Medieval lit people: the headless man wants you!

To distract me from all the scary weather flying around, I thought I'd pass on a request. Scott Erik Eric Kaufman at Acephalous (whose name I constantly misspell - sorry, Scott!) has undertaken the ambitious task of producing a list of "The Best Introduction to..." (fill in the blank with literary subject of your choice). For instance, The Best Introduction to New Historicist Literature or Literary Theory: New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, Brook Thomas. I'm sure there are lots of things for the literati to argue about regarding the current choices, but the real point is: Scott needs medievalists! Well, okay, he also needs Britishists, and Early Modernists, and Classicists. Basically, he needs people who study the old, hard* stuff to weigh in with their choices. So head over there and help him out!

Me, I'm just a lowly historian, so I'm not in the best position to contribute. And I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with his periodization (I don't mind Anglo-Saxon, Early Medieval, or Late Medieval, but I'm not sure that the Twelfth Century Renaissance really merits its own category, and what exactly is plain old "Medieval" - if the others are modified, shouldn't this be High Medieval or something? But then, literature and history often follow different periodizations. And I'm a historian, so professionally required to get cranky about periodization).

I will say that from a historian's point of view, for a good general overview to English literature from the Norman Conquest through the fifteenth century, I really really like The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace - it's not literary theory, but it's a great collection of essays. For late medieval, I'm partial to Paul Strohm - probably a good place to start is with Theory and the Premodern Text. And while I haven't read it cover to cover, if I were trying to tackle high medieval English lit, I'd probably pick up Alastair Minnis's Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100--c.1375 : The Commentary Tradition. (I'd be amused to see lit folks' responses to my list!)

*That's sure to piss someone off!

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Thanks for the assist; I realize the categories are a little strange, but I think you've pointed to why there can be a best introduction to medievalism in general, and another to late medieval. The Strohm is fantastic, for example, but since medieval refers to a swath of time some 800 yrs. long, it wouldn't really help someone interested in, say, early medieval history and/or literature.

[Medieval Woman]

Hi NK, I like all of your choices - I'm a big fan of A.J. Minnis. Also, a good general (but definitely 14th and 15th century weighted) book is Ralph Hanna's "Pursuing history: Middle English manuscripts and their texts" - it's actually wonderful even for scholars who aren't necessarily interested in paleography. Another is M.T. Clanchy's "From memory to written record, England 1066-1307" - it definitely covers a larger period of time and is pretty general about its discussion of the transitions from oral to written culture in the early and High Middle Ages without being to general.

[Shelly]

No comment but chill on the scary weather.

[Dr. Virago]

I saw that post and also thought the periods were odd. I would think that the 12th century Renaissance wouldn't apply much to *English* lit (whether you define that as literature in English or literature in England). But maybe Scott wanted to include continental lit -- French lit people still talk in terms of the 12th century as a special category I *think*. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Dr. V., I can't correct you. I compiled those categories by digging through all the various anthologies the Little Womedievalist has lying around the house. Since she does a lot of work with Provencal--I don't feel like digging up the diacritic--Spanish, French and Italian medieval literature, I'm sure many of such oddities snuck in. (I'd ask her for advice, but she has 400 pages of reading for her paleography class tomorrow and seems a little, shall I say, "preoccupied." But anyway, these are exactly the sorts of things I need brought to my attention. Distributed intelligence, after all, means I'm necessarily handing y'all experts the wheels. One reason I didn't post the Strohm was, well, because it was the best of what I'd read, but I haven't read that much.

[meg]

Okay, since no one else will defend the 12C Renaissance, I'll do it myself, said the little red henne. I do indeed believe that it's very helpful to have it as a category.

And much as I like Clanchy, he can be dangerous in the wrong hands, MW. You have to have be able to tell when he's smoking crack and when he's not.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

So, meg, how can we tell when Clanchy's smoking crack? Because I really like From Memory to Written Record, and it would be good to know if I'm missing something!

And Scott, I was giving you a hard time about the categories; I know very little about the continental literature, so I'm quite happy to be told I'm just being the cranky historian. Good luck to the Little Womedievalist with getting through the paloegraphy!

(Shelly, nothing seems to have blown away; I'm just hoping the hail didn't trash my car!)

[meg]

Well, I don't have page citations, but a number of major scholars have noted that he plays fast and loose with the evidence when it comes to the material on what is, in effect, simultaneous interpretation (reading Latin out loud in the vernacular). There are some other things people take issue with too -- but I haven't got my copy here, so I can't be more specific.

Any other mid-evillists gonna help me out here? (Actually, I would have thought that the historians would be dogpiling us hapless litterateurs on this matter.)

