Middle English Literature

Map from Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology

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Introduction
xxix
Introduction
This anthology makes available a selection of historical texts, cultural docu-
ments, and images in order to further readers’ thinking about the works of
Geoffrey Chaucer and other Middle English writers. Several of the historical
writings have been regularly mentioned in literary and historical studies
in the past, while some are less familiar – for instance, the Anonimalle
Chronicle’s account of the 1381 revolt and Henry Knighton’s description
of the pestilence alongside Jean Froissart’s description of a tournament
Richard II held in 1390. The cultural documents are necessarily of many
kinds, some again frequently noted in literary and historical criticism while
others less so: parliamentary and local acts and trials, letters and testimonies,
moral, homiletic, and educational tracts. The images are principally of manu-
script pages and illuminations and, like the others, chosen for the student of
Middle English literature.
These texts and images represent a cross-section of social, economic,
political, ideational, and epistemological developments. The most important
criterion for including a text or image is that it contain something, prefer-
ably several features, that shed light on the themes, ideas, and styles com-
monly found in Chaucer and other Middle English literature. This broad
measure is nevertheless reasonably finite: rulers and their exploits, guilds,
labor, sumptuary, censorship, marriage, gender, the fraternal orders – to
name a few topics – are of particular interest to authors of this period. The
second most important criterion is the sheer significance of a historical
event or cultural factor. The usurpation of the throne in 1399 and the
persecution of Lollards, for instance, are historically momentous and had
noteworthy causes and lasting effects. Texts such as John Gower’s Confessio
amantis and William Langland’s Piers Plowman acknowledge them explicitly,

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while they receive smaller or tangential references in others. The third measure
for inclusion is the richness of the selection; that is, whether it is interesting
in itself rather than merely in terms of some inert fact or idea that might
simply be stated in summary form. The authors and artists who create these
histories, cultural texts, and images appear actively engaged with the events
and issues at hand, or are at least writing in a style or making an illumina-
tion that is complex enough to encourage comparison with more creative
literature. In a few cases I have included more than one author’s or artist’s
interpretations of a historical occurrence or cultural feature to allow readers
to compare and contrast these interpretations themselves, as well as compare
and contrast them with literary texts.
Even though today it seems we can only talk about more and less explicitly
literary works rather than a clear distinction between literature and histor-
ical or other writing, I have pragmatically allowed current and hopefully
up-coming literature textbooks – both anthologies and editions of individual
authors – to shape my selection of documents to include here. That is, I rely
on those publications to take care of literature, and I have tried to choose
more explicitly historical and cultural texts. I have also been somewhat
restrictive in my selections from among these usually less-consciously literary
writings. Rather than simply aim to represent historical and cultural items
from a primarily inert and generalized Middle Ages, this collection contains
only fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts and images that existed in Eng-
land. The idea in limiting the selection to these two centuries and this
country of origin or production is to introduce descriptions, arguments,
narratives, and images that are often articulated in a temporally specific
manner and in forms that correspond to or differ in interesting ways from
contemporary poetry, prose, and drama. While the historical and cultural
distinctions between England and the Continent were by no means clear,
England of course claiming a good deal of France during the period, it was
felt that sufficient translation, not only in the literal sense of “carrying
across” but also of adaptation to the target audience – English readers and
writers – made it possible to include only documents that existed in material
form in England. My only regret is that because of the practical constraints
of course offerings and literature textbooks produced, my selection is narrowly
English and excludes substantial material on Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.
Obviously, on a more practical level, the strictures of time period and
country have also helped to limit the potential number of inclusions from
approximately four hundred documents I considered.
The principal idea that informs the collection is that fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century English literature may most fruitfully be read alongside

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xxxi
less deliberately literary texts. The “textual environments,” in Paul Strohm’s
useful phrase, of the poems, prose, and dramas are diverse but finite.
1
As
even a cursory examination of the Chaucer or Middle English selections
we most commonly read reveals, medieval literature demands that we
look beyond the borders of its lyrics and narratives. It is messy, habitually
pointing to forces and texts outside the enclosure of a whorling hypotactic
opening “Whan . . .” and the declarative and conventionally terminating
“. . . Amen.” Readers of medieval literature may begin at the most material
and seemingly concrete starting point, the physical page of a poem, prose
work, or drama, but they quickly find that manuscript survival and versions,
authorial anonymity and scribal preferences, intrusive glosses and expository
illuminations, combine to multiply and connect such a beginning to a web
of historical starting points beyond the single text. Moving off the vellum or
paper, one is immediately struck by the openly allusive nature of Middle
English literature. It may refer to itself, even to the act of authorial com-
position, but it also loves to echo – often concurrently – a range of religious
and secular, and Latin, French, and English discourses. In the process the
works, passages, lines, even words, suggest historical and other events, both
large scale and more mundane, forcing a binocular perspective on the
historical level as much as on the practical, one eye on the line and another
on the footnotes. A reader familiar with the literary work at hand and yet
still wishing to avoid delving into historical and cultural contexts might
resort to beginning his or her research from the other end, commencing
with the most recent reception of a text. However, there again the critical
responses thread together back into the past beyond medievalisms and John
Dryden until one ends up examining fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
responses; reception becomes an issue of near-contemporary influence, scribal
recension, even authorially reworked texts and an author’s anticipation of
responses to his or her own works.
The student of Middle English literature has to love the mess yet try to
find a way to enjoy such complexities while not losing focus, perhaps out of
baffled exhaustion. Studying this conglomeration of materials is undoubtedly
challenging and demands a range of skills that other periods do not always
require. While the fundamental goal of this volume is utilitarian, it is hoped
it will encourage more of an interdisciplinary approach, that is, thinking
about how, on the one hand, historical and cultural items and, on the
other, literary texts of various kinds register each other, correlate, and “quite.”
It is for the student of the literature who wants to rise to the challenge
of considering him or herself a “literary historian,” an appellation that
compresses the potentially daunting idea that the specialities of literary and

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historical study are both possible nowadays despite the inadequate time
institutions and society at large make available for such development. In
fact, a trinity appears to characterize the goal of medieval studies today, of
literary and historical abilities as well as theoretical sophistication. Literary
theory offers not only the chance to reconsider one’s assumptions but also
expands the field of interpretation so that more and more thoughtful read-
ings become possible. Indeed, theory has always been essential to medieval
study, for instance leading to the inclusion of more texts in the medieval
canon, not only texts by women but works of different genres such as
nonfiction prose as well as writings that were formerly labeled as simply
minor, derivative, or somehow not literary enough. Textual–literary study,
historical examination, and theoretical abilities are three very powerful tools
that one can see employed in ever more eloquent combinations in articles
and books on medieval literature, making the Middle Ages an exciting
period for those who like playing in a multiform and diachronic field that
may be characterized by what the sciences currently call “complexity.”
Students of medieval literature already have resources and training they
can draw on to comprehend and think imaginatively about the materials in
this volume, not the least of which is a tendency to read all phenomena,
whether textual, cultural, or historical, with sensitivity. Cultural critic Stuart
Hall is worth quoting at some length here because he suggests why we
might already be at an advantage: “Meaning is a social production, a prac-
tice. The world has to be made to mean.” A person looking at incidents in
the past, for instance, consequently wants to ask
which kinds of meaning get systematically and regularly constructed around