laws which foster, preserve and inculcate such representations in the minds of individuals.12 But, even as he explained this, Althusser also noted that the positing of superstructure and base was an important step in the description of their interpenetration, that the division of culture into ‘levels’ was, in fact, a ‘great theoretical advantage’ in Marxist analysis.13 On the one hand, such division makes it possible to discern and describe the various ways that our abstract imaginings are in fact rooted in the real conditions of our existence (all those ways that the base does in fact produce the superstructure), while, on the other hand, such division also makes it possible to notice the way that our imaginings may alter concrete conditions (all of the ways that there is a ‘reciprocal action of the superstructure’ on the base).14
We may identify the superstructure and base of a culture, in other words, not only to keep these levels apart, but to describe their rich, uneven and constant intermixture as a culture. And if we begin again with the image of the ‘pike in galentyne’ in To Rosemounde, looking now not for the base that produced its imagery but, rather, for the variety of cultural transactions in which that image participated, what we quickly discover is not only the possibility that literary representation could have preceded certain techniques of cookery (as above), but the surprisingly literary form that medieval cookery sometimes took. This is particularly obvious in the menus that survive from this period,15 where courses are often said to have concluded with a sotelte [subtlety], often further identified only by the name of an animal, ‘aquila’ [eagle], say, or a ‘lebarde’ [leopard].16 To look at a variety of such descriptions is to realize that these were a kind of sculpture in which cooked food as well as the parts of animals discarded during cooking (feathers, skin or hair, say) were reassembled in the form of some animal not commonly eaten (a leopard or eagle, say), or simply reassembled to present what had now been cooked as if it were still alive. Where the figure was human, as such subtleties often were, dyed or painted sugar was used as the basic material,17 and, as in the menu for the feast celebrating the installation of John Stafford as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1443, such figures were often presented as a kind of meaningful tableau:
A sotelte. Seint Andrew, sitting on an hie Auter of a-state, with bemes of golde; afore him knelyng, the Bisshoppe in pontificalibus; his Croser kneling behinde him, coped.18
[hie: high Auter: altar a-state: state pontificalibus: bishop’s ceremonial dress croser: bearer of bishop’s staff coped: dressed ceremonially]
Because we know about them from menus, it is fair to assume that these figures were not only a part of actual meals, but that, in their less elaborate forms, they were eaten. And yet such figures are also well described as allegorical, since, as in such literature, they represent one thing by means of another. We might therefore wish to say that the sotelte is an instance in which medieval cookery borrows from the literary or visual arts, as if the poetic capacity to represent, say, a lover as a ‘pike in galentyne’ (in this sense a technique of the superstructure) had filtered down to kitchens. And yet, this very image must then count as an instance of reciprocity in such relationships, since, in the light of these soteltes, it is possible to see that a ‘pike in galentyne’ is also a figurative foodstuff, for it transforms a cooked pike, on a plate, into a fish once again ‘swimming’ about in liquid (‘cast the sauce under him and above him, that he be al y-hidde in the sauce; and cary him whether ever thou wolt’). When Chaucer imagines himself as such a fish, also swimming about in this sauce, he is not only creating an image out of something he might have eaten, but adapting a kind of figuration already native to cookery to a particular poetic purpose.
A Marxist cultural history worthy of the name is therefore dedicated to the discovery and careful description of this sort of complex transaction, and, that being the case, it is also true that where such transactions involve movements in which the superstructure actually and verifiably alters the base (where, say, a poem can be shown to have really changed practice) the Arnoldian model of culture has emerged as the truth that Marxist analysis has discovered. Such a theoretical convergence and examples that prove it true have not featured very largely in cultural criticism of late, nor have they been much noticed in literary history on the whole, but they did once have a spokesman in Raymond Williams, whose largest contribution to the Marxist study of literature was probably the long-term insistence that human creativity necessarily played a key part in historical change. Williams sometimes made this point by discovering the Arnoldian claim in Marx’s own writing, noticing, in particular, all of the times and all of the ways in which Marx’s theories were predicated on the human capacity for (as Marx himself put it) ‘creating something that has never yet existed’.19 But Williams also insisted that Marxist cultural history necessarily described not only all those ways in which ‘art reflects its society’, but also all those ways in which ‘art creates, by new perceptions and responses, elements which the society, as such, is not able to realize’.20 Rather than identify ‘base’ or ‘superstructure’, Williams preferred to regard culture as a ‘totality’ comprised of activities and processes,21 and, rather than attempting to establish the priority of ‘political, economic, and “social” arrangements’ over ‘literature, art, science, and philosophy’, he preferred to insist on the ‘genuine parity’ of these elements, seeking above all to describe the ‘patterns’ and ‘relationships between these patterns’, the ‘unexpected identities and correspondences’ as well as ‘discontinuities’ that assemble these disparate ‘elements’ that comprised ‘a whole way of life’.22
