The Squeezed Middle

It is a commonplace, but worth repeating nonetheless, that history is written by the victors. This maxim applies not only to political history but also to the history of language, where a society's dominant tongue will inevitably condition approaches to the linguistic landscape of the past. The 'triumph of English' in the late Middle Ages, which has endured down to the present day, has occasioned a particularly comprehensive reimagination of England's medieval literature. The fortunes of English as a literary language in the Middle Ages tend to be described as an initial loss after the Norman Conquest, followed by a three-century period of dormancy, before an eventual, and largely definitive, resurgence in the second half of the fourteenth century. Yet such a representation, though compelling, elides the richness and impact of Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Norman literature in post-Conquest England and underplays the extent to which the literatures in these languages form a key part of the literary history of the country.

Most undergraduates will never encounter a text from the period between the Conquest and the Black Death in any language during the course of an English degree and most graduate work and scholarship still tends towards the study of Middle English texts at the expense of the other languages of England in this period. A whole host of often interrelated factors feeds into this neglect. Student-friendly editions of many texts are still hard to come by, and production of translations has not kept pace with declining linguistic knowledge (of Latin, in particular) in society at large. Perhaps the most significant factor is the tendency of universities to found and nurture faculties that reflect contemporary interests rather than past realities. In tertiary education, where English faculties are numerous but where most French departments will not usually have a specialist in Anglo-Norman and few Classics departments place much emphasis on medieval Latin, it is unsurprising that an anachronistic emphasis on medieval literature in the English language endures.

Douglas Gray's new collection of texts and extracts from this period, From the Norman Conquest to the Black Death: An Anthology of Writings from England, is a particularly ambitious attempt to redress this neglect. So far, most attempts at recovering medieval England's trilingual complexion have been aimed at a postgraduate and professional academic audience, with undergraduate curricula largely ignoring the Anglo-Norman and Latin texts from this period. Gray's anthology aims to make this material available to a wider readership and sets out to 'help students of English Literature deal with the transition from "Old English" to "Middle English"' by filling in the blank spaces around the 'scraps or isolated examples which seemed to exist in a kind of vacuum' in the literature between the Conquest and the late fourteenth century (p. vii). Courses on medieval English literature can sometimes give the impression that the literary imaginations of the Ricardian poets - Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Gower, Langland - appeared fully formed ex nihilo three centuries after the Conquest. Even scholarship investigating the influences of these poets has tended to look to continental examples and to stress the impact of French and Italian literature rather than considering the multilingual native culture of England itself. In the standard story of literature in English there is a general acknowledgement that Old English had a rich poetic tradition, but only a few works, typically Layamon's Brut, the Owl and the Nightingale, and the Ancrene Wisse, are offered as a slender, and rather unsteady, bridge across the space between 1066 and about 1350. The stated aim of this rich and accessible anthology is to act as a textbook for courses that might fill that perceived gap with the varied and rich literature that flourished in three languages in England in these years. However, the literary quality of its contents means it should also appeal to more general readers, both within and beyond the academy, who are not specialists in this period.

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