Parenting: a natural instinct

Parental sensitivity is a natural instinct (Kringelbach et al, 2008). When any adult hears a baby cry, she or he will have an emotional reaction (although the emotional reaction might be stronger in women than in men; Sander et al, 2007). This natural instinct was demonstrated in a study in which adults were asked to look at images of infants and adults (not from their own family or group of friends) while a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner measured the blood flow in different parts of their brains. When the image was of a baby, there was a lot of activity in the frontal and temporal parts of the brain; these areas are involved in planning complex behaviours (Kringelbach et al, 2008). When the image was of an adult, there was no such activity.

The fact that parental sensitivity is so natural means that it does not require conscious effort. It is something we can literally do without thinking. A sensitive mother is getting on with her life, but has in-built ‘antennae’ that allow her to be ready for action if her child is in need. The best example of this is the play park, where you will often see two women engrossed in a conversation with each other on a park bench, while their young children are absorbed in play. These women are not ignoring their children: they each have an ‘ear out’ for trouble. If a scary dog came into the park, the children would abandon their play and run towards their mothers. The mothers (if sensitive) would immediately abandon their conversation, in mid-sentence if necessary, and hold out their arms for a hug and some soothing words. Only when the crisis is over, and the children are once more engrossed in play, will the conversation between the friends resume.

Things that can block sensitivity

So what might get in the way of a mother being sensitive to her child? Anything that preoccupies the mind enough to stop the antennae from working. If there is insufficient support from family/friends, or complicating factors, mothers may find it difficult to be sensitive (Kivijärvi et al, 2001; Ensink et al, 2016).

Storytelling may be one of the very oldest human activities after the acquisition of language. Language is a symbolic process that produces signifying sounds as a substitute for the things themselves; story allows those sounds to be linked to describe a sequence of events that are not present as fact but that have their existence in the mind, as memory or conjecture or imagination. The very earliest cave paintings or rock art suggest pre-existing stories of some kind behind them. Studies of memory formation and of childhood psychology suggest that it is the ability to form narratives, to shape random events into the syntax of a story, that enables an infant to make sense of the world it finds itself in.

Derek Brewer was increasingly fascinated by story and storytelling – not just in particular stories, though his delight in those masters of narrative Chaucer and Malory makes that evident, but in the principles underlying story itself. That is apparent even in the titles of some of his publications, in his Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in English Literature (1980), or in the collection of articles he entitled Chaucer: The Poet as Storyteller (1984b). That contains a reprint of his earlier Gollancz lecture, delivered in 1974, ‘Towards a Chaucerian Poetic’, which is perhaps his most concise and detailed consideration of the principles underlying story as such, and of the importance of story – especially traditional forms of narrative, folk-tales, fairy-tales and many medieval romances – over whatever meanings might be attached to them.

The trajectory of Derek Brewer's academic career does not invariably reflect trends of modern scholarship. Relatively few of his many publications are directly concerned with the topics of this chapter. But his activities in these areas of manuscript and textual study show that his sense of the potential for new forms of scholarly enquiry in medieval English studies was often remarkably prescient. By the time of his death, Middle English manuscript study and editing had come to enjoy positions of importance in which their historical and cultural significance were increasingly acknowledged. Brewer's own roles in these developments warrant some exploration, not least for what they suggest about the changing climate of Middle English scholarship in these areas over the course of his long careers as scholar, publisher and teacher.

Brewer's interest in manuscript study can be traced back to his uncompleted BLitt thesis, which he began at Oxford in 1948. Some of the research from this period was published in an early article that described Gloucester Cathedral, MS 22, a collection of sixty-six fifteenth-century sermons, some associated with Mirk's Festial, bound with a fragment of the Gesta Romanorum, in a different hand, all in Middle English. Brewer's article is perhaps less interesting for its substance than for some aspects of its method, particularly his consideration of the whole manuscript itself as a proper object of study.

Having completed his studies at Oxford after military service in the war, Derek Brewer took up a lectureship at the University of Birmingham in 1949. He joined there with Geoffrey Shepherd and, two years later, Eric Stanley to form a remarkable medieval triumvirate. During the years in which they worked together, Birmingham was a power-house of Old English and Middle English Studies, perhaps second to none in its day. Derek Brewer, who left for Cambridge in 1964, taught across the medieval syllabus, including Anglo-Saxon, but Chaucer, even in those earliest days, was the principal focus of his interest. He soon took over the Chaucer lectures from Margaret Galway, a scholar of the old school whose principal interest was in speculations about the details of Chaucer's life at court and the identity of his ‘Muse’. Derek Brewer's ambition, by contrast, was to share with students his love and understanding of Chaucer, not as a subject of biographical speculation nor as a repertoire of linguistic data, nor as a ‘set text’ to be hammered through remorselessly and translated line by line, but as a full member of the European community of poets and of the English poetic tradition. It was a revelation to those of us who were privileged to be his students at that time to hear Chaucer talked about as if he were important to us now, and important in the same way as Shakespeare or Milton or T. S. Eliot. We had heard of the New Criticism: we thought this was it.

