Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England (review)

Abstract

Reviews 185 Burnley, David, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England (Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library), London and N e w York, Longman, 1998; paper; pp. xiii, 241; R.R.P. £14.99. Probably no generation of students in the last five hundred years has felt more remote from the concept of courtliness than that of the present day. The English royal court has been reduced to tabloid-fodder, and courting is n o w almost as rare as the curtsy. Modem students are more aware of courts legal than regal, and are largely ignorant of the origins of our surviving ' c o m m o n courtesies'. Happily, David Burnley's book can confidently be recommended to all students of medieval literature as a lucid and wide-ranging account of the significance of courtliness in the literature and life of England in thefirsthalf of this millennium. And for the general reader, for w h o m the L o n g m a n Medieval and Renaissance Library is also devised, this volume amply justifies our sense that 'the past has as m u c h right to our understanding as exotic modern societies' (p. x). Professional medievalists will also leam something instructive and thought-provoking on virtually every page of this learned but pleasurably readable book. Burnley characteristically focuses on careful analysis of the likely semantic ranges and developments of key words in a variety of contexts (citing over 130 primary sources). Eleven chapters explore different thematic aspects of courtliness, within a looser chronological movement from late Old English and the Conquest to Caxton, a period w h e n 'courtliness and French cultural values were nearly synonymous in England' (xii). The story starts with the complementary and opposed strands of court fealty exhibited by auxilium and consilium, valour and diplomacy,fortitudo and sapientia, skills heroic and civil, of war and speech, field and hall, which constitute chivalry and courtesy. 186 Reviews 'Court' itself, w e are reminded, derives from cohort-em 'place or troop of warriors', reinforced by the administrative attributes of curia-les, courts imperial and papal. Burnley examines the aesthetic values and moral dimensions of the courtly romance hero, of refinement and elegance in secular accomplishments, of cointe, skill and complexity in the manufacture of artefacts and the artfulness of manners, of proportion and beauty as 'a social benefit' (p. 46), and the idealised relations of inner beauty and external grace. At every point w e are offered pointed and significant details, e.g. the treacherous force of the root familia 'household' in Chaucer's famulier foo' (Damien in The Merchant's Tale), or the importance of the opposition between fortitudo and sapientia underlying the use of Thogh and the subjunctive in the description of Chaucer's Knight: "Thogh that he were worthy, he was wyse', or the technical sense of convey 'to escort on departure', surviving in Falstaff's parodic 'convey m y tristful queen'. Burnley further examines the qualities of courtliness inherent in the words 'pite', 'mesure', and Targesce', and in Chapter Six presents an extended account of the Aristotelian, physiological explanations of the relationships of sensitive touch to emotional and intellectual sensitivity, which are pertinent to discussions of the superior, refined, and courtly soul as opposed to the brutish tendencies of the vilain's sensuality. Such justifications of the inequality of m a n and manners, of the equation of worth and birth, were to give w a y to the possibility and then the certainty by the late fourteenth century that defects of ancestry might be remedied by instruction, that nobility might be acquired via nurture as well as by nature. Such learning might promote eloquence, the verbal manifestation of inner nobility, and a certain clerkishness becomes valued in fifteenth-century courtliness, marked by features of the Reviews 187 curial style adopted from the practice of the court's administrative and legal functions. Burnley notes in passing the French-derived phrasal forms Tiave mercy', 'make complaint', which mark Mak's Southern tooth (in the Second Shepherd's Pageant), alongside his more usually recognised inflections. H e also discusses the adoption from the rrud-thirteenth century of French and Latin patterns of usage...