Reading Devoutly: Havelok the Dane in the Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108 Manuscript
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In this pair of essays, we resituate the early Middle English romance, Havelok the Dane, in its Laud Misc. 108 manuscript context to account for its sanctification of the hero and its affective narrator. Dieter Mehl and other critics have long recognized the 'exemplary' nature of this poem.2 When viewed within its manuscript context, the poem's spiritual allusions and tone signify more than the religiosity critics find in Middle English romances generally.3Havelok's textual ties to the South English Legendary, the collection of saints' lives which precedes the poem, suggest a way of reading the poem that would align it with the manuscript's devotional concerns and practices. This contextual approach to reading Havelok the Dane opens new interpretive dimensions to the romance itself, offering a better understanding of a medieval aesthetics of reception.4 In light of its manuscript context, a reader cannot credibly interpret Havelok in isolation nor in the contrived romance/chivalric context of a modern edition of medieval romances.
Footnotes
1. These two essays anticipate a larger collaborative project in which Laud Misc. 108 scholars explore the intertextual dynamics of the texts contained in the Laud manuscript (Text and Context in Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellaneous 108, eds Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, forthcoming).
2. Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 171–172. See also Nancy Mason Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 84.
3. Mehl calls Middle English romances 'homiletic': they are meant to illustrate moral truths with an exemplary story; he contrasts this focus to the more courtly French romances (Middle English Romances, p. 5).
4. See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
