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11178 results in Anglo Saxon and medieval literature

Page 358 of 559

A Companion to Wace
  • F. H. M. Le Saux
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005
  • The twelfth-century writer Wace is best known for his two influential works on the history of England (the Roman de Brut) and on the history of the Normans (the Roman de Rou), but despite this he has, until recently, been neglected. This book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of all his surviving works, including his hagiographical pieces, La Vie de sainte Marguerite, la Vie de saint Nicolas and La Conception Nostre Dame. Beginning with an examination of the historical and textual background necessary to an informed understanding of the poet, it moves on to discuss the manuscript tradition of each of Wace's poems, together with the sources that underlie each text, highlighting the additions, omissions and modifications made by the poet in adapting his material for new, non-Latinate audience. Particular attention is given to Wace's swan-song, the Roman de Rou, where his skill in combining history and romance is most clearly revealed.

    Dr F. H. M. Le Saux teaches in the Department of French at the University of Reading.

  • Introduction Wace: his life and times

  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    We have very few certainties regarding the life of Wace. His date of birth is unknown, and attempts to estimate it have been based essentially on extrapolations from the dates of composition of his extant works. The nineteenth-century scholar Gaston Paris concluded that the poet must have been born around the year 1100, on the grounds that by the death of Henry I, in 1135, he had already completed his studies and was established as a ‘clerc lisant’. Anthony Holden, the editor of the Roman de Rou, inclines towards 1110. A date of birth in the first half of the first decade of the twelfth century would fit with the overall picture of the poet's production; though, as Glyn S. Burgess has pointed out, Wace was still active in the mid 1170s, making his career an unusually long one. His name, which also appears in the manuscripts as ‘Guace’ and ‘Gace’, is Germanic, possibly a diminutive form of Walter; it has survived to this day as a family name, including in Jersey. In the case of our poet, ‘Wace’ must have been his Christian name, as family names were not in common usage in the early twelfth century. References to ‘Robert Wace’ are erroneous, based on textual misreading.

    What little information we have regarding Wace's long and productive life is contained in a few lines scattered in his Roman de Rou and a handful of legal documents. The poet was born on Jersey, was sent to school at Caen, on the Norman mainland, and pursued his studies in France before returning to Normandy, as he tells us himself in his Roman de Rou (Troisième Partie, 5305–12):

    En l'isle de Gersui fui nez,

    a Chaem fui petiz portez,

    iloques fui a letres mis,

    pois fui longues en France apris;

    quant jo de France repairai

    a Chaem longues conversai,

    de romanz faire m'entremis,

    mult en escris e mult en fis.

    Who paid for these long studies away from home is unknown. Presumably it was his family, as an abbey was unlikely to invest such resources in a student (however promising) who was not destined to become a monk. In the event, Wace does not appear to have received more than minor orders.

  • Conclusion

  • from Part II - Le Roman de Brut
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 151-152

  • Summary

    It is apparent from our study that Wace was thoroughly in control of what he was doing throughout his Roman de Brut. His translation is based on an in-depth analysis of the themes and implications of the Historia Regum Britanniae, as represented by the Variant version of the text. Though the Norman writer was clearly familiar with the vulgate text and did not hesitate to borrow from it, the general framework supporting his narrative is firmly that of the Variant, with occasional interpolations. Geoffrey of Monmouth's vulgate text is not, therefore, markedly different in status to the tales mentioned in reference to the Round Table, or Goscelin of St Bertin's Life of Saint Augustine. Moreover, whereas one can find many passages (some quite extensive) where the Variant text can be read line by line alongside the French poem, it is virtually impossible to detect any evidence that Wace had the vulgate text on his work table whilst composing his Roman de Brut. Even in the few cases of obvious borrowing from the vulgate text, the influence is felt ‘ad rem’ rather than ‘ad verbum’ (though a striking metaphor might be adopted here or there). As with his Vie de sainte Marguerite, Wace's work is founded on close textual study of his source material, which he adapts to reflect his personal interpretation of the material, but also to respond to the expectations of a non-clerical audience whose interest would presumably have been mainly in the figure of Arthur. Moreover, as with the Vie de saint Nicolas, Wace relaxes his strict narrative control over Geoffrey's material at key points, to encourage a mixed audience to continue listening. In this, he was helped by the fact that Geoffrey of Monmouth himself followed the same strategy (this explains the presence of the memorable account of the story of Leir and his daughters after a rather dry stretch of narrative): adapting from the already polished work of a brilliant writer was undoubtedly a major advantage. This advantage was exploited to the full by Wace, and his Roman de Brut fully deserved its success. The superb job made of this one piece of historiography led to royal patronage and the undertaking of another major historiographical project: the adaptation in French of the history of the dukes of Normandy.