[Another Damned Medievalist]

And me, I'd say medieval was more like 1100 years, if we include Late Antique ...(or early, early medieval ...)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Nah, meg, in my particular graduate training, Clanchy was one of the Godlike ones! Although most ground-breaking books end up getting some stuff wrong.

[meg]

It's true about the ground-breaking books. For everyone who beams at Roberta Frank or Marcia Colish, some other august scholar beetles his/her bushy brows.

Are we all working on our supercilia? I can't decide which to go for first, the overgrowth or the greying.

[meg]

Except for Caroline Walker Bynum. Nobody EVER beetles at her. They wouldn't dare. An iron fist in a velvet glove, just as my mother always wanted me to be. (Instead, I'm a tin fist in a silly-putty glove.)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Hee hee hee! My supercilia are sadly in need of grooming, which is on the list of things to do once I get paid/before Kzoo. However, by nature I'm inclined to bushiness over grayness.

And ah yes, Bynum... the untouchable. If only her stuff weren't so damn good. Although I will say that one of the best things my advisor ever said to me was in grad school, when I was agonizing about not doing enough archival research (b/c I really ended up becoming a cultural type rather than a hard-core counting-things social historian), and Advisor said to me, "Well, I don't imagine Caroline Walker Bynum spends a lot of time in the archives either."

[meg]

My supercilia aren't very super at all -- if I'm really putting on the dog (last time: job market), I have to use a pencil to make them visible and coherent. That's why I have eyebrow envy for all those folks with big caterpillars napping over their eyes.

[Tiruncula]

Oh, I know people who beetle at Bynum! (Not in person, though.)

As for Clanchy, it's important to use the 2nd edition, which takes into account a lot of newer research and corrects some cracky bits in the first edition. Unfortunately, it's been ages since I sat down with Clanchy for a detailed comb-through, so I won't try to be more specific. There's a book to be written taking down the whole edifice of oral-literate hooha of the past generation, but Saenger needs taking down first and my detailed notes on him are at the top of the heap under which Clanchy is hiding. (I should also say that Clanchy himself is a very nice guy and very open to criticism and revision - not at all entrenched in his famous positions.)

Oh, and: Yes, the 12th c. ren. definitely needs its own category, whether you call it a ren. or not.

For Scott's Anglo-Saxon category, I've never been happy with any of the available handbook-type intros to the literature. I guess I just never get much out of surveys. I'd rather recommend a few studies that show with great elegance what can (and, importantly, cannot) be done with texts of the period and let them imply the rest. If I had to choose three, I'd say: "The Monsters and the Critics" (yes, still); Robinson on the Appositive Style; and O'Brian O'Keeffe, Visible Song.

[meg]

Tell us more about the take-down that's headed Saenger's way, Tiruncula. I've never really used him, and I've only dipped in and out sporadically.

And whence Bynum's beetling?

As for A-S, I couldn't really think of anything either. Frankly, I still have tremendous admiration for Kenneth Sisam's work, but I'd hesitate to recommend his *Studies in OE* (or whatever it's called -- NOT the blue & white Szarmach volume), since it was written in the 1930s.

[Medieval Woman]

Does the 12th century Renaissance refer to the Alliterative Revival in England?

Also, like many, I haven't read Clanchy closely since grad school and I didn't notice the shaky bits. I dig Bynum (and would never beetle at her) but I love Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Carolyn Dinshaw (although no one would ever call Dinshaw a generalist, I think).

A book that does deal with the oral/literate issue quite well (and comes out in favor of simultaneity even in the later periods) is Joyce Coleman's "Public reading and the reading public in late medieval England and France" - I'm not sure how she falls in terms of Clanchy's assertions, but she's sharp as a tack and I know she doesn't use crack! She did teach me how to use the Tube the very first time I ever went to London to do research - back when I was a baby medievalist...

[meg]

I think of the Alliterative Revival as more of a 14C thang, although I happily defer to folks who work in that period.

The 12C Ren is, as suggested, a European phenom, but it plays out in England too. Essentially it is a major wind shift in approaches to learning (which is why I pimped Jaeger's *Envy of Angels* in Acephalous' comments) and writing -- new genres, new approaches, new structures of patronage, blah blah blah.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

I'm just pretty clueless about anything literary prior to the fourteenth century (you know, when you start to get actual English that I can understand!).

And MW, I nearly mentioned Coleman's book!

