University of Southern Denmark European Literature and Book History in the Middle Ages, c. 600-c. 1450 Mortensen, Lars Boje Published in: Oxford Research Encyclopedias DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.284 Publication date: 2018 Document version: Final published version Citation for pulished version (APA): Mortensen, L. B. (2018). European Literature and Book History in the Middle Ages, c. 600-c. 1450. In Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.284 Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. 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Sep. 2021 European Literature and Book History in the Middle Ages, c. 600-c. 1450 Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature European Literature and Book History in the Middle Ages, c. 600-c. 1450 Lars Boje Mortensen Subject: Italian Language Literature, Literary Studies (early and medieval), German and Scandinavian Literatures Online Publication Date: Apr 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.284 Summary and Keywords Medieval European literature is both broader and deeper in its basis than what is usually offered in literary histories with their focus only on a narrow canon and on vernacular languages. One way to see this bigger canvas is to consider technical and statistical book- historical factors together with the authority of the two Roman Empires (Western and Eastern) and of their religious hierarchies (the papacy and the patriarchate). A coordinated reading of developments in the Latin West and the Greek East—though rarely directly related—brings out some main features of intellectual and literary life in most of Europe. With this focus, a literary chronology emerges—as a supplement to existing narratives based on either national or formal (genre) concerns: the period c. 600 to c. 1450 can be considered a unity in book-historical terms, namely the era dominated the hand-written codex. It is also delimited by the fate of the Roman Empire with the Latin West effectively separated from the Greek Empire by c. 600 and the end of Constantinople in 1453. Within this broad framework, three distinctive phases of book- and intellectual history can be discerned: the exegetical (c. 600–c. 1050), the experimental (c. 1050–c. 1300), and the critical (c. 1300–c. 1450). These three headings should be understood as a shorthand for what was new in each phase, not as a general characteristic, especially because exegesis in various forms continued to lie at the heart of reading and writing books in all relevant languages. Keywords: Europe, Middle Ages, empires, papacy, literature, intellectual history, book history, Latin, Greek, vernacular, Rome, Constantinople If an unprepared modern reader opens one of the late medieval canonical works by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), Christine de Pizan (1364–c. 1430), or François Villon (1431–1463), s/he will immediately recognize them as “literature”: strongly authored as well as multi-voiced, fictional, or lyrical, and written in a “national” language and clearly intended both to entertain and to connect critically, ethically, and emotionally with a Page 1 of 28 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 April 2018 European Literature and Book History in the Middle Ages, c. 600-c. 1450 mixed audience. These towering figures are indeed symptomatic of specific late medieval developments, but their canonicity in the modern age also works to hide a vast spectrum of verbal art and intellectual and emotional insights before, below, and beside them. In what sense is medieval Europe a valid literary geography and chronology? Prominent postwar endeavors of taking a European view of medieval literature by Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach saw Western, Latin Europe as the obvious unit to investigate. Byzantium and the entire Orthodox world of Eastern Europe was bypassed as irrelevant, not to speak of Arab and Hebrew writing on the European continent.1 Even the eastern and northern periphery of Latin Europe, such as Scandinavia (including Iceland and the entire Baltic area), Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, and Palestine, was in practice excluded. The rich Arab (and Hebrew) literary heritage in Spain was also sidelined in mainstream scholarship until a groundbreaking book by María Rosa Menocal from 1987, and only in recent decades is this being researched and presented as an integral part of Spanish and European writing.2 In the more recent surge of European views, a much more inclusive approach has thus been adopted, most clearly in the extraordinary recent survey edited by David Wallace; still Europe defies strict definition, as intersecting networks and cultural transfers across the Mediterranean or involving, farther afield, Armenia, Georgia, or even Persia and India remain relevant for any story on a European level.3 Nation-states and a post-2004 vision of Europe (after the large expansion of the EU) are both modern impositions; but so is “Christendom,” excluding pagans, Muslims, and Jews living on what is otherwise treated as uncontested “European” soil; in addition, Christian communities existed throughout the period in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Furthermore, Christendom in Europe provided little perceived unity: strong heretical movements and the predominantly poor communication and lack of respect between papal and Greek Orthodox camps provide clear testimony to the contrary. That being said, by far the most writing included even in a generous definition of European literature was under the spell of two sets of texts coming out of antiquity, both mediated and spread by the Roman Empire: (1) the Bible and its innumerable paratexts (paraphrases, commentaries, theology, liturgy, etc.), and (2) ancient Roman (and Greek) imperial history and myth, including the ubiquitous tale of Troy and histories/tales of Alexander. A continuous engagement with these two sets of texts did broadly characterize literature within European Christendom as well as played defining—if partly negatively delimiting—roles for scholarship and literature within European Muslim and Jewish communities.4 Co-reading developments in the Latin West and the Greek East (defined as spheres of a dominating, “imperial” written language and of Roman and Greek rites) enables a reading of comparable literary- and book-historical trajectories for the whole sphere of European Christendom, even if this only rarely can be understood in terms of direct exchange between East and West.5 Page 2 of 28 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 April 2018 European Literature and Book History in the Middle Ages, c. 600-c. 1450 As a designator of the period between c. 500 and 1500, “medieval” is a category that many specialists would prefer to leave behind (however unrealistic at the beginning of the 21st century); it helps to reify a remarkably diverse and dynamic millennium as a static period, and carries either highly negative or strongly exoticizing connotations, both incessantly recirculated by contemporary popular visual culture and both unhelpful in each their way. In the context of books, literature, and intellectual culture, however, the period from c. 600 to c. 1450 can be seen as a meaningful entity for most parts of the wider European space; this chronology is worked out as an alternative to the many competing chronologies of the national canons, languages, or literary forms, or of national or dynastic political chronologies. It should be seen as a supplement to these other periodizations and is adopted here as an attempt to balance book-historical factors with intellectual and political history in a wider European geography. It is based on a conviction that literary history must hand a large role to media studies—in this case book history—and that the more technical and statistical aspects of book history must, in turn, be supplemented with one or more relevant parameters that are informed by the contents of books. The guiding line here is the connection between book history, textual authority, and the political and religious universal powers: the Roman Empire of the East and of the West, including the patriarchate and the unique institution of the papacy. This obviously tilts the attention toward certain core areas of Europe and toward books written in Greek and Latin, but this vantage