My title carries an implicit question: was falling in love in the Middle Ages different from falling in love today? The question reflects the still widespread belief that medieval lovers adhered to a systematized ‘code’ of ‘courtly love, a special, artificial variety of romantic love that obliged the lover to act in strange and exaggerated ways – to love without necessarily revealing his love to the lady concerned, to remain her devoted slave for years without seeking so much as a kiss by way of reward, to obey her every whim, however humiliating, to faint, to weep, to adore her as if she were a goddess rather than a woman.

Early on in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the adolescent prince Troilus, while cruising the Trojan girls at the Palladion festival in Troy, happens to see the young widow Criseyde standing in the crowd (1. 269–301). ‘His eye percede’ the crowd deeply until it ‘smote’ Criseyde and stopped (‘stente’), like an arrow (1. 272–3; cf. 1. 325). The effect on him is immediate: ‘he wax ther-with astoned … And of hire look [appearance] in him ther gan to quyken/ So gret desire … / That in his hertes botme gan to stiken/ Of hir his fixe and depe impressioun’ (1. 274, 295–8). Snail-like, he draws in his horns (1. 300), quits the scene at once, and goes home to his bed chamber, alone. This is emphasized. There he rehearses in full detail the event that had at first so ‘astoned’ him and turned him mentally to stone. He sees again Criseyde in the temple, fully and exactly as she appeared and acted:

He is completely alone, sitting on his bed, groaning, and in that physical posture, undertaken deliberately like a preparatory exercise, he thinks on his experience of Criseyde with such complete concentration that his ‘spirit’ – animus, mind – sees it all again: ‘Thus gan he make a mirour of his mynde,/In which he saugh al holly hire figure’ (1. 365–6).

Derek brewer was the founding figure in the post-war study of Chaucer. Through his eponymous publishing firm, he subsequently went on to contribute more than any other individual to furthering modern study of the early literatures and cultures of these islands. An irrepressibly positive and genial personality, his humanity and kindness as a teacher, scholar and publisher enabled and changed many lives. In a sixty-year career as a critic of medieval English and other literature, Brewer foresaw and pioneered much that has since developed into defining aspects of the field. Far from being a backward-looking memorial volume or Festschrift, the present book celebrates how some of the topics Brewer made central to the study of medieval literature are being taken forward, both because of his influence and beyond it. In so doing, this book aims to build towards an intellectual biography of a very modern medievalist.

Derek Brewer was born into a relatively modest background, the son of a clerk with the General Electric Company. Educated at his local Crypt Grammar School in Gloucester, he won a scholarship (‘demyship’) to Magdalen College, Oxford for the year 1941–42. As he later remarked, ‘getting to Oxford to read English had been my heart's desire’, and he wrote in his eighties that Magdalen was still, for him, simply the most beautiful place in the world. But after one short year at Oxford he joined the army and in 1944 was posted to Italy; he taught himself Italian on the troopship with the aid of a Hugo's language course, a characteristic foresight.

Here Windeatt evokes the gentlemanly virtues – the remnants of a knightly value-system wherein great store was set by honour and gentilesse (nobility of birth or rank together with the attendant moral qualities of nobility of character or manners; generosity, kindness, gentleness, graciousness and the like). Indeed, it was no surprise to read, in the Telegraph obituary, Derek Brewer being described as ‘a gentlemanly, kindly man’. The thought that I want to offer in this paper is that those same virtues enabled Derek to gain some of his greatest insights into Chaucer's mind and art (to use a phrase in vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was producing much of his best work). I am going to celebrate some of those insights – expanding them here, qualifying them there – because I believe they have withstood very well the buffets of changing academic fashions.

There is a long-standing view that French, or Anglo-Norman, was a ‘true vernacular’ in medieval England (Sugget 1946: 79). Johan Vising (1923: 18) made the earliest and broadest claims, insisting that there was a ‘complete dominance of the Anglo-Norman language during the second half of the twelfth and most of the thirteenth century’ as well as a ‘penetration even into the lower strata of society. In this view of literature in England in this period, Anglo-Norman often takes the lead, and English follows not as an alternative, but as a substitute’ (Salter 1988: 33). We are therefore not even studying Middle English adequately if we are not prepared to situate it carefully in the broader territory of Anglo-Norman language and literature. In the last decade there has also been an increasing tendency to insist that the importance of the ‘French of England’ lasted even later than the thirteenth century (‘the composition … of most kinds of French literary texts ceases in England … at the turn of the fifteenth century rather than in the early fourteenth’ [Wogan-Browne 2009: 3]). As Ardis Butterfield (2009: xx–xxi) puts this point, England and France ‘shared a language for four centuries [because] until the 1420s and 1430s, and in some fields such as law for much longer, French in England was the language of jurisdiction, of official and private correspondence, diplomacy, parliamentary petitions, the Privy seal, guild documents, administrative registers, business transactions, the Bible, sermons and moral and devotional treatises, history, biography, satire, romance, lyric, science and medicine’.