The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337–1600 by Joanna Bellis (review)

It is perhaps surprising to realize that there is as yet no standard account of something called "the literature of the Hundred Years War." Many studies of medieval literature consider texts that were written between 1337 and 1453, the years conventionally designated by modern historians as the Hundred Years War between England and France, but the concept of a distinctive category of literature belonging to or defined by this particular war is something relatively new, first signaled in slightly different terms by Ardis Butterfield in her 2009 book, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War.

The title of Joanna Bellis's book, The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337–1600, both stakes a claim to this literature and sets a bold upper limit on its period. Following the fashion for crossing the boundary between medieval and early modern literature, Bellis takes her study up to the staging of Tudor history plays, by Shakespeare and others, in the 1590s. Another of her strategies is to sidestep much of the canonical writing of the period in favor of less familiar texts, and this gives the book a welcome freshness. Her discussion, for example, of two Latin satires of the fourteenth century reveals the extent to which humorous caricatures of both the French and the English were based on the sounds of their respective languages, with French denounced as being soft and effeminate and English perceived to be "foul as pitch" (p. 110).

These strategies result in a book that, though not a conventional account or survey of literature about the Hundred Years War, interrogates numerous texts that concern themselves explicitly with the long unfolding of the conflict. Chronicles, political poetry, sixteenth-century poetry, and Elizabethan drama of the 1590s form the bedrock of the book, paved over with passing references to Chaucer, Lydgate, Spenser, and many others. Bellis's scholarship and impressive breadth of reading is on display on every page.

The main argument of the book is focused not specifically on literature but, like Butterfield's book, on language. For Bellis, the battleground where French and English fight it out is the English language, starting with the original offensive of 1066. The first chapter covers this prequel, from the Norman Conquest to the beginnings of the wars with France, establishing the link between language and conquest that underpins much of the textual criticism that follows. Bellis argues that "French was at the heart of English identity, culturally and linguistically, from 1066 until at least the fifteenth century, but the Hundred Years War made England's heteroglossia politically embarrassing" (p. 17). In other words, the long wars against France made the linguistic embrace of French words into the English vernacular, and the continued use of French by élites in England, somewhat ironic, an irony not lost on English literary commentators of the time who tried to bluff it out with assertions of "aggressive xenophobia" against the French (p. 47).

Like Butterfield and Thorlac Turville-Petre before her (in his 1996 book, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340), Bellis pursues with great tenacity the connections between language and nationalism articulated in the texts she examines. Chapter 2, focusing on chronicles and political writing produced during the conflict, shows how the foundations of linguistic nationalism were laid during the fourteenth century when the English language was vigorously promoted as the "national" language of England, despite the fact that French was already deeply embedded within it. Bellis shows that many writers, including Robert Mannyng and Thomas Usk, commented on a register of English that they called "strange Inglis," glossed by Bellis as "something unfamiliar, foreign, embellished and frenchified" (p. 68), and therefore almost incomprehensible to the average English speaker. Such a register of English represents the ambivalence and contradictions of the language as a marker of national identity, leaving many writers "uneasy about exactly where its boundaries lay" (p. 71).

The...