The Cambridge history of medieval English literature

Abstract

The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). xxiii + 1043 pp. ISBN 0521-444209. L65.00. With the publication of this book the literary history of the period 1100-1500 has developed, perhaps for the first time, a demanding intellectual pressure. Certainly previous literary histories have been monumental in their way: Warton's History of English Literature (1774-81) effectively established the subject, and, slightly more than a century later, the first two volumes of The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907-8) capitalized impressively on the editorial work of the Early English Text Society that had so thoroughly recharged the subject since 1864. Coming itself almost a century after the first Cambridge history, then, this latest volume begins the third century of later medieval English literary history. Its intellectual pressure derives, however, from demonumentalizing the history of `English' `literature'. Those earlier volumes framed discussion of individual authors within a set of underlying progressivist assumptions: the worthy but struggling Middle Ages led to the enlightened Renaissance; literary discourse (itself an unproblematic category) was the repository of transcendent cultural value, most fully expressed in the works of individual geniuses; and the triumph of vernacular English was an implicit synecdoche for the triumph of England itself. Thus to characterize those histories is of course to iron out significant differences between them, and to condescend to their real and undogmatic achievement within their respective historical moments. It is also naively to suggest that we have ourselves broken free of this nexus of Whig assumptions. For all that, the volume under review cuts a figure both stylish and substantial as revivified literary history. Because literary history in the latter half of this century had either lost faith in, or felt embarrassed about, the underlying Whig assumptions just described, it tended to retreat into fetishistic inventories of `what's there'. Such `histories' dutifully listed authors and briefly described their works with touches of belletristic comment, so as to produce effectively useless books lacking any overall narrative, and, therefore, any claim to be history. Only Derek Pearsall's Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977) pointed the way out of this neutralization of history by returning transcendent `literature' back to the material instantiations in which it survived. The Wallace volume by no means ignores the kind of issues raised by Whig history; on the contrary, it is confidently yet unobtrusively assured of an alternative set of scholarly (and political) persuasions that effectively challenge the cultural assumptions of progressivist Whiggism. These scholarly practices could be defined as a set of injunctions: look to the larger political history into which `literary' works project themselves; undo categories of analysis even as you work from them; remain conscious of what is suppressed and becomes `marginal' in narratives of the ascendant; reinsert authors into the cultural and institutional context from which they have been artificially extracted; destabilize any single narrative that claims to tell the whole story; and, finally, situate discussion in the scholarly history of the subfield. Always historicize! No single chapter manages to fulfil all these injunctions, but to look wholly to single chapters is in any case to miss the point of this collective project's subtle organization. Just as the ideology informing this volume is suspicious of borders, so too do its individual chapters themselves frequently overlap with others. The cumulative effect of these overlaps within and across sections is to suggest larger diachronic narratives within which smaller synchronic narratives occur. The first three sections exemplify this commitment to overlap: section I is chronological (`After the Norman Conquest'); section II geographical (`Writing in the British Isles'); while section III is broadly institutional (dealing with the `literary' significance of, respectively, monks, friars, schools, and secular clergy; the courts, `the people', and the institutions responsible for biblical translation). …