A book focused on a literature, as this one is, can only hope to keep the complexity of this whole in mind, since so many of these processes, so much of the way of medieval life, extended far beyond the precincts of literary writing. But the structure of what follows is meant to give some emphasis to each one of the various relationships that may obtain between literature and a larger culture. Chapters 1 and 2 form a kind of balanced and oppositional pair, the first describing many of the ways in which Middle English literature was fundamentally shaped by techniques of material production or ‘technology’, the second offering as detailed an account as possible of all the ways in which Middle English literature was sufficiently ‘insurgent’ to have brought about real social or political change. Chapters 3 and 4 tread the middle ground between these two extremes, showing, first, in a chapter on ‘statecraft’, how the political and the literary can overlap and converge, and, second, in a chapter on ‘place’, how certain sorts of writing were embedded in social circumstances and institutions. The book concludes by describing the complex process by which Middle English literature actually pulled free from the ‘jurisdiction’ of other areas of culture, actively working to define itself as an autonomous practice, thereby giving us the notion of ‘literature’ that we still use today. Although chapter 5 describes this emergence rather than its consequences, sustained attention to this momentous change makes clear why Middle English writing must be one of the places we look if we wish to understand why cultural study of this kind is needed: for one of the more distinctive and lasting contributions of Middle English literature is the idea (as distinct from the reality) that ‘art’ is a separate and independent cultural sphere.
This book is not in itself revolutionary, and my highest aspiration has been to tell a different sort of story. My chapter titles represent the boldest departure from more traditional literary history, and I have hoped that these categories might themselves disrupt customary connections, while also allowing the less familiar works of Middle English literature to jostle the more familiar, and, in these new circumstances, to show the latter in a new light. Because I want this book to be useful to those who are also reading Middle English according to the traditional syllabus, however, I have used more standard terms as sub-titles within individual chapters. For this same reason, I have tried to cite what I take to be certain classics of scholarship in the field (criticism that, while old, offers insights that seem to me undimmed) while attempting, in so far as I was able, to cite and make use of the most innovative recent scholarship.
If this book does make a contribution to Middle English scholarship, I hope it will be to underscore the need for other, more thorough, revaluations of the literature of this period by way of demanding theories of culture. To my mind, such revaluations will go the furthest towards satisfying what Elizabeth Salter so memorably defined as the goal of any student of this period: ‘we should … wish … to extend … rather than limit the number of medieval English poems which may be expected to interest and move us’, and we may do this best by refusing to allow for any ‘safe area’, by actively resisting our own literary tastes ‘as they have been shaped by post-Renaissance poetry’, relying, instead, on our ‘imaginative curiosity’, always making a ‘conscious effort … to widen more our reach’.23 Many historical and analytical methods would count as such an effort, but I believe that cultural study is uniquely effective in the activity of such widening.
Notes
1 Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, 389.
2 Ibid., 389–90.
3 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 94 (‘individual’) and 123 (‘right reason’).
4 Ibid., 95.
5 The term is still in use, although the most modern instance cited in the OED (s.v. ‘galantine’) is dated 1870.
6Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, 101.
7Curye on Inglysch, 75–6.
8 Marx, Capital, 1: 284.
9 Volosinov, ‘Concerning the Relationship of the Basis and Superstructures’, 65.
10 Ibid.
11 Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 36.
12 Ibid., 17 (for a list of ‘ideological state apparatuses’), 43 (‘practices’, ‘rituals’).
13 Ibid., 8.
14 Ibid., 9 (‘great’), and 10 (‘questions’).
15 A number of these are printed in Curye on Inglysch, 39–41, and Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, 57–64.
16Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, 61.
17Curye on Inglysch, 215.
18Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, 68.
19 Marx, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’, 300. For Williams’s criticism of this position in others, see, in particular, Culture and Society, 272–4.
20 Williams, Long Revolution, 69.
21 Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, 35.
22 Williams, Long Revolution, 46–7.
23 Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 9.
