1000–1350: Conquest and Transformation by Laura Ashe (review)

This volume is the first in a new series summarizing English literary history whose mission is "to undertake a critical investigation of the very notion of a national literary heritage" (p. vii). Few periods of recorded English history are more ripe for this sort of investigation than that running from 1000 to 1350. These years witness first the Danish and then the Norman Conquest, the Anarchy, the reigns of the Angevins, and the era of Magna Carta and the Barons' Wars, and it ends on the cusp of the Black Death. These events surround a lull in the manuscript record of English language literature, whose lowest ebb is more or less precisely that era of European history Charles Homer Haskins provocatively called "the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century" (1927). Accordingly, the (apparent) diminution of English language output at this time corresponds to an (apparent) efflorescence of Anglo-Norman and Latin writing in England, whose most important examples are often not literary but bureaucratic—for example, the Domesday book and the Dialogue of the Exchequer, now commonly remembered as the first census and the first accounting manual, respectively, to be produced in medieval Europe.

Already, then, it should be clear that there are so many fascinatingly particular stories to tell about the texts that arose in this period's many linguistic, regional, and otherwise localized contexts, that it leads one to question the very desirability of a synthetic approach to the period, especially since the lack of an obvious through-line is a likely reason that it has been so overlooked for so long by the field. Introductory classes in English literature routinely skip from Beowulf to Chaucer without acknowledging how this leaves out at least as many years of English history as transpired between The Canterbury Tales and Pride and Prejudice (1813). The incoherence of the logic that would construct a canon around such a gaping lacuna instantiates the incoherence attending the processes of canon formation generally, especially when such canons are constructed to reinforce received notions of a particular nation's supposed greatness.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the general editors of the series appear to be more interested in interrogating the category of "literature" than they are in interrogating the category of "national heritage," as we may see in their decision to limit most of their volumes to surveys of works in English. They recognize, however, that such limitations are untenable in a survey of writing from 1000 to 1350, not least because of the rapid transformations occurring in the English language itself at this time. Ashe's literary history considers a well-chosen selection of Latin, Old Norse, and French works alongside Old and Early Middle English ones, across a wide array of genres: homilies, saints' lives, anchoritic codes, chronicles, romances, occasional verse, and more. The extraordinary range of materials surveyed here and the obvious erudition of the author ensures that this volume will remain an important touchstone for years, as the traditional periodization of "Old" and "Middle" English give way to new literary histories, abandoning their predecessors' circular questions about how England became the seat of such a successful empire for more pluralistic, globally decentred investigations.

The volume organizes its material around the concept of "interiority" and the development of "the self" (p. 95), themes that demonstrate Ashe's broader tendency to find in the twelfth century the roots of the same cultural and philosophical developments that new historicists like Lee Patterson and Stephen Greenblatt have attached rather to the late medieval and early modern periods, respectively. The volume begins with Wulfstan, Ælfric, the versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and The Battle of Maldon, and it describes the literature of this period as "a literature of trauma" (p. 14), characterized by the "profoundly un-, or even anti-ethical" (p. 88) emphasis of agents of "the Church" on the individual's relationship to God, over and above interpersonal relationships. Ashe argues that this emphasis in Old English writing...