Medieval Literature and Historical Enquiry

Abstract

In a recent essay in the journal Essays in Criticism, entitled 'Should We Leave Medieval Literature to the Medievalists?', the distinguished medieval scholar and critic John Burrow laments the passing of the literary study of medieval literature.1 He looks back forty years to a time when critics like himself were try? ing to bring medieval texts out of the clutches of philology and into the embrace of literature. What they were committed to was the 'distinctive character and integrity' of individual texts as works of literature, marked off from ordinary discourse 'in their structure, modes of meaning, and use of language' (pp. 27879). But medieval literary texts, he points out, are now almost always studied from a historical point of view, because presumed always to be immersed in the political and religious issues of their day. He gives a number of examples, and particularly cites David Wallace's large book on Chaucer, Chaucerian Polity: Absolute Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy,2 and the even larger Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature edited by the same scholar.3 In the General Preface to the latter, Wallace speaks of a time when 'medievalists sought to demonstrate that certain texts met critieria of literary and aesthetic excellence exemplified by later works of genius' (p. xvi), and clearly regards these criteria as outdated and irrelevant. Rather, every text must be understood 'within the social system that produced it (and which it, in turn, produced)' (p. xvii). Burrow has more to say about the part played by centres for medieval studies in helping to bring about the present ascendancy of histor? ical scholarship in literary studies. It is these centres, he says, that have drawn medieval scholars away from their natural comrades in the English literature of later centuries and into the company of historians, where they become 'me? dievalists' rather than scholars of literature. Since I have in the past had a keen interest in at least one centre for medieval studies, I shall come back to this explanation of events a little later. No one, I think, would dispute the fact that the scholarly study of medieval literature is now carried on very largely in the terms set out by Wallace: texts are studied in relation to the social systems that produced them, that is, in relation to history. This was not the case when Professor Burrow and myself began teaching. Forty years ago, as he says, medieval texts were studied (if studied at all as works of literature)4 for their inherent qualities of structure, form,