1
Technology
During a visit to the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, the historian Henry Adams was alarmed by the quiet force of the dynamo that confronted him, its ‘huge wheel, revolving within an arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring’.1 Although he was aware that the dynamo seemed so powerful because he could not understand it, the mystery of this ‘silent and infinite force’ (361) was not nearly so worrying to Adams as its novelty, that here was something that really defeated the historian’s capacity to ‘arrange sequences … of cause and effect’ (362–3), a ‘sudden irruption of forces totally new’ (363). Turning for comfort to what he took to be a more explicable sort of force, Adams found himself equally struck in France by the quiet power of the Virgin Mary: in this omnipresent symbol, he felt, was an energy whose operations he could track but whose effects were no less impressive than those of the dynamo (‘All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres’) (368). Although he did not press the point, Adams meant the stark contrast to express an overwhelming anxiety about the post-medieval world and its technological direction; he was worried that humankind had finally unleashed forces it could not control, that in the place of building in the name of human warmth and feeling, growth and accomplishment occurred at the behest of machines. And yet, a history of the Virgin that was less techno-phobic might have realized that there was no difference between the turning of a turbine that generates electricity and the lifting of heavy stones that make a cathedral, that the force Adams perceived in the dynamo and identified with the Virgin (those mechanical and architectural innovations which made cathedral-building possible) was, mutatis mutandis, also technological – a deployment of mechanical power that made building possible in so far as it magnified human strength and reach.2
Although the profusion of machines, and their increasing sophistication, in the last two centuries makes us think of our own period as the age of technology, the Middle Ages in the West can be described as ‘the first industrial revolution’, the place and moment in which machines were first put to wide and systematic use.3 The stirrup, which greatly increased the power of mounted warriors, and the heavy plough with coulter, share and mould-board (the better to turn heavy earth), were brought into wide application in early eighth-century France.4 At roughly the same period the horseshoe was introduced and a harness for a team of horses (vastly stronger than the oxen which had been used until that point), and the ‘three-field system’ of crop rotation (considerably more productive than simple autumn and winter plantings) transformed agricultural production (and increased yields by 50 per cent).5 The Utrecht Psalter, produced near Rheims some time between 816 and 834, contains an illumination that shows the use of a mechanical crank (a device for transforming reciprocal motion – pedalling, pulling and pushing – into continuous rotary motion).6 Evidence of a water-powered mill for the manufacture of cloth in 983 in Tuscany counts as the first use of water power for something other than grinding grain and involved the ‘first useful application of the cam’ (a notched or eccentrically shaped wheel which converts circular to alternating or intermittent motion).7 At the end of the twelfth century windmills were coming into use in Normandy and England.8 The spinning wheel appears in Germany in 1280.9 There is a mechanical clock in Dunstable Priory in 1283.10 The printing press employing moveable metal type is invented by Gutenberg in the 1440s and arrives in Britain in 1475.11
None of these transformative devices, however, can be classed as an invention of the medieval West. The heavy plough was already in limited use in the Po Valley of Italy in the first century ad;12 windmills were simply an adaptation of the ancient technology of the watermill; the mechanical clock was long preceded by the water clock;13 the cam was known in ancient Greece;14 the stirrup was known in India in the second century ad,15 the crank was in use in China in ad 31,16 and books were being printed in China in the ninth century.17 What in fact distinguished the European Middle Ages from the rest of the world was the eagerness with which it embraced devices and structures that had the capacity to bend natural forces to human use, and how, having happened upon such capacities, medieval culture elaborated itself by creating more and more opportunities for their widespread diffusion. A figure often cited in histories to prove this point, and certainly impressive enough in its own right, is that although the watermill was known in ancient times it is almost never referred to until 1086, when Domesday Book (the great survey of land and possessions commissioned by William the Conqueror) counts 5624 mills in some 3000 different English communities.18
The novelty that rendered the West so substantially different from the rest of the world, and which still accounts for the importance of technology in its culture, Lynn White has argued, is a particular, and defining, attitude toward human labour. Where the application of brute force had acquired extremely negative connotations in Greco-Roman antiquity, when much physical labour was performed by slaves, early medieval Christianity revalued such work – as, indeed, it revalued servitude – as a positive spiritual pursuit.19 The transformation is well marked in the Regula Monachorum (c.530–40), the widely influential monastic rule written by Benedict of Nursia (d. 547), where manual labour is placed at the centre of piety and a fully Christian life (‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul. The brethren, therefore, must be occupied at stated hours in manual labour’ [Otiositas inimica est animae; et ideo certis temporibus occupari debent fratres in labore manuum]), and labour was also equated with the act of worship in the general category that included both, the opus dei (‘work of God’).20 This valuation was given more systematic articulation by the Benedictine monk Theophilus, who, in the De Diversis Artibus (1122–3), claimed that all mechanical devices (from kilns to blast furnaces) and crafts of all kinds (from painting to glass-making) flowed from ‘the power and the guidance of the Holy Spirit’ [magisterio et auctoritate Spiritus sancti].21 The notion that labour was a particularly Christian virtue is also captured neatly in a pictorial tradition that represents the virtue of temperance in a figure whose capacities for measurement and regulation are represented by the mechanical devices ranged round her: in an illustration of 1450 she is shown with a clock on her head, a bit and bridle in her mouth, holding eyeglasses and reins, with her feet resting on a windmill (fig. 1).22 The aspirational nature of the machine in such a culture is best captured in a story about a Benedictine monk from the period just before 1066, told by William of Malmesbury (1080–1142) in his Gesta Regum Anglorum:
[Æthelmær] was a good scholar, advanced in years by now, though in his first youth he had taken a terrible risk: by some art, I know not what, he had fixed wings to his hands and feet, hoping to fly like Daedalus, whose fable he took to be true. Catching the breeze from the top of a tower, he flew for the space of a stade and more; but with the violence of the wind and the eddies, and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of his attempt, he faltered and fell, and ever thereafter he was an invalid and his legs were crippled. He himself used to give as a reason for his fall that he forgot to fit a tail on his hinder parts.
