Abstract
The story of the study of romance is in many ways the master narrative of the study of medieval literature and of medieval culture in general. Within the study of medieval romance, from its earliest inception, is a peculiar political dialectic, involving fantasies of race, gender, and power. The definition of romance in England (and elsewhere) starts with an obsession with origins, as one would expect of a genre of doubtful legitimacy. Inscribed in the description of romance from the earliest days of its study is a deep suspicion of its parentage. On one side, romance is imagined as indigenous, national, and local, as a form of history before historical consciousness takes shape. On the other side, the origin of romance is imagined as identical with the origins of fiction itself, and these origins are described with the imagery of otherness, which in the eighteenth century at least, meant a version of Orientalism. As with the literature of courtly love in the late nineteenth century, something so socially problematic is described as having originated elsewhere, probably from Arabic poetry through Moorish Spain. Warton’s History of English Poetry in fact begins with the assumption that medieval literature, and Western fiction in general, is energized by the contact of Saracen and Crusader. Pierre-Daniel Huet’s (1630–1721) influential treatise on romance was translated into English in the eighteenth century, and repeats the speculation that romance has its origins in Moorish influence upon Spain, but generally regards fiction itself, with its layers of allegory and rhetoric, as born in the East, infiltrating the West through various routes.1
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Notes
Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1886), 43.
Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica with an English Translation, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 450–51.
It is a passage which stands as a talisman to medieval rhetoricians such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf who is not entirely precise as to its warnings: “Et ita vitabimus vitium illud quod apellatur incongrua partium positio . . . Quod vitium tangit Horatius in Poetria sub his verbis” (Documentum de arte versifi-candi II.3.154–5) in Edmond Faral, Les Arts Poétiques Du XIIe et Du XIIIe Siècle (Paris: É. Champion, 1924).
Giorgio Vasari, Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari (Firenze: Sansoni, 1973), 137.
An important history of ideas of the Gothic is Paul Frankl, The Gothic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960).
On the gendering of the imagination in general, see Marie Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993); for Bakhtin on Vasari, see
M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1968), 33.
Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
John Aubrey, Chronologia Architectonica, p. 186 cited in Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), 162. I have relied on Hunter’s transcriptions of the Chronologia, included in the manuscript of the widely known and published Monumenta Britannica, Bodleian MS Top. Gen. C. 25, ff-152–79. For an important contextualization of Aubrey in terms of the appreciation of Gothic architecture, see
Howard Colvin, Essays in English Architectural History (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1999), 206–16.
See Christopher Hill, Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill, ed. D.H. Pennington (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1982), 50–122; R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest.
See Samuel Kliger, “‘The ‘Goths’ in England: An Introduction to the Gothic Vogue in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Discussion,’” Modern Philology 43 (1945): 107–17.
Quoted in Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley: an Eighteenth-Century Antiquary. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 24. See Alexander Gordon, Itinerarium Septentrionale or, A Journey Thro’Most of the Counties of Scotland, and Those in the North of England (London: Printed for the author and sold by G Strahan etc., 1726).
See Jordanes, Iordanis Romana et Getica, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Inde Ab Anno Christi Quingentesimo Usque Ad Annum Millesimum et Quingentesimum. (Berlin: Weidman, 1882). For a modern English translation, see Jordanes, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version (Cambridge; New York: Speculum Historiale; Barnes & Noble, 1966).
A convenient translation is Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla the Norse King Sagas, trans. Samuel Laing (London: J.M. Dent, 1930).
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. Arthur Brodeur (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916).
Widukind, Rerum Gestarum Saxonicarum Libri Tres, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1989).
See Heinrich Hübsch, In What Style Should we Build?: The German Debate on Architectural Style, trans. Wolfgang Herrmann (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992). Interestingly, the use of the adjective “Barbaric” in such contexts was proscribed during the Nazi era in Germany.
On Romanticism and Orientalism, especially in relation to the rise of empire, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Filiz Turhan, The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings About the Ottoman Empire, Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
On the politics of medievalism, see Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) and
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). The story of popular medievalism and chivalric nostalgia in the nineteenth century has been well told by Girouard. Girouard is especially helpful in detailing the influence of chivalric ideals upon the “Young Englanders” and the nostalgia, social as well as cultural, represented by the Middle Ages in their program. Chandler’s A Dream of Order characterizes the high literary use of the medieval revival as a retreat from a critique of the present in its formulation of the Middle Ages as Golden Age. No matter how different the uses to which nineteenth-century writers and politicians put medieval romance, the ideal of romance remained more important than the individual works that made up the genre.
See Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a discussion of how Germanic nationalism is negotiated in the debates on the Celtic or Germanic origins of British national origins, see
Maike Oergel, The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen: National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature, European Cultures (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998). See also, in general,
Hugh A. Mac-Dougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982). On the shift towards a Saxon bias in Victorian historiography and literature, see
Claire A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
In any case the relative lateness of British academic literary study meant that room was still left for men of letters and nonacademic scholars to play an important role in the establishment of the field. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, this gap was filled by the book clubs, of which the Roxburghe club was the most productive, for which see
Harrison R. Steeves, Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship in Great Britain and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1913). Composed largely of aristocratic and gentlemanly amateurs, the clubs originally concerned themselves with antiquarian matters of all kind, increasingly centering, however, on editions and literary miscellany. By mid-century few of the clubs still functioned actively, and their place was taken by publishing societies. The tone of the clubs is best communicated by the rancor that met Sir Frederick Madden’s edition of Havelock the Dane, largely because Madden was a non-member. Madden represents one aspect of nonacademic professionalism, through his appointment at the British Museum. Irascible and difficult, he combined an early fascination with medievalist antiquarianism with a sure sense of judgment, both textual and aesthetic. His work on the Pearl manuscript is best known to modern scholars, but he also produced important editions of Havelock the Dane, William of Palerne, the Brut, Sir Gawayne, the Wycliffe Bible and Mathew Paris’ chronicle. In his dyspeptic dismissal of the efforts of other projects, he also predicts the judgments of modern editors upon nineteenth-century pioneering editorial efforts. Madden seemed attracted to the nexus of historiography and fictionalization that marks medieval literature for twentieth century rather than eighteenth-and nineteenth-century scholars. Even in treating the most exotic Middle English romances, he refrains from the rapture of his predecessors. His critical observations are understandably lean, but the fact remains that the nature of his profession minimized the influence he would have other than in terms of the standards of his work. See
Robert William Ackerman and Gretchen P. Ackerman, Sir Frederic Madden: A Biographical Sketch and Bibliography (NewYork: Garland Pub., 1979).
A recent biography is William Benzie, Dr. F.J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK.: Pilgrim Books, 1983); the best account of the study of Middle English is now
David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910, Medieval Cultures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); an excellent related comparative account of Chaucer studies is now available in
Richard J. Utz, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1793–1948, Making the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (London: Macmillan, 1897), a.
The most complete account of these structures and their context is Megan Aldrich, “Gothic Sensibility: The Early Years of the Gothic Revival,” in A.W.N. Pugin Master of Gothic Revival (New Haven: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York by Yale University Press, 1995).
See Hübsch, In What Style Should we Build? the German Debate on Architectural Style. See also W.D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany:A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
Crinson, Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Opentalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996), 57, reads Ruskin’s reaction as a primarily Protestant interest in medieval ornament, emphasizing its naturalism, not, as in Pugin, emphasizing the ritual function of medieval art and architecture.
Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Crinson, Empire Building (73) points out that earlier French Romantic scholars regarded Byzantine architecture as “Neo-Greek,” as connecting classical and Gothic architecture as part of the same historical lineage, rather than as the result of collision and contamination. See also David B. Brownlee, “Neugriechesch/Néo-Grec: The German Vocabulary of French Romantic Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50 (1991): 18–21.
John Ruskin, The Opening of the Crystal Palace Considered in Some of Its Relations to the Prospects of Art (New York: J.B. Alden, 1973).
Allen J. Frantzen, “ ‘Chivalry Sacrifice and The Great War: The Medieval Contexts of Edward Burne-Jones’ ‘The Miracle of the Merciful Knight’,” in Speaking Images Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve (Asheville, NC.: Pegasus Press, 2001), 611–35.
See T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom:A Triumph (London: J. Cape, 1935); a reedited version of Lean’s classic film is available as
David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia, Criterion Collection (United States: The Voyager Company, 1989).
Irving Howe, A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (New York: Horizon Press, 1963), 1–40.
See John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Lifie of T.E. Lawrence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
M.D. Allen, The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).
Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 3–25, 49–62.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1894).
John Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1957);
C.S. Lewis, “The Anthropological Approach,” in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Norman Davis (London: Allen, 1962), 219–30.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 191.
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935).
Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
Susan Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978).
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past the Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
Jean-Pierre Mileur, The Critical Romance: The Critic as Reader, Writer, Hero (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), discovers the quest romance not in modern literature but in modern criticism. The chief structuralist and post-structuralist critics, according to Mileur, carry on in their own writings the project of romanticism.
Especially M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1968).
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963).
See John M. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
C.S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” in They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London: G. Bles, 1962), 11.
See the personal account by Yuri L. Bessmertny, “August 1991 as Seen by a Moscow Historian, or the Fate of Medieval Studies in the Soviet Era,” American Historical Review (1992): 803–16.
See Aron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages; Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture.
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© 2008 John M. Ganim
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Ganim, J.M. (2008). The Middle Ages as Genre. In: Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09039-3_2
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