Filling in the gaps: early middle English, nationalist philology, and reparative codicology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ongoing interventions by antiracist scholars and activists demonstrate the lasting impact that the racist, nationalist, and colonialist foundation of the field has had on modern perceptions of the pre-Conquest English past and those who study it. This article identifies the impact of the same ideologies on the study of early Middle English literatures and its place in canonical accounts. The deployment of medieval English literatures in a teleological effort to establish histories of whiteness and legitimize white colonial superiority. However, close interrogation of the linguistic and literary developments of the period threatened the very structures they were invoked to sustain. Effectively, early Middle English was placed in a medial position that invoked its presence only to deny its importance. This article offers an alternative. Eve Sedgwick's conception of ‘reparative reading’ has resonances with both the material forms in which early Middle English is preserved, and the human experiences that underlie that preservation. Fragmentary lyrics, like the couplet from Poema Morale, provide an example. These snippets point to the presence of a widely circulating ‘cultural repository’ that could negotiate the structures of institutional (primarily Latinate) literacy and opened those frameworks to dynamic participation by a wide range of readers and users.