[Is erat litteris. … bene imbutus, aeuo maturus, immanem audatiam prima iuuentute conatus: nam pennas manibus et pedibus haud scio qua innexuerat arte, ut Dedali more uolaret, fabulam pro uero amplexus, collectaque e summo turris aura spatio stadii et plus uolauit. Sed uenti et turbinis uiolentia, simul et temerarii facti conscientia, tremulus cecidit, perpetuo post haec debilis et crura effractus. Ipse ferebat causam ruinae quod caudam in posteriori parte oblitus fuerit.]23
Fig. 1 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Laud 570, fol. 16r., showing Temperance, with a clock on her head, a bit and bridle in her teeth, reins in her right hand, eyeglasses in her left hand, resting her feet, which wear spurs, on a windmill. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Æthelmær’s ‘art’ has no direct relation to the more successful modern devices for mechanical flight, but even more visibly than for the Virgin and the dynamo, the continuity in hope and method is clear: non-human power is used to augment labour so that a person may wildly transcend his physical limitations.
This embrace of technology is not without its paradoxes, for what begins as a valuing of labour in religious life becomes, in the end, an embrace of a wide variety of labour-saving devices. And yet this makes the medieval Western embrace of technology an ideology entirely worthy of the name, ideas about that world that not only determined the way it was perceived, but which are themselves powerful enough to substitute themselves for (and therefore even conceal) the actions they promote and produce. We might also seek deeper material causes for particular technological innovations (the general pressures of population growth and settlement which led to the improvement of the plough, the particular necessities of warfare which made the stirrup so valuable for the military advantage it gave), but, in describing the machines themselves, we have gone far enough to understand the various ways that Middle English writing might be shaped by technology. For while it is too much to say that Middle English writing was a product of the ideology I have described, the kinds of writing we have, the subjects it treated, and, most of all, the quantity that has survived were all deeply affected by the Western fascination with technology.
Romance
It is, fittingly, the kind of writing we tend to call romance that would have been impossible were it not for the infatuation with technology that led medieval Western culture to embrace the stirrup. Such writing has been described as the ‘self-portrayal of feudal knighthood with its mores and ideals’, and technological innovation sits at the root of any such re-presentation because it created the fundamental social role that was so portrayed (the mounted warrior, chevalier – from French cheval for horse – or knight).24 Until recently ‘feudalism’ was understood to be a fairly rigid social and political system wholly organized around knighthood: certain favoured subjects of a king or overlord were given the right to farm and live on a particular tract of land in exchange for services rendered ‘in respect’ of that land, and the most important of these services were military, either defending or assisting in the campaigns undertaken by that king or overlord.25 More recent scholarship has shown, however, that feudalism ‘was a pretty fugitive affair’, with enormous variation over time and, from very early on, the possibility that a feudal tenant might be ‘allowed to pay’ his overlord rather than to provide him with knight service.26 It is also clear that the relationship between concrete or ‘real’ versions of feudalism and literature make it wrong, particularly early on, to describe the latter as a ‘self-portrayal’: in many cases it is clear that literary accounts of feudalism actually preceded the social structures they purport to describe.27 On the other hand, the development of a sizeable body of literature in order to celebrate the activities of mounted combat was an important social change and is itself one consequence of the transformative power of the stirrup.
