Ageism: Leland, Bale, and the Laborious Start of English Literary History, I35O-I55O

Abstract

Abstract ‘The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves.’1 Brian Stock’s wonderfully pithy epigram must of course simplify, but one source of its potency is its implicit point that many cultural movements in the West, since the fourteenth century, generate themselves by contrast or identification with ‘The Middle Ages’. This essay focuses on a founding moment of one area of ‘Medieval Studies’, the study (in the sixteenth century) of ‘literary’ writing of the period 1350 to 1550 in Britain (regardless of language).