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Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291 Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215 Abstract The last ten years have seen a swathe of revisionary scholarship on the afterlife of Old English texts in the twelfth century. This article places this research beside work on the earliest Middle English texts and contemporary writing in Latin and French to suggest that the time is now ripe for a new, synthetic literary history of the period. In particular, the article identifies three key aspects of post-Conquest literary culture which have been neglected because they chafe against the conventional paradigms of literary history, with its expectation of a literature national, monolingual and constantly original. The twelfth- century norms, by contrast, were regionalism, multilingualism, and the habitual recycling of older texts. Medievalists must insist these differences should inform wider discussions about the form and purpose of literary history in the twenty-first century. 1 Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint 1066, as Sellars’ and Yeatman’s brilliant parody of textbook history recognised, was the one date in English history every schoolboy knew, a shorthand cipher for a canonical series of dramatic and mostly negative changes which followed inevitably from the Norman Conquest.1 Yet while today’s historians have begun to ask whether the date still matters (Bates ‘1066’; see also Chibnall Debate on the Norman Conquest; Thomas Norman Conquest; Garnett; as well as van Houts ‘Memory of 1066’; Otter on the date’s significance to medieval writers), for literary histories like David Wallace’s Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, 1066 remains ‘a solid bookend of English history’ (Wallace xxi; see also Chism et al.), keeping Old and Middle English literature securely apart. While Anglo-Saxonists of the last ten years have problematised this periodisation by demonstrating that ‘Old’ English texts continued to be read long after the arrival of William and his troops, this is yet to be reflected in literary histories.2 Though the value of writing literary history has itself been questioned in recent years, its defenders have emphasised its role in signalling the consolidation of a field of study (Hutcheon; see also Perkins Theoretical Issues; Is Literary History Possible?; Brown; and the other essays collected by Hutcheon and Valdés). Traditionally, the principal task of literary history is to explain where, why, and how authors wrote the texts they did (Valdés 95). This is a particularly arduous task for the long twelfth century. Post-Conquest Britain was a tri-, even multilingual, society with a literature to match. For this survey at least, it is axiomatic that English literature comprises all texts written in Britain regardless of the language in which they are inscribed.3 Despite this inclusive definition, the article focuses principally on texts actually composed in English, partly for reasons of space, but also because these English language texts offer the most vigorous challenge to the paradigmatic methodologies of literary history. The start- and end-points of this study of English literature in the long twelfth century have been chosen provocatively as a challenge to canonical periodisations. They do not purport to mark definitive watersheds in English literary history. Beginning in 1042 with the accession of the Normandy-raised Edward the Confessor emphasises that English contacts with Normandy predated the Conquest (Musset ‘Apports anglais’; Lewis), contacts which gave a European outlook to much eleventh-century English writing (Tyler ‘Fictions of 2 Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint Family’; ‘Talking about History’; ‘Vita Ædwardi’; ‘OE to OF’; van Houts ‘Flemish Contribution’). The article elects to end in 1215 with the Fourth Lateran Council which introduced mandatory auricular confession and (literary history holds) gave special impetus to the production of vernacular religious texts (Watson 828; Millett ‘Ancrene Wisse Group’ esp. 9-13) even though the extensive twelfth-century interest in English language homilies challenges any attempt to treat it as an originary moment. The period between 1066 and 1200, or indeed 1042 and 1215, has typically been described as transitional, witnessing, on the one hand, the gradual death of the Old English tradition, and, on the other, its mutation into early Middle English literature (Georgianna ‘Coming to Terms’; Georgianna ‘Periodization and Politics’; Cannon ‘Between the Old and the Middle’). Mid-twentieth-century literary histories were generally Whig in tone and emphasised continuity (Chambers; Wilson Sawles Warde v-xxx; Lost Literature; on the Whig model, see Butterfield) on the strength of the fourteenth-century alliterative revival and presumed connections between the Katherine Group and Old English prose, but both arguments are now discredited (Hanna ‘Alliterative Poetry’; Bethurum; Millett ‘Continuity of Old English Prose’; ‘Katherine Group and Alliterative Tradition’; ‘Discontinuity of English Prose’). Other critics have emphasised the discontinuity of the period. Christopher Cannon began his recent monograph with a chapter melodramatically entitled ‘The Loss of Literature: 1066’ where he finds ‘sudden silencing is not the exception, but the rule’ (Cannon Grounds 19). To thus advocate rupture is to ignore the substantial evidence that English was an important literary language in the trilingual twelfth century. By contrast, disproportionately to emphasise the very limited continuities so far traced between Old and Early Middle English texts (cautiously surveyed by Frankis ‘La3amon's English Sources’; Morrison ‘Orm's English Sources’; ‘Reminiscence of Wulfstan’; ‘Continuité et innovation littéraire’), as scholars like Chambers did, does nothing to explain why the latter appear, or choose to appear, ‘profound[ly] isolat[ed] from immediate models and examples, from any local precedent for the writing of English’ (Cannon Grounds 2). Consequently recent studies by Seth Lerer, Thomas Hahn and Elaine Treharne have traced a delicate balance of continuity and innovation, with Treharne arguing for a post-colonial approach to the twelfth century which sees English surviving against the odds as ‘a literature of resistance’ (Lerer; Hahn; Treharne ‘Categorization, Periodization’ 269).4 Any future literary history will need to 3 Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint emphasise the ever-dynamic efforts of twelfth-century writers to define the English vernacular with and against the other literary languages of a multilingual Britain. The first stage in rewriting the literary history of the long twelfth century is necessarily to assemble the corpus of English literature extant from between 1042 and 1215 (literature is here taken to encompass anything recorded in writing). Texts in Latin, the most prestigious literary language of the period, are inventoried in Richard Sharpe’s Handlist (see also Rigg History); texts in French in Ruth Dean’s Anglo-Norman Literature (a new edition of which is promised by Daron Burrows; see also Woledge and Clive). Twelfth-century Anglo- Norman literature, precocious in comparison with French writing on the continent (Short ‘Patrons and Polyglots’; ‘Language and Literature’; Howlett), is receiving ever-increasing attention thanks to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s French of England project (Watson and Wogan-Browne; Wogan-Browne et al.; also Ingram). Alongside Latin, French and English were spoken a range of other languages including Welsh, Cornish, Old Norse and Flemish, which occasionally penetrate the written record.5 There is no comparable handlist of English language texts from the long twelfth century.6 This is due to a variety of factors, including the impermeable boundaries habitually erected between ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English, the tendency to treat twelfth-century homilies as debased copies of older works rather than texts in their own right, the difficulties attendant on dating works securely. Collections of early Middle English writing have typically anthologised only a very narrow selection of texts composed during this period (Hall; Dickins and Wilson; Bennett and Smithers; Gray), but, a decade after the publication of Swan and Treharne’s field-defining Rewriting Old English, any new literary history must also take into account earlier English texts copied, remediated and revised during the long twelfth century. The following survey, though not exhaustive, is the first to incorporate such works alongside new compositions. Verse is distinguished from prose in the confidence that there are significant formal differences between the media, despite the existence of a number of interstitial texts (though cf. Savage). To judge from surviving manuscripts, English verse was substantially less widely read than prose in this period as earlier. Nonetheless, Henry of Huntingdon judged the earlier the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems worthy of translation for inclusion in his Historia anglorum, registering that Brunanburh was in verse (Rigg ‘Metrical Experiments’; Greenway v. 19), and 4 Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint the late Abingdon, Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles found room for a number of new
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