The stirrup also thoroughly revolutionized warfare because it made it possible for a rider to brace himself as he attacked, ‘delivering the blow not with his muscles but with the combined weight of himself and his charging stallion’.28 The diffusion of this technology took some time, and while the stirrup began to be used in France in the eighth century, the mounted, braced lance was not employed widely in combat until the eleventh century,29 but it is in this period that a celebratory literature first began to emerge. One of the earliest such works is the French Song of Roland, a text that also plays a significant part in the cultural history of England since, as legend has it, one of the soldiers of William the Conqueror, Taillefer, sang the Song to inspire the Norman troops on the eve of their campaign against the English in 1066.30 This poem’s celebration of heroism and sacrifice in battle is an exemplary instance of the chanson de geste, and William’s success at Hastings ensured that this poem became a part of English history (the oldest surviving manuscript of the Roland is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23), but it is also a text celebrating exactly the sort of mounted combat which produced that success (‘Here is how a knight, armed and astride a good horse, ought to show his worth’ [Itel valor deit aveir chevaler / Ki armes portet e en bon cheval set]),31 for it is not too much to say that the Norman Conquest was made possible by the stirrup.32 The records make clear that the Anglo-Saxons had the stirrup, and their soldiers certainly made use of horses: William of Jumièges writes that, when Harold Godwineson heard that William of Normandy had landed with a fighting force near Hastings in 1066, having ‘gathered innumerable English forces’ [contracta Anglorum innumera multitudine], he hastened to the coast by ‘riding through the night’ [tota nocte equitans].33 But these facts are themselves a way of illustrating that technology is not so much a particular innovation as the willingness to exploit it, for when the Anglo-Saxons encountered the invading force of William the Conqueror, as the Bayeux Tapestry dramatically illustrates (fig. 2), they ‘drew themselves up in very close order … abandoning the aid of horses’ [protinus equorum ope relicta cuncti pedites constitere densius conglobati].34
Fig. 2 Bayeux Tapestry, showing Anglo-Saxon soldiers standing before William the Conqueror’s mounted soldiers. Reproduced by permission of the City of Bayeux.
This decision was certainly not the only factor in the defeat of the Anglo-Saxon force – Harold and his troops had just seen off a Norse invasion at Stamford Bridge in the North – but, even through its partisan attempt to emphasize the losses suffered on the Norman side, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes clear that the mounted Norman force simply mowed down most of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers, including their leaders, right up to the king himself:
Tha com Wyllelm eorl of Normandige into Pefnesea on scype Michaeles mæsse æfen … This wearth tha Harolde cynge gecydd, and he gaderade tha mycelne here, and com him togenes æt thære haran apuldran, and Wyllelm him com ongean on unwær ær his folc gefylced wære. Ac se kyng theah him swithe heardlice withfeaht mid tham mannum the him gelæsten woldon, and thær wearth micel wæl geslægen on ægthre healfe. Thære wearth ofslægen Harold kyng, and Leofwine eorl his brothor, and Gyrth eorl his brothor, and fela godra manna.
[Then duke William sailed from Normandy into Pevensey, on the eve of Michaelmas … When king Harold was informed of this, he gathered together a great host, and came to oppose him at the grey apple-tree, and William came upon him unexpectedly before his army was set in order. Nevertheless the king fought against him most resolutely with those men who wished to stand by him, and there was great slaughter on both sides. King Harold was slain, and Leofwine, his brother, and earl Gurth, his brother, and many good men.]35
Another consequence of this battle was the end of the kind of English writing that I have just quoted, a significant manifestation as well as record of the unusually rich vernacular culture in Anglo-Saxon England (on the Continent, chronicles of this sort were almost always written in Latin): the Norman Conquest was so overwhelming and complete that the wholesale change in rulership resulted in a wholesale change in culture. In fact, William’s all-conquering knights constituted the first wave of an entire French-speaking aristocracy which was systematically installed in England, not only as overlords of the land, but in all important positions of authority in the cathedrals and monasteries, the primary site of Anglo-Saxon learning. It was in these institutions that the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were written, and most of them simply break off just before or during (and, in one case, right in the middle of) their record for 1066.36 The Chronicle kept at Worcester Cathedral (from which I have just quoted) continues until 1079 (an English bishop, Wulfstan, remained in Worcester until 1095),37 and one version (now lost) was continued until at least 1121, at which point it was borrowed by the abbey at Peterborough (which seems to have lost its own copy in a catastrophic fire of 1116); Peterborough monks then continued this version of the Chronicle until 1154. This last sequence of events can be seen as a surprising local resilience in the face of a broader transformation, and it is also the story of how the nearly complete demise of Anglo-Saxon literary culture necessitated the rebirth of English writing in what were, at first, very fragile forms. In language, and very often in outlook, the entries in the Peterborough Chronicle for the years after 1121 can be understood as the birth of Middle English writing.38
The most important way in which this new writing bore the impress of the cultural changes brought about by the Norman Conquest was, however, in the central role it had in developing the ideology that came to govern knighthood, an ‘ideal’ in so far as it placed the knight at the centre of the whole social world, and a set of ‘mores’ or ethics as it everywhere equated the knight and his acts of military service with ‘the good’. ‘Romance’ is the term usually given to the texts that most fully articulate this ideology, although the term itself is complicated because roman, the French word from which ‘romance’ is derived, was at first applied to long narratives of all kinds (and, consequently, for some time in English, to any such narrative originating in French).39 Moreover, as I have already suggested, the idealization of knighthood was also a central function of the texts we still refer to as chansons de geste. A mechanical division can be made if one looks only to the verse form of such texts in French, since chansons de geste were written in laisses or 10-line strophes joined by assonance in their last syllable, while romances were written in octosyllabic, rhyming couplets. The distinction can also be avoided if we speak not of ‘romances’ and chansons de geste, but of ‘chivalric literature’, and include in the category all those poems that celebrate an aristocratic world in which mounted combat was socially determinate.40 On the other hand, certain distinctions of subject and emphasis are also possible, since chansons de geste tend to focus on exemplary action (the geste) and to envision the mounted soldier as an embodiment of the qualities and destiny of large armies and peoples,41 while romances tend to narrow their focus, projecting the identity of a whole class onto a particular individual, developing their ethics by way of that knight’s successes and failures. Chansons de geste also tend to describe clashes of large massed force, while romances tend to reduce the social and political world to two combatants:42
Ains que la joie fust remese,
Vint, d’ire plus ardans que brese,
Li chevaliers a si grant bruit
Com s’i cachast un cherf du ruit.
