From the Norman Conquest to the Black Death: An Anthology of Writings from England (review)

This volume is an edited anthology of texts written in England in the years between c.1066 and c.1348, edited by Oxford Emeritus Douglas Gray. In his preface, Gray sets out his objective: to help students of English Literature deal with the transition from Old English to Middle English (vii). He crafted this volume with teaching in mind, hoping to fill the “unfortunate gap,” often perpetuated by undergraduate courses and readers alike, in the annals of literary writing in England from the Conquest to the mid-fourteenth century. He hopes to make the trove of twelfth- and thirteenth- century literature available to modern scholars and students, adding that perhaps some of them will be enticed to learn the languages and regain some of the linguistic expertise he perceives as absent in the modern academy. Gray’s aims are thus pedagogical, and with this excellent volume it is likely that he will have achieved all of them.

From the Norman Conquest to the Black Death contains excerpts from around one hundred texts, divided by the editor into thirty genre- or author-specific chapters (e.g. “Science, Learning, and Instructive Stories”; “Short Romances and Lais: Marie de France”; “Wonders of the East: Mandeville’s Travels”), comprising nearly five hundred and fifty pages of text. Each chapter includes an introduction to its texts, authors and contexts, explaining the place of the subjects within the history of English literature, the contexts of their composition, and the difficulties or problems in working with them. In addition to the chapter headings, each text is accompanied by a brief history of its author and composition; each excerpt is also given context within the larger works via accompanying notes.

In addition to the texts, Gray offers an introduction intended to provide what he calls a “cultural background” to the literary flowering of his anthology’s three-century span. He views the Conquest through the more cautious lens of modern historiography: a trying time, but one of as much continuity—notably in language, religion, and law—as changes. The ambivalent meanings of the Conquest play out in his first chapter, which gives a sampling of the multivalent responses to the Conquest by authors in the immediate aftermath. He follows Robert Bartlett’s thesis on the expansion of a core European culture in the central Middle Ages (The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change: 950–1350 [Princeton 1993]), but while Bartlett does not explicitly include Anglo-Norman England in this expansion, Gray does.

Gray also introduces the linguistic currents that lead to the trilingual developments in English literature in the period: Latin, used by clerks for history, theology, philosophy, religious instruction, devotion, science, but also tales and satires, lyrics, and plays; Anglo-Norman, often ahead of its continental counterparts, used for verse, fables, fabliaux, plays, lyrics, lays, and romances; English continuing and changing across the period, with writing in English slowly emerging and eventually matching the quality of works in Latin and Anglo-Norman (1). Gray muses on the issue of multilingualism, suggesting there was “a fair amount,” but positing from evidence that the barriers scholars have perceived between groups of different language speakers are largely specious (5).

Gray ties the political history of England, particularly expansion in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries into Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (which he considers to be an insular version of general medieval “Europeanization”), to the cultural history of literature. He argues that the sense of a “society on the move,” responses to contact with the Celtic world at the frontiers and the Jewish communities at home, and reactions to Arabic science, Greek learning, and the distant stories of the East all appear in some form in the literature of the period. He further sees the twelfth century as a period in which the self was not invented, but found new expression in literary forms (9).

Gray’s explicit goal is a readable, clear anthology...