Periodization and Politics: The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English Literary History

For several years I have been at work on a narrative literary history of medieval England from the beginnings to 1350. The project, to be published as the first volume of a new Oxford English Literary History, intrigued me in part because it requires the theorizing of a period in which an event as seemingly cataclysmic as the Norman Conquest falls not at the beginning, as in current Middle English studies, nor at the end, as in Anglo-Saxon studies, but in the middle. To me the project was an opportunity to pursue new lines of inquiry, particularly in eleventh- and twelfth-century studies, but to Oxford University Press it was simply the necessary result of a prior decision to figure the years 1350-1550 as a period that could borrow some cultural capital from the term early modern. Medievalist Nancy Partner once joked that if we wanted the medieval period to get more respect, we should call it "the Really Early Modern," and Oxford has done just that with the former Late Middle Ages. But putting the origin of the modern at Chaucer's birth left six hundred years never considered a period at all. The press invited me to take on the project because I had done work on both sides of the Conquest, having written on Beowulfand on the early-thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse. Flattered by the invitation, I accepted, but in trying to work out a proposal, I realized the great flaw in Oxford's logic and in mine: I had written on both sides of 1066, but, like most medievalists, I had never considered the space in between. Once I did, I saw that a huge job lay ahead and enlisted Anglo-Saxonist Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe to coauthor the volume. We produced a proposal for a book of fourteen chapters, each focusing on five or six key texts, with no claim to being encyclopedic. We would choose the texts so as to emphasize the complexities of early England's multilingual cultures, and we would stress the cultural work that these texts had done in their own time and later in literary history. The questions we would ask of each text were not what is it or who wrote it but what was it for and what did it do.

The proposal was sent to five readers, whose responses, while generally favorable, were instructive. Of my plan to write one chapter on nineteenth-century constructions of the Norman Conquest and three on the twelfth century, one reader asked how much there was to say about "the deadest century for English literature of any from the seventh to the twentieth," while another fumed about "all of this tedious and unnecessary theorizing" about the history of our discipline. But by then it was too late. We had come to see that to reconfigure what had never been a period, we had to look at why it had never been one, and that examination revealed that the foundation of our discipline in nineteenth-century nationalist historiography was itself responsible for a literary history in which the Conquest had assumed mythic proportions. In the process, "Englishness" had come to be defined in such a way that the twelfth century had to be erased. Thus I began with a chapter on the role of the Conquest in English literary history, and I will lay out the chapter's argument here before turning to a single case study from the project itself. ¹

The English Middle Ages has long been split into two fields, neatly divided by a single day, 14 October 1066, when King Harold was killed at Hastings and William the Bastard effectively became William rex Anglorum. That few contemporary sources described the event paved the way for the mythic treatment of the battle, especially in the nineteenth century, when...