Et maintenant k’il s’entrevirent,
S’entrevinrent et sanlant firent
Qu’il s’entrehaïssent de mort.
Chascuns ot lanche roide et fort,
Si s’entredonnent mout grans cos,
Qu’andeus les escus de lors cols
Perchent et li hauberc deslichent;
Lor lances froissent et esclicent,
Et li tronchon volent en haut.
[Before their joy had subsided the knight arrived, more blazing with rage than live coals, and making as great a din as if he were hunting a rutting stag. And the moment they saw each other they rushed together, both seemingly full of mortal hatred. They each had a stout, strong lance; and they exchange such hard blows that both of the shields at their necks are pierced, the hauberks are rent, the lances shatter and shiver, and the splinters from them fly aloft.]43
This passage is taken from Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, or ‘The Knight with the Lion’ (c.1177), and this and the clutch of other romances written by Chrétien are both influential and exemplary in the emergence of this particular literary mode. At stake, in this battle, between Yvain and (as we later learn) Esclados is no more really than the ‘shame’ (honte, l. 587) which accrued to Yvain’s cousin Calogrenant when he was defeated by this knight on an earlier occasion. Yvain also makes clear how the narrowing of focus from armies to individuals tends to bring with it an emphasis on ‘love’ (romance in the modern sense, ‘the private relationship par excellence between two human beings’).44 Such love tends not only to follow from combat (as the successful knight’s reward), but to draw its consequences back into the private sphere (rather than conquering kingdoms, a knight in romance conquers hearts). Thus, when Yvain succeeds in this combat, he finds himself ‘in love’ with Laudine, the ‘lady’ of the late Esclados. In the private sphere also, Yvain’s success in wooing Laudine, as well as a variety of other ladies, yields further proof of his particular excellence as a ‘knight’, that he is – within the particular grid of others this romance sets him against – the ‘more worthy’ (miex vaille, l. 1696).
Chronology is also complicated in describing the emergence of romance in English, not least because that emergence occurs after the Norman Conquest, when England was increasingly a part of French literary culture: in the century when Chrétien was active, much of England’s literature was written in French (or Anglo-Norman, as this dialect is usually termed), and the central matter of a great deal of this romance concerned the legends of the ‘British’ king Arthur and his knights (including Yvain). Matters are further complicated by the generic progress of this material in England. It first appears at the heart of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1138), a fiction whose wit lies partly in its very form which adopts the Latin prose customary in chronicles, and silts historical, or near-historical, kings and events in among a great variety of invented incident. Geoffrey’s narrative then passes quickly into an Anglo-Norman translation that employs the octosyllabic couplets that were the common form of romance (this is Wace’s Roman de Brut [c.1155]). Arthur and his story first appear in English in the Brut (c.1200) of Lagamon, where heroic action is routinely set in the context of a group identity and dynastic politics, and, as in chanson de geste, the key issue is not individual action but the conquest of peoples:
Matters are further complicated in Lagamon’s case because he chooses to celebrate the British victory over a Saxon enemy in an alliterative metre that recalls the style generally employed by Anglo-Saxon poets. But this sequence of changes is itself a measure of just how many sorts of literary strategies, techniques and styles may be used to think through the same sort of social life (and the above evidence is itself a way of showing that romance and chanson de geste – and even chronicle – may be understood as ‘alternative narratives’ for one another, each mode called into being by aspects of chivalry the other leaves out).46
