The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 by David Matthews (review)

REVIEWS inviting, and a great deal to build on for scholars interested in the historical turn. David Matthews University of Newcastle, Australia David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910. Medieval Cultures, vol. 18. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. xxxviii, 234. $39.95. ‘‘On the fifth of June, 1835, in the Royal Hotel at Pisa, in Italy, a young man styling himself Baron Eunice de la Batut died of hard living . . .’’ (p. 3). And so on. We feel we know where we are when a book on the emergence of Middle English studies in England begins in this way, and are not surprised when the opening chapters, on Percy, Ritson, and Scott, are propped up with some hastily erected theoretical apparatus having to do with ‘‘the technology of the self.’’ This phrase from Foucault seems to be used to describe the way in which Percy, Ritson, and Scott used medieval literature to advance their prospects and get on in life and achieve some sort of ‘‘selfhood’’—except that Ritson failed, and went mad. As an application of cultural theory, this doesn’t look too promising. Elsewhere, Bourdieu is wheeled out to explain in other, more opaque words how people with no aristocratic background will do unusual things to get themselves accepted (p. 5) or how aristocratic interest in medieval literature was a form of cultivated leisure activity (pp. 102–3). He provides the broad generalizations under which particular observations may be housed. This, I suppose, is what’s called ‘‘theorizing the subject.’’ Fortunately, there is no evidence that this top-dressing of theory has much affected the actual writing of the book, or the way the research for it has been conducted. Livestock have to be preened and trimmed and soaped up before they go on to win prizes at the show. It pleases the public, but doesn’t change the basic cow. This is in fact an interesting, readable, and well-researched book on a fascinating subject. Matthews writes well, doesn’t expect too much (or indeed much of any) specialized or previous knowledge, explains things clearly, and has an eye for the telling detail—for instance, how the history of his subject is epitomized in the shift from Madden’s edition of 579 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:29 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Havelok for the gentleman amateurs of the Roxburghe Club in 1828 to Skeat’s reedition of the poem for the more broadly based Early English Text Society in 1868. The subject is the history of the scholarly study and editing of Middle English from the time it first got under way after the publication of Percy’s Reliques in 1765 until it can be said to be firmly established when Middle English became a set subject in universities about the time Furnivall died in 1910. To the question of why we should bother with outdated and superseded scholarship, Matthews replies that judgments about ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘improvement’’ are precisely made from the positions established by the scholarship now rejected. Nothing is ‘‘superseded.’’ This is a just and generous observation— though there are moments, in some of the stodgier rehearsals of past silliness and ignorance, when one might think that some things are better forgotten. To the question of why Chaucer is left out (at least until the penultimate chapter), Matthews gives an answer that is impossible to disagree with: because the study of Chaucer during the early part of this period was ‘‘not so much the study of a great medieval poet as of a great English poet who happened to live in the Middle Ages’’ (p. 30). What Matthews really wants to do—and maybe ‘‘the technology of the self’’ gave him an excuse that he felt he needed—is to write about people and what they did and why they did it. He gives a vivid account of the career of Thomas Percy, and how his discovery of the manuscript that bears his name coincided with his ‘‘discovery’’ that he himself was descended from a Percy long gone. He sent a copy of the Reliques to the Countess of Northumberland and was soon dining with the...