  • 5 - Britain, Rome and the House of Constantine

  • from Part II - Le Roman de Brut
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 108-124

  • Summary

    The Rise and Fall of the Celtic rulers of Britain, in Wace as in his Latin sources, takes place in four phases:

  • The Foundation and early kings. This part has at its core Britain's relation with Rome, and ends with the Roman retreat from the island.

  • The House of Constantine and the advent of the Saxons.

  • Arthur, who constitutes the culmination of the House of Constantine, and whose reign faces the dual threat of Rome and the Saxons.

  • The passage of dominion to the English.

    • These parts are linked together by the theme of Brittany. Conquered by the Emperor Maximien in Part 1 and granted by him to Conan who founds a powerful dynasty there (at considerable expense for Britain), it becomes, in the words of Elizabeth Bryan, a ‘royal nursery’ for Britain. King Constantine, Arthur's grandfather, is the brother of the king of Brittany, and when Vortigern usurps the power, the young princes Aurelius and Uther seek refuge there. Arthur maintains strong bonds with his Breton kinsmen, in particular his cousin Hoel who is at his side throughout his campaigns. And in the final phase, it is to Brittany that King Cadwallader flees from the plague devastating his land, and in Brittany again that he has the divine vision telling him to renounce England.

    The initial phase in the history of the Celtic kings of Britain, in Wace as in his sources, revolves around the relationship between Britain and Rome. This relationship is expressed on three levels: the common origins of Britons and Romans; the military campaigns opposing Britain and Rome; and the bond of Christianity between the two nations.

    The myth of origins

    The myth of the Trojan origins of the Britons is of crucial importance for an understanding of the development of the plot. The French poem presents §6 (the first chapter after the prolegomena) of the Latin as follows: Eneas becomes king (9–66); length of Eneas's reign, his achievements, his posthumous son, Aschanius's regency, his pedigree, achievements and duration of his rule (67–106); the conditions of Brutus's birth (107–48); Brutus's exile to Greece and his meeting the enslaved Trojans (149–60).

  • 4 - Manuscripts, sources and adaptation principles

  • from Part II - Le Roman de Brut
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 85-107

  • Summary

    The Roman de Brut was by far the most successful of Wace's works. Over thirty manuscripts have survived containing all or part of the poem, and further fragments continue to come to light; one was discovered as recently as 1999. A full list of these manuscripts is provided by Judith Weiss in the introduction to her edition and translation of the work. Nineteen of the manuscript witnesses (eighteen of these being medieval) preserve a complete, or near-complete, text. Interest in the poem was especially great in England, as might be expected: nine of the nineteen complete or near-complete texts, and seven of the thirteen fragments known at this date, are in Anglo-Norman (A-N) manuscripts (or scraps thereof). However, it also follows from these figures that as far as we can tell, over half of the medieval manuscripts of the Roman de Brut were copied in Continental France (Cont.). The phenomenon was not exclusively an English one, by far. The oldest of the surviving manuscripts is Durham Cathedral Library, C iv 27, an Anglo-Norman copy dated to the end of the twelfth century; one of the extremely fragmentary fragments kept in Oxford (Bodleian, Rawl. D 913) was also originally part of a manuscript copied in the late twelfth century. Some fifteen of the extant manuscripts (eight of which are Anglo-Norman) were copied in the thirteenth century; nine of these are complete or near-complete. Ten date from the late thirteenth/fourteenth century, six of them Anglo-Norman; five of the ten are complete or near-complete. Three manuscripts date back to the fifteenth century, all copied on the French Continent, and all preserving a full text; and finally, a copy was made in the eighteenth century of one of the fourteenth-century texts, Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève 2447 (a Continental copy).