The blow dealt to English writing in general by the Norman Conquest is, again, a factor in the uneven diffusion of genre, and while Lagamon follows the standard pattern for cultural exchange (‘virtually every Anglo-Norman romance had a Middle English descendent’),47 his translation is early in the process, and the birth of romance in English has to wait for another century (an English translation of Yvain did not come until 1325–50).48 The first English text that we might wish to categorize as a romance is King Horn (c.1240), but because the verse form of this text, as well as of many of the other earliest English romances, is so irregular (often more reliably consistent in the number of stresses than the number of syllables per line), the new category of ‘popular romance’ is often created for it and other early productions, usually thought to have been corrupted by the oral delivery for which they were designed, and the casual recording that was, for that same reason, their lot. Such popularity for writings about the exploits of an aristocratic class is itself strong evidence for a dramatic change in social norms, a manifestation of the improved ‘standard of living’ throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages, the spreading of the surplus made possible by those technologies of husbandry I have described, and the burgeoning of a middle class of ‘skilled artisans and merchants’ with the interest and leisure time to care about such idealizations.49 As King Horn makes abundantly clear, neither an increased distance from the place and time in which romance first arose nor these changed patterns of reception and dissemination had any effect whatsoever on the rarefied world of romance, where there is only ever (really) one class, and hardly ever an event worth mentioning that does not take place among the aristocracy:
Particularly when compared to the kinds of actions in Lagamon in which a ‘king’ might engage, such a scene is also useful for showing how, in romance, chivalry appeared less as a mode of warfare and more as a governing ethics, a system (though never a ‘code’, for it is only in parody that anyone ever tries to set out the subtle and endlessly negotiated norms of chivalric life) often described as ‘courtesy’ or ‘courtliness’ (courtoisie in French texts), or sometimes simply ‘knighthood’ or ‘worship’ in English,51 a sense, almost always both delicate and complex, that certain sorts of behaviour are appropriate in court and others are not. Romance can often be said to be ‘about’ this ethic, and in this sense even a text written in the thirteenth century, such as King Horn, is a kind of meditation on the place such an ethic defined, what is here (as generally) called ‘the curt’. Such a court – in structure an especially lavish and elaborated household (or, as here, ‘hus’) – was also made possible by the technologies used to exploit a horse’s strength, but in this case it was not the stirrup but the ‘wide application of the heavy plough’ and the development of the harness (which allowed horses to pull such ploughs).52 Each of these developments occurs first in the eighth century, but diffusion is again surprisingly slow, and it was not until William the Conqueror brought it that the horse-drawn plough was known in England, and it was only at the end of the twelfth century that the technology was widespread here.53 When added to the three-field system of crop rotation, these new methods of husbandry produced an ever-increasing surplus and wealth,54 most quietly visible in this passage of Horn as Athelbrus has gathered round him a band of loyal followers (‘his knights’), which, along with an administrative machinery that bespeaks its size (‘a stiward’), constitutes the household as a kind of institution.55 There is no single origin for the ethic associated with such a house, but it is clear from the insistent balance of warfare and good manners between warriors that one of the crucial functions of the ideology celebrated in such texts (if not, often, of those texts themselves) was to redirect the energies of a class of persons each capable of killing one another toward thoughts and endeavours which would give their life together some order.56 The process of sublimation involved (the rendering of hard social facts as an admirable beauty) is also neatly on view in this passage from Horn – which in this sense is almost an allegory of the rise of the genre of romance – as Horn and his ‘y-fere’ [knights one and all] come into this court and every possible martial activity is converted to ‘songe’.
