Response

Response David Wallace University of Pennsylvania Abook of such bulk as this Cambridge History loves its readers , particularly hardy individuals—such as these five reviewers—who persist to the end. Most readers will dip into the volume occasionally, making a backdoor approach via Barbara Hird’s fine index (recently the recipient of the Library Association Award). But the volume and its contributors always hoped for the kind of seriatim readings attempted here and are thus most grateful. It is interesting to note that the reviewers evaluate the volume more as a Platonic idea collectively sprung from the mind of its author rather than as a material object, fashioned and determined by very specific commercial and institutional constraints. Fiona Somerset sees the volume providing ‘‘a sort of snapshot of Medieval English literary studies at the turn of the century.’’ Since the book took almost a decade to produce, a whole-plate camera affords a better analogy (with poses held for years, rather than seconds). The founding assumptions of the book might thus be traced to the early nineties rather than to millennium’s end. Filing cabinets full of early discarded plans and urgent correspondence attest to the insecurities of that moment. It was proposed, for example, that five professional historians should write ‘‘ribbing chapters ’’ to hold us in or keep us together or somehow stop us from collapsing like an ill-made barrel. Such was our lack of confidence, then, as litterati ‘‘doing history’’ that we felt the need for real historians to come in (as Derek Pearsall put it, in a private letter) like ‘‘fatal bellmen,’’ telling us what’s what. Things have shifted dramatically since then: literary scholars have struggled to imagine literariness as epiphenomenal of greater historical processes—thus closing the divide implicit in the well-worn ‘‘texts and contexts’’ formula—while historians have shown some willingness to acknowledge the fundamentally text-based character of their most characteristic disciplinary act, namely, narrativizing. 513 ................. 8972$$ CH20 11-01-10 12:22:55 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER And in the United States, now, many litterati find themselves de facto the closest thing to a medieval historian on campus. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, the History department no longer seriously teaches or researches English history at any level (but no decade of America’s immediate past shall lack its specialist). While agitating for the hiring of English historians (and while yet recognizing History’s global remit), English professors struggle perforce toward historical competence: an agon recorded in many of the chapters, and in many of the abortive drafts, of this history. Similar struggles await literary medievalists in England, given recent dramatic shrinkages of period teaching in English secondary (high) schools: undergraduates tend to arrive in their first year with ‘‘no sense of span,’’ since the national curriculum after key stage 3 encourages the majority of pupils to study ‘‘Hitler, Hitler, and again Hitler.’’1 As a material object, then, and in its sense of urgency about matters historical, this History reflects the competencies, limits, and developmental moment both of its practitioners and its publisher. The original draft was a glorious thing, envisioning some sixty-three chapters of varying length, some ambitiously long and some (Jewish writing, Cornwall ) arrestingly short, thorns in the side of the main account. This draft made it as far as the pre-Syndics meeting, where the plan was thought overambitious: thirty chapters of equal length were surely preferable. After some negotiation, limited variation of length was reestablished and a principle of selective coauthorship introduced; the original draft was thus left to languish in the filing cabinet like one of those Renaissance drawings of the Ideal City. Sad to say, Cambridge University Press was right about this: had we persisted with the original design we might all still be at work. There were, of course, some losses—such as the attention to regionalism sought by Chris Chism. And yet my sense is that in 1990 we were hardly competent to attempt such regionally specific analysis; for it is perhaps disappointing how slowly the kinds of skills suggested by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English have been taken up in the cause of...