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  • Thinking Historically after Historicism: Essays in Memory of Lee Patterson
  • Candace Barrington (bio) and Emily Steiner (bio)

The contributors to this collection share an indissoluble link to the distinguished scholar Lee Patterson, who taught medieval literature at the University of Toronto, The Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and Yale University, from where he retired as the Frederick W. Hilles Professor Emeritus of English. Lee was a masterful teacher who electrified the classroom and fostered in his students a taste for Middle English and for poetry of all kinds. He mentored dozens of young medievalists, and his writing continues to have a devoted following. His doctoral students found him a formidable advisor whose exacting standards they would later recognize as marks of respect with which no praise could compete.

Patterson built towering models of scholarship in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (1987) and Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991).1 These books are vintage Patterson, elegant and fearless. Field-changing when first published, they have become classics of Chaucer criticism and of the critical movement that came to be known as New Historicism. Students of Chaucer still cut their teeth on Chaucer and the Subject of History, while Negotiating the Past and the Speculum article “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies” (1990) remain essential guides to the contentious terrain of medieval studies.2 [End Page 361]

The model of interpretation exemplified by Patterson requires hard, patient work. It also requires a constant admission to ourselves that the evidence we unearth may be scant, our understanding of it partial, its manifestations multiple, and our analyses totally dependent on the methodologies and assumptions available to us in our moment. However, as Patterson pointed out, by trying to uncover some truth in those things that are specific, particular, local, and contingent in medieval culture, we have the opportunity to resist the homogenizing tendencies of our own culture.3 We hope that these eight essays offer new and exciting ways to think with historicism after historicism.

Poetic Values

The historicists of the 1980s and 90s, aided by a robust feminist historiography, challenged the existence of an autonomous aesthetic realm, putting in its place a textual model of culture in which poems could be read alongside legal documents, and in which bodies, ideologies, and events could be read as discourse. Even as it remains influential, the approach has been vigorously critiqued in recent years, in part for sidelining other approaches such as psychoanalysis, and in part for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, losing what is particular to literature—its formal qualities—and losing what is particular to literary disciplines.4 These losses have perhaps been the greatest for poetry, especially the lyric, although the last few years have witnessed something of a revival, and the lyric may prove to be the comeback kid of the twenty-first century. Consequently, many of the questions that mobilized historicist criticism are still pressing: What is the value of the category of the literary? And what belongs exclusively to literary art?

Beneath these questions lies another that informs all literary criticism: How does the past continue to mean to the present? For many medievalists working in the last decades of the twentieth century, a literary text yielded value insofar as it exposed the operations of political power, resistance, and injustice.5 More recently, scholars have significantly rethought this question [End Page 362] about value from the perspectives of affect and ethics.6 In a complementary way, many critics have been engaged in the project of historicizing affect, ethics, and emotion.7 By interrogating the category of the literary, Patterson and his contemporaries encouraged generations of critics to evaluate their own desires and stakes in the past.

In “Literary Value and the Customs House: The Axiological Logic of the House of Fame,” Robert J. Meyer-Lee returns the question of literary value to the historical realm by asking what the relationship between literary aesthetics and socioeconomic value reveals about the worth of poetry. Meyer-Lee’s subject is the House of Fame, a highly experimental poem that uniquely references Geoffrey Chaucer’s work as customs controller. In Meyer-Lee’s reading...

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