The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature ed. by David Wallace

Abstract

‘ XEVl'EWS David Wallace, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.1043. Cloth. The Cambridge History of English Literature, begun in 1907 and finished twenty years later, remained a standard reference work for many decades after that. In his gracious Preface to this new history, David Wallace ventures to hope for a long shelf-life for his volume too, while he acknowledges that “it can scarcely hope to outlast its immediate predecessor” (xi). This is one of many such gestures throughout the volume as the con­ tributors, a dazzling roster of senior scholars and rising stars, acknowledge their own debts to the scholars of the past. But this new volume is not at all shy about challenging almost every paradigm and construct established in that past. Indeed, each main term of the title is immediately challenged. “Medieval” begins around 1050 and carries on well into the sixteenth cen­ tury. “English” means written in England, as essay after essay seeks to restore English vernacular literature to the multilingual contexts in which it was produced. And “literature,” too, means something quite different at the end of the twentieth century than it did at the beginning. In the Introduction to one section of the book, for example, Wallace writes that “Much of the writ­ ing considered here — classroom exercises, penitential manuals, legal transcripts, fragments of translation — may not be consid­ ered ‘literature’ at all: but the acknowledged canonical authors of Middle English writing [... ] can hardly be understood as medieval English texts without reference to this under-studied, under-edited corpus” (313). The reference to editing is telling; Wallace is clear about his desire to “ease the bottleneck that has formed, in literary criticism and in curricular design, around later fourteenth-century England” (xii). In this aim the volume should, by all rights, succeed brilliantly, and leave one, as it does, dizzied by the size and richness of the world it describes. ESC 26, 2000 ESC 26, 2000 The book is organized into five sections: After the Norman Conquest, Writing in the British Isles, Institutional Produc­ tions, After the Black Death, Before the Reformation. These imply a chronological organization, and there is a progression from the late Saxon world in the opening chapters to the early Tudor world in the final pages. But the volume’s five-hundredyear history is often repeated in the individual essays, regardless of their placement in the overall design. The reader is sometimes confused as a result, particularly through the first three sec­ tions. But resistance to neat narratives of progression is one of the volume’s hallmarks, and one does become habituated to the embedding of these miniature histories within the larger one. As with the chronology, so with the thematic emphases im­ plied by the section titles. While the section on Institutional Productions, for example, gives particular prominence to the monasteries, schools, courtrooms, and universities, the aware­ ness of modes of production is found in almost every essay in the book. It is no accident that Pierre Bourdieu is a touch­ stone for many of the essays: to take one at random, Sheila Lindenbaum’s chapter on “London Texts and Literate Prac­ tice” opens by stating its intention to study London as a site of social practice (285). This overarching concern with produc­ tion and circulation is one that Wallace notes at the outset: “It is perhaps through resisting the divorce of literature from history in literary history [... ] that this volume makes its most distinctive contribution. [... ] Medieval literature cannot be un­ derstood (does not survive) except as part of transmissive pro­ cesses” (xx-xxi). It is, then, no surprise that later chapters in the book, such as Steven Justice’s account of Lollardy, continue to offer accounts that are deeply embedded in historical and institutional contexts. The emphasis on medieval institutions is doubtless respon­ sible for another of the volume’s most distinctive features, its emphasis on Latinity. Christopher Baswell’s “Latinitas” ad­ dresses Latin culture directly, but Latin texts feature promi­ nently in many other chapters as well, among them Andrew Gal­ loway’s “Writing History in England,” Christopher Cannon’s “Monastic Productions,” John V. Fleming’s “The Friars and...