Invention and Authorship in Medieval England by Robert R. Edwards (review)

This valuable study posits an anatomy of the discursive field of literary authorship in medieval England from the wake of the Norman Conquest to the humanist turn of the early sixteenth century, considered within a multilingual (Latin, Anglo-French, and Middle English) but not regional (Scots, Welsh, Norse) framework. Such a wide-ranging scope, together with an unapologetic focus on the "literary"—defined as "a primary rather than instrumental commitment to imagination, expression, and the allusive resources of language"—results in a study that is rather differently oriented from important recent considerations of Latin and vernacular literary theory and medieval Scholastic conceptions of authorship (by Alastair Minnis, Rita Copeland, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and others), even as it builds generously on such work (xii). Edwards's principles of selection, which center on texts displaying a "self-reflexive, performative negotiation of authorship," particularly those that foreground creative imitation, structurally favor the Chaucerian tradition of courtly writing (and elide, somewhat peremptorily, counter-traditions such as the Langlandian) (xiv). Accordingly, the axis of this study is a stimulating series of readings of the well-studied literary output of Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. The author's commanding expertise in the intersections among classical tradition and multiple vernaculars yields an especially illuminating treatment of the layered influences behind major installments in authorial self-fashioning such as Lydgate's Troy Book, discussed in Chapter 7. At the same time, Edwards's long-view approach and emphasis on the canonical are nuanced by his assertion of the impossibility of tracing "a unitary history of authorship in medieval England," highlighting instead the fragmentary, provisional, and performative nature of literary authority in a cultural milieu inflected by the linguistic and institutional displacement wrought by the Conquest and the continual sifting of disparate languages and literary traditions (xxviii). To account for this decenteredness, this book advances a series of micro-histories of English authorial practice, considered both diegetically and as a function of social or institutional contexts. What emerges is a characterization of early English authorship, conscious of itself as such, as agential, revisionary, belated, and reflexive, ultimately serving as an enabling construct, however submerged, for Renaissance literary negotiations.

Invention and Authorship in Medieval England begins with a "Prelude" that establishes the historical and conceptual terms of the study by considering, somewhat unusually, the liminal case of Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People concertedly appropriates principles of classical authorship within a Christian institutional framework (the lexicon of which is further developed in its Old English translation) and, in its account of Caedmon, triangulates the mechanism of authorship against fruitful grace and wasteful fiction. Edwards regards the latter as rehabilitated, and Bede's lexicon of authorship vindicated, in the new kinds of social value acquired by literary writing after the Conquest, beginning in the court of Henry II. Thus, Walter Map's De nugis curialium, the subject of Chapter 1, is read as a polyglot satire with a deep concern for the performative dimensions of authorship and the domain of readership. The Welshman's somewhat marginal position as an observer of, and adviser to, the Angevin court rhetorically shapes what is here designated "counter-authorship," or a position of "committed alterity, incompleteness, and subordination" that stands as an oblique—and proto-Chaucerian—instantiation of English authorial agency (16).

Chapter 2 contends with the paradoxical status of Map's contemporary Marie de France as an Anglo-Norman writer who exists, in her self-inscriptions, solely as an author-function or "signature." In particular, the chapter dwells on her creative appropriation of Ovidian literary precedent through an ambitious program of translatio. First, it usefully canvasses Marie's paratextual comments on her authorial role, literary transmission, and cultural preservation. Proceeding from this is an adroit analysis of Marie's Ovidianism, in which is identified a strategic, even subversive, reprisal of Ovid's amatory poetry in accordance with the demands of a distinct cultural milieu. Refreshingly, Marie is...