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 The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Andrew Galloway 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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