England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 by Thorlac Turville-Petre (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Cestre, a washerwoman in the royal household, and searches again for some connection with Alceste in the Prologue to Chaucer's Legend ofGood Women. JOHN H. FISHER Emeritus, University of Tennessee THORLAC TURVILLE-PETRE. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. vii, 241. $65.00. In the course of a series of lectures on patriotism and nationalism de­ livered, with dark appropriateness, in Leiden in February, 1940, Johan Huizinga pointed out that it is "not difficult to demonstrate the un­ tenability of the notion that national antitheses were alien to the Middle Ages and that national consciousness is a product of the mod­ ern period."1 That the news has still not reached many of our non­ medievalist colleagues is unsurprising but unfortunate, for the Middle Ages provides unusually interesting evidence for the formation of the idea ofthe nation. Since at least the ninth century, medieval Europeans were possessed of(and at times by) a sense ofwhat Susan Reynolds calls "regnal solidarity."2 The elements that went toward creating such a feel­ ing included a common territory, a common language, a sense of being an identifiable gens or populus (with a specific descent myth, shared mores, and a common history), habits ofloyalty to a prestigious monarchy (re­ gardless of attitudes toward the current king), and an awareness of other, easily identifiable nationes that could be defined, at least for a while, as different from one's own. To this basic substratum of national feeling were added the lineaments of statehood: a centralized govern­ ment defined by a more or less extensive administrative, financial, and judicial bureaucracy; a common law; and some institutional means, such as a parliament, by which the populus or communa-the community 1 "Patriotism and Nationalism in European History," in Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas: History, the MiddleAges, the Renaissance, trans. James S. Holmes and Hans van Marie (New York: Meridian Books, 1959 {1940)), p. 117. 2 Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 262. 324 REVIEWS of the realm--could represent itself to its king and itself.3 Finally, those in authority generated the symbolics of nationhood, which included na­ tional saints, festal celebrations of royal and national import, the iden­ tification of the king with his people, national sanctuaries, and hallowed heraldic and military symbols like France's oriflamme, lilies, and white cross.4 Given England's extraordinary history of large-scale migration, for­ eign conquest, and monarchical supersession, none of these processes was easily accomplished. That they were accomplished at all is an index of people's desire to belong to national and cultural communities, a tribalism we have reason these days to deplore but one that seems vir­ tually coextensive with being human. In his very interesting book, Thorlac Turville-Petre throws light upon a small but crucial aspect of this process: the way in which writers in the fifty years before the Hundred Years' War identified themselves as speaking, in English, for and to a nation of which they were themselves a part. He is concerned above all with the role of language in the development of national con­ sciousness, and he shows with learning and clarity both the way English writers constructed a unified nation in defiance of the facts and the strategies they used to exploit difference in the service of sameness. Turville-Petre's archive is a collection of texts of which, for the most part, there are few to read and even fewer to love. These include Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle (completed after 1297); the Short Metrical Chronicle (various redactions between 1307 and 1340); Robert Mannyng of Brunne's Handlyng Synne (ca. 1332) and Story of England (completed in 1338); the Cursor Mundi (three versions, ca. 1300-1350); the Anglo-Norman Brut (compiled ca. 1272); the South English Legendary (some six redactions, ca. 1300-1400); the Northern Homilies (ca. 1300-1350); Havelok the Dane; and some of the texts found in four man­ uscripts: the Auchinleck manuscript (Guy of Warwick, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, King Richard, Roland andVernagu, Otuel a Kni3t, Of Arthour and of...