2 - Medieval Romance and the Generic Frictions of Barbour’s Bruce

Summary

Many historians and literary critics – for Barbour’s Bruce is one of those rare texts that really is of equal interest to both – have puzzled over the generic classification of The Bruce. Or to be more accurate, literary critics have puzzled over which literary genre to assign it to, while historians have argued about the extent to which it can be treated as a historical source. It is essentially the same question, approached from different disciplinary angles. What is it about this text that prompts these questions to resurface with every generation of scholars that studies it? The question of why an awareness of literary genre is necessary in the first place needs little expansion now: Jauss’s description of how genre shapes a reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’ has become the industry standard in literary scholarship. For Barbour’s Bruce, matters such as the level of factual accuracy expected (or the amount of exaggeration and identifiable departure from fact tolerated); the value-system by which actions are to be judged; assumed attitudes to social status; and more nebulous qualities such as the relative levels of emotional engagement and rational analysis encouraged in the audience are all affected by what type of text we perceive The Bruce to be. The recognition of a text’s genre also encourages readers to compare it to, and read it against, other known members of that genre. The attempt to identify the most appropriate generic context for a text of a different historical period does, however, risk misleading the modern reader, since literary genres are in a constant state of evolution. Not only have generic labels themselves – ‘romance’, ‘story’, ‘chronicle’ – changed in what they designate, but medieval writers and scribes could be shockingly careless in their use of them in the first place, indifferent to the difficulties this would create for literary pedants of later centuries. Nevertheless, neither medieval nor modern readers can read a text without groping for a context in which to interpret it, and picking up clues as to genre remains a vital part of identifying (or reconstructing) that context. The problem with Barbour’s Bruce is that it gives mixed generic signals.