This scene in Horn also shows how the ideology of romance delicately shadowed the kinds of expansion that its technological and social bases made possible, for, where more heroic versions of conquest (such as that by Lagamon) might not only stage confrontations between enemy hosts but were also deeply interested in the disasters that might ensue (as Lagamon says, ‘thus is this eitlond igon from honde to hond’ [thus is this island passed from hand to hand], l. 1033), romance almost always concerns itself with various kinds of social absorption, often by representing its ethics as so compelling that anyone who confronts the court inevitably becomes a part of it. This is markedly true of the next surviving Middle English romance, Floris and Blancheflour (c.1250), where an Emir who is prepared to put Floris to death melts when he is told of the ‘grete love’ (1047) that led Floris to search for Blancheflour.57 The basic manoeuvre appears in a more standard form in Havelok the Dane (c.1280), the other thirteenth-century English romance that survives:
As Fredric Jameson has emphasized, the link between these texts and what we know of the cultures from which they arose is well described as ‘unconscious’ since, without much altering the political scenery and bases from which it emerged, romance provides an ‘imaginary resolution’ to the problem of the implacable ‘enemy’, a process repeatedly realized in romance – almost as romance – in which ‘the antagonist ceases to be a villain’ and ‘becomes one more knight among others’.59
The moment in which such thinking can be said to have definitively passed into English is hard to mark, since our early evidence is so frail, but one solid object that marks the epoch is Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 19.2.1, the ‘Auchinleck’ manuscript, compiled c.1330–40 and containing among its forty-four texts a kind of conspectus of the important kinds of English poetry at that moment (saint’s life, religious debate, a chronicle, and poems of religious instruction), and, along with these, eighteen romances, which in their very number, as well as their achieved variety, measure the consequence of the genre in English at this point.60 In addition to Floris and Blancheflour and Horn Child (c.1330), a version of the Horn story, this volume contains tales of knightly exploits and conquest in the East (Kyng Alisaunder [c.1300], Richard Coeur de Lion [c.1300]), pseudo-histories of knights native to some region of England (Guy of Warwick [c.1300] and Bevis of Hampton [c.1300]), magical stories of redemption and transformation (Sir Orfeo [c.1330] and Lay le Freine [c.1330]), another version of the story of Arthur (Arthur and Merlin [c.1300]), and an English version of the Tristan legend (Tristrem [c.1300]). It also offers helpful documentation of the central role romance was to play in Middle English literature as such, for while it is probably not true that Geoffrey Chaucer held the Auchinleck manuscript ‘in his hands’,61 as was once claimed, Chaucer certainly read something like this collection of texts, as he makes clear in his Tale of Sir Thopas (1392–5), where he names many of them:
Sir Thopas is one of two tales set within the larger fiction of The Canterbury Tales assigned to the narrator of the whole of the Tales (the other is The Tale of Melibee).62 It is less a romance than a burlesque of romance style, a conglomeration of all the clichés and stylistic excesses to which the genre had grown prone, here in particular, a carelessness in descriptive detail (Thopas, for example, lacks both sword and spurs) as well as metre (especially in the tendency for the last line of the tail-rhyme stanza – two four-stress lines followed by a three-stress line rhyming aabccb – ‘to drop off from the main stanza like a mortified limb’).63 The whole of the poem is therefore a delicious joke presenting ‘Chaucer’ as the one Canterbury pilgrim incapable of telling a tale, but it has also been described as ungrateful in its mockery, since the ‘plain and easy verse style in romance narrative’ formed the ‘tap-root of Chaucer’s poetry’ (as one critic put it, Sir Thopas ‘has the effect not just of biting the hand that fed but of snapping it off at the wrist’).64 There is, to be sure, a certain affection in the very exuberance of the send-up (which itself quietly acknowledges a deep familiarity), and the stanza I have just quoted still offers a surprisingly full documentation of Chaucer’s reading in romance (Horn Child, Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick are all extant romances). Romance was certainly a genre Chaucer took seriously elsewhere (although they each ring consequential changes on the genre, The Knight’s Tale [c.1387], The Squire’s Tale [c.1392–5], The Wife of Bath’s Tale [1392–5], and The Franklin’s Tale [1392–5] can all be so categorized), but perhaps the most concrete measure of its significance is the extent to which the language of romance (and, in particular, a newly elaborate vocabulary for describing the nuances and complexities of human feeling)65 as well as its narrative techniques (in particular, the capacity to project a psychology and an ethics into dramatic events) were spreading into Middle English writing of all kinds. This is particularly clear in Chaucer’s earliest poems, especially the Book of the Duchess (1369), where this language and these techniques are deployed in the even more inward genre of dream vision. But perhaps the best evidence of this generality is offered by John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c.1390–3), for this monumental allegory, structured by the Seven Deadly Sins (each of which is accorded a book), and unfolding as a lengthy version of the sacrament of confession, generally envisions the ‘pointz of schrifte’ [confession],66 not only in those octosyllabic couplets that romance normalized as a part of English verse, but in the most resolutely chivalric terms:
As it happens, the confessor in this poem is himself just such a ‘worthy knight’. Amans, as his name implies, is a man preparing himself spiritually ‘to love’, and if the ‘firy darts’ in this confessional frame, as in many of the exemplary narratives that fill it, tend to draw more on the ethical than on the martial aspects of chivalric literature, the Confessio Amantis is a poem that, in just the manner of such imagery, relies on the defining techniques of Middle English romance even as it directs them toward entirely different purposes.67
At this high-water mark in its prospects, Middle English romance acquired an increasingly acute sense that the social system it idealized ‘contained many inner contradictions which … made it unstable’, and although, once detected, these contradictions can be seen in every romance, early and late, it is in this later moment that Middle English busies itself particularly with their exposure.68
