A Cultural History of Middle English Literature, 1066 - 1500

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This project will identify the unique qualities of what is usually termed 'Middle English' literature (writing that survives from the period 1066-1500). Although the period's very name seems to insist that it is dependent on what precedes and follows it (that it is no more than the place-holding literature in the 'middle' of the Old and the Modern or the Old and the Early Modern), and almost all literary history has capitulated to such a view in one way or another, an attentive account of this whole period shows just how rich its writing was, and how unusually experimental. This project will be the first to root the crowning accomplishments of the fourteenth century, the poems of Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet, in this earlier experimentation, showing just how the variety and originality of this work was made possible by the less remembered, but equally intriguing, writing produced in the two centuries after the Norman Conquest. The story of this richness will be told by means of innovative categories ('technology', 'insurgency', 'statecraft',' place', 'jurisdiction'), each of them designed to provide a new perspective on the way that Middle English writing is related to the world around it, some emphasizing its dependence on particularly dramatic events, others showing the dramatic and effective force this literature could muster. This history will also show that the 'middle' of English is the period in which the idea of 'literature' as we know it was first conceived--a body of writing thought to answer to nothing other than itself, an autonomous 'tradition' always capable of encapsulating and preserving innovative or rare thought in the most memorable form, The procedures and discoveries of this account will also make a strong intervention in the procedures of cultural history, which has tended to work from historical, social and political contexts to literature rather than vice-versa. Finally, this book will challenge the presumption that literature 'reflects' lives or 'contains' thoughts simply by showing just how many ideas Middle English literature produced.