Middle English (review)

This excellent collection of essays largely fulfills its ambitious promise to “enter the zone of the not-yet known,” resisting the traditional aim of the companion volume: that is, to offer an assessment of a field or subfield, accounting for information and methodologies veteran scholars have come to agree upon. Instead, Middle English seeks to avoid consensus, provoke debate, and suggest where the field might go in the next several years.

The book is unevenly organized across four sections: “Conditions and Contexts,” “Vantage Points,” “Textual Kinds and Categories,” and “Writing and the World.” Without short introductions to these sections, I found it difficult to discern the coagulating agent of each segment or to see how they speak to one another. Indeed, even as I outline these sections in the description of many of the volume’s essays below, I illustrate some connections between the essays in different sections to demonstrate the volume’s generative richness.

This is not to say, however, that the essays that make up each part do not work well together. For example, the first section includes several articles that attempt to understand Middle English culture as “multilingual,” demonstrating, as Robert M. Stein does convincingly, that “the polyglot reality of medieval life” is also a literary phenomenon in the Middle Ages (28). Christopher Baswell’s essay, “Multilingualism on the Page,” shows how material text studies can inform our understanding of multilingualism, particularly with respect to the interdependence of Latin and the vernacular. Michelle Warren’s contribution on “Translation” proposes a reconceptualization of the status of translated texts. According to Warren, translation enabled vernacular texts gradually to emerge as self-sufficient authorities, acting outside the putatively originary tongue, Latin. These essays all demonstrate how multilingualism builds on and stretches medieval studies’ long-standing interest in vernacularity. Likewise, in a different section, Vincent Gillespie reevaluates “vernacular theology,” a phrase developed by Ian Doyle and Bernard McGinn and influentially discussed by Nicholas Watson, to show that devotional texts written in English depict “intralingual ambition” (402). He thus crucially reframes our sometimes monolithic account of vernacular theology as “multiple, interlocking, and overlapping vernacular theologies” (406).

The second and largest section, “Vantage Points,” reveals (among other topics) a rigorous theoretical investment in form, anchored by Christopher Cannon’s argument that Middle English texts often obfuscate their own formal properties, with the result that our task is to explore texts’ ostensible oddities via larger structural principles. Elizabeth Allen pursues such exploration in “Episodes,” in which she posits “narrative incoherence” as a crucial formal principle of Middle English romance. Such an aesthetic, she argues, articulates these texts’ concern with dynastic incoherence and familial disruption. (In the next section, Matthew Giancarlo makes a similar argument: for him, romance’s investment in foundational kinship ties reveals its affiliations with historiography and chronicles.) For Maura Nolan, thinking about form allows her to postulate broad questions about beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and artifice; as she persuasively argues with respect to The Miller’s Tale, beauty mediates between idealization and particularity, between universal aesthetics and individual reader response.

If one of the second section’s concerns is form, the third section, “Textual Kinds and Categories,” moves to genre. Yet the first essay of this section, Alfred Hiatt’s “Genre Without System,” dismantles genre as a stable analytic category, pursuing “ungenre” as a potential avenue of analysis. He suggests we pay attention to moments of textual disorientation or inexplicability in the service of recognizing the kind of “boundary disturbances” (291) fundamental to Middle English literature. Similarly, Bruce Holsinger’s essay on liturgy suggests that we “detheologize” English liturgical writing to register “the space between professed belief and material practice” (298). Karen Winstead’s focus on saints’ lives deconstructs the force of “exemplarity” by illustrating how medieval hagiography invites divergent interpretations and responses. In this section, “genre” is rendered flexible and dynamic, with new takes on old genres and the formulation of heretofore unrecognized generic frameworks.

The final section, “Writing and the World...