    The scarcity of twelfth-century manuscripts is not really surprising, if only because Wace's work appears to have been used as a historical textbook by its earlier Anglo-Norman readers,5 and such books have always suffered from wear and tear.

  • Part III - Le Roman de Rou

  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 153-159

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: MANUSCRIPTS, SOURCES, STRUCTURE

    When Wace set out to produce his verse account of the history of the dukes of Normandy, in 1160, he was confronted by a very different set of problems from anything he had encountered before. The preparatory phase of collecting his materials would have been much more complex, and the task of selecting those suitable for inclusion in his work would have been far more delicate. The subject matter itself was heavily charged politically, and some of the events he had to deal with were still within living memory. There was no one, single work whose structure he could adopt to provide the framework for his own narrative, as the sources for the Rou were diverse, open-ended and compilatory. We are far from the Roman de Brut, where the entirety of the material was available in a compact, thought-out form; and while Wace was not inexperienced in combining disparate sources to create a logical whole (witness his Conception Nostre Dame), the Roman de Rou presented him with the problem of a subject matter that was difficult to circumscribe due to the increasingly close links between Normandy and England in the course of the period he was to present. To this, one might add that whilst the Historia Regum Britanniae enjoyed widespread popularity and had the advantage of recounting politically ‘safe’ accounts of a semi-legendary past, the chroniclers and historians of the rulers of Normandy were not granted outstanding prestige; their subject matter was too recent for it to be endowed with the authority of the Classical historians, too easily verifiable for it to be idealised with impunity, too recent to escape partisan tensions. Wace had to evolve new strategies and find a suitable narrative model.

    The resulting work is unlike anything else by Wace to have come down to us. The manuscripts of the Roman de Rou have transmitted four poems, almost free-standing and in two different metres, that in conjunction recount the history of the dukes of Normandy from their Viking origins to Henry I of England. The Chronique Ascendante is a genealogy of the dukes, starting with Henry II of England and moving back in time to the founder of the dynasty, Rou.

  • 9 - The aftermath of Hastings

  • from Part III - Le Roman de Rou
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 253-274

  • Summary

    If William the Conqueror is to the Roman de Rou what Arthur is to the Roman de Brut, we would expect his highpoint to be followed by a pattern of decline. This is indeed what happens, but in such a different way to what we find in the Roman de Brut that the comparison is barely valid. Contrary to Arthur, William is a deeply flawed character, from whom much of the darkness in the ensuing narrative originates; his failure to follow in the footsteps of his wiser forebears and forego the royal dignity results in an identity crisis in the ducal family and leads to internecine warfare. The narrative ends with the demise of the last duke of Normandy (as opposed to duke-king), Robert Curthose, at the hands of his younger brother, King Henry I of England. There is more to this final section of the Roman de Rou than meets the eye. While Wace refrains from overtly commenting on the issues that arise in the wake of the merger of England and Normandy, we find echoes from earlier episodes in the work that give strong indications as to the poet's views. The final 1600-odd lines of the work are thus highly politicised, albeit in a relatively discreet way.

    The aftermath of Hastings is both violent and unpleasant in the Roman de Rou, with Normandy apparently treated in a way not dissimilar to England by the victorious duke (9011–18):

    Maint travail out e mainte guerre

    ainz qu'il eüst en pais la terre,

    mais comment que il li fust grief

    de tote traist il bien a chief;

    en Normendie trespassa

    e quant il i vint tant ala

    pais fist deça, pais fist dela,

    larrons destruist, felons greva.

    The impression given by these lines is that William's grasp over Normandy is as insecure as it is over England, with the stress put on the punitive aspect of his visit. Whilst the quelling of robbery and thieving (‘larrons’) is entirely laudable, the mention of ‘felons’, which can mean ‘traitors’ as well as ‘criminals’, suggests an undercurrent of feudal revolt by nobles trying to take advantage of their lord's protracted absence, and therefore a breakdown in law and order due directly to the English campaign.

  • Conclusion: the epilogue

  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 275-278

  • Summary

    It is customary to consider the Roman de Rou as an unfinished work, abandoned by its author before its completion because Henry II decided to entrust the project to someone else (11419–24):

  • Die en avant qui dire deit;

  • j'ai dit por Maistre Beneeit,

  • qui cest'ovre a dire a emprise

  • com li reis l'a desor lui mise;

  • quant li reis li a rové faire

  • laissier la dei, si m'en dei taire.