[Tiruncula]

Briefly - very briefly! - on Saenger, his taxonomy of word separation and all his paleographical arguments are sound and incredibly useful; it's just his Big Thesis (no silent reading till 11th c.) that I don't buy. His arguments are really week at two (non-paleographical) ends: in the beginning of the book, he seriously misreads the evidence from psycholinguistics, and on the other end, he labors under some very peculiar misapprehensions about what Medieval Latin was like. That, and there's a whole strain of very persuasive but not-as-sexy/not-as-widely-known argument for silent reading as an ancient practice. I'd recommend particularly the work of A.K. Gavrilov.

Also: I second the props for Coleman! That's a great book!

Also also: Those who beetle at Bynum do so in the same terms (tee hee!) as NK's Advisor. But for me, I have to say I find her work endlessly stimulating of my own intellectual imagination, and in that she does a great service to the field.

On the 12th c. ren: The 12th c. was, obviously, the nadir of English lit in terms of quantity of production/survival (not making aesthetic judgements, but one could). But to try to understand post-12th-c. literary culture in England or anywhere in Europe without taking into account the explosion of new sources, new discourses, new literary forms, new ways of conceiving the project of authorship, formation of national literatures (including in Latin), new ways of reading the classics...that would be just plain silly. To look at it another way, try this thought experiment: how would you explain the high medieval (13th-15th c.) literary culture of any European vernacular simply on the basis of developments that had happened before, say, 1130?

[Tiruncula]

Ooh, also: Meg, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Sisam. You'd do a disservice to somebody starting out in OE lit if you made them think that early-20th-c. work was inherently outmoded - not only because there's so much good older work, but because coming to terms with the conservative nature of the field is at least as important as the content of any introduction!

That said, another suggestion for newer approaches would be O'Brien O'Keeffe's Reading Old English Texts, a slim and affordable collection of essays on different current approaches.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

It's funny, because the 12th c. is such a big deal in so many ways, but in my own context, it gets outweighed by lots of other things (I sort of tend to think of the period from the Conquest to the Black Death in terms of economic/demographic issues, or even political/admininstrative, but the literary/cultural element just drops right out).

And I should clarify that my advisor wasn't actually beetling at Bynum about the archives - she was actually just pointing out to me that being an archive rat wasn't necessarily a prerequisite for doing good work! (Since if Bynum wasn't in the archives much, you certainly couldn't say it had to be a weakness!) Bynum was quite revered in my program as well. One of my profs had Bynum as a TA at Harvard. ;-)

[Dr. Virago]

Over at Acephalous I recommended Orchard's Pride and Prodigies for OE lit. I also recommended Jesse Gellrich's The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages for late medieval lit. Haven't read it in years, but I remember liking it early in grad school. What say you all?

But I'm having trouble of thinking of other broad works for late medieval lit. I can think of indispensible works on individual texts or authors or genres, but nothing broader and it's driving me nuts! Is medieval studies too balkanized? Or is it that a necessary evil of our huge period?

And Meg and Tiruncula, you've convinced me that the 12th century needs its own category. Mea culpa. But do people still refer to it as the "12th c. Renaissance"? Just wondering.

On Bynum: well, Leo Steinberg and she had it out. In the second edition of Christ's Sexuality he devotes a chapter to her criticism of his book and calls it "Ad Bynum"!

And I have to say, though I like her work immensely, I'm a little tired of its all-pervasive influence in less adept hands. Not all representations of Christ in the late Middle Ages are feminized.

[Medieval Woman]

I second the props to Meg and Tiruncula for the 12c. Renaissance info - I, like NK also mentioned, focus on the late Middle Ages and the holes in my knowledge are showing. It's fascinating, though - thanks!

Quick question - did the 12c. Renaissance in Europe have *any* discernable impact on English lit at the time? Of course, the 12c. is just post-Conquest and so there's already an interesting tension between Anglo-Saxon literature in England and French (and eventually Anglo-Norman) literature in England - but I didn't know if the kids of European literature/thought that was undergoing the 12c Renaissance was being imported to Norman England during this time.

Not sure if this question is that clear! :)

[meg]

Definitely an impact on English writing; "lit" would depend on how you define it. (I'm very generous in my definition of literature, but not all medievalists are, I know.)

Moreover, the English had their part to play in it. John of Salisbury's *Metalogicon* (in which he glossed Aristotle's logic, or at least claimed to) was widely copied in Europe, and Adelhard of Bath was one of the main translators of Greek and Arabic texts.

I could go on and on, but I'll have mercy.

[yourpal]

Saenger's touching belief that Western civ depends on word separation is unshared. The book reperesents a level of positivism which gives manuscript study a bad name. Nor are his references to 1970's work on psychology of reading of much help. Far better to read Ornato and Bozzolo, or Parkes.