Burrow - Medieval writers and their work: Middle English literature, 1100-1500

J. A. Burrow

Middle English Literature 11001500

SECOND EDITION

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J. A. Burrow 2008

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First published 1982

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ISBN 978-0-19-953204-9

This book offers neither a history nor a survey of Middle English literature: a survey may be found in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace (1999), and Derek Pearsall provides a history of the verse in Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977). The present book is designed as an introduction. At the risk of giving an exaggerated impression of the strangeness of Middle English writings, I have concentrated on some of the chief differences which confront a reader of modern literature when he or she first approaches them: differences in the notion of literature itself ( also attempt to characterize the Middle English period in relation to earlier and later periods of English literature.

Texts are quoted from the editions cited in the Bibliography. Bible quotations are from the Authorized Version. Translations of Dantes Divine Comedy are taken from the version by C. H. Sisson (1980).

I would like to thank Stephen Medcalf, Alastair Minnis, Charles Runacres, John Scattergood, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and many students and colleagues for giving me ideas and advice.

For the present new edition I have reviewed the text throughout and rewritten parts of it, as well as bringing references cited in the notes and bibliography up to date.

The phrase Middle English has an academic and somewhat unidiomatic flavour. It was first coined to designate a period in the history of the English language. Historical philologists in the nineteenth century, most of them German, liked to see in the history of a language three phases: Old (alt-), Middle (mittel-), and New or Modern (neu-). This triadic scheme fitted the history of English quite well. Old English could only be the language of pre-Conquest, Anglo-Saxon England. New English presumably extended back from the present day to the beginning of modern timessay, the first Tudors. In between lay Middle English. This was distinguished from Old English chiefly by a simplified system of inflexion and a vocabulary enriched from French and Scandinavian sources, and from Modern English by inflexions still further simplified and a vocabulary further enriched and diversified, especially from Latin. On the strength of changes such as these, philologists fixed the beginnings of Middle English in the period 11001150 and its end around 14501500.

Philology and literary history being twin disciplines, it is not surprising that literary historians were quick to adopt the concept of Middle English. The three or four hundred years in question soon came to be seen also as a literary period. It seemed natural to consider the works surviving from these centuriesAncrene Wisse and The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Cloud of Unknowing, the Canterbury Tales and Morte Darthuras representatives not only of a stage in the English language, but also of a stage in the development of English literature. Yet this usage cannot be accepted without question, even in a book such as this, committed by its title to the concept of Middle English Literature. Literary historians are accustomed to borrow like jackdaws from other disciplines when it comes to defining and naming periods. They use, for instance, the reigns of kings and queens: Jacobean drama, Victorian poetry. The status of such borrowed labels must always be questionable, even when they are borrowed, as in the case of Middle English, from a discipline more closely related to literary studies than is political history.Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any given time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences. However, the particular features which interest philologists and form the basis of their periodizations (inflexions, for instance) are not always fraught with profound literary implications. So there is no necessary reason for the literary historian or critic to pay any attention at all to linguistic periods, any more than to kings reigns.

Yet the philologists concept of Middle English has in fact proved useful for literary purposes; and this utility is not merely a matter of happy accident, as a glance at some of the linguistic changes marking the beginning of the period will suggest. The main changes in vocabulary and inflexion can be seen by comparing two passages from the Peterborough Chroniclea version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which the monks of Peterborough kept until the middle of the twelfth century. The monks entries for the years up to 1121 are written in passable Old English. Thus one of them writes as follows about William the Conqueror, on the occasion of his death in 1087:

Se cyng Willeim e we embe spreca ws swie wis man, and swie rice, and wurfulre and strengere onne nig his foregenga wre. He ws milde am godum mannum e God lufedon, and ofer eall gemett stearc am mannum e wicwdon his willan.

King William, of whom we speak, was a very wise man, and very powerful, more distinguished and more powerful than any of his predecessors were. He was gentle with those good men who loved God, and beyond measure severe with those men who opposed his will.

All the words here are native Anglo-Saxon words; and the inflexions (except in wurfulre and strengere, which have -e for -