    • This is certainly the impression derived from a first reading of these lines, and it must be admitted that the Roman de Rou ends rather abruptly. On the other hand, abruptness is the hallmark of the final section of the Troisième Partie, partly due to the increasingly present (and increasingly censorious) narrator. Moreover, from the battle of Val-ès-Dunes onwards – that is, in the part of the Rou where Wace writes as a historian rather than a historiographer – one senses a reticence, if not outright ambivalence, towards the material treated. Secure in his Bayeux prebend, Wace could easily have continued his work had he wished to do so; but there is nothing in the last 6000 lines of the Rou suggesting that he had ever contemplated going beyond Tinchebray. Bowing to the king's wishes reads as a convenient, non-controversial way of justifying this breaking point beyond which the subject-matter of the poem becomes subsumed under the history of the kings of England.

    To this, one must add Wace's apparent disaffection towards Henry II himself. The warmth of the Prologue, where the king is lauded as a worthy scion of Rou, gives way in the Epilogue to an openly critical tone (11425–30):

  • Li reis jadis maint bien me fist,

  • mult me dona, plus me pramist,

  • e se il tot doné m'eüst

  • ço qu'il me pramist, mielz me fust;

  • nel poi aveir, ne plout al rei,

  • mais n'est mie remés en mei.

    • This unflattering image of the king reneging on his promises is not unlike that of Robert Curthose, who, like Henry II, was generous with his promises but less forthcoming when it came to keeping them.

  • Conclusion

  • from Part I - Wace: hagiographer
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 79-80

  • Summary

    The three surviving religious poems by Wace show that he was a major poet well before he undertook the Roman de Brut, and a recognised scholar. It would be difficult to find three works more different from each other than the Vie de sainte Marguerite, the Conception Nostre Dame and the Vie de saint Nicolas: from a relatively simple, linear narrative to a tripartite exposition and commentary, and ending with an episodic compendium of miracles. However, as pointed out by Elizabeth Francis (p. xvii), all of Wace's poems have ‘un intérêt d'actualité’: the Vie de sainte Marguerite is composed at the beginning of a movement of dissemination of the cult of the saint; the Conception Nostre Dame was commissioned at the height of a theological dispute regarding the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; while the Vie de saint Nicolas is written at a time where the cult of the saint was expanding eastwards from Normandy. In all three cases, Wace appears to have been the first writer to work on these subjects in the French language, and in all three cases, he introduces a new element to the traditional accounts. Margaret is confirmed as the protector of childbirth and women in labour; the Virgin is depicted not just as pure and good, but also free from the original sin from her conception; Nicholas receives a fresh attribute, that of the baptismal figure. Wace clearly had his finger on the intellectual and religious pulse of his time.

    Even though the Nicolas appears to have been commissioned by a layman, it is likely that dissemination occurred through ecclesiastical channels; the patron for the Conception must certainly have been religious, and influential. The abbeys of Caen had close connections with England, at a time when Anglo-Norman interests spanned the Channel, and all three of Wace's religious poems have a connection with England; a very strong one in the case of the Conception Nostre Dame. In particular, a nexus of coincidences would seem to point to some link betweenWace and Winchester, possibly in relation to the entourage of Bishop Henry of Blois.

  • 14 - Latin commentary tradition and vernacular literature

  • from V - VERNACULAR CRITICAL TRADITIONS: THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 361-421

  • Summary

    ‘Translation [translatio] is the exposition of meaning through another language [expositio sententiae per aliam linguam]’, claims Hugutio of Pisa in the Magnae derivationes which he compiled between 1197 and 1201. That sentiment, which is rooted in grammatical theory, makes it abundantly clear that medieval ‘translation’ does not mean merely the production of a replacement text: exposition, exegesis, interpretation (however one wishes to denote hermeneutic process) is involved as well. Hence in a twelfth-century gloss on Priscian interpretatio is defined as the exposition (expositio) of one language through another, and in his Summa super Priscianum Peter Helias describes interpretatio as ‘translatio de una loquela in aliam’. Such theoretical discourse is echoed in one of the most widely disseminated vernacular prefaces of the later Middle Ages, Jean de Meun's introduction to his French Boethius (c. 1300). If he had ‘expounded [expons] the Latin by the French word by word, Jean explains, the book would have been too obscure for laymen’ and clerks of moderate learning would have found it difficult to understand the Latin from the French. Therefore he has opted for a freer form of translation – an activity which, quite clearly, remains inseparable from expositio.

