Medieval Literature for Children (review)

Daniel Kline's well-edited book of sixteen essays, each by a different authority and accompanied by the medieval text to which it refers, is an important milestone in the ongoing rediscovery of children's literature prior to the printed book. I anticipated learning much from this work, and I was not disappointed. Nevertheless, a more accurate title might be Medieval Literature Associated with Children. As Kline recognizes in his fine introduction, determining whether a text was written or rewritten for children and actually read by them is not an easy task, and the evidence is often ambiguous. He defines "medieval" as roughly 476 (the Fall of Rome) to 1517 (the Reformation) and "children" from infancy through adolescence; he does not exclude a mixed child-adult audience (4-5). Kline divides his collection into five sections: Didactic and Moral Literature, Courtesy and Conduct Literature, Educational and Instructional Literature, Religious Literature, and Entertainment and Popular Literature.

The difficulty I have with this collection is not the scholarship of the individual contributors. What bothers me is that some authors do not make absolutely clear where the problems lie when they make their claims for children's literature. Some of the works presented in this volume, such as The Book of the Knight of the Tower' Ælfric's Colloquy, Le Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth (with a most welcome translation from the Anglo-Norman), The Babees Book' Plimpton MS 258 ("A Schoolchild's Primer"), Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe' and the school play Occupation and Idleness quite clearly indicate children as a primary audience. Moreover, I find Mary E. Shaner's evidence for the editing for children of a version of the fifteenth-century romance Sir Gowther in Advocates MS. 19.3.1 most convincing.

On the other hand, the first essay by William F. Hodnap, "The Fables of Avianus," includes the letter commending his fables to a "Theodosius" at the beginning of his translation. Although there is plenty of evidence that the Avianus fables (circa 400 AD) became a staple of elementary education in the medieval period, what Hodnap should have made clearer is that they were written for an adult audience and dedicated to a contemporary author, [Macrobius] Theodosius, or, less likely, the Emperor Theodosius; in either case, an adult. The difficulties Avianus' fables might present to beginning readers is, curiously enough, illustrated by Hodnap's useful discussion of the fable of the tortoise and the eagle and its rewriting by Alexander Neckham in the twelfth century (Kline 16-19). Avianus puts his verbs in the imperfect and perfect subjunctive in what Charles Bennett's New Latin Grammar calls "Supposed Case Represented as Contrary to Fact" (200), a construction that might give beginners pause, while Neckham, demonstrating the medieval educational practice of having students compose expanded and contracted versions of fables, uses simpler future indicative constructions and shorter phrases.

Avianus' fables are readily available, for example in the Loeb Library. On the other hand, the text of Theodulus' Eclogues (10th century), another medieval educational staple and "arguably the most important pastoral poem between Vergil and Mantuan" (Kline 188), is harder to obtain, particularly with a translation. Patrick Cook finds the poem was composed to appeal to a double audience, and his analysis of how it works differently for adults and for children, introducing the latter to "the mythological heritage of pagan antiquity and the major stories of the Old Testament" (188) is impressive. Cook's translation of this 352-line Latin poem is clear and reads well.

A much later work, the British fourteenth-century 608-line poem Ypotis, likewise introduces its audience through a question and answer sequence to doctrinal questions; some classify it as a type of catechism. As it belongs to the wise child tradition, is overtly didactic and metrically, and thematically unsophisticated, it is tempting to call the Ypotis children's literature. Judith Deitch's careful examination of its manuscript contexts, however, leads her to conclude that its appeal is to an unlearned audience including youth, and "that Ypotis is medieval...