    The activities of expositio or interpretatio and translatio were complexly interrelated. This chapter seeks to explore some of those relationships, with reference to late-medieval English, French, German and Spanish literary traditions. It will range from quite pedestrian vernacular renderings of standard glosses along with the texts which they expounded, to exceptionally sophisticated exploitations of the techniques – and the scholarly prestige – of commentary in the valorisation of texts composed anew in the emergent European languages.

  • 26 - Byzantine criticism and the uses of literature

  • from VII - BYZANTINE LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 667-692

  • Summary

    A year or so before his death in 1332, at the end of a distinguished career as a scholar and public servant in the imperial court, Theodore Metochites composed his Epistasia kai Krisis, a critical comparison between two preeminent orators in the Greek rhetorical tradition, Aristides and Demosthenes. After setting out their respective stylistic merits at some length and discussing their effectiveness, the profit to be gained from reading their discourses, and the different political circumstances in which they wrote, Metochites announces his verdict. Demosthenes was indeed eloquence incarnate – an opinion shared by the vast majority of his critical predecessors – but it is Aristides who should be awarded the palm. He is, Metochites writes, the more ‘useful’ of the two (§ 31.14–23). Like himself and the readers of this epistasia, Aristides lived under a monarchy and composed a sort of rhetoric appropriate to that political setting.

    Metochites' ‘essay’ has been variously praised by scholars as a masterpiece of humanist criticism and condemned for not being literary criticism at all, but the work of an astute politician – which Metochites was. To readers persuaded that ‘literature’ can be set apart from other ‘modes’ of discourse, Metochites' observations may indeed seem odd, perhaps confused or disingenuous, since they appear to confound literary principles and political aims. But Metochites' essay, though by no means a paradigm of Byzantine criticism, is far from atypical. It exhibits a number of presumptions that are more or less constant in the large body of critical literature that extends over six centuries, from Photios in the ninth century to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

  • 2 - Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century

  • Robert Allen Rouse, University of British Columbia
  • Book:
    The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 11-51

  • Summary

    THE dominant textual mode of history in England during the first half of the twelfth century was that of the monastic chronicle. Chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester constructed a view of the Anglo-Saxon past that played an important social and political function by representing England as a once-virtuous kingdom that had fallen from God's grace, and which had been healed by Henry I's marriage to Edith (renamed Matilda after the marriage), niece of Edgar Atheling and grand-niece of Edward the Confessor. Henry's restoration of the ancient line of Wessex lent a weight of genealogical legitimacy to his rule. The justification of the Conquest seems to have been one of the major reasons for the Anglo-Norman interest in the pre-Conquest past during the first half of the twelfth century. The politically informed Anglo-Saxon past that had been produced by the chroniclers became for future historians a model of the Anglo-Saxon past.

    However, this version of the pre-Conquest past was one that was soon challenged. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, whether intended as a parody or not, and despite the condemnation and criticism that his text received from other chroniclers, had a dramatic effect upon the conception of the English past after it appeared. From the time of King Stephen, England's Anglo-Saxon past suffered in comparison with the Arthurian myth. Anxious both to unite his kingdom under a single historical myth and to provide his nation with Trojan descent, Henry II was an active participant in this refashioning of the past. His close association with the discovery of Arthur’s grave at Glastonbury (thus reminding the Welsh that their Arthur was indeed safely dead and buried), and his naming of his first son Arthur (as an English Rex Futurus), lent a royal seal of approval to an English Arthurian history.

  • 8 - The profits of pleasure

  • from III - TEXTUAL PSYCHOLOGIES: IMAGINATION, MEMORY, PLEASURE
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 275-288

  • Summary

    What we normally think of as medieval literary criticism – whether in the form of gloss, commentary, treatise on writing poetry, or defence of classical studies – predominantly concerns written composition. It presupposes texts or lettered traditions of enough heuristic value to warrant critical study or imitation. Such criticism dominates the available manuscript evidence, which obviously reflects learned, usually academic and clerical, interests. Yet throughout medieval Europe people not only studied literature but attended performances or read poems (aloud or silently) or told stories for their own enjoyment. In 734 Bede complained of bishops who support people ‘addicted to laughter, jests, storytelling [fabulis], gluttony and drunkenness’. In 1119 the entertainment at a marriage feast in Iceland was reported as including ‘many kinds of games, dancing as well as wrestling and saga entertainment’. Around 1300 a prioress complained about damage to her convent's property from Londoners trekking across it to see ‘miracles and wrestling’. One of the major lessons we have learned from contemporary theory is that no attitude towards literature is free of social or ideological influence and implication; some sort of interpretative context underlies even the most seemingly transparent descriptions of literary activity and reception. These three brief passages, the tiniest tip of a medieval iceberg of references to performance, signal as well medieval attitudes towards it: in every case forms of narration or representation that might in more modern contexts be treated as literary genres are linked with other types of amusement, recreational activity or social indulgence. Stories, sagas and enactments of some sort are conceptualised not as ‘literature’ but as part of a diverse group of activities that provide entertainment.

  • 17 - Literary theory and polemic in Castile, c. 1200–c. 1500

  • from V - VERNACULAR CRITICAL TRADITIONS: THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 496-532

  • Summary

    The first signs of a critical stance towards poetic composition in the Castilian vernacular are to be found in the clerkly metre of cuaderna vía, which accompanied the emergence in the early thirteenth century of a new class of university–trained clerics. Writers such as Gonzalo de Berceo and the anonymous poets of the Libro de Alexandre and Libro de Apolonio introduced their narratives with self–conscious statements about their ‘clerical ministry’ (mester de clerecía) and their role as intermediaries between the laity and the received wisdom of bookish authority. Theirs, they claimed, was a new poetic movement, superior to the work of juglares (minstrels), and characterised by its metrical polish and civilising goals. These prefatory remarks are undeveloped (and have been variously interpreted), but they are nonetheless significant. They are evidence for the fact that, for the period in question, what may loosely be called ‘literary theorising’ was undertaken fundamentally in order to establish a social relationship: it is, so to speak, literary theory ‘in action’. This is to say that those who wrote for a lay public were less concerned with philosophising about an abstract category later to be called ‘literature’, than with defending their status as writers, and confronting the problems that attended the composition and interpretation of their own work. Thus, although theoretical treatises were written during this period, theory and criticism find expression principally through the medium of the literary text itself, prologues and, later, commentaries on specific works in the Castilian vernacular tradition.

  • 10 - Anglo-Saxon textual attitudes

  • from IV - VERNACULAR CRITICAL TRADITIONS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 310-323

  • Summary

    Moððe word fræt. Me þþt þuhte

    wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þþt wundor gefrægn,

    þþt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,

    þeof in þystro, þrymfþstne cwide

    ond þþs strangan staþol. Stþlgiest ne wþs

    wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.

    (Riddle 47, The Exeter Book)

    In the fifth century CE, the erstwhile colony of the Roman Empire known as Britain became home to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, Germanic tribes moving across continental Europe in what has been somewhat romantically characterised as the ‘Age of Migrations’. Pushing the Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants of Britain westward and northward, these tribes rapidly consolidated their hold over the island, which they soon termed engla-lond, ‘land of the Angles’ (and hence ‘England’). The Germanic dialects they brought with them developed into a language that they called englisc, ‘English’. Modern scholarship terms this language ‘Old English’ (in distinction from ‘Middle English’, which developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066), or, sometimes, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, after the two major tribal groups, while ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ refers to England between the Saxon Advent and the Norman Conquest.

    Anglo-Saxon England was one of the earliest European cultures to produce a substantial corpus of vernacular prose, alongside a flourishing monastic literacy in Latin and a robust tradition of vernacular poetry in the alliterative Germanic style. Much of this writing has survived in the dialect of Old English that philologists distinguish as ‘late West Saxon’. Both prose and poetry were used for narrative, hagiographic, exegetical